/ 21 January 2009

Not the usual old boys’ club

Pat Schwartz talks to Marguerite Poland about her new book, The Boy in You

We meet for coffee, the author and I. Old friends, collaborators on two books — she the creative spirit, I the pedant editor. In the case of the latest, The Boy in You: The Biography of St Andrew’s College, 1855-2005, I was forced, in the interests of economy, into the role of brutal censor, cutting thousands of words she considered precious.

She has flown in after a six-week pilgrimage that has taken her from a gathering of Eastern Cape farmers in the tiny town of Bedford to a glittering function at London’s Royal Automobile Club, attended by, among many others, four ”knights of the realm”; from the winter-bleak battlefields of Ypres, Corbie and Delville Wood to a balmy summer evening at the Johannesburg Country Club. What is the connection, and why is novelist, linguist and now historian, Marguerite Poland, making it?

The link is St Andrew’s College, Grahamstown, the 153-year-old boys’ school that has produced some extraordinary South Africans — engineers and educators, businessmen and churchmen, record-breaking sportsmen and courageous soldiers — and propelled them all over the world — some to live and gain glory, others to die in battle. The why, I believe, can be answered in one word — passion. She calls it ”unashamed love”.

The Eastern Cape, its history, its landscape and ”College” itself are, it seems, embedded in her DNA. ”Deeply rooted in me is knowledge of that place and the men who have come out of it,” says Poland.

Part of that rootedness is the fact that several of the Old Andreans (OAs) of whom she writes are members of her own family — the great-great-grandfather on whose land the school now plays its cricket; the great uncle who was College’s first double Oxford ”Blue”; her husband, Martin Oosthuizen.

”The people I’ve loved best have always come from there and my whole quest in life has been to return to a place which was my first inspiration.”

Shades, her second adult novel (she began her career writing children’s books), was the first step on that return journey — a love story rooted in Eastern Cape history, set against a background of drought, famine, the rinderpest and the South African War. Iron Love, her third novel, brought her yet closer to this latest work, set as it was in ”a boys’ school in colonial South Africa”, its hero the fictionalised depiction of a real OA, Charlie Fraser, one of those who died in the Great War and whose non-fictionalised story is movingly recounted in The Boy in You.

”How,” asked one dubious OA when he heard that Poland had been commissioned for the job, ”can a girl write the history of College?” At a function in Johannesburg recently, having read the book, he was consuming his words along with his dinner.

It was probably only a ”girl”, this particular ”girl”, who would have put into recording this history the intensity of devotion and the pure slog required to make the place and its people live. It took five years of meticulous research. She trawled through minutes of meetings, archives she describes as ”chaotic”, a multitude of interviews, history books and reams of letters from old boys. The result is not merely the story of an elite school in one of the country’s more inaccessible cities, it is a social history of the Eastern Cape and, in some ways, of South Africa itself. Poland has not allowed the school to stand in isolation; her story ranges far wider.

”When I started looking at the early history I realised how fascinating the people were who founded the school and how they had affected South Africa in so many different ways.”

Among those who were to play a role in a future South Africa were some who had attended what was then known as the ”Native branch of St Andrew’s” — the Mullins Institution (founded in 1861 and separated from St Andrew’s in 1867), among whose pupils are some who bear names that reverberate through the country’s political history — Josiah Gumede, future president of the ANC; Daniel Letanka, editor of the ANC mouthpiece Abantu Batho; Thomas Mapikela, delegate to England in 1909 with WP Schreiner to protest against the Act of Union.

Although Poland concedes that there is a dark side to life in a boys’ boarding school and has dealt, albeit in passing, with the endemic problems of bullying and victimisation, her theme is the sense of belonging and the loyalty College has infused in those who studied there. ”Even boys who have been deeply unhappy go to reunions,” she marvels.

If she needed any further evidence of that loyalty, she witnessed it only weeks ago when she joined a small group of OAs aged from 17 to 70 gathered in the St George’s memorial church in Ypres to unveil a plaque honouring the 125 of their number who lost their lives in the Great War (the largest number from any school in the Dominions). Striving to fill the silence of the great empty church, the eight pilgrims ”bellowed” the school hymn.

”There was a real sense of family, a bond. People laugh at it, but it does exist.”

The Boy in You is published by Fernwood Press