Memoir maps out the fascinating history of Natal
GETTING old is hard. Getting very, very old is even harder, especially when your mind starts playing tricks on you and you can’t remember your own daughter’s name. It’s harder still when your frail legs are tied to a pillow to stop them from crossing over each other, when you lie in a bed that looks like a crate, and your only outlook on the world is at a syringa tree with some pigeons and squirrels.
Julia Martin’s mother, in her 90s, had slipped from a very respectably intelligent and cogent thinker to a muddled old woman. In this memoir, Martin tries to re-ignite some of her mother’s more lucid memories by looking for the home of her youth: a paradise somewhere near Pietermaritzburg in a place called Blackridge.
The search for the home is no less a journey to repair the myelin of her mother’s mind as it’s a searching for her own place and identity in the South African historic landscape.
She packs her partner, Michael Cope, and their two children, twins Sky and Sophie, and heads northwards to Natal from Cape Town. The route is marked by memories of their earlier English family. She comes across her forbears and their colonial aspirations.
She applies to the Office of the Surveyor General with an old photograph of the house. Surprisingly he answers with an aerial view, but crucial elements are missing: a river or stream and a railway line. With satellite photographs, Google maps, and help from everyone in the area, she looks for all the watercourses, wood and iron houses and the deceptive railway line… Even all the years later, Martin recognises the paradise of her mother’s youth. Apart from looking for own mother’s (and her) history, Martin discovers stone chips that were once axes and tools of a bygone people, thousands of years ago.
Each bit of information Martin finds she tells her mother, and so bit by bit as the memories reappear, her mother begins to find closure, some measure of peace as she heads towards the end. It is a gently told memoir, sometimes lyrical, sometimes quite straightforward, as her mother’s map of her life disintegrates through age, Julia Martins builds another map of her own of Natal’s fascinating history.