Archives: Persephone Forum

Ten men stood in the dock with Nelson Mandela in October 1963. Four of them were white: Hilda Bernstein’s husband, Rusty, an architect, Denis Goldberg, an engineer, and two lawyers, Bob Hepple and James Kantor. Harold Wolpe, also a lawyer and Arthur Goldreich, a noted painter and owner of Liliesleaf Farm in Rivonia, the ANC meeting place at which the men (apart from Mandela himself who was in prison, serving a five year sentence for treason) were arrested, had managed to escape from Pretoria Jail by bribing a guard. A team of five white lawyers defended all of the accused. Hilda Bernstein and Goldberg’s mother Annie travelled every day from Johannesburg to Pretoria to attend the seven-month-long trial.

 

 

Mandela – a Long Walk to Freedom, whose London première coincided with the announcement of Mandela’s death, pretty much ignores the part played in the struggle against apartheid by a few brave white men and women, many of them Jewish. Rightly the makers of the film focused on the appalling treatment of Mandela and his fellow Africans, on the iniquity of the justice system, on the length of their sentences, on the brutality of the prison regime on Robben Island. Denis Goldberg too was sentenced to life imprisonment. He served his twenty-two year sentence in Pretoria Central Prison where conditions were a little less harsh: apartheid ruled in prisons, as it did everywhere else – Hilda Bernstein tells us that even the Black Maria taking the men to and from the Palace of Justice has a separate ‘white’ compartment.

Goldberg is still alive and was one of the last friends to visit Mandela before he died, invited by his wife Graca to ‘stimulate his mind’. Surely he deserved a mention. Bob Fischer, the lead lawyer, and the only one shown in the film, was punished for his role in the trial, arrested shortly after it ended and charged with ‘furthering communism’ and ‘conspiracy to commit sabotage’. He received a life sentence, of which he served eleven years, dying two weeks after his release. In his autobiography Mandela himself gratefully acknowledges the friendship and the help that he received throughout his life from a large number of white South Africans. But white heroes aren’t box-office, not in 2013.

 

 

The World that was Ours paints a wider picture, covering the cruel history of white rule in South Africa, the deliberate destruction of black communities, the violent response to peaceful protests. It gives a clear account of the slow rise of the ANC (I didn’t know that it was founded in 1912), of the gradual and inexorable worsening of living and working conditions for the African majority, of the increasingly cruel retribution reserved for those of any colour who dared to step out of line politically, and it describes a country of lush beauty, and fruitfulness, and ease for those lucky enough to be able to enjoy it – she paints her own garden in loving detail. The difficulties faced by the small minority of anti-apartheid ‘Europeans’, were minor, of a different order to those of non-whites, and avoidable – they could have conformed, or left. To stay and to carry on the fight required a particular courage. Denis Goldberg summed it up, ‘Being black and involved (in the struggle) meant you had the support of many people and it meant you got to be part of a community. Being white and involved meant being isolated.’ It is this that Hilda Bernstein describes so vividly, so movingly, and with such modesty.

Isolation came in many forms. The Communist Party, still a legal organisation when they joined in the early 1940s, had no colour bar. ‘We were accepted by Africans,’ she writes, ‘because we were communists, and we became part of the movement for national liberation’. But the result of that commitment was to set them apart from ordinary white society. When the Suppression of Communism Act was passed in 1950, cold disapproval turned to official persecution: raids and arrests, trials, surveillance, restraints and government bans. By 1960 raids had become almost routine: hundreds of books, newspapers, pamphlets and letters were regularly removed from their house by the boxful. A permanent watch was placed on the home that for years had been open for friends to gather, to talk, or swim, pick fruit in the garden or borrow books. Thenceforth the doors were closed and locked. ‘They’ had imposed silence and loneliness on a house that had ‘murmured with people and sound’.

Banning laws originally applied in 1950 to undesirable organisations and their members, were being tightened (they remained in use until 1990) so that by 1962, nothing written or spoken by any banned person could be published or reproduced in South Africa. Large gatherings had always attracted suspicion.

 

 

 

A new act altered the definition of a gathering, ‘making it virtually impossible for a banned person to go to a cinema or have a cup of tea with a friend.’ A bridge party or a game of tennis might be illegal. When Bob Fischer’s wife, Molly, died, friends had to get permission to attend her funeral, a ‘gathering’ by definition, and Hilda was unable to deliver her tribute. Her words were spoken, anonymously, by one of the Rivonia lawyers – I defy anyone to read this passage with dry eyes. In 1964, after the trial, seeing off a friend at the airport, Hilda sits at a separate table: both women are banned and forbidden to communicate. They must say their hurried goodbyes in the ladies’ toilets, out of sight of the Security man. The friend was Ruth First, the wife of Joe Slovo. Fourteen years later she was killed by a letter bomb in Mozambique, on the orders of the South African Police.

Banning laws and the terms of house arrest, to which Rusty was subject, made working life next to impossible. While Hilda was forbidden from publishing articles even in Amateur Photographer, Rusty had been forced to leave his architectural practice and work at home: builders and engineers could not come to the house and site visits had to be fitted around compulsory daily visits to the police. When their grown-up daughter, Toni, invites friends to the house – and she makes a point of doing so, regularly informing journalists about their visits – he must eat in a separate room. But with a wife and four children, still swimming and shouting and playing jazz records, Rusty’s home life, diminished as it is, seems almost normal compared to those under complete house arrest; Hilda describes them as ‘prisoners forced to provide their own food and lodgings’. Deprived of work and communication, these people were subjected to ‘a punishment worse than ordinary imprisonment, one potentially destructive to the individual.’  Isolation was a powerful tool in the régime’s armoury: it could break a man.

In 1963 the police were handed a new weapon: the ninety-day order under which anyone could be arrested (and repeatedly arrested) without charge or warrant and held incommunicado for ninety days, long periods in solitary confinement, without books or paper or visits. These were the conditions under which the Rivonia accused were held for four months while they were awaiting trial. Hilda had experienced imprisonment, arrested with Rusty and jailed for three months after the Sharpeville shootings -‘Not a hardship for me’, she writes with characteristic stalwartness, but hard on the children. Her job now would be to persuade lawyers to take on the case. Meanwhile she fought to be allowed to visit her husband, each visit requiring a fresh battle with the head of the Rand Security Branch, a lone woman against an unyielding system.

 

 

Rephrasing W.H. Auden, Hilda writes that suffering ‘takes place while I shop and look after my family.’ Throughout the pre-trial period, and for the long months of the trial, she, like most of the other women (some had made the equally hard choice of leaving the country with their children) carried on her daily lives as best she could, caring for her family, making the ordinary everyday decisions, like any mother on her own, except that she kept a packed bag beside the bed in case of a night-time police raid, and travelled day after day to observe a travesty of justice taking its course. We know the outcome, but the drama and the daily anguish draw us in, so that we are living it with her.

 

 

When, at the end of the trial, Rusty is discharged and immediately re-arrested on new charges, the Bernsteins decide, after thirty years of fighting apartheid from inside South Africa, that it is time to leave. Hilda looks down on their house and acknowledges that: ‘No one can live indefinitely on the edge of disaster. Our ability to survive all these years of abnormality had been due precisely to bring an everyday normality into our lives.’ Having returned from her temporary hiding place to take her youngest son to his new school, almost her last task is to put the washing in the machine, as if bequeathing normality to her family, before setting out on a hair-raising journey which would eventually take them to London.

 

 

The Bernsteins’ tortuous escape, by car, cart and truck, and on foot, via Bechuanaland (now Botswana) and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) would rely on the help of countless others, some friends, many strangers, some of whose names they never knew. In the weeks before they left Johannesburg Hilda had been hidden by a friend’s neighbour. While in prison Rusty and his fellow detainees had been able to count on their wives and friends; many of the Africans, held in far worse conditions, had no-one to bring food or clean clothes. Hilda describes the tireless efforts of a poor Indian woman collecting food, and cooking and delivering meals to men she had never met. This is the kindness of strangers and Hilda proves convincingly in The World that was Ours that for all its brutal efforts to keep friends, and families apart and isolated, the régime was powerless against that.

 

 

 

 

A new phrase entered the vocabulary of human relationships recently : ‘conscious uncoupling’. Thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow and her rock star husband we have learned that this is a ‘proven process for lovingly completing a relationship’. For ‘completing’, we must read ‘ending’, and ‘proven’ … who knows? In any case congratulations seem to be in order, for by celeb standards Gwyneth and Chris achieved something of a record: together for ten years

For Martin and Letty Lovell in Bricks and Mortar, the tenth year of marriage was marked by the arrival of a third child, a son, stillborn, and the realisation for Martin that ‘some vital current had ceased to flow between them …. He was left with a sense of strange irreparable loss: the dear, dull, familiar woman who now shared his domestic life was not the Letty he had married; his heart ached for the loss of that bright foolish creature.’ Her life had become centred on her children, and although she remained gentle and tender towards him, ‘some vital current had ceased to flow between them.’ Today’s relationship guru would definitely be calling ‘time’. Not in 1903. In the first decade of the last century only one in four-hundred-and-fifty marriages in the UK ended in divorce. According to Ruth Adam in A Woman’s Place (Persephone Book No. 20), between 1911 and 1915 there were 3,100 divorces, fewer than eight hundred a year. In 2012 there were thirteen divorces an hour in England and Wales. Marriage in 1903 didn’t end with the dream, if indeed it had started with the dream.

Bricks and Mortar opens in 1892 in Rome. Martin Lovell is 24, a budding architect, ‘a very decent, simple, sweet-minded creature’, earnest and ambitious, but easily swept off his feet by eighteen-year-old Letty Stapleford, with forget-me-not eyes, smooth golden hair and an impoverished widowed mother, ruthlessly determined to see her married as soon, and as economically, as possible. Martin’s prospects are adequate, his antecedents are acceptable and Lady Stapleford has no trouble convincing him that he is truly in love with her daughter. Letty’s reluctance, unknown to Martin, is, shockingly, overcome by ‘a good slapping and shaking.’ And so the young architect leaves Rome with a frightened young bride, and a hundred regrets for all the unseen churches, and temples and monuments. Persephone readers are often reminded how important it was, as late as the 1930s, for a young woman, particularly one with no money of her own, to find a husband. Our hearts have gone out these girls, but Helen Ashton opens our eyes to the plight of the young men. Martin is not a weak man, but he is no match for a martinet in search of a son-in-law.

Letty quickly proves to be in many ways a disappointment: ‘uneducated, ignorant, vain, weakly impressionable, and yet firm in her tiny prejudices, dependent, stupid and easily hurt’, but harsh as his assessment appears, Martin does not stop loving her. The author’s voice is principally his voice, so we can only surmise what Letty feels – something short of passion, a sort of benign acceptance perhaps, deepening over the years. She cannot be faulted as far as tolerance goes: although she never shows much interest or understanding of his work, or shares any of his delight in fine buildings, she indulges his need for occasional breaks from family life, and selflessly puts up with seven moves in thirty years, all to satisfy Martin’s fascination with restoration and refurbishment – if she does complain, the reader is not told.  Martin never fulfils his youthful dream of building his own house. Are we to believe that he is prevented from doing so by Letty? Is it not rather that the building of marriage and family is a hard enough task in itself? Hard and with all the compromises and frustrations of working with bricks and mortar: the dream is never quite realised, spaces are enclosed, openings let in less light than planned. Life and architecture intertwine. ‘He was to discover later that he always liked a house best when the walls had only risen three or four feet between the scaffold-poles; when the doors and window frames were still empty … A building was somehow more amusing and promising then that in the later stages when the floor-boards were being hammered down on the joists, when the blind glass panes with their circles of whitewash shut out the view, and the roof was being closed in, and all the rooms looked dark and small and somehow not as pleasant as he had expected.’  Just like his marriage.

 

 

The young Lovells first proper home together, a ‘six-roomed cottage’ in Hampstead, with their two small children, a sturdy little daughter adored by her father, and a sickly  son doted on by his mother, offers the promise of happiness. Martin can draw in his light filled attic, and Letty can sew and push the children out in their pram; ‘very simple and unexciting and pleasant’, and unfulfilling. Allowed no say in the choice, furnishing or decoration of this house (or subsequent ones) Letty has continued to seek a sort of harsh comfort from her mother: little wonder then that she has been ‘very little developed by six years of marriage’. For his part Martin has come to believe that ‘the chief variety and excitement of his future life would lie in his profession and outside his own house’ – a belief that he would continue to hold, and, unkindly, profess many years later to his daughter. ‘They had,’ reflects Martin, ‘learnt each other’s limitations.’ But their life together would continue, just as his architectural career, while never reaching the dizzy heights to which he had aspired in his twenties, continues. ‘Letty was still the only woman in his heart, he never loved any other; but his deepest interest was in his work.’ And thus it will remain.

 

 

If Helen Ashton is intrigued by the notion of architecture as a metaphor for life, she is equally if not more intrigued by architecture as architecture, and the four architects in Bricks and Mortar (Martin’s boss and early mentor, Nicholas Barford, Martin himself, Oliver, Nick’s nephew and Stacy, Martin’s daughter), provide a sweep through seventy-five years of building in England, from Pugin and Sir Gilbert Scott, to Webb, Norman Shaw, and the followers of Corbusier. Each has his or her heroes, loves and hates. Fashions change, the new ceases to shock, the old finds fresh admirers. Past styles go in and out of favour: for Nicholas Barford, the head of the practice, in his fifties, there is nothing to beat the Gothic, Martin leans towards the Classical, and his daughter enthuses about the Baroque. Ashton is thrilled by the detail of it all. Martin’s travels through Europe, solitary at first, and later with his daughter Stacy, produce lingering descriptions of Venice, and Rome and Brussels and Ghent and Provence. As exciting and instructive are her on-the-spot accounts of the construction of buildings which are now such integral parts of the London cityscape that it is impossible to believe that they were once nothing more than a mass of scaffolding and plans on paper, and that, when they were first built, could have generated such outrage. ‘… that railway station with the Roman candle that Bentley has stuck up for the RCs’, Westminster Cathedral, ‘the prow of a bulk as arrogant as a battleship’,  Broadcasting House, Adelaide House.

 

 

These are bold structures, monumental expressions of the dreams of ambitious architects, mostly young and, in Asthon’s lifetime, male. The men in Bricks and Mortar want to build big, but with age are compelled to lower their sights. Having started with Gothic revival town halls, Nicholas Barford subsequently found a niche in vicarages, and in his latter days is reduced to extensions of his early designs. Martin downsizes from large country houses for rich clients to copies of ‘an olde Englishe cottage from the Ideal Home Exhibition, or a sweet little Queen Anne House that their uncle’s widow had just built at Purley.’ We leave Oliver, still only in his thirties, designing factories and banks and flats and yearning for a skyline more like that of New York. Stacy Lovell has no such soaring ambition. Neither her father, nor her husband, nor Ashton herself, question the fact that she should be designing nothing more than ‘compact manageable little houses in the suburbs’.

 

The house must be ‘manageable’, because this is a servantless post-war era. It is the 1920s, Stacy is a ‘new woman’, part of a generation of single women, unmarried or widowed, ‘going valiantly about together in threes and fours, calling each other heartily by their surnames.’ Her achievement has been to qualify as an architect, and later to combine family and work – Ashton, herself, had given up a career as a doctor when she married (her character’s medical conditions are described in clinical detail!).

Not a long novel, Bricks and Mortar is a very rich one, deftly, and often wittily, wrapping together lyrical descriptions of country life, the joys, difficulties and sorrows of parenting, architectural practice and history, and a subtle account of a complex and enduring marriage. ‘He and Letty had come to love each other in the end with all their hearts … They had eaten their portion of disappointment together, and they had shared one great sorrow, they had become indivisible.’ Perhaps that kind of marriage is history too.