Murderers and Other Friends Page 23

  I don’t know who reads Rider Haggard today. He wrote thirty-four adventure novels that made him famous; the best of them are set in Africa and deal with its hidden magic and mysterious history. Recently a reviewer, wishing to insult a contemporary novelist for telling anything as vulgar as a story, compared him to Rider Haggard, but the author of King Solomon’s Mines was admired by Tolstoy, and Jung used She as a striking example of the anima concept. Horace Rumpole, who hasn’t read much Tolstoy and practically no Jung, adopted Haggard’s phrase ‘She Who Must Be Obeyed’ to describe his formidable wife. Queen Ayesha or ‘Hiya’, Rider Haggard’s She, is extremely beautiful, has round, ivory-coloured arms, lived for thousands of years and was fluent in various languages, including Arabic, Latin and Greek, and was a ‘terrible but most fascinating person’.

  King Solomon’s Mines was published in the year before my father went to Michaelhouse and She a year later. Rider Haggard had the same idealized picture of the noble Zulu warrior as British writers, such as T.E. Lawrence, had of warlike Arabs. There was Umslopogaas ‘the splendid savage’ with his razor-sharp axe Inkosi-Kaas and, clearly adored by the author, Umbopa, a servant, who turns out to be king of a remote country ‘beyond the Lukanga river’. Umbopa is described as a magnificent man, six foot three and broad in proportion. ‘I never saw a finer native,’ Haggard writes, and he is clearly a gent to equal Sir Henry Curtis, the blond and bearded British landowner who sets out to find King Solomon’s treasure. In the final, blood-stained battle scene, Sir Henry is dressed in Zulu war-gear – black ostrich feathers and a leopard skin – as he wields a great battle-axe: ‘We are men, you and I,’ Umbopa says to Sir Henry. This implanting of British public school virtues on an African king would be regarded as politically horrendous today; but no doubt my father, a shortsighted schoolboy in the year Mafeking was relieved, found these adventure stories irresistible.

  Haggard used a curious biblical prose, even more archaic than the way Kipling wrote The Jungle Book, for the way natives talked: ‘Down, my son, down my Baboon; down on to thy hands and knees. We enter the presence of She, and, if thou art not humble, of a surety she will blast thee where thou standest’ and ‘ “Ah stranger,” She answered with a laugh that sounded like silver bells, “thou wast afraid because mine eyes were searching out thine heart, therefore wast thou afraid.’” Writing in the Michaelhouse magazine, my father’s version of this style was, ‘Now this is the curse of ’Mpala and the vengeance that he swore upon the hand which humbled him, and that hath slain him.’

  The implacable enemy of Rider Haggard’s Umbopa is the witch Gagool, who creeps on all fours, is centuries old but shrunk to the size of a child and whose face might have been taken for ‘a sun-dried corpse had it not been for a pair of large black eyes . . . which gleamed . . . like jewels in a charnel house’. Fears of witchcraft still bedevil South African politics. It’s whispered among conservative whites that the ANC has infected the blood oranges with Aids. More devilish still is the ANC plot to infect the mice in Sun City (also known as Sin City), so they will bite the rich whites who go there to gamble and purchase love, causing their early death.

  When he was at school, the headmaster was Canon Todd and my father would sing me, to the tune of ‘Lives of Great Men Still Remind Us’, the verse he had made up about this cleric.

  Todd’s old slippers still remind us

  Not to case our feet in grime

  And by passing leave behind us

  Odours which are not sublime.

  When he left Michaelhouse my father was sent to Cambridge to study law. His elder brother may have felt some jealousy about this, because Will afterwards refused to employ anyone who had been to a university. After he’d got his degree, Clifford came home for a few years and was admitted to the bar in Natal. He also entertained the children of the family by building dams and treasure islands in the stream at Hilton. He drew a map of one of these islands on which such places as the Dontchu Sea and the Tellme Strait are marked, leaving Rosie a blood legacy of appalling puns. One of his most vivid memories of this period was of seeing a black prisoner being taken to gaol with his wrist chained to the stirrup of a horse on which his gaoler cantered and the man had to run for his life. Soon he was back in England and joined chambers at Number One Dr Johnson’s Buildings in the Temple, which specialized in wills and broken marriages.

  He always wrote at Christmas to Rene, his favourite sister, but stayed away from that land of witchcraft. I also stayed away as an empty gesture, a protest I now see as pointless against apartheid, and only went recently to discover a great number of relatives, cousins, second cousins and cousins several times removed. It was my cousin Pam Edkins who told me over dinner in Johannesburg about the dancing and suicidal Jacksons.

  It was my father’s elder brother who married into the Jacksons. Will was a pillar of the chapel who washed in a tin bath on the roof of his house and would, if dinner guests outstayed their welcome, slowly and methodically unwind the bandages which supported the swollen veins in his legs. Mabel Jackson, however frivolous her upbringing, was apparently devoted to Will and would peel grapes for him as though he were Mae West. There were also lighter moments in the family life, however, and I have seen strange photographs, taken in the early 1900s, of a party where all the men, including my father, appear to be in drag. And then there was my father’s elder sister, the exotic Auntie Gertie.

  Gertrude Emma appears in photographs, less beautiful perhaps, but just as daunting as Queen Ayesha. She wears huge, brimmed hats and feather boas, her waist is hauled in, her skirts flow outwards. Without a hat, her hair, spread out in snakelike curls, looks as elaborate and ornate as the yucca in front of which she stands. She was known to the local Zulu community as Umuthimkulu, The Great Tree or The One Who Offers Shade, and she used to drive a pony and trap at a spanking pace down the Victorian streets of Pietermaritzburg. She specialized in Cockney imitations and sang ‘Twilight’ to the mandolin at local concerts where she was billed as Mrs Norman Pechey.

  Norman Pechey was a considerably older man. Because of the rough way his nurse pulled his foot out of a grating, where it had got stuck when he was a child, he was lame, a total abstainer and couldn’t keep up with his wife, Gertie the Goer. She became the mistress of Sir Duncan MacKenzie, a savage old general who, after the Bambatha Rebellion, led a punitive expedition into Zululand, slaughtering and setting fire to huts and, presumably, returning to the welcoming bed of my Auntie Gertie, who liked a man with ‘dash’.

  Her home, for many years, was Dimity Cottage, a pretty Victorian bungalow in the middle of Maritzburg, dwarfed today by a large building which was once the police headquarters and now houses the ANC. As she grew older she would sit, wearing a black dressing-gown patterned with huge pink flowers, on the red, polished verandah with a green trellis. She would call out in what Graham Pechey, her grandson, has described as ‘a harsh and rasping voice of such volume that she seemed to imagine the rest of the world was deaf’, ‘Hello, lassie, how are you today?’ to young women, or, ‘Are you two ger-fuffling?’ to those she suspected might be lovers. Somewhere in the nether regions of her bungalow there lived an elderly gentleman but, Gertie explained to another of my relatives, ‘We only sleep back to back.’

  Gertie had a manservant called Mkhize, which was actually his name. To call your servant by his surname was considered extremely liberal in her day. Graham Pechey remembers that some less enlightened employers called their servants after the wages they received, such as Half-a-Crown or Sixpence. Mkhize would squat outside his quarters in the afternoons, still in his white apron and khaki uniform, selling muti-magical cures for all diseases. He would have to pack them away hurriedly when Gertie, awake after her siesta, screamed at him from the verandah.

  I only saw Dimity Cottage almost forty years after Gertie died. It became a dentist’s, and then a doctor’s, surgery.

  There were two big houses at Hilton, in the hills above the steaming heart of Maritzburg, one for my grandfat
her and his wife Selina, one for my Uncle Will and his wife Mabel, née Jackson. They are long, low, red-brick buildings with cool verandahs, marble floors, tiled fireplaces and roofs of that corrugated iron which seems to cover all Natal buildings from regimental headquarters to pigsties. The houses had a good deal of land and the Mortimers sold most of it for the building of St Anne’s School. St Anne’s always had English mistresses to teach the well-heeled South African girls who, bicycling in white dresses among the trees in faded photographs, look like Proust’s jeunes filles en fleur. The St Anne’s magazine for 1913, the year before Europe embarked on four years of dedicated self-slaughter, announced that Miss Robinson the art mistress had left ‘rather suddenly’ to be married and her place was taken by Miss K. Smith, my mother, who couldn’t have been much more than twenty.

  I was driving down to the Wild Coast on a hot Sunday morning when the Zulu driver took off his rhythm and blues and replaced it with a tape made by Will’s daughter Mavis shortly before she died. On it she remembers old times. She spoke of my mother as ‘a beautiful thin girl with huge dark eyes’, who never seemed entirely happy at St Anne’s. She had been born and brought up in Leamington Spa and bicycled each day to art school in Birmingham. She made friends with Leslie Brockhurst, who became an RA and a glossily competent portrait painter. She also met Dick Stubbington, who had a flaming red beard and used to visit my mother after she was married. I suspected, I’m sure wrongly, that they were having a torrid love affair and used to burst into the room unexpectedly when they were alone together. My mother’s chief memory of St Anne’s seemed to be of mealtimes, when a platoon of black servants came running at high speed into the dining-room carrying great plates of wobbling blancmange.

  In 1916 the St Anne’s News announced that ‘the children have been admirably taught by Miss Smith, who left at Easter to go home’. Before she went the Mortimers, who still lived in the school grounds, suggested that when she got back to England she might care to ‘look up Cliff’, who was waiting to be sent to France, where the expectation of life for an infantry officer was about four weeks. I have a photograph of him wearing a khaki uniform and a gold pince-nez. He must have been one of the few people who ever thought of going into battle wearing pince-nez. When Miss Smith, just home from Natal, looked him up, he bought a picnic and took her on the river at Hammersmith. This was the start of their strange, life-long romance.

  When my father told his commanding officer he was getting married, this unusual soldier said, ‘No point in going out and getting killed then, not if you’re just getting married. I think there’s a job going in the Inland Waterways.’ So began my mother’s life of unfailing love and dedication and, tragically, the end of her life as an artist. They always shared the same bed and I can remember her saying, ‘It can’t be true. It can’t!’ as we tried to bandage up my father’s jaw which had fallen at the moment of death. After his funeral she wrote, ‘I am very lonely and nothing can quench my regrets.’

  When I married my first wife, Penelope, she had four daughters. Our first child together was also a daughter, Sally. Much loved by my mother, affected, perhaps by my father’s blindness, Sally started, when she was still at school, visiting and looking after handicapped children. Now she lives in Bristol with her artist husband and two sons, supervising the care of extremely handicapped and blind children over a large part of Avon. When my father, with great subtlety, was trying to put Penelope off the idea of marrying me, he warned her that I was useless at looking after the sick and said, ‘If your temperature goes up a couple of degrees, he’ll be off like a shot in the other direction!’ Like all his wilder generalizations, this had a grain of truth in it; I’d’ve made a hopelessly squeamish and impatient doctor. Sally has more, much more, than made up for such defects. The painter Walter Sickert once said that the world can be divided into patients and nurses, and Sally is, like all the great nurses, an extraordinarily efficient organizer. She has helped take over and equip a building in Bristol where handicapped children can spend time and be encouraged, by a battery of toys and other ingenious devices, to look, listen and discover that even the slightest movement of which they are capable can produce astonishing results. One of these is a ray of light which, if you move a hand or an arm in it, will produce notes of music which rise or fall. Children, so handicapped that they have lost all incentive to move, suddenly discover that, by doing so, they can produce magical sounds in the air and are lured into unusual activity. This is Sally’s work, her great talent and her consuming passion. She becomes, I sometimes think, more interested in me as my handicaps increase.

  After five daughters, Penelope had, to our amazement, a son. Jeremy is the only male person among the eight children that have made up my life, and he always seemed gentler, calmer even, than his sisters and half-sisters. He met Polly Fisher when they were at school; they have been together almost ever since, married, and now have three small children. Polly’s grandfather was the Archbishop who crowned the Queen and had a brother, it seems, of uncertain sanity, who had to be handed into a nearby mental hospital. When the authorities weren’t looking, the brother escaped through a window and the attendants arrived and put their hands on Polly’s grandfather. ‘Let me go’ – he spoke with the full authority of the head of the Church of England! – ‘I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury.’ ‘We know all about that,’ the men in white coats told him. ‘We’ve got twenty-three of you in here already.’ Polly’s father, a most distinguished lawyer, is so sane that he gave up being a High Court judge out of boredom with the job.

  Radio doesn’t blast, like television, from the corner of a room; it speaks to people alone in cars, in bedrooms, workrooms and kitchens. It can command the services of great actors because it doesn’t call for long rehearsals and they don’t have to learn their lines. Jeremy has always worked in radio drama, where many writers got their first chance of hearing their lines spoken by actors.

  I persuaded him to join me in search of our relatives in South Africa. I had got to know Graham Pechey, who had been exiled during the darkest days of apartheid and is now teaching at an English university. He sent word to Maritzburg and soon the telephones, like tom-toms, were summoning the Mortimer tribe to gather from areas as far apart as Durban and Pretoria. I had no idea what to expect. Would they be grim Calvinists, Methodist abstainers or last-ditch racists with steel shutters and a plentiful supply of small arms and Rottweilers in the garden? Would they be as eccentric as my father, as scandalous as my Auntie Gertie or stick to cocoa with their dinner like my grandfather? I had absolutely no way of telling.

  I arrived, a little ahead of Jeremy, on Peace Day in Johannesburg. There were two minutes’ silence and all the traffic stopped. In the dining-room of the hotel black and white waiters and waitresses, black and white cooks in tall hats, were standing with their heads bowed, praying for peace. As I got to know these people better, I learnt their names. One waitress was called Sweetness, another Birthwell, because, it seemed, she gave her mother an easy delivery. A waiter told me his mother called him Adolphus ‘because she was always a great admirer of Hitler’.

  Half a dozen close relatives whom I’d never met arrived for dinner. I was pleased, in a way, to see they were wearing blue ribbons in their buttonholes, the symbol chosen for the day of peace, but disappointed also. Could the Mortimer family not produce one outrageous apartheid apparatchik for me to describe and mock? It seemed not. The ghost of my grandfather, being carried across a stream on a ‘Kaffir’s’ back, the raucous tones of Aunt Gertie – The Great Tree and adulteress, screaming from the shadows of her verandah – had, it seemed, been stilled for ever. It was the sort of amiable dinner party you might go to in Hampstead with a family who supported the Liberal Party. Pam Edkins, grey-haired and pretty, handed out photographs of my bearded grandfather, my father as a schoolboy at the famous drag party, my beautiful Aunt Rene, my father’s favourite, and Gertie in her prime, her jutting sleeves and billowing skirts making her look like a tall ship sailin
g out to war. But these people were long dead. The later generations scorned cocoa, did complete justice to the Coastal Region Cabernet Sauvignon and accepted the fact that Nelson Mandela would be the next State President and that they had no alternative but to be nervously optimistic. It was a perfectly enjoyable evening. The Peace Day was held to be a great success as there were only three murders. A few days later twenty-five people were slaughtered as they waited for taxis to take them to work. It was, once again, as the whites comfort themselves by saying, ‘black on black’.

  Death is so near and yet seems, for most of the time, so safely far away. The road from the airport into Cape Town is said to be dangerous. Soldiers line it and helicopters guard the sky over a city of fragile shacks where almost half the adults are unemployed and one in five of the young men is going to die by a shot from a hand-gun. And yet so near, it seems almost next door, are the watered greens and manicured tees where white people are playing golf in the sunshine, apparently without a care in the world.