Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  But he failed to come immediately. It was another two weeks until Livingstone came to take her and the children to their new home. Before they set out she had to watch the home they were leaving be burned to the ground. Her husband didn’t want the Boers taking up residence there. Settlers of Dutch and German extraction, the Boers had refused to bow to British rule in the Cape Province, especially after the abolition of slavery, and had been trekking further and further inland taking land from the Africans as they went. They were hostile to the missionaries, whom they believed were supplying the Africans with guns to attack them. In previous weeks, parties of Boers had come nearer and nearer to Chonwane, intent on destroying all before them in order to expand their own farms. Livingstone wanted not just to build a new mission but to move further away from this threat.

  When he’d collected the nails (needed for building work at Kolobeng) from the ruins of a house that had meant little to him (itinerant as he proclaimed himself) but a great deal to his wife, they were off, in an ox-wagon. At least Mary had the pleasure of finding Kolobeng attractive and infinitely preferable to Chonwane – the river, the trees, the new houses already built made a good first impression. But it was misleading. The temporary house they were living in was only a hut, made of mud and reeds, and the wind blew through it constantly, a hot wind during the day and a cold one at night, bringing with it dust and flies. The dust irritated the children’s eyes and then the flies settled on the sores; and altogether the hut barely provided any shelter. Mary had mysterious pains in her chest; then her own eyes became infected and she could hardly see. There was grit everywhere – no matter how scrupulously she cleaned, dust settled on every object and her hands felt always dirty. But worst of all was seeing the plentiful water dry up. Yet again, drought had followed them and though the irrigation canal kept some few vegetables growing, most perished.

  Her husband went off again, on a trek to reach the huge lake rumoured to exist to the north, where he was hopeful of finding an enormous population ready for conversion. He got nowhere near the lake, returning home fairly quickly after discovering the Boers had been there, looting and burning, and likely to return. Once back, he set himself to complete a new house for his family. He chose a site on a rocky outcrop and began building an impressively large house, based on the design of the best houses at Kuruman, with a sitting-room, a study, two bedrooms, a verandah and even a stone fireplace. There were windows with glass in them, and a lean-to kitchen. On 4 July 1848, the family moved into their new home, the most comfortable building they had ever inhabited. It was a significant moment, symbolising as it did an end to makeshift arrangements. Livingstone solemnly recognised this by making a metal plate and attaching it to one of the walls. At last, Mary was content. She had a solid and (for that area and those times) splendid home, which she set about beautifying as best she could. Although he pretended to grumble that it was luxury gone mad, her husband did not oppose the order for a sofa, and he was willing to put up shelves for books and to make an oven so that Mary did not have to bake bread in a lidded pot set straight on to coals. There was even time to think of that most frivolous of concerns, clothes. Mary, her husband reported, wanted him to order, from his sisters, a decent jacket to be sent out, something that could be regarded as ‘respectable … not fustian … a thin dark coloured [jacket], something green, will do’.5 He professed to be amused at her dissatisfaction with his normal tattered apparel, but all the same was prepared to indulge her – a wife had rights. If she wanted him to look smart occasionally then he would oblige. A wife, even a wife with no clothes sense whatsoever, knew about such things. Indeed, it was perhaps one of her many duties to see her husband looked ‘respectable’. So his measurements were sent: ‘collar to waist 16½ inches, elbow to end of sleeve 12 inches, round chest 2 feet 11 inches, waist 29¼ inches’. The family was settled, and Mary could establish a routine, following the pattern of domestic order instituted by her mother.

  In the light of what had gone before, this was domestic bliss, but it was still a hard life. Mary rose at dawn, as most people living in Africa do, to light the fire for the breakfast of maize porridge; then came family worship and after that the day’s routine began. Before she baked the daily loaves of bread, she had first to supervise the cleaning and milling of the grain; before she washed clothes, in cold water and always short of soap (a very valuable commodity), they had to be soaked overnight because they were so ingrained with dust in the dry season and mud in the wet; before she made coffee, a luxury she and Livingstone allowed themselves, she had to go and collect water to boil, then skim the cream from the milk to add to it. As she and other missionaries’ wives commented, they were maids-of-all-work, more like farmers’ wives than anything. There was no afternoon rest to follow the gruelling morning’s essential work. Then, she left the two children with a girl and trudged in the ferocious heat to the mission meeting-house where she taught the African children. She made them wear some kind of clothing, much against their will (but following her mother’s ruling on what was ‘decency’) and tried to discipline them to learn how to count, read and write. Afterwards, when the day had begun fractionally to cool, she taught the girls sewing and then walked further into the town – Kolobeng was a kind of town in African terms by then – to talk to the women and help those most in need. She was mother, housewife, teacher and social worker all in one and, not surprisingly, exhausted by nightfall. She knew just as much about juggling roles as any wife today. There was not much time or energy for reading, but when she did read it was religious tracts or magazines or books such as George Cheever’s lectures on Pilgrim’s Progress. Her husband, meanwhile, turned to Punch – Mrs Sewell sent out copies and he told her how much they made him laugh.

  At least her husband appreciated her. His letters home are full of praise for her hard work and very ready with acknowledgement of how much she did at great cost to her own health. He was proud of her success and popularity with the children – ‘the native children are fond of her’ – and aware that she lacked female friendship. He had to be her friend, she his, and this bred an intimacy different from the existing marital relationship. She was his ‘rib’, she was ‘the main spoke in the wheel’, she was ‘a heroine’. And she seemed content to be all of these things in a way that touched him. All she dreaded was that their new-found stability should be disrupted, especially when in the summer of their first full year in Kolobeng she became pregnant again.

  It was her third pregnancy in three years, but then there was nothing remarkable about that – she had seen her mother give birth with the same kind of regularity. Livingstone, like all the missionaries, saw children as a blessing and would have been unlikely to try any form of contraception to give his wife some respite at such an early stage in their marriage. Total abstinence was the only alternative and clearly not practised.

  Pregnancy was never easy for Mary and this time she was very sick and had more pains in her chest which her doctor husband could not account for. She had to give up teaching, and languished at home, barely able to attend to the hyperactive Robert and the lively, but much more easy-going, Agnes. By November, when she was five months pregnant, the weather was ‘excessively warm’, touching nearly 100° Fahrenheit in the coolest part of the house, and Mary felt worse than she had ever done. Her husband dreaded the coming birth for her, and wished he had some of the newly invented chloroform he’d read about.

  But, to his relief, a son, Thomas, was born in March with comparative ease, after a labour of three hours. Mary, however, was not allowed to recover slowly – there was a threat of attack again from the Boers and she had to force herself to get ready to flee with her children. Fortunately, the attack did not materialise on this occasion, but her husband was anxious about leaving her while he went off on another expedition. He had been more or less fixed at Kolobeng for longer than he wanted, feeling the same urge to press on and bring God’s Word to other tribes – and to explore deeper into the continent. When Mary’s parents
invited her to Kuruman he was relieved – once his family was there, he would be free to travel again. Mary had little choice. She couldn’t survive on her own with a new baby and the ever-present rumours of a Boer attack, and she couldn’t go with her husband. Livingstone took her to Kuruman in April, on the first leg of what was a two-week journey. When he said goodbye she broke down and sobbed – ‘My poor lady is away out crying all the road in the full belief that I shall not be seen by her again.’6

  But his wife’s tears had other causes too. She had not wanted to leave her home and be sent off to her mother’s house where she never seems to have been happy after her marriage. Even seeing the children thrive on a diet infinitely better than any she could provide at Kolobeng, didn’t compensate for the absence of her husband. Nor could the company of her sister Ann. The children were happy though, in the company of their grandparents and in no hurry to return home. It was Mary who was desperate to go back, against all advice and even common sense, and after four months she packed up and left with the children, though her husband was not yet back from his travels. He’d gone far north, as she knew, in May, with his two big-game-hunting friends, William Cotton Oswell and Mungo Murray, to find Lake Ngami. She knew and liked Oswell, the perfect English gentleman, 6 feet tall (1.8 m) in his stockings and so well developed as a schoolboy at Rugby that he’d been called the Muscleman. He’d come from India to Cape Town to convalesce after an attack of fever. Once recovered, he felt restless and wanted to spend some time exploring and hunting, so he travelled first to Kuruman, where he was charmed by the Moffats, and was sent on by them to see Livingstone. Surprisingly, the two men liked each other immediately and Oswell was only too willing to accompany Livingstone on his travels. They were supposed to be home by August, though Mary knew perfectly well how unlikely such accurate timing would be. But she seems not to have cared. It was almost as though she felt that if she were there, waiting for them, her husband would come – her need for him would summon him.

  It was a dismal arrival for her and the children. It was August (winter there) and drought had once more dried everything up and made the cattle lean. The east wind she hated blew across the whole mission station, filling every nook and cranny in her house with sand. It was so cold at night that there was frost on the ground in the early morning, and the Africans coughed and wheezed with the respiratory infections the season always brought. The children picked up these infections and lost the bloom they had had acquired under their grandmother’s care at Kuruman. She felt ill, drained from nursing Thomas and from hard manual labour, and the Africans depended on her, coming to her for medicines and food which she needed to conserve for herself. She could have admitted defeat and gone back to Kuruman, but she refused to consider this. Instead, showing the first faint spark of rebellion against the circumstances inflicted on her by her husband, she sent a message north, hoping the messenger would find him or at least someone who knew where he was. He had to come back to her – she could not endure being on her own any longer, and it was wrong of him to expect her to do so. Past caring about how her own mother had coped (for once), Mary let her feelings be known.

  Livingstone got the message and made all haste to return home, leaving the main party and riding on ahead. He got back on 9 October and found his family if not well, at least in less desperate straits than Mary’s message had led him to fear. She had been two months on her own and the isolation had shattered her emotional health, just as bronchitis and other infections had wrecked her children’s. His sympathy was tempered by a stout justification for his absence. His work required it. Mary does not appear to have pointed out to him that there was plenty of work to be done at Kolobeng, plenty of souls to save there without going off looking for other tribes. Nor does she seem to have pointed out what his absences were doing to his children, especially Robert. The three-year-old boy, always highly strung, had suffered not just the upheaval of moving between Kolobeng and Kuruman but also the full weight of his mother’s distress. What he needed, more than did Agnes and the baby, was a settled environment and the confidence his father’s presence gave him.

  Livingstone’s nature was such that he could not provide both. For Robert, to be with his father meant being unsettled, going off with him on his travels, in an ox-wagon. It was the last thing Mary wanted to do, but in May of the following year, she found that if she wanted to be with her husband, she must travel with him. To add to her misery, she was pregnant again, nearly six months pregnant when they set off in a cavalcade without anything like adequate provisions, and accompanied by twenty African helpers. Mary, unlike her mother, hated ox-wagon travel, though she was an exerienced packer, knowing exactly how to arrange the contents. In the smaller chest at the front she put the daily supplies of tea, coffee, rice and sugar, all packed in small metal canisters, and in the bigger chest at the back larger quantities of the same goods from which the fore-chest was filled weekly. In the side-chests went plates and cups and clothes. A mattress formed a seat, with a movable wooden back put up during the day. Under the wagon she suspended a basket with meal in it and she hung six carriage bags made of sailcloth round the inside with cooking utensils in them. Within this confined space she and the children lived, and Robert and Agnes either played there or else trotted alongside the wagon. Since the wagon train moved so slowly, never more than 3 miles (4.8 m) an hour, it was easy enough for them to keep up, and it gave them vitally needed escape and exercise.

  In spite of her temperament, phlegmatic and stoical most of the time, this way of living didn’t appeal to Mary. Other missionary wives enjoyed sitting high up on the bench at the front in enforced idleness – the jolting, rolling motion over the uneven ground made even sewing impossible. But she preferred to be at home, solid ground beneath her feet and plenty of space around her. For a woman who had been born to the life, she showed an especial fear of the wagon’s overturning (though when it did, on this very journey, she was brave) and of lions attacking. She never felt safe in an ox-wagon and it held no compensatory romance for her. The spirit of adventure was something she did not share with her husband, the excitement of exploration never appealed. She worried about the children, who were bitten all over by mosquitoes and other insects, and who had little choice of food. Water was a constant worry too – sometimes the wagon travelled all night as well as all day in an attempt to find drinking water before it ran out – and so was malaria. It was a relief to reach Lake Ngami (which Livingstone had reached previously and now wanted to go beyond) where the children could play in the water and pick up shells. Mary was to be left there while her husband moved on. The prospect that she might go into labour before his return and have no one to deliver her baby, terrified her. All she could do was trust her husband to return within the short time he had said he would.

  But before he could leave, one of the drivers of the oxen came down with fever, thought to be an unusual type of malaria; then Agnes and Thomas both caught it. Even Livingstone realised that, faced with this calamity, there was only one option – they must all flee the fever-ridden area and make for home as rapidly as possible. By a piece of good fortune to match the bad, Oswell was waiting for them at the ford across the Botei river where he had supplies of potatoes and fruit to sustain the sick children. Agnes was soon better, though pale and drawn, but eighteen-month-old Thomas was so ill that Mary had to hold him all the time and carry him everywhere when they were not in the wagon – exhausting for an almost full-term pregnant woman. But at least they were all going home together and her husband’s ambitious scheme to go further than the lake was for the moment shelved. This expedition in itself had been costly and it would be some time before another could be mounted. They returned to Kolobeng having lost eight of the oxen, with one of the wagons hardly fit for travel and another needing attention to make it safe. But the human cost was higher still.

  Quite how high became apparent only three weeks later when Mary gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth. The baby was very small, and though her f
ather joked about this in a letter, saying she was about the size of her grandmother’s finger, her likely low birth weight (though not recorded and probably not even known) contributed to her lack of resistance to disease. Even before Elizabeth became ill, Mary herself suffered fits of violent trembling on the third and fourth days after giving birth. She had earache too, and her husband deduced that this pain came from a bad tooth which, when she was well enough, he would extract. Meanwhile, she stayed in bed, exhausted and immobile, unable to do anything but feed her baby. Livingstone assumed that rest would see to his wife’s recovery, but he was wrong. He noticed that when she tried to smile, one half of her face did not move. She couldn’t speak clearly, and when he checked her limbs he found she couldn’t move her right leg. She had, in fact, had a mild stroke, a cerebral haemorrhage due either to a malarial infection caught when Agnes and Thomas contracted fever at the lake, or, more likely, to pre-eclampsia brought on by stress, heat and high blood pressure in late pregnancy.

  Mary’s mother refers to a letter her daughter wrote to her after the birth, but the letter itself has not survived. It was written to tell her of a far greater tragedy than her own health – on 18 September, the baby Elizabeth died. She’d been ill two weeks, with what was referred to as inflammation of the lungs, and in spite of her father’s best efforts was not strong enough to survive. Livingstone’s anguish was genuine – the baby’s last cry haunted him for years – but nevertheless he had as usual to excuse himself of responsibility for what had happened. He recorded no remorse, no confession that he had been partly to blame for subjecting his pregnant wife to the ordeal of travelling in an ox-wagon into a malarial region. It was all God’s will. The baby would have died wherever they were. Mary would have had a stroke even if she had stayed at home. It was the only way he could deal with what had happened.