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Synopsis
Joanna Burton was born in South Africa but sent by her missionary father to be raised in Yorkshire. There she dreams of the far-off lands she will visit and adventures to come. At eighteen, tall and flaxen-haired, she meets Teddy Leigh, a young man on his way to the trenches of the First World War. Joanna has been in love before - with Sir Walter Raleigh, with the Scarlet Pimpernel, with Coriolanus - but this is different. Teddy tells her he's been given the world to wear as a golden ball. Joanna believes him and marries him, but the fabled shores recede into the distance when, after the war, Teddy returns in ill health. The magic land turns out to be the harsh reality of motherhood and life on a Yorkshire farm. Yet still she dares to dream.
Release date: June 2, 2011
Publisher: Virago
Print pages: 287
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The Land Of Green Ginger
Winifred Holtby
When the Reverend Ambrose Entwhistle had been for six months in his grave, his widow besought an Eternal Father in Heaven
to substitute His Providence for that of a mortal father upon earth, and to assist Nature and Society in the provision of
husbands for her girls. She therefore felt appropriate gratitude when the Bishop of Kingsport developed jaundice, and the
S.P.G. Bazaar was opened for him by the Reverend Robert Harringly Burton. Mr Burton came from the Fort Carey Mission, Eastern
Province, Cape Colony, and if his opportune arrival resulted from the intervention of Providence, to Mrs Entwhistle alone
belongs the credit for selecting her daughter Edith to superintend the African stall at the bazaar.
For Edith, tall, brown-haired and dreamy, had an incongruous taste for travel, and spent time more profitably devoted to the occupations of needlework and distributing Parish Magazines, in devouring unladylike literature from the Kingsport Free
Library, such as A Voyage up the Amazon, The Coast of Blood and Gold, and Kelsey’s Islands of the Pacific. Mrs Entwhistle had read none of these works, but she had her own ideas about Amazons, and considered that the sooner this sad
failing was transformed into advantage, the better for Edith, for herself, and for the household in Park Street, Kingsport.
The advantage revealed itself. The yellow beard and uncouth gestures of the middle-aged missionary, which aroused the derision
of Emily, Kate and Helen, were glorified for Edith by the glamour of his adventures. She stood with soft parted lips and glowing
cheeks while in abrupt and disconnected phrases he told the ladies at the S.P.G. Bazaar of the native Missionary College,
built by his efforts, of the chapel in a rondavel, where he celebrated Holy Communion to brethren black, but in the Lord’s
sight, comely; of the round thatched huts among the prickly pear bushes where the baboons walked in grotesque procession,
and of the lordly warriors who laid aside the ochre-stained blankets of their heathen life to don the sober raiment of Christianity.
And the Reverend Robert Harringly Burton, seeing her slender figure in white spotted muslin, her gentle rapture, and her wondering
eyes, suddenly knew that he had been sore with loneliness, and that the Gospel light would burn far brighter if illuminated
by such innocent and tender grace.
Their courtship was necessarily brief, because Mr Burton had promised to attend three missionary congresses, to read a paper
before the Geographical Society, and to return to South Africa after Christmas. But Mrs Entwhistle was a practical woman,
and Edith’s trousseau grew under the flying fingers of herself and her four daughters, until on January 14th, 1896, Edith found
herself leaning over the railing of the steamer, while the deep brownish-grey water of the Thames rushed past with silent
dark intensity.
The boat seemed to be perfectly still. It was the low white coast between Tilbury and the sea; it was the smooth subtle river,
which flew away from her. England was flying away. The red-brick rectory at Cattleholme on the wolds, where the snowdrops
in February pierced the black earth below the briar bush; the bedroom with blue knots on the wall paper, which she shared
with Kate in the house at Park Street, Kingsport; her workbox in the back sitting-room, the Mothers’ Union meetings; the red
plush hassocks in the Church of St Michael and All Angels – all these were flying away. While she herself, since the day not
three months ago when she had stood by the African Stall selling kettleholders, had done nothing at all. She had remained
as quiet as the snow-wreathed ship. And yet she had done everything. She had left Kingsport for ever. She had been married.
She was sailing out on a real ship across the sea. She was Saint Paul, setting forth towards Rome. She was Sir Walter Raleigh,
seeking El Dorado.
With the low, flat coasts, ridged by their frozen roofs, the familiar things all fell away from her, and a small round unfamiliar
sun, flat as a sovereign thrown on a grey silk tablecloth, hung in the snow-filled sky to watch them go.
She turned to her husband. ‘Oh, I’m happy, happy, happy. It’s too lovely. Too romantic. It seems to me impossible.’
He regarded her with hungry yet detached affection. ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘With God all things are possible.’
His hand met hers in her little seal-skin muff.
Edith Burton’s child was born eighteen months after her marriage, fifteen months after her arrival in Fort Carey.
The journey had enchanted her. Its discomforts enhanced its magic and destroyed its tedium. Fort Carey itself with its oak
trees, its village green, its wooden houses, and the gossiping, vivid, restricted social life of the officers’ wives, both
pleased and disappointed her. An Africa which tried to be as much as possible like England dissatisfied her craving for the
remarkable, and the barely concealed distaste of the ladies for her husband’s calling aroused her indignation. She learned
that officers’ wives thought the natives happier and better without missionary interference, which ‘put ideas into their heads’,
and augmented the danger of risings. ‘Ah, my dear,’ they told her, ‘when you have been in Africa as long as we have, you will
think differently.’
She climbed with relief into the ox-wagon which was to convey her, her brass bedstead from Port Elizabeth, and the cases of
new books, out to the mission station forty-two miles away.
She saw the parched and twisted valleys where the baboons walked in colonies. She saw the bushes of prickly pear crouched
in fantastic attitudes, thousand-armed, pulpy-breasted, like the lascivious goddess of the Ephesians pictured in her Bible
Concordance. She saw the cool, transparent cup of the evening sky warmed at the rim by burning hills, and the goats, with
bearded, provocative faces, mocking her from their grim banquet of thorns.
She saw the group of rondavels which formed the mission station, the chapel hut with its smooth, earthen floor, its circular
walls and pointed roof of thatch, and all the curiously assorted treasures collected for it by her husband, the Crucifix fashioned
from a Russian Pax, its brass kissed smooth by pious lips, the hood of a cope made from a Kaffir blanket, embroidered in gold
thread from Persia; the altar cloth that had once decorated the tea-table of a colonel’s wife.
She saw the hut provided for her use, not thirty yards from the main building of the college, where her husband had slept
on the veranda with his students, his bed at one end only distinguished from theirs by a neat white sheet between the rough
brown blankets. He slept with her now on the new brass bedstead bought in Port Elizabeth, but his days were completely occupied
by the discovery of misfortunes which had occurred during his absence, by disagreement with his white assistants, and by perturbation
of spirit over the shortcomings of his black but comely brethren.
Edith was therefore left to learn many things for herself.
She learned that a missionary’s life was not, as she had supposed it, a series of fervent journeys into heathern lands, illuminated
by moments of spiritual radiance, when a few kneeling converts opened their eyes to the Gospel Light. It was rather a succession
of skirmishes with official prejudice about the transport of mealies, the local status of native preachers, and the enclosure
of commonage.
She learned to house-keep upon chickens, rice, goats’ milk and yams, to endure mosquito bites, the ravages of white and brown
ants upon her furniture, and the labour of dealing with a people whose tongue she did not understand, and whose alien colour,
scent and presence she found unexpectedly disturbing.
She learned, moreover, that life cannot be lived quite objectively. Her eyes and ears were rich with wonderment; her heart
was curiously bare. Her husband, a kind, affectionate and preoccupied priest, hardly showed more concern for her than had
her father, who had also been a kind, affectionate and preoccupied priest. She was lonely beyond description, but not at all
unhappy, diverted from hour to hour by the strange ecstasies of discovery, the perilous delights of an enchanted world. Always
the doors of her heart stood a little ajar to receive some new wonder. When she found that she was going to have a child,
she thought, ‘This is the wonder.’
To have a child in Kingsport was, she knew, an ordinary and somewhat prosaic business. There were doctors; there was a nurse;
there were presents from relatives, of woolly coats, and cot-covers. There was a whispering atmosphere of pleasurable fear.
To have a child in South Africa was a somewhat perilous but wholly desirable adventure. The ladies of Fort Carey urged the
expediency of bringing Mrs Burton into the township. Mr Burton, however, believed in the efficacy of Black Labour. Edith,
prejudiced against the ladies by her recollection of unhappy tea-parties, and assured of her husband’s infallibility, elected
to remain.
On a fresh, exquisite June day, when the air challenged the shadows with a clear blue light, she walked down the path to the
valley and stumbled on the shadow of a rock that swarmed suddenly about her face in a cloud of purple butterflies. Her surprise
and consequent fall terminated in the birth of a girl child before the doctor could be summoned from Fort Carey. When he arrived,
accompanied by Colonel Fanshawe’s wife, who had most irritated Edith by her superiority, but who now rode the forty-two miles to her assistance, the child was wailing healthily,
but Edith lay flushed and in pain, her wide eyes bright with dismay. She could not believe in this abrupt ending to her pilgrimage,
while its supreme adventure still eluded her. She died three days later of puerperal fever, demanding from her distracted
husband a bowl of aconites and snowdrops from the shrubbery at Cattleholme Rectory.
Mrs Fanshawe’s indignation at Mr Burton’s ineptitude was quenched by her pity for his despair. His militant spirit could fight
all wills but that of the Lord, so clearly manifest in His injunction of celibacy. When Mrs Fanshawe suggested that the Mission
was an unsuitable place for the upbringing of a child, and that it should be conveyed as soon as possible to its aunts and
grandmother in England, he acquiesced. The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
So in the third week of her life, Edith’s daughter was christened in the rondavel chapel. She was called Joanna, after the
Spanish wife of Sir Harry Smith, who followed his camp in the Peninsular War, and later accompanied him to South Africa, to
give her beautiful name to hills and towns in the Eastern Province. The small Joanna, attended by a subaltern’s wife going
home on leave, thus returned by the route along which her mother had adventured, to the house in Park Street, Kingsport.
On the day before Christmas Eve, Joanna walked with her aunts Kate and Emily up Friarsgate, Kingsport. Friarsgate is a grey,
narrow canyon between beetling cliffs. Usually the cliffs are blank grey and angry brown, but at night they blossom surprisingly with orange flowers that leap to light in a dramatic
climax of surprises.
Joanna, who was eight years old, danced two or three yards ahead of her aunts, singing in a soft little happy voice, ‘Christmas
is coming! Christmas is coming!’ Because of the shop-windows full of holly and toys and groceries in scarlet frilled paper,
and silver tinsel, and trumpets, and mistletoe, she was so happy that her little blue serge dress felt as though it must burst
from the swelling of her breast.
‘Joanna, Joanna,’ called Aunt Emily, and Joanna stopped.
‘We turn up here,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Helen said that she thought he lived in Commercial Lane.’
‘Helen thinks a great deal too much,’ replied Aunt Emily acidly. Aunt Helen was engaged to Mr Braddon, of Braddon’s, Elk and
Braddon’s, Coal Exporters, and did think a good deal of herself, which was hardly surprising, considered Joanna, seeing that
she had such lovely underclothes all with little tucks and embroidery, lying out on the spare room bed.
‘I don’t think that this is Commercial Lane,’ said Aunt Kate, screwing up her short-sighted eyes behind her glasses. They
were seeking an electrician who, Aunt Helen had thought, might come even at the eleventh hour to mend a bell, dumb at so inconvenient
a season. Joanna, who rarely went out on late shopping expeditions, jigged up and down singing her private song.
‘Joanna, my dear, your eyes are younger than mine,’ said Aunt Emily. Joanna was always hearing that her eyes or her legs were
younger than other people’s, an observation so apparent that she wondered why people troubled to make it. But being an obliging child, she never resented the requests to make use of her youth which invariably followed.
Joanna stood on tiptoe, feeling tremendously important, and peered up at the letters half hidden in the obscurity of the dirt
and darkness.
‘The – Land – of – Green – Ginger,’ she read incredulously. ‘The Land of Green Ginger.’
It was unbelievable. It was inevitable. On such a night of course such things must happen. Only they never had happened before.
‘Aunt Emily. Auntie. Auntie! It’s called the Land of Green Ginger.’
Why did her aunts not share the wonder of her delight?
‘Of course,’ said Aunt Kate crossly. ‘Commercial Lane is the next turning. I told you that it was right at the end of the
street. If I’d known it was so far I’d never have said I’d come.’
‘But the Land of Green Ginger, Auntie? The Land of Green Ginger?’
Was it really possible that having found it, they would not enter in? That like Moses – or was it Abraham? – Joanna was not
very good at Scripture, except about the countries – That like Moses they would look at the Promised Land and never enter
it?
But they were gathering up their skirts. They were settling the strings of parcels more comfortably across their gloves. They
were moving on.
‘But Auntie, Auntie, we can’t just – just leave it, can we?’
To be offered such gifts of fortune, to seek Commercial Lane and to find – the day before Christmas Eve and by lamplight too
– The Land of Green Ginger, dark, narrow, mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa, which was the goal of all men’s longing, the place
where Father lived in a rondavel, the place …
Her aunts were moving away. Relentlessly, majestically, with skirts well lifted from the muddy road, and firm boots laced
against the slithery grease of the pavement, they moved forward.
‘But Auntie, we must stay, mustn’t we? We shall come back, shan’t we? We must just look, just a little look?’ If she were
very modest in her requests she might perhaps break this monstrous spell of indifference.
‘Now come along, Joanna, and don’t be a naughty girl,’ chanted Aunt Kate in the accepted formula.
‘But Auntie … ’
‘Hurry up, dear, and walk nicely. Don’t drag your feet like that. It spoils your new boots. Yes, of course we shall come back
some time. Well, Emily, what about some chestnuts for the turkey stuffing? Mother said that if there were any nice ones …
’
The three moved on.
In the summer of 1914, misfortune came upon Joanna. Her father died while on an expedition through the Transkei, and she failed
to matriculate in Mathematics and Latin.
Her aunts Kate and Emily – Aunt Helen, now safely married, had children of her own, and Grandmother was dead – became seriously
perturbed about their niece’s future. The Reverend Robert Harringly Burton had left a will but no money. All his earthly goods had been expended upon the Mission College. The house in Park Street had been maintained partly
by remittances every year from Fort Carey, and Joanna was just eighteen. They wept a little over the combined misfortune.
Joanna did not weep, but with a stiff little smile and a queer pain in the side of her chest, she sought her two great friends
at the Kingsport High School, Agnes Darlington and Rachel Harris.
They took counsel together.
Joanna told them the facts as she had heard them, then added the real cause of her fears.
‘Of course this means that I can’t go to Fort Carey.’
They nodded sympathetically. Both girls knew that Joanna regarded England as a place from which one sailed for South Africa,
or possibly China or Bolivia or Thibet, or anywhere attractively remote. Yet all roads hitherto had led to Fort Carey at last.
‘You can still travel,’ said Rachel firmly. ‘You can always do what you want to do, if you want hard enough.’
‘Darling, it’s beastly for you. Come and stay with my family in Manchuria,’ murmured Agnes, biting a daisy stalk.
They lay together in a corner of the cricket ground, and as Rachel was a prefect, and Joanna the tennis captain, and all three
in the sixth form, they were left undisturbed in Olympian detachment.
‘All that you have to do is to want enough,’ said Rachel. She was a small ardent Jewess, with the rich beauty of her race
and most decided opinions. ‘Look how I fought my parents to get them to let me try for Somerville. People will always give
way to you if you really mean to do something, and all getting on in life is making people give way.’ Rachel always talked as
though she knew all about life. As a matter of fact, her physical and mental maturity was remarkable, though not so remarkable
as Agnes and Joanna thought. ‘It’s your own fault, Joanna, if you’re a lazy little hound. Look at the way you messed up your
matric. It’s the indolent people, pleasant and popular like yourself, who make things so hard for the fighters. We’re never
so nice as you are because we see beyond our noses and try to get there.’
‘Rachel, dearest, don’t scold today. Our beloved Joanna is distressed,’ remarked Agnes, peacefully weaving a daisy-chain but
glancing from Rachel’s vehement little face to Joanna’s flushed agitation.
‘Joanna wouldn’t like me half so much if I didn’t scold her. She prefers to think of her friends as more clever and virtuous
than herself, because this excuses her from making the efforts that she ought to make, and justifies her illusions about a
very wicked world.’
‘My lamb,’ comforted Agnes. ‘Rachel went to a Suffragette meeting in the Town Hall last night, and it went to her head a little.
The Hebrew mind takes its politics seriously, as Miss Phillips said in O.T. class yesterday.’ Rachel was, fortunately, one
of those Jewesses with whom one could discuss anti-Semitism and jokes about Jews. ‘Don’t let her bother you. My family’s moving
to Kirin Province next August. Come out with me when we leave school and we’ll see lovely things. Korea is cold, and Japanese
hotels lack privacy, but they are clean and there are lovely down quilts and paper screens and friendly little policemen.
And we’ll go South to Yunnanfu, where the streets are full of brigands and mandarins, and palanquins and swaying oxen dragging heavy carts.’
Joanna’s eyes grew dim with pleasure and consolation. She cupped her chin on her long hands and smiled across at Agnes.
‘It must be wonderful to be the daughter of a Chinese customs official.’
‘Not nearly so wonderful as to go to China because of your own efforts. It’s the curse of women to think of themselves just
as “somebody’s daughter”. What do you think of men who think of themselves as “somebody’s son”?’
‘But that’s just how all the best sons in China do regard themselves. Joanna has a Chinese mind,’ said Agnes serenely. She
and Joanna smiled at one another, lazily, secretly, sharing a deep extravagant love of the strange places where both had been
born. Joanna’s mind became full of palanquins and exquisitely caparisoned camels, and temples with roofs ingeniously curled,
tinkling with bells and brilliantly coloured; and as she smiled across the daisies at her friends, she forgot that her heart
was sore with disappointment and the shock of amputating from her personality an unknown but always anticipated father. She
became intoxicated by her own vague, lovely vision of a world enriched with so many curious and coloured creatures.
‘When I leave school I shall see all the world, and travel for ever and ever,’ she crooned dreamily.
The daisies opened their eyes wide in wonder that anyone, having seen them, should desire more abundant pleasures.
Six weeks later the declaration of War provided an unmatriculated Joanna with the remunerative position for which her aunts
had prayed.
Sister Warren of the South Park Nursing Home, Kingsport, where Aunt Helen had stayed during the birth of her first baby, lost
two valuable nurses, and had to attend to operations herself in consequence. Therefore she took Joanna into her office as
assistant secretary at a salary of twenty-five shillings a week.
Joanna thus left school for ever, bought three grey overalls and a fountain pen, pinned up her thick fair hair, and set herself
to learn the mysteries of petty cash, night-specials, and reduced terms. Because she was, beyond all her other loves, in love
with life, she found it very interesting.
She was, moreover, an unexpected success, for though she sometimes forgot messages, or sorted linen into the wrong bundles, the nurses liked her. And even when she charged 4d twice
for soda-water, the patients liked her too. Her capacity for endowing the commonplace with transcendental qualities enabled
her to see South Pa. . .
to substitute His Providence for that of a mortal father upon earth, and to assist Nature and Society in the provision of
husbands for her girls. She therefore felt appropriate gratitude when the Bishop of Kingsport developed jaundice, and the
S.P.G. Bazaar was opened for him by the Reverend Robert Harringly Burton. Mr Burton came from the Fort Carey Mission, Eastern
Province, Cape Colony, and if his opportune arrival resulted from the intervention of Providence, to Mrs Entwhistle alone
belongs the credit for selecting her daughter Edith to superintend the African stall at the bazaar.
For Edith, tall, brown-haired and dreamy, had an incongruous taste for travel, and spent time more profitably devoted to the occupations of needlework and distributing Parish Magazines, in devouring unladylike literature from the Kingsport Free
Library, such as A Voyage up the Amazon, The Coast of Blood and Gold, and Kelsey’s Islands of the Pacific. Mrs Entwhistle had read none of these works, but she had her own ideas about Amazons, and considered that the sooner this sad
failing was transformed into advantage, the better for Edith, for herself, and for the household in Park Street, Kingsport.
The advantage revealed itself. The yellow beard and uncouth gestures of the middle-aged missionary, which aroused the derision
of Emily, Kate and Helen, were glorified for Edith by the glamour of his adventures. She stood with soft parted lips and glowing
cheeks while in abrupt and disconnected phrases he told the ladies at the S.P.G. Bazaar of the native Missionary College,
built by his efforts, of the chapel in a rondavel, where he celebrated Holy Communion to brethren black, but in the Lord’s
sight, comely; of the round thatched huts among the prickly pear bushes where the baboons walked in grotesque procession,
and of the lordly warriors who laid aside the ochre-stained blankets of their heathen life to don the sober raiment of Christianity.
And the Reverend Robert Harringly Burton, seeing her slender figure in white spotted muslin, her gentle rapture, and her wondering
eyes, suddenly knew that he had been sore with loneliness, and that the Gospel light would burn far brighter if illuminated
by such innocent and tender grace.
Their courtship was necessarily brief, because Mr Burton had promised to attend three missionary congresses, to read a paper
before the Geographical Society, and to return to South Africa after Christmas. But Mrs Entwhistle was a practical woman,
and Edith’s trousseau grew under the flying fingers of herself and her four daughters, until on January 14th, 1896, Edith found
herself leaning over the railing of the steamer, while the deep brownish-grey water of the Thames rushed past with silent
dark intensity.
The boat seemed to be perfectly still. It was the low white coast between Tilbury and the sea; it was the smooth subtle river,
which flew away from her. England was flying away. The red-brick rectory at Cattleholme on the wolds, where the snowdrops
in February pierced the black earth below the briar bush; the bedroom with blue knots on the wall paper, which she shared
with Kate in the house at Park Street, Kingsport; her workbox in the back sitting-room, the Mothers’ Union meetings; the red
plush hassocks in the Church of St Michael and All Angels – all these were flying away. While she herself, since the day not
three months ago when she had stood by the African Stall selling kettleholders, had done nothing at all. She had remained
as quiet as the snow-wreathed ship. And yet she had done everything. She had left Kingsport for ever. She had been married.
She was sailing out on a real ship across the sea. She was Saint Paul, setting forth towards Rome. She was Sir Walter Raleigh,
seeking El Dorado.
With the low, flat coasts, ridged by their frozen roofs, the familiar things all fell away from her, and a small round unfamiliar
sun, flat as a sovereign thrown on a grey silk tablecloth, hung in the snow-filled sky to watch them go.
She turned to her husband. ‘Oh, I’m happy, happy, happy. It’s too lovely. Too romantic. It seems to me impossible.’
He regarded her with hungry yet detached affection. ‘My dear,’ he said. ‘With God all things are possible.’
His hand met hers in her little seal-skin muff.
Edith Burton’s child was born eighteen months after her marriage, fifteen months after her arrival in Fort Carey.
The journey had enchanted her. Its discomforts enhanced its magic and destroyed its tedium. Fort Carey itself with its oak
trees, its village green, its wooden houses, and the gossiping, vivid, restricted social life of the officers’ wives, both
pleased and disappointed her. An Africa which tried to be as much as possible like England dissatisfied her craving for the
remarkable, and the barely concealed distaste of the ladies for her husband’s calling aroused her indignation. She learned
that officers’ wives thought the natives happier and better without missionary interference, which ‘put ideas into their heads’,
and augmented the danger of risings. ‘Ah, my dear,’ they told her, ‘when you have been in Africa as long as we have, you will
think differently.’
She climbed with relief into the ox-wagon which was to convey her, her brass bedstead from Port Elizabeth, and the cases of
new books, out to the mission station forty-two miles away.
She saw the parched and twisted valleys where the baboons walked in colonies. She saw the bushes of prickly pear crouched
in fantastic attitudes, thousand-armed, pulpy-breasted, like the lascivious goddess of the Ephesians pictured in her Bible
Concordance. She saw the cool, transparent cup of the evening sky warmed at the rim by burning hills, and the goats, with
bearded, provocative faces, mocking her from their grim banquet of thorns.
She saw the group of rondavels which formed the mission station, the chapel hut with its smooth, earthen floor, its circular
walls and pointed roof of thatch, and all the curiously assorted treasures collected for it by her husband, the Crucifix fashioned
from a Russian Pax, its brass kissed smooth by pious lips, the hood of a cope made from a Kaffir blanket, embroidered in gold
thread from Persia; the altar cloth that had once decorated the tea-table of a colonel’s wife.
She saw the hut provided for her use, not thirty yards from the main building of the college, where her husband had slept
on the veranda with his students, his bed at one end only distinguished from theirs by a neat white sheet between the rough
brown blankets. He slept with her now on the new brass bedstead bought in Port Elizabeth, but his days were completely occupied
by the discovery of misfortunes which had occurred during his absence, by disagreement with his white assistants, and by perturbation
of spirit over the shortcomings of his black but comely brethren.
Edith was therefore left to learn many things for herself.
She learned that a missionary’s life was not, as she had supposed it, a series of fervent journeys into heathern lands, illuminated
by moments of spiritual radiance, when a few kneeling converts opened their eyes to the Gospel Light. It was rather a succession
of skirmishes with official prejudice about the transport of mealies, the local status of native preachers, and the enclosure
of commonage.
She learned to house-keep upon chickens, rice, goats’ milk and yams, to endure mosquito bites, the ravages of white and brown
ants upon her furniture, and the labour of dealing with a people whose tongue she did not understand, and whose alien colour,
scent and presence she found unexpectedly disturbing.
She learned, moreover, that life cannot be lived quite objectively. Her eyes and ears were rich with wonderment; her heart
was curiously bare. Her husband, a kind, affectionate and preoccupied priest, hardly showed more concern for her than had
her father, who had also been a kind, affectionate and preoccupied priest. She was lonely beyond description, but not at all
unhappy, diverted from hour to hour by the strange ecstasies of discovery, the perilous delights of an enchanted world. Always
the doors of her heart stood a little ajar to receive some new wonder. When she found that she was going to have a child,
she thought, ‘This is the wonder.’
To have a child in Kingsport was, she knew, an ordinary and somewhat prosaic business. There were doctors; there was a nurse;
there were presents from relatives, of woolly coats, and cot-covers. There was a whispering atmosphere of pleasurable fear.
To have a child in South Africa was a somewhat perilous but wholly desirable adventure. The ladies of Fort Carey urged the
expediency of bringing Mrs Burton into the township. Mr Burton, however, believed in the efficacy of Black Labour. Edith,
prejudiced against the ladies by her recollection of unhappy tea-parties, and assured of her husband’s infallibility, elected
to remain.
On a fresh, exquisite June day, when the air challenged the shadows with a clear blue light, she walked down the path to the
valley and stumbled on the shadow of a rock that swarmed suddenly about her face in a cloud of purple butterflies. Her surprise
and consequent fall terminated in the birth of a girl child before the doctor could be summoned from Fort Carey. When he arrived,
accompanied by Colonel Fanshawe’s wife, who had most irritated Edith by her superiority, but who now rode the forty-two miles to her assistance, the child was wailing healthily,
but Edith lay flushed and in pain, her wide eyes bright with dismay. She could not believe in this abrupt ending to her pilgrimage,
while its supreme adventure still eluded her. She died three days later of puerperal fever, demanding from her distracted
husband a bowl of aconites and snowdrops from the shrubbery at Cattleholme Rectory.
Mrs Fanshawe’s indignation at Mr Burton’s ineptitude was quenched by her pity for his despair. His militant spirit could fight
all wills but that of the Lord, so clearly manifest in His injunction of celibacy. When Mrs Fanshawe suggested that the Mission
was an unsuitable place for the upbringing of a child, and that it should be conveyed as soon as possible to its aunts and
grandmother in England, he acquiesced. The Lord had given and the Lord had taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
So in the third week of her life, Edith’s daughter was christened in the rondavel chapel. She was called Joanna, after the
Spanish wife of Sir Harry Smith, who followed his camp in the Peninsular War, and later accompanied him to South Africa, to
give her beautiful name to hills and towns in the Eastern Province. The small Joanna, attended by a subaltern’s wife going
home on leave, thus returned by the route along which her mother had adventured, to the house in Park Street, Kingsport.
On the day before Christmas Eve, Joanna walked with her aunts Kate and Emily up Friarsgate, Kingsport. Friarsgate is a grey,
narrow canyon between beetling cliffs. Usually the cliffs are blank grey and angry brown, but at night they blossom surprisingly with orange flowers that leap to light in a dramatic
climax of surprises.
Joanna, who was eight years old, danced two or three yards ahead of her aunts, singing in a soft little happy voice, ‘Christmas
is coming! Christmas is coming!’ Because of the shop-windows full of holly and toys and groceries in scarlet frilled paper,
and silver tinsel, and trumpets, and mistletoe, she was so happy that her little blue serge dress felt as though it must burst
from the swelling of her breast.
‘Joanna, Joanna,’ called Aunt Emily, and Joanna stopped.
‘We turn up here,’ said Aunt Kate. ‘Helen said that she thought he lived in Commercial Lane.’
‘Helen thinks a great deal too much,’ replied Aunt Emily acidly. Aunt Helen was engaged to Mr Braddon, of Braddon’s, Elk and
Braddon’s, Coal Exporters, and did think a good deal of herself, which was hardly surprising, considered Joanna, seeing that
she had such lovely underclothes all with little tucks and embroidery, lying out on the spare room bed.
‘I don’t think that this is Commercial Lane,’ said Aunt Kate, screwing up her short-sighted eyes behind her glasses. They
were seeking an electrician who, Aunt Helen had thought, might come even at the eleventh hour to mend a bell, dumb at so inconvenient
a season. Joanna, who rarely went out on late shopping expeditions, jigged up and down singing her private song.
‘Joanna, my dear, your eyes are younger than mine,’ said Aunt Emily. Joanna was always hearing that her eyes or her legs were
younger than other people’s, an observation so apparent that she wondered why people troubled to make it. But being an obliging child, she never resented the requests to make use of her youth which invariably followed.
Joanna stood on tiptoe, feeling tremendously important, and peered up at the letters half hidden in the obscurity of the dirt
and darkness.
‘The – Land – of – Green – Ginger,’ she read incredulously. ‘The Land of Green Ginger.’
It was unbelievable. It was inevitable. On such a night of course such things must happen. Only they never had happened before.
‘Aunt Emily. Auntie. Auntie! It’s called the Land of Green Ginger.’
Why did her aunts not share the wonder of her delight?
‘Of course,’ said Aunt Kate crossly. ‘Commercial Lane is the next turning. I told you that it was right at the end of the
street. If I’d known it was so far I’d never have said I’d come.’
‘But the Land of Green Ginger, Auntie? The Land of Green Ginger?’
Was it really possible that having found it, they would not enter in? That like Moses – or was it Abraham? – Joanna was not
very good at Scripture, except about the countries – That like Moses they would look at the Promised Land and never enter
it?
But they were gathering up their skirts. They were settling the strings of parcels more comfortably across their gloves. They
were moving on.
‘But Auntie, Auntie, we can’t just – just leave it, can we?’
To be offered such gifts of fortune, to seek Commercial Lane and to find – the day before Christmas Eve and by lamplight too
– The Land of Green Ginger, dark, narrow, mysterious road to Heaven, to Fairy Land, to anywhere, anywhere, even to South Africa, which was the goal of all men’s longing, the place
where Father lived in a rondavel, the place …
Her aunts were moving away. Relentlessly, majestically, with skirts well lifted from the muddy road, and firm boots laced
against the slithery grease of the pavement, they moved forward.
‘But Auntie, we must stay, mustn’t we? We shall come back, shan’t we? We must just look, just a little look?’ If she were
very modest in her requests she might perhaps break this monstrous spell of indifference.
‘Now come along, Joanna, and don’t be a naughty girl,’ chanted Aunt Kate in the accepted formula.
‘But Auntie … ’
‘Hurry up, dear, and walk nicely. Don’t drag your feet like that. It spoils your new boots. Yes, of course we shall come back
some time. Well, Emily, what about some chestnuts for the turkey stuffing? Mother said that if there were any nice ones …
’
The three moved on.
In the summer of 1914, misfortune came upon Joanna. Her father died while on an expedition through the Transkei, and she failed
to matriculate in Mathematics and Latin.
Her aunts Kate and Emily – Aunt Helen, now safely married, had children of her own, and Grandmother was dead – became seriously
perturbed about their niece’s future. The Reverend Robert Harringly Burton had left a will but no money. All his earthly goods had been expended upon the Mission College. The house in Park Street had been maintained partly
by remittances every year from Fort Carey, and Joanna was just eighteen. They wept a little over the combined misfortune.
Joanna did not weep, but with a stiff little smile and a queer pain in the side of her chest, she sought her two great friends
at the Kingsport High School, Agnes Darlington and Rachel Harris.
They took counsel together.
Joanna told them the facts as she had heard them, then added the real cause of her fears.
‘Of course this means that I can’t go to Fort Carey.’
They nodded sympathetically. Both girls knew that Joanna regarded England as a place from which one sailed for South Africa,
or possibly China or Bolivia or Thibet, or anywhere attractively remote. Yet all roads hitherto had led to Fort Carey at last.
‘You can still travel,’ said Rachel firmly. ‘You can always do what you want to do, if you want hard enough.’
‘Darling, it’s beastly for you. Come and stay with my family in Manchuria,’ murmured Agnes, biting a daisy stalk.
They lay together in a corner of the cricket ground, and as Rachel was a prefect, and Joanna the tennis captain, and all three
in the sixth form, they were left undisturbed in Olympian detachment.
‘All that you have to do is to want enough,’ said Rachel. She was a small ardent Jewess, with the rich beauty of her race
and most decided opinions. ‘Look how I fought my parents to get them to let me try for Somerville. People will always give
way to you if you really mean to do something, and all getting on in life is making people give way.’ Rachel always talked as
though she knew all about life. As a matter of fact, her physical and mental maturity was remarkable, though not so remarkable
as Agnes and Joanna thought. ‘It’s your own fault, Joanna, if you’re a lazy little hound. Look at the way you messed up your
matric. It’s the indolent people, pleasant and popular like yourself, who make things so hard for the fighters. We’re never
so nice as you are because we see beyond our noses and try to get there.’
‘Rachel, dearest, don’t scold today. Our beloved Joanna is distressed,’ remarked Agnes, peacefully weaving a daisy-chain but
glancing from Rachel’s vehement little face to Joanna’s flushed agitation.
‘Joanna wouldn’t like me half so much if I didn’t scold her. She prefers to think of her friends as more clever and virtuous
than herself, because this excuses her from making the efforts that she ought to make, and justifies her illusions about a
very wicked world.’
‘My lamb,’ comforted Agnes. ‘Rachel went to a Suffragette meeting in the Town Hall last night, and it went to her head a little.
The Hebrew mind takes its politics seriously, as Miss Phillips said in O.T. class yesterday.’ Rachel was, fortunately, one
of those Jewesses with whom one could discuss anti-Semitism and jokes about Jews. ‘Don’t let her bother you. My family’s moving
to Kirin Province next August. Come out with me when we leave school and we’ll see lovely things. Korea is cold, and Japanese
hotels lack privacy, but they are clean and there are lovely down quilts and paper screens and friendly little policemen.
And we’ll go South to Yunnanfu, where the streets are full of brigands and mandarins, and palanquins and swaying oxen dragging heavy carts.’
Joanna’s eyes grew dim with pleasure and consolation. She cupped her chin on her long hands and smiled across at Agnes.
‘It must be wonderful to be the daughter of a Chinese customs official.’
‘Not nearly so wonderful as to go to China because of your own efforts. It’s the curse of women to think of themselves just
as “somebody’s daughter”. What do you think of men who think of themselves as “somebody’s son”?’
‘But that’s just how all the best sons in China do regard themselves. Joanna has a Chinese mind,’ said Agnes serenely. She
and Joanna smiled at one another, lazily, secretly, sharing a deep extravagant love of the strange places where both had been
born. Joanna’s mind became full of palanquins and exquisitely caparisoned camels, and temples with roofs ingeniously curled,
tinkling with bells and brilliantly coloured; and as she smiled across the daisies at her friends, she forgot that her heart
was sore with disappointment and the shock of amputating from her personality an unknown but always anticipated father. She
became intoxicated by her own vague, lovely vision of a world enriched with so many curious and coloured creatures.
‘When I leave school I shall see all the world, and travel for ever and ever,’ she crooned dreamily.
The daisies opened their eyes wide in wonder that anyone, having seen them, should desire more abundant pleasures.
Six weeks later the declaration of War provided an unmatriculated Joanna with the remunerative position for which her aunts
had prayed.
Sister Warren of the South Park Nursing Home, Kingsport, where Aunt Helen had stayed during the birth of her first baby, lost
two valuable nurses, and had to attend to operations herself in consequence. Therefore she took Joanna into her office as
assistant secretary at a salary of twenty-five shillings a week.
Joanna thus left school for ever, bought three grey overalls and a fountain pen, pinned up her thick fair hair, and set herself
to learn the mysteries of petty cash, night-specials, and reduced terms. Because she was, beyond all her other loves, in love
with life, she found it very interesting.
She was, moreover, an unexpected success, for though she sometimes forgot messages, or sorted linen into the wrong bundles, the nurses liked her. And even when she charged 4d twice
for soda-water, the patients liked her too. Her capacity for endowing the commonplace with transcendental qualities enabled
her to see South Pa. . .
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The Land Of Green Ginger
Winifred Holtby
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