At the edge of my memory is what it felt like to be “scribbling”, like my mother, in the Global South, far from anywhere that mattered. Before the mid-century a voyage from Cape Town to England took two weeks; six weeks from New Zealand, home to Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp, who became Katherine Mansfield. The literary life she found in London led my mother to cherish this writer, all the more keenly because she herself could not flout, not outwardly, the limits of womanhood. Her bond to Mansfield was further tightened by the constraints of illness.
Next to her bed lay John Middleton Murry’s posthumous editions of Mansfield’s stories, Journal, Letters and Notebooks. My mother warmed to their sense of apartness and read aloud what Mansfield called her “thoughtful child” stories: “The Doll’s House”, “Prelude”, “At the Bay”. These mirrored a small-minded colonial world that upheld social and racial divides, cutting down what it could not take in. In South Africa our ways were much the same or worse. We too copied an imaginary motherland; took in its stories; spoke its language in our divergent accents; and prepared to widen our eyes when the actual England came into view.
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