I grew up in an age when men told stories of war. Sadly, the men who told these stories weren’t ancient Greek heroes or Shakespearean kings: they were my male relatives, freshly returned to Cape Town after fighting for years in World War II. We children put our hands over our ears as Uncle John recited monologues about his “pee oh double you” experiences, and Dad tried to outdo him with tales of Egypt and Monty and desert rats. How much I’d love to hear those long-lost stories now.
The worst offender was my grandfather, and he hadn’t even fought in the world wars, either of them. His war had been the Anglo-Boer South African War at the turn of the century — or the boring war, as I sniggered to my small sister while Grandpa droned on about the unruly Boers and their defiant, disrespectful women.
My grandfather was a tall, creaking, ticking man. Long retired, he still wore a three-piece suit, black shiny lace-ups and a hyperactive fob watch. His white, oiled hair used to be plastered flat on his skull. A transparent drip often gleamed at the tip of his long nose. In my child’s eye, he was a frightening man with a violent temper. It was impossible to imagine that he had ever been young and desirable.
My grandmother, on the other hand, still retained something of that calm madonna beauty that shines from her photograph on the first page of our family album — and which adorns the jacket of No Place for a Lady. Opposite this image of female allure is an unrecognisable photo of my grandfather, aged 20, smiling roguishly from beneath his tilted scout hat, every inch the daredevil trooper.
There was a family myth about this glamorous couple. In 1900, along with hundreds of upper-class young women, Granny sailed from England to nurse wounded British soldiers. She attended to the battle wounds of this handsome young Irishman and they fell in love, married and Granny was instantly disinherited by her family. How could their beautiful daughter have married a crude Roman Catholic orphan of Irish descent? Her name was in Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage, and wealthy admirers in England were queuing to marry her. It is this romantic narrative (most of which turns out to have had little connection with reality) that I use as a springboard for No Place for a Lady.
The triple-apartheid into which I was born seeps into the novel unavoidably. To a white child living in a leafy, safe, all-white suburb, the recently installed Nationalist policies inflicting racist laws upon the nation seemed as remote as the ocean’s horizon.
Far more potent was the hatred English-speaking people were supposed to feel towards the Afrikaners, not because of their apartheid regime, but because they had dislodged the British from their position of power. We didn’t actually know any Afrikaners, but we knew they were the enemy. As if this wasn’t enough, as Irish Roman Catholics we were taught to believe that every other religion on Earth, even the Anglican church, was condemned to hellfire. Catholics alone went to heaven. My own punitive education in a girls’ convent permeates Patch’s orphanage experience and, later, philosophy.
Only in adulthood did I learn the truth. My grandfather had quite probably been a guard at a Boer women’s concentration camp where 4 177 mothers and 22 074 children, crammed into unhygienic bell-tents, had died of disease or malnutrition — a terrible wound that still has not healed in the collective Afrikaner psyche, more than 100 years later. The crucial role played by Emily Hobhouse in improving the squalid camp conditions is honoured by Afrikaners to this day, but is largely forgotten, ignored or derided by the English population.
But there was a worse truth. Other camps had no tents, doctors or nurses such as my Sarah-grandmother. More than 20 000 black women and children also died in British concentration camps during the Boer war, a truth South African children never learned in history classes. Neither did we learn that blacks had been promised a qualified franchise in the ex-Boer republics if they supported the British troops during the war. On the contrary, the peace settlements after the war merely endorsed white supremacy and helped to lay the foundations of an apartheid state.
It is against this background of filth, disease, bigotry and betrayal that the fictional fate of my grandparents is sealed.