Road Trip Memories

This morning, when I saw the ocean, I remembered how excited we used to be to see the sea – the Indian Ocean. The long, long drive of over 2,600kms (1,600 miles) from the farm in Zimbabwe, south to Fish Hoek near Cape Town. Some years there were four children in the back seat. My mother would be in the front next to my father who did all the driving. This meant the car was quite squashy. Sometimes one of us was allowed to sit in front. The journey took three or four days because, not only was it a long journey, but not all the roads were sealed.

The first overnight stop would be in Louis Trichardt (now called Makhado), not far from Beit Bridge – the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. I can’t really remember the other stops, although we usually stayed in the same places each trip. I do remember Parys because, apparently, that is where I managed to push over a massive wardrobe looking for Father Christmas. The crash was heard throughout the old hotel. Of course, my parents came running. Thinking I was in, or under, the wardrobe, they struggled to lift it. I was hiding under the bed knowing I was in deep trouble. Fortunately, I’ve forgotten what happened next, I was only about five years old.

If he could, Dad would bypass Johannesburg but would stop in to see friends in Pretoria.

Once we were in the Western Cape, past the surreal landscapes in the Karoo, we would start to recognise the landmarks. The countdown had begun. The Hex River Pass; De Doorns in the Valley of the Vines (do you remember the book by Joy Packer?) then Paarl, named for the huge pearl-shaped rock above the town, meant we were not far off. We were never allowed to climb around on Paarl Rock. There was the sad story of a young boy who slipped down in one of the fissures in the rock and could not be saved. How true it is I don’t know.

Coming from a landlocked country, the ocean was the most wonderful thing for us. The first view was cause for much shouting! “I saw the sea first!” But it was usually Mum or Dad who saw it first.

All my life I wanted to live within sight or sound of the sea and now I do. Yes, still the Indian Ocean but on the Australian side. I live walking distance to the beach and can hear the breaking waves when the wind is in the right direction.

where I live now.

Olive Schreiner

“We are a race of women that of old knew no fear and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.” Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner

Most people, when they think of Olive Schreiner, remember her classic novel The Story of an African Farm. (Originally published in 1883 under the pseudonym Ralph Iron). I was scratching through my Long Drawer and came across the quotation cited above. According to my notes I originally found the quote in Mary Daly’s Pure Lust.

Olive Schreiner was born in 1855, the twelfth child of missionary parents, with more children to follow. Olive Schreiner’s mother appears to have abused her children, thrashing them for the smallest misdemenour. One such sin that earned five-year-old Olive fifty lashes was hanging on the door handle and saying “Ach!” a Dutch word and speaking Dutch was forbidden in the Schreiner household. It seems the injustice of the many vicious beatings was the main reason Olive, at as an eight year old, rejected the religion of her parents and refused to go to church. Nevertheless, she inherited her mother’s intellect, her ethical fervour and her longing for the infinite. Perhaps, in the shocking abuse of her childhood, Olive subliminally received the secret, ambiguous knowledge of the power of women?

When Olive was nine, her beloved baby sister, Ellie, died. This was seen as punishment for Olive repudiating her parents’ faith. She was devastated and cradled Ellie’s tiny corpse in her arms all day and into the night. After Ellie was buried, she stayed near the grave and talked passionately into the tiny mound of earth. In later years, Schreiner said that the death of her baby sister was the most important event of her childhood: it was to Ellie that she owed her lifelong love for women, her mystic faith in the unity of the cosmos, her pacifism, and her desire to be a doctor (Letters, 29 October 1892).

Her rebellion against Victorian and parental mores saw her become a feminist, a best-selling writer and intellectual, philosopher and a celebrity of her time.

The first time I read anything by Olive Schreiner was in an anthology of South African stories Veld Trails and Pavements given to me by a friend of the family. I was a teenager and didn’t have much understanding. I can’t remember Olive Schreiner’s stories very clearly but I do remember that they haunted me for a long time and I had to return to it again and again. I didn’t know you could write sad stories that did not have a happy ending. I didn’t know you could fit an enormous amount of emotion into a one or two page story. I don’t have the book anymore although I can see it in my mind’s eye and I found this image on the Internet. I don’t remember any of the other stories in the anthology, not even the H. C. Bosman.

I have borrowed quite considerably from Anne McClintock’s paper Olive (Emilie Albertina) Schreiner for this blog post. The original paper can be accessed here.

Reference: *Anne McClintock. “Olive (Emilie Albertina) Schreiner.” British Writers. Ed. George Stade.: Supplement 2: Kingsley Amis to J. R. R. Tolkien. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992. Literature Resource Center. Web. 4 May 2010.

*Anne McClintock was born in Harare in 1954. She is a writer, feminist scholar and public intellectual who has published widely on issues of sexuality, race, imperialism, and nationalism; popular and visual culture, photography, advertising and cultural theory.

Great Grandmother, Grandmother and Mother

I woke up this morning thinking about my mother and her mother. I don’t know who my grandmother’s mother was. I vaguely remember Granny telling me that her father took her and her sister away from South Africa to New Zealand when she was a small child. Her mother (my great grandmother) didn’t want to leave her family; her country, so great grandfather snatched the children and went anyway. His sister went with him to care for the children. He was in the British army – or so the story goes. There has been some discussion on how important he was in the army. My research shows he was simply the aide de comp and not the main player. No matter. Great grandfather never returned to South Africa from New Zealand because he suffered such terrible seasickness on the trip over there. Granny eventually went back to her homeland as an adult. She married a South African man and my mother was their oldest child. Because she was a girl, but was meant to be a boy, my mother’s nickname was Bobby. This had no relation to her real name at all.

My mother had four siblings: three boys and a girl. One of her brothers was a pilot in the South African Air Force. He was killed in the Second World War. I believe he was a rear-gunner as he was quite tiny in stature and I’ve always heard him referred to as ‘Uncle Stumps’ because of it. I have a photo of him. My second brother looks a lot like him.

My mother was an artist. She studied art at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Some of her botanical studies are beautifully executed. I don’t have them but my oldest brother managed to get them to Australia when he migrated here some years ago. He has them in his keeping and they will, no doubt, be passed on to his children eventually.

I have started writing a novel, part fact and part fiction (the bits I don’t know I make up) about my granny but I’ve bogged myself down in the research so have stopped. Actually, I stopped a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago!

Sometimes I wish I knew more about my ancestors. I’d like to know so that I can tell my grand daughters if they show any interest.