Review: Vivien Horler

The Blackridge House – a memoir, by Julia Martin (Jonathan Ball)

From a family home to a retirement flat to a single room to a single bed – this is the trajectory of so many people as they age. It doesn’t bear thinking about.

It was the experience of Elizabeth Madeline Martin, who was born in what was then Natal in 1918 and who died in Cape Town in 2012.

Elizabeth Martin was the mother of Julia Martin, the author of this fine, touching, and beautifully written memoir.

As dementia claimed Elizabeth, her memories drained away. She didn’t remember her husband, she often didn’t remember Julia, frequently confusing her with one of her own long-dead sisters. She told Julia: “My memory is full of blotches, like ink left about and knocked over.”

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Review: Vivien Horler

The Messiah’s Dream Machine, by Jennifer Friedman (Tafelberg)

Jennifer Friedman has a way with words. So much so that I may never look at a frikkadel in the same way again.

The Messiah’s Dream Machine is a sequel to her well received Queen of the Free State, about a little Jewish girl growing up in Philippolis, the sleepy Afrikaans town where Laurens van der Post was born.

As far as one can gather there aren’t many Jewish farmers in the Free State, but her family had farms in the Philippolis area, now run by her cousins, and it is clear these spaces are deep in her heart.

This has not however prevented her from emigrating to Australia, where she has acquired her pilot’s licence, bought a Grumman Tiger aircraft and now “flies to the small outback towns and stations around Australia, often just for a lunch date and where the sun is shining”.

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Review: Vivien Horler

The Salt Path, by Raynor Winn (Penguin)

Raynor and Moth Winn were in their 50s when they decided to walk. Their lives were falling apart and they didn’t know what to do.

So they started to walk, along south-west England’s famed South West Coast, setting out from Minehead in Somerset, and carrying on, across North Devon, round the Cornish Peninsula and Land’s End, and on, eventually, to Poole in Dorset, covering just over 1000km.

And by the time they had completed their trek they had a plan.

Raynor was in her teens when she met Moth, and loved him from the off. They married, had two children, and bought a run-down farm in Wales which they rebuilt and from which they ran holiday lets. Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

One Man’s Climb – a journey of trauma, tragedy and triumph on K2, by Adrian Hayes (Pen & Sword)

K2 is not the highest mountain in the world, but unlike Everest, very few people have climbed it.

It is more remote than Everest, which is why it never acquired a local name – the title K2 comes from the Great Trigonometrical Survey of British India, begun in 1802 and finished in 1871.

Italian climber Fosco Maraini referred to K2 as: “Just the bare bones of a name, all rock and ice and storm and abyss. It makes no sense to sound human. It is atoms and stars. It has all the nakedness of the world before the first man – or the cindered planet after the last.” Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

The Reckoning, by Yrsa Sigurdardottir (Hodder)

Cold, snowy and bleak, the Reykjavik Yrsa Sigurdardottir writes about does not warm the cockles of a reader’s heart.

Yet Iceland is becoming a major tourism draw; according to Wikipedia the industry now contributes upward of 10% of the country’s GNP, and in 2017 the number of foreign visitors exceeded 2 million for the first time. I was one of them, and I was both fascinated and charmed.

The country, which virtually touches the Arctic Circle, could not be more different from South Africa, with its jagged volcanic mountains, its icebergs and its terrifying prices. Cars have heaters but no air-con, the default position of taps is hot and you have to let them run cold, and streets in the capital have underfloor heating – thanks to the wealth of free hot water produced by the country’s natural geysers (geysir is an Icelandic word). Continue reading →

Review: Vivien Horler

Vintage Love and Other Essays, by Jolyon Nuttall (Jacana)

I spent my entire career as a journalist working for the old Argus Company, publishers of newspapers including the Cape Argus in Cape Town, The Star in Johannesburg and the Daily News in Durban.

One of the top guys in management, whom I didn’t know but with whose name I was familiar, was Jolyon Nuttall, who started at the Daily News as a reporter and went on to become the manager of the Star and a director of the company.

On newspapers there is a gulf between editorial, the people who produce what you read, and management, the people who control the money. Relations are not always cordial.

Or as Nuttall puts it in one of the essays in this small, delightful and beautifully produced book: “Management was the antithesis of everything Editorial stood for. It was there to curb editorial initiatives, to pay the staff as little as possible, to control – and cut – costs at every turn and place constant impediments in their way. Above all, Management failed to recognise that the very newspaper existed only because of Editorial and the content it produced.”

Nevertheless he made a successful career in management and when he retired he was delighted to be referred to as “an editor’s manager”.

Nuttall says that in early 2016 he spent two months within a bus ride of the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he became a regular. He found a section titled “Essays and Non-Fiction Literature”, which had a seat in an alcove where he spent hours, and essentially discovered what was to him a new literary form: the essay.

“It was neither memoir nor autobiography… It tended to focus on specific episodes, specific people, specific periods in which the essayist had been involved. It was time bound. In many of the essays there was a narrative…”

The experience in the Harvard Book Store led directly to this collection of essays, a form which, he says, has brought “astonishing focus” to his writing. There is no sequential connection between the essays other than the fact they are episodes and memories in the life of one man.

His subjects cover the death of his beloved wife Jean after more than 40 years of marriage, the pleasures of grandchildren, the freedom he and his twin brother experienced as young boys growing up in Newcastle in the old Natal, first love, the Alan Paton he knew (Nuttall’s father Neville and Paton were lifelong friends), spending a summer in New York with Drum writer Lewis Nkosi, managing stress (keeping chickens turned out to an inspired solution), trout fishing and newspaper publishing in the 1980s in South Africa.

His career in newspapers took place against a background of what he calls a darkening political landscape. The government of the day hated the press, particularly the “Engelse pers”, and introduced a series of increasingly draconian laws to keep its dirty secrets under wraps.

Nuttall recalls how a team of media lawyers was on hand to guide editorial through what felt like “walking blindfold through a minefield”.

Or as he puts it: “Our instruction to the lawyers in giving us this advice was to allow us to walk as close to the edge of the precipice as possible without falling off.”

It has become fashionable to decry companies like the old Argus company for continuing to operate in a tightening political landscape which demanded certain compromises, but in many cases editors and their journalists – reporters and photographers – functioned in a fraught environment with true courage.

However, as a former president of the Newspaper Press Union, Nuttall was often confronted by the apartheid machine, and he says he has subsequently questioned whether the actions and initiatives they took “in good faith stand up to scrutiny”.

A technique used by the government was to provide NPU members with confidential background briefings in a bid to make clear the challenges the government was facing, putting the more liberal side of the press into a very awkward position.

He writes: “In my mouth the distaste remains… The only ultimate satisfaction to be drawn from the saga was the collapse of the regime while the press survived to tell the story of the birth of a new South Africa.”

Because of my own history with the Argus company I found these reflections particularly interesting, especially when trying to put names to people he has tactfully left nameless (including my father-in-law).

But the collection contains so much more than newspapers. On the whole the essays make for a gentle, charming read and a reminder of a different time.