INVOLUTION: Science and God: Reality Redefined

Mother’s Day- The African Quilt Continues…

My Mother, Louie. The African Quilt continued.

Let’s face it: Mothers are ‘off limits’. To write about one’s mother is the emotional equivalent of a strip search. Yet, for writers they have probably shaped the way we see, the things we value and care about. Whether we loved or hated them, battled or bruised them, cosseted or cared, their shadow looms larger than any other. As writers we step round it. It’s considered only decent.

Yet as a four times mother myself, I recognise the crucial necessity of probing and unclothing the role of mother, to understand how it shaped my life and now the book that wrote my life, wrote it on my own mother’s stooping back. There is no aspect of the book that cannot trace its origins to her necessary neglect, her interest in the self-sacrificial and heroic, her solitude and mine. She made no choices for me, which necessitated me trying everything, and ending up writing about everything without any guidelines, or narrow pathways.

I want to paint my mother ( and I have elaborated her friendship with Ndaba) but the reluctance to focus a glare bites even now, and I shall take my cowardice into the third person to begin with, because she was probably more important to others, a public life, heroic though not renowned. All she was, and gave, was in spite of me. And because of me. I was her cross; I was never unaware of that, although its weight became a familiar monkey on the back. It was during a ‘metaphor therapy’ workshop that I ran smack into our mutual obliquity and looked it, unflinchingly, in the eye. By then I was in my early fifties and she just into her seventies. The group of metaphor spinners was given large sheets of paper and a set of drawing pens and asked to ‘Draw what you remember of your mother’.

The woman next to me drew a pair of legs in elegant shoes that ended at the skirt hem. It was all she remembered, as a child. Her mother was always hidden by a table, and, as an Italian, that continued. Mother meant pasta ribbons, food and the ferrying of food.

I drew a wet towel, coiled as though being wrung out.
‘Explain this?’ said the therapist.
‘It is what my arrival did to my mother’ I found myself saying ‘Go on…’ he said.
‘Well it’s pain, and grief and conflict, being wrung out and inescapable, as strong as a wet towel…the sort boys flick each other with in the shower- the better to sting’

‘Well now, draw what came before it’ he said.

So I will. You have heard about consequences, I now lay out some causes. For the present, facts will be bare boned. How they structured my life and interests and the ‘book that wrote my life’ will follow anon.

My mother, Louie and her sister Ursula were the second family for my grandmother, Marna, and the first joyful arrivals for my grandfather Heli. They had run free in Uganda, swum in wave-dashed pools in Natal, camped under the stars with horses cropping the grass on the Freestate Farm. Then Education dictated imprisonment, in a boarding school, in England, (since there were none in Uganda) and life had to prepare for a Future. From twelve to eighteen they never saw their parents, but spent holidays with remote cousins in remote Wales, where Sundays were bible black Chapel kneeling, and book bound with prohibitions, no running, no paddling.

Louie ( Right) and Sister Ursula, Leaving School

Service loomed large for Louie. Her father, sweltering in Africa, for those aspirants who walked five miles for the privilege of school, had laid the foundations for missionary zeal. The Welsh abstinence might have contributed its saltpetre. Louie had studied against the call of Spring, developed a poetic appreciation of the Seasons ( as can scarcely be avoided in Staffordshire) in which Easter was the high and polite point of some ancient rite, made doubly precious if snow fell on the straw ‘boater’ on the way to Church and the bells rang slowly in the pebbles of the holy streams…but she had identified her calling. She would become a doctor, in a country devoid of doctors. It would be a hard road for one, not academically outstanding or retentive, but dogged and dedicated. Medicine came bound with Schweitzer, Pasteur and Fleming, whose self denials stood at her shoulder, mixing their brew of nobility and rewarding virtue.

Leaving school with an adequate matriculation, she boarded a Union Castle Liner in Southampton for the journey towards her adult and independent life. After six years she was going home; life was opening out and there were ship board rituals of evening dress and the Captain’s table. It was heady and disorienting.

Continue reading “Mother’s Day- The African Quilt Continues…”

South Africa Through the Eyes of Colour-blind Friendship

Portrait of Mildred Thoko Ndaba-

More of the African Family Quilt.

As a country to be born into South Africa’s politics shaped everything. The politics ate at the breakfast table, turned off the radio last thing at night… never something to be left to others. Not merely administrative decisions but every encounter influenced by its prejudices and expectations. We moved against each other, we blacks and whites, like separate shoals of fish, noticing, but seeming not to, separate doorways, separated schools and townships, and ‘whites only’ beaches, playgrounds, parks and buses. Because my family sailed against the winds, and pretended to be oblivious, and then defiant, I only really only see it clearly now: now that its worst excesses are past. That is not to say it wasn’t a constant subject of conversation, but Mildred Thoko Ndaba’s relationship with my mother was a bulwark that protected us all. It was their love for one another that triumphed, and for which they each sacrificed almost everything else.

How does one do justice to the character of everybody’s Mammy? Milly had the perspicacity and dishcloth efficiency of Calpurnia in To Kill a Mockingbird, the everlasting loading of a table, the sharp remark at bad behaviour, but more laughter than I remember from Calpurnia. Always laughing, doubled up and wiping tears and singing, always singing out loud or, on if on her knees, below the breath. She had the capacious bosom of Mammy in Gone with the Wind and the quiet certainty that without her the world ceased to turn.

All of these similes are appropriate but none describe Milly (to most) Ndaba (to me). Ndaba as a name could not have been more apt- it means ‘big discussion-powwow’ in Zulu, and big discussion was her role, consulted by everyone, deliberating everything, and taking upon herself the management of lesser beings. We were all lesser beings.

Milly walked into our life when I was six. My mother had survived farming me out to crippled soldiers while she finished her medical training. Confined to wheel-chairs, or on crutches they had little else to do but build me a go-cart, read me stories and see that I drank my milk. Together my mother and I, the only females in this interim desolated boarding house, had early solitary servings in a dismal dining room; eating marrow bones on toast or sardines on limp lettuce, before she took out Grey’s Anatomy in the room we shared, and then studied or wept. Her life was over before it had begun. On her graduation at twenty five, and landing her first job we moved out- into a high rise flat in the rougher part of Hillbrow with a balcony six floors above a square of grass, and a walkway on the outside. I was sent to boarding school. My mother worked round the clock.

One morning, just on the point of departure there was a knock and a young Zulu woman asked for work. My mother had no time to talk, pulled her inside, and gave her the keys- of our life. When she came home the sunshine shone off every surface, and a meal was prepared. While she ate my mother asked how this rural girl (the same age as herself, about 27) had come, from where and why? It transpired that Charlie, who managed the garage below, parking cars for the block of flats, had been knifed in a fight, and killed. Milly, his young wife with three children to support had left Paulpietersberg in Natal, her rural homestead where her father had been Chief, and come to find work to support her children, now fatherless.

That was in 1947. My mother died in 2000 and Milly in 2005 and they remained together for the whole of their lives. She was my black mother and more present than ever my white one could be. She made my mother’s professional life as easy as possible, hospital uniforms were starched, ironed and hung in rows, one for each day of the week, shoes were polished and all food prepared. As time went on and my mother gradually acquired wealthy private patients, Milly would accompany her to houses in Parktown or Inanda and while my mother massaged, or applied diathermy treatments, Milly learned from top level chefs in their kitchens; borscht and gefiltre fish (many were Russian Jews) and pickled and chopped herring, chicken soup, but also potato salad, meringues, fish pies, and goulashes. She then realised she could learn from cookbooks and her repertoire expanded with experimental dishes all her own. Independence was methodically achieved; there was nothing she would not tackle, except driving a car. No African woman in Johannesburg then did that.

She had been educated to standard seven at a mission school and could always read and write ( in a perfect looping copperplate script) but she began to master white commerce, and the telephone, making lists and ordering supplies from grocers, and wholesalers and taking command of the deliveries. This in Johannesburg then was almost unheard of. Milly would carefully wrap sub-standard supplies and return them. Her careful deference and innate courtesy smoothed all feathers. ‘Please sir…my Madame asks can you be so kind…’ In time my ‘madam’ did not even ask questions. Milly decided everything. I only ever wanted lamb cutlets and chips which she supplied, laughing, almost every night. But somehow I learnt to cook, because she made me chop and fry and assemble (and add spring onions, mustard and cayenne pepper to potato salad, still a speciality.)

Milly had little regard for men ‘Ow darling what they for? Make work, make babies, useless!’ When my grandmother could no longer be cared for in Lesotho she moved in with us for her final years in Johannesburg, and these two large women could be seen walking arm and arm through the suburban streets stopping to bend over with laughter, jelly moulds of shaking. Enough to stop the passing cars. Blacks and whites never did that, never showed such easy intimacy.

Continue reading “South Africa Through the Eyes of Colour-blind Friendship”

Stitching Memory- Voetstoets

Stitching Memory. (Voetstoets)

I have decided to take a break. Not exactly a holiday, but a change of wind, tacking to the side. Ultimately all is relevant to everything else. Voetstoets in Afrikaans means ‘as found…warts and all’. It was legally used to clarify that a house buyer took it ‘as found’. IE No come back or complaints or changing your mind. No whinging.

Although my book ‘Involution…’ is about memory, it gives it a seemingly ‘worthy’ importance (Books have a habit of looking ponderous or self-important) and I want to make it simple. Memory for each of us is pretty simple, often fragmentary and from fragments we stitch together some significance. The more I look into what people write, the more obvious it becomes that they are doing just that. Their sleuthing detectives wander the streets they recall, their romantic couples lean over bridges whose views once detained them with duller disappointing men, their crimes happen in the Estate they never pass without a shiver. Their revenge is sweet when it draws in their torturer of any stripe. Writers have only memory on which to draw, even if they call it imagination. It is woven from the familiar.

I confess Involution, outwardly a scientific thesis, takes all its images from what I chance encountered and somehow stored in haphazard piles until they leapt out as apt, pithy or stuck up two fingers to challenge all misgivings. I know where all of them come from—the patchwork of my life, haphazard, unplanned, but re-ordered somehow meaningfully creative.

So I have decided to share a real patchwork. The idea of a ‘family quilt’ was inspired by an envy of that fabulous quilt that wrapped the girl led through an orange grove by a blackbird ( in How to Make an American Quilt) My hopes of leaving such a legacy to the few that might recall that I existed ( my children- I was less ambitious then…) began my own chronology through memory. I set to with a will and kept going for two winters. At the moment a few panels await joining, and the construction of a few more and a border. Since it may never be finished I thought my blog could exhibit and explain (and invite a few similar associations or opinions).

It will force me to persist with it. I often think those Victorian samplers, with their delicate stitchery convey something apart from what they portray; privation of children kept indoors, imbued with the modest expectations of nothing but more of the same through marital life. Cedar chests to chase away moth, boudoirs of bare boards, lace edged dowries increased for each year of dying hope, all convey a disciplined emotional containment, paid for in pricked fingers and failing eyes. (To quote e e cummings in a recent blog… a pile climbing up as hope away down…)

Mine, I regret, is not that. Rather a spontaneous image just to capture some essence of personality, recalled, for the most part with affection ( and frustration when it gets to my children! As you will see if you visit again…)

I have written about my grandparents in previous blogs- Marna, my ‘galleon grandmother’ and my somewhat saintly diligent grandfather, Heli. In this panel they are captured on an average day, my grandmother out of doors whenever possible engaged in the supervision of planting; my grandfather nailed to his desk with minions forever waiting for missives. The barometer of their lives divides two people, entirely different emotionally and intellectually.

She loved gardening (which in the barren landscapes they occupied posed a challenge) he loved languages and the written word. His letters to Whitehall couched in diplomat’ese’ expressing ‘concern’ for ludicrous instructions on the teaching of Latin to Zulus, tendering gentle urgings of English instead. His reports would never express his fury at the vulgarity and disrespect shown to African teachers by racist visitors like Harold Nicolson, but be sealed with wax into which his ring would be pressed before dispatch. Spread-eagled on his study floor I would read the sighs and clenched teeth, while I made brass rubbings of coins or Meccano structures from a book of plans. Nothing pleased me more than the use of a spanner, and undoubtedly often in his works. Continue reading “Stitching Memory- Voetstoets”

Today: Guest of Mary Gottschalk on Secrets (and Lies)

Chez Mary:- She writes…

My blog this week offers a very different perspective on secrets. My guest, Philippa Rees, offers the view that some secrets are well-kept and may be a source of strength.

Philippa’s Story

Secrets are of many kinds, some buried beneath a significant event, some like fungi that spore underground and mushroom when the light is right to poison the unwary. On the surface my family seemed to have no secrets. That was the doing of ‘Marna’, my galleon grandmother, whose high disdain and certainty of her natural superiority sailed the high seas of our misfortunes, trimming her sails to every wind, and charting our independent course of proud poverty.

It was only after her death that I learned her secret, which explained everything.

To read more go here

The Gifts from Friendship

A Week’s Spontaneous Offerings. Tailoring a Suit to suit.

In the scramble to make any kind of progress in the mountainous world of book marketing it is sometimes quite hard to perceive the significant and generous. As an author there is always more mountain to ascend. I have probably been more whinger than winged, doggedly putting one foot after another without stopping for the view, or even a meal. Truth is I am too impatient to master stratagems I don’t believe will work anyway, and all the IT cleverness I might need I do not really trust. Besides there is always an Inbox waiting to be answered or emptied. Not to even glance at that Novella half written and short stories to be polished and posted. They must bide.

This week it is time to give thanks to my new friends; people who have hosted guest blogs like Chris Graham, the Story Reading Ape , who still comes to visit me and leaves his spoor, and Roz Morris who shows how it is all done, with one hand, and still has time to ride and read recipes, and one or two faithful friends who read everything like Ashen Venema, who gives heart to everyone in generous poetic images that blow roses into mid winter. You have all kept me going and I have not thanked you enough. This is for you.

What focused my attention on those who might feel less than sufficiently acknowledged in my obsessive Skinner rat existence have been two events this week that a professional publicist might die for. Both came as unexpected gifts metaphorically left on the door step, entirely unexpected.. Somehow this site and the book drew that attention of the first person ever to actually sign up as an official ‘friend’ which earned Brian George the questionable honour of the first Canto of the book. We exchanged a few letters and he sent some materials to a friend of his called Joe Moore who runs a podcast Interview site called Occult Sentinel. Joe interviewed me this week and within 24 hours the Interview was posted up.

Joe’s sympathetic and thoughtful questions gave the opportunity really to introduce the book to a possible readership, to define why it was written and why in poetry, and how it is different from the great wealth of books suggesting we have all reached the end of a road, or that Armageddon requires us to ‘Brace brace!’ His podcast can be visited and other things of great interest found on Occult Sentinel. Nothing is easier than talking about a book to someone who is genuinely interested. It turns the wretched sense of selling, to one of offering and that is another feeling altogether. I am indebted to both Brian George and Joe Moore for reminding me of that.

The other thing this week brought (despite the floods) in Devon and Somerset was a copy of the Holistic Science Journal’ which is subtitled ‘The quest for perception in lived experience’ and this issue (Vol 2 Issue 3) is devoted to various articles and thoughts on Parallel Time. As a compilation, dovetailing very diverse ideas, the magazine weaves together strands that complement one another, a new vision of something deeper pushing outwards in multifaceted worlds of experience, from plant language and intuitive medicine, marine systems and water harvesting, and then the world of mind and other minds. The Editor Philip Franses and his team of volunteers have put together a compilation of ideas and articles, all of which relate to alternative thoughts about time, matter, creation and relationships within the outer and inner worlds, from the mathematician Fantappie and Henri Bergson to Teilhard de Chardin and nestled in such company, yours truly. Rather daunting to find myself so seated at a high table. (Though the Editor had judiciously removed any frivolous challenges to the august company I was to keep, -never can resist the slight poke with a stick to see if it moves! I suspect he knew it would without any help.)

This offers a link to the Holistic Science Journal which is (barely) maintained by subscription. Survival of all such generosity needs friends. Do please visit. The ‘Contents will give you an idea of its breadth, the abstracts at the beginning of each contribution some indications of their depth.

I am not sure if this is good news for the rest of you but I confess myself renewed. This week I take on the tube strike with a talk at Watkins Bookshop on Thursday (6.30 Cecil Court Nr Leicester Sq) Perhaps I will develop a taste for talking and if you come I might have a chance to do some listening. That would be good. All welcome. Thank you and Adieu.

South African Safari (circa 1944)

New Year’s Resolution (Now to take Action)

My few followers (probably sick to death of THE BOOK) have suggested that the South Africa I grew up in might find its way into blogs and stories. They are more relevant to the book than might be imagined since all I grew up with found its way in somehow, furnished images, spoke dialects, poked fun. So are you sitting comfortably? What’s in it for you? A safari round Africa, encounters with elephants and elephantine characters and then some Proper Stories (note the capitals) if you’d like. Just ask.

Recovering Maweni Heights.

Mandela’s death has pricked slow oozing memories from my earliest life, like bitter beads of sap from a cut aloe. They are of the beloved country with its smell of grass, and wood-smoke, and the whiff of rain promised in sudden moisture; of mielie meal in sacking and pungent sweet sweat beneath blankets. The sounds are peppered with incredulity ‘Ow Nkosi!’ and courtesy ‘Sala gahle’ reassurance, and always laughter behind shy hands. There is singing somewhere, in harmony of seconds, and in the evening’s low light wending figures piled with wood, or water containers, going home. The sky immense, and unending, the stars bright salt in the black velvet of a night that falls like a curtain at an appointed hour. The day closing with the sudden certainty of an angelus, and the dim lights of the kraal fires flickering soon after.

Most of my memories are cast in the remote areas where a bushbuck might appear, mountaineous from horseback, or flat and arid from a ten ton truck grinding through sand, but no matter how different the regions we inhabited or travelled the essence remained, of tolerance, and gentleness, and above all an open curiosity. People were books to be fathomed, and opportunities to read them were precious. I never recall fear or any warnings, or prohibitions. From the moment I could walk I was encouraged to walk wide, as far as the eye could see, and away. Where people were concerned, nothing was unsafe. Nobody ever asked when I would be home.

My earliest recollections offer the view of legs below a table in a room with an audible clock. A clean scrubbed kitchen, with a cat cuffing a dog and eventually lifted onto cushions to eat a bowl of yellow mielie porridge with brown sugar and cream. I do not recall the faces but the sense that things would always be just like this, immortal and forever. The barefoot maids came and went with piles of ironed linen, and basins on hips or heads, and when spoken to raised their aprons to hide the smiles and embarrassment. Through the open doorways the light was blinding, and by contrast the room dark, with surfaces so polished that gleams from the edges of things, silver and copper would whisper grander rooms elsewhere, the rooms I later found in picture books or museums; grand tureens, silver trays, and by the back door saddle trees and boot hooks. The stoep (verandah) was where the older family lived and entertained the always unexpected guests (people were always an excuse for more strong coffee and peach brandy if sunset threatened) and over the stoep railings Catorba grapes rambled, the round small black grapes you popped by squeezing their sour skins, (sour enough to freeze-dry the palate) into the mouth, an explosion of unique sweetness, unlike any other grape.

Down along the left, marching away from the house like defending warriors, were the oak trees and below them rusted old tractors where I had a swing and a bouncing metal seat afforded control of a steering wheel. The farm, braced against the buttress rock behind it, where a silver pencil of water fell into the pool below, was the only homestead visible in any direction. Behind that waterfall the dark python cave held shivers of courage. My days were endless roaming between the kraal where I was teased by the women who plaited my hair, and the swing and the grapes, with a pocket full of dried peaches so hard they had to be sucked before they could be chewed. They were sour too, and green or sour fruit has always brought memories and been preferred.

I was less than three and probably only a few months on that farm, but the memory has flashed unchanged ever since as though caught swinging below deep oak. I recall my first ride, in front of a saddle and the view of a rippling neck and the ears that flickered when the rider spoke but I have no memory of what the rider looked like. Three year olds seldom see a face. I recall the boots and the knees under khaki shorts, sharp brown against the blue-white sock covered skin. Mostly it was grass and the hurumph of a horse nodding and stopping to crop when it thought it could. I thought I might die for a horse, I loved them uncontrollably and breathed in their smell as though it was life giving. Horses understand passion, and accept it as their rightful due. So it is, which is why I daily gave my mother thanks for my name- lover of horses. My father was her big mistake but at least the first name she got right.

That was the van den Bosch farm where I was with my galleon grandmother while my poor abandoned mother returned to the Reef to finish her interrupted medical training. I was the interruption and I’ve tried not to repeat that in later life. I always retained the vivid memory of the farm but for seventy years no further encounter. Later the van den Bosches were spoken of, occasionally; the polo playing wild boys, the Dutch home in the Heerengracht from which their forbears had sailed, the first qualified vet in the country, but they were the hidden side, from my grandmother’s mother of whom there are forbidding photographs and a terrible tale. From that terrible event my grandmother had sought refuge in the other half of her blood and other places. Her father was a Barrett, related to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a gentleman raised in a world of civilised discourse, at sea in those fields of limitless grass and the harsh barter of Afrikaanerdom. The farm might have been the setting for a book I had read rather than a memory. I was never totally sure.

Until…

Continue reading “South African Safari (circa 1944)”