Love, abuse, survival under blue skies
Karoo and its people feature again in Carol Campbell’s new book
SURVIVAL, abuse, love and tenderness are woven together in author Carol Campbell’s new book The Tortoise Cried
Its Only Tear, due for release in January. Fans of Campbell’s writing will know her previous two books, My
Children Have Faces and Esther’s House, which feature the Karoo’s humble donkey cart people.
In The Tortoise Cried Its Only Tear, Campbell returns to her favourite place – the Karoo’s wide landscapes where she lived for 12 years.
“It had a profound impact on me. It inspired my creative side and there is not a single day that I don’t think of the landscape or long for it,” she said. “The Karoo people endure a great deal of suffering, yet they display an honesty, vulnerability and humanity that one doesn’t see in many people in modern life.
“There is no sky in the world that is as blue as a Karoo sky. I love the space and the silence. It is an ancient landscape with so many secrets and such a deep history, a history that stretches from the beginning of time.”
It was while living in the Karoo Campbell met the late Saul Prince, a
karritjieman with whom she formed a strong friendship.
“It was one of my most meaningful friendships – he taught me a great deal about the Karoo, but also about poverty and suffering,” she said, highlighting that the donkey cart people or
karretjiemense are a disappearing people with all the “rickety old donkey carts almost gone now”.
Published by Penguin Random House, the story is about Siena, Boetie and Kriekie, whose lives intersect as children and who meet again as adults, and which starts on “a black Karoo night and a young woman, covered in blood, is running along a deserted dirt track. A terrible thing has happened and the woman, Siena, has to reach Seekoegat Primary School at the end of the track, the only place she knows that is safe. “It’s a long way to run, a three-day ride on a donkey cart”.
“The essence of the story is about kindness. Sometimes you do something for someone and you change their life. It is a story of hope,” she said.
The main characters, Siena, Boetie and Kriekie, are a mixture of children she has known. “Boetie was based on a farm worker’s child who I first met in the Weltevrede Valley when he was about 4. He turned up begging at the parking lot in front of Oudtshoorn Pick n Pay. He told me he had come to find his mother who was in jail. Then he was about 10 years old.
“Kriekie was based on a boy from Prince Albert Road with crooked hands. This child had been damaged by his mother who broke his hands when she hit him with a frying pan.
“The prostitutes plying the N1 are still there – as is Seekoegat Primary,” she said, while the themes explored deal with “survival and abuse in an unforgiving environment – like those I touched on in my first book.
“Essentially, this book is about Seekoegat Primary and shines the light on how education through teachers and support workers can impact our most indigent children. This is really through compassion, understanding and appropriate discipline,” she said.
Campbell, now living in Shetland, a subarctic archipelago of Scotland, was the former assistant editor at the Sunday Tribune and former news editor at the Daily News.
Having written all her books between 4am and 7am over the last four years, Campbell said she writes “very slowly because I am a mother to two boys and I work full-time”. She has dedicated this book to her sons, Stuart, 19, and David, 14.
While not having the luxury of being a full-time novelist, she said: “I am always thinking about what I am writing. I walk a lot and solve a lot of plot and character problems that way.”
She plans her stories in advance, chapter by chapter and knows her characters before she starts writing.
“Working on a news desk, alongside highly skilled editors and sub-editors, has helped my writing enormously in that I am now able to write tightly.”
Having twice lived in Durban, Campbell said the city “is so culturally rich and dynamic that it provides incredible fodder for a writer”. The Tortoise Cried Its Only Tear will be available on Amazon.