Marguerite Poland’s new novel is set in a boys’ school. She spoke to Jane Rosenthal
Marguerite Poland looks like any ordinary white South African lift-club mum; elegantly but conservatively dressed, she is obliging and forthcoming and friendly. But those who are familiar with her novels will know that she does not flinch from the hard questions. The affection and tenderness, the apt and amusing observations of people, the sentimentality even, which make her writing so accessible, provide a deceptively comfortable vehicle for the examination of heroism and worldly acclaim, colonialism, religious arrogance, militarism and the lives of the dispossessed – some of her themes.
In Iron Love she uses a Sunny Memories photograph album which belonged to Charlie Fraser, an old boy of St Andrew’s, Grahamstown, to recreate in fiction the lives of six boys at school in the years just before World War I. Life centred on the boarding house, in this case presided over by Robbie, as benign and eccentric an old misogynist as one could hope to meet: pipe in mouth, hunting knife at his waist, battered old camp tea pot in his study and a dab hand with the cane.
But escape was at hand and the boys made themselves “forts” on the river bank, rode donkeys at the dam, and learned to survive. Far from home and unlikely to see their mothers for months on end, these “nubs” (smallest new boys) learned the rules: to suffer in silence and deny suffering, and “not to fail at footer”.
Of writing this book Poland says, “I was the gatherer together of material that came from so many different sources.” Many old Andreans sent tapes, letters, photographs. “A book like this isn’t done in isolation, just out of somebody’s imagination.”
She anticipates that she may be criticised for writing a “paean of praise to an elitist institution”, but she points out that, although her “devotion to the place is absolute”, it’s more subtle than that. She “chose not to write about the private school system at all, just to talk about “these kinds of boys that were part of Charlie Fraser’s community”, and Charlie Fraser happened to live in a setting she knows well and loves: the Eastern Cape. And this is crucial to the book since she feels St Andrew’s was a very special school – “unpretentious” is the word she uses – where most of the boys came from a farming community living in very harsh conditions.
Poland quotes research done on “church” schools at the turn of the century which shows that their purpose was plainly to mould boys to rule the colony. Their ethos was “muscular Christianity”; never cry and “look sharp”. And as the boys got older these translated into Honour, Valour and Duty to be used in the service of God, King and Country.
In Shades, her earlier novel, Poland says she was “exploring what I think about heroes”; in Iron Love she continues to examine conceptions of manliness. The title comes from a poem by Isaac Rosenberg, Dead Man’s Dump, in a stanza -often omitted from anthologies – in which the images of earth and death “captured the kind of love between boys, and the kind of love that was appropriate at that time, which was silence and denial and letting your sorrows leak inward”.
Her portrait of the school and those boys is not without criticism, which is delivered softly and often by implication and is not the less devastating for that. She examines the ruthless exclusions practised in that circle against, for example, a boy whose father committed suicide, and of course such hopeless outsiders as Afrikaners and Methodists. Where it is appropriate to laugh she allows herself some ironic digs: “All that manly drama,” she says, fondly, as the footer team runs onto the field.
She uses a favourite character, Percy Gilbert, who has a detached and sardonic take on school life, to offer critical insight. Although the whole book is about love in various forms and many of the “great boys”, heroes of house and footer team, are loved, Percy is the only boy who is “in love” with another boy. Commenting on the observation that homosexuality is dealt with in Shades, but almost entirely omitted from Iron Love, Poland says, “I am a very discreet person, and if there was [any actual rogering] I didn’t want to know about it.”
She says also that she wished to “avoid the clich of it” , since any school setting these days seems to carry an obligation to talk about sex. And letters that she read that did reveal romantic friendships also were “restrained” about sex, which she puts down to the fear of sinfulness and lack of opportunity, and she wished to respect the privacy of her characters, whatever their sexual inclinations.
Although much is made of Robbie’s devastating swing when giving cuts, and there is a lot of bravado about taking it like a man, the last caning Robbie gives in the book results in the public undoing of Charlie Fraser, a cruel humiliation for the star of the footer team. Poland explores this unhappy consequence firmly and thoroughly.
She has included, almost verbatim, speeches and sermons from school records which might seem to us now highly questionable. For example, Robbie, speaking to the cadet corps just before the outbreak of war, extols “the ruggedness and vigour that are the hallmark of young men from the colonies”, and goes on: “Death in battle is the most glorious and manly of ends, gentleman. There is no more heroic sacrifice than that.”
Charlie Fraser’s class leaves school and goes straight into the war. Many of them die, fighting for God, King and Country, before they are 19. The particular poignancy of this sacrifice and waste is not confined to that era; Poland says it applies as well to all boys sent to later wars where to resist peer and societal pressure and actually question one’s “duty” would perhaps be asking too high a price.
In writing about great-grandfathers when they were 12, Poland skilfully bridges the generations, showing that in many ways those rites of passage by which one wins one’s place in the world, and the esteem of one’s peers, are still the same for boys today.
In this deeply considered and lovingly detailed pastiche Poland has captured the era and a little corner of South Africa where many still have their roots, settlers who also suffered under the empire. When Robbie ends his “death wish” speech to the cadets, the author comments: “Well could Robbie rest his eyes on Charlie Fraser, that template of masculinity. But what of Unwin? And what of Edwards, who could shear a sheep and raise a hansie, fix a windmill, stalk a rooikat, set a trap – could he be uprooted and shipped away and turned into a soldier?”