Nellie - 'Lady Eileen Scott, daughter of a former Viceroy of India, reclined among velvet cushions surrounded by books and small dogs, exclaiming 'Oh, François! François!' in mild protest if some remark of his disturbed her.                           

Midday Sun - 'Eileen Scott lingers in my [Elspeth Huxley] memory draped in chiffon scarves, clasping a French novel and a gaily coloured parasol, and uttering at intervals bird-like cries of 'Oh, François! François!' when some domestic mishap stung her husband into an outburst of irritation. Setting forth on an expedition in their battered old T-model Ford was quite an undertaking since, as well as the dogs and novels, Eileen surrounded herself with a quantity of props such as cushions, towels, a tin of Keating's flea powder, a first aid kit, a picnic basket, a bottle of smelling salts and a parasol, and wore beige cotton gloves. She was seldom without her parasol, and would hold it aloft when riding about the farm on her pony.'

Alice - Memories - Uncle Francis was not much helped by Aunt Eileen in running the farm. She adored him but Kenya was something she preferred to ignore. She loved music and the theatre and must have missed these sadly. While the other settlers' wives rolled their sleeves up and mucked in, Aunt Eileen carried on in the style to which she had been accustomed as a daughter of the Viceroy. She seemed to spend most of her time reading in bed, but when she got up she dressed impeccably, always wearing gloves, a hat and carrying a parasol. At Deloraine she hung old family portraits on the walls and insisted on silver for every meal. There was nothing like it in the colony.

However, she did design and start the lovely gardens that now have flowering shrubs of brilliant colours nine or ten feet tall and she also made a kitchen garden on either side of a small stream, in which were grown many English vegetables, including asparagus. Fig trees did well but the figs had to be enclosed in little bags, as otherwise the monkeys ate them.

Anne Scott, A Nice Place to Live, 1991: My mother was quite different from my father. She was small and delicate, had dark hair and green eyes, and was beautiful, gracious and gentle. She loved theatricals and drama and reading poetry, in French and German as well as English. She enjoyed listening to music like Strauss waltzes or Gilbert and Sullivan, although she was not musical herself. She was completely unpractical and I doubt whether she had ever sewn on a button or boiled an egg in her life — or for that matter even washed her own hair. She had a wonderful sense of humour and could always see the amusing side of things. She used to say that she was never bored. She liked to be surrounded by beauty and comfort and wear lovely clothes. I think that she was always conscious of coming from a different background from most people in Kenya, where there were very few people with whom she had much in common. She missed her mother and her sisters and other friends in England very much. When our money began to get less and less, and we had to make economies, it was a real hardship for her, and she began to suffer from acute depression and insomnia. Eventually her health broke down altogether. She had never been very strong and she died in England in 1938 after an operation for cancer and was buried at Minto. My father told me after she had died that he was afraid that he had done a cruel thing when he brought her to live in Africa.