mini-SITREP XII - Article on Delameres - anon? ..... still lives on the 50,000 acre farm his grandfather acquired at the turn of the century. ....... The ghost of Diana still haunts Soysambu, the family farm on Lake Elmenteita. Beyond the veranda, in a blaze of bougainvillea, is the swimming pool. 'It's heated' explained Lord Delamere. 'I can't stand cold swimming pools. When Diana lived here she never bothered with swimming so it was unheated. She just lay around with her pearls on and always said to me, "Hughie dear, won't you go swimming?" and it was 50 degrees. As soon as she died I had the heating installed. And the wall built. She said the wall would have spoilt the view." There are still wardrobes in the house full of Diana's clothes from Chanel, Givenchy and Yves St Laurent. Her jewels remain too: large diamond rings and pearls the size of pebbles. But he does not share the regard that others felt for her. 'Of course she was the best whore in the country for 50 years. She was a trisexual. What's a trisexual? I thought everybody knew; she liked men; she would jump into bed with any woman that would have her; and she had a boyish body and liked seducing gays who would then enjoy her. There, now you know as much as I do." Lord Delamere is no dilettante or socialite but a farmer. His problems are zebras eating his grass, not what to wear at the next governor's garden party. He deplores the changes from his grandfather's time, partly because they restrict his freedom. The zebra are breeding on the farm and deestroying his fences. The district commissioner told him that any zebra shot in his game park should come out of his annual quotas of culls on the farm. 'It's ridiculous. My grandfather spent a fortune getting rid of the zebra on this farm. Of course what I should have done is shoot the district commissioner, but that's bloody illegal too.' He is tall, six foot six, with thin grey hair, jagged teeth and a hooked nose. His wife Ann, is shorter and smiles a lot. She was very beautiful when she was younger. Five dogs have followed us onto the veranda and breathe heavily, their eyes on the sponge cake. 'This is the finest tea in Kenya,' he said. 'I grow it myself. I'll show you tomorrow.' ........... The Delameres live in considerable style. There are some fine paintings on the walls: a Brueghel, a portrait of Charles I, and another of the first Lord Delamere. 'The Breughel has been rather ruined by one of my aunts deciding that she could paint better snowballs than Breughel, so she added some. I don't know why I keep that picture of the first Lord. He was an idiot who decided it would be impressive to have a peerage. He thought he had a bargain when he paid £5000 for it. The only problem was that the going rate was £1,200. Before he came along we had been content to be shire knights in Cheshire, when William the Conqueror gave us the whole county.' It is hard to beat an evening with Delamere. Pick a topic and he has a forthright view on it. Take game hunting - 'The only way to reason with an elephant is with a Rigby .405. That gets to his brain.' On the writer Karen Blixen, author of 'Out of Africa': 'That wretched Danish woman. What did she know about the country? She only lived here for eight years. As for Robert Redford playing Denys Finch-Hatton in the film, it was ridiculous. Everyone here knows that Finch-Hatton was as bald as an egg, it was the best thing about him.' On farming: I plan to grow soya to produce cooking oil. I reckon I can undercut the market by 20 per cent and still make an obscene profit. I have nothing against making an obscene profit: I haven't done it yet in my life but I'm about to try now.' About a former Governor: 'He was very bright, but of course he was at Oxford. I was only at Cambridge.' ............... Delamere's life's work, apart from his 13,000 cattle, is a model railway. This is no ordinary toy train set. It is vast, the size of four ping-pong tables. Putting on station master's hat, he introduces us to the Tunbridge Wells-Elmenteita-Boston-Tokyo railway line. There are more than 40 locomotives. One of the carriages is the night train, where passengers get up to white mischief. He has painstakingly built the figures and glued them in unusual positions. 'Look at this fellow,' he said. 'He is trying to work it up a bit. Probably an old boy, rather like myself.' Outside there's a whole nursery of miniature trees which will be used for the railway. Eccentric? Possibly. But this man has as great an understanding of Africa as anybody. He was born there. He will probably die there. His love of the wildlife is profound, even though he has shot large swathes of it. He employs 20 staff in the house, not out of necessity, and knows that they look after probably another hundred dependants. His language and way of life would shock many liberals, but they in turn would be unable to cope with its intensity. ...................... As we leave Elmenteita, Delamere is playing the organ. It was owned by Hannington, a missionary who came to Kenya to convert the natives to Christianity. Unfortunately, they took exception to his preaching and killed him. His loss is Delamere's gain. He plays a burst of Handel's Messiah. As we walk over the lawn to the landing strip to greet our pilot, he breaks into a jazz song by Joss White, singing along: 'Black girl, black girl, don't you treat me cruel.'