Author’s Note
Dakar, which incredibly rapidly became the centre of French Colonial Society in the twentieth century, required a great deal of construction and public works to make the living conditions suitable for Europeans.
From a handful of European merchants and Company employees in 1900, the white population of Dakar rose to two thousand five hundred in 1910.
The high ideals of France’s policy of colonisation and total assimilation in Senegal was helped by the increasing presence of European women.
There were over one thousand by 1926 and they all made a great impact on the domestic scene. There was a series of colonial handbooks dedicated to the problems of their activities and diversions. These included Care of African Children and Studies of Flora and Fauna. Evening dress was compulsory on most social occasions.
When I visited Dakar in 1979, I found it an impressive and beautiful City and a perfect holiday resort.
President Leopold Sedar Senghor, whose encouragement of black culture and art has had a huge effect in raising the status of the natives, is France’s most famous modern Symbolist poet.
Chapter One ~ 1899
Walking along the corridor, Kelda heard the sound of someone crying.
She paused, listened and realised that it came from the room of Yvette de Villon.
She stood still, controlling an impulse to knock on the door and ask what the matter was.
She well knew that it was not her job to interfere in any way with the older girls. Mrs. Gladwin had made that very clear when she had promoted her from being little more than servant doing all the odd jobs that nobody else would do to the position of Assistant Mistress.
“As you play the piano so well,” she had said in the hard voice in which she spoke to her inferiors, “you will supervise the practising of the younger girls and you will also sit in the classroom when they are doing their homework. That will relieve the proper Mistresses.”
She paused as if she was thinking what else she could pile on Kelda’s shoulders and then added,
“Of course, your duties as regards the laundry, the sewing and mending will continue as before but you can look on this as a promotion and you should be suitably grateful.”
“Thank you, madam,” Kelda said automatically.
Mrs. Gladwin’s eyes rested on her critically.
“I consider that gown to be too tight in the bodice. It is almost indecent.”
“I am afraid I have grown out of it,” Kelda replied apologetically.
“Then let it out!”
“I have done that already, madam.”
“Excuses, always excuses to spend money,” Mrs. Gladwin exclaimed. “You may go.”
Kelda had left the Headmistress’s study feeling vibrations of disapproval following her and it was with a sigh of relief that she reached the passage outside.
She realised that Mrs. Gladwin disliked her, although she found her useful and she had wondered why until one of the older girls enlightened her,
“Keep out of the dragon’s way, Kelda.” she had warned. “She is on the warpath and you know that she takes it out on you because you are so pretty.”
Kelda had been too surprised to reply, but that evening when she had at last been able to retire to the garret bedroom where she slept, she had looked into the small discoloured mirror that hung on the wall over the ancient chest of drawers.
‘Am I really pretty?’ she asked herself and knew that it really was the truth.
She had come to Mrs. Gladwin’s Seminary for Young Ladies when she was fifteen from the orphanage where she had lived for three years after her father and mother had been killed in an earthquake in Turkey.
Philip Lawrence had been an archaeologist and the National Geographical Society had sent him on a journey of exploration to Turkey. It was a considerable concession that they had allowed him because he had insisted on taking his wife with him.
There had been no question of the Society paying for anyone else, but somehow Philip Lawrence had scraped together the money to take his only child along as well.
It was nothing new for Kelda to accompany her father and mother on their travels and she had loved every moment of it.
When her father and mother had been killed, she had always bitterly regretted that on that particular day she had not been with them.
She had been very tired after a long expedition that they had just taken and they had left her behind in the cheap boarding house where they had stayed the night since she was still asleep when they departed they had not woken her.
Often she would cry not only because she had lost them but also because she had not said ‘goodbye’ to the two people she loved most and who comprised her whole world.
After that she had never really been able to find out who had decided that she should go to an orphanage on the outskirts of London.
She supposed that it was one of the Missionaries who had taken charge of her, but she had been suffering from shock and nothing had seemed real until she found herself a ‘charity child’ with some fifty orphans of varying ages, many of them having been in the orphanage since the moment they were born.
They had accepted it philosophically because they had never known anything else, but to Kelda who had been brought up with love and understanding, knowing the companionship of her dear father and the gentle sweetness of her mother and it had been like being plunged into the deepest hell with no chance of escape.
For three years she had suffered the almost intolerable humiliation of finding herself a nonentity, of being ordered about as if she had no feelings, of enduring bad food and little of it and having to sleep with a dozen other children in a ward where they shivered miserably in the winter and panted with heat in the summer.
It had been an inexpressible relief when at fifteen she was told that she must start to earn her own living and was sent to Mrs. Gladwin’s Seminary.
Here at least she heard cultured voices and ate what seemed good food even though the pupils often complained about it.
What was more important to Kelda than anything else was that she was now able to pick up her education once again from where, on entering the orphanage, she had been obliged to relinquish it.
Most of the children in the orphanage could neither read nor write and, while a voluntary teacher came in for three hours a day to teach them, there was no provision made for those who were more advanced or, like Kelda, extremely intelligent.
At the Seminary it was easy for her to take a lesson book up to her bedroom at night and, although she was often too tired to absorb all she wished, over the years she had gradually become almost as knowledgeable as her father would have wanted her to be.
The Mistresses were constantly changing, but one or two were kind enough to lend her books of their own and sometimes even to explain to her problems she did not understand.
There was a French mistress, an elderly woman who she carried secret cups of coffee to after she had retired to bed, until she reciprocated by talking to her in French.
“You have a natural Parisian accent, my child,” she said, “but you must practise your verbs. The English are always very lazy over their verbs.”
Kelda already spoke a certain amount of French, but she had been determined that she would be as fluent as her mother had been.
She therefore waited on the Mademoiselle assiduously and was rewarded eventually by being told,
“Anyone who did not look at you would think that you were French. If they heard you speaking in the dark, they might easily be deceived.”
It