Swimming with Cobras (5 page)

Like most South African towns, the Grahamstown I got to know in the late sixties was divided into three racially distinct parts. Fairly prosperous looking white residential areas surrounded the central business district, a smaller section for coloureds clustered just beyond the railway line, and beyond that lay the large African residential area. Unlike most South African towns, however, Grahamstown contained all its distinct racial communities within a single bowl surrounded by hills. In fact, the townships were visible from our front door. By day we could see Tantyi, Fingo Village and Makana's Kop (or Joza) sprawling up the hill to the east, and at night we could hear the hubbub of crowded community life.

We were not in what was considered one of the prime areas of white Grahamstown, and definitely on the "wrong" side of the tracks. A good deal of township traffic passed our door, with spans of oxen pulling wagonloads of firewood and donkeys trotting by trailing carts. When we decided to buy here, more than once we were asked, “But who will your children play with?”

We were attracted to the house in Market Street for its spaciousness. We could picture it whitewashed, with slate roof and simple lines, reminiscent of a Derbyshire farmhouse. On a lecturer's salary it was also all we could afford. Other more modern houses we had seen at the lower end of the market were poky and boring by comparison. But this one was in a bad state of neglect. When we first entered, our legs were covered instantly in a swarming mass of fleas. I was shocked as I associated them with slums and filth. I had no idea that they were a common hazard in the Eastern Cape, especially in old buildings.

The house was divided into three fats with hardboard partitions, and was further spoiled by an ugly balcony out front and a tin-roofed lean-to at the back. The big garden was a mass of weeds, broken bricks and the ruins of hen houses and pigeon lofts. Malvern had more vision than I did and was enthusiastic from the start, knowing that the house was full of promise. So we bought it and began the long adventure of making it our own.

In many ways Grahamstown seemed like a small English market town straight out of a novel. The streets were wide with little traffic and the High Street had a particularly colonial air. At one end stood the Herbert Baker buildings of Rhodes University with their broad steps and tower, and at the opposite end, Gilbert Scott's cathedral spire stretched into the sky. In between were houses with cool verandas, bustling shops, a magistrate's court and a Supreme Court. One of the hotels had red carpets, palms in large tubs and waiters wearing white gloves and fezzes. One would not have been surprised to see the author Rudyard Kipling or British army officer General Gordon of Khartoum striding out. Both had in fact visited Grahamstown and Gordon had taken tea in the drawing room of the very house we had just bought.

The Church Square was dominated on one side by the Anglican cathedral and on the other by a rather fine 19th century Methodist church, where an avenging angel, looking as though she might at any moment soar heavenward, commemorated the Boer War. The Standard Bank with its neo-classical columns lent an air of the British Raj. Various shops with splendid, picturesque facades faced onto the square. There was a bookshop with panes of coloured Victorian glass in its doors and windows, and glass-fronted bookcases within. Stepping inside, I felt as though I had entered the pages of a Dickens novel. The proprietor served me with deference and old-world courtesy, his black coat shiny at the elbows and his suit in need of a trip to the dry cleaners. I imagined him sitting on a high stool dipping his quill into an inkwell and writing in a leather-bound ledger. The ambience of outdated gentility did not give the impression of a thriving commercial business. Years later, when our son took a holiday job there, the then proprietor would be astonished by Matthew's sales patter.

“How is it that every customer seems to be your friend?” he would ask.

“They're not, Sir,” was Matthew's cheeky reply, “but this is the way to sell books.”

The local newspaper,
Grocott's Mail
, was produced from the back of this shop. It had been family-run for a hundred years and beneath its front-page banner it carried the boast, “South Africa's oldest family newspaper. Established 1870. Liberty and Progress.” It seemed at times to be stuck in the 19th century. A journalist friend of ours said that when he was working on Bloemfontein's local newspaper in the 1950s, copies of
Grocott's
Mail
would arrive still addressed to The Editor,
The Friend
, Bloemfontein, Orange River Colony.

Opposite the square lay the equally old-fashioned Birch's Gentlemen's Outfitters and General Drapery selling school uniforms, church vestments and graduation gowns. I was astonished when I paid for my first purchase there to see my money conveyed to the cashier on overhead wires by a quaint metal shuttle. More astonishing still is that Birch's continued to use this system well into the 1990s.

I quickly learnt that if there was anything at all that my household needed, I would find it at Woods' General Store in Bathurst Street, owned and run by the Woods family for over a hundred years. It sold everything from knitting needles to pans, from aprons to marshmallows. The glass-fronted showcases were monuments to the past and throughout the next three decades I never witnessed any attempt to modernise. I was served on my first visit by one of the Mesdames Woods, with grey bun and horn-rimmed spectacles and a forbidding air of correctness that made me feel like a nuisance to be shopping there. When she presented the handwritten bill in her rather intimidating way, I felt embarrassed not to have the exact amount immediately to hand.

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.”