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Letter from Goeffrey Hutchings, 1992

 Mom with Geoffrey Hutchings campaigning for the ANC in 1994, picture taken by Dad

There were few occasions I head about Geoff. He was the best man at my parent's wedding. He loved poetry and literature and he was a close friend. Then I Mom and Dad told me that they were in touch again after many years. Dad remarked that Geoff was the same and that he was full of life and the Professor of English literature at a University of Zululand and in a sense renewing their friendship with Geoff and Anne was like Mom and Dad completing the circuit of University, activism, exile and return. They were back at the beginning. 


Dad and Mom and behind them, Geoffrey Hutchings, the best man, 7 February, 1959


But the last time they told me about Geoff was tragic. It was 1996. They had been to a party together and Geoff had left early with his daughter. It was getting dark. His car was sideswiped by a lorry. Mom and Dad left the party and had the misfortune to see Geoff and his daughter Sarah and grandson Timothy's bodies under sheets. 

My parents were still quietly horrified as they told me, a month later.


'What does it mean?' asked my father. They were shaken to the core. Their friend Geoff and his daughter and grandson, uprooted so violently and from life.

In Geoff's case, the more vibrant, someone's life is the more arbitrary such a death must seem. 


I'm sorry I didn't meet Geoff, going from this letter, I think he would have been a person after my own heart.

Dearest Eve and To

Bloody amazing, after all these years. We must have seen you last over 20 years ago. You were, I have a hazy recollection, somewhere in Bucks, was it? What were we doing? Was it early 1971? Was I at Reading doing my MA? What an enormous amount of water we've all passed since then.

It's absolutely astonishing, after all our vicissitudes, that you two and Anne and I and Alf and Jenny and Don and Shirley are still together - beats the national average handsomely. Not without hiccups in every case, of course.

Let me summarise the story since then. We returned to Malawi, where we stayed until the end of 1974. Then for a year to Keele (about halfway between Manchester and Birmingham), where I had a temporary post which didn't turn into permanency. I got an offer of another temporary post, this time at Rhodes, and we had to face the decision to come back. Rhodes was fairly unhappy, since, again, the permanency didn't materialise. And so I drifted uneasily into the third-world sector of SA tertiary education, being offered jobs at Fort Hare and the University of Transkei. I took the Transkei one, and we were all in Umtata by the beginning of 1978.

Catherine went into standard nine, and Michael was a year behind. Sarah and Veronica were turning 13 and 11. As you can imagine, Transkei was an amazing saga. Four teenagers in the house would have made it difficult enough anyway, but it was very emphatically and viciously Matanzimaland. In addition my head of department (Canadian) turned out to be a real shit.

We were there for ten years. Work for me was a nightmare. But other things happened. The children, as they emerged from their teens, showed signs of becoming human. Anne, after some silly adventure working for architects, became a botanist by accident, (because she could draw and observe and walk) and she and I collected plants at taxpayers' expense extensively, all over Transkei, which is, physically, a ravishingly beautiful place. I put my head down and got my PhD (on a topic including poetry and music!) from Rhodes, and I also started writing again.

With the PhD behind me I began applying for other jobs. But there weren't many. I thought hard before coming here to Zululand, because moving from one tribal college to another didn't seem a very good idea. A friend of mine, (a UWC graduate) put some of that argument in perspective by observing "Ah, shit, man, all our universities in this country are tribal colleges." He was right, of course, though he didn't add that some are rich tribal collages and some are poor tribal collages. You'll find it droll that I was appointed as peacemaker in a department in which death threats had been made and supreme court litigations were in progress. Proves God is alive and well and still joking.

Well, my colleagues drove me mad, but they all have some talent, and they are now, after six years, working well, and more or less together. In their way, they love me, and I them (sometimes). Sometime when we meet I'll begin to tell you what it's like working in the third-world sector in SA. It is unbelievably hard work lifting yourself by your bootstraps because history is pulling you down. If there is one good department in the Arts Faculty, the others, that have no idea that education is enabling, pull that one down. The students' expectations are determined by the worst departments, not the best, and their anger is deeply destructive.

Anne moved into a job researching Zulu plant medicine here, and has had her frustrations with the system, but has produced a number of conference papers and articles and an MSc thesis in botany, which earned her the degree with distinction. She is now recognised as an authority in the field. Sadly, she gets little time to draw.
......

We are very busy perpetually, I play squash, fish, sing and write poetry (a collection coming out next year). Anne is always getting into some new research project. We still like food and drink and one another and old friends.

We don't see that much of Alf  - he's a lousy correspondent - but we see Don and Shirley a couple of times every year. Ben Mac's second marriage was to a fellow journalist, Martine Barker, a very beautiful and talented woman. Ben is a lovely person, but self-tortured. He is a very good journalist, working  for SAPA (I think). Joe is married too, doing physic research work in Germany. David is in computers in the States. Susan, who has enormous musical talent, profoundly shocked her parents by declaring herself "Gay" a couple of years ago. John Patton, another whose marriage has survived - possibly with less friction than the rest of us - is now editing The Natal Mercury, and has done a marvellous job since taking over. We see them (John and Wanda) occasionally, and find them good, warm company. I am also in occasional touch with  Rose Moss (Rappaport) and Jacques Bertoud (now Prof. of English at York). And last year in Canberra I saw Fred and Erica Langman - Fred about to retire - very much the same really - as much an opponent of Australian literature (which is bloody wonderful) as he was of South African.

last year, on our way back from a conference, we had a road accident that left us unhurt, but ruined the suspension of the car I was driving. I got a lift from Grahamstown to Durban with forty nubile matric girls, who were charm itself. Their taste in music was, however, execrable. I commemoated them recently in a poem. Here it is.

SCHOOL BUS JOURNEY

O lively lissome girls, who leant with grace
Across a generation gap, your talk
Was supple, witty, the livelong day; not gross
Or strident, nor stuck on the same repeating track;
But I cannot conceive how any such gift survives
The appalling rage of the music that hammers your lives.

We very much want to see you. By the way, if ever you want any article (or review) that falls within our capabilities, just ask. We'll do it if we can, or find someone else, promptly. We'll offer you facts as unreliable as anyone else's. If you come this way, we can ask my mother to move up in bed or make some other plan, but we want to see you. Durban / Johannesburg via Empangeni is not bad. Make it official - a fact - finding tour.

Love,

Anne and Geoff

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