The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey. Rupert Isaacson
he set out for the Transvaal anyway, only to end up, not a mining magnate as he had hoped, but a butcher in the mine kitchens, where his wife Minnie managed to track him down, having travelled all the way from Lithuania to do so. Harry stayed with her just long enough to sire Freda (Robbie’s wife and my father’s mother, who died from Alzheimer’s while my sister and I were still small), before running away again, this time to Rhodesia, where he graduated from butcher to cattle trader to wealthy owner of a livestock auctioneering house. Minnie, no less resourceful, tracked him down a second time, whereupon he capitulated, though she of course never forgave him.
My father remembered Minnie – by then an old woman – drinking champagne by the gallon and forcing Harry to buy her a neverending stream of expensive gifts – Persian rugs, Chinese vases and the like – which she would then sell, banking the money. Because, she claimed, she never knew when her husband might take it into his head to disappear again. During these latter years she developed delusions of grandeur and used to tell my father that she had married beneath her, having spent her girlhood in a Lithuanian palace. ‘Rubbish, Minnie,’ Harry would harrumph from his armchair, ‘you were born in a hovel.’
My father’s side was successful financially, my mother’s side less so. But the Loxtons were made of epic stuff. My mother’s father Allen, for example, after spending an idyllic boyhood riding his horse Starlight across the rolling green hills of Natal, became a journalist, then a tank soldier in the 8th Army during the war in North Africa. He escaped his burning tank at Tobruk and jumped onto an abandoned motorbike just as the Afrika Korps came running over the dunes. On his return from the war, Allen resumed his career as a journalist, roving all over southern Africa as a feature writer for the Sunday Times and Johannesburg Star. My mother showed us great fat binders full of his cuttings – stories of travels with crocodile hunters, with witch doctors, with Bushmen; the black and white pictures and Boys’ Own language (at which he excelled) conjuring a world of adventure that stood out in stark contrast to the world I knew in London.
No less intrepid, his wife – my grandmother Barbara – also went to the war, putting my mother (then aged three) and aunt (aged five) into a children’s home and roaming the Western Front as a freelance war artist for the South African papers. As with Allen’s cuttings, my mother would show us Barbara’s paintings, which were kept in a big leather trunk in our sitting room. Barbara had painted everything she saw: London families sleeping in the Underground during the Blitz; the Battle of the Bulge, with the American dead lying in the snow of the Ardennes, cut down like wheat by the German Tiger tanks; the blood-spattered agony of the military hospitals; civilians starving on the streets of the Hague. Shortly after Berlin fell, she and a group of other journalists were allowed into Hitler’s eyrie, high in the Bavarian Alps, literally days after the great dictator and his mistress Eva Braun had committed suicide. Barbara rifled the desk drawers and brought back a few of Hitler’s personal effects – minor things like photographs, an Iron Cross or two, and some official documents – to pass on to the children. My sister and I felt proud that my mother’s parents had taken part in this great story.
But the Loxtons paid for their adventurous spirit by being heavy drinkers, prone to irrational rages, and subsequent wallowing remorse. Allen was no exception, and drove Barbara to leave him a few years after their return from the war. The effect on my mother and her sister Lindsay was far-reaching. Once she left Allen, Barbara (who seems to have been kind, but emotionally cool) never had her children to live with her again. Having been put into boarding schools as near infants while their parents went adventuring, they experienced but a brief couple of years of family life before being shunted off once more, to grow up in institutions until they reached university age.
My petite, blonde, bespectacled mother grew up a true Loxton, becoming involved, while at university, in anti-apartheid campaigns. Her old photograph albums show pictures of the time: my mother (a platinum perm atop a Jane Mansfield bust) and a black male student symbolically burning the government’s separate education Bill; my mother speaking on podiums; brawls between Afrikaans students loyal to the system and my mother’s leftist crowd; pictures of more serious attacks by policemen. One in particular stands out: a march by black domestic maids, protesting for better working conditions, charged with batons and dogs. In the foreground, a woman is on the ground, a police-dog savaging her abdomen, the handler’s truncheon raised high, about to deliver a skull-cracking blow to the woman’s head.
By this time Barbara had remarried, and she and her new husband (a politically active, left-wing lawyer named George Findlay) decided it would be best if my mother left the country before the inevitable arrest that must follow such activities. She was glad to get out and go adventuring in the world as her parents had and took the boat to England along with her sister, Lindsay. In England my mother flirted with the ANC, but became diverted – by art school, by meeting my father, himself an African émigré – and settled down to produce my sister and I while embarking on a career as a sculptor and artist. But when I was eighteen months old, and my sister four, my mother took us back to Africa and presented us to Barbara and Allen (who, though as much of an alcoholic as ever, had moved to Johannesburg and started another family).
A year later, both Allen and Barbara were dead. And in a sad postscript to their failed relationship, though they lived at opposite ends of the country they died within hours of each other. One day while at work in the Sunday Times office, Allen collapsed from emphysema (he had been a heavy smoker), and never regained consciousness. A telegram was sent to Barbara. According to her husband, she went quiet, and retired to have a think and be alone with her memories. When he knocked at the door a short time later to see if she was all right, there was no response. He opened the door and found her lying dead from a stroke.
My mother went almost mad with grief. She had at last begun to know her parents, and now suddenly they had been snatched away. Throughout our childhood, she would be prone to periodic depressions, and the sense of being an exile never left her. Unlike my father, who fitted happily into London (he later told me that even in his Rhodesian childhood he had longed for cities: ‘The first time I went to Johannesburg and smelled the car fumes and saw all that concrete around me, I felt an almost sensual thrill of excitement and pleasure’), my mother missed Africa keenly. She expressed it in her sculpture, her painting, almost all of which featured African people, African scenes.
It was perhaps to make up for the loss of her parents, and of all that she had hoped we children would have learned from them, that she became such a willing story-teller. She told us of the four Loxton brothers – Jesse, Samuel, Jasper and Henry – who in 1830 had come to South Africa from the Somerset village of Loxton and immediately dispersed into the wide spaces of the dry north, the area known as the Great Karoo.
Like all the other early Karoo settlers, the Loxtons lived, at first, by pastoral nomadism learned from the Khoi, a people who looked like Bushmen and spoke a similar clicking language, but who lived by herding rather than hunting. Having shown the whites how to follow the rains and where to find water in this unendingly arid land, the Khoi soon found themselves dispossessed, along with the local Bushman clans. By the time the Loxton brothers arrived, the Khoi had been reduced to working for the whites, and the last remaining Karoo Bushman had retreated to mountain strongholds, from where they watched the white men carve out farms by the land’s few natural springs and kill off the game.
For the whites, it was a slow, monotonous existence, enlivened only by hunting, mostly for wild animals, but sometimes also for Bushmen, who would, as their situation became more and more desperate, occasionally materialise from nowhere to raid livestock. For many Karoo settlers, hunting Bushmen became a well-known, if little talked about, sport. I can only speculate that my family must have done as others did.
Eventually, the Loxton brothers bought land and settled down. Henry, the youngest (my great-great-grandfather) trekked over the Drakensberg mountains into Natal – Zulu Country – where he ended up a wagon-maker, wedded to an Afrikaner woman named Agathe-Celeste (my great-great-grandmother), who had been abandoned as an infant in the court of the Zulu king Mpande by her ivory-hunting father. She had spent her girlhood there, re-entering white society only when she became a young woman and married my great-great-grandfather.
There are many stories about Agathe-Celeste. The best