Bill Nasson: Sached Personal Fragment

I turned to SACHED completely by chance, prompted by a small notice in the Cape Times listing alternative correspondence study and bursary opportunities through the University of London. It offered a kind of migration from South Africa, or at least an exodus of your mind. 

After matriculating from Livingstone High School in 1970,

I tried to enrol at the University of Cape Town in the following year, having a long shot at either  

Classics or Business Science. Having no interest whatsoever in Homer and the  

Odyssey and being barely numerate, I was hopelessly unsuited to both. But, as  

these were not offered by the University of the Western Cape, it was a tactical 

means of avoiding having to study at what was then called, derisively,  

apartheid’s ‘bush college’, or just ‘Bush’. Pulling it off required not just  

acceptance by UCT but, no less – if not more – crucially, the securing of a  

discretionary government study permit to enable an untermensch to enroll there. 

  

 

    When that approval did not come, I turned to SACHED completely by chance, 

prompted by a small notice in the Cape Times listing alternative correspondence  

study and bursary opportunities through the University of London. It offered a 

kind of migration from South Africa, or at least an exodus of your mind. I was  

fortunate enough to have had the benefit of a post-school educational fix from 

SACHED.  An oxygen tent of open learning, egalitarian fraternity and sociability  

under the devoted and kindly stewardship of Lindy Wilson, it was one of the  

most encouraging and most genial educational environments I’ve ever  

experienced.  

 

 

    Along with a tiny group of fellow-students in the early 1970s I had the good  

fortune to benefit from the provision of individual tutorial guidance from a  

mostly inspirational and fairly eclectic band of SACHED tutors, including 

local UCT academics, high school teachers, visiting scholars and others involved  

in educational fields like publishing. As all of the tutoring took place not in the 

SACHED offices in the Christian Institute in Mowbray but in their private homes,  

you were very quickly no longer in awe of your tutors, getting to know them on  

first-name names, sometimes encountering their friends, often drinking their tea  

and coffee and even wine, and occasionally sharing meals. SACHED boosted the  

process of growing up. And tribute should be paid to those refreshing tutors who  

made up so free and easy a magic circle – Sally Carpenter, Jean Bleach, Tessa  

Fairbairn, Cathy Salomon, Peter Wickins, Wallace Mills, Doris Lauel, Ulrich  

Klingmann, and John van der Westhuizen.      

   

    Under their tutoring eye I spent 1971-73 doing Advanced Level (A-Level)  

English and History, and O-level German for the University of London’s Overseas  

General Certificate of Education (GCSE). That carried the further possibility of a 

post-SACHED alternative to continuing higher education beyond apartheid South  

Africa. If your GCE performance was up to the mark, you stood a chance of  

gaining a Southern African scholarship for undergraduate degree study at one of 

several British universities, including Keele, Hull and Durham. That possibility  

spurred one on to try your hardest academically as a SACHED student.  

 

    And so it was that I ended up having weekly history tutorials on late- 

eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain (Charles James Fox, the East  

India Company, rotten boroughs, the 1832 Reform Bill, and other enchantments)  

in a flat in Gardens, Cape Town. One of its two warmly welcoming and hugely  

likeable Canadian occupants was my SACHED tutor, an historian from St Mary’s  

University in Nova Scotia called Wallace G. Mills or, as he became known to me,  

Wally Mills.  

 

    Wally was in South Africa to research the history of African Christianity for a  

doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Leonard Thompson, then a 

professor of African history at the University of California Los Angeles. The other  

inhabitant was Wally’s spouse, Margaret Sparling Mills, a poet, who hung around  

during those tutorial sessions as a nosy listener.   

 

   Or, to be more exact, Margaret lounged about, settled on a sofa across the room 

from the window table at which Wally was wading me through such riveting  

topics as free trade and Catholic emancipation. From there, she would often look  

up from whatever she was reading to chip in with fascinating and mischievously  

distracting observations or suggestions. Invariably literary, they certainly spiced  

up those weekly Friday supervisions. How could they not have?  What was the  

Fox-North coalition government of 1783 when Margaret Mills was quietly being 

a whizz on Byron and Shelley, or on eighteenth-century English novelists like  

Fielding or Sterne?  

 

 

   She was also a granary of ‘Canadiana’ knowledge. Both musical and literary,  

what those cross-currents carried included the haunting early 1960s and 1970s  

poetry collections of Margaret Atwood, including The Journals of Susanna Moodie  

(1970), visionary verse based on the elemental life experiences of an English  

emigrant in the primitive backwoods of Ontario in the first half of the nineteenth 

century. Mrs Moodie’s Roughing it in the Bush (1852), a classic account of  

pioneer life in the Canadian wilderness, was my first encounter with a personal 

memoir which documented a historical period, if in a gloomy and rambling way. 

 

I still wonder, to this day, whether Margaret Mills was intentionally ironic in  

recommending something titled, Roughing it in the Bush.        

 

  Then, one Friday, Margaret did not put in her customary tutorial appearance.

That week became the next, and the next, and months passed in which she seemed to have vanished.

There was no explanation of her sudden absence, and I was far too polite back then to have asked Wally.

Just once, behind a door which was slightly ajar, I glimpsed her legs,

clad in dark blue tights and under a familiar floral skirt, stretched out on a bed.

The mysteriousness of her withdrawal and the silence over it left me baffled –

it was a puzzle which accompanied the remainder of those history tutorials in the Mills flat.

Perhaps, as I only came to realise, dimly, and many years later,

they amounted to much more than an introduction to the East India Bill of the 1780s.

They were also a sideways peep into the complex psychological and emotional circumstances in which people find ourselves.   

 

   Later back then, when the time came for them to return to Nova Scotia in 1972,  

Margaret was suddenly there again, Lazarus-like, to say farewell. The three of us  

went on a drive around the Cape peninsula and had a picnic in Kirstenbosch  

botanical gardens. We talked of SACHED people, and of how much it felt like a  

liberated zone. Needless to say, the unfathomable withdrawal remained unmentionable.  

 

    Two years later, I received, out of the blue, a slim volume of her latest poems,  

inscribed to me, simply, as ‘a daffodil’. While it was no surprise to find ‘Table  

Bay’, ‘A Criminal Offence’, ‘Cape Agulhas’, and the ‘Republic of Good Hope’ among  

its contents, I was taken aback to discover half-a-dozen stanzas which evoked  

those A-level Friday mornings, and the silent enigma which came to accompany  

them.  

 

    Herr Professor, Billy, and me  

 

Billy is one of my husband’s students;  

 

he is 10 years younger than I am. 

 

He is slim, with dark hair; 

 

Talks with his hands when he gets excited – 

 

So different from the Afrikaner dead-weights. 

 

History was the subject 

 

And very boring too 

 

(to me); so I would interject 

 

biographical tidbits 

 

from the literary point of view. 

 

These contributions were not appreciated; 

 

My husband waited 

 

for my last word of irrelevancy,  

 

Then proceeded as if I had not spoken. 

 

But did I detect an interest 

 

On Billy’s part ? He mentions Leonard Cohen. 

 

Does he know only Suzanne ? 

 

Or does he actually enjoy reading poetry ? 

 

Have I found a poetry-lover in South Africa  

 

When I’m leaving for Canada  

 

In two month’s time ? 

 

Should I show him my poems ? –  

 

But what about the History lesson, 

 

And those 10 years I’ve lived 

 

that Billy hasn’t ? 

 

Better be a coward –  

 

Retreat at lesson time. 

 

So now I dread, and look forward to, 

 

Fridays. I read the newspaper  

 

in my own room, and wonder 

 

what Billy thinks about my stopping; 

 

or if he thinks of it at all.  

 

 – from Sparling Mills, Woman, be Honest (Herring Cove Press, Nova Scotia, 1974)  

– an earlier version of this piece was published in Bill Nasson, History Matters: Selected Writings, 1970-2016 (Penguin, 2016).