The fascinating story behind her novel African Violet.
I’ve often read articles by published authors who say they’ll never forget that magical moment when they knew they’d found the story they had to write.
I’ve always wanted to write. Every time I travel, particularly when I fly, I find myself beginning to write little notes; the beginnings of a story will pop into my head and I’ll jot down a paragraph or two. But nothing has ever come of these musings. At home, I have drawers full of dog-eared, yellowing notebooks with the beginning of various novels: potential openings to potential stories. But, in truth, I’d never really found a story I had to write. The magical moment eluded me.
Then, a couple of years ago, two important things happened in my life. First, my grandmother died. She had been admitted into hospital for a routine operation on her knee and spent her recovery in an underfunded NHS hospital in the North of England, riddled with MRSA. She subsequently contracted the condition and her health deteriorated. The family made a strange decision. We were all called to her bedside to be with her in her dying moments. Sons and daughters, grandchildren and great-grandchildren all stood round her hospital bed as the last flicker of light faded from her eyes. I don’t think she wanted us there. She was a proud woman, she knew she was dying and this was intrusive and undignified.
When my dad and I went to clear her house, I remember him looking round her small flat at the few material possessions she had accumulated in her 81 years and commenting, “She didn’t have much, bless her.” It was true. Hers had been a humble life.
Violet Jane Thompson was born in South Africa in 1927 and her earliest memories are of life in Nazareth House, a home for “poor and orphaned children”. Her mother had placed her in the home, saying she couldn’t look after her. When she was 12 years old, a man claiming to be her father turned up at Nazareth House to take her ‘home’. It was clearly a terrifying experience for the young girl and a moment she recalled many times to us throughout her life.
“Violet, your father is in the lobby, he’s come to take you home.”
“But my father is dead.”
“Well, never mind that now, go and pack your things, he’s come to take you home.”
As it turned out, this man was her step-father. Her mother, a hopeless alcoholic, had re-married and together they had two more children. Both heavy drinkers, they decided parenthood was too much like hard work and sent for my grandmother to take care of her younger siblings. My grandmother’s life was so mired with tragedy and suffering, that she used to say that her times in the orphanage were the happiest in her life.
Four months after her death, I was offered a job working in South Africa. This was the second significant thing that happened that year. And, although I’m not a huge believer in fate and destiny, it did seem to me that these two incidents were somehow related – particularly after I’d been to visit an old, Great Aunt – one of the younger siblings my grandmother had been summoned to care for back in 1939.
The old woman shared memories with me of my grandmother from their early childhood. To her, Violet was the glamorous, adventurous elder sister who, at the age of 16, had sailed off to England with her young husband to start a new life.
Even without the family connection, my experience of working in South Africa was an awe-inspiring one. I worked in the Eastern Cape with the amaXhosa – the tribe of Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and many of the prominent ANC figures. My friend and guide was a woman called Peggy Calata whose father, The Reverend James Calata, had been the first Secretary General of the ANC. Peggy remembers many a gay Sunday afternoon when a young Mandela and Desmond Tutu were regular guests to lunch. I also dated a man from the Township, called Mziwabuntu; a fairly eventful relationship with language and cultural differences adding a fair amount of colour. Perhaps the earliest indication of a star-crossed love was a discussion we had over monogamy. He assured me he was monogamous, I breathed a sigh of relief, before he went on to explain he had just the one wife.
In the two years I was there, I had a privileged experience. My work took me into the heart of the vast rural areas, the former “homelands” of black South African and into the Townships that – even today – white South Africans visit rarely and when they do it is with a fair amount of trepidation. With Peggy as my friend and Mziwabantu as my faithful guide (if not faithful lover) I believe my personal journey took me to places, and gave me insights, that most Western visitors will never have. They were wonderful, life-changing years full of joy and frustration, love and sorrow. And, underpinning it all this deep yearning to share these experiences with the grandmother I lost.
And that’s how I came to have my magical moment. If I couldn’t have the grandmother-granddaughter conversation I desired, I would invent it. I would create a fictional account of how Violet Thompson’s life and my own could have intertwined. I found the story I had to write and African Violet was born.
The story would retrace what I knew of my grandmother’s life and recount my own experiences of the Beloved Country. But I would fictionalise the story in a way that allowed our two lives to intertwine. I always knew it had to be a heavily fictionalised account, but I had to make some tough decisions about which facts of my grandmother’s life to include and which to leave out.
Having met some of my South African relatives, and knowing what I know about the way white South Africans were raised and indoctrinated in the 1930s, I couldn’t be sure of my grandmother’s attitude to race. I suspect she wouldn’t have shared my own liberal views, hers was a different world. But I didn’t want my protagonist to have all the prejudices of the era, I couldn’t imagine that having resonance with contemporary readers. However, I also didn’t want to be unfaithful to the country and to deny the truth about the all-pervading existence of such attitudes. So, I invented a formative experience for the young Violet that would see her enjoying a close and loving relationship with a young black girl and her mother. And, then, mid-way through the story – at the height of Apartheid – there is a pivotal moment when Violet struggles with the issue of race and finds she does in fact hold some deep-seated prejudices that have a profound impact on her. In this way, I hope I’ve been able to give some sort of faithful reference to the contradictions and psychological struggles of the time.
For the storyline that features the granddaughter character, which is based on my experiences, I again had to make some decisions about how much of ‘me’ to include in the character. I was in my late 30s when I went to South Africa, but in some ways I was politically naive. I liked the idea of the both characters embarking on a personal journey from wide-eyed innocence to a more politically real view of the world. I also wanted the younger character to have a sexual awakening, alongside her political awakening and so I had to make her younger than me, in her early 20s. I named her Lucy and she is very loosely based on EM Forster’s Lucy Honeychurch of A Room with a View.
I’ve set the story against the backdrop of Apartheid and the end of the regime. The country is the third character in the story. South Africa is a complicated place: overwhelmingly beautiful, yes, but scarred by a traumatic past. Anyone who thinks that 15 years after the end of Apartheid things are markedly different probably hasn’t ventured past the bars of Johannesburg or strayed from the beaches of Cape Town. I have not attempted to fictionalise any elements of South African society, the truth far less prosaic than anything I could conjure up in my imagination.
African Violet is, at heart, a story about mothers and daughters. It is exploration of emotional, familial inheritance. The story is told through the eyes of a grandmother and granddaughter, but – through them – we learn about their mothers and find out the connections between them.
Each of the four women’s lives affect their daughters and the dénouement hopes to leave the reader pondering the question of how much of our destiny is caught up in that of our ancestors’ fate.
Mo Lovatt
Fascinating article.