London Chapter
My Bechstein piano returned to my parents’ home in Port Elizabeth, and I arrived in London and started a new chapter. I threw myself into the novelty of the courses at the DPU (Development Planning Unit, at the University College of London) with 65 post-graduate students from 35 developing countries. I lapped up all the information, stimulation, seminars and debates and put my personal recent past out of my mind, with intensive work and socialising with new friends.
I completed the one-year course with an interesting dissertation and by October 1979 there were discussions about further studies. Professor Shula Marks at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) was interested in my work and assisted with finding further scholarships. I was accepted for an M Phil/PhD programme with joint supervision in History and Geography but carried on a close association with the DPU where I felt more at home and where I got a part time job at the library. I moved in with my friend Caren, generously helping me given my reduced stipend.
One coincidence during this time at SOAS was the presence of a shy young man in a grey shirt and a hand-knitted striped woolen pullover, who blushed whenever attention was focused on him. We shared the same supervisor, Professor Hodder in the Geography department. I was also shy in the seminars we attended, not speaking much about my research topic. Much later I realised that my fellow student was actually Eckhart Tolle, who had his epiphany on a nearby park bench at the age of 29, around the time when we were smiling at each other across the room. His spiritual teachings starting with “The Power of Now” has been translated into 33 languages.
An interesting thread.
But then my personal life became much more complex and complicated. My student status gave C a chance to come to the UK as my spouse, and I found it difficult to resist this pressure. I realise that an important factor in my apparent acquiesence had to do with my father’s health and my desire to avoid any stress or chaos in my parents’ life – C had created conflict several times and my mother actually feared him. This potential threat exerted considerable power over me and my decisions and actions.
In London I awaited his arrival with increasing trepidation. I guess those months were difficult. I began to feel a wildness in my spirit, the noose beginning to tighten, and I was aware of the need for a parallel reality, which would be completely secret and open only to me as an escape route when he arrived and would be in my space. I didn’t articulate it like that then. But I see this now with hindsight. Caren was amazing during these months, trying to protect me, trying to anticipate ways of making my life less stressful. She gave me my own little room, a safe haven in her house where I buried myself in my research, and there she was, prepared to accept the husband into her home, where we all lived in a communal arrangement.
There was no physical relationship between us. He called me a ‘boy scout’.
Thinking about events over this period, I cannot come up with too much detail. I was carrying out research, shaping up my research questions and preparing for my field trip to South Africa. But I was living on the edge. In early 1981 I was able to return to South Africa for my fieldwork. I recall being with my parents for my 30th birthday and reconnecting with old friends during this intensive time in South Africa. The early 1980s were highly charged, politically volatile and dangerous. I found unique and original material and realised I was dealing with a huge topic in the actual building of Soweto and the townships, revealing a part of apartheid’s history hitherto unknown.
I remember discussing my thesis with my father. My parents had planned their long looked-forward to overseas trip for this year, and when I returned to London loaded with materials, which had been photocopied secretly in archives as yet not open to the public, my father carried huge wads of the documents in his suitcase.
So, we had some family time together in the UK, although it was quite fraught. C’s presence was not easy and, as I learnt in a subsequent discussion with my mother, my father was deeply disturbed by my situation.
As I kissed them goodbye at Heathrow in early August, my father’s last words to me were ‘Marni, don’t let anything stop you finishing this thesis’
Three weeks later on 2 September 1981 my father was dead.
After I received the telephone call with this devastating news, C said something like, “Well, I guess that’s also the end of us.”
That evening I left for SA with my sister and while I was away, he packed up and moved out. Almost out of my life.
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The subsequent 6 months after my father’s death were intensely painful. When I came back to London from SA, I needed to be alone and moved out of Caren’s house to house sit and to start writing up my thesis – my father’s last words ringing in my ears. I kept my solitude. I remained in my grief, venturing out rarely and dealing with abstract and theoretical conceptual frameworks, which took my mind out of the immediate pain. I found it hard to express myself, to communicate, to share. I started seeing a therapist, talking things over with her, trying to make sense of my life.
One Monday, a very rainy Monday, the 1st of March 1982, I knew I should make the effort and travel across London and attend a small seminar at SOAS – if only for some interaction with people. Weeks had gone by without any social contact. It was raining heavily… I tossed a coin, promising myself if it came down heads/or tails (? I’ve forgotten) I’d force myself to go. The coin came down and I went.
That evening I found myself sitting next to and talking to Ronald, long and intensely after the small meeting. We then went out to dinner together at a small Greek restaurant with three tables and then home. The next morning I felt a sense of panic as I asked him to leave, and went and had an emergency session with my therapist. She suggested I leave all my ‘stuff’ behind me in her office and get out there and live!
Ten days later, Ronald and I moved into a ground floor bedsit in Wandsworth and I started, tentatively, to live!
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