The Inklings and King Arthur (book review)

The Inklings and King Arthur: J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, C. S. Lewis, and Owen Barfield on the Matter of Britain by Sørina Higgins
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Several of the Oxford Inklings wrote about King Arthur though for most of them Arthur was not the main focus of their work. Roger Lancelyn Green's prose retelling probably did a great deal to make the Arthurian stories accessible to 20th-century readers, and Charles Williams devoted quite a lot of poetry to Arthurian themes, but for the other Inklings, Arthur, though not central, was always present.

This book looks at the ways in which the four main Inklings -- Barfields, Lewis, Tolkien and Williams -- handled the "Matter of Britain" in their writings, and how they themselves contributed to it. In such a project, one of the first things that needs to be decided is what makes a particular text "Arthurian". In the first chapter editor Sørina Higgins deals with this question and generally adopts an inclusive approach. Any reference to the Arthurian legend, explicit or implicit, is included. So the book also includes a list of all the writings of the four main Inklings, published or unpublished, that contain such references.

This alone would make the book useful to Inklings scholars, or indeed anyone wanting to know about 20th-century Arthuriana, but the main articles deal with it comprehensively from various points of view, including a survey of the source material, the writings of the Inklings themselves analysed from various points of view, and much more.

I found it especially valuable because much of my own knowledge of "The Matter of Britain" comes from the Inklings. As a child I had read a children's edition of Stories of King Arthur by Stuart Campbell, and likewise a child's edition of Spenser's The Faerie Queen (during the reading of which I fell in love with Britomart). So when I read Arthurian bits of the Inklings, that was my reference point, and things that were not mentioned there (like the Fisher King) passed right over my head. So this book helps to anchor the Inklings' Arthurian references in a wider tradition, and helps one to make sense of them.

There is not much mention in this book of Roger Lancelyn Green, a minor Inkling, whose retelling of the stories of King Arthur helped me to put them in context. I've said more about that in South African Camelot.


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Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 3 - final)

(Continued from Part 2)

On Sunday morning we had breakfast with Theo Ngubane and his brother Owen, and Owen told us something of his history. He had kept a shop for a while and then gone overseas to England, where he drove buses in London, based at Ealing, but he had been there after me, when it was Transport for London, not London Transport.

Owen & Theo Ngubane, Steve Hayes

So we had something in common, but with a time lapse, so we compared notes. Owen said the buses he drove were fully automatic and could almost drive themselves. I drove RT buses with preselector gearboxes -- you selected the next gear you thought you were going to need, but it wouldn't actually change until you pressed the gear pedal with your left foot. A little later we got Routemaster buses, which had automatic gearboxes, but not very good ones, because they only changed at certain speeds. so late at night one would have to travel long distances slowly in a fuel-wasting low gear. because to change to a higher gear one would have to travel faster and so get ahead of schedule.

The London we lived in was also very different. If anyone is interested in my reminiscences of the Swinging London of the 1960s, you can find them here.

Deacon John Aitchison reading the Gospel, St John's

After breakfast we went to Durban to St John's Church in Clark Road. John Aitchison was serving as deacon, and they had 3 New Testament readings, one of which was St Peter's vision of clean and unclean foods, and John preached on that. They sung hymns to a piano accompaniment, and John read the Gospel from the middle of the church, surrounded by servers swinging incense.

Afterwards John told me something about the arrangement of the stained-glass windows, how they surrounded people with saints, the disciples of Jesus, his friends, and others. We asked the Rector, Themba Vundla, if we would use the chapel to sing the Hours and Obednitsa, and we read our own Gospel of the Samaritan Woman. There are not many Sundays after Pascha left when we can sing the Paschal hymns. so we did not want to miss this one.

Gammage Family, Pinetown 19 May 2025

On Monday 19 May we went up to Farningham Ridge to see Val's cousin Arthur Gammage, who was celebrating his 74th birthday. Arthur's younger brother Douglas and his wife Margie and their son Ken was also there, so it was a fair-sized family gathering, with Arthur's wife Jenny and their son Keith.

They talked about their children and foster children and adopted children. Both families had adopted or fostered children with various disabilities, and Hilda, who had been adopted by Arthur and Jenny was now in a home, where she could be cared for. 

Arthur Gammage, 74th Birthday

Doug and Margie had adopted Hilda's brother Richard, who had even more problems than Hilda, and they said his behaviour would worsen at the time of the full moon. Nowadays many people seem to think that is a silly superstition, I had noticed that much the same thing had happened with someone I had worked and shared a house with 50 years ago. He could be very pleasant and affable sometimes, but then he would start getting fits of the sulks, and would do all kinds of petty spiteful things. I sometimes wondered if I was just imagining things, or perhaps was going mad -- more recently I discovered that this kind of behaviour is called "gaslighting" After a few months I noticed that his sulky phases seemed to coincide with the full moon. I don't know if Richard's behaviour was similar, but it did seem to be affected by the moon.

After the birthday party we went to Durban North and again went to the Spur Steak Ranch for their pensioners' special. That particular branch of the Spur franchise was in the grounds of a sports club, and we parked next to an abandoned bowling green.

Blacksmith plover at Durban North

There we saw a blacksmith plover, like the ones we have in our garden at home. This one had a sore foot, and, perhaps because it was more difficult for it to run away, stood still and let me take a photo of it. It seems that several species of birds that used to be quite wild and rarely seen, and then only out in the country, are becoming urbanised and even domesticated. Hadedas became urbanised about 1990, and plovers and dik kops a few years later. At first it was crowned plovers we saw in our garden, but now the blacksmith plovers seem more common. The are called that because their cry sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil. There were also a couple of babies, and the one with the sore foot appeared to have a mate on the other side of the bowling green.

We sat by the window overlooking a hockey field with astroturf, and some schoolkids were practising on it. Four schoolboys came in, aged about 11-13; two Indian, one coloured, one white, They sat at a table nearby, and we wondered how they had enough money to buy lunch at such a place. Maybe they were here after school to practise some sport, and their parents might have arranged for them to have lunch first.

Nora Saneka, Noreen Ramsden, Val Hayes

We went on to see Nora Saneka, now living in Roseglen with her widowed mother Noreen Ramsden. We had known the Ramsden family in Durban North in the 1970s, and it was good to see two of them again

They were having their fibre telephone cable repaired, as the municipality had cut the grass and cut the cable as well. Nora showed us photos of their family -- her husband Mike Saneka, who had died a couple of years ago after an operation for a cancer resulting from smoking too much. Her daughters Rebecca and Pascal, Pascal was a doctor, and specialised in trauma, and had gained a great deal of experience through the disasters that had struck Durban in recent years -- the Zuma riots, bringing in gunshot wounds; the floods, with drownings and so on. She said her brother Richard was in Sydney, Australia, where he was a kind of consultant, and he was the one member of the family that never seemed to be mentioned in our communications with them on Facebook.

Mexican Sunflower?

Her mother Noreen came in in a wheelchair, now in her 90s and suffering from Parkinson's disease, which made it difficult for her to talk. Her father, Bill Ramsden had died a few months ago, and had been disappointed that he would not last long enough to get a letter from King Charles on his 100th birthday, as he never made it that far, but tried to pretend he was older than he actually was. There was, however, a commendation from Queen Elizabeth hanging on the wall.

Nora said she belonged to St Mary's Anglican parish in Greyville where she seemed to be quite active. She said the rectory had been sold to become a pizza parlour, and the adjacent shops were used by a group of businessmen who wanted to take over the church hall as well, but the parish had started a nursery school, which the businessmen seemed anxious to close. Nora was worried that the Archdeacon of Durban seemed to support the businessmen, as he thought the sale of the hall would bring in some money for the church. Nora argued that the church should use its buildings for the benefit of the community rather than just selling them off to raise funds.

Val Hayes & Peter Gunning, Ballito Beach

On Tuesday 20th May we had breakfast with Theo and Owen Ngubane, and left Nagina at 9:15 am, to head up the North Coast and stopped nearby to take some photos of the ubiquitous yellow roadside flowers. They only seem to grow along roads with heavy traffic, so it's difficult to take photos of them. Carl Brook told us they were Mexican sunflowers and were an invasive alien species, but we thought they looked rather pretty and looked them up on the Web, and found that they are useful for fertilising the soil.

We drove down to Umngeni and along Riverside Drive and up the old North Coast Road. We turned off at Casuarina Beach, where there had once been an old house we liked as we passed it when we lived in Melmoth and travelled to Durban back in the 1970s, but it had long been demolished, and modern ugly blocks of flats were being built in its place, and most of the Casuarina trees had vanished and we saw only a few palms.

Melvain Donyes at iHlozi Lodge

I went to a toilet there, but only the shell remained. It was full of rubbish, and all the fittings had been nicked. As we were leaving a bloke in a car stopped, and said it wasn't safe there; old people had been attacked, and we should rather go on to Westbrook Beach, which was further on.

We went on to Ballito, where we called on Peter Gunning, who took us to coffee at a beachside kiosk. We sat on a bench overlooking Ballito Beach and Pete spoke of Bible study groups he had participated in, some of which had old St Martin's people in them, including Alison Bastable, whom he said had wanted to see me, but we did not have her contact info. He talked about the millennialists in Bible study groups who waited for the end of the world, and were fans of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. I wasn't aware that there were people who were still interested in that, and Pete said that they had changed the ending to put forward things that Hal Lindsey had predicted would happen, but hadn't happened as predicted, so they moved them further into the future.

IHlozi Lodge. Kuleni Estate, near Hluhluwe, KZN

We went on our way up the coast, using the R102, and avoiding the N2 toll road, partly because of a conscientious objection to toll roads. In the past all roads had been paid for out of the Road Fund, which was replenished by the tax on petrol, which seemed a pretty fair "user pays" way of doing things, but the then National Party government wanted to rob the Road Fund for its attempted conquest of Angola, and so toll roads were introduced. Another reason for avoiding the toll roads was that they are full of big 26-wheeler trucks, which make driving unpleasant.

Along the R102 at every settlement or village there were speed bumps in the road, often not well marked. But though the road makings had faded, you could often tell where they were because of the sugar cane that had bounced out of trucks as they went over them. The road was otherwise in good condition.

Melvain Donyes

We crossed the Tugela (uThukela) River on the old N2 bridge, which had been washed away in floods some years ago, so we had had to take a detour via Mandini when we travelled this way before, but the bridge had now been replaced. looking much as it had before, and from there to Empangeni the road was much as it had been 40 years ago when we lived in Melmoth and travelled down to Durban. Here it was the new toll road that was nearer to the coast.

We filled up with petrol for the third time on our trip at Mtubatuba. We drove on to Hluhluwe and reached Kuleni Estate at sundown. We went on to iHlozi Lodge, where our friends Melvain and Lynette Donyes welcomed us and we had supper with them and chatted. Melvain and Lynette had bought iHlozi Lodge out of their retirement savings and run it as a guest house to support them and their ministry as evangelist/teachers in the Pentecostal tradition. Melvain was one of the pioneers of online communications in South Africa, having set up one of the first BBSs and importing some Christian networks. One of the forums we started back then is still functioning, now as an email mailing list. It's called Offtopic, because it's a relaxed sort of place where you can discuss things that might be considered "off topic" in more specialised online forums. If you know us and would like to stay in touch, feel free to join us there -- you can find out more about it here. And if you're looking for a place to stay in northern Zululand near the coast, click here to find out more about iHlozi Lodge.And for more places to stay run by our family or friends, see here.

Melvain Donyes, Val Hayes, Lynette Donyes

On Wednesday 21 May we spent the day with Mel and Lynette, driving into the small town of Hluhluwe to have lunch at a small cafe there, and chatting about old times and old friends sitting around the fire in the evening.

On Thursday 22 May we said goodbye to Mel and Lynette and headed for home, and again had problems with poor road signage. Perhaps the roads authorities think that road signs are not needed because nowadays everyone listens to the plastic auntie giving directions on GPS, but we found that doesn't work too well, at least not on our cell phones. It shows you approaching a turnoff, but by the time is shows you have reached it, you've already passed it, so the signs would be useful. So we drove up the N2 for about 5 kilometres looking for the R69 to Vryheid, and had to turn back. It turned out to be a rough gravel road, but soon climbed into the hills with some spectacular views over the Pongola Dam.

View from Magudu, KZN

Then the map showed we had to join the R66 and travel 3 km south towards Nongoma before continuing along the R69. This time there was a sign, but it was actually a "short cut" and we should have carried on along the unmarked road. Eventually we saw a sign to a place that was on the map, the small village of Magudu, perched high on a hill, with splendid views in every direction -- well worth a visit.

And from there it was a zig-zag run (to avoid potholes) to Vryheid via Louwsburg (off the road and unseen) and Hlobane, a rather unromantic coal-mining town. Stopped for lunch at a Wimpy in Vryheid, and then on to Utrecht, where we had lived in 1976/77. 

St Michael's Anglican Church, Utrecht, KZN

The small church of St Michael & All Angels, built by British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, looked much the same as ever, but there was nothing to indicate what denomination it belonged to or the times of services. When we had been there there was an amazing carbon-filament light bulb in the entrance, which had probably lasted the 77 years since the church was built. Perhaps, after another 48 years, it is still working.

 We had a quick look around the town, which seemed little changed from nearly 50 years ago, before heading on home via Volksrust, Standerton and Leandra -- 710km in 13 hours, tired from avoiding potholes, for which Steve blames Maggie Thatcher, who started the mania for deregulation of road transport which has led to the deterioration of both the road and rail infrastructure. But hey, it was an enjoyable trip, and we saw a lot of old friends and met a few new ones.

Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 2)

 (Continued from Part 1)

Val Hayes & Cath Stempowski

On Wednesday 14 May we had tea with Huberto and Cath Stempowski at Cowies Hill. We had met them at Clarens, where they had also gone for the memorial to Peter Walters. 

Cath is an artist, and worked in various media, and showed us some of her pictures. She said she would be interested in playing with a possible illustration for the cover of the second edition of my children's book Of Wheels and Witches, which is being prepared for publication by Shack Simple Press in Texas, and she suggested some styles that could be used.

The story is about four children who have adventures in the Southern Drakensberg back in the time of apartheid, and spend some time riding around on horses, so the illustrations could show them on horseback or on foot, at any point in the story. Cath had one picture of a horse that suggested one possible style that could be used.

We drove down from Cowies Hill into Pinetown, and there found Sandy's Supermarket, which had been there forever. In the same shopping centre was a Spur Steak Restarant, so we had lunch there. We had their old folks special -- coffee; 124g steak with salad and chips, and ice cream, for R129.00, which was less than half the cost of the single course we had had at Granny Mouse's Country House the previous day.

Revd Theophilus Ngubane

Back to Theo Ngubane's place for supper, and more talking afterwards about old times together in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand in the 1970s and 1980s. Theo was amazed that Steve remembered the names of many people that he had forgotten, and said that most of those we had known had died. The only one left was Hamilton Mbatha, who had been Rector of KwaMagwaza Parish and rural dean of the Mthonjaneni Deanery when we had been there. Hamilton, Theo said, was still active in his retirement, and was often asked to preach in various places. Remembering names was easy because it was a close-knit community, and people often gathered at the diocesan conference centre at KwaMagaza. It was a place where we had many friends, and felt closer to people than in the big city. Once the burglar alarm went off at our neighbour's house in Kilner Park, in the Great City of Tshwane, and we phoned the neighbour to let him know, and he said he had moved away two years previously. Big cities are very anonymous places.

Perhaps one thing that has made it easier to remember people's names is that we had taken photos of many of them, and looked at the photos occasionally to remind ourselves of them.

Nagina, near Pinetown, with yellow roadside flowers

On Wednesday Theo asked us to lead morning prayers, so we read the Hours of Pascha, with its repetitions of "Christ is Risen". After breakfast Theo took us in his son's car, a Yaris that was newer than ours, up to Maritzburg, up a back road from Nagina near Pinetown, where Theo lives, , the M61 West via Shongweni Dam, where we could see all the houses built on what until quite recently were bare hillsides. The hills were very steep, and there were lots of yellow flowers at the sides of the road, a bit like the orange zinnia-like ones in Gauteng, except that these were a bit more like daisies.

At one place Theo pointed out sewage pipes coming out of houses and emptying into the gutter of the road, and said that people bribed the municipal inspectors for such things. Up at the top,just before joining the N3, there was a new shopping mall, Westown, a huge affair out in the veld, with access roads being built to it from Hillcrest and other places.

Macrina Walker, Val Hayes, Carl Brook, Theo & Steve

From there we drove along the N3 to Hilton, and much of it being worked on, so it was reduced to 2 lanes, with the left lane being mostly occupied by 26-wheeler trucks. We went to Sweetwaters to see Carl Brook and his wife Elma. He is now head of ESSA (the Evangelical Seminary of South Africa). after having worked in Swaziland for a while. We had last seen them in 2008 when they were living down the South Coast. I had first met Carl online back in the 1990s and he was researching monastic and other intentional communities in southern Africa, and we had later met face-to-face a few times.

Val Hayes & Macrina Walker at Macrina's new cottage

After a while Macrina Walker, who lives just down the road, joined us, and we took her to lunch at a place called "The Upper Millstone" where they served sandwiches and coffee which for the four of us cost little more than lunch for one at Granny Mouse's Country House.

 Macrina took my book of St John Chrysostom's Liturgy and said she would rebind it for me. She was looking for an apprentice  of sorts to do that kind of work, as she is now mainly binding new books that she sells overseas, through her bookbinding service Annesi Bindings.

 Macrina is another person we had first met online, when she was a Roman Catholic nun in the Netherlands, and thinking of becoming Orthodox.

Theo Ngubane, Linelle Irvine, Val Hayes

We went across to Hayfields to see Linelle Irvine, who had been at varsity with Steve back in the 1960s, and hadn't seen each other for nearly 60 years.  She was living at the Lutheran Gardens Retirement Home, opposite the Lutheran Church. She had spent most of her working life as an English teacher.

We were very much having a "seeing people" holiday, visiting old friends and family that we hadn't seen for a long time, as many as said they would like to see us.

Darryl & Anne Honey, Val Hayes. Sarnia, 15 May 2025

On Thursday 15 May we visited another old friend, Darryl Honey. He had been a neighbour of Steve at Culemborg Flats in Sandringham, Johannesburg, and later in Cheltondale. And we reminisced about old times and people we had known. We had found him on Facebook -- he was one of the people Facebook said we might know, as we had a mutual friend Tony MacGregor. Darryl said he had actually been friends with Tony's brother Chris MacGregor, through his interest in jazz, and said he had had a jazz guitar when he was younger, but when his bike was stolen his father had refused to get him a new one, and he had swapped his guitar for a bike. That is one of the main uses of social media web sites like Facebook -- they help you to re-establish contact with people you had lost touch with.

Val Hayes, Tim & Celia Sparks

In that afternoon we had tea with more old friends, Celia Sparks and her son Tim. Steve had first met Celia when a mutual friend, Martin Goulding, had commandeered her garage to repair Steve's old car, a 1961 Peugeot 403 station wagon, which needed new main bearings, not a job which could be done out in the street. 

Tim had been interested in Orthodoxy, and had visited a monastery near Pretoria. He is now a poet, and we talked mostly about books of Charles Williams. 

On the Saturday we left Theo’s home in Nagina and went to the other side of Pinetown to visit Val's sister Elaine and her family.

Val Hayes, Elaine Machin, Wyatt Anderson

They have an interesting family arrangement as Val's niece Lesley and her husband Jay have a house with a small second house on the premises and their mothers live together there. This gives security to the ladies and also provides for baby-sitting for their mutual grandchild Wyatt, who certainly does not suffer from the lack of love and attention from two grannies.

Elaine has not been well for the past few months, and also had a very bad fall which left her face bruised and cut . I had been very concerned for her, but was happy to see that she is well and recovering. She is very artistic and I encouraged her to pick up her paints again and spend time doing something she really enjoys.

They spoiled us with lovely tea/lunch and it was great to catch up on so many years since we were last together (13 years). Wyatt is a beautiful, active, enquiring little boy.

Wyatt and his other granny, Averil Anderson

 

(continued in Part 3)

Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 1)

In May 2025 we went on a holiday trip to the Free State and KZN, the first time we had been outside Gauteng for ten years. In 2015 we went to the Northern and Western Cape, which you can read about here, if you are interested. This is a kind of travelogue, people and places we saw in our travels.

This time our journey was initially sparked off by family concerns. A cousin of mine, Peter Walters (alias Peter Badcock-Walters) died a year ago, and we went to Clarens in the Free State to have a memorial gathering on the anniversary of his death. Its a route we have taken a few times before -- from Kilner Park in the Great City of Tshwane we head south-east down the R50 to Delmas, which the road by-passes, and from there to Devon, Balfour, Villiers, Frankfort, Bethlehem and finally to Clarens.

Sibusiso Gama - a kind young man

But, we find, the Province of Mpumalanga doesn't do road signs. The turn-off to Devon is not marked, and we can't remember it from the last time we passed this way 12 years ago. I tried to check the Google maps on my cell phone, but didn't know how to work it properly and trying to type something in while bouncing along avoiding potholes was too difficult. So we continued on to Leandra, formerly known as Leslie and now called something else, and took the road to Devon from there. A few kilometres on, we hit an enormous pothole. Val was driving, and with a 26-wheeler truck coming the other way, there was nowhere to swerve to, and bang there was a flat tyre. We stopped at the first place where it was possible to get off the road, and had to remove all the luggage to get at the spare wheel, and fumble under the passenger seat to find the jack, and we had just started to jack up the car when a very kind young man, Sibusiso Gama, stopped to help us. One thing we have found is that if you have car trouble, people are generally kind and stop to help. The road from Balfour to Villiers had many more potholes, and we very drove slowly as another flat tyre would mean we'd be stuck.

Villiers looked a bit like a ghost town, since the highway now by-passes it, but the volume of traffic can barely manage the toll plaza, and the single-lane bridge into Villiers would never cope. The Vaal River at Villiers looked pretty, so we took some photos. 

The Vaal River at Villiers

We made it to Clarens without any further problems. Peter Walters and his wife Toni ran a guest house, Clarens Country House which they had converted from an old sheep shearing shed. Peter & Toni's son Craig returned from Greece to help Toni run the guest house after Peter's death, and their other son, Ross, came up from KwaZulu-Natal with his wife Susie and son Tom for the gathering.

The next morning we drove back to Bethlehem to get the flat tyre seen to. It turned out that there was nothing wrong with the tyre, but they couldn't mend the wheel, and got a second-hand one from somewhere, and as a result we now have two mismatched front wheels. Farming communities are very good at fixing things.

More friends arrived and on the Saturday morning we all went to have breakfast at a cafe on a farm surrounded by herb gardens, and all meals served with their homemade cheese.

Susie, Ross, Craig & Toni Walters, Steve & Val Hayes

 

At the memorial gathering itself, Peter's friends came, and there were about 30 people there. Several shared their memories of Pete. He was an artist and book illustrator. He did the illustrations for an edition of the work of Herman Charles Bosman, He was also an educational reformer, and gave a lot of time to educational reform in South Africa. We concluded with the shortest and simplest form of the Orthodox Memorial Service (with the blessing of our parish priest, Fr Danil). This is usually done on the anniversary of a person's death, or the closest Saturday to it.

Craig Walters presents Tom with his granddad's kilt

This was followed by a buffet supper at which Craig passed on to young Tom his grandfather's kilt in the MacFarlane tartan (Peter's and my great-grandmother was Ellen MacFarlane (1858-1933), from Glasgow). 

On Sunday morning we sang the Hours and Obednitsa with Toni and Craig, and Craig, who had heard Orthodox services in Greek, quite enjoyed hearing it in English. These are the services used in the Orthodox Church when there is no priest present, and the Obetnitsa, or Typika, is like the Divine Liturgy, but with the priest's parts left out. 

On Monday 12 May we left Clarens for KwaZulu-Natal. Last time we passed this way the Oliviershoek Pass over the Drakensberg was said to be impassible, so we had avoided it. This time we were just told it was bad, with detours and wash-aways, but it was much better than we expected, and we enjoyed the autumn colours of the trees along the route, especially in Winterton. We avoided the toll roads as far as possible, driving through Estcourt, Mooi River and Nottingham Road. Beyond Balgowan we saw a sign saying that Granny Mouse's Country House was open for lunch, so we went in. I expected a thatched cottage surrounded by hollyhocks with a few tables and maybe tea and cream scones. It turned out to be a rather large hotel, with a very expensive, though tasty, curry lunch. It cost over R600 for the two of us.

Jacelyn & Hannes Zwart, Gary & Cheryldene van Schoor

On leaving there we stopped to take photos of the Lidgeton Falls on Lions River, then bypassed Pietermaritzburg, and visited another cousin, Cheryldene van Schoor (nee Bradbury). I had not met her before, and had last seen her father, Michael Bradbury, when I was 7 and he was 12, in Ingogo, so it was good to meet his children, grandchildren and great grandchildren!

Our common ancestors were John and Adelaide Cottam, from Manchester in the UK, They came to Durban in 1863, with John Bagot Cottam as accounted to the Natal Cotton Plantation Company, which didn't succeed in growing much cotton. Manchester at that time depended on its cotton miles, and the cotton supply had probably dried us as a result of the American Civil War, which was probably what brought J.B. Cottam to Natal.

We went on to Pinetown, and drove past Mariannhill through an endless traffic jam going down the hill to Nagina, where we stayed with an old friend, Theophilus Ngubane. Forty-five years ago we had worked together in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand, training self-supporting priests and deacons. We sat around talking until 1:00am catching up on news from the past.

Addington Beach, Durban. 13 May 2025

The next morning Theo insisted that the first thing we must do in Durban after not having been there for a long time was go to the beach, and so he took us on a tour through some of the southern suburbs. Seeing it in daylight we were immediately struck by the proliferation of yellow flowers at the side of the road. We had never seen such flowers in Durban before (our last visit was in 2012). They grew on quite tall plants. But about a month ago we were struck by similar plants in the Great City of Tshwane, but there the flowers had been orange.

Addington Beach, replanted with coastal bush

Theo took us to Addington Beach, which had been done up since we had last seen it, and one noticeable improvement was that someone, presumably the eThekwini Municipality had restored the indigenous coastal bush along the edge of the beach, which helped to stop beach erosion. This also gave the feel that you used to get along the coast of walking the narrow path through the bush, and encountering the beach and the sea. Another interesting observation was that I follow a couple of Facebook groups where people post historical pictures of old Durban, and there are usually numerous comments from white racists about how nice and clean Durban and its beaches were in the "good" old days of apartheid, and how filthy and rubbish clogged the place is now. But we could see no sign of the alleged filth and rubbish, and it all looked clean and well maintained to us.

Steve Hayes, John Aitchison, Theophilus Ngubane

Theo took us to the King Shaka Ocean World, which again was new to us. We had lunch at Macdonalds, where they no longer had printed menus. and you were expected to order through a phone app. None of us had the app, or any room on our phones for it, so the black waitress pressed buttons on a big screen, and was a bit taken aback to discover that Theo was buying lunch for his white friends. 

We went on for afternoon tea at the Windermere Centre, where we had afternoon tea with another old friend, John Aitchison, who had been at university with Steve in Pietermaritzburg, and we has worked together on Theological Education by Extension (TEE).

(continued in Part 2)

 

 

 

The Adventures of Skew

 The Adventures of Skew and The Foxes Hunt

As a child, I loved this book, and read it several times. It is a fairly short book, with two stories. The Adventures of Skew is about a china horse who longs to be a real horse, and one day hls fairy godmother comes and tells him that he will be allowed to be a real horse one day of the month, at the new moon, and if he is good enough he might be allowed to be real permanently.

The Foxes Hunt is about a family of foxes who are tired of being hunted and make plans so that the next time they are hunted they can turn around and hunt the hounds. 

It seems to be a fairly rare book -- it doesn't seem to appear in the GoodReads catalogue. I inherited it because my father was a chemist, and had a chemist friend, Bill Buchanan, who worked at Klipfonein Organic Products near the Modderfontein dynamite factory. The name sounds rather ironic nowadays, because some people speak as though "organic" products means they have no "chemicals", but the products of Klipfontein Organic Products were mostly poisonous -- insecticides and the like. One of them was Bexadust, which we used for killing ticks on our horses, which is perhaps appropriate in a story sparked off by a story about a horse. 

But, sadly, Bill Buchanan died, and they were living in a company house on the grounds of Klipfontein Organic Products (KOP) and the house was needed for Bill's replacement. So Bill's widow and children came to stay with us until they could find a place to live. 

Alan, the older child was 15 and at boarding school (Michaelhouse in Natal), so I only saw him during school holidays. Rosemary, the younger child, was 13, and rather pretty, I thought, but I was only 8. 

Rosemary brought The Adventures of Skew, and when they left after a few weeks she left some of the books behind, presumably because she was too old for them. I remember one of the others, which has since been lost, which was called Tick Tock and was about a Professor Postlethwaite who had an underground laboratory that controlled the seasons, and woke up the bulbs when it was time for them to flower, and sent spiderlings away on gossamer parachutes when they hatched. This one was even rarer than the Skew book, and no search engine seems to be able to find it. 

Grace Buchanan and her children eventually went to live in Pietermaritzburg, in Jesmond Road, Scottsville, next to the golf course, where we visited them when travelling to Durban. Grace Buchanan was later the lady warden of the women's residence of the Natal Teachers Training College. Rosemary married someone called Sutton. 

 

The Zombification of America

 Last week a headline read:

Columbia University agrees to Trump administration demands to restore funding

Among other things Columbia University agreed to empower 36 campus officers with the power to make arrests. The university also agreed to stricter controls over its Middle East studies department, which will now be overseen by a new senior vice provost who "will conduct a thorough review of the portfolio of programs in regional areas across the University, starting immediately with the Middle East" (Eye Witness News, 22 March 2025).

Similar reports from other places indicate that institutions like universities in various parts of the USA are complying with the demands of the Trump regime without protest, even if the executive demands have no legal basis. They have, in effect, decided to play it safe and be politically correct. They are like burrowing apparatchiks, submissive to those they see as having more power, and bullying those (like their students) who have less power. 

This is a sad contrast to many South African universities, which, when the National Party government sought to impose apartheid on universities that had open admission policies, staff, students and university administrations stood together in protest. They stood together for academic freedom. That was after the National Party government had been in power for 11 years. In the USA the Trump regime had been in power for barely two months when universities and others were seen to capitulate to demands for political correctness.

In South Africa it was after 11 years of National Party rule. After 21 years, or 31 years of civil repression, protest was more muted, but was still there. Some did not bow the knee to Baal, and mindlessly capitulate to unjust demands, without questioning them. 

And it is this mindlessness that is the mark of the zombie. A zombie is a corpse that is reanimated by a witch to be a servant that does the witch's bidding. Since it is a corpse, the zombie is literally brain-dead. It has no living brain so it cannot question the witch's orders. 

More recently there has been a huge uproar in the media about the leaking of a US government plan to bomb Yemen. People are going on and on about how terrible it is to talk about it, especially in the hearing of someone who is not in the inner cabal itself.  Hardly a word is said about the morality of the bombing itself, that people are actually going to die. The talk about the deed is taken more seriously, and seen as more evil than the deed itself. They strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. 

It's yet another sign of zombification, which is well expressed in the Cranberries' song Zombie. Click on the link, listen to it, and weep.

Abyss by Paul Bryers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I discovered, after taking this book out of the library, that it was the third book in a trilogy, and I haven't read the first two, so I've missed much of the backstory, and I'm not really qualified to review it. What drew me to it was reading the blurb and seeing that it was more or less in the same genre as most of the books I've written and am writing, so I was interested in seeing how other people do it.

In this story Jade runs away from her boarding school in Cumbria, England, just before being expelled, and her foster mother Emily meets her, and they are then chased by Jade's real father, Kobal, and escape from him with some difficulty, and they are joined by a Benedict, a long-lived member of a miliary monastic order. Benedict believes that Kobal wants to use his seven children, by seven different mothers, for an evil purpose. He had gathered six of them, but Jade had escaped (presumably in one of the earlier books) and Kobal was looking for the seventh. So the three of them set out to travel to Romania, where they hope to find the seventh child.

It was quite a pleasant read, with lots of adventures during the travels, though the denouement was a bit over the top.

One of the things I found rather disappointing is that Jade, the main character has superpowers. In this case it was integral to the plot in that she was bred for this by her father, who wanted to use her and her siblings for nefarious purposes, so she was not altogether happy about having these powers, and would probably have been happier without them, and in the earlier part of the story she rather regretted use them against bullying school fellows.

It may be just me, having this aversion to superpowers, at least for my main characters. Perhaps that is what  most readers want. Perhaps they like to picture themselves as having superpowers, and that is the attraction of such books. I suppose I was a bit like that as a teenager too. Up to the age of 12 most of my reading was of things like Biggles and Enid Blyton's adventure stories. Biggles & Co had one super skill, which made them different from most people, and that was the ability to fly aeroplanes, but it was a skill that anyone who really wanted to might be able to learn. Enid Blyton's characters were ordinary children who got into trouble and ether got out of it by their own ingenuity or by the intervention of adults.

When I was 13, however, we stayed with friends whose son, then a university student, had a huge collection of comics which he had been dumped in the garage. There was a run of Hotspur covering several years, so I was able to read complete runs of several serial stories, with each weekly episode followed by the next. Several characters in those stories either had superpowers, or access to gadgets which, like Aladdin's lamp, gave them superpowers while the possessed it. Some of the plots involved how they lost and regained possession of the gadgets. And so I pictured myself, like Jade in this story, having such a gadget, and picturing myself using it as protection or revenge against schoolfellows I feared or disliked. It was really a kind of excuse for misanthropy. A couple of years later, when I was about 15, I got similar satisfaction out of reading Gulliver's Travels, a kind of "the more I see of some people, the more I like my horse kind of thing. But it seems there are some people who never grow out of the desire for superpowers, and I wonder if they grow up to be people like Elon Musk.

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The Comedians

The Comedians by Graham Greene
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A group of travellers who meet on a ship sailing from New York to the Caribbean find their lives entwined long after they step ashore in Haiti, under the dictatorial rule of "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his dreaded secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

Brown, the narrator, is a hotelier, returning from an unsuccessful trip to New York attempting to sell the hotel, which he had inherited from his mother. Among his travelling companions are Mr and Mrs Smith, vegetarians hoping to establish a vegetarian centre in Haiti, and "Major" Jones, who turns out to be a con man. The Smiths stay at Brown's hotel, and make it their base for preaching the benefits of vegetarianism.

These expatriates are the comedians of the title, and at many points in the story I was reminded of Jean Genet's play The Balcony, where the setting is a brothel, and the clients are given an opportunity to act out their fantasies. So the comedians play their roles in a society in which everything seems unreal, like a stage set. Over it all hovers the spectral figure of Baron Samedi, the Voodoo lwa of the dead, who functioned (in real life as well as in the novel) as the evil genius of Papa Doc Duvalier.

Brown, who is having an affair with a diplomat's wife, wants to elope with her, but is trapped by, among other things, the corrupt bureaucracy of the authoritarian state, whose ministers tend to disappear when they fall out of favour, and whose bodies disappear even during their funerals.

Graham Greene manages to convey the atmosphere of an authoritarian state well, with the ruthless elimination of those perceived as enemies of the regime. Some of his descriptions of encounters with the Tonton Macoute reminded me of encounters with the South African Security Police 50-60 years ago. and actually contemporary with The Comedians. There are similarities between all authoritarian states, but there are also differences. One of the differences is ideology. Some totalitarian states have an official ideology, such as Communism in the USSR, Nazism in Hitler's Germany, Fascism in Mussolini's Italy. In South Africa the ideology was Apartheid, which grew out of Christian Nationalism. Apartheid didn't begin as an ideology. Under Dr Malan it was an election slogan and a principle to be opposed to that of the previous United Party government. Under J.G. Strijdom it was a policy. It only developed into a fully-fledged ideology under Verwoerd, after which the tendency was simply towards naked power.

In Haiti the progress toward naked power was more rapid and far-reaching, because the ideological roots were weaker. Papa Doc Duvalier doesn't make a personal appearance in The Comedians, but his ministers do, and what is most obvious about them in the book is the insecurity of their positions. They disappear, and their bodies are not found. The comedians of the title are the expatriate characters, but it could just as well be the whole society, the regime and its opponents.

And reading it now, when Donald Trump and his minions are doing a Papa Doc on the USA. makes the story more relevant. There is little ideology, other than a distorted vision of neoliberalism, And the model seems to be that of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There: "the question is, which is to be master -- that's all." Like the apartheid regime, the Trump regime has the support of Christian Nationalists, but Christian Nationalism is not the ideology of the regime. Perhaps it is that Baron Samedi has migrated to the mainland, and is one of the few immigrants who is not in danger of deportation.
 
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The Drawing of the Dark

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I have often expressed the wish to be able to read more novels of the kind written by Charles Williams and various people have been recommending books by Tim Powers, telling me that they are a similar genre. After searching in vain in bookshops and libraries for years, I was given some money and got the ebook version of this one. and yes, I can say it is in the genre of Williams's novels, which means that in writing about this one, I'm inevitably comparing it with Williams. Another book one could say is in a similar genre is Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I tried to read and didn't finish.

In The Drawing of the Dark Brian Duffy, an Irish mercenary soldier of the 16th century, is down-and-out in a port town somewhere in southern Europe (I've forgotten the name of the town, and Kindle won't let me page back to look it up, perhaps it was Trieste or Venice) when he is recruited by a strange character as a bouncer for his pub in Vienna. Duffy travels to Vienna to take up his employment, with several strange adventures on the way.

On arriving in Vienna, he is not welcomed by the manager of the pub, but is pleased to meet an old girlfriend. Epiphany, who had married someone else, but her first husband had died, giving him something to hope for. When his employer eventually arrives in Vienna, Brian Duffy discovers that being a bouncer is only the start of his duties. The year is 1529 and Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople is preparing to send his army to capture Vienna. His object however, seems to be not so much the city itself as a certain barrel of beer, which it is said, will revive the Fisher King of Arthurian legend and give magical powers to those who drink it. The army of the Sultan approaches, the city is besieged, but behind the conventional battle to attack the city walls, there is a magical battle for control of the beer, with rival magicians on each side seeking to control armies of supernatural creatures.

There are physical battles with swords and cannons and mines and sorties, so there is plenty of action in the story. There are also the magical battles between the rival magicians and characters channelling Merlin and King Arthur. But though the elements are there, Charles Williams it isn't. The appearance of the supernatural creatures is described, but they don't seem to mean anything. In Williams's story the supernatural creatures are significant in themselves, but in The Drawing of the Dark they are simply tools in the hands of the rival magicians. And the ending was disappointing -- the title suggested it would end with the drawing of the dark beer, but that happens offstage, as it were, if it happened at all. The dark is never actually drawn.

In Charles Williams's novels, "magicians" of the kind portrayed here are usually evil, with evil intentions, the prime example being Sir Giles Tumulty. I don't know about Tim Powers, but Charles Williams seems to have moved in circles of magicians or would-be magicians, and his portrait of them in his novels is not flattering. The world of Tim Powers seems to be driven by Renaissance magic, and so this book, at least, seems to resemble Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell more than anything Williams wrote. Merlin and Ibrahim are magicians or witches rather than wizards.



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Fantasy Adventure Stories for Kids

I've written a series of three fantasy adventure stories for kids. They are not a trilogy, and not a series, or at least they don't have a series title, though if anyone who as read them has any suggestions, I'd be open to them. 

The books feature four children who are unrelated to each other, but become friends, partly through sharing adventures together, though sometimes their friendship is strained. The stories are also historical novels, being set in the mid-1960s. The first two, Of Wheels and Witches and The Enchanted Grove, are set mainly in the southern Drakensberg of South Africa, where the apartheid system dominated the lives of people, and this is reflected in the lives of the children too. In the third book, Cross Purposes, the scene shifts, though the background is no less authoritarian.

Now the first book in the series, which went under the title Of Wheels and Witches, is out of print, but a second edition is in the press now. One of the things it needs is a cover illustration, and I was thinking of how to describe the kids for an illustrator. I started by describing them to an AI app, and after about 7-8 attempts it came up with this, which represents fairly accurately how I and some of the readers pictured the kids. 

The children are shown oldest to youngest, their ages as in the first book. 

On the left is Sipho Mdluli (12), grandson of a peasant farmer in the foothills of the Natal Drakensberg. His father has been banished to the Northern Transvaal by the apartheid government.

Next is Jeffery Davidson (11), son of a Johannesburg businessman, whose parents have sent him to stay on a farm that takes children as guests while they go gallivanting overseas. 

Then comes Janet Montgomery (10), daughter of a rich white farmer on a farm next door to the one where Jeffery is a guest. 

On the right is Catherine Kopirovsky (9), whose grandparents were refugees from Bolshevik Russia. She is an orphan, as her parents were killed in a car crash, and she stays with an aunt and her grandmother in Oxford, England, but has come to South Africa to stay with another aunt, Irene Sanderson, who runs the farm where Jeffery is a guest. 

After writing three books about them I've grown quite fond of them, and haven't abandoned them completely. Some of them appear as minor characters in other books I've been writing. So it's nice to have a picture of them, more or less as I saw them when writing the books, and I hope that the picture can be used by whichever illustrator gets to do the cover picture. 

They don't have to be shown walking. They could be running from the villain(s), who, in the first two books include the apartheid police and a witches. Or they could be riding horses, or having a picnic by a river, or exploring caves in the mountains.

Here's another of the AI app's attempts at picturing them. I don't like it quite as much as the top one, but I hope it would be enough to give the illustrator an idea.

One of the reasons for posting this is that the use of so-called AI in book publishing is quite controversial. 

Some people, it appears, use AI to write and illustrate stories, with virtually no human input at all. I've seen apps and web sites advertised that claim to be able to do this, and you can submit 10 or 20 books to publishing sites like Amazon KDP every day. 

But AI is a misnomer. It may be artificial, but it isn't intelligent. The creators of AI bots just pour millions of written texts into the machine to make word salad, and it analyses them to try to rearrange the words in a way that make sense to human readers. They don't make sense to the machine, they don't have to.

I haven't tried to do that. I think there are uses for AI in book production, but mainly in research and providing models, as these pictures could be models for an artist doing a picture to illustrate a book or book cover. It could possibly be used for abstract pictures but really it's better producing models. For text, what I might try asking an AI bot to produce might be something like a letter written be a farmer in Scotland, or a clergyman in the English Midlands (would it nick stuff from Trollope, I wonder?) and hope to have a model, though one would still need to be wary of anachronisms, like sneaking in a "snuck". 

Anyway, meet my characters. And if you'd like to read about them, see here, or here.
 
 

The Dragonfly Pool by Eva Ibbotson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A historical novel for children, The Dragonfly Pool is set at the beginning of the Second World War. Tally Hamilton is the daughter of a doctor in a poor area of London, and war seemed increasingly likely she is given a scholarship to a boarding school in Devon, where her family think she will be safer from the expected air raids.

Tally goes reluctantly, especially when her snobby cousins tell her what their posh boarding school is like, but she discovers that it is quite different. It's a kind of progressive school where the children have a lot of freedom, and tally really enjoys it, and makes some good friends. She persuades the school to enter a folk-dancing competition in an obscure East European country threatened with a Nazi takeover, and Tally and her friends find themselves in a position to attempt to foil a plot against Prince Karil, who find the free English school children a refreshing change from stuffy court protocol. But the danger is real and they have to find a way to escape it.

Author Eva Ibbotson was herself a refugee in a similar position, and also attended a school similar to the Delderton School in her story, and so her descriptions of the setting and events ring true, and gives the reader a feel of what it was like to be there.

There was a point, about two-thirds of the way through the book, where it felt as though some of the descriptions were overdone, and at that point I was thinking of giving it four stars, but it recovered again towards the end. 

Though it was just a book I picked up randomly in the library, I found it quite absorbing, not least because if overlaps at some point with a genre of books I myself have tried to write -- historical novels for children, though mine are set mainly in the apartheid era in South Africa, and have more of an element of fantasy. The war, which begins in the middle of the story, remains in the background, but the menace is always there, though my 11-year-old self would probably have preferred to see some more military action.

I see Eva Ibbotson has written several other books, so I'll be looking out for them, as this one was certaingy a good read.  

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