Actually, I was rather nervous about retirement, worrying that I might be sidelined and have little to do. As it turned out I quickly found myself busy again. I realised that my expertise was still of some use when organisations like the Legal Resources Centre and the Public Service Accountability Monitor called on my help. And when the Friends of the Library asked me to sit on their committee I found my new passion. I was pleased to throw myself into this new task. How else would I ever have met the Fingo Village Revolutionaries, a group of gentle Rastafarians who worked in the Fingo township library promoting perhaps the one thing our society needed most – books, reading and knowledge.
At home
“Come on, family, how shall we celebrate the millennium?” I asked at dinner one evening early in 1999. Fortunately only our youngest, Lucy, was still at home and numbers around the dinner table no longer reached the critical mass for producing a collective groan. Anna was married and living in London while Matthew and Charlotte were both working in Cape Town. Lucy entered into the spirit of the ensuing brainstorm and it was she who said, with a Shakespearian flourish, "Let's put a girdle round the earth.” And so we came up with the idea of a walk around the globe, or at least a global walk, in which we would get our friends in various parts of the world to participate. Malvern may have groaned inwardly, but he responded with his usual amusement, “I thought you were retiring this year, my dear.”
Malvern and our children were not the only ones who trembled slightly at my enthusiasms. When I retired from the advice office my friends and colleagues presented me with a book of tributes in which several of them alluded to the rather intimidating demands I apparently made. Sheena Duncan described a daily ream of fax paper curling onto her floor, followed by my phone call to check whether she’d got it and what she thought of it. She claimed she was often too afraid to confess she’d not read it yet. Someone else suggested that I’d been born draped in a sash and wielding a chairperson’s gavel! I know that I sometimes exasperated people by “chairing” a committee when I was not in the chair, making another colleague describe me as “a good chairperson but a demon of an ex-chairperson”. Is this what my friends in the East London advice office meant when one of them wrote in a card, "Before you retire give us tips, how did you manage to be one of the more arrogant women but being cool and calm most times”? I had always been inspired by the Tibetan proverb, “Better to live one day as a tiger than a thousand years as a sheep”, and if living as a tiger meant being a bit of a tiger then so be it. For the most part my colleagues were tigers themselves, so I took with a pinch of salt the cartoon they had drawn of me jogging along in my sash (though actually jogging is something no one would ever have seen me doing), with a phalanx of panting and exhausted Sashers following in my wake. Funniest of all is a cartoon (adapted from a UNESCO cartoon in the Sash magazine of March 1988) of me as a dungareed child bawling slogans like “freedom”, “justice” and “peace” while my parents cower on a couch wondering, “What are we going to do with her when she grows up?” My Grahamstown friends, who had not known my parents, could not have realised how accurately they were portraying them. And the cartoonist’s solution to my parents’ predicament? “Sending her to Africa seemed the only answer!”
Whenever I was asked to list my favourite things I always said that one of them was going downhill really fast on a bicycle. I suppose that is how I lived. But I also always listed quieter pleasures like nude bathing and eating Greek yoghurt with honey.
In the course of 1999 Malvern and I planned the millennium hike we had hatched with Lucy round our dinner table that night. We contacted friends around the world inviting them to do a hike as near to New Year’s day as possible in the hope that, at 10 kilometres per hiker, we could accumulate a total of 1 000 km. We encouraged people to choose a historically significant destination, to send a brief record of their group’s effort, and to mark the occasion with a donation to a charity of their choice. We were amazed by the response. Photographs and stories came in from around the globe. Great Britain had the most representatives and their walks ranged from country rambles with small family groups to a 40-strong multigenerational party tramping over the Cotswolds; from a rain-soaked walk along the Thames in London to a march across the bogs and crags of north-west Scotland to find the remains of a crashed World War II plane. In America friends did the Pacific Crest Trail and in Australia a party of 13 walked from Spit Bridge to Reef Beach along the north of Sydney harbour. David Woods, the Rhodes vice chancellor at the time, and his wife, Charlotte, walked in the Ithala Game Reserve and into the foothills of Swaziland. Val and Trevor Letcher, whose family had tolled the Grahamstown cathedral bells during political protests of yore, walked in Namibia, while our own party strode along the Eastern Cape beach from Riet River to the Three Sisters. I enjoyed the walk with old friends like Jackie Cock, Kathy Satchwell and Julia and Chris Mann, but our record of the day shows a photograph of Malvern reluctantly holding the fort at home, following a neck operation. A grand total of 1 234 km was walked “around the earth” on or around 1 January 2000.
Over the years our house hosted endless meetings, many parties and much fun, and the album that records most of these is our visitors' book. To begin with it reflects Malvern's political aspirations in the Progressive Party. Joyce and Colin Eglin, Alex and Jenny Boraine and Helen Suzman all stayed with us in those early days, when the talk was of election campaigns and antiapartheid strategies. Then there were the writers and academics like Noni Jabavu visiting from Nairobi, Es’kia Mphahlele and Rob Amato. One of our visitors wrote down this definition of a university from the American poet, Robert Hillyer:
Where scholars prepare other scholars, not for life,
but for gaudy footnotes and a threadbare wife.
This was certainly apt for our struggles on an academic salary, but also for Malvern's battle to find time for writing and keeping up with trends in literary thinking. At first the academic visitors from abroad were few and far between, owing to the boycott of South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. However, Lionel Knights and Muriel Bradbrook of Cambridge, both well-known scholars, did visit and we felt fortunate to have contact with such great minds during a time of increasing isolation. The poet Sydney Clouts lived next door for a while. He was often caught up in enthusiastic bursts of emotion and once whirled me down the street at night saying, “Grahamstown is just like Paris!” I must say I failed to see the similarity.
From the 1980s onward the visitors' book begins to reflect the growing number of people visiting from abroad on antiapartheid business: Oxfam and Amnesty International workers, British MPs and members of embassies, representatives of churches in Scandinavia and Germany. And as the new era dawned, more local figures too. Perhaps most notable of these was Frene Ginwala, who came in 1990. The Black Sash hosted her at a meeting in the office after which we brought her home for supper. A peculiar meeting occurred in our living room later that evening when a local ANC activist arrived in her nightdress to meet with Frene. It had clearly been past her bedtime when she received the call delegating her to represent the local movement. I was impressed again, as I had been in Harare, by Frene Ginwala’s incisive mind and I was not surprised when she was later appointed the Speaker of South Africa's first democratic parliament.
In 2002 the visitors' book reflects a glorious week in our lives – the visit of Marie and Seamus Heaney. Malvern spent many years teaching and admiring the work of this great poet, and to mark Malvern’s retirement a colleague arranged to bring Heaney to Grahamstown for a week. It was an imaginative and bold plan. As a Nobel laureate Heaney was much in demand all over the world and we really didn’t think he would come, but Wendy Jacobson is nothing but determined. As Marie later said, “I told Seamus this Wendy means business. You’d better go.” In the event the town rose to the occasion, the university took the opportunity of holding an extraordinary graduation ceremony to bestow an honorary doctorate on him, and we made two wonderful new friends. The visit was a cultur
al feast and everything worked with clockwork precision – down to a roaring salute, as though on cue, from a lion when the Heaneys visited in the local Shamwari Game Reserve.
Most memorable was a poetry reading in the cathedral, preceded by a procession from the Drostdy Arch. Walking down High Street amidst this cheerful crowd of students, local poets and academics, I recalled the many political marches that had taken place down this same street, and as we entered the cathedral I thought how ftting that the building that had offered shelter to so many of our angry and anxious protests in the past should tonight be the venue of such a joyous occasion. Seamus and Marie were not the only two people who were bowled over by what awaited them inside the cathedral. Never in our wildest dreams had Wendy, Malvern or I thought that the cathedral would be full to overflowing for a poetry reading! People were crammed on chancel steps and all along the aisles. Candlelight flickered on the grey stone walls. The shouts of a praise poet lifted the roof as he led Malvern and Seamus to the front. And then it was a heart-stopping moment when the great poet started to read. "Between my finger and my thumb,” he read, “the squat pen rests, snug as a gun.” We were all entranced but none so much as Malvern. He was delighted and humbled by the entire visit and the event in the cathedral was an unforgettable highlight of his career. Malvern had succeeded Guy Butler as head of the English department at Rhodes in 1979. He’d led the department through the era of post-colonial studies while continuing his own teaching and research. Now, the position of Emeritus Professor would give him the opportunity to concentrate on his writing.
One of the meetings frequently hosted in our living room, over a period of more than 40 years, was a monthly gathering of 20 women friends called, accurately if prosaically, the Third Thursday Essay Group. On arriving in Grahamstown in 1966 and feeling socially adrift, I’d begun to search for friends with like minds. One of the activities that had stimulated me and made me feel so much more at home during our brief stay in the United States had been a women’s group called Friends in Council. It had its roots in 19th century Kansan life, when a church minister’s wife had decided that the ladies of the congregation needed “improving”. Each month she’d set an essay topic and the group would get together to read their various offerings, which she then critiqued. Over the years the nature of the group evolved until, by the time we arrived in Lawrence, members no longer had any specific church affiliation and they were taking turns to write essays for the monthly gatherings. My good friend Betsy Bell was a member and took me along to meetings. Fortunately for me the topic that year was 19th century American literature, so I learnt a great deal.
Asking around about anything similar in Grahamstown, I discovered that a newfound friend, Betty Davenport, had previously belonged to such a group in Cape Town. Together with Shirley Maclennan we decided to launch one and, rather gingerly at first, started inviting women we thought might be interested. At a foundation meeting squashed into our temporary fat, Grahamstown's answer to Friends in Council was born. More than four decades later my living room continued to take its turn at hosting these meetings. Amidst the hectic commitments of my working life, the essay group was a date I seldom missed and always looked forward to. Apart from mental stimulation and the company of friends it offered welcome respite from the crises and conflicts that many of us dealt with daily, and it was no surprise that we seldom if ever chose local or socio-political themes to discuss.
When the essay group was joined in the late 1990s by a member who farmed in the Bedford district and arrived at meetings in her double-cab truck, the club started having annual picnics in the Baviaans valley north of Bedford. Gill Pringle would lay on a spread under a thorn tree, complete with champagne and balloons, and we would laze on rugs in the shade and listen to readings on a theme we had chosen for the day. Occasionally conditions were conducive to nude bathing in the Baviaans stream, but on other occasions severe drought confined us to the garden around the farmhouse.
Spending time with friends was important to me, but of course there were those I was unable to see regularly, such as Caroline Starling, my great university friend and bridesmaid, and so letter writing became our form of communication. How I rejoiced over the years at the sight of Caroline’s regulation Royal Mail envelopes with their Par Avion stickers, and how I enjoyed replying to them! In the early years especially, I valued my various correspondences enormously. Copious letters to and from friends, most of them in England but several scattered around the world, allowed me to gain perspective on my life and the events going on around me. They were windows onto other worlds, with views that helped keep me sane, and at the same time they provided me with a kind of vicarious window onto my own life. Through them I could always feel at my back the wonderful support of an interested and caring network of friends.
Besides the constant stream of friends and colleagues, our house in time became home to Grahamstown’s Quaker meetings. The book-lined room which opened onto the garden had first been a bedroom and playroom. With a new ceiling and another set of French doors it later became known as the garden room, and now it became the meeting room. Here, away from the road, one could meditate in quiet, interrupted only by the sound of oriole or pigeon or cicada. The British travel writer Freya Stark once said that old age comes most gently to those who have doorways into an abstract world. After a lifetime of being too busy for much contemplation, such a doorway eventually opened to me in the old library of Pembroke College, during a sabbatical leave in Cambridge.
My great-aunt Elsie, who had been a Quaker, had left an abiding impression on me, but we’d never talked about her faith and in the family it had been alluded to more as an intellectual adventure than a spiritual conviction. At university, a boyfriend had introduced me to the principles of pacifism and during the holidays in Cornwall, where my parents then lived, I went down steep country lanes to a thatched Meeting House with cool, whitewashed walls that rejoiced in the name of Come to Good. Later still, when we came to Grahamstown, I attended some meetings, but my growing family claimed my attention and my attendance soon petered out. Then while on leave with Malvern in Cambridge in 1993, I cycled each Sunday morning to Pembroke College where, in the peace of a paneled room that had been a library for generations of students, the Cambridge Friends encouraged my bumbling efforts on a new journey of faith.
In all the turmoil of my life in South Africa, there had been a part of me that longed for stillness. In my initial alienation I had rushed to the Anglican Church, finding in its building and familiar services something that quenched my homesickness. But I was annoyed by its hierarchies and often felt its members in general acquiesced too easily to apartheid. The Quakers, by contrast, had a consistent heritage of humanitarianism here and elsewhere, and the democracy of their church governance appealed to me. Once I’d become a regular member I was happy that our house could host this very different kind of gathering, in the silence of which I was beginning to learn to be still.
One of the best-kept secrets of our Market Street house was its garden. Because the house faced straight onto the street, without a drive or front area, no one expected the spacious, tree-filled back garden. When we first moved in I cultivated the friendship of the head gardener at the university who on occasion loaded my car with saplings and plants, saying, “I don’t think the vice chancellor’s garden will miss these.” Over the years the trees grew, and especially in the early summer they soared up into a green canopy of oak, erythrina, chestnut, mulberry, yellowwood and Cape lilac. There was a long stretch of grass on which the children pitched tents, learnt to ride bikes and played badminton, and in time it would provide space for eight grandchildren to play in. It was definitely a garden for parties, of which there were many, especially in the summertime, but mostly it was our refuge from the outside world. Some time after the children had all left home, Malvern wrote the poem Aerial Photography:
The lawn is silent now
Screened by trees
No older than the children
With their tents and games and laughter.
Turning green by solar clockwork,
They can no more be seen
From my study window:
The rich compost of soil and sun
Ensures that in their genes
The life of youth will turn again,
And again, shut off from ageing eyes
Which search in vain
For the aerial photograph
Of childhood’s shadow
Impressed forever on the grass.
When I was a child I spent a lot of time cutting out pictures from magazines of houses and gardens – usually manor houses with extensive lawns – and then I would fantasise about the rich husband I would have and the many children who would complete the romance. Feminism and political struggles were unknown concepts to a middle-class English girl. My mother never had a career and had very little experience outside the home. She did encourage me to train for something, but only “to fall back on”, and though my friends and I all started out on careers, our eyes were really on marriage. To marry and be supported by one’s husband was still the expectation. None of our daughters, I am pleased to say, has thought of her career as an insurance policy only.
The world has changed. And so did my life, from fantasies and dreams of a romantic idyll to a reality I could not have imagined. For my 70th birthday the family gave me a garden swing seat. As a child I’d had to swing in other people’s gardens as all we had was a rather uncomfortable hammock slung between two sycamores, which tipped at unexpected moments. I’d always wanted a swing of my own. Reclining in it now, the warm sun on my legs and a book open beside me, I recall my expectation that Malvern and I would ultimately park our caravan in the English countryside. Two of our four children, like swallows, have flown north. I suppose I will always continue to feel that pull. But it’s nostalgia, not regret.
Swimming with Cobras Page 18