Singled Out (42 page)

time the decision to travel to Africa was taken under doctor’s orders.

Margery had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was firmly advised

to take a year’s convalescence.

The breakdown was the result of a pile-up of troubles both during and

after the war. Margery’s catastrophe was not the man shortage, nor even

the death of a sweetheart, but the loss of the person she loved most in the

world, her brother Edgar, killed in the awful slaughter of Delville Wood

on the Somme in . Edgar and she had been inseparable as children.

They had invented a private world, written each other long letters when

he was away at boarding school, composed a joint opera and studied at

Oxford together. She found it almost unbearable to live without him. In

her  novel
Josie Vine
* Margery struggled to describe the depths of grief which afflicted her during that terrible time: . . . After twenty-five years of vigorous life, his body lay, a disfigured and useless thing, already touched, perhaps, by the decay that would soon crumble it into the earth on which it was lying. She felt the sword-like severing that had cut away her comrade from her side and put an end to his music, his learning, and laughter . . .

She dared not look upon the years during which she would live on without him; to be alive now – to be strong – to breathe and eat, seemed a treachery to him.

‘. . . Why were we born at all, or allowed to love each other so? Oh God, God, how could You let it happen?’

Then she sank into that silent realization of loss in which human nature reaches the utmost limit of suffering.

After the war Margery took her degree, and got a job in the history

faculty of Sheffield University. She was utterly miserable, barely clinging

* Margery Perham denied that the novel was autobiographical, but it contains too many parallels with her own life for this claim to be convincing.

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Singled Out

to existence. Female academic staff were exiled to a freezing and comfortless dungeon called the ‘Ladies Common Room’; her salary was inadequate.

Nightly she travelled on a clanging tram to her nasty cheap rooms on the edge of the city and consumed her meagre meat and pudding ‘which I had cut up into four portions to last for four days’. When demobilisation came, bringing with it a torrent of students needing tuition, she was crushed with overwork.

‘My one recreation was to walk out on to the rather grim moorland and

sit down amongst the wiry inhospitable heather which was grimed with

soot, and contemplate, physically and mentally, the dark bare horizon.’

Grief and exhaustion took their toll. Margery was sliding into the abyss.

When her doctor issued his command some self-preserving instinct drove

her to reach into her childhood and fulfil a secret dream of travel. Her early reading had been Kipling and Rider Haggard. From a very young age, when the grown-ups had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew

up, Margery’s invariable answer had been ‘a big-game hunter in Africa’.

By luck her older sister Ethel was married to a colonial administrator who

had recently been posted to Hargeisa, British Somaliland. Now Ethel was

due to join her husband, so in  she and Margery set sail together in a

P & O liner from Tilbury. The adventure, and the healing, had begun.

They travelled via Aden and then took a cattle-boat across the gulf. At

Aden Margery was overwhelmed for the first and last time with a night—

marish recoil of fear and revulsion at the thought of her own vulnerability

as a white female among savages: ‘I was about to commit myself to that

black continent across the water; one, almost alone, among tens of thousands of strange, dark, fierce, uncomprehending people, and live away on that far frontier, utterly cut off from my own race.’ But the feeling passed and, despite many real dangers, never returned. At Berbera on the coast of Somaliland the ladies were eventually met by the District Commissioner,

Margery’s brother-in-law Major Rayne. Accompanied now, they travelled

 miles on camel-back, through the inhospitable wasteland of north-east

Africa, to the distant outpost of Hargeisa.

. . . Hargeisa. It is still a magic word to me. Yet there wasn’t much to see – sand, thorn-trees, aloes, a few stony hills, a
tug
or dry water-course . . .

You might well ask how such a place could give me the ‘time of my life’. Yet it did. Whatever my later travels in more beautiful and dramatic parts of the continent, this was my
first
Africa.

In her own words, Margery Perham was ‘gloriously happy’ in Hargeisa.

She was transfixed by the beauty of the Somali people, by the burnished

A Grand Feeling



bloom of their dark skins, by their vigour and proud carriage. The Raynes

lived in a reasonably comfortable compound; colonial life, even in the

middle of nowhere, held to its traditions of Britishness. Tennis, steeple—

chasing and shooting were all available. Margery and her sister donned

evening dress before mounting camels to join the handful of British officers living in tents on the other side of the
tug
for pre-dinner drinks, though out in the bush she delighted in her costume of high leather boots, khaki breeches and wide-brimmed terai hat. But above all Africa itself bewitched

her. On moonlit nights ghostly hyenas prowled around the compound;

from the roof where Margery slept under the stars she heard their unearthly

howls and felt a quiver of exhilarated fear. When the rains finally fell on

that desiccated landscape the unforgettably acrid scent of dust and water

filled her nostrils.

There was danger all around. Between their tribes the Somali people

could be as fierce and ruthless as they were often gentle and loyal. There

was strife between Christian and Muslim, and Margery never forgot the

fearful day when the Major found a document pinned to a thorn tree calling

upon their loyal soldiers to cut the throats of their white masters and join with the Muslim uprising to overthrow the infidel. Fortunately for them the soldiers ignored this diktat, and their throats were not cut.

Most of all a trek with her brother-in-law to reconnoitre the Abyssinian

frontier sated Margery’s thirst for adventure. On the map the border area

was blank, with the word ‘Unexplored’ printed tantalisingly across it. ‘As

far as I know no Europeans had ever followed our route . . .’ They set off

with a party of resplendent Somali police in uniform, travelling sometimes

on camel-back, sometimes by pony, winding their way through the thorn—

scrub. Every day they rose at first light, and started out through the mysterious silence of the African dawn; in the heat of the day they rested. They camped out in beautifully decorated Indian tents.

Night was the zenith of adventure. I slept on a camp-bed in the open with large fires on each side of me to scare potential carnivores – lions, hyenas or leopards.

The police built a high
zareba
of thorn branches round our camp. They would sing themselves gutturally to sleep. Then that miracle of the tropical night of stars!

If the moon was up the sand turned the colour of milk. These nights utterly fulfilled the heart’s desire of my childhood for adventure in Africa.

But more was to come, for one night a lion jumped the defences of a

neighbouring Somali camp and killed a man. Margery accompanied Major

Rayne tracking the pack across the bush; after a day’s pursuit she became

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Singled Out

separated from her brother-in-law and found herself face to face with an

exhausted, angry lion. Fortunately the animal uttered a snarl and, hearing

it, the experienced Major fired his gun into the air, scaring it back into the bush: for Margery, this incident was the climax of the entire expedition.

The year ended. Margery Perham went back to Sheffield, back to the

sooty heather and the clanging trams. And somehow this time it was

different. Her experience of Africa had dislodged the cloying misery which

had clamped down over her hopes and ambitions. She found friends, bought

a motor-bike, wrote a play and acted in it, and had two novels published.

But Africa never loosed its hold on her; her fascination with the country,

and the issue of our own responsibility for it as colonisers, took root in her brain. By chance in  a post came up at her old Oxford college; her scanty experience of the colonial administration was by then sufficient

for her to be asked to instruct foreign service probationers. And that was

the beginning of a lifetime of travel and research, of teaching, advising,

publishing and journeying. Margery went to the Pacific islands, to the

Antipodes, to America, the Caribbean, and made many return visits to

Africa. When Major Rayne died in the s Margery and her sister set up

home together in Surrey, which became her base for writing when not

abroad. Her academic eminence as an expert on African affairs was recognised by governments at home and overseas and in  she was honoured with a CBE.

‘And what about my beloved Somaliland?’ In  the new government

invited Margery to attend the independence celebrations as its guest – ‘so I could see again that harsh land and those handsome, high-spirited people rejoicing in their freedom and unity’. The occasion had personal echoes

for her. She remembered the days of tribal strife; conflict had brought

tragedy for her too, but her life’s work had been to attain peace between

peoples. Certainly, their ecstasy now mingled with her own, for in that

stony unexplored desert, forty years earlier, she had found a passion, a

purpose and, after terrible anguish, peace of mind.

Finding happiness as a ‘bach’

But it was no good pretending. A lot of the Surplus Women still found it

tough being surplus. Independence could be isolating. Urges didn’t come

to everyone. Closer to home, for the average Surplus Woman confined to

office, classroom, scullery or bedside, what silver linings could enable them to look on the bright side? How did the single woman deal with the black times, the natural feelings of forlorn rage, loneliness and disappointment

A Grand Feeling



that crowded in upon them? The anti-feminist Charlotte Cowdroy cited a

women’s magazine article describing a new disease: ‘one-room-itis’, from

which many of the bachelor girls were suffering. ‘One-room-itis’ afflicted

hostel-dwellers in big cities, living on inadequate wages, condemned by

lack of resources to spend cheerless evenings washing and mending stockings, with never any fun, never any games. Miss Cowdroy’s unrealistic (and somewhat hypocritical) solution was to discourage women from

ever entering the workplace. They should all get married and have babies.

Some hope.

There were advice-givers who adopted a more optimistic and practical

line when addressing the Bachelor Girl. Many of their suggestions have

already been outlined in Chapter ; they ranged from taking up callisthenics to astrology, home decorating to football, learning German to good works.

‘One-room-itis’ as seen by
Woman’s

Weekly
, 

But, as was so often the case, it was the women’s magazines that seemed,

somehow, to understand best what it was like for the bachelor girl with

‘one-room-itis’. ‘Little City Girl All Alone’ was the title of ‘a little article for the Business Girl who Lives in Digs, and Feels Rather Lonely’, published 

Singled Out

in
Woman’s Weekly
in March . The drawing that illustrates it shows the young thing in a nightie with a quilt wrapped around her shoulders to keep off the chill, perched on the edge of her iron bed with its inadequate

light; she probably had no chair. The uncurtained window looks on to the

empty blackness of night, and the walls are bare. The book she is reading

may be the Bible or Ethel M. Dell – we don’t know.

‘There are some advantages, I suppose, in being out in the world on your own,’

said a business girl rather wistfully to me. ‘And all the stay-at-home girls I know envy me my latch-key and complete independence – but, do you know, sometimes I’m frightfully lonely.

‘You see, I’m out at business all day, and I don’t have many chances of making friends . . .’

Woman’s Weekly
to the rescue. Take the initiative, urged the author of the article. There were office friendships to be made, contacts to be made through churches, and for goodness’ sake, JOIN something. There were

simply endless clubs: the YWCA, amateur dramatics, debating clubs and

cycling clubs. ‘Don’t shut the door in the evenings and sit alone, when you

are pining for a friend. Go out instead . . .’

If you did, there were open arms to greet you. So manifest was the issue

of the Surplus Women that concerned bodies started to look at ways to

assuage their needs. The Christian Alliance of Women and Girls was an

outreach group set up in  to offer friendship and religion specifically

to women living in cities who suffered from ‘one-room-itis’. Covertly,

they feared that the girls would find their way from their ‘one-rooms’ and

on to the streets if not steered towards more virtuous paths. The CAWG

aimed at lifelong membership (unlike the YWCA), so was also particularly

sympathetic to the older spinster who ‘had once again got relegated to

Cinderella’s part behind the scenes’. For these ladies the CAWG offered

clubs, hostels and, importantly, a solution for single women anxious about