by Muriel Spark
By the time I had been in Africa two years, I thought of leaving my husband. He became a borderline case, and I didn’t like what I found either side of the border. He got more and more violent. I thought I could argue rationally with him. This never worked for any length of time. When Nita McEwen, a friend from school, was killed that night by her husband in the hotel where I was staying, I got seriously frightened. My husband had a small revolver, a ‘baby Browning’, which he liked to fire off in corridors and courtyards. I hid it, and refused to hand it over when he demanded it.
It was exactly two years after my marriage that war broke out. This put an end to my plans to leave the country. No civilians were allowed to leave Rhodesia. Transport, except for intercity trains, was put exclusively at the disposal of the military. After 3 September 1939, no passenger shipping was normally available.
My husband joined the Army. He moved to the Air Force and back again to the Army. I took on a responsible nanny, a ‘coloured’ (mixed-blood) girl called Esther, and together we moved to new lodgings with my child. I had now officially left my husband. Stuck in Africa, I had to get jobs, but Esther was extremely reliable and affectionate towards me and my son. Her father had been a white magistrate from Durban, her mother a Zulu.
I started the long, weary process, as it then was, of divorce. It was especially difficult under the Roman Dutch law which prevailed in the colony. Even in Britain, at that time, the last thing that could be revealed was ‘collusion’, or agreement between the parties. If collusion was suspected by the judge, the divorce was endlessly held up, and if it was proved, the divorce fell through. When there were offspring, the law favoured the man. The very mention of mental instability or cruelty in either of the partners was enough to ruin the case; these factors were grounds for legal separation, but not for divorce. The grounds for divorce were infidelity (especially on the woman’s part) and desertion. I chose desertion. My husband would not desert me, so I deserted him. I made a private agreement to pay for the divorce, which my father most willingly did, digging into his hard-won savings to meet the legal fees. He also augmented my income and eventually paid for my voyage home. It was good fortune that in his last years I enjoyed sufficient literary success to be able to make his life more comfortable, in turn. The good fortune was really mine: nothing can repay goodness, love, and loyalty.
My father had never liked S.O.S., but now he thoroughly despised him. My mother, with more understanding, was sorry for him, and later on, when he returned to Edinburgh for an endless series of cures, she did her best to make him feel he had a friend. Small thanks she got.
I, too, was sorry for the man I had married. But I was reminded of a recent novel by Stefan Zweig entitled Beware of Pity that treats of a young officer who is induced by pity to get engaged to a crippled girl. Finally he cannot keep up the pretence. The girl, aware of having been misled, commits suicide. Though the material circumstances of the story were far from mine, the elements of pity and compassion were always present. If my husband had not been an object of pity, I would have been much tougher.
For a young woman my life was extremely difficult. One night, having been asked to a dance by a party of friends, I was dancing innocently with a Dr Shankman, who was an eye specialist whom I knew. My husband appeared and set up a fight with him on the dance-floor. My husband was removed, of course, and the doctor and I went on dancing, but this sort of harassment made me hesitate to go around with my friends. It isolated me considerably.
As it was, I escaped for dear life. If I had not insisted on a divorce, God knows what would have happened. I told the man as frankly as I could that I had no intention of living with him again but that if he agreed to a divorce I might possibly be able to help him. I was faithful to my word, but, as it turned out, the possibility of helping him in any dedicated way was plainly beyond me. ‘You were the capable one. You were the strong one,’ he wrote in his letters from a mental hospital after the divorce. The letters are full of self-recrimination and self-blame but, as a friend wrote and confirmed to me at the time, ‘self’ was obviously the operative idea. ‘You tell me to “snap out of it” but I’m damned if I can,’ he wrote to me in October 1944, after I had left Africa. I realized that some people simply cannot help themselves by thinking of others; it is perhaps unkind to expect it.
After my divorce I retained my husband’s name, to be the same as my son. This was generally the custom unless one married again. I was glad of this later when I began my literary career. Camberg was a good name, but comparatively flat. Spark seemed to have some ingredient of life and of fun.
I wanted to start my life afresh, and, as well as I could, I did so. Not long after my husband went into the Army, I had my son’s eyes tested at Dr Shankman’s, and met his receptionist, a young, very pretty, and natural woman, May Heygate. She had a small girl, Gail, about the same age as Robin. May’s husband, Nick, was now in the Army and she, like me, was making do in furnished rooms. We liked each other instantly. May suggested we share a flat. Although May had settled for a job as a receptionist to give her more time with Gail, she was a brilliant classics scholar, from Bristol University. I had found a secretarial job with a glamorous businessman, Basil Frost, who had a trading establishment in Bulawayo.
May and I moved in together with our furniture and our two nannies. We were looked after by Moses, the ever-faithful cook. Moses was reserved and dignified. ‘One of Nature’s gentlemen,’ said May. Besides being kindly by nature, he was a mission-educated man. The much-maligned missionaries were in fact the finest people in the colony. Africans flourished and were well educated in their care. Zimbabwe owes its independence in part to the influence of the Christian missions. One of the most saintly men in the colony was an Anglican missionary and poet, Arthur Shearley Cripps, who frequently went cold or hungry because he had given the coat off his back or his dinner to an African. Strangely enough, he was deeply respected by the whites.
May and I shared our flat in Bulawayo for some years. In the mean time the first part of my divorce proceedings was completed. This was the decree nisi, which preceded the decree absolute, due in about a year’s time. My husband was already in the nervous-disorders hospital. May’s husband, charming Nick, fell ill and died of pneumonia. May and I stood together under a great many vicissitudes. She was so very pretty, a natural ash-blonde, that a great many men wanted to woo her. For my part, the charming Basil Frost (twenty years my senior) spent a lot of time gazing at me over the desk, telling me how young and fresh I was, and explaining how these facts affected him. The truth was that neither May nor I was ready for love affairs; there was a cloud of sadness over both our lives. We felt a predominant concern for our toddlers, and very isolated from home. We would take the children for picnics at weekends, and to the cinema (called the ‘bioscope’) to see Lassie, who was already a star. Davy Crockett was also a great hero with both children. Pop-eye was not thought much of.
I thought I might get a job as a junior teacher and applied for a job at an Anglican convent school. I thought it would be convenient to have an infant school for Robin at the place where I worked. I had four interviews in all. A friend of mine who taught at the school told me, after my first interview with the Mother Superior, that I had made a great impression, ‘so young and fresh.’ These words rang a bell all right: Basil Frost, the ardent heart-throb. And my friend added, ‘She loves your complexion and your golden hair.’
What about my abilities? In my second interview, the Mother Superior told me that there might be an opening at the school for me. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘the trouble with this war is the Jews. We need more people like you.’ She went on for some time in this vein, sometimes gazing at me in a most wonder-struck way. This woman, fairly well put together physically, somewhere in her forties, was thoroughly obsessed by the Jews; a hatred came through her teeth that I had never experienced before. I murmured that Hitler’s propaganda was… She wouldn’t let me finish. Hitler’s quite right, she said. The war
is all the fault of the Jews.
At home, I said to May that I was going back again to the convent to see how far the Mother Superior would go. May thought this a lark. But before the fourth interview, which was to be the decisive one for my employment, I told May, ‘Today’s the day. I’ll tell her I’m a Jew.’
This I did. I didn’t say part-Jew or any other sort of Jew. I just said, ‘Of course, I’m a Jew.’
She said, ‘It’s not so.’
I said, ‘What isn’t so?’
She said, ‘What you just said.’
I took my fair skin and my golden locks right out of there. At the gate I found May waiting for me with our two infants crammed into one push-cart. We bought ice creams all round and sauntered home.
All this time I had never stopped writing poetry. I entered twice for the Rhodesian annual poetry competition and won twice. I published in local magazines. One of the poems was called ‘The Go-Away Bird’, about the haunting cry of the grey-crested lourie that one could hear all over the veldt of the colony. The bird cried ‘go-’way, go-’way’. I felt that it spoke to me, and in later years, my long short story ‘The Go-Away Bird’ expressed the intermittent sad feelings of those years, the ignorant ill-will of some of the Boer farmers, and the disillusionment of some who had longed for ‘home’, in an England they had never known, and who found there everything cold, changed, and many people on the make. I was really, myself, a ‘Go-away Bird’.
While on the subject of the effect of my African experience on my subsequent work, I should mention my radio-play The Dry River Bed, based on a real episode in my life in Africa when a car I was driving got into a rut and went into a dry river bed, smashing the car. Another story, ‘The Portobello Road’, touches on the then Southern Rhodesia and the great difficulties of mixed marriages there.
In 1942, at the beginning of my period of comparative freedom, and while waiting for the finalization of my divorce, I went to parties and dances occasionally, quite rightly urged by my friends. The Air Force had mounted an immense air-training scheme, and one was always meeting cheery young men just out from home. One of these was a young flight lieutenant who had been through the Blitz, Arthur Foggo. I had a soft spot for Arthur, and that was all; at the same time, it was a lot. His sentiments went much further. We really had a charming time together. Then Arthur was posted home with his group. Overcome by sadness once more, I saw him off at the station to Cape Town from where they would sail for England. Two days later, on 6 October 1942, came a wire from Cape Town. It read: ‘Leaving immediately will write you as soon as I arrive. Love Arthur Foggo.’ I was rather surprised, knowing the secretive rules of those wartime days, that Arthur’s wire had beat the censor. It was extraordinarily specific. It was handed in at 6.17 p.m. and arrived in my hands after ten that night.
South Africa was officially an ally in the war, but an insipid and reluctant one, as I found when presently I spent some time in Cape Town waiting for a boat home. I have often wondered how many of Arthur’s friends sent messages that evening so openly revealing their movements. Whether they were betrayed by spies or were simply victims of chance, there was a torpedo waiting in the seas outside Cape Town for their ship. Arthur and his companions went down with it that night. It was about two weeks later that I heard the news. Some of the airmen had left behind them girls whom they had recently married. The men had been extremely popular. The whole colony was in mourning.
May was trying to wangle a passage home. Our friends wrote to describe the horrors of wartime England. But I was now determined to see wartime England. I wanted to be involved. Life in the colony was eating my heart away, and in my depression at Arthur Foggo’s death I felt I didn’t care what bombs would fall about my ears.
By the end of 1943, it was expected that the war would be over in a few months. There was a possibility of getting on a boat to England if one could reach Cape Town. There was no question of transporting children to England at that stage of the war. I decided for my sanity’s sake to go ahead by myself. I had met some very good Catholic nuns at the Dominican convent school in Gwelo. Quite a few young children separated from their parents by the war were at boarding school there. I was satisfied that Robin would be safe in that convent school, and so he was. Even my husband in the mental home, asserting on paper his legal ‘rights’, liked the nuns of Gwelo. Robin was able to play with the children of my friends there. They also kept an eye on him. A friendly professional childminder and her family had Robin home almost every day, and supported me greatly with constant letters. When I left Rhodesia, Esther, who had been in another job for some time, unexpectedly turned up at the station to see me off. We were sad to leave each other.
My plan was to prepare for Robin to go and live with my parents, who were pining to have him as soon as the war was over and the transport ban lifted. This worked remarkably well. I arrived in England in March 1944. My little son joined me in September of the following year and was greeted with great joy by both my parents. So far as my mother was concerned, her grandson made a remarkable difference to her life. She had been going through a period of depression, probably menopausal. Earlier in the war my parents had taken in a little refugee German girl in response to the Save the Children movement. She had now gone to her relatives in the United States, but my parents were missing her a lot. But now, when Robin arrived, my mother felt thoroughly rejuvenated and Robin took to her from the start. It was a great good thing, and an immense relief to me that he finally had a settled home with my mother and father in Edinburgh. My father was really a second father to my son.
My escape from Southern Rhodesia had been effected by a ruse. I obtained a magistrate’s permit (from the same magistrate, Mr Smith, who had officiated at my marriage) to visit Cape Town for three months in order to study literature and drama. I simply didn’t go back. I put my name down for a passage to England with a shipping line. I took some jobs while waiting, but I was very impoverished at this stage. Jobs were ill-paid, especially for English girls who were looked down on by the Afrikaners. Afrikaans policemen would not answer if you asked the way in English. Jobs were also scarce. There were strikes, and an air of economic depression. My life for the few months I was there waiting for transport was enlivened by Marie Bonaparte (Princess Marie of Greece), with whom I struck up a friendship on the basis of our literary interests. She lived with the rest of the Greek royal family in exile, in a fairly small villa. That house was to me an oasis of civilization.
The then Princess (later Queen) Frederica of Greece, whom I was to meet again many years later, in exile in Rome, occupied the upper floors with her rowdy small son (now ex-King Constantine). Marie Bonaparte had bright, dyed red hair, and shrewd eyes sunken into an elderly face. It was simply astonishing to hear her talk so seriously and with such a powerful intelligence, completely regardless of the trappings of exile around her.
Her bedroom, where often we had to sit when the drawing-room was engaged, had the air of what I had come to associate with the few Russian exiles I had come across or heard of, or the Jewish professors and their wives, who had taken refuge in Southern Rhodesia. The mantelpiece of Marie Bonaparte’s room was crowded with family photographs in silver frames, a large package of Bemax (a bedtime beverage), some tattered papers, a book of poems by Edgar Allen Poe, on whom she was writing a book, and a pretty vase.
We discussed literature, which she, having been a prominent pupil of Sigmund Freud, approached from a psychological point of view – something quite new to me. I was intrigued, but I felt it left too much unsaid. I had an idea that there was such a thing as a ‘literary sense’, with which some readers or critics were endowed in addition to the normal five senses, and that it was by this ‘sense’ that one should judge literature.
Princess Marie’s drawing-room was more elegant and impersonal than the bedroom-study. A (white) butler took one’s gloves and brought in the tea. I cannot recall very much of our actual conversation, but I remember that I found Marie Bonaparte’s
company enormously interesting. She seemed equally eager to hear what I had to say, although this must have been very little. But I let her see my poems, and I think she was sincere in her admiration.
My reading over the past years had been very limited, though intense. In Rhodesia I had little to choose between popular novels, which I hated, or Shakespeare and the Bible, which I read assiduously. Sometimes, by some fortune, I would find a copy of Penguin New Writing, which I fell upon voraciously. I read Eliot. I read what I could find of Ivy Compton-Burnett.
Cape Town was much more civically evolved, but it was still rather empty of intellectual life. I think Marie Bonaparte felt this, too. She was quite indifferent to politics. The encroachment of Communism, which everyone predicted with horror in those days, did not dismay her. In one of her letters to me after I had returned to England she wrote, ‘The Russians are a very artistic people. Art will not die therefore.’
When I went to say goodbye to Marie Bonaparte she gave me a letter to carry to Anna Freud in London. I took it to Miss Freud, who pressed me for news of her friend – how she was keeping and how I thought she was managing. I was puzzled then, and still am, that Anna Freud could not get this information through the ordinary mail. Surely the two friends corresponded? But perhaps there were things, in those days of wartime censorship, which could not be written between a member of the Greek royal family and the daughter of Sigmund Freud. Indeed, I had been rather surprised that the letter I carried was in a gummed-down envelope. That was certainly unusual.
There had been an atmosphere of unreality about Cape Town. The community was divided into three: coloured, black and white. The coloured comprised Malays, Indians and people of mixed blood. There were three entrances to the cinemas, and other public places, labelled ‘Coloured’, ‘Black’ and ‘White’. I thought this quite amusing when I didn’t think it tragic. The buses bore the warning ‘Do Not Spit’ in English and Afrikaans. I had a room in a district called The Gardens where certain visiting naval officers of all nationalities would arrive at odd hours to visit Girlie Lonsdale, an ageing gentleman who occupied the room opposite. My story ‘The Pawnbroker’s Wife’ is set in Cape Town. I think it expresses what to my mind was a refusal of the white people of South Africa to face the human facts around them. They were in ‘a world of their own’. Their very speech was surrealistic. Even more than in Rhodesia I felt that their world was not the real world. I wanted the reality of home, even though it meant the bombs of war.
