Swimming with Cobras (4 page)

At last, after a year at the Almoners' Institute in London, I found myself in my first job at the Radcliffe in Oxford, a job and place that I loved. There followed the happiest of times, during which I worked and played in equal measure. Life was sometimes giddy with fun, but we were all becoming much more engaged with serious issues and I would soon come face to face with a challenging one of my own.

“I've met the man you're going to marry!” declared my flatmate Patsy Tranfield one late afternoon outside the squash courts where we had gone for a game. A student at the London School of Economics, her chutzpah never failed to impress me. “He's a Rhodes Scholar…,” she said.

I flourished my squash racquet. "Well, where is he then?" I asked cheekily.

“…and a South African.”

“Forget it,” I shot back. “Never a South African.” I ended the conversation and concentrated on the game ahead.

Patsy bided her time. She was engaged to be married that summer to a student at St Edmund Hall where she sang in the choir, and it was there that she had spied the South African. Attracted by his looks she had fallen into conversation with him, and finding that his interests coincided with mine, she decided to match-make. She disapproved of the boyfriend I was seeing at the time and was determined that all her friends should be as happily engaged as she was.

Curiosity overcame me and I started attending the choir rehearsals with her. Before long I was in conversation with the handsome South African too. I had met English-speaking South Africans before but never an Afrikaner. Malvern's mother was Afrikaans and his parents were card-carrying members of the Nationalist Party and faithful members of the Dutch Reformed Church. As the son of a railway stationmaster, he had grown up simply. There was no silver spoon in his mouth.

Getting to know him was exciting. He had come to Oxford to read English literature and was curious about the world in a refreshing way, looking with wonder at all things English and keen to explore the places he had previously only read about in books. In his years as a student in South Africa he had developed strong anti-apartheid views, but he was adamant about one thing: he would be going back to his country.

I found a shelf of books about South Africa in the Oxford public library and started reading. My simplistic condemnation of all things South African grew more nuanced as I read, and discussions with Malvern helped me to glimpse some of the complexities involved. As our friendship developed I became convinced that Patsy had matched us perfectly. He, on the other hand, secretly doubted that I would be able to make my life in his country, and in years to come I would look back with astonishment at how little I understood and how ill-prepared I was for life in one of the most complex societies on earth.

We became engaged during a blissful weekend in Paris and planned to marry shortly after Malvern's final exams. He and my mother got on well and my father enjoyed debating with him. It must have been hard for them, knowing that their only daughter was going to live in a distant and troubled country, but never did they make me feel guilty.

I felt deep gratitude to my father as he sat beside me in the car carrying us to St Peter's on my wedding day. I also felt grateful knowing how close his relationship with my mother was. It gave me confidence as I prepared to take this enormous step away from them.

My father's strength was doubly important because he knew the anxieties and concerns Malvern and I had shared up to this point. We were to have been married a year earlier. Arrangements had begun but were fortunately far from completed when one weekend Malvern disappeared. He lived in a house with three others and none of them knew where he was. I was stunned and at a complete loss. His friends were helpful and my flatmates tried to console me, but I found it impossible to be passive or patient. In my distress I turned to a South African couple with whom Malvern and I had become friends.

Alex and Jenny Boraine had voyaged to England on the same Union Castle boat as Malvern had three years earlier. Alex had studied theology at Oxford and later would become President of the Methodist Church of Southern Africa and deputy chairperson of the TRC. Right now though, they were in Windsor Great Park acting as wardens in an international hostel. It was there that I phoned them. My mother asked me later why I had chosen to go to them when I had so many English friends – and I think she emphasised the word “English” – who would have helped me. I don't think I had any expectation that Malvern would be there, but suspecting the worries he had about taking me home with him, I felt that talking to older and wiser South Africans might help me grasp the situation.

The Green Line bus to Windsor gave my muddled thoughts time to sort themselves into a list of basic certainties. I knew that Malvern loved me. I knew that our lives belonged together. I knew that we shared enough to make our marriage possible. And I felt sure that his present panic was simply the result of the combined pressures of his final exams and the wedding preparations. I discussed these things with the Boraines. They were sympathetic and shared my relief when Malvern eventually turned up. It transpired that he had taken a bus to Stratford, where he had walked the streets, wandered by the river and sat in the Cobweb café, trying to sort out all the anxieties besetting him. When he finally contacted his housemates, they urged him to make his way immediately to Windsor.

Windsor Great Park is vast. The castle occupies just a small part of it. Among the ancient trees, green with summer leaves, swathes of mown grass formed miles of broad track for riders. Malvern and I tramped these pathways, this way and that, the entire day, talking, explaining, apologising, trying to understand, to find a way forward.

“Why did you leave? What are you afraid of? Can it be that bad?”

“You don't understand. I can't take you home. I can barely go home myself.”

It dawned on me that Malvern's anxiety was not just about taking me to South Africa. It was about his own return to a beloved homeland that had become in many ways alien to him. He had become a different person in Oxford. How would he ft in again? The only conversations he'd had with family and friends for the past three years had been conducted over muffled phone lines that made people sound as if they were speaking from under the ocean. He and his past life existed in different realities.

When we had told each other all our fears, yet felt certain that we still wanted to be together, we agreed to postpone the wedding for a year. Malvern would teach at Whitney Grammar School while I continued to work at the Radcliffe.

When the car pulled up at St Peter's church, the red carpet lay stretched from aisle to pavement and my bridesmaids, headed up by my great friend Caroline Starling, awaited me. Caroline and I had met at Bristol University and trained to become almoners together, and though our lives would be lived on different continents, we would always count one another as sisters.

The window boxes in the St Edmund Hall quad were ablaze with scarlet geraniums, the champagne flowed freely and there were strawberries in abundance. My mother, always well dressed, outdid herself that day in a pink petal hat chosen to contrast with the navy of her dress and coat. She and my father, as they moved among the guests, were truly happy and I felt pleased to have brought them some pleasure at last. Years later, after their deaths, my confidence in their close relationship was confirmed when I found their love letters and was moved by the depth of emotion expressed in them.

There followed an idyllic rural year in Elsfield, a village famous for its view of the Oxford spires and once home to John Buchan, a Scottish novelist who was once a government administrator in post-Boer War South Africa. Having read the Buchan adventure novels while still at school, I now reread them in Elsfield, absorbing the African connections and thinking about the author going to South Africa in 1901. The rector of the attractive Elsfield church had spent much of his life as a missionary in Africa, and Malvern and I enjoyed chatting with him and listening to his reminiscences. It was as though Africa had begun to beckon. And yet it would be two more years before we reached South Africa, and by then we would be a family of four.

Not a person

“I'm sorry, Sir, your wife is not a person in this country.”

An officious customs operative had my blue embossed British passport in his hand. His thick South African accent was incomprehensible to me. We were in the customs shed at the Port Elizabeth docks, waiting for our car to be unloaded. Malvern did what he could to push the proceedings on, while Matthew ran his toy car along a dusty shelf and Anna niggled in my arms, my milk seeping through my blouse.

It was early 1966 and we were finally in Africa after an 18-month detour to America during which Malvern had taught as an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. It had been a carefree year filled with firm new friends and happy memories and in many ways it helped ease me into the unfamiliar life that was to come.

Our first Christmas in the US was spent in Oklahoma with Don and Betsy Bell who took us to their family home in Muskogee where no fewer than three Christmas trees lit up the house. It was my first festive season away from my parents, with whom Christmas had always been a discreet, low-key affair. Here the occasion was rambunctious, overindulgent and altogether delightful, passing in a glow of gourmet eating and a surfeit of brandy Alexanders.

I worked one morning a week at a nursery school for disadvantaged children and saw for the first time the socio-economic realities some black people faced. In spite of their welfare cheques, they seemed sunk in a miasma of poverty, the mothers often victims of abuse from unemployed and frustrated husbands. These scenes began to introduce me to the gross contrasts I would find in South Africa.

The prospect of pursuing an academic life in the United States was attractive, though Malvern would have had to study immediately for his PhD. My chances of being the breadwinner were slim as my qualifications would have had to be reviewed and I was pregnant with Anna. In the end though, Malvern's strong feeling that he should return to South Africa prevailed. We had made friends with a South African couple in Lawrence who were graduates of Rhodes University. Ian Macdonald was a philosophy student at the University of Kansas and Gus was working as a char. When Malvern spotted an advertisement for a job in the English department at Rhodes they urged him to apply for it and, sight unseen, it was his.

Ian's and Gus's enthusiasm had heartened me as I prepared for my life in a foreign land, but driving from Port Elizabeth to Grahamstown through low hills, thorn bushes, aloes and gashes of ochre soil where the road had been laid, the customs official's words echoed in my head. No, this was
not
my country. And it was clear that it would indeed take a long time for me to become a person here.

Malvern quickly began to settle and make his name in the small university community, while I felt like an appendage, defined by his identity and dependent on his status. Sometimes it seemed to me that everyone was related or had known each other in previous lives. The network of relationships and shared histories spread like webs over the parochial society, excluding the newcomer. No-one knew my history; no-one shared my memories. Like the early settlers of this town, I was assailed by homesickness.

Grahamstown was founded by British settlers who came in a wave of immigration in the 1800s. In Britain, the Napoleonic wars and the agrarian and industrial revolutions had led to massive unemployment, and people were attracted by promises of land in Africa and new beginnings for themselves and their families. At the same time these settlers were pawns in a colonial conflict. Grahamstown was a military outpost on the extreme eastern frontier of the Cape Colony, where a settled white population was strategically desirable as a buffer against the displaced indigenous peoples being held at bay across the Fish River.

The voyage by ship must have been extremely arduous. The boats were buffeted unbearably in rough seas, and in the crowded conditions onboard, sickness was common. Measles and smallpox accounted for many deaths. When the voyagers finally arrived at Algoa Bay the view was dismal. They had to wade to the shore, and where Port Elizabeth now lies there was no town to welcome them, just a small fort, a few houses and huts, and many tents. The Reverend William Shaw, the minister who arrived from England in 1821 and played an important role in the early days of the Methodist church in the Eastern Cape, wrote of his landing, “Separated by six thousand miles of ocean from all you were wont to love and enjoy in your native country, . . . the hearts of many sank within them and the inquiry was often reiterated, 'Can this be the fine country, the land of promise to which we have been allured by highly coloured descriptions, and by pictures drawn in our imaginations?' We are deceived and ruined, was the hasty conclusion of many.” How they must have wished to return home. Whenever we visited Port Elizabeth in those early days and I saw a Union-Castle liner docked in the bay, I too wished I could escape.

As I began to explore Grahamstown's cultural museums and saw the fine furniture and
objets d'art
the settlers had brought with them, I wondered at their expectations and marvelled at their courage and tenacity. Trying to establish themselves in this alien land, they had to confront droughts, unproductive soil and deadly conflicts with the Xhosa people. How often they must have yearned for the more accommodating land they had left behind. In the cathedral I came upon plaques in memory of these pioneers, with epitaphs like, “Treacherously killed by the kaffirs." Such words revealed not only the alienation between the peoples involved in the conflict but also -and more tellingly for me at that stage – the dreadful shocks the settlers faced.

Nevertheless, although I found myself empathising with these people, it seemed strange and unacceptable to me that they were still held in such veneration in the Eastern Cape. The 1820 settlers and their descendants seemed to be regarded as nothing less than aristocracy in the rather inward-looking white society of Grahamstown. While I could identify with their plight, something in me balked at their undeniable story of colonial dominance and oppression. It was just one of many moral dilemmas I would have to confront in my new life.