Stephen Gray
SECRET FIRE: THE 1913-14 SOUTH AFRICAN JOURNAL OF PAULINE SMITH (University of Natal Press, R99,95)
PAULINE SMITH’S pre-war journal demands a sunny corner to curl up with. Labyrinthine, and actually too disorganised to be read continuously, it wants picking at, probing. This is where those marvellous fine-art stories of hers of a decade later went into incubation. Here are dozens of the preliminary tales she pried and chivvied out of her Little Karoo informants, recorded in their raw, unedited state. Only Athol Fugard’s Notebooks are their equal in writerly interest.
We may know that “Mess Smiff”, as the locals called her – or “Polly” or just plain “P” – was browbeaten by Arnold Bennett into keeping this daily dairy and working it up, during a ten-month collecting trip through the Oudtshoorn region she had left aged 12. But revisiting it in her early Thirties, she seems far less of a timid protg of that Edwardian bully than very much her own woman. She is really South Africa’s Turgenev, loving the landholders and their peasants to death, never missing one of their tricks.
For a contemporary less interested in metropolitan boosters (who is Bennett these days?) than in the slump in the ostrich- feather industry, the horse-sickness that blotted out Cape transport, then the great railway strike that brought in trade union ideology, here is a lost segment of our past leaping into gritty reality. Without Smith, it would all be pretty unimaginable now.
Some of it is hard to credit. She preferred travelling by cart, trap or wagon than by Hupmobile, because she could note details of that spice-box of the veld and liked holding the reins. She wore her Florentine hat with a puggaree (a veil), packing a money sack and a pistol in her garter. After a day’s kuiering, she would knock herself out from the flask of French brandy.
They used to say Pauline Smith remained a spinster because she worried about cousins having married to produce her. (In one horrid scene she finds some offspring of incest, legless and kept in a pigsty.) But now we have to view her as so professionally engaged in her craft, as a democratic modern woman, that she had no time for all that cumbersome domesticity, even if she depicted it so well.
Enter another world, when everything was different – where “coming out” meant turning your back on Home and starting anew in Africa, “colonial” just meant local, and “colonisation” having discipline, as in children staying in school. The “crossing over” was something novel to do with the tabs of a pinafore and one’s “draws” (her spelling) could get eaten off the line by a Malay cow. To enter, all you had to present was your carte-de-visite. It helped if you were the beloved daughter of everyone’s favourite Scottish doctor. Then tea, chat, make copy, work-up, to Jonathan Cape …
“But to go on” – her favourite tag. The story of the pumpkin that grew so fast it had burn-marks underneath. The predikant at Tiger Kloof who married the bywoner couple across a flooding river, as they had cropping to do. Phillida the midwife who wouldn’t deliver “cullid persons” (if whites were watching). Mr Jones, the harbour-master at Plettenberg Bay with his 21 children (his “duty to the state”), and for a grand finale the Terblanche patriarch who had over 200!
And Mr B the minor canon, asleep in his chair, his false teeth on the book he was reading. Tetchy Langenhoven the anthem- writer, “hopping about like a turkey cock on hot bricks”. The Australian tutor. The ragtime on the “old kettle pianner”, the gloomy, fated “bonded” children. Yuccas and prickly-pears. And that sudden commotion in the hen house “which foretold our evening meal”.
Once she just has to burst out: “How much it all belongs to me!” Then she is “stupidly happy and glad to be alive and to be a bit of an Africander too”. “Collecting all I can get for the future.”
She meant this rambling, packed journal as her own creative patchwork, parcelled off in instalments in the English mail to her sister Dolly, and she published only a few excerpts (in Voorslag in 1926). She always meant to get it in shape. Now here it is, a great South African quilt, retrieved by the ever-patient Harold Scheub of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
He began this task in 1980, for what was to be the fifth and last volume of the Smith Centennial Edition, all of 16 years ago. But never mind the delay, because Smith was a rather slow maturer. And never mind that Scheub’s apparatus sometimes gives in just when one has crucial questions. (What happened to Aunt Jean’s handbag that went on the train to PE? Was Pol’s project stopped in its tracks by World War I?)
Anyway, here it is at last: Pauline Smith restored, at her homely best. It is my book of the year.