‘Her feelings and her observations’
In 2008 Jonny Steinberg published a striking study of the impact of HIV-AIDS in South Africa’s rural Eastern Cape. Seeking to understand the context of the disease, he read Reaction to Conquest, which he described as ‘one of the finest ethnographic monographs ever penned in South Africa’; it had been researched in Pondoland from 1930 to 1932 by Monica Hunter, then in her early twenties. Steinberg goes on to remark that, as a social scientist, Monica ‘seldom draws attention either to her place in the world she describes or to the relationship between her feelings and her observations’. While there are many themes in this book, among them religion, politics, war, race and class, love and death, extensive and often highly personal sources now enable an understanding of Monica’s ‘place in the world’, and an appreciation of the relationship between emotion and intellect, not only in her life, but also in her scholarship. ‘Feelings and observations’ pervade and bind together this story.1
‘Who I was and whence I had come’
Monica was from Lovedale Mission, near the small town of Alice, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, and also from Hogsback, the forested village in the Amathole Mountains. Perched on precipitous cliffs, just off Wolf Ridge Road, is Hunterstoun, family home of the Hunters and, later, the Wilsons. Below Hunterstoun lies the Tyhume Valley grassland, stretching thirty kilometres to Alice. Monica was born at Lovedale on 3 January 1908.
Today, like mission stations in many parts of Africa, Lovedale has a desolate and abandoned air. Once the premier mission educational centre in southern Africa, it has now contracted to its central buildings, which have been used for various purposes since the campus was taken over first by the South African government and then, in 1979, by the Ciskei homeland, a creation of the apartheid regime. Many have collapsed entirely, leaving heaps of bricks among the encroaching vegetation. One wall of what was once described as ‘one of the finest technical workshops in the country’ is gone, so that today the two-storey building gapes open. But the oaks, under whose spreading branches students and workers attended services and assemblies, remain. Across the Tyhume River, the University of Fort Hare, Lovedale’s offspring, continues to thrive.2
Lovedale began as a station of the United Free Church of Scotland, a liberal evangelical branch of Scottish Presbyterianism. Its missionaries rejected the idea that Africans should have only enough education to equip them to be labourers and to read the Bible in their own languages. Many Lovedale missionaries, dissenting from prevailing notions of racial separation and hierarchy, refused to separate their message from its social context. James Henderson of Livingstonia Mission in Malawi, who from 1906 was principal of Lovedale, said in 1900: ‘it is not possible to stem the tide of Western civilisation if we desire it; but there is a more excellent way. Christ is in the civilisation more than we at all realise, so let us give it to them, keeping none of it back.’ There were differences of approach between individuals, and changes of emphasis over time, but in essence Monica spent her childhood surrounded by this atmosphere of high-minded Christian endeavour where it was presumed that all people, irrespective of race, are capable of the highest intellectual pursuits.3
Monica’s paternal great-great-grandfather, William Hunter, was a Scottish tailor from Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, who settled in Greenock, one of the many who had migrated to the newly industrialising Clydeside. William’s son, Monica’s great-grandfather James, perhaps married up when he took Margaret Davie, daughter of Greenock timber merchants, as his wife. James and Margaret’s son, Monica’s grandfather – another William – married Mary Hubbard. This William was a partner in Hunter, Barr & Co., the other partners being his brother James, his uncle David Hunter, his eldest son Richard, as well as James Barr. Originally a hat and cap manufacturer and retailer, the company expanded and moved into drapery manufacture and wholesale warehousing. By the early twentieth century the enterprise employed over 1 500 people, with factories in Glasgow and Leeds and branches in Edinburgh, Belfast and Newcastle. From its huge headquarters in Queen Street the firm operated a worldwide trading network. Richard Hunter, now managing director, lived on a substantial estate at Kilbarchan, Renfrewshire. In 1925 he visited his brother David and his wife Jessie in South Africa for their silver wedding anniversary and bought them their first car, a Buick, which they called ‘Dora’. Active in charitable causes and a founder of the Glasgow United Evangelical Association, Richard died in 1939 with a net worth of £160 000. His brother, William, an accountant and a partner in a Glasgow hardware business, was also active in charitable concerns; another brother, Walter, was a physician and academic. David, Monica’s father, born in 1864, was the eighth of the nine siblings who reached adulthood. His family, cosmopolitan and philanthropic, was part of the commercial and professional elite of Glasgow.4
David received a privileged private education at the Glasgow Academy, in Switzerland and later at the recently established Leys School in Cambridge. Before being called to religious service, David was an elegant young man, yachting on the Clyde and travelling in many parts of the world. In the early 1890s, he became the manager of the Liverpool branch of Croggon & Co., ‘galvanizers, roofing manufacturers, ships’ sheathing & boiler felts, tanks, iron church and house builders’. He was of independent means with about £900 a year, including £400 from the company, which was at the time a substantial middle-class income, though it made him, as he said, ‘in no sense a wealthy man’.5
David Hunter was curious about his supposedly aristocratic Scottish ancestry. Though surviving material revealed no direct connection with medieval Hunters, he was in touch with a Hunter genealogist who noted that ‘the estate of HUNTERSTOUN has been in the possession of the family since at least the beginning of the 12th century’, and that in the late thirteenth-century Ragman Roll ‘the name Ailmer de la Hunter occurs’. A real or imagined aristocratic ancestry, appropriate perhaps to hierarchical Hogsback, seems to have influenced the naming of the mountain property in South Africa, and of David and Jessie’s son, Aylmer. Monica surmised that in purchasing Hunterstoun, and planting it with trees from all over the world, David may have been asserting himself as a younger brother in relation to Richard and his ‘most beautiful’ Glentyan estate at Kilbarchan.6
Before joining Lovedale Mission, David travelled extensively through southern Africa, though he avoided Rhodesia, where the Matabele rebellion was in progress. One photograph of his trek shows him immaculate in a suit, standing by his ox-wagon with rugged retainers on his approach to Pretoria in 1893. Southern Africa was at the time a collection of colonies, Boer republics and African territories, one of which was Pondoland, where Monica later worked. Persuaded by James Stewart, principal of Lovedale, that concentrating rather than dispersing mission forces would be the best way of creating a class of educated, Christian Africans, on 6 June 1894 David accepted an appointment as honorary lay missionary at Lovedale. For the next fifteen years, even after his marriage and the birth of two children, he drew neither pay nor travel assistance from the mission. But his inherited income fell after making some poor investments during the depression in the years following the South African War. In November 1910 he wrote to the Foreign Mission Committee requesting that, in fairness to his family, he be granted a missionary’s salary and be permitted to contribute to the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund: ‘it would be possible for me to return to commercial life and so earn an income; but I have given my life to this work and the conviction deepens as the years go on that it is the work best worth doing in the world’. His request was granted. Like Monica after him, David was careful with money. Ashley Brooker nicknamed him ‘one-plum Hunter’, as he allowed the children just one plum each from the hundreds that grew on his tree. He was, however, remarkably generous when there was real need.7
Monica saw her father as ‘extraordinarily practical, and extraordinarily imaginative’. He grew a variety of trees, sourcing seeds from correspondents all over the world, and bringing them home in his pockets whenever he returned from his travels. He grew carob trees because their seedpods were potential fodder; sweet chestnuts; even luffas from seeds shaken from a bathroom luffa. This was in line with his belief in home industries, which, as its editor for many years, he stressed in the Christian Express (called the South African Outlook after 1922). David Hunter’s main achievement at Lovedale was building the Victoria Hospital. He raised money from friends and relatives and eagerly pursued government grants. He worked closely with Dr Neil MacVicar, who had been forced out of the Church of Scotland mission in Blantyre, Nyasaland, for his Unitarian views. James Stewart realised MacVicar’s quality, the Free Church was willing to tolerate his opinions, and he was appointed to Lovedale in 1902. MacVicar became board secretary and medical superintendent, and through his efforts and those of David Hunter, Victoria Hospital became the main South African centre for training African nurses. Ever willing to make contact with people of all faiths and beliefs, in 1944 David Hunter wrote to Josef Stalin and Mohandas Gandhi, sending each a copy of the New Testament. Stalin seems not to have responded, though Gandhi did.8
Monica’s mother, Jessie MacGregor, was the daughter of the Rev. William MacGregor, DD, and his wife Harvey Eliza, née Urquhart, Presbyterian missionaries in Amoy, now Xiamen, China, where she was born. William MacGregor was joint principal of a theological college, and he also taught at a boys’ academy. Jessie had lived in Germany for several years and was fluent in German; her library included works by Schiller, according to Francis Wilson. In later years, whenever Monica needed translations of German articles in connection with her work in Tanganyika, she turned to her mother. Jessie added a personal mode of spirituality to her husband’s more orthodox Presbyterianism, and Monica is reputed to have identified with a ‘fey’ Celtic trait that ran through the MacGregors. Jessie allowed young Monica substantial freedom because she believed that Aylmer, who had died at the age of six on 1 November 1912, was looking after her: ‘she “knew” this with her whole being’, Monica wrote in her later years. Two MacGregor uncles, the Rev. John MacGregor of Edinburgh and Dr George MacGregor, who practised in Didsbury, Manchester, and John MacGregor’s wife Mary, were particularly important to Monica during vacations when she was a Cambridge student. Another MacGregor uncle, William, an Amoy missionary like his father, later became a rubber planter in Malaya.9
David and Jessie Hunter combined Presbyterian plain living with a sense of hierarchy and degree; spirituality with Calvinism; canniness with imagination; and caution with an unfussy belief that the world was there to be explored. They combined the subtleties of being Scottish as well as British. While both were from the professional and business class, they became landed proprietors. They were intensely devoted to their daughter, perhaps all the more so because of Aylmer’s death, yet allowed her a freedom that was unusual for young middle-class women at the time. Jessie and Monica navigated their way deftly in this close though patriarchal family, and Monica enjoyed a stable and happy childhood, though with insecurities, which, she believed, plagued her into adulthood. She was known to family and friends as ‘Moché’ (pronounced ‘Mocky’), a nickname which stuck.10
Monica’s Houghton uncles by marriage were Irish Anglicans, transplanted from tumultuous early twentieth-century southern Ireland. This minority community confronted intractable questions of religion, nationality and class, juggling Irish nationalism and British loyalism. Some of this became apparent even in South Africa. Cecil Houghton came to South Africa as a stretcher-bearer with the imperial forces during the South African War. Afterwards, with the aim of returning to South Africa, he studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently practised in Alice. Cecil proposed to Jessie’s sister, Marie, who was visiting from China, and they were married soon afterwards.
Cecil and Marie had three children, who were Monica’s cousins and contemporaries: Margaret (‘Maga’), Iris and George. With the outbreak of the First World War, Cecil and his family returned to Britain, where he enlisted as an army doctor. He was gassed in the trenches and invalided to England, where he worked in a reception centre for the wounded. Towards the end of the war, hearing that his locum had left Alice, he decided to return. In September 1918 the Galway Castle, the ship on which he and his family were travelling, was torpedoed. Cecil and the three children survived, but Marie was lost. He went back to England and subsequently married the matron of the hospital where he was working, thereafter returning to South Africa.11
Jessie became something of a surrogate mother to Margaret and Iris, who nevertheless held on tightly to Marie’s memory: ‘they shared Jess as a mother, in a way’, according to one of Margaret’s sons. This led to an exceptionally close relationship between the cousins. When the two sisters went to Collegiate School in Port Elizabeth, Monica, who was three years older than Margaret, looked after them as though they were her siblings.12
Cecil’s brother, Kenneth, followed him to South Africa where he eventually became inspector of schools, based at Fort Beaufort. Kenneth and his wife Cheri built Innisfree at Hogsback, recalling W.B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’. Monica was a constant visitor to Innisfree, which was in many ways a counterpart to Hunterstoun, down to its fine garden. In its grounds was the expressly non-denominational St Patrick’s-on-the-Hill chapel, built by Kenneth and Cheri, and another recollection of Kenneth’s Irish origins. On 5 February 1935, Monica and Godfrey’s marriage was the first to be celebrated in the recently completed building; the guests then crossed the stream to Innisfree, where the reception was held. Kenneth and Cheri’s son, Desmond, though not a blood relative, was considered a cousin. He was the family member of her own generation to whom Monica was closest. Desmond later became professor of economics and director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University and her collaborator, with others, on the Keiskammahoek Rural Survey and the second volume of the Oxford History of South Africa.13
Kenneth Houghton’s sympathies lay with the Irish Free State. He hoisted the Irish tricolour at Innisfree in the period preceding the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1948, thereby enraging David Hunter. His close but loyally British friend retaliated by hoisting a bigger Union Jack over Hunterstoun. Thus were British, Scottish and Irish identities reflected in a remote corner of South Africa.14
The most extensive account of Monica’s childhood may be found in Francis and Lindy Wilson’s 1979 interview with her. While this part of the narrative draws extensively on this interview, the time lapse should be borne in mind.15
Monica’s first memories were ‘sudden vivid photographs – instantaneous and disconnected’. She saw Halley’s Comet in 1910, when she was two and a half years old, but more than the comet, she remembered the comfort of her father taking her, wrapped against the winter cold in a brown Shetland shawl, onto the terrace of their Lovedale house. On another occasion, she screamed petulantly when she wanted to carry all the eggs she and Aylmer had collected, and upon being told by her mother to share, she recalls the shame and guilt she felt when Aylmer said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, if it pleases her let her take them all.’ Her next memory, when she was nearly five, was of Aylmer’s death on 1 November 1912, and his funeral: ‘… and my father wanted me to kiss him and … I knew that the corpse was not my brother. And it was terrible’; and her father’s attempt to comfort Jessie: ‘There is still a child’. Monica, at seventy-one, echoed the terrible intensity of her mother’s whispered reply, ‘It’s the boy’.
From March 1913 to April 1914 Monica was in Britain with her parents. Sensing that her mother was isolated in her grief, she herself was ‘feeling very lost’ without Aylmer. It is from this time that Monica dates her sense of rejection: ‘the sort of feeling which … dogged me always of being in the way and not being wanted’. The five-year-old was ‘very, very frightened’ by the crowds, and the smell of oil and smoke on the trains and tubes nauseated her. The laconic entries in her father’s pocket diaries show, however, that he spent much time with her, walking, going to church, bringing her with him whenever he played golf, and tobogganing in the Scottish winter. Writing to David, Jessie enclosed the first extant piece of writing by Monica: the first four lines of the children’s hymn ‘Jesus Loves Me’. This is illustrated with what looks like a church, and flying birds:
Jesus loves me this I know
For the Bible tells me so
Little ones to him belong
They are weak but he is strong.
In her letter, however, Jessie herself reverts immediately to the pain of losing ‘our wee son’.16
Monica was thus exposed early to her parents’ grief, and their struggle to believe that ‘In His will is our tranquillity’. Nevertheless she was a lovable child, and far from morbid. Florence MacFarlane wrote from a Midlothian manse to the by-now six-year-old girl, ‘We have had great fun together, haven’t we? And I’ve no wee girlie to go for walks with and nobody to read fairy-tales to and I’m missing it very much … Good-bye Monica dear, don’t forget me altogether for I won’t forget you, and I shall always be interested in Lovedale now, and especially in you all … be sure and stay a real little Scottie with your McGregor tartan and ancestors!’17
Many memories were joyful or intriguing. Monica was fascinated by flowers and the natural world. The sun shining on the violas in an uncle’s garden near Glasgow made an impression ‘as vivid as anything terrible like a funeral’ and the blossom of ‘an English spring … was something absolutely miraculous’. She got ‘immense joy out of growing things for [her]self’, and the scent and colour of the flowers on her patch of ground at Lovedale were crucial to her then, as later, as is clear from a letter she wrote as a ten-year-old. She often accompanied her father as he collected and planted seed and seedlings for the ‘arboretum’ he created at Hunterstoun.18
Monica depicted herself as emotionally vulnerable in some ways, but she also acquired the skills and self-reliance characteristic of many rural white South African children, horsemanship being one example. Each year she spent three idyllic summer months and several shorter visits at Hogsback. She remembered the excitement of setting out: the huge Lovedale ox-wagon, with its span of sixteen oxen, laden with supplies, the African maids perched on top, talking excitedly, and Huidsman the coloured wagoner with his ‘enormous wagonwhip’, while the Hunters themselves followed later in a horse-drawn buggy. At the steepest point near the crest her father would hand the reins to Monica, the lightest in the group, and the adults would walk alongside, Jessie nervous for her daughter, her father reassuring her, ‘But she is perfectly capable, my dear … she’s got good hands, she can hold them all right.’ Monica learnt early from her father, as good a horseman as he had been a yachtsman, and together they traversed the Hogsback mountains and valleys on horseback and in the buggy, and, at Lovedale, rode, walked and played golf together. ‘A horse is one of the peculiar joys of Hogsback,’ Monica wrote from buNyakyusa in 1937.19
Her mother taught Monica for the first four years of schooling. She had two hours of lessons each morning, which included piano practice and homework, and was then free for the rest of the day. Monica explained, ‘The theory was that if you worked quickly, you didn’t need to stay in school very long.’ In 1919 she continued her schooling next door at the Lovedale Girls’ School. School was ‘quite entertaining’, with lively discussions about lobola (bride price), for instance, but she found it slow going after the lessons she had enjoyed with her mother. Her day began with family prayers and a reading from the Authorised Version of the Bible, ‘a sound which was deep in me from the earliest childhood’. School followed, with morning prayers for the whole station, and with the Lord’s Prayer in isiXhosa. The singing, especially the ‘splendid bass voices’ of the men, made a deep impression. Monica had both black and white teachers and classmates. Her school reports for Standards V and VI survive. In both years she came first in her class of seventeen and was praised by teachers S.F. Poto (Standard V) and R. Jeffrey (Standard VI) for her work and conduct.20
After Standard VI Monica moved to the coeducational secondary school, where she met Wellington Buthelezi. He went on to become the leader of a millenarian movement in the Transkei, drawing on the ideas of Marcus Garvey and promising that African-Americans would deliver the people from oppression. As ‘Bootlaces’, he was, however, a figure of fun to his peers at Lovedale. Her history lessons left a lasting impression on Monica, who later recalled
… a wretched woman history teacher saying, ‘Look. This is the history book and I have to follow it according to the syllabus. And it talks about “Kaffir Wars”. And I am not insulting anyone when I talk about “Kaffir Wars”. I have to because it is in the syllabus.’ And there was a sort of uproar in the class. And I became aware that there were two versions of frontier history.
From that moment, aged twelve, she was, she said, ‘extremely sceptical’ of the textbook, her scepticism reinforced by the realisation that her classmate Janet Maqoma was a descendant of Chief Maqoma, one of the main guerrilla leaders in the Frontier Wars, who fought the British from his strongholds in the nearby Waterberg. In 1963 she wrote to Rev. E.C. Lediga that she ‘vividly’ remembered the class they had both been in, and that she was ‘very proud of having been at school at Lovedale’, adding, ‘my regret is that it was not possible for my sons also to attend school with other South Africans of all colours, but I hope my grandchildren will’.21
Around the same time, there is a glimpse of eleven- and twelve-year-old Monica in the four typed issues of The Lovedale Monthly. In these mock newspapers, spelling, always a weak point with Monica, was a running joke. The ‘contributors’ are announced in the first issue as Miss Worstspeller, Mrs M. Goodspeller and Mrs K. Badspeller, each name having variants such as Worstspellar: ‘We are sure this paper will be a great success and if at first we don’t succeed we will try try again.’ In the second issue there is an editorial apology for the anticipated failure to publish in the coming June, December and January, ‘as these are holiday months and the editors are too buisy [sic] playing to write. We also beg the public to excuse all miss spellings [sic], as the editors of this paper are all in Std V and cannot yet spell very well.’ There is uninhibited ghoulishness for example in ‘The Jelly-fish Takes a Journey’, a story in the second issue that ends: ‘Dragon king’s wife very ill: “Heart’s desire”, He said to his pale bride, “I would give my life for you”. “Little good it would do me”, she answered. “Howbeit, if you fetch me a monkeys [sic] liver I will eat it and live.”’ Unfortunately for the reader, the story, ‘to be continued’, never was. Perhaps echoing Aylmer’s death, the ‘Births’ column in the fourth issue announced: ‘To Lady French, 6 Hunter St. a son who died in infancy’, and below, insistently, under ‘Deaths’, ‘Daniel de Foe infant son of Lady French. Deeply mourned’.22
Unlike many middle-class children of the time, Monica did not eat in a nursery: ‘I had meals with the family, and listened in to the grown-up conversation. I probably picked up a good deal more than was quite realised’, though she knew that nothing should be repeated. As she wrote in the last year of her life, she learnt to recognise poverty and observe stress on the veld’s productive capacity. These were ‘familiar themes of discussion at my father’s table’. Talk was lively and wide-ranging. Though ‘the whole atmosphere of the house was one of the deepest reverence … [it was] … not a slimy piety which would never have survived my mother’s laughter … she had a very ready eye for any insincerity, or put-on piety’. The Hunters welcomed and accommodated missionaries and visitors of all races, from southern Africa and elsewhere. Rather than a mere backwater, Monica experienced Lovedale as ‘a place which was very much on the frontier of Christian thinking, and missionary work’. Guests included Henri Junod, the outstanding missionary-anthropologist of his generation; John R. Mott, mission statesman and later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize; Thomas Jesse Jones of the Phelps-Stokes Fund; and journalist and novelist Winifred Holtby. ‘I remember D.D.T. Jabavu coming back from Europe, and he being very entertaining at a Sunday lunch, and wishing that other people were as interesting and entertaining as he.’ In the background were others of intellectual substance, both at Fort Hare and at Lovedale itself. Among these were Dr Alexander Roberts, principal of Lovedale Teacher Training School and senator in the South African Parliament representing African interests. He was also a highly skilled amateur astronomer, some of whose data on Southern Hemisphere skies is only now being interpreted.23
Monica also had vivid glimpses of life beyond Lovedale and South Africa. During the war her uncle George MacGregor, serving with the Manchester Regiment on the Western Front, wrote frequently to Monica between the ages of seven to nine, sometimes on hand-painted cards that convey the horror but also gaunt beauty of the blasted landscape. Church connections were useful for Monica’s stamp-collecting, a hobby she continued to enjoy into adulthood, as letters arrived from Iraq, Gold Coast, Persia, Trinidad, the New Hebrides, Nigeria and Scotland.24
Monica was, however, an only child, with the grief of Aylmer’s death ever present in her mind. She accompanied her parents on visits to his grave at Hogsback. In January 1919 Jessie and Monica went to ‘our little son’s garden’. They picked flowers and it was quiet and peaceful, and afterwards Jessie wrote: ‘How good it would have been to have him growing up beside us, but thank God our dear little Moché has been spared to us. She is so gay and sweet one prays that life may not become sad for her too soon.’ Still, Monica remained convinced that her mother would rather she had died than Aylmer, a reason, she claimed, for always wanting to be a boy. This explains, too, why later she was so happy at Girton College, Cambridge, ‘where one was given the total space to expand’.25
On 9 April 1921 the Hunter family boarded the Balmoral Castle at East London, arriving in England on 2 May. There were visits to family and friends, and David was busy with church business, including a trip to the United States from September to October 1921. He visited Booker T. Washington’s educational institute for African-Americans at Tuskegee, Alabama, an essential stop for Protestant missionaries from Africa, and attended the founding conference at Mohawk, New York, of the International Missionary Council. Jessie and Monica remained behind in Edinburgh where Monica attended St George’s School.26
Though late-nineteenth-century Scottish education was held to be far ahead of that in England, this was not generally true of girls’ schools. However, St George’s School, founded by a group of intellectual Edinburgh women in 1888, was modelled on progressive English schools such as the Cheltenham Ladies’ College and the North London Collegiate School of the Misses Beale and Buss, who rejected the idea of a distinctively female curriculum. Monica arrived at St George’s in 1921, when Elizabeth Stevenson, the last of the headmistresses ‘known to be in accord with the founding principles’, had just resigned. Stevenson, the daughter of a missionary in India, had studied at Trinity College, Dublin, at Girton College in Cambridge, and at the women’s teacher training college linked to St George’s, the first such institution in Scotland. From there she went on to become headmistress of the Collegiate School for Girls in Port Elizabeth from 1906 to 1910. This was the school that Monica attended on her return to South Africa in 1922. Stevenson believed that the educated should work for the betterment of the less fortunate and, unusually for the head of a prestigious girls’ secondary school, left St George’s to become a London County Council divisional inspector of schools in the East End, where some of the city’s poorest schools were located. After her departure, St George’s became ‘a respectable part of Edinburgh’s educational establishment’. Nonetheless, Monica’s parents had chosen the most advanced Edinburgh girls’ school available at the time. Though Monica attended neither St George’s nor Collegiate during Miss Stevenson’s tenure, the latter is an intriguing presence, prefiguring Monica in many ways.27
Monica flourished in her short time at St George’s, from October 1921 to April 1922. The headmistress wrote that she was ‘a most satisfactory pupil in every way’ and that had Monica remained at the school, she would, unusually, have been moved up a form. ‘We part with her with great regret,’ she wrote, ‘and I am sure she will do well having so purposeful a character and so much natural ability.’ Monica came first in her class of twenty-five pupils. She seems to have fitted in well with her classmates, and she and school friend Elspeth Slimon corresponded for several months following Monica’s return to South Africa.28
The Hunters arrived back in South Africa in May 1922, and in July Monica was enrolled as a boarder in Standard VII at the Collegiate School in Port Elizabeth. In later years she was highly critical of the school, contrasting it unfavourably with St George’s. She described herself as ‘unwelcome’ and a ‘freak’, and believed that there was ‘no respect for scholarship’. The food was poor, with only the bread and oranges being passable. In the same interview she recalled hearing the likes of the Bishop of Northern Rhodesia talking with her father, and was aware that the ‘mistresses were really rather ignorant about the rest of Africa’, expressing also her scepticism about the history syllabus. She argued about the accuracy of maps of the Eastern Cape frontier, and about official interpretation in general: ‘the history mistress was an Englishwoman, trained in Cambridge, and perhaps herself a little sceptical, but …obliged to follow the official line’. Yet even allowing for a brave face for her parents’ sake, Monica’s copious letters from this period give a considerably less bleak and embattled picture of her years at the school.29
Living at Lovedale, Monica made regular journeys to and from Port Elizabeth. Sometimes she journeyed to East London where she boarded a Union Castle liner; but more often she came and went by train, first from Alice to Cookhouse, and then on to Port Elizabeth. She often travelled with other girls, including her cousins, and with boys from Grey High School. In November 1923 she asked to be allowed to travel alone, when appropriate: ‘I am nearly 16 now, and that’s dreadfully old.’ Indeed, her letters from about this time begin to display an adult poise.30
Although Collegiate School had a liberal history, by the time Monica arrived it was led, as the school’s historian put it, by ‘the patriotic Miss Anderson’ (known as ‘Pan’ to her pupils). The teachers were English; ‘home’, to Monica as to others, meant Britain. The school had largely lost its earlier progressive stance epitomised by headmistress Elizabeth Molteno and her close friend Alice Greene, vice-principal in the 1890s, and later by Elizabeth Stevenson. Monica herself was no rebel, and though shy, she was also wryly self-aware. Loyal to Britain, Monica was nevertheless capable of humorous detachment, as when the visiting Prince of Wales ‘smiled and waved his cigarette at us so nicely’; a bright girl who felt herself part of the school’s elite in the ‘aristocratic attic’, she held to the beliefs of her upbringing. Though relaxed about race, her attitudes concerning class and gender were prim: a new singing mistress was ‘an impossibility’, with her ‘very low frocks, frizzed hair, very highly powdered nose, and equally high heels. Rather a curiosity for the Collegiate.’ The latter’s successor was satisfactory, despite being ‘a most peculiar little man’ whose ‘accent and grammar upset [the pupils] horribly’. Dr W.J. Viljoen, superintendent-general of education in the Cape Province, visited the school and made ‘quite a decent speech’, despite having a ‘very Dutch accent’.31
Monica’s stream of letters to her parents began during her years at Collegiate. She wrote to each parent once a week, a habit that continued almost to their deaths in 1949, whether she was in Port Elizabeth, Pondoland, Britain, Tanganyika or Northern Rhodesia. They were substantial letters – typically four handwritten pages, often more – and her parents marvelled at Monica’s capacity to write so copiously and vividly. The enormous correspondence is affectionate, lively and humorous on both sides: ‘ever so much love to you dear one’, wrote her mother in 1923, ‘[b]e happy and laugh lots. It is awkward sometimes when one always sees the funny side of things but how awful never to think things funny!’ Letters to her father are slightly more formal, but are also intensely affectionate. Whether Monica was talking about school or, later, university, discussing anthropological research or ironically reporting on life as a colonial wife and mother in Northern Rhodesia, she wrote to her parents as people with an interest in and understanding of her work and activities.32
As an adult, Monica shared an eager interest in clothes with her mother, and there are often lengthy passages about making and altering ‘frocks’, and about buying clothes for herself and for Jessie. But as an adolescent, though apparently careless of appearance, she was aware – sometimes cruelly so – of feminine sensitivities and vulnerabilities. Her mother chastised her for her rushed dressing: ‘stockings of cast iron with seams of brass could not withstand your speedy methods!’ Monica, though, was critical of a ‘disgusting little new pot’ in the dormitory, just thirteen years old, who used face-powder heavily: ‘she is absolutely the limit’, she wrote, ‘I detest her’. Monica and her friends adulterated the powder and tied up the girl’s bedclothes ‘by way of a gentle hint not to powder so!’ Two years later, now poachers turned gamekeepers, Monica and her fellow prefects rooted out and berated the ‘silly little asses’ who had ragged a nervous new girl until she collapsed in hysterics.33
Collegiate may have been academically inferior to St George’s, but it was less hierarchical: ‘we can be free with a girl in any class without anybody thinking it funny’. At first, Monica was a ‘curiosity’ because of her Scottish accent: ‘they are all persuaded I am not S.A. but altogether Scotch’. She spent many days and weekends with the McRoberts at the Presbyterian manse, where she enjoyed the open air and the flowers that she loved so much, ‘hythunces’, ‘point settiers’ and ‘booganvillias’, as she said. Later, to her delight, an imaginative botany teacher allowed her and her friends to grow flowers on school property.34
Monica recounted her friendships to her parents. Most were deemed appropriate, though some were not. She was asked out for the weekend by day-girl Ray Bloc, which was ‘jolly decent’ of her. Then Monica realised that Ray was Jewish, and played tennis on Sundays: ‘of course I would not do that sort of thing if I went … but if you rather I did not I will tell her so’. In any case she found Ray uncomfortably insistent, whereas she felt ‘sort of at home in a manse’.35
Jessie wrote that neither she nor Monica’s father wished their daughter to stay with the Bloc family: they seemed not to be ‘our kind of people’, and she knew nothing about them ‘except that they are Jews’. Monica would not be able to go to church ‘and their way of looking at things is quite different from ours. … So I am sorry dear but you will just have to say … that your Daddy and Mummy do not wish you to go’. Monica picked up the reference to Jewish identity in Jessie’s thinly veiled comments, and not long after she wrote, ‘The Jew girl is “unsquashable” – she has asked me for the next leave out. Of course I said no.’36
Who, then, were the Hunters’ ‘kind of people’? Karen Kjasgaarde, the daughter of a Danish engineer and a Scottish mother, was one such person, ‘a jolly decent sort and a lady which is more than some of the girls in the dorm are’. Monica’s best friends were Hazel Brock and Hilda Murray, daughter of a Presbyterian judge and someone who, like Monica, was ‘far more interested in natives and such things than most people’. One holiday, Hilda, who lived in Maseru, Basutoland, visited Lovedale together with Hazel, and the two girls stayed with the Hunters.37
References to ‘natives and such things’ were of course of their time. Indeed, like her mother, Monica may have been curious about inexperienced new servants: ‘I wonder what their thoughts are poor dears. I am sure if I were pitchforked into such an utterly new environment I should trek for home within the first 12 hours feeling that the whole thing was too hopelessly bewildering.’ However, though encounters with black people would mostly have been with servants, Monica had also met highly educated people like D.D.T. Jabavu and Rev. John Knox Bokwe, and most of her classmates at Lovedale were black. This prevented a simplistic approach to race, and marked Monica off from most of her Collegiate fellow pupils. Even the warning not to wander off alone from school walks because ‘[n]atives in the towns are not like our natives here [at Lovedale]’ perhaps carried the germ of future ideas.38
Monica developed a strong sense of hierarchy that was defined by intellect and appropriate behaviour rather than social status. Completing some forms, ‘for a lark’ she once wrote ‘FRSGS’ (i.e. Fellow of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society) after her father’s name. A teacher asked her what it meant and looked at her strangely: ‘I’m sure she realised “who I was and whence I had come”’. On various occasions she was pleased to emphasise her origins. In March 1925, wealthy Uncle Richard, ‘so like Daddy’, visiting South Africa with one of his daughters, Lena, took her out to dinner. Her friends had prepared a ‘most juicy and thorny apple-pie bed’ for Monica, ‘but under the influence of first-class chocs’ and impressed by the scarf and aquamarine pendant her uncle had given her, they ‘abstracted the thorns’ and ‘just gasped in envy, and made remarks about spoilt nieces’. On another occasion, Dr and Mrs Fraser, eminent Free Church missionaries in Nyasaland, called to see Monica and Margaret after visiting David and Jessie. The cousins felt proud, ‘for everyone at school realises what a Big Man Dr Frazer [sic] is since he came to speak at school’.39
Though intensely shy, Monica was also determined, and even stubborn at times. As she said in relation to an intractable algebra problem, ‘I hate being beaten.’ When she felt she was in the right she confronted the school authorities, for instance arguing until she was allowed to go on a shopping expedition: ‘I have not got the reputation of being obstinate for nothing,’ she told her mother. She was prepared to defy edicts she considered unreasonable, such as the ban on letter-writing in study periods, even when all work had been completed.40
As a prefect, Monica without difficulty quelled an unruly dormitory that had been taunting an ineffectual teacher. She regularly took part in school debates even though they embarrassed her, and she was glad that she had not been elected chair of the Debating Society, because it annoyed her ‘intensely to hear a bloody battle waging around, and not to be able to give my opinion in the matter’. She turned down a visit to the familiar McRobert family because her Presbyterian contemporaries were going elsewhere: ‘I am too shy to go alone,’ she said. She was ‘petrified’ at the thought of attending dances with boys from Grey, but when the time came she relished the amusing encounters. When she went to stay with her friend Hazel Brock she felt ‘horribly shy’ of Hazel’s brother, chastising herself for being ‘quite ridiculous, seeing he is only nineteen, and I am not given to being shy of people of that age!’ Indeed, from early on, bolstered by a strong sense of the ridiculous, she dealt with her shyness by laughing at it. When the governor-general of South Africa visited Collegiate in March 1925, the girls ‘had to curtsey when the “big-wigs”’ arrived, and Monica describes herself ‘nearly dying of horror’ at the thought of being the first to do so in a line of girls. She deeply resented the imputation of dishonesty. Chided unjustly for using an injury as an excuse to miss classes, Monica expressed extreme annoyance: ‘I hate above all things to be thought a “malinger” [sic]’.41
She had a sharp eye for what would now be called sexism. When the headmistress called in Grey boys to assist with drum-rolls at Collegiate’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, Monica wrote: ‘Pan evidently considered we could not roll drums being mere girls’. Within the family circle such issues were worked out with subtlety. Her parents’ attention and devotion were focused entirely on Monica after Aylmer’s death. Nevertheless, there are hints of a feminine conspiracy to outflank some of David Hunter’s conservative inclinations, with the women inching forward, taking care not to damage his ego. Instructing her mother, who was unwell, to go to bed, Monica says: ‘I am sure Mr Hunter can manage very well without rice pudding.’ Her father was a sabbatarian, disapproving even of Girl Guide meetings on a Sunday, but Monica submitted her name for a troop, telling him that they would do ‘the more serious sort of things’ on Sunday afternoons. Her father also disapproved of the theatre, though not necessarily of concerts. Port Elizabeth was on the itinerary of operatic recitalists touring South Africa, and Monica attended many performances in the Feather Market Hall with her schoolmates. In February 1922, Jessie wrote to Monica, ‘Daddy does not want you to go’ to a theatrical performance, striking out the phrase but leaving it perfectly visible. She was eventually allowed to attend since all the other girls were going. Thereafter she seems to have attended various plays at the school and in the city on the basis that ‘you said I might go if it was a school treat’. In June 1924 she wrote, ‘I hope you don’t mind my going … very much’ to a matinee of The Merchant of Venice the following day. It was too late to forbid her, and Jessie wrote that ‘your naughty mother is delighted that you should have such an opportunity … and I hope you enjoyed it very much indeed’. Her father was in a logical quandary: ‘my views with regard to theatres in general I would rather talk over with you than write about. A Shakespeare play rendered by a thoroughly respectable company is a different thing from the ordinary run of theatrical performances; just how the principle should be maintained is not always an easy question.’ Indeed, he could be sententious, glad for example that Monica was enjoying tennis and swimming, but admonishing his daughter: ‘don’t let them crowd out the deeper things of life – the things of the spirit’. Her mother was more relaxed, even occasionally slightly risqué, as when Monica sent her a present of stockings and garters: ‘the garters are sweet – Daddy was much interested in them’. By 1925 there seems to have been no question of Monica not attending stage performances, for example Cinderella: ‘of course there were one or two rather vulgar bits … but they were quite made up for by the rest of the parts’.42
Monica attended the Presbyterian church in Hill Street. There she heard a sermon by Dr Laws, head of Livingstonia Mission in Nyasaland, who had been invited by Rev. James McRobert. ‘After reading his life it was so thrilling to hear him preach … I was so glad I was there’, wrote Monica. In May 1925 she attended Rev. McRobert’s classes in preparation for confirmation, and joined the church that month. Her parents came from Lovedale for the event, and she left Port Elizabeth ‘in full communion with the Presbyterian Church of South Africa’. But denominationalism meant little to her, and she was happy to attend high Anglican services in churches such as the Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin.43
Monica was often annoyed by the sharp-tongued and authoritarian headmistress, who also taught Latin: ‘such a lecture from “Pan” last night on only having blue and white wraps at the beginning of the year! She is always lecturing.’ Fifty-five years later, Miss Anderson’s ‘I think you will get through Latin’, still rankled. Nonetheless, Monica could appreciate the woman’s strengths, for instance agreeing with her principle ‘not to let things slide’.44
Monica was academically ambitious – ‘I like having places it makes it much more exciting’ – and successful, though she did not dominate as she had at St George’s. ‘I am top at last! 83%’ she wrote in March 1923. She achieved a first-class pass in the Junior Certificate at the end of 1923, to the delight of the headmistress, though Monica was disappointed in her three Bs and three Cs. She was taken aback that the ‘quite … decent’ school library was only open on Sundays, ‘and you can’t take out books’, a genuine annoyance, as she read widely. In one letter she mentions books by Rose Macaulay, J.M. Barrie, Jane Austen and, somewhat defensively, Zane Grey. She had always thought Grey ‘rather shocking’, but The Spirit of the Border was an adventure story like Ballantyne’s or Buchan’s, ‘only Red Indians. Some missionaries come into it … and they are awfully nice.’ Robert Louis Stevenson and Kipling were two more of her favourite authors.45
From early on, Monica focused on history, getting good marks and favourable comments in her reports. Writing home, she said: ‘When I start reading it I want to go on and on … I would like to specialise in History some day.’ She had been ‘hopelessly bitten by a craze for History’. Her father encouraged her, arguing that it was important for understanding ‘the white races and the “climbing” races such as the Bantu’. She supposed it was ‘rank heresy’, but she disliked what she took to be Van Riebeeck’s arrogance, and Theal’s historical works did not appeal to her. She was not wholly sympathetic to the Voortrekkers’ allegations of discrimination by the British government: ‘British prejudice on my part I spose cause [sic] they did have a jolly thin time of it’. And about criticisms of missionaries said to have interfered in ‘“questions they did not at all understand”’, she declared: ‘it makes my blood boil’. Some of her school history notes survive: neat and clear, they cover the overwhelmingly Eurocentric themes of the day.46
Monica was not simply a narrow crammer, however. Her interests ranged from mathematics to art and music, and she played the piano. She was keen, too, on national and international politics, for example attending a lecture by the respected liberal Mabel Palmer on the League of Nations; indeed, in later years the League of Nations Union would play an important role in Monica’s life. An accomplished seamstress, Monica made garments for herself and for her mother. She played hockey and tennis and collected stamps. Her first published writing dates from Collegiate: a one-page ‘Essay on Travel’ in the school magazine, which focused on the Scottish Highlands and water, ‘a joy to one who comes from this dry and thirsty land’. Though Monica loved Scotland, she concluded, ‘in spite of all I love South Africa more’.47
Monica was studious but not solemn. Do not get the notion, she said to her mother as she moved into her final year, ‘that we are growing pale and haggard. On the contrary, I laugh and grow fat.’ There are many accounts of schoolgirl exuberance: ‘Hazel and I had a wild game before undressing … just to let off steam.’ At the prospect of reading out her English essay in class, she said: ‘everyone is sure to chortle at mine – they always do’. As at Girton later, she perceived education as being far more than mere examinations. In the run-up to her matric, she was lectured by the headmistress ‘on the enormity of taking music “these last few months”’. Monica ‘listened outwardly meek, inwardly boiling’, explaining that her parents were keen for her to continue with music. Her father was glad she ‘stuck to her guns about music’ and commented that the narrow focus on examinations did ‘not sound to [him] to be true education’. Two years previously, her mother had written to Monica that she was ‘sure exams are a huge mistake – use up far too much nervous energy in their useless anxiety’. She advised her daughter to ‘forget them as soon as they are over’. Indeed, only one girl achieved a first-class matric, and Monica was among the six who gained a second-class pass. Nevertheless, her ability was recognised by the school. Her father proudly transcribed the headmistress’s testimonial into his diary under ‘Memoranda’, where he generally wrote improving religious texts: ‘[Monica’s] influence has been very helpful and she leaves a splendid record behind her.’48
Decisively for Monica’s future, in March 1925 her parents broached the question of university education ‘at home’, that is, England. The year before, her forty-year-old cousin Lena, Richard Hunter’s daughter, had apparently discussed the possibility with Monica. Her mother wrote to Monica confidentially – ‘terribly silent people we are!’ – that if she went to Rhodes University College she might ‘never reach college at home at all’. Monica agreed, adding, ‘of course it all depends on what will suit the family’. She enquired about Girton College in Cambridge from Dorothy Ruffell, her history teacher, herself a Cambridge graduate from Newnham, who was not confident that Monica could in the time available master the English history required for the entrance examination. Nevertheless, on 15 September 1925 her father submitted the registration fee and application for Girton. In support, Miss Anderson wrote of Monica’s ability, her ‘fine and well balanced character’ and ‘excellent home’; her two medical uncles, Professor Walter Hunter and Dr George MacGregor, were her referees; and her uncle John MacGregor, the Edinburgh pastor, was to act as her guardian. Though Girton was from the beginning Monica’s first choice, she and her parents also investigated and applied for most of the best-known English women’s colleges. She did not apply to any Scottish institutions.49
‘Moché works as usual early and late’
By now a young woman of eighteen, Monica was finished with conventional schooling. Though shy, she was intrepid. Her parents managed to balance protectiveness with freedom, a policy involving calculated risks. David gave a laconic but heartfelt account of one alarming episode: on 1 January 1926 at 4.15 a.m. he dropped Monica at the Hogsback Inn so that she could climb the Hogsback peaks, apparently alone. He returned to the hotel at 9.00 p.m., but she was not there. On 2 January, his diary entry reads: ‘Moché returned 10 a.m. LausDeo!’ His daughter had been overtaken by darkness on the mountains. Later that month she had a less dramatic but similarly adventurous expedition to Basutoland, going by train to Maseru for a holiday with her school friend Hilda Murray. She found the differences between Sotho and Xhosa life fascinating and noted the details of villages and agriculture. Yet the round of entertainments rapidly palled, and she wrote to her father that though she enjoyed ‘having a bit of an orgy once and away’, she was ‘perfectly satisfied (and rather pleased) to spend the rest of the holidays in sheep-sheds and such places! No regrets!’ In April, having taken lessons from her father, Monica got her driver’s licence.50
She returned to Collegiate in 1926 to prepare for her entrance examinations for Girton and other colleges. This arrangement was unsatisfactory from the start and in retrospect a ‘total loss’, though Miss Anderson was reluctant to see Monica go. Dorothy Ruffell had been replaced as history teacher by Miss Frazer, a Cambridge graduate fresh from Girton. She was unsystematic and erratic, believing that Monica could never cover in time the History of England and the British Empire, and Europe from 1494, the required syllabus for entry to Girton. Monica was also not getting sufficient help with Latin. Miss Anderson thought that Monica’s spelling and handwriting would count against her in her applications. With all this, Monica eventually decided that she would be better off at home, helped with French by her mother and possibly coached in history by Dorothy Ruffell, who had moved to Lovedale. Books could be mailed from the Port Elizabeth public library to Lovedale, and on 26 March Monica left Collegiate. She wrote two sets of entrance examinations in December 1926 and the following February.51
From March 1926 Monica was at home for a year and so there is no correspondence with her parents. Nevertheless, her father’s pocket diaries and some other sources give a reasonably clear outline of her life. In 1979 Monica wrote the following: ‘Hogsback. Freedom at home to walk. Kweta school. Reading at home. Desultory. Tolstoi. Resurrection.’ Though sketchy, it is clear that she revelled in the freedom and space of Hogsback; that she had an encounter with abakwetha initiates, young isiXhosa-speaking men undergoing the rites of passage to full manhood, involving circumcision; and, though she read somewhat aimlessly, she was impressed by Resurrection, Tolstoy’s 1899 novel attacking upper-class hypocrisy and organised religion.52
Back at Lovedale, Monica either attended classes or was privately tutored at Fort Hare. On 10 April David ‘arranged with J.L. [Rev. Dr John Lennox, warden of Iona House and tutor of Presbyterian students at Fort Hare] re Latin class’. In October he paid £2-2-0 to Fort Hare for ‘Monica’s fees’. It is likely that Dorothy Ruffell tutored Monica in history, since David’s diary indicates that she was frequently at the Hunters for supper. Whatever the precise form of her studies, Jessie wrote to David that ‘Moché works as usual early and late. I feel concerned about her for it will be such a bitter disappointment to her if she does not get into either Oxford or Cambridge … the only consolation is that she is certainly getting more help in Latin and History than she did at school’. Later, she wrote from Hogsback that ‘the girls’ must not disturb Monica with ‘“eggs” and “fowls”’ and similar housekeeping issues.53
Apart from the formal instruction, Lovedale was a good place to prepare for university entrance. It was by no means a rustic backwater. In some respects its intellectual life, combined with that of Fort Hare, was in advance of provincial cities like Port Elizabeth. A branch of the League of Nations Union, of which David and Jessie were members, was established at Lovedale before Port Elizabeth, and, for instance, Jessie and Monica attended a lecture in Lovedale’s Cuthbert Library in May 1926 on ‘The Flaming Terrapin’, enfant terrible Roy Campbell’s recent poem.54
The following year, on 4 March 1927, David accompanied Monica and Jessie to the East London jetty, and mother and daughter embarked for England.55