Swimming with Cobras (24 page)

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

Who used to fill each summer

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 70
^th
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.

When I think back to the child I was, and the home and country I grew up in, I have to pinch myself. Was that me? Has this been my life? By South African standards my life has not been remarkable. My story is not one of suffering or heroic deeds, but the simple record of one woman's life in a provincial town on an extraordinary frontier. Against all my early expectations I've become completely absorbed in this very strange society – and that has made all the difference.