A Brutal Paradise
This piece by Louisa Treger first appeared on Isabel Costello’s wonderful website THE LITERARY SOFA
‘Every writer has a myth-country,’ wrote Doris Lessing in African Laughter. Hers was an old house made of earth and grass on top of a hill in the Lomagundi District of what was then Rhodesia. My myth-country is a white house in Durban, very big and very light, which belonged to my maternal grandparents. When I close my eyes to sleep, my mind drifts back there. Once again I am walking through rooms that smell of beeswax and old books, or sitting underneath the piano watching my grandmother’s feet work the pedals as she plays, while all around me the chords of the Pathétique Sonata ring out: urgent, stormy and grand.
The house was built on a hillside, with a view stretching to the harbour. On a clear day, you could see ships steaming in and out, seeming scarcely to move on the indigo water. The garden was edged by avocado pear trees, banana trees, guavas; the earth beneath them pulpy with rotting fruit. Pigeons cooed under the roof, monkeys cavorted in the trees, and enormous ants scurried about on unknown missions. At night, under a blaze of huge African stars, crickets clicked incessantly and the frogs in the pond croaked so loudly that my grandparents drained it, for nobody in the house could sleep.
Every inch of that house and garden exists freshly in my memory. The immense skies, the warmth of the sunlight, the smell of the earth. Africa gets hold of you in a visceral way. I go back whenever I can, for I need to feel and inhale it. Yet even as a child, I sensed that all was not right in this paradise of spacious houses and lush gardens. There were signs on beaches, public toilets and buses: SLEGS BLANKES: WHITE PERSONS ONLY. NIE-BLANKES: NON-WHITES.
My grandparents had a servant called Franz, a man of dignity and warmth, whom I loved. Franz’s pockets always stored some treat for me; sweets or nuts, and once, a coin with a hole magically drilled into it – a good luck charm. He told me about his wife and twin daughters who lived hundreds of miles away in a rural village. He was only able to visit them once or twice a year and from the way he talked, I could tell that he missed them. But it wasn’t till I became a mother myself that I could begin to imagine the pain of not seeing your children grow up.
Franz lived in a small brick house on my grandparents’ land. His South Africa was a country of pass books and segregation, of police harassment and arbitrary arrest, of being isolated from his family and forced to submit to countless humiliating laws and barriers. It was a precarious, dangerous place, yet Franz never spoke of it to me. As the years passed, I felt rather than understood the violation of his human dignity, and it filled me with anger and a kind of helpless grieving.
Let us rewind a generation. My mother was drawn to black resistance, like Doris Lessing, like Stephen and Virginia Courtauld in The Dragon Lady. She handed out political literature in the townships, some years after Doris Lessing did. Lessing described this experience in her semi-autobiographical series, The Children of Violence.
My mother was on the edges of the struggle; her extraordinarily brave friends were not. Harold Wolpe was among them – a civil rights lawyer and member of the ANC and the South African Communist party, who was arrested and imprisoned in Johannesburg. He was listed as a co-conspirator of those who would become the defendants in the Rivonia trial, among them Nelson Mandela.
My mother left South Africa for the US and then the UK. My father was British and I grew up in London, but we returned to Durban regularly to visit my grandparents. And then my grandparents passed away and for several years, we did not go to South Africa. By the time we returned, apartheid had been dismantled. The Durban I visited no longer exists.
As I grew up, I learned exactly how brutal and warped apartheid was. It was brought home all the more powerfully because my family knew about being second class citizens. My father’s aunts, uncles and cousins had sported yellow stars in Eastern Europe during the 1930s, and some of them had disappeared into the camps and were never heard from again.
The Dragon Lady began as a way of exploring my relationship with Southern Africa, but turned out to mirror it. In the novel, young Catherine senses that the segregation of the races is wrong but lacks the maturity to comprehend it fully. The Courtaulds struggle against an unjust regime, like my mother and her friends. Through writing, I tried to make sense of my Africa – my attraction to the beauty of the land, my despair at the brutality and injustice. The extraordinary story of Stephen and Ginie Courtauld provided me with a way of trying to understand this dichotomy within myself and to process knowledge that was unbearable.
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Louisa subsequently turned to literature, gaining a First Class degree and a PhD in English at University College London, where she focused on early twentieth century women’s writing.
Married with three children, she lives in London.
Follow Louisa on Twitter https://twitter.com/louisatreger
Find out more about her on her website http://louisatreger.com/
THE DRAGON LADY, Louisa Treger
‘A daring blend of romance, crime and history, and an intelligent exposé of the inherent injustice and consequences of all forms of oppression’ Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
Opening with the shooting of Lady Virginia ‘Ginie’ Courtauld in her tranquil garden in 1950s Rhodesia, The Dragon Lady tells Ginie’s extraordinary story, so called for the exotic tattoo snaking up her leg. From the glamorous Italian Riviera before the Great War to the Art Deco glory of Eltham Palace in the thirties, and from the secluded Scottish Highlands to segregated Rhodesia in the fifties, the narrative spans enormous cultural and social change. Lady Virginia Courtauld was a boundary-breaking, colourful and unconventional person who rejected the submissive role women were expected to play.
Ostracised by society for being a foreign divorcée at the time of Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, Ginie and her second husband ,Stephen Courtauld, leave the confines of post-war Britain to forge a new life in Rhodesia, only to find that being progressive liberals during segregation proves mortally dangerous. Many people had reason to dislike Ginie, but who had reason enough to pull the trigger?
Deeply evocative of time and place, The Dragon Lady subtly blends fact and fiction to paint the portrait of an extraordinary woman in an era of great social and cultural change.
BUY THE BOOK HERE
Category: On Writing
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