Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 9

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 temperament but which never explored her full intellectual potential. Over the years she nevertheless read voraciously and her capacity to absorb and apply the deep wisdoms she found in her books was beautiful to see. It would take 40 years before, in a lovely irony, she first sat in a university lecture room among students one third of her age, who all worshipped her and hung on her wisdom.

Elizabeth always said that she loved me from 1953 and that was that. For me it was not that simple. I needed to do some exploring, but she took my wanderings in her stride and waited them out. There was another fellow around who was persistent if not successful. He liked birds and photography and they went out together often. I’m glad to say he didn’t win her heart, but his hovering presence was a warning that I shouldn’t take anything for granted and had better get my head straight; she was not going to wait forever. I finally saw sense in the middle of my seminary training at Rhodes University. By then I knew I could love no other and we conducted the kind of long-distance romance completely beyond the comprehension of today’s generation: twice-weekly long letters written on tissue-thin blue ‘airmail’ paper, and one three-minute telephone conversation each week. The only telephone in my university residence was located under the stairs and our conversations often had to take place with a couple of other lovelorn students waiting for me to hang up. Every three minutes the local operator butted in asking for more coins. We knew that he listened in and we sometimes profited when he got so interested that he forgot to cut us off. Once when I was dead broke, I asked him for a couple more minutes and he graciously consented. During our courtship Elizabeth was working first for John Dickinson stationery company, then at the Motor Union insurance. When we married she left the workplace for twelve years, giving birth to our four boys and anchoring them through their early lives, often in my absence.

This chapter is not meant to pre-empt the altogether 62 years of our relationship, but to make sense of them. Wherever Elizabeth may appear in the coming chapters, it will always be less prominently than she deserves, because whatever public contribution I may have been permitted to make could not, and would not have happened without her.

Our marriage spanned 54 years. Marriages are both public and private affairs. Falling in love and the joys and challenges of exploring that love in a lifelong relationship are deeply personal, but the decision to spend the rest of your life together has public consequences, which is why marriage officers may not conduct weddings behind closed doors. When two people make those vows of love to each other it may be an exercise of private choice, but they are also doing something of import for wider society. For better or worse, the quality and permanence of our relationships touch circles wider than we are aware of. In Elizabeth’s and my case, over the years we found ourselves in loco parentis to numbers of younger couples who said they found strength in our marriage. This had little to do with me; it was rather because of time they spent with my remarkable spouse. Times without number, when we travelled together for me to engage in some high-profile public commitment, it was Elizabeth’s quiet contribution to a conversation that was remembered afterward more than my speech. She was the ‘great encourager’. Her diary was full of the names of people who had shared some burden with her and to whom she regularly wrote, and for whom she prayed. She could empathise with people in all sorts of circumstance and they knew instinctively that this person’s concern was utterly genuine and could be trusted. It came naturally out of a soul that had been to school with the greatest of all soul-lovers.11 Her secret was a simple one: she spent her life seeking to imitate Jesus in a way that was completely authentic. I never heard a pious platitude from Elizabeth. When she spoke – always thinking deeply before doing so – her words were shared in ways that encouraged, or enriched, or gently reproved – but always loved – whoever she was speaking to. In the years of training Life Line counsellors, I used to lift up psychologist Carl Rogers’ ‘non-directive’ counselling method as a best practice model. Rogers described the most healing attitude to others as ‘unconditional positive regard’, and this is how Elizabeth saw other people. She never tired of quoting one of her bosses, Desmond Tutu, saying, “When we meet a stranger we should genuflect, because in every person we meet the Imago Dei – the Image of God.”

No marriage is without struggles; the law of self-disclosure makes it impossible to hide our self-truths no matter how adept we think we are at disguising them. But much depends on whether the frailties thus exposed are grasped as opportunities to find ‘a more perfect union’ or as reasons to cut and run. I won’t traverse the sore places which I, more than she created, except to stand in awe of how much more ready she was to learn and grow from them. The most consistent beneficiary of Elizabeth’s wisdom and patient love was of course myself. It was an inestimable gift, of unwavering reliability.

As a mom she was wise and selfless – but often anxious about whether she was doing the job right. She grew up with three brothers and quite naturally regretted not having enjoyed a sister or daughter, yet this never affected her love for each of our sons, John, Christopher, David and Alan. Sometimes reserved in the showing of affection, she nevertheless had an instinctive grasp of what each needed in the way of parenting. When one of them stumbled or ran into trouble, she sometimes took it too much to heart and worried more than was helpful, but she was a patient listener to each one, and above all she prayed for them – a phrase that may sound pious to some ears. But Elizabeth understood that prayer for others is more than tossing some names at God. Real prayer is to carry somebody’s need intimately, patiently and painfully in one’s heart, holding them in love and lifting them tenderly and consistently into the light of God’s grace. Real prayer costs and Elizabeth was willing to pay its price.

During the years when she was not working money was spread very thin. She tried not to let me see it, but the boys knew that she worried deeply about making ends meet. The only meal we might ever have out was the odd trip to Pan-Burgers, the local drive-in eatery. In charge of our meagre budget, she often went without, always putting me and the boys ahead of herself. The Methodist Church of Southern Africa (MCSA) was attempting to achieve a measure of income equity for its ministers, but stipends were not only racially skewed, they also left inner-city ministers like me far behind those appointed to the more salubrious suburbs. When we were unable to match what some of their school friends enjoyed, the boys used to hear for the umpteenth time that I didn’t receive a salary, but a stipend – ‘an allowance for living, not payment for services rendered’. The lack of money was not fatal, but we did regret having to see our sons sometimes missing out, even though they now look back with some sense of pride that they could handle it. It was also hard not being able to reciprocate when taken out by friends for a dinner or movie. When Elizabeth did go back to work her salary outstripped my stipend even when I was a Bishop and the extras making the difference to our lives came from her income.

There was another kind of scarcity too: to my shame, especially through the boys’ teen years, Elizabeth carried far too much of the parenting burden. Even in normal times, a minister’s routine is the reverse of most, tending to be busiest when the rest of the world is off duty. Evening meetings, Saturday weddings and Sunday services all conspire to make for a different-shaped family week. But our times were not ‘normal’ and, as we shall see, nor were my commitments. As the political struggle ramped up and extra burdens came my way I was frequently an absentee husband and parent. I would come home late and often tired or too distracted to share Elizabeth’s day or have time for the boys. For me duty meant that when a school rugby match clashed with a mass funeral in some township, it was the boys’ game that lost out. Elizabeth seldom complained but she was often lonely and no matter how much the boys might have ‘understood’ there was part of them that felt the loss keenly, as did I the guilt. Worse still, I found difficulty switching off when I was at home. As one of them put it, “Even when you were home, Dad, you weren’t here.” He was right: I was often not fully present, unable to let go of the stuff churning in my head. So, while we may now cherish the times of closeness we did have, nothing – no justifying of the circumstances – can bring back opportunities lost. It did mean perhaps that each of our sons learned earlier than most how to cope, make decisions and accept consequences, and remarkably it seems that each one seems to have found in his own way a balancing out between their sense of resentment and a genuine pride in their parents.

Returning to the workplace in 1972, Elizabeth went on to build an impressive record with two of the most influential institutional players in the South African struggle for justice and equity, first as personal assistant to three different General Secretaries of the South African Council of Churches (SACC),12 and then in a similar role at Independent Mediation Service of South Africa (IMSSA). The latter included a period of secondment to the Wits-Vaal Peace Accord office.13 But far more important was the sense of value and vocation she found for herself in her work positions: her lifelong struggle with self-worth was requited by the knowledge that she was doing work that made a difference in the nation. Whether by enabling Bishop Tutu to be the nation’s prophet in chief, or facilitating the massive difference Charles Nupen and IMSSA made to trade unionism and labour relations, or ensuring that peace monitors were in place in the midst of the pre-election strife of the 1990s, she oiled the wheels and ensured that they never lacked for the right resources. She also provided moral wisdom when needed. No matter who the boss – including Desmond Tutu – if some decision or action fell short in that department Elizabeth had a quiet, unthreatening way of questioning it and suggesting a worthier alternative. This latter quality formed a strong compass for me all through our marriage. Elizabeth kept me honest. When she worried that I was cutting ethical corners or being over hasty, a strategic question or two would bring me up short. I would maybe argue the case for a while but most often I would change course in the end.

Perhaps her greatest achievement was an internal one: the overcoming of fear. Most people did not know how frightened she was. Ever since childhood she had been nervous and afraid, of the war, of the dark, of strangers, of failing, of being left alone, of public speaking, of violence, of the future. All the more amazing, then, were her acts of courage, especially during the ‘struggle’ years: facing the jeers and catcalls from passing cars as she stood holding an anti-war placard on Jan Smuts Avenue, being arrested in Pretoria for marching on the Union Buildings, venturing into conflict-ridden townships to help set up peace committees, or standing between threatening thugs and Desmond Tutu’s office door, refusing them entry. Then, having to watch family members go into harm’s way for the ‘cause’. About the risks Desmond Tutu was subjected to, she wrote, “I cannot save him but I can walk with him,” and what she believed to be right trumped even a mother’s fears. In later years when I sat listening to her speaking to a crowded roomful of people in strong, confident tones, I often wondered if they had any idea how much courage she had to summon to do it.

You don’t get to be like that without inner reinforcement. Cynics who dismiss faith as a mere crutch for dysfunctional people haven’t encountered the real thing. Authentic faith takes us on a journey in which we invite Jesus and his teaching to interrogate every part of our lives, seeking both the desire and resources for transformation. Lived faithfully, this journey enables deep inner overcoming in those places where we need to be different. It also makes life different by placing the turmoils of the moment into God’s ‘big picture’ perspective, replacing our fears with serenity. It lifts up changeless virtues to inform our actions, shaping us toward integrity. It reminds us that because our lives are already given, they are therefore impossible to lose, freeing us from fear.

All her life, Elizabeth was on this journey and that is why she populates each chapter of this book.