As well as feeling decidedly British, much of the architecture in Bathurst Street reminded me of Kansas. Like several other streets in Grahamstown it was wide enough to turn an ox wagon, and with its fat-fronted buildings it could easily have been a set for the western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Years later I would see a great deal of this street, as the Black Sash advice office would be situated there, and on occasion it would indeed feel like the Wild West. One late afternoon while locking up, a Black Sash colleague and I looked up the street to see a young man running towards us, chased by a policeman brandishing a gun in each hand. A police van was supporting the chase, swerving in and out of the road while a crowd of onlookers cheered loudly. The fugitive was probably a petty thief, for we saw him toss a package over a gate just before he was caught. While he was being bundled into the van, we noticed someone else retrieve the packet. This person, probably a student, had been hanging out of a high window watching the proceedings. When he thought no-one was looking, he slipped along the parapet, jumped down, picked up the parcel and climbed back up again, disappearing into his window and drawing the curtains behind him. The fugitive’s case drew no subsequent attention. His was just one of many arrests in those days, and as a theft case it would certainly have been unlikely to be brought to us at the advice office. And so we never did find out what the agile opportunist in the digs upstairs had found in that package.
Such experiences would however come later when I had, thankfully, found my niche. In the meantime it would require all my energy just to accept that this bewildering town was going to be my home. The climate was alien, the light too bright, the flowers too vivid in colour. The prolific dark purple bougainvillaea in suburban gardens unsettled me, making me feel claustrophobic, as though some unknown danger lurked in its deep shade.
The vastness of the landscape frightened me, as it had done in America. While Malvern had been awed by the Painted Desert in Arizona, revelling in its colouring, light and shade, I had felt a deep longing for the manageable scenery of Oxfordshire. Our little red brick cottage in Elsfield had perched on a hill from where we looked out on green and yellow chequered fields and small copses of trees. The hedgerows contained a many-layered world of twisted twigs and roots, small wild flowers and rambling berries. It was all so neat and pretty. Even the sand hills of my childhood now seemed cosy, with the star grass that pricked our legs and the familiar bee orchid, grass of Parnassus and evening primrose. Years later in Tuscany near San Gimignano, where a South African friend lived in exile, I remarked on the loveliness of the hedgerows there and she replied, “I long for the Port Jackson willow and the hot African sand under my feet.” So deeply are the scenes and scents of our youth embedded within us.
Fortunately much of my energy in those early days was consumed by domestic concerns. When we arrived, Matthew was 18 months and Anna 3 months. They were joined three years later by Charlotte and shortly afterwards by Lucy. The children’s early years were spent amidst the clutter and bustle of ongoing renovations at 24 Market Street. Structurally the house was fine but a great deal of scraping and painting needed to be done and the garden had to be rescued from dilapidation. Our parents, who visited us at the start of the restoration process, were horrified by the task. My father referred to the house as the “whited sepulchre” while my mother bluntly stated it needed people with money to buy it. Malvern’s parents could not understand why we didn’t opt for mod-con.
When Malvern returned briefly to Oxford to complete his BLitt, leaving me with the children, I was heartened to find new friends rallying around. With the restoration of the house, this sense of community grew as friends and colleagues arrived, rollers and paintbrushes in hand. We in turn helped others with the renovation of their crumbling homes. The poet Don Maclennan and his American wife Shirley had arrived at Rhodes at the same time as us and bought a Victorian house that also needed a lot of painting. I admired Shirley and her handsome young family and longed for my own brood to become as wise and independent as hers.
During the painting process I’d do my best to keep the children out of the way, but on one occasion Matthew got into the sitting room where Malvern and fellow lecturer, André de Villiers were in the midst of a delicate wallpapering task. Matthew climbed up on the couch to watch them as they battled to get the pattern straight. Fuelled by a few beers and a discussion, no doubt on the Romantics, the job was going smoothly until Matthew started to wriggle and the hood of the grandfather clock, propped up next to him on the couch, slipped and crashed. Shards of glass and tiny splinters of wood spilled across the floor. It was heartbreaking. The 18th century walnut clock, with its delicately painted face, had stood in the hall of my grandmother’s house in Cheshire. On either side, had hung portraits of Lord and Lady Vernon, for whom my grandfather had worked. And as a little girl I had gone to sleep listening to its ticks and chimes echoing in my grandmother’s hallway. Now it seemed ruined.
Many items of antique furniture in our house were ingrained with stories and memories from my early life, and having them near helped me recreate the distant home that I still missed. Malvern understood this. He picked up every splinter of the shattered hood with stamp tweezers and put them all in a box. One of his mature students at the time was a skilled woodworker and craftsman, and over a few months this amazing man patiently and lovingly restored the piece. When the clock was moved back into its place in the renovated living room, flaws in the wallpapering were easier to detect than mends or joins in the walnut hood.
Steadily our lovely house emerged. In the 1860s it had been home to Bishop Nathaniel Merriman, father of John X Merriman who became Prime Minister of the Cape. The original building was completed in 1830, with a second section added when the schoolmaster Charles Grubb lived there, to house the first school in town. We found fascinating relics during the restoration. The lock on the front door, when polished up, was found to bear the crest of William IV. Lost behind the mantelpiece in the drawing room there was a daintily framed picture, embossed on plaster, of a girl holding a cat. Had it belonged to one of the Merriman daughters? Was it perhaps a kind of Christmas card that had dropped from display? In the garden we dug up old apothecary bottles and pieces of blue and white china. A letter written by Mrs Merriman records the visit of General Gordon of Khartoum. “About ten, as father and I were huddled across my Davenport, the door opened and in came Mr Huntley with General Gordon so to speak in his hand … [he] met us quite as old friends and at once launched forth into a stream of talk.” We were thrilled with all this history in our living room.
Years later historians would suggest that bishop Merriman’s groom, Goliath, who had lived in a hut in the garden, was none other than Mhlakaza, the uncle of the prophetess Nongqawuse. For years Goliath travelled and preached with Merriman in the remote parts of the diocese. They would read to each other from their English and isiXhosa Bibles, comparing the interpretations of scripture. He left Merriman’s service, perhaps with some disenchantment, returning to his tribal home across the Kei River where, it is believed, he resumed his traditional name and customs and began preaching his own version of the gospel. In 1857, when his young niece claimed that the spirits of the ancestors had appeared to her, it was he who interpreted her visions to the people. The ancestors instructed Nongqawuse to tell the people to kill their cattle and destroy their crops, after which the dead would arise and chase the white oppressors into the sea. Mhlakaza’s precise role is disputed, but he undoubtedly contributed to the debacle that led to the subsequent cattle killing and the tragic decimation of the Xhosa people.
Most often, the Eastern Cape weather was hot, dry and dusty, with veld fires filling the wind with smoke. I wondered if I would ever get over the strangeness and alienation, the hostility with which I viewed so many things. Then, stepping out of my back door into a pale green light one late afternoon, I saw flocks of birds circling against the rugged hillside behind our house. “It’s not as good as the slow twilight of a long summer’s evening,”
I thought, “but it is beautiful.”
Years later we were driving to the wedding of a young friend in Port Alfred. Along the roadside the summer grasses had a pinkish tinge in the sun and the fences were smothered in blue plumbago. At one point, where the hills roll away from the road towards the sea, there was a vista of never-ending space. I was thrilled by the beauty and solace of all that space. “I love the bush and the light,” I said, looking across at Malvern – and found myself completely surprised by the simultaneous thought, “I love this land.”
Establishing an identity
Market Street has always been at the centre of a lot of activity. Across the road from our front door lay the square where wagonloads of merchandise were traded in the 19th century: horns, skins, pelts, feathers, pots, bracelets, beads – and piles of ivory. Once Grahamstown ceased to be a commercial hub the market traded mainly in local agricultural produce. In our early years in the town we bought fresh vegetables from the run-down sheds on the square, but as the decades passed we watched in dismay as supermarkets and fast food outlets began to arrive on our doorstep.
In typical settler style, our house fronted directly onto the street. Later suburban trends would set houses behind hedges and gates, making them less accessible to the passing traffic, but in the older parts of town there were constant knocks on doors as people from the townships walked from house to house seeking work. During my childhood in England the only strangers who had banged on the door were the occasional gypsy in a long skirt, often with a baby in her arms, selling pegs or white heather, or more likely, a salesman selling small sweeping brushes from a neat little suitcase.
A frequent caller in Market Street was a man by the name of Milton. Sporting a black beret and speaking an old fashioned but articulate English, he always seemed to me to be just popping by on his way to the Reading Room at the British Museum. Although his mind had known better days, his social and political comments could be very sharp. Word was that he had been an early member of the South African Liberal Party, which had long since been banned. Knowing that Malvern was associated with the Progressive Party (he’d joined in 1959 before leaving for Oxford), Milton enjoyed baiting us on certain flaws in the opposition’s manifesto. Was it not discriminatory, he taunted, to advocate a qualified franchise based on minimum levels of education and income?
Of course, he also knew precisely how to win a girl’s heart and invariably I would end up putting my hand in my pocket. One day he reassured me that he had not come for money but to find out what the German word for 'lemon' was. I later discovered that he had helped himself to a sack-full from our friend’s tree and was bartering with our German neighbours! I was sorry when Milton died before the new South Africa had begun to dawn.
I soon learnt that giving beggars food or money created untenable dependencies and I realised that it solved few problems. But there was no getting away from the relentless stream of need. I had encountered poverty in England and had seen the effects of social inequality in my work there, but I had not been prepared for this vast gulf between rich and poor. By comparison to those coming to our door, even we seemed rich. We had no jobs for them and not much spare money, and yet our material circumstances were worlds better than theirs. With each knock I became more oppressed by helplessness and guilt. I felt compelled to seek some sort of action. But how did I ft in and what was I to do? I had begun helping out as a volunteer at the Black Sash advice office on Saturday mornings, but I thought that if I took a job – any job at this stage – I could perhaps find ways of alleviating some of the problems on our doorstep.
One of the few Afrikaners at Rhodes at this time was the sociologist HW van der Merwe. He was known by his Afrikaans initials, “HW”, which to English ears like mine sounded like “Harvey”. He was probably responsible for introducing Malvern to anti-apartheid ideas as a young man. The Contact Study Group at Stellenbosch University, founded under HW’s influence, had helped to shape the political thought of young Afrikaners such as Malvern and Frederik van Zyl Slabbert, who would one day become the leader of the official opposition, the Progressive Federal Party. One of the stereotypes of the time was that all Afrikaners were nationalists and that English South Africans were generally more liberal. But I was surprised to discover in time that my fellow English-speakers were often very conservative. Many were overtly racist, while some Afrikaners were much more liberal than I was. This was indeed proving a strange society.
HW came to my rescue. He was studying white elites in South Africa and offered me a part-time job as a research assistant administering a questionnaire door-to-door. What an opportunity, not just to do something, but also to get a glimpse of the people behind the doors of suburban Grahamstown. Barking dogs would often bar my way and although it was not yet the era of security gates and blade wire, one house I visited did sport a hand-painted sign declaring, “This house is protected by a shotgun.” Chilling messages aside, I was surprised at how many people invited me in and were willing to answer my questions. In England, where I had visited patients at their homes, I had found people much more private than these South Africans were proving.
From the poorest to the wealthiest home, the person who responded to my knock at the door was often a uniformed maid referred to as “the girl”. In Kipling-esque style, she referred to her employers as “madam” or “master”. In many instances she lived in, and was not the only domestic help. The smartest homes gleamed with a lustre that suggested entire teams were on hand – what a friend referred to as “servants running hot and cold". Later, in my advice office work, I would gain a very different perspective on the lives of these smiling maids who ushered me in for the interviews. Beneath the surface of most domestic arrangements there was a reality of exploitation that I was not yet able to discern.
My research formed a very small part of HW’s work, but through it I learnt a great deal. I began to perceive the divisions between town and gown. For example I realised that membership of the Anglican cathedral gave one a certain patrician status; and I discerned that the legal fraternity saw themselves as a powerful elite. In all, I encountered some very colonial mentalities.
After working for HW I took a part-time job with a welfare scheme at the university, which began to give me some insight into the “other” side of Grahamstown. Some members of the white academic staff donated money each month that was made available for loans and bursaries for black service staff. My job was to assess the needs of applicants and manage the distribution of the money from a dark, poky office on campus. Always awaiting me at the door would be queues of cleaners and gardeners, each with an insoluble problem arising from the poverty trap that ensnared them all. My power to grant or withhold money, and the corresponding powerlessness of the applicants, made me feel like the feudal dispenser of old-world charity to the “deserving poor”.
I often felt that I was foundering. Not only was I overwhelmed by the extent of people’s need but I was also ignorant of their language and culture and aghast at their circumstances. Unemployment was rife and wages appalling. Education was not free, and school fees, books and uniforms presented extra expenses. People got themselves into debt through hire-purchase, often to have their goods repossessed when their payments lapsed. It was a job with no end. Clearly the university needed to start a proper personnel department, and this did eventually happen, though long after I had moved on.
Interestingly, the nature of the work I did, and the association it gave me with black people, did not make me popular in some circles. One right-wing professor who was also a warden at one of the halls of residence described me, along with the then professor of anthropology and a woman who had started a feeding scheme for children, as the three most dangerous people in Grahamstown. This was rather startling. At that time I was not prominently involved in any political activity and was comparatively unknown – unlike my fellow accused. Perhaps I was achieving some identity after all.
Being young and idealistic, Malvern was creating a reputatio
n of his own within the Progressive Party. In 1970 he was chosen as the party’s parliamentary candidate for the Albany region and there followed a few months of intense party-political energy in our home.
We’d witnessed elections American-style when, living in Kansas we’d heard Hubert Humphrey speak at a razzmatazz event when he was running for the vice-presidency. There, politics seemed lightweight and glitzy. In South Africa, by contrast, elections were fought over deadly serious and deeply moral issues. The first post-war election of 1948 had astounded the world by giving DF Malan’s Nationalist Party the victory over respected international statesman and Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Jan Smuts. Malan had seemed bad enough, but far harsher Afrikaner nationalists were to succeed him.
The official opposition, led by Sir de Villiers Graaff, seemed merely to promote apartheid with a kinder face. In fact, the United Party seemed anachronistic to me. Many of its members harked back to a bygone age. The MPs I met with their cravats and moustaches all spoke in clipped tones, mostly about World War II.
With the demise of the Liberal Party, the Progressives, born in a split from the UP, had become the only legal opposition worth supporting. It was not exactly radical. It did not believe in One Man, One Vote, but in a qualified franchise; a policy which seemed archaic and patronising, but for many whites at that time it was a revolutionary and dangerous idea. At least the Progressive Party was unequivocally opposed to separate development. Helen Suzman served as this party’s sole representative in parliament for thirteen years, where she was vilified by MPs of other parties for the tenacity of her opposition. She was especially known for relentlessly ferreting out failures and sins with which to confront the ruling party. This indomitable woman showed a completely different side to her character when she stayed at our home. She charmed the whole family by behaving like a beloved grandmother, allowing the children to clamber all over her bed and gleefully distributing the jelly beans she had brought.
Swimming with Cobras Page 4