CHAPTER 6: Searching

CHAPTER 6

Searching

BY HIS FOURTH YEAR, NEIL HAD MOVED AGAIN, VACATING HIS room in Mowbray for an isolated farm cottage on a thickly wooded mountain slope near Eagle’s Nest in Constantia. A small number of young non-conformists now lived in secluded settlements on the mountain while some of South Africa’s wealthiest residents lived in the valley below in gabled Cape Dutch houses surrounded by vineyards. When Michael sought out Neil in his remote cottage, which had no electricity or running hot water, he perceived his brother as an intensely lonely figure. Set amid rocky outcrops, above dense evergreen forests and tangled undergrowth, from which arose a profusion of bird calls, this bowl of the mountain provided a retreat from the world. A few kilometres away lay Hout Bay. It was here on the beach that Neil, recognising a young woman with long fair hair as a medical student, first approached Liz Floyd.

A year behind Neil, Liz had spent a year in America as a Rotary Exchange Student. She had left Rustenburg Girls’ High School politically unsophisticated, but travel had begun to open her eyes, allowing her to recognise how parochial Cape Town was. In her architect father’s world, that of Bishops Diocesan College and the exclusive Kelvin Grove Club, there was ‘a total inability to see that there’s anything else, or that Jewish people might not like the fact that Kelvin never accepted Jews, or that if you don’t wear a blazer and cravat you’re not being rude’.

It wasn’t long before Liz joined Neil in the cottage on the mountain, ready to put up with the cold-water shower that he had built outside and the basic cooking facilities. Summers might be idyllic, but the cold, wet and windy Cape winters required endurance. Unlike Neil, Liz had thrown herself into the cut and thrust of student politics. She soon found that Neil, while not short of friends, could be ‘extremely introspective’, with a capacity to withdraw into himself. Neil enjoyed the solitude, walks in the pine forest, sitting around the fire at night. He spent much of his time studying, and didn’t relate a great deal to others living up there. To Liz, Neil was still ‘doing quite a lot of searching and landing up with Nietzsche … which I don’t think he ever outgrew … I suppose it was the idea of transformation, the superman idea, creating a new person’.

In the summer holidays at the end of 1974, after a short visit to Jill and Paul in Eldoraigne on the outskirts of Pretoria, Neil set off for a few weeks of solo hitchhiking. Writing to his mother ‘on top of a petrol pump at about 8pm at Marendellas, just outside Salisbury, before bedding down for the night’,1 he offered vivid cameos of his journey through Botswana on bad roads, with very little traffic and almost every truck stopping to give a lift or advice. He had helped to load heavy crates at numerous stops on a three-day journey to Francistown, where he finally enjoyed ‘a beautiful bath and cup of tea and washed some clothes’. In parenthesis, he explained that there were no taps, so to get water, he had asked at each village and ‘someone would produce water from the well’. He commented how the education level was quite high and ‘the people are very happy about the political situation’ – a message to his father as much as to his mother about the newly independent African country.

Travelling in Rhodesia felt different, even though lifts had been easy:

I haven’t had a bath for three days, but was caught in some rain just outside Salisbury so that should suffice. Rhodesia is looking very green and beautiful, but is still very colonial, and there is a certain tenseness between black & white here. Bulawayo is a terribly sleepy little backwater, but Salisbury is quite a pleasant place. The whites are quite shocked that Smith should have had secret talks with Kaunda! The nights are beautiful, and sleeping under the stars, I have not yet been caught in the rain. At night I make a little fire & heat some soup & meat – it tastes good! I go to sleep as the sun sets, and rise with it, because that is when the lifts are best.

He signed off warmly, ‘Happy Xmas – I will be thinking of you. Fondly, Neil’. While making no mention of his father, his tone was one of easy conversation. Time must have tempered Neil’s anger since the row, but, as Jill would tell me, all three men in her family – her father and both brothers – were uncompromising, each in their own way. Despite the similarity between Neil’s keen outdoor spirit and that of Aubrey’s pioneering father, Neil’s difference in philosophical and political outlook, signified in the length of his hair, had brought down a screen through which Aubrey would not look. The sustained pressure on Joy, whose vision was not so blinkered, must have been extreme.

The following year, Neil prepared to set off again in his summer break, this time to Europe and his first trip abroad. Writing briefly to his mother on 7 November 1975 from Jill and Paul’s house in Eldoraigne, he wrote of walks in the nearby bush to see the sun rise and declared their new baby ‘medically fit’, before concluding affectionately, ‘Stay well, and look after your grandchildren … I will probably see you again in January. Fond love, Neil’.

A ‘Dear Mom’ postcard showing the Houses of Parliament arrived soon afterwards from London. Everything, including his passport and money had been stolen, but ‘everything is O.K. now, so don’t worry’. Neil was staying ‘for free in a hotel near Kensington Gardens so have a chance to read & write on my own’. He would leave for Berlin as soon as he received his new passport. He ended, ‘Stay well, Neil’. Despite the injunction to his mother not to worry, it was obvious that she would.

However, a letter headed ‘London. Monday 24 Nov.’, raised a problem that Joy must have felt was far more difficult, if not insoluble. Neil began, ‘Dear Mom, Just a short note in the early hours of the morning …’. The note extended to four air-letter pages of closely written script, beginning with a graphic description of his accommodation in ‘an old disused room that leaks and has rats’. But he could look out over the rooftops of the city, enjoying ‘the privacy and silence all around’, and he was optimistic about receiving his new passport and traveller’s cheques so he could move on to Germany. Neil then suddenly expresses his feelings of estrangement from his family:

Mom I find it very difficult to talk to you about things that really matter when I visit, and almost feel that my presence is futile. I know I’ve caused you a lot of worry since I left a few years ago and I’m sorry for that. I am not angry, I don’t hold anything against Dad or you, but my development is just such that a split had to come. Your constant support and love all the time has been incredible; I really appreciate it. I know your existence is not very happy, but that is the lot of the world and we grow strong in our suffering. I understand Michael’s religion and do not hold it against him, but it is the easy way out, and I am grateful that you have never succumbed to those platitudes or forced them on us. I find it difficult to explain, but our situation in the world is such that there will always be misunderstanding and suffering between people who love each other, because their natures run in different directions, and they fulfill [sic] a different destiny. I feel very strongly that I have a certain destiny, or life, to fulfill (to which my writing & poetry are only secondary), and I am just sorry that this should cause such a rift between us. I am forever grateful for the amazing childhood that you gave us and the calm confidence of a warm family environment in which we grew up in. After a certain time a man must begin to follow his own path; seek out his own truth and follow that … that is what makes a man. I admire Dad’s strength and independence and his belief in himself, even though I do not agree with his values. He struggled and fought out of poverty to a certain self-realization, but children cannot just accept the whole universe of values and beliefs of their parents; they must struggle and form their own identity. Please don’t misunderstand me, I don’t think that I have the answer to everything, or that I am superior to my family setting. I have deep in myself a warmth and feeling for the family as it nurtured me through childhood and youth … but now with the loss of innocence our ways diverge, and I find myself totally alienated from the family. I do not regret it, it is the way our existence takes its course; there is no justice … starving children die in suffering before they reach self-consciousness … a mother’s love is seldom repayed [sic].

But because of this we mustn’t think that there is no meaning in the world. It doesn’t lie in the period after death, but in the ordinary everyday petty existence we endure. I am sure you must feel frustrated and disillusioned at the life you lead, but that is the lot of everyone, and it is just in your suffering that you gain your strength and meaning. I remember clearly about 8 years ago when you dropped a milk bottle and were very upset … I tried to comfort you. What does it matter? We have our bodies, we are still alive, we are strong enough to walk, to hear the birds sing in the morning, to watch the sun set … what does it matter if there is going to be a war, or if the economy is going down? Excuse all this abstract talk, but I really think it is all that really matters.

I phoned Granny while I was in Pretoria, but didn’t see her. I also feel deeply estranged from Jill and her family, though they are very kind to me. Granny has also been very understanding and I feel that she has become wise through all that she has been through – though I find it difficult to talk to her.

At the moment I am busy on two short stories, and am writing a little poetry – I have sent some in for publication that may be out when I get back.

London is quite cold, though the sky is clear and I spend whole days just walking through the parks and along the roads. The grass is covered in orange leaves, and with windy gusts they blow all over. This morning I spent a long time watching some school-kids playing in the park … so innocent and beautiful. My address in Berlin is: AMERICAN EXPRESS, 11 KEURSUERSTENSDAMN [sic], BERLIN.

Bye now, Neil

With candour, sincerity and lack of rancour, Neil separates himself from his parents. While thanking them for the warmth of his childhood nurturing, he asserts, ‘but now with the loss of innocence our ways diverge’. Alienation from his family is inevitable, however sad. He understands the difficulty in his mother’s position but does not criticise. Instead he clarifies his own position. This is a moral journey – although he uses neither word – that must take its own true course. In spite of his rejection of Christianity, a strong philosophical core remains of becoming stronger through suffering. Neil faces his future with equanimity and, it seems, the calmness of an existential observer.2

After arriving in Paris, Neil wrote two further letters. Knowing that the family would be together in Somerset West for Christmas, on 15 December he addressed a letter to them all, naming everyone, including ‘Dad’. Had the frankness of his earlier letter perhaps unleashed something? This letter was even longer, full of vivid observations and commentary about life in Paris. He had cut short hiking through Germany. People hadn’t been friendly; he’d been ‘carrying too many books’ and it had rained all the time. Now he was staying in an old hotel in a poor southeastern district of the city: ‘The hotel itself is falling to pieces … I have a window-pane missing, the floor creaks, and the toilet (with no paper) is so small one can barely close the door.’

In the bitterly cold winter, lakes and fountains had iced over, the sun not even melting the frost on the grass in the Luxembourg Gardens. He had been trying to get manual work at hospitals or ‘loading fruit at the market, carrying bags of cement; but there are no jobs going at all’. He seemed undaunted by not speaking French and had inquired about a houseman job at the British Hospital, which looked possible, adding that he would also be applying to Cairo. Was Neil’s unspoken agenda here perhaps to find work outside South Africa and so avoid the inevitable army call-up papers that would arrive as soon as he completed his medical training?

In the meantime, with the days so short, he was often working into the night and only getting up at midday. This work was writing, reading:

… then it is dark again by 5pm. It is too cold to walk too far outside, and I have to plan places to stop and get warm again. I spend time in the ‘Shakespeare’ and have been to some poetry readings there (but not much good).3 I’ve also found the Nietzsche library in Paris which is worth being in. The Universities are much the same as ours though the whole of Paris is swarming with riot-police … at a place I was staying before, a crowd of them rushed in and wanted to beat us up … (thugs, not much different from the American police.)

Wednesday: It has just started to snow, and from my window I watch the little flakes blown by the wind swirl around, then land and disappear. On some of the roofs the whiteness starts to stay, the flakes congregate and it gets colder and colder. Across the street a woman shakes the snow off her drying clothes and takes them inside. Down below women walk with white spots tangled in their hair, and the streets shine from the moisture. I hope it warms up a bit soon, or maybe I will try to get another room with all its windows intact … Cafes are warm but expensive so I eat mainly bread and patte [sic] with milk here in my room in the evenings and sometimes go for a cup of coffee at a Cafe.

Neil had rejected the conventional European tour so prized by many of his fellow students. For a few weeks he had become the artist, the writer, who ekes out daily life, enduring what is ordinary, everyday, ‘petty’, while doing his work. To conclude his six pages of conversation with the family from whom he had earlier expressed estrangement, Neil proposes that they might like to walk in the forests around Constantia, wishes Michael well in his new registrar job, and ends with a touch of irony: ‘Well, have a good Xmas, eat well, (and keep warm). Yours, Neil.’

Neil’s final letter from abroad, dated ‘Paris. 29/12/75’ begins ‘Dear Mom & Dad’. News of his stolen money had prompted them to send him a cheque. Thanking them both for the trouble they had taken to get this to him, and for a letter forwarded from Berlin, he assures them that he has quite a bit of money left and he would bring the cheque back to Somerset West. He was not giving up his stubborn independence:

I must have given you the wrong impression, though at the time I wrote it was very cold. Over the last fortnight the weather has been beautifully warm, and last night I slept with the window open. It takes a while to get used to the little contingencies of existence here so that one doesn’t have to concern oneself with petty problems that crop up inevitably in a strange town with a foreign language.

Echoes of Nietzsche and Camus in the letters intimate that Neil had also come to Europe, at least in part, to understand more about the writers he admired. Separation from others was a means of freeing himself to deepen his own ‘subjective experience’:

It is difficult to describe the kind of life that I am leading here; it is a solitary existence with not many external events, but rich in subjective experience. On Xmas night I stood for a while in a beautiful church listening to some singing and looking out over the lights of Paris. With all the ponds frozen one appreciates to [a] far greater extent the beauty of flowing water, its infinite variety, clarity and purity. The ice looks so dirty and coarse, though it is different when it hangs in icicles from the fountains. We only had that one period of snow (only for about 10 minutes) but now it is starting to get cold again so we may be in for another spell.

Time and again, in these letters from Europe, moments of beauty interweave with mundane, often grim, realities. In this final letter, Neil mentions amputations in young people with cancer as ‘the most terrible example of the absoloute [sic] indifference and injustice of the world’. However stimulating he had found Paris, he was beginning to feel ‘a little stifled’ and would be ‘glad to get some fresh air again, and be near the sea’. He signed himself formally, ‘Yours, Neil’. On his return, he would express to Liz a sense of disappointment. If he had been searching for something in Europe, it seems that he hadn’t found it.

1 Neil Aggett Papers.

2 It’s strange to think that at the time of writing this letter, Neil was just a few miles away from where I was living in north London with my husband Nandha. I was pregnant and soon to give birth to our second child. We welcomed visitors from ‘home’ bringing news of the country to which we could not return. However, my solitary cousin was making his own journey.

3 This is a reference to the famously eccentric bookshop on the Left Bank, Shakespeare & Co, created and run by George Whitman, with his motto, ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise’.