Authors: Virginia Nicholson
time the decision to travel to Africa was taken under doctor’s orders.
Margery had suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was firmly advised
to take a year’s convalescence.
The breakdown was the result of a pile-up of troubles both during and
after the war. Margery’s catastrophe was not the man shortage, nor even
the death of a sweetheart, but the loss of the person she loved most in the
world, her brother Edgar, killed in the awful slaughter of Delville Wood
on the Somme in . Edgar and she had been inseparable as children.
They had invented a private world, written each other long letters when
he was away at boarding school, composed a joint opera and studied at
Oxford together. She found it almost unbearable to live without him. In
her novel
Josie Vine
* Margery struggled to describe the depths of grief which afflicted her during that terrible time: . . . After twenty-five years of vigorous life, his body lay, a disfigured and useless thing, already touched, perhaps, by the decay that would soon crumble it into the earth on which it was lying. She felt the sword-like severing that had cut away her comrade from her side and put an end to his music, his learning, and laughter . . .
She dared not look upon the years during which she would live on without him; to be alive now – to be strong – to breathe and eat, seemed a treachery to him.
‘. . . Why were we born at all, or allowed to love each other so? Oh God, God, how could You let it happen?’
Then she sank into that silent realization of loss in which human nature reaches the utmost limit of suffering.
After the war Margery took her degree, and got a job in the history
faculty of Sheffield University. She was utterly miserable, barely clinging
* Margery Perham denied that the novel was autobiographical, but it contains too many parallels with her own life for this claim to be convincing.
Singled Out
to existence. Female academic staff were exiled to a freezing and comfortless dungeon called the ‘Ladies Common Room’; her salary was inadequate.
Nightly she travelled on a clanging tram to her nasty cheap rooms on the edge of the city and consumed her meagre meat and pudding ‘which I had cut up into four portions to last for four days’. When demobilisation came, bringing with it a torrent of students needing tuition, she was crushed with overwork.
‘My one recreation was to walk out on to the rather grim moorland and
sit down amongst the wiry inhospitable heather which was grimed with
soot, and contemplate, physically and mentally, the dark bare horizon.’
Grief and exhaustion took their toll. Margery was sliding into the abyss.
When her doctor issued his command some self-preserving instinct drove
her to reach into her childhood and fulfil a secret dream of travel. Her early reading had been Kipling and Rider Haggard. From a very young age, when the grown-ups had asked her what she wanted to be when she grew
up, Margery’s invariable answer had been ‘a big-game hunter in Africa’.
By luck her older sister Ethel was married to a colonial administrator who
had recently been posted to Hargeisa, British Somaliland. Now Ethel was
due to join her husband, so in she and Margery set sail together in a
P & O liner from Tilbury. The adventure, and the healing, had begun.
They travelled via Aden and then took a cattle-boat across the gulf. At
Aden Margery was overwhelmed for the first and last time with a night—
marish recoil of fear and revulsion at the thought of her own vulnerability
as a white female among savages: ‘I was about to commit myself to that
black continent across the water; one, almost alone, among tens of thousands of strange, dark, fierce, uncomprehending people, and live away on that far frontier, utterly cut off from my own race.’ But the feeling passed and, despite many real dangers, never returned. At Berbera on the coast of Somaliland the ladies were eventually met by the District Commissioner,
Margery’s brother-in-law Major Rayne. Accompanied now, they travelled
miles on camel-back, through the inhospitable wasteland of north-east
Africa, to the distant outpost of Hargeisa.
. . . Hargeisa. It is still a magic word to me. Yet there wasn’t much to see – sand, thorn-trees, aloes, a few stony hills, a
tug
or dry water-course . . .
You might well ask how such a place could give me the ‘time of my life’. Yet it did. Whatever my later travels in more beautiful and dramatic parts of the continent, this was my
first
Africa.
In her own words, Margery Perham was ‘gloriously happy’ in Hargeisa.
She was transfixed by the beauty of the Somali people, by the burnished
A Grand Feeling
bloom of their dark skins, by their vigour and proud carriage. The Raynes
lived in a reasonably comfortable compound; colonial life, even in the
middle of nowhere, held to its traditions of Britishness. Tennis, steeple—
chasing and shooting were all available. Margery and her sister donned
evening dress before mounting camels to join the handful of British officers living in tents on the other side of the
tug
for pre-dinner drinks, though out in the bush she delighted in her costume of high leather boots, khaki breeches and wide-brimmed terai hat. But above all Africa itself bewitched
her. On moonlit nights ghostly hyenas prowled around the compound;
from the roof where Margery slept under the stars she heard their unearthly
howls and felt a quiver of exhilarated fear. When the rains finally fell on
that desiccated landscape the unforgettably acrid scent of dust and water
filled her nostrils.
There was danger all around. Between their tribes the Somali people
could be as fierce and ruthless as they were often gentle and loyal. There
was strife between Christian and Muslim, and Margery never forgot the
fearful day when the Major found a document pinned to a thorn tree calling
upon their loyal soldiers to cut the throats of their white masters and join with the Muslim uprising to overthrow the infidel. Fortunately for them the soldiers ignored this diktat, and their throats were not cut.
Most of all a trek with her brother-in-law to reconnoitre the Abyssinian
frontier sated Margery’s thirst for adventure. On the map the border area
was blank, with the word ‘Unexplored’ printed tantalisingly across it. ‘As
far as I know no Europeans had ever followed our route . . .’ They set off
with a party of resplendent Somali police in uniform, travelling sometimes
on camel-back, sometimes by pony, winding their way through the thorn—
scrub. Every day they rose at first light, and started out through the mysterious silence of the African dawn; in the heat of the day they rested. They camped out in beautifully decorated Indian tents.
Night was the zenith of adventure. I slept on a camp-bed in the open with large fires on each side of me to scare potential carnivores – lions, hyenas or leopards.
The police built a high
zareba
of thorn branches round our camp. They would sing themselves gutturally to sleep. Then that miracle of the tropical night of stars!
If the moon was up the sand turned the colour of milk. These nights utterly fulfilled the heart’s desire of my childhood for adventure in Africa.
But more was to come, for one night a lion jumped the defences of a
neighbouring Somali camp and killed a man. Margery accompanied Major
Rayne tracking the pack across the bush; after a day’s pursuit she became
Singled Out
separated from her brother-in-law and found herself face to face with an
exhausted, angry lion. Fortunately the animal uttered a snarl and, hearing
it, the experienced Major fired his gun into the air, scaring it back into the bush: for Margery, this incident was the climax of the entire expedition.
The year ended. Margery Perham went back to Sheffield, back to the
sooty heather and the clanging trams. And somehow this time it was
different. Her experience of Africa had dislodged the cloying misery which
had clamped down over her hopes and ambitions. She found friends, bought
a motor-bike, wrote a play and acted in it, and had two novels published.
But Africa never loosed its hold on her; her fascination with the country,
and the issue of our own responsibility for it as colonisers, took root in her brain. By chance in a post came up at her old Oxford college; her scanty experience of the colonial administration was by then sufficient
for her to be asked to instruct foreign service probationers. And that was
the beginning of a lifetime of travel and research, of teaching, advising,
publishing and journeying. Margery went to the Pacific islands, to the
Antipodes, to America, the Caribbean, and made many return visits to
Africa. When Major Rayne died in the s Margery and her sister set up
home together in Surrey, which became her base for writing when not
abroad. Her academic eminence as an expert on African affairs was recognised by governments at home and overseas and in she was honoured with a CBE.
‘And what about my beloved Somaliland?’ In the new government
invited Margery to attend the independence celebrations as its guest – ‘so I could see again that harsh land and those handsome, high-spirited people rejoicing in their freedom and unity’. The occasion had personal echoes
for her. She remembered the days of tribal strife; conflict had brought
tragedy for her too, but her life’s work had been to attain peace between
peoples. Certainly, their ecstasy now mingled with her own, for in that
stony unexplored desert, forty years earlier, she had found a passion, a
purpose and, after terrible anguish, peace of mind.
But it was no good pretending. A lot of the Surplus Women still found it
tough being surplus. Independence could be isolating. Urges didn’t come
to everyone. Closer to home, for the average Surplus Woman confined to
office, classroom, scullery or bedside, what silver linings could enable them to look on the bright side? How did the single woman deal with the black times, the natural feelings of forlorn rage, loneliness and disappointment
A Grand Feeling
that crowded in upon them? The anti-feminist Charlotte Cowdroy cited a
women’s magazine article describing a new disease: ‘one-room-itis’, from
which many of the bachelor girls were suffering. ‘One-room-itis’ afflicted
hostel-dwellers in big cities, living on inadequate wages, condemned by
lack of resources to spend cheerless evenings washing and mending stockings, with never any fun, never any games. Miss Cowdroy’s unrealistic (and somewhat hypocritical) solution was to discourage women from
ever entering the workplace. They should all get married and have babies.
Some hope.
There were advice-givers who adopted a more optimistic and practical
line when addressing the Bachelor Girl. Many of their suggestions have
already been outlined in Chapter ; they ranged from taking up callisthenics to astrology, home decorating to football, learning German to good works.
‘One-room-itis’ as seen by
Woman’s
Weekly
,
But, as was so often the case, it was the women’s magazines that seemed,
somehow, to understand best what it was like for the bachelor girl with
‘one-room-itis’. ‘Little City Girl All Alone’ was the title of ‘a little article for the Business Girl who Lives in Digs, and Feels Rather Lonely’, published
Singled Out
in
Woman’s Weekly
in March . The drawing that illustrates it shows the young thing in a nightie with a quilt wrapped around her shoulders to keep off the chill, perched on the edge of her iron bed with its inadequate
light; she probably had no chair. The uncurtained window looks on to the
empty blackness of night, and the walls are bare. The book she is reading
may be the Bible or Ethel M. Dell – we don’t know.
‘There are some advantages, I suppose, in being out in the world on your own,’
said a business girl rather wistfully to me. ‘And all the stay-at-home girls I know envy me my latch-key and complete independence – but, do you know, sometimes I’m frightfully lonely.
‘You see, I’m out at business all day, and I don’t have many chances of making friends . . .’
Woman’s Weekly
to the rescue. Take the initiative, urged the author of the article. There were office friendships to be made, contacts to be made through churches, and for goodness’ sake, JOIN something. There were
simply endless clubs: the YWCA, amateur dramatics, debating clubs and
cycling clubs. ‘Don’t shut the door in the evenings and sit alone, when you
are pining for a friend. Go out instead . . .’
If you did, there were open arms to greet you. So manifest was the issue
of the Surplus Women that concerned bodies started to look at ways to
assuage their needs. The Christian Alliance of Women and Girls was an
outreach group set up in to offer friendship and religion specifically
to women living in cities who suffered from ‘one-room-itis’. Covertly,
they feared that the girls would find their way from their ‘one-rooms’ and
on to the streets if not steered towards more virtuous paths. The CAWG
aimed at lifelong membership (unlike the YWCA), so was also particularly
sympathetic to the older spinster who ‘had once again got relegated to
Cinderella’s part behind the scenes’. For these ladies the CAWG offered
clubs, hostels and, importantly, a solution for single women anxious about