4
Then There Was Elizabeth
In 1953 Dad was transferred from Kilnerton to Rosebank Methodist Church in Cape Town, a steepled gothic sanctuary nestled on the old Main Road below Cape Town University. My sister Valmai stayed on as a boarder at Pretoria Girls’ High to complete her matriculation but I was enrolled for my last three years of schooling at Rondebosch Boys’ High School (RBHS). I was fortunate to get in because admission to this fine school was at a premium; RBHS probably saved me from uselessness. The ethos of the school was different than I had known. It was a community where, without fuss, ethical values were lifted up and expected of all of us and where, for the sake of the school, I think we found ourselves wanting to be more decent human beings. Part of this ethos came from a very strong Christian Union, regularly attended by up to 200 of the 500 boys, and some of the boarders attended Dad’s church each Sunday too. But there was more to it. In a quiet and totally unassuming way headmaster ‘Nobby’ Clarke simply expected it of us – and mainly got what he expected.
I found myself growing in new ways, in confidence and in exploring friendships. I played school sport for the first time – travel and distance having made that impossible at PBHS. I loved cross-country running and while never reaching first team standards, revelled in rugby and cricket, the former played as it was meant to be – in the mud and slush of a Cape winter, and the latter on school fields that imitated the village greens where the game was born. I was almost useless with a cricket bat but made up for it by being a reasonably good fast bowler. Dad had been a fine rugby player and I wished I could do better to impress him, but playing flank for the 4th rugby team one Saturday morning, I was upside down in a loose maul when someone leapt on it and my neck gave way with an ominous crack. Stretchered off the field, I was found to have fractured one of my neck vertebrae and that put paid to rugby for some time. The game obsessed us: as schoolboys we camped all night outside Newlands Rugby Stadium to watch our Springbok heroes play the British Lions, or the All Blacks. Even then, the occupants of the ‘Malay Stand’ – reserved for people of colour – tended not to share our enthusiasm for the home team: they cheered the visitors. But life for us boys was simple and uncomplicated by the nation’s pathologies. None of us thought it strange that every Springbok in the team was lily white.
While never a brilliant scholar, I must have done some work and was invited into the prestigious Twelve Club. At each monthly meeting one of the twelve would have to produce a paper on a challenging subject. Mine was on the ‘Development and Techniques of Plastic Surgery’, still a relatively new speciality. It was my first experience of being regarded as ‘bright’, and I felt somewhat fraudulent about it.
Something else was happening too. In 1953 I met the girl who was to become the love of my life and my wife for 54 years. Elizabeth Hardie was the daughter of an Old Mutual Insurance manager. Tom Hardie had married into the Tonkin clan – a family deeply embedded in the mayoral history of Cape Town and of Rosebank Methodist Church. Elizabeth was an only girl with three brothers, one of whom (Allan) became over the years the nearest thing to a brother to me. Elizabeth was a year older than me, but in the equivalent Standard 8 (Grade 10) class at our sister institution, Rustenburg Girls’ High School. Her cousin Megan invited her to play badminton in the church hall with the new minister’s son. It was a less than romantic meeting, with Elizabeth commenting afterward that I was ‘a very rude boy’. But everything has to have a beginning, and when later that year both our families holidayed at Knysna, 300 miles up the coast, there was time to get beyond cheekiness. Like most teenage relationships, there were ups and downs, but a die seems to have been cast. Apart from her rosy Scottish complexion, ready smile and bright blue eyes, what most attracted me to Elizabeth Hardie was her steadfast, principled goodness and her quiet, unruffled, honest handling of anything that came at her, including me. In all our life together, that never changed.
There was one complication: her family was deeply involved in Moral Rearmament (MRA), a movement that had evolved out of the Oxford Group led by Dr Frank Buchman. In some ways MRA emulated the eighteenth century Wesleyan Class Meetings, where people bared their souls and confessed their failings to one another. The practice of listening for personal guidance from God was emphasised and major decisions taken on the basis of this ‘guidance’, especially if it came via Buchman himself. In itself, MRA spirituality could be helpful, although definitely scary to someone like me who was anything but ready to spill out my insides to a group of strangers. The real problem, however, was the political ideology that Buchman had grafted onto what was essentially a pietist spiritual movement. Like John Wesley, Buchman was convinced that the inward spiritual journey needed to express itself in transformational action in the world, but that is where the similarity ended. Wesley saw Christian activism as a journey downward to the poor of the earth and became more and more committed to social justice; Buchman’s ‘guidance’ drew MRA into the anti-communist paranoia of the 1950s. Its simple beginnings tended to be displaced by an obsession with the world ideological struggle, focusing upward on people of power and beginning to look like a religious version of McCarthyism. Anything vaguely left of centre was suspect, and it was apparent to me that in the eyes of MRA people like my dad, who was increasingly vocal in his opposition to the government’s apartheid policy, were ‘unwitting tools of the communists’, a notion that chimed much too cosily with the official line of the apartheid regime. It disqualified MRA as far as I was concerned. This was sad because, in their zeal to guide people to a deeper spiritual life, MRA members crossed South Africa’s racial barriers sooner and more whole-heartedly than most white South Africans.
I wanted Elizabeth, but I didn’t want the right-leaning ideology of MRA and when our relationship got serious this led to some strains between Tom Hardie and myself. Elizabeth’s mother Flo, deep as she was into the MRA ethos, kept her own council. She secretly liked me. Fortunately, as the climate within the movement grew more suffocating, some, including Elizabeth, rebelled. Under the preaching and spiritual mentorship of my father, she had come to an increasingly mature and clear sense of her relationship with God and had been troubled by some of the obsessions in the MRA ‘sharing groups’. She decided that she had grown beyond this. Even then, her rebellion was very Elizabethan: it consisted simply of a quiet, non-judgemental withdrawal and typically, though having left the movement, she faithfully retained the friendships she had made within it.
We both approached matriculation with Elizabeth consistently outshining me academically. Not that we were in competition: she was disciplined and persistent in her studies; I tended to sit on my bike outside her house and whistle at her as she beavered away at her desk. I was doing just that when a wood truck came roaring up the road and a small log flew off it, hitting me in the face and knocking me out. It was a parable of our different approaches to study but she did rush out and I woke up in her arms. Elizabeth earned a first-class matriculation and won the school music prize for pianoforte; I managed a university pass and won nothing. I could argue that I didn’t see much point in academics because my secret ambition was to go to sea, but the more likely reason was a simple procrastination and aversion to work. All the more astonishing then, that at the RBHS Centenary in 1997, I found myself listed as one of the school’s eight distinguished alumni.10 Whatever they saw in me four decades after leaving school was not linked to any academic prowess while there.
Yet, the 1950s being what they were and despite her excellent performance at school, instead of moving on to university Elizabeth enrolled at Cape Town’s Technical College to be trained in shorthand and typing. Increasing numbers of young women were breaking the bonds of old custom, but I’m not sure Elizabeth’s school achievements were sufficiently affirmed at home for her to imagine herself at university. She did want to be a nurse but an early visit to a casualty ward put paid to that. All her life she would struggle with her self-worth and underestimate her intellectual abilities. For her and thousands of others, secretarial work was still seen as the norm. So she began a career of quiet service, which peculiarly matched her