LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

younger than Claude, moved into Beara to help run the household after Evelyn left home.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      Switzerland and Cape Town: 1947–51

      The early years of peace time brought immense relief to everyone. For many it would mean a gradual path through the 1950s to home ownership and slowly to greater prosperity. For those who had lost loved ones, there would be massive personal adjustment. As life returned to a new semblance of normality, Evelyn and Sylvia, instead of resuming a comfortable life in Britain, decided in 1947 to move overseas.

      Sylvia Dunsford had cousins living in Switzerland who suggested to them that they should move there. The idea appealed to Evelyn as she had spent a year at a Swiss finishing school and had loved it, so they decided to settle in Montreux, on Lake Geneva, where Sylvia’s relations lived. At their invitation, Frances, now aged 21, decided to leave her job in London and to go with them. The house in Ardingly was duly sold, and Evelyn and Sylvia found a spacious flat overlooking the Chateau de Chillon.

      It was not an easy time for Frances, who was still grieving the loss of her father. She had no work permit so enrolled at the town’s School of Languages, and was glad to use time to improve her French. Under-employed, and with the rawness of bereavement, her days hung heavily, even depressingly. Frances played tennis, learned to ski, and took Carlo the Alsatian for walks in the local woods. While a couple of boyfriends at different times lifted her spirits, her life overall seemed empty; she felt she was drifting and she missed her father’s counsel.

      Two years after arriving in Switzerland, in 1949, more change would come. Through Sylvia’s cousins, Sylvia, Evelyn and Frances had got to know a husband and wife from South Africa, with whom they spent much time. In talking with them a new idea surfaced, that of another international move. Evelyn and Sylvia were persuaded to explore a move to South Africa, with a view to purchasing a sugar-cane farm in Natal and employing a manager to run it. The prospect sounded very attractive.

      Such a venture would require financial assistance from Evelyn’s mother, back in Paignton. Beatrice Eastley was surprised at the plan and sensed it had been Sylvia Dunsford’s idea. But Evelyn’s voice tended to be the dominant voice when it came to moving, and it was her wanderlust which would take them out of Europe. Having to leave Carlo behind, with a Swiss maid, was a painful loss for all three women. The Alsatian had been a faithful friend.

      They travelled by train to Venice, where they boarded a boat to Durban, sailing through the Suez Canal. Having no particular guidance on where to settle, they travelled first up to Zululand. The terrain and the culture were not easy for westerners. Frances’s father had grown up in South Africa, and would have returned to the Johannesburg goldmine if he had not been injured in the war, and met Evelyn Eastley in his convalescence. But Evelyn had no experience of the country. She, Sylvia and Frances learned as they went. On one occasion they were told a black mamba snake had wound its way under their car. This is the fastest and longest snake on the continent, and its venom the deadliest.

      They were advised to travel to Cape Town, where they first took a flat in the Oranjezicht area. Then for a short while they lived on a snake farm belonging to people with whom Sylvia and Evelyn had fallen into conversation as they travelled. An unusual setting indeed for such women, but the travelling trio needed somewhere to stay while they searched for a farm to buy, and accommodation was available here. The snakes were kept in pits, where they were bred so they could be ‘milked’ for venom, which would then be used to create an antivenom. It was a very different kind of life from Beara days.

      A fruit farm in Paarl

      In due course Evelyn and Sylvia learned of a fruit farm which would soon be for sale in Dal Josafat, near Paarl, in the Western Cape Province, thirty-five miles northeast of Cape Town. Paarl was the third-oldest town in South Africa, after Cape Town and Stellenbosch, following the arrival of the European settlers. The area is known for its scenic beauty and its fruit-growing heritage. It would become the focus of international news in February 1990, when Nelson Mandela completed the last days of his prison sentence in the Victor Verster Correctional Centre, where he was given a house. It was from Paarl that the last straight of the nation’s journey began to achieve multi-racial elections and abandon apartheid.

      The farmhouse into which the women moved was situated just below the home of John Russell, the Marquess of Tavistock and future 13th Duke of Bedford, who had arrived there to farm a year or two earlier. (On succeeding his father as Duke of Bedford, he would later court much controversy by opening Woburn Abbey, the Bedford family seat, to the public, and introducing a safari park to its grounds.) The water supply, piped downhill from a dam above the Russells’ home, was shared by both households; the Russells’ needs taking priority because they were higher up the hillside.

      There was no proper sanitation, and the lavatory was a simple hole in the ground in an out-house. There was no mains electricity – just oil lamps. Farming was a new world to these women, but within a few months some simple houses had been built for black farmworkers and servants, and a manager appointed. The orchards grew figs, apricots and guavas, while buchu, a herbal tea introduced to South Africa by the Dutch colonists, grew on the hillside. In addition there was a vineyard. The household kept a cow, a mule, and also Susie, another Alsatian, but no dog could really replace Carlo.

      There was consternation one day when the cow became bloated and lay down in her stall, distressed in her breathing. Frances sat down beside her, and supported the recumbent cow’s head in her lap as they waited for the vet to arrive, uncertain whether the cow would survive. In due course the vet arrived, treated the cow, and the cow rapidly recovered. This story was to endear Frances to Rose McIlrath, a veterinary surgeon, whom she met a few years later, and who was to become a lifelong friend.

      Frances helped in the orchards when the fruit was ripe, and drove crates of fruit into Cape Town each week to sell in the market. In due course she came to the point where she wanted a job away from home. Soon, to her own surprise, she found herself living in Constantia, on the north side of Table Mountain, helping to look after five small children, including a four-month-old baby. Never having held a baby before, she was not a natural nanny. Frances made friends with fellow nannies in the area as they took children for walks, and she enjoyed going on holiday with the family; but she longed for greater purpose.

      Back in Paarl, she sat one day in the vineyard, weeping. She was conscious of civil unrest in South Africa, and the injustice of apartheid, issues from which she had been shielded in Devon and in Malvern. She was concerned by the political climate and the supremacy of the whites in the apartheid regime. Over these years she began to develop a social conscience. But there were deeper issues, ones which she could not define. Why was she so unhappy in such a beautiful place?

      She felt she was simply marking time. The countryside was stunning and yet she could not appreciate it. She felt lonely, unsettled, and struggled to make sense of life. There was nothing to aim for. In school she had worked hard for exams, and worked to get into the first sports teams. Her father had always urged her on. But here she sensed no goal in her life, and there was no one to help her find direction.

      In 1951, Frances’s grandmother came out to stay. When it was time for Beatrice Eastley to return home, Frances was asked to accompany her back to Devon, to save her travelling alone. She was glad to do this, and as she boarded the ship, she wondered whether or not she would ever return to the Western Cape. Edgar, Frances’s boyfriend from her days in Switzerland, had written to say he hoped to marry her, but Frances was less certain and wrote to decline. Perhaps she would stay in the UK; she wasn’t sure.

      The boat journey from Cape Town to Southampton took three weeks. On board ship Frances got to know Ian, a Rhodes scholar who was returning to Balliol College, Oxford for post-doctoral research. Ian had been raised a Roman Catholic but had no personal commitment to Catholicism or to Christ. As the days went by, the friendship turned to romance. In God’s economy, while the relationship did not last, it was to have a special bearing on Frances’s coming to faith in Christ.

      CHAPTER SIX

      London, the BBC, and a new-found faith: 1951–56

      Britain in 1951 was a very different Britain from the one Frances had left in

Скачать книгу