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- Herausgeber: Jonathan Ball
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
A quest is never what you expect it to be. Elizabeth Madeline Martin spends her days in a retirement home in Cape Town, watching the pigeons and squirrels on the branch of a tree outside her window. Bedridden, her memory fading, she can recall her early childhood spent in a small wood-and-iron house in Blackridge on the outskirts of Pietermaritzburg. Though she remembers the place in detail – dogs, a mango tree, a stream – she has no idea of where exactly it is. 'My memory is full of blotches,' she tells her daughter Julia, 'like ink left about and knocked over.' Julia resolves to find the Blackridge house: with her mother lonely and confused, would this, perhaps, bring some measure of closure? A journey begins that traverses family history, forgotten documents, old photographs, and the maps that stake out a country's troubled past – maps whose boundaries nature remains determined to resist. Kind strangers, willing to assist in the search, lead to unexpected discoveries of ancestors and wars and lullabies. Folded into this quest are the tender conversations between a daughter and a mother who does not have long to live. Taken as one, The Blackridge House is a meditation on belonging, of the stories we tell of home and family, of the precarious footprint of life.
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JULIA MARTIN
The
Blackridge House
A Memoir
Jonathan Ball Publishers
Johannesburg & Cape Town
For her grandchildren
Sophie and Sky
and for Katie, Michelle, Zimisele, Lwazi, Sbulelo, and Kelsey,
who played in the garden
That thing we call a place is the intersection of many changingforces passing through, whirling around, mixing, dissolving, and exploding in a fixed location.
– Rebecca Solnit
To tell a story […] is to relate, in narrative, the occurrences of the past, retracing a path through the world that others, recursively picking up the threads of past lives, can follow in the process of spinning out their own. But rather as in looping or knitting, the thread being spun now and the thread picked up from the past are both of the same yarn. There is no point at which the story ends and life begins.
– Tim Ingold
The vast wild
the house, alone.
The little house in the wild,
the wild in the house.
Both forgotten.
THE STORY
My mother, Elizabeth Madeline Martin, was born in 1918 and died in 2012. Her early childhood was spent at Blackridge, a semi-rural neighbourhood at the edge of Pietermaritzburg, in KwaZulu-Natal. In her final years, as recent memories dimmed, she felt increasingly unsettled, and experienced a powerful longing to return to that first home. By then, she was frail and bedridden, and had been living in Cape Town for decades. Though she remembered the place in detail, she had no idea of where exactly it was.
This is the story of a journey to find it, a story she was keen for me to tell. In writing it down, I have tried to be true to our many conversations, as well as to the kind people I met along the way, and to record accurately the contents of the domestic and public archives that the process opened up. But if the tale does ever wander into the country of imagination, I think she would have been glad. As she said to me one day, ‘You can be as dramatic as you like when you’re writing about this. My memory is full of blotches, like ink left about and knocked over.’
THE TREES
1.
‘Well if you do find the place,’ my mother said, ‘I’d like you to bring me back two things: a photograph, and something growing from the garden.’
It was spring in Cape Town, and she was lying in the bed where she always lay, the metal cot sides up and a blue cushion strapped between the knees to prevent her legs from crossing and dislocating the hip.
‘They run up and down,’ she said, watching two grey squirrels through the sliding glass doors. ‘Actually no, not up and down. They run up the long branch and then on to the next tree. Look at that one, just rippling along!’
Her room was upstairs, level with the tree. So the view from her bed was the life of its branches. This tree and all the others in the garden were the main reason she lived there, a nursing home chosen for its big trees, for the quality of light through morning leaves, for the joy of squirrels and birds, and for the fat koi swimming in the pond. All day they would drift in the dark water, bright torches of gold and red. If you dipped your hand in, they’d come up to the surface to hold your finger for a moment in their soft fish mouths, then dive back down into the deep.
Aside from such things, there was little to recommend about the facilities. Among various problems with the management, what particularly disturbed my mother was that they did not like pigeons. One afternoon she called me, crying, out of breath, furious, heartbroken, to say she’d been told she was no longer allowed to feed the birds that came to her verandah. Why? They make a mess.
I phoned the owner and explained that my mother, Elizabeth Martin, called the birds by name, and knew their characteristic ways and plumage. That at more than ninety years old, lying immobilised in this bed, most of the people she remembered were dead, the hours were so long, and the world had become strange. But the ring doves, the turtle doves, and the rock pigeons returned each day and she could ask the nurses to feed them. When the owner remained unmoved, I said, Please try to imagine this is your own mother. Please understand. She has cared for others all her life and now she must submit to being washed and dressed, looked after in every detail. But she can still care for those birds, and she must. She is a mother. Then I mentioned St Francis (they are Catholics). I begged. The call was inconclusive, but the owner seemed to have softened a little. Afterwards I continued to buy birdseed, and the nurses, who were mostly kind, conspired to feed the doves and pigeons anyway.
On the particular day when I told my mother about the idea of visiting Blackridge, the birds had entirely occupied the verandah, and the room was filled with the violet smell of the tree she loved, the fragrance of syringa blossoms. From where I sat in the unused wheelchair beside her bed, the sweetness of those tiny stars was all the smell of a long warm afternoon in another garden. How I used to wish, in those days, that I could pick them, make posies for my dolls, even if they wilted so soon. But the delicate fragrance of syringa was mixed inextricably with the resonance of my paternal grandfather’s warning.
‘Every part of the tree is poisonous,’ he would say, every time he visited. ‘Every part.’
Our syringas were the tallest trees in the garden, the canopy of those early years. But the smell of the flowers is infused, even now, with my grandad’s words. He had studied botany and loved trees, and so complete was his conviction that I never wondered to find out whether he was right. For he was a man accustomed to authority, and I was a girl then, wary of transgression.
These days the tree evokes a different prohibition. Like black wattle, lantana and bugweed, the syringa tree, Melia azedarach, is listed in some regions of South Africa as a Category 1 declared weed, a tree that must, by law, be removed and destroyed immediately, an alien invader, foreign, dangerous, undesirable.1
‘What a stupid idea,’ my mother said, laughing, when I told her. And then, more seriously, ‘I would be so upset if they chopped it down.’
‘Nobody is going to hurt your tree, don’t worry. But syringas actually are a problem, especially along the rivers.’
I told her how colonials brought the trees from the East as ornamentals, transporting them to wherever in the world they would grow. These days it’s birds that spread the golden berries, and in some parts of the country the edges of rivers are choked more with syringas than with any other alien plant species. The trees displace the indigenous vegetation, drink up the run-off, and can even dam the flow altogether. So people who are serious about water do say syringas should be eradicated.
But my mother had little interest in such arguments, or in the idea that grey squirrels were also alien invaders, or that pigeons were vermin, flying rats. Strapped all day to the blue cushion in the nursing home bed, her mind absorbed the undulating line of the long syringa branch that reached towards her verandah, the lichens that grew on its bark, the beings that passed through. She knew the bunches of flowers that bloom and fall, the little berries, the pattern of twigs and leaves against the sky, the movement of the tree when it rocked in the wind. When the pigeons came, she loved to watch their jostle and strut. How the one she named Solomon would be tender to his wife but fight all the others to secure his rights to the grain. How deferent the ring doves and cinnamon doves were to the pigeons. And who had a sore foot, the toes constricted by tangled thread.
Beyond the immediate particulars of pigeons, squirrels, and this long branch, my mother had forgotten the rambling garden she cultivated when I was a girl, watering and tending in the early mornings as I watched her from my bedroom window, a tall figure in a long white dressing gown in the early light, under the syringas. She had forgotten the oak sapling my father planted and the tree that it became. She had forgotten his flagrant bougainvillea hedge, and his roses and intermittent vegetables. She had forgotten my father. Most of the time she would forget that she’d ever had a daughter.
Now, when the lifetime of stories that made up a self had almost disappeared, what she had left was early childhood and the present moment. As other things faded into forgetting, what remained were a small wood-and-iron house, and a garden with deep trees. And water, there had to be water. In the gathering dark of the nursing home bed, that first place gleamed like a lighted window.
‘At Blackridge,’ she said, ‘for some reason the baby bats used to get right down into the curled-up banana leaves. If you touched the leaf, you would feel the little thing moving inside.’
Across the years, the touch of small fingers reaches to me now: even now, the feel of a baby bat asleep in a curled leaf.
2.
For a while the phone calls had been getting more insistent. She might be angry (‘I can’t stay here another second, please come and fetch me home’) or matter of fact (‘Hello darling, I’ve had lunch and I’m ready to go now’) or vaguely confused (‘Where are you? I need to come home’) or simply desperate (‘I’ve just arrived here and this place is unspeakable. Please let me come back’). At such times, even the comfort of the tree with its pigeons and squirrels could not reach her.
At first my mother would call during the day, sometimes several times. Then the midnight calls began, wrenching me from sleep to run downstairs and talk, and afterwards return to lie for hours with a pounding heart.
Usually I would say something like, ‘Everything’s all right. Look around the room. You can see your pictures, your books … That’s where you live now, you’ve been there several years.’
But the indefinite article that makes all the difference between home and a home sapped my conviction. For she knew, and I knew, that home was never like this. They never played this sort of music at home. They never ate this sort of food. Meals were not eaten alone with an aluminium spoon, or carried in on a tray by a person who speaks to one in that special intonation that is reserved for babies, pets, and people to whom we wish to condescend. And the smells of the place, the smell of old people, sick people, cleaning fluids, these smells are different from the smell of home. And the pills, all the unknown pills to be swallowed each day. It was never like this at home. It was never like this.
Anyone could find the institutional culture of a nursing home distressing, particularly at the end of a life when the slow diminishing route from family house to cottage to retirement flat has brought you at last to this one room, this single bed, the last stop on the line. But the terror of exile is especially acute when you wake up each morning and you don’t know where you are, or what happened yesterday, and there is nothing familiar in the room, and the people who greet you are all foreigners.
‘These people get on my nerves,’ she said one day. ‘There’s no friendliness at all. Of course, the trees here are lovely. Never seen such green … It’s like walking into a puddle and getting splashed.’
‘What is?’
‘Not being able to remember. Because your brain gets muddled and mixes things up. It’s a great sadness.’
In the various strange states of confusion and memory loss that doctors call the dementias, the longing for home recurs as something persistent and unrequited. Even when a person is living in a house she has known all her life, the disease of forgetting may render it alien, unrecognisable. She wants to go home. To be the person she was when she lived at home. Perhaps in the silence of her memory she detects the echo of a time when things and people resided in their places, and she was present to herself. At home. She felt at home. Please make yourself at home. Please take me back home. Please.
The way she put it when I picked up the phone one particular afternoon was, ‘I can’t stand this atmosphere. I don’t have any friends.’ And then, ‘I’m homesick. I want to go home. I’ve been living a strange life for the last few years, away from Natal.’
I tried to explain that it was nearly thirty years since she had left KwaZulu-Natal, but she did not believe it. I said her old home was no longer there, and she did not believe that either. I said I had thought about the possibility hundreds of times, but that Michael and the twins and I just could not have her come and stay with us at our house, that we were all working or at school, and she needed more care than we could provide.
‘But nobody does anything for me here!’ she said, astonished and affronted at the idea that she might need looking after.
‘Yes they do.’ I was arguing again, pointless. ‘You can’t walk any more.’
‘Of course I can walk.’
‘And the wheelchair in your room?’
‘That’s for long walks. But otherwise I just walk around a lot.’
‘And your meals. They bring you your meals.’
‘They do not! I have my meals in the dining room. I had breakfast and lunch there, and I’ll have my supper there too. I can’t remember when I last had a meal in bed!’
‘Lunch.’
‘Oh no. I wonder where you got that idea from.’
In that moment, the mind’s determination to escape, to find its way home, made it possible for her to construct whatever was needed to fit that fierce imperative.
For other residents of the nursing home who were not bedridden, there was in fact a small chance, even with all the gates and cameras in place, of making the break. So far, it had happened once since she had been there when a woman called Goldie walked out of the gate one morning with her shopping basket and never returned. I met her a few weeks later, on a city street. She was looking a little disreputable, but pleased and defiant.
‘I’ll never go back,’ she told me. ‘It’s a terrible place.’
The others were all still there. The old, the sick, the dying, the man who used to insist he was my mother’s husband, the woman who played air guitar in the corridor and sang romantic songs in Portuguese, the woman who had recently begun to hit the nurses in the face, the young man with no legs, the ones who simply sat and stared. And among this gathering of the lost was my mother herself in her upstairs room, not mixing with the other residents, choosing, at the cost of loneliness, to retain a measure of psychic space that was still her own.
It seemed easier to respond to Goldie’s dramatic and competent escape than to my mother’s intense feeling of displacement. The literature on dementia care is full of practical suggestions on what to do about wanderers, people who want to go home. But there was nothing to help me answer this longing that occupied the heart like the chafe of a bedsore that would not heal.
‘I just don’t know what to say.’
‘Well, I understand the answer’s no. About coming home.’
‘It’s very hard for me to say this …’ I began.
She was thinking I was her mother, her sister, anything but her daughter. And all she wanted was for me to take her home. I felt it then, the weariness of it all. And the terror, hers and now mine, of waking to a place where there is nobody to hold you.
‘It sounds as though I’m rejecting you,’ I went on. ‘But I’m not. Please trust me when I tell you that we just don’t have what it takes to care for you. You’re ninety-two years old. It’s normal to need looking after.’
‘Ninety-two? That’s why I’m homesick.’
It was after this anguished conversation, or one of many like it, that I began to form the idea of visiting KwaZulu-Natal and looking for her family house at Blackridge, the only home she could remember.
It was not clear why I wanted to do this. Perhaps I felt that, if my mother could not go herself, then somehow I could find the place for her. Or perhaps I was hoping that, in some inexplicable way, I might meet her there. She liked the idea when I mentioned it, but could give me no hint of an address.
‘My memory is … gone, you know,’ she said.
Then she began telling stories about a garden with mangoes and a stream in it, a small house full of dogs and children, a wild hill growing with flowers and grasses.
From the nursing home room where she lay, you could see the syringa tree. Inside, the walls were filled with images of people, trees, houses, animals, and flowers which the nurses had drawn. She would give them crayons, coloured pencils, and paper whenever they wanted them, and it got them drawing, many for the first time in their life. One of them told me, ‘We can breathe in here.’
Now she had given me a task too: to bring back a photograph and something growing, if I ever found the house. All I had intended was a short journey to another province. But the force of my mother’s imagination made me feel like one who must cross over into a distant realm, make it through the mists and the mud of forgotten things, pass through dark forests, and return with something salvaged from the dead, and something living.
I must do this before it was too late. I still had no directions.
3.
On weekends I would bring birdseed for the pigeons, rusks for my mother to eat during the week when the nursing home food became intolerable, and biscuits to share with her grandchildren, Sophie and Sky.
‘Tell me about Blackridge,’ I said in the first of many conversations.
She hesitated.
‘It makes me cry.’
Then, ‘Okay, the things I remember: Cyril Green. They lived in a house below ours, across the road, and we both had elder brothers and sisters. So we played together. We played trains for him, and family for me. In our garden. His people didn’t welcome people playing. But our house was very friendly. Lovely trees all around. A stream at the bottom of the garden. A railway above and the road below. It wasn’t a proper river, but we called it a river. It needed a bridge over it, big enough to have railings at the side.’
Cyril. Family. Trees. Railway. Stream. Each was a primal feature of her world, but the railway line and the stream were defining elements. The railway would not be difficult to locate, but if I wanted to find my mother’s house, there had to be a stream.
‘Now Cyril and I used to play all the time,’ she went on, ‘and he brought me back secrets from school because he went to school before me. He told me a secret. He showed me his banana. It was very secret. He said, “Look, this is what is called a banana.”’
The twins, twelve years old, were amused. We all laughed.
‘Oh we used to play,’ she said, smiling. ‘He used to pretend to drive, to be the engine of the train, and I used to come along behind carrying all the luggage. We used to watch the trains go by. The train driver was a friend of ours and he used to throw an apple to us.’
We. Together. Secrets. Playing. In the album I found a picture of Betty, as her family called her, and Cyril. They are standing together in the garden, a little awkward before the camera, but smiling mischievously, each holding the hand of one of her dolls. The garden is a realm of barefoot summer, a world where you can play.
The other picture of her from this time must have been taken on the same day, in almost the same place. Her hair is untidy, long. Her arms and legs are bare, and she is wearing a loose cotton dress, a little bracelet. Flopped in a chair on the grass, she is a small mother facing the camera with her assembled children. One doll is on her lap, while another doll sits in a little bed, and one in a chair, wooden furniture made by her father. Behind is a stand of tall gum trees, a hedge along the back near a small corrugated iron structure and, to the left of Betty, the edge of a wood-and-iron house.
It was a warm day in the garden at Blackridge in 1925. Someone had a camera, and hoped by that device to wrest some tangible thing from the flow of change and forgetting: a six-year-old girl whose smile is so wide that it creases her eyes and wrinkles her nose, or the tenderness of bare feet, crossed at the ankle.
The third picture of Betty as a little girl was so tiny that, once my mother had identified the dog sitting at her feet as Bindle, I almost disregarded it. Only some time after her death, when the image was scanned and digitally enlarged, did I really see it for the first time: a picture that both recalls and resists a whole genre of Victorian and Edwardian pictures of little girls posed for the camera. She looks about four years old, and someone has dressed her in a pretty white dress for the occasion, brushed her curly hair, and tied a ribbon over her head for an Alice band. But where the studio photographer might have put an oversized bunch of roses or lilies in her arms and seated her on a small throne amid some pastoral fantasy, the branch she is holding has been picked from the garden, and her seat is one of the family’s wicker chairs, placed in the morning sun beside what looks like an avocado tree in a realm of ferns and weeds and unkempt grasses. Blackridge. At her feet, bare feet that don’t yet touch the ground, Bindle faces the camera with interest.
Discovering the picture again after her death, it was her small bare feet that touched me most. And the strength of the expression on her face. Instantly recognisable.
‘What about your other friends?’ Sophie asked.
‘Well there was Charmian. Charmian Turton, with her long beautiful blond ringlets. I think her mother had died and her grandmother was bringing her up. She came to visit in a white dress, and she wasn’t allowed to get dirty. She had a beautiful expensive doll that nobody was allowed to touch. Now what was the good of a doll like that? She would be brought down to the house by her nanny. I think Cyril and I would go and climb up the mango tree to escape from her. We used to crawl along the branches.’
The mango tree had been part of the story of her childhood for as long as I could remember. It was tall, with dense glossy leaves to hide among, good branches for climbing, fragrant sprays of little flowers, and the fruit, the fabulous, sticky fruit.
Its ancestors came from India, where people have been cultivating them for thousands of years. The fleshy orange fruit would be eaten raw, preserved, or cooked, turned into medicines or used in religious ceremonies, the patterns of the flowers embroidered into paisley shawls, or the tree woven into magical songs and the stories of gods. At first, the spread of seeds happened gradually as passing monks and traders packed mangoes into their luggage. Then, things became more systematic. When mangoes arrived at Kew Gardens in the early nineteenth century, they were found to be so delicious that soon they were being shipped from that fabulous garden metropolis to satellite botanical gardens around the world. Within a few years, under Queen Victoria’s administrators, the plant was classified among the Flora of British India.2
The tree in my mother’s garden would have been a specimen of the plant they named the common mango, Mangifera indica, its new name a record of inscription in the taxonomies of a science whose tracks had already criss-crossed the planet. Mangoes were more useful as a commodity than the poisonous syringa. But they were a less profitable crop than the sugar or tobacco or certain other plants among the multitude of species whose seeds, cuttings, or root stock were, in the space of a couple of centuries, being transported over long distances and transplanted into unfamiliar soils, changing forever the ecologies of the places where they began to grow.
Would it be heavy-handed to say that Betty and Cyril, and all the other children with an exotic mango tree in the garden, were ingesting the fruits of conquest and imperial trade? In one sense the common mango at Blackridge was indeed another node in the global grid of Empire, its tropical produce a thing of power and information. But for my mother the tree was particular and alive. The ramifying branches were a leafy place for hiding with your best friend, and the delicious, hairy, juicy flesh of the mango tasted so sweet. How perfect that messy mango was then, fibres caught in the teeth, your face and hands and dress all wet with sticky juice, young skin tasting of summer.
‘Gorgeous. Mangoes,’ my mother said, looking back into that tree from the nursing home bed. ‘And bananas and apples from the garden. Those things were just taken for granted. I remember boiled mealies too.’
Then she told us about Roy Johnstone, the only other boy she knew apart from Cyril, and how they tried to escape from him as well as Charmian by climbing the tree.
‘When he came to play, Cyril and I would go and scuttle up the mango tree,’ she said. ‘So my mother would call us, “Come on, come out and play with Roy.” And Roy would look proud.’
She grinned.
‘One time we prayed. I knew about praying because I had been to Sunday school. I didn’t go back because I thought the people were rude. They talked about Abraham’s bosom and I said I’m never going back there. My mother was glad. It was a nuisance to take me there, all the way up to the little church near the station. And Sunday school was boring. I remember that when I said I wasn’t going back, Letty and Doodie and Jock and Barts and Mother all said, “Thank goodness!”’
Betty was the fifth of six children. She was often a nuisance, she told us, to Mother and her elder siblings, and having to be walked up to church was just another instance. But if Abraham’s bosom was an excuse to get out of Sunday school, it also worked as a successful appeal to the family’s Edwardian silence about the body. Whatever might have taken place in private in the bedrooms of the house, bodies were unmentionable. She knew, without being told, that Cyril’s banana was a secret.
How compelling, then, that transgressive word, remembered across all these years.
‘It was very rude to say bosom,’ she said. ‘But to picture Abraham, a man, with a bosom! You tried not to think about it at night.’
‘Anyway,’ she continued, ‘I knew you had to kneel down. So Cyril and I both knelt down on the lawn with the dolls and the teddy bears and prayed: “Please God, send Roy the toothache.” I don’t remember whether it worked. I suppose it didn’t. He was lonely. He didn’t have anyone to play with.’
4.
I called the Office of the Surveyor General in Pietermaritzburg and was put through to a person called Mr Marais.
From what my mother had said I now knew that the house must have been situated quite a way from the little church, that you had to walk ‘up’ to get there, that the railway line was above the house and a road below it, that in the garden there was a great mango tree and a stream. Or perhaps it was all rather different from this. The family left Blackridge in 1926 when she was eight, so whatever she could tell me were the memories of a small child, traces recollected more than eighty years later across a smudgy realm of forgetting.
Then I found a faded sepia image stacked among a heap of old photographs in the nursing home cupboard. It was a small wood-and-iron house. My mother identified it. Blackridge.
‘Yes,’ said the voice on the other end of the phone, ‘that’s the old station, the old railway line. It’s close to Sweetwaters Road. There’s an old church there. We call it the paper church because it’s made of that cardboard with some sort of tar over it. There’s a boarding establishment around there, and then three or four old houses to the right. No, I don’t think any of the old houses have been pulled down.’
I mentioned the stream.
‘Yes, there’s one that could have a stream. You take a left into Uplands Road, or Albany Road. Or is it Simpson Road? Ask your mother if she remembers any of the road names. At the railway station there’s a narrow bridge. Ask her if she remembers the bridge.’
‘You seem to know the area so well. You’re being so helpful.’
‘Well I walk there sometimes.’
Mr Marais explained how busy he was, how many requests he was dealing with.
Then he said, ‘But email me the photo. Maybe I can go and have a look for it on one of my walks.’
It wasn’t a response I could have anticipated when I called. I’d not expected to find someone at the surveyor general’s who knew a place by walking.
Instead, I’d imagined the phone ringing in an airless set of offices lined with racks of old cadastral maps and bulging files, the computers full of diagrams and boundaries. If not quite surveillance, the idea evoked a sort of quintessential state headquarters of measurement and cartography: that single view from above that comprehends a living neighbourhood in terms of ownership and parcels of land, plots its precise location from a series of points, and can admit neither people nor stories. It was what I thought I was looking for just then. Co-ordinates.
Before we said goodbye, he told me his name. Francois.
5.
A quest is never what you expect it to be.
A few days later, I met a librarian called Andrew who offered to help me trace the house. Then an email appeared from him that reminded me of a narrative I would have preferred not to inherit.
Our communication began with my mother saying that her father taught at the Pietermaritzburg Technical College during the Blackridge years. This gave me the idea that that institution might just have a record of his address at the time. So I called the library of the current Durban University of Technology, where I was put through to the friendly young voice of a man who identified himself as Andrew Naicker. I told him what I was looking for, and a couple of days later he emailed to say he had done some sleuthing.
The old Tech where my grandfather worked had later become the Umgungundlovu FET College (Msunduzi Campus). But as for archival material from the 1920s, Andrew wrote, ‘Apparently much of the stuff dating back to that period has been either lost or discarded during the merger process that the college underwent. Go figure.’
The next day, he told me, ‘I happen to have a cousin who works for the PMB municipality. I am hoping that he could use his resources to find the address you seek (fingers crossed). Will get on the horn now and let’s see what my cousin comes up with. Keep you posted.’
The day after that, there was nothing from the cousin, but Andrew had now found a different lead.
‘I managed to get this invaluable information about your grandpa,’ he wrote. ‘It seems that Mr Smallie had quite an illustrious military career.’
The email went on to outline my grandfather’s activities in a volunteer regiment, the Natal Carbineers, around the turn of the century. Andrew listed the dates on which he was promoted (Corporal, Lieutenant, Captain, Brevet Major, Major), the various ‘operations’ in which he was more significantly involved, the details of his mention in Lord Kitchener’s dispatches for marked good work near Nondweni, Zululand, 28 July 1901, and a list of medals and clasps. It emerged that Alan Watson Smallie not only fought from beginning to end in what he called the Boer War, but was also a senior officer in the forces enlisted to quell the Zulu rebellion of 1906.
What was I to do with the information? Warfare was repugnant, and dusty stories of imperial conquest and occupation were unlikely to help me find the place. But after Andrew’s email I could no longer ignore the old suitcase at the top of my mother’s cupboard in the nursing home. Though I had never paid it much attention, it had always been around in a back room somewhere, a collection of her father’s papers. It was not what I was looking for, but on the next visit I took it down anyway, brought it home.
When I opened the suitcase it looked like an archive.
Someone had long since removed the ceremonial red coat with its brass buttons, but the main documents were still there. The oldest manuscript, Alan Smallie’s Diary of the Trip of the Natal Volunteers to England for the Festivities at the Diamond Jubilee, 1897, had been re-bound in red leather by my mother, and looked quite recent. Another notebook, large and cloth-covered, had been eaten by rats or mice all around the edges so that the marks of their little teeth made its brown pages seem more ancient than they really were, like someone’s idea of a parchment map. It was the first of two books in which he had copied out the letters he’d written to his parents during the South African War. The second volume of letters was a blue-and-brown marble-covered notebook, its paper a little better preserved. Then there was a heap of uncollected fragments (photographs, certificates, newspaper cuttings, a sort of narrative curriculum vitae) and another collection of letters assembled in a sheaf of plastic sleeves.
My grandfather died long before I was born, but the suitcase archive evoked at once a person who wanted very much to remember and to be remembered. To have been there. To have been someone. Though he had no formal education after school, his commitment to the practice of writing suggested that his trust in storytelling, in the power of inscription and of orderly syntax, must have been a defining feature of who he was.
