Out of Mind – A story of Robben Island, by Barbara Townsend
‘When a man is out of sight, it is not too long before he is out of mind.’ (Victor Hugo). This is the quotation Barbara Townsend has chosen as the epigraph of her novel, Out of Mind – A story of Robben Island.
In the preview of an article about Robben Island (‘Playground Robben Island? (South Africa).’ Queen's Quarterly, vol. 104, no. 3, fall 1997) Kogila Moodley says, ‘from 1846 to 1931 the island accommodated lepers, chronically ill poor, and people designated as lunatics. The lepers are said to have wept so fiercely upon arrival that their point of entry is known as the “gate of tears.” A lepers' church and graveyard, a Muslim kramat, an Anglican church, a lighthouse, and a dull prison tract with various administrative buildings and staff houses are scattered across the Cape Town side of the island. A few ostriches, bushbok, and penguins occupy the rest of the wild southern side.’
This forbiddingly inhospitable place is where much of Out of Mind plays out. The year is 1908 and Robben Island is a microcosm of a social and political order where people are supposed to know their place according to the dictates of a strict hierarchy. White men must know their place according to rank and seniority, white women have no place except for the few who make it out of the kitchen and into careers such as nursing and teaching, and even then, once they marry, they lose their jobs and are expected to be become willing helpmeets to their husbands. People of colour are at the very bottom of the pecking order and the question of their rights isn’t open to debate as far as the English colonial system is concerned.
This is where Reggie van Riet and Vera Godwin meet. Vera is a young theatre nurse on the island; Reggie has been brought over from the mainland to supervise a beautification project. The island has been under recent scrutiny by the government and found to be lacking in many ways. One idea for improvement is to make Robben Island into a ‘garden as lovely as any in England’ and to this end ranunculas, daffodils, anemones and irises (a thousand bulbs of each) are on order. Trees are also arriving, from all corners of the world, and Reggie and Tom Harris, another young clerk on the island, have been tasked with overseeing the care of the new plants.
At the head of the island sit Doctor Saunders, the Chief Medical Officer, and the Commissioner (and his wife, the formidable Mrs Adler). Below them fall government clerks, the lighthouse keeper, the minister (and *his* wife, the bracingly wonderful Mrs Braithwaite), the staff of the leper colony, asylum and convict station and various people of colour – workers who clean and cook and tend to the plants.
Reggie is shaped by the dictates of the time. He’s a young man who wants to get ahead, who sees the time he has to spend on Robben Island as a necessary step up the ladder, one that will lead to promotion, and, if he doesn’t blot his copy book, to a better position back on the mainland. Vera struggles against convention, choosing time and time again to follow her conscience, no matter what trouble this might cause. She’s an intelligent, sensitive woman and the plight of the people on the island affects her profoundly. Her behaviour causes raised eyebrows among the upper echelons, but she isn’t deterred.
Vera is young and beautiful, and Reggie is immediately smitten by her. She’s also aloof and unapproachable, but slowly a romance blossoms. This is not to Doctor Saunders’s liking. He is Vera’s guardian and doesn’t approve her becoming involved with any young man.
Four characters tell the story of Out of Mind: Vera, Reggie, Harris and Leentjie, a young serving maid. Their voices are distinctive and true and as the story progresses, we see how they handle the challenges that life throws at them. And there certainly are challenges to be faced. Each of them has a secret: one because of something that happened in the past, one because of their current lifestyle, one because of what has been done to them, one because of an unrequited love. But secrets have a way of worming their way to the surface, no matter how well they are hidden … For some characters this is all to the good, others have to face the consequences of their actions.
Vera’s is the story that holds the novel together, and the more we read of her, the more we come to love her, for her indomitable spirit, her clearsighted gaze, her sense of justice, her loyalty, her wisdom and her resourcefulness.
Vera, Reggie, Harris and Leentjie’s stories interweave, with each other and with the other people living on the island and mainland. There’s Phyllida, the lighthouse keeper’s beautiful daughter; Vincent Wade the ferry skipper’s handsome son; Willis, the storeman; Ant Katie, the washerwoman who looks after Leentjie; Jacob, Leentjie’s father; Leentjie’s mother; Auntie Dot, Harris’s aunt; Lucy Watts and Cecily Swann, women on the mainland; Reggie’s mother, and his sister, Lily. Each has a part to play and each is created in tangible detail, from Vincent’s piercing blue eyes to Cecily Swann’s evocative scent.
Just as the main characters have untold stories and dark secrets, so too does the island. It’s the story of the unwanted, the ‘undesirables’, the terminally ill, those classified insane, those classified politically dangerous. Those who have passed through the Gate of Tears with little hope of ever being able to leave. From the mid-1960s to 1991, Robben Island served as South Africa’s maximum-security prison for political prisoners, an infamous time that is well-known and documented. Barbara Townsend has taken a lesser-known history before this and with meticulous attention to detail and true flair for telling a great story she has brought another moment in Robben Island’s unhappy past to life.
Out of Mind is a love story. It’s a love story with a twist. It’s a reflection on patriarchal attitudes, on the restrictions placed on women, particularly those courageous enough to buck the system. It’s a story set in a bleak place, but the thread of kindness that runs through it in the interactions between some of the women allows gentleness and hope to lighten the narrative. Out of Mind shows women working together to help each other (or, in some cases, to censure each other for daring to be brave). It makes me grateful to be living in the twenty-first century, even though the freedoms that women like Vera struggled for are still under threat. Vera, and those who surround her, are characters to invest in, some because they are so very twisted and appalling, others because we are stunned by their hypocrisy, yet others – and these are the most important – because we want the very best for them; *all* of them because we’ll remember their story long after we reluctantly turn the last page of Out of Mind – A Story of Robben Island.
