by James King
Jack was offered the job, but the Colonial Service regretted they had no accommodation for married couples and informed him Mrs. Laurence would have to remain behind. That obstacle was removed when Jack assured his employers that his wife was a “typical” Canadian girl (“an accomplished woodswoman, a kind of female Daniel Boone”), one habitually used to living in tents and wielding an axe. The ploy worked, and the Laurences were on their way to a new challenge. Peggy’s high spirits are evident in a letter that November:
We went on a shopping spree last week, and bought a lot of clothes for both of us. Jack is highly annoyed at having to get an evening suit, for the first time in his life, but I keep telling him he won’t put on any weight so he’ll be able to wear it forever.… We got a lovely formal for me. I had to get a washable one, as there is no dry-cleaning in Somaliland.… It is in glazed chintz.… Boned top so I can wear it strapless if I want, and very full skirt. White background, with a pattern of huge butterflies all over it, in shades of mauve, yellow and dark brown.
She was filled with the most wonderful sense of expectancy. At last, she was going to escape to a truly foreign land. Although extremely shy, she was eager to take on new experiences, taking pleasure in the brightly coloured dress which showed off her slim body. Like the colourful butterflies, she was in full sail, ready for a great adventure.
7
WATER FOR A DRY LAND
(1950–1952)
A LITTLE BIT of Peggy’s élan in the Somalia adventure was punctured by the sea voyage to Africa. Before that, she had to put up with the confusion generated by the Colonial Office’s muddled notions of life in Somaliland. First, the Laurences were given a pamphlet which stated they must carry with them a year’s supply of tinned food and a portable bath. This injunction proved to be out of date. Then they were warned of the omnipresent danger of “woolly-bears,” cloth-eating insects. Juxtaposed in her mind were such practicalities and the images she had retained from her reading of Sir Richard Burton’s adventures, from her recollection of the legend of Prester John, and from her knowledge that “Somaliland was the end of a bitter journey and the beginning of a lifetime of bondage, for there the Arab slave routes had emerged at the sea, and from there the dhow-loads of slaves had once been shipped across the Gulf of Aden to be sold in the flesh markets of Arabia.”
The Laurences booked passage from Rotterdam to the Red Sea on the Tigre, a Norwegian passenger-cargo vessel. Unfortunately, the Tigre was delayed by a week, and the almost penniless couple had to find a way to survive until the ship reached the Netherlands. Restaurants in which English was spoken were beyond their means, so they were reduced to eating wiener schnitzel and slagroomwafel (waffle with whipped cream) and walking the slippery streets of chilly Rotterdam. Jack spent much of his time reading War and Peace, which he had the foresight to bring. Peggy paced the room until she discovered the Gideon Bible, whereupon she read the five books of Moses for the first time. When their ship finally arrived, the tired and disgruntled couple “tramped on board dully, expecting nothing.” There, they were the only passengers and were ensconced in the owners outrageously opulent suite. “We mustn’t act surprised,” a grinning Jack instructed his wife, as he sprawled on a velour sofa. “The idea is that we take it all completely for granted.” The crew’s friendliness extended to sharing their Christmas celebrations with the young couple. Jack was given a bottle of whisky, Peggy a marzipan pig. Genoa was their first extended stop. Later, they passed by Sicily. One night they even saw Mount Etna, “a far-off red glow in the black sky.”
On board the Tigre, Peggy kept herself busy working on a novel, as she rather matter-of-factly informed Adele on December 27: “I’ve been going ahead with my story not too badly, having finished Chapter III (rough draft!) yesterday. I’ve done 25 shorthand pages since leaving London, and now must transcribe them.… I’m reading ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ now.… I’ve never read a book that impressed me so much with its sharpness of perception, vividness of dialogue, and a way of catching the full complexity of its characters.”
Peggy’s first view of the mysterious east was a Coca-Cola sign in Arabic at Port Said, a sure sign of imperialist presence. “But,” as she pointed out, “the dhows were there, too, with their curved prows and triangular sails.” Some of these—the smaller ones—were “shabby,” and in her recollections of Port Said—and later of Somaliland—there is a contrast between first impressions, such as a town or village’s beautiful appearance, and the often grim realities of what they were really like. Like most travellers, Peggy was always having to adjust her sights in order to meld reality with fantasy: “We went ashore and walked the crowded and intricate streets where stained mud buildings stood side by side with slick stuccoed apartment blocks in florid pinks and greens. Rows of ragged palms fringed the roads where horse-drawn carriages unbelievably rattled along like old engravings come to life. And the people—merchants waddling slow and easy in long striped robes and maroon fezzes, nimble limping beggars who trailed the tourists, girl children with precociously knowing eyes.…”
The passage through the Suez Canal was cold. Wrapped in sweaters and coats, they saw villages of square clay houses slip past them, “tattered children, and black cattle and women in purdah.” At Aden, they switched to a smaller ship, the Bombay-owned Velho, which was to take them across the Gulf of Aden to Berbera on the northern coast of the Somaliland Protectorate. The new vessel was inhabited by those like the Laurences, who were arriving, and those returning from leave in England, who could hardly wait to get back to the “exile that had become beloved.” One of the passengers, an Army sergeant, gloomily warned them: “This your first time out? You’ll hate it. Nothing there but a bloody great chunk of desert. It’s got the highest European suicide rate of any colony—know that? Good few blokes living very solitary there in outstations, that’s the reason. They go round the bend.”
Peggy was drawn to the Somalis crowding the third-class section, whom she saw from her matchbox-size first-class room.
They were tall gaunt men, most of them, their features a cross between negroid and Arabian. They wore tunic-like robes called lunghis, knotted around their waists and reaching just below their knees. The cotton materials of their robes were of every shade and variety—splendid plaids, striped or plain, green and magenta and mauve. Around their heads were loosely constructed turbans, pink, white, blue. The few Somali women on board seemed a contrast to the brash, assertive men.
At a glance, these women seemed “meek and gentle,” an impression that would be modified in the next two years. At first, Peggy was also content to accept Jack’s injunction: “In this part of the world, you have to learn that if you can’t change something, you might as well not worry about it.”
However, a dispute between her and Jack arose just as they arrived at Berbera, when Peggy did not wish to make use of the services of Mohamed, a Somali, who was to act as their servant. Jack informed her: “ ‘This isn’t Winnipeg or London. You don’t tote your own luggage here. It just isn’t done. Maybe we don’t agree with the system, but there it is. Another thing—he’ll be useful in the shops. If you buy anything by yourself, before you know what’s what, you’ll likely get cheated by the local merchants.’ ” The advice was good and obviously well intentioned, but from the very start she rebelled at being the “Memsahib”—or being called or treated as one.
Peggy identified with the “other.” She had a natural affinity for placing herself in the shoes of the outsider. Jack Laurence did not believe in the imperialist way of life, but he attempted to work within its constraints. For example, he obviously felt the technology of the West should be used to help the Somalis. Sometimes, Peggy could steel herself to see things from this vantage point, but her real position—as she became more and more aware—was in fact radically different from her husband’s. Not only did she loathe the racist attitudes of the colonizers, but she came to see that any attempt to help was ultimately misleading and condescending. Instead, she s
earched for ways of understanding which emphasized similarities while still recognizing differences. Even in such instances she worried about her possible misappropriation of an alien culture.
Somalia in 1950 was a country that had been tossed back and forth by various European powers. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the French, Italian and English considered it to be of strategic importance. In 1887, Britain established the British Somaliland Protectorate there and, a year later, reached an agreement with France defining their Somali possessions. (The British Somaliland Protectorate is referred to hereafter as Somaliland.) In 1889, Italy created a small protectorate there. After Britain conquered Italian Somaliland during the Second World War, it became a UN trusteeship territory. Despite the fragmentation of Somalian territory, the inhabitants shared one religion, Islam and one oral language, Somali. In 1951, the English were attempting to remedy the perennial problem of water supply in the Haud, the interior plateau region of 25,000 square miles. For this they had sent for young Jack Laurence.
The only written record of Peggy’s stay in Somaliland is contained in The Prophet’s Camel Bell, which was based on the diary she destroyed after that book was published. The Prophet’s Camel Bell was written in the early 1960s, during which time her marriage was beginning to unravel. In that book can be glimpsed—in a subdued and submerged way —some of the differences between the Laurences, but since it was written almost ten years after the event, it may not be a completely accurate account of the emotional life of the couple at the time it is set.
Hargeisa. (illustration credit 7.1)
There are two distinct areas to northern Somaliland, where Jack and Peggy lived. There is coastal Guban (“burnt”) and Haud (“south”), separated by a high escarpment where the mountain town of Sheikh and the capital, Hargeisa, obtain some relief from the rigours of the desert. The fertility of the Haud was of enormous concern because its population—the Somali Bedouin—are dependent on the summer grazing of flocks there. The building of ballehs was an attempt to overcome the privations of the desert during the dry season, to bring water to a dry land.
On their second day in Somaliland, the Laurences were driven to Hargeisa. During that trip Peggy faced the hazards of the desert for the first time: “The light brown sand glistened with mica and slid down into long ribbed dunes. It seemed to be no place for any living thing. Even the thorny bushes, digging their roots in and finding nourishment in that inhospitable soil, appeared to have a precarious hold on life, as though at any moment they might relax their grip, dry up entirely and be blown clean away.” Later that day, she learned firsthand what an oasis was when she was confronted with the sudden sight of greenery and human dwellings. However, she did not receive any other nourishment there since, for her and Jack, Hargeisa was closely tied to the English Club, a low rambling structure surrounded by pepper trees and acacias: “It stood, like the European bungalows, at a considerable distance from the magala or Somali town.”
That distance extended to every aspect of colonial existence, as she soon learned at the morning tea party, where the ladies present offered her conflicting advice:
Always lock the storeroom door, or you will be robbed blind by your servants.
Never lock the storeroom door, or your resentful servants will find other ways to pilfer food.
The common thread in these adages is the distrust of the servants. Peggy was not inclined to be overly sympathetic to the English women: she saw the barriers they put between themselves and the Somali, and she also reacted negatively to their attempt to establish a “little England” in the desert. She created a scandal when she went with Mohamed into Hargeisa. Her conduct was unusual enough for two Somali policeman to trail her unobtrusively. When she returned to the Club, she learned that “European women did not go to the Somali town alone, and no European ever went on foot. It simply wasn’t done.” She made this entry in her (now destroyed) diary: “Perhaps it is the sight of poverty that the memsahibs shrink from.” Of course, she was not yet sensitive to the fact she might be transgressing the customs of the natives. Somehow, Peggy felt, she would be “immune from their bitterness.”
From Hargeisa, the Laurences went to Sheikh, where they lived in a small dark-green house on a ridge away from the main settlement. So windy was their location that sandbags were placed on the roof to prevent it from blowing away. The house had some attractive features, such as a stone fireplace. At first, Peggy, in a frenzy to settle in, rearranged furniture, made curtains and cushions, and, in general, did everything to tame the house to her ways. Then, “I stopped my buzzing after a while and looked around, and then I noticed that everything was calm. The land was not aware of me. I might enter its quietness or not, just as I chose. Hesitantly at first, because it had been my pride to be as perpetually busy as an escalator, I entered. Then I realized how much I needed Sheikh, how I had been moving towards it through years of pavements, of doom-shrieking newspapers, and the jittery voices of radios.” The moment was transformative, for she began a slow but steady process wherein she accepted Somaliland and its people as they were, not as she would have them be.
There were many wonderful things to explore, such as the early morning clouds that swept so low one could walk through them. There were always new customs to be aware of, as when Peggy received three elders. Protocol dictated a woman did not receive such guests by herself, and the elders decided to return at a time when Jack was at home. They discussed the ballehs with him, even confronted him with their fear that the English, having provided themselves with a continual supply of water, might attempt to push the Somalis out and live there themselves. Peggy also became aware of the outcast tribes among the Somali, the Midgans who did menial work, the Yibir who were magicians and sorcerers, and the Tomal, the workers in metal. She also learned that the wearing of slacks by women brought protests from passers-by: “Look, Dahab! Is it a man or a woman? Allah knows. Some strange beast—.”
Jack’s life was divided between Sheikh and the camp in the Haud where the ballehs were being constructed. When Peggy accompanied him to the camp, she saw a vivid contrast between the desert in the dry season—the jilal—
No green anywhere, none, not a leaf, not a blade of grass. In stretches where the wind-flattened grass remained, it had been bleached to bone-white. The earth was red, a dark burning red that stung the eyes. The sun was everywhere; there was no escaping its piercing light. The termite mounds, some of them three times the height of a man, rose like grotesque towers, making part of the plain seem like a vast city of insects.…
and the flowering paradise it became after the rain—
On that portion of the plain where once only the red termite-mounds stood, now the grass grew several feet tall, ruffled by the wind and swaying gently. The thorn trees were thick with new leaves and the country seemed to have filled in, the grey skeleton no longer visible. The whole was laced with flowers. White blossoms like clover were sprinkled through the short grass under the acacias.
Unfortunately, this change often brought about a strange tragedy whereby men and animals who were dying of thirst would be swept away when the rivers overflowed. As Peggy said, “This must be the ultimate irony, surely—to drown in the desert.”
This fate almost befell her. Soon after she and Jack had settled at Sheikh, Peggy had been surprised to learn of the tribulations of the desert. At that point her imagination of those grim events was “depressingly limited.” Her baptism was exactly that when she, Jack and Abdi, their driver, were caught in the flooding at the onset of the rainy season. “We were forced to follow the path pointed by this swift torrent of water, for it became impossible for us to see anything. There could be no darkness anywhere to compare with this darkness, unless in caverns under the sea where the light never reaches.” Finally, after many hesitant starts and quick stops, the car bogged down completely. After an hour, the rain stopped. The three slept and, in the morning, they awoke to find the flooding had abated.
I glanced a
t myself in the Land Rover mirror and immediately looked away again. I was covered with clay and grime, my clothes filthy and dishevelled. I had never felt more demoralized and miserable in my life. Last night we were keyed up, tense, ready for anything, but now that feeling was gone. We were depressed, wondering how long it would take us to get back to Hargeisa, or if we would get back at all. The thought of slogging through the mud again filled us with weariness.
Although her mouth was filled with bile and her stomach empty with the nausea of emptiness, she, Jack and Abdi finally made it back safely to Hargeisa.
There were more tranquil moments. In her account of the Haud, Peggy evoked the wildlife in language of incredible vivacity. The hyenas emerged, “long shadows sneaking from bush to bush … They were scavengers, not fighters, these giant bastard dogs with massive shoulders and jaws that could have broken a man’s neck in a single snap. They had strength but no heart.” Perhaps the strongest passage is that dealing with the approach of the “yellow canaries”: “The dozen pairs of wings became two and three dozen, a multitude, and I saw that the creatures were not little yellow canaries but large yellow locusts. They were in the middle stage of their growth. When they were fully mature, their wings would be scarlet, with a span as wide as a man’s hand. Soon we were driving through a swarm of them. They fluttered blindly in through the Land Rover windows, and launched themselves like bullets at our heads.”
The most painful incident involved a cheetah shot by Abdi. It was illegal to torture these beautiful but dangerous creatures, but the Somalis ignored this and proceeded to torment the cat as it clung to life. Since Jack was away at the balleh-site, Peggy was alone in camp and had to deal with the situation on her own. She ordered the men to kill the animal, but they ignored her. Suddenly, the animal roused itself and tore a labourer’s leg from knee to ankle. At this point, Jack arrived back and shot the beast. “Why,” she later asked, “should they have any mercy for the cheetah, who killed their sheep when it could? Life was too hard, here, for any such sentimentality. I knew this very well, but I could not help admiring the desperate courage of the animal. The Somalis thought I was foolish to want the cheetah put out of its pain at once, and I thought they were cruel to want to prolong its agony. Neither of us would alter our viewpoints.”