Psychology--Fiction and Fact

A blog for the psychological aspects of writing fiction

Pau hana single malt Scotch whisky diary during the pandemic

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Diary of the sunset pau hana (end of day) wee dram ritual on our lanai during the corona-avoiding self-isolation:

 

It’s early March, 2020, and Hawaii is in lockdown, so we’ve started with a top-of-the-line 16-year-old Lagavulin from Islay. Finished that. Then moved on to a special edition of Highland Park, Orkneyringa, that we brought back from the Orkney Islands in 2018. We’d been saving it, but it wasn’t totally full and needed to be finished. Then moved on to an Ardbeg Uigeadail—it was half empty, but we’ve got another bottle. Finished that. Decided it was time to move Speyside and we were looking forward to The Macallan, a classic single malt for easy drinking. Alas the bottle, even though still in its fine but deceptive box, was empty. Squeezed out one dram to share. Finished that. Had to start on a new bottle: Glenmorangie, to see what “the sixteen men of Tain” on the banks of the Dornoch Firth had to offer us. We visited the distillery in 2018 after staying with cousins in Nairn, near Inverness (Tain is 40 miles north of Inverness) and had a guided tour and learned the correct pronunciation, which now makes us experts. Just one dram to match the single dram of The Macallan, so plenty left. It will be an orangey week, for sure. For a spot of variety we’ve just had a dram or two of the Arran Distillery’s special Machrie Moor malt in honor of the parents’ wee but ‘n ben that looked over Machrie Moor and the standing stones. It was a pale and powerful first sip—tomorrow it gets one extra drop of water. Finished the Glenmorangie Original (seriously, it wisnae full when we started), and to save the Arran whisky moved on to the Talisker Dark Storm. Talisker is on Skye, which, according to my late mother, is a much inferior island to the Isle of Arran, and nowadays if you wanted to carry a lad born to be king, you dinna need to go over the sea in a wee bonnie boat. There’s a bridge. However, my mother’s opinions notwithstanding, this was the finest malt we’ve had to date, and the best on this page. “Deep, dark, and rich, matured in selected heavily charred casks to give extra spice and smoke” turned out to be an accurate description. However I’m less convinced by the other statement on its dark and stormy box: “Imagine tasting a mighty storm at sea and you have Talisker Dark Storm, the single malt that takes an intense whisky experience to a new level.” However a phrase at the bottom of the label on the bottle is genius: “MADE BY THE SEA”! Tonight we coaxed two more drams out of the Talisker—I do declare that the angels must have had more than their fair share. Finished that. Time to move on to a 10-year-old Laphroaig and will alternate with what’s left of the Arran malt to contrast the effects of being right on the Atlantic Ocean: Islay, known as the Queen of the Hebrides. Laphroaig is well known here in the US, as it has a romantic Gaelic name that is easy to pronounce, if not spell. Alas, the darn angels have been at this bottle as well—‘tis but two third full, and being a pessimist at heart, this means ‘tis one third empty. However, while it lasts, it is a wonderfully pungent peat smoke flavored whisky. A “heathery perfume from Islay’s streams” is claimed, but we didn’t really get it. Laphroaig means ‘beautiful hollow by the broad bay’—Gaelic sure packs a lot of words into one. Finished that. Only two bottles and the dregs of the Machrie Moor left…then what? Aha, happy days—found a hidden bottle of Tomatin distillery’s Cù Bòcan. Sadly less than a half-bottle, 20CL, which is about ¾ of a cup. We bought it in Scotland, and it was very expensive so we were cheap. It has just a hint of smoke on the nose and citrus on the finish, but both sensations were as ephemeral as Cù Bòcan himself. For those less familiar with Scottish legends, Cù Bòcan is a huge black dog with dense fur who has been terrorizing the villagers of Tomatin for centuries. But when a distillery worker tried to touch him, he dissolved into an inky blue cloud of smoke. And that’s what happened to 20CLs of their very costly single malt. By the way, dogs are a common theme. The Arran whisky featured (notice the past tense) a fierce-looking hound on its label. This, of course, as you would guess, is Bran. Among the standing stones on Machrie Moor is a huge stone with a hole in the middle, which is where the warrior giant Fingal tethered his favorite dog, Bran. Fingal’s warrior skills were limited, as what he mostly did was hurl rocks across the sea to pelt a  giant in Ireland. Somewhat understandably, the Irish giant threw them back, which is why there are these huge stones on Machrie Moor. In case you are wondering, the connection between these facts and single malt whisky is indeed as evanescent as, well, an inky blue cloud of smoke. So, talking of smoke, we move on to the second bottle of Ardbeg. Yes, that is smoke indeed; as one of our Māori friends once remarked, ‘hmm, tastes like hāngi’! We plan to alternate it with the very last bottle of all: Scapa! Scapa will flow, one might say, and it will require a very serious analysis. However, surprise! Removal of the last two bottles from the liquor cabinet revealed a tiny, miniature bottle of The Singleton, 12-year-old. Any single malt that starts with “The” is clearly superior and we must have bought it after a tasting at the distillery in Dufftown (yes, that’s its name, it’s on the River Fiddich, a tributary of the River Spey, near to Nairn), and were too embarrassed to walk out sans a purchase. The bottle, at only 5 CLs, put the wee in ‘a wee dram’, but it was smooth, mellow, with a hint of fruity sweetness—at least what little there was to linger on the palate. And so now we are down to the wire: smokey Ardbeg and Scapa, the Orcadian. The distillery is half a mile south of Highland Park and can thus claim only to be the second most northerly distillery in Scotland, one of those claims where second place needn’t really be mentioned at all, being rather pointless. It is on the shores of Scapa Flow, the historic waterway sheltered by five of the islands. At the end of WW I the German fleet was interned in this natural harbor under the terms of the Armistice, but Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, not trusting the allies, scuttled the entire fleet and 52 ships were sunk. In October 1939, just a couple of weeks after Britain declared war with Germany,  perhaps as revenge, a German submarine slipped past the defenses and torpedoed the British battleship, the HMS Royal Oak, which sank with a loss of 833 officers and men. Although now a popular diving location, it is an eerie spot, not unlike the USS Arizona memorial, with bits of sunken ships sticking up out of the water at odd places. None of this has much to do with the whisky. History in general, however, does. The Romans seemed vaguely aware of the Orkney islands and called them the Orcades, hence the name of our Scapa malt, The Orcadian. Long before the German High Seas Fleet (Hochseeflotte) or the Royal Navy ever anchored in Scapa Flow, the Vikings used it as a major base for raids against Scotland and Norway. The old Norse influence is everywhere, and our bottle is described as skiren, Norse for glittering bright skies. Matured in first-fill American oak casks, the whisky is a rich amber, with a creamy sweetness and hints of citrus and heather—without a doubt our favorite in this long list. We’ve been alternating it with the Ardbeg for beautiful contrast effects (there’s none of that wild west smokiness in the Scapa), but now both are, one might say,  finished. This means we will now follow the Russian tradition and smash our special dram glasses in the fire, if we had one, but first we raise a toast for everyone’s good health and to a speedy end to the COVID-19. And for that, Ardbeg takes the prize: at 54.2% alc/vol (for Americans, 108-proof), and if that don’t kill the virus, nothing will, even a Clorox cocktail.

SLÀINTE MHATH, everyone!

 

Ian & Luanna

Honolulu, Hawaii , May 10th, 2020

Maudsley Memoir: My Four Years as a Doctoral Student of Hans J. Eysenck, 1966-1970, at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London

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Maudsley Memoir: My Four Years as a Doctoral Student of Hans J. Eysenck, 1966-1970,

at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London

 

Ian M. Evans, PhD FRSNZ

Professor Emeritus, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

 

              In 1965 I was an Honour’s student at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and my research project was on the effects of environmental deprivation on “intelligence”. I reared rats in a deprived environment (total darkness) and tested them in total darkness as well. The test involved speed of conditioning–speed of acquiring an operant lever-press response in a Skinner box. My supervisor was Alma E. Hannon, a Senior Lecturer and a well-known behaviourist, largely of a Hullian rather than a Skinnerian persuasion, but I had made it a point to learn as much as possible about Skinner’s approach to learning theory and to psychology, especially clinical applications. The other senior lecturer in the animal lab was Peter Radloff, who had recently come back from a study leave at University College, London. Peter was quite an academic showman, and when I asked him where I should go to do my PhD, he replied immediately, “Oh the only place in the UK is the Maudsley!”

              So without knowing much else about it, I wrote to Hans Eysenck about the possibility of coming in the late summer of 1966 as one of his doctoral students. He wrote a short note back saying I was welcome to come, but that the British government “in their infinite wisdom, had once again failed to provide sufficient funding to the universities,” and so he had no money available for financial support. Fortunately I was able to obtain a scholarship from the Witwatersrand Council of Education, and furnished with my first class Honours degree in Psychology, I duly showed up at the Maudsley hospital one very wet day early in September, 1966.

              I had spent the summer months traveling alone across Europe, armed only with Arthur Frommer’s wonderful American guide book Europe on Five Dollars a Day. I visited Greece, Turkey, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and Holland, and had some wonderful adventures. But when I arrived in London at the height of the “swinging Sixties” I was still a rather naïve, sheltered, South African young man who had just turned 22. I showed up in the morning having caught the bus from my digs, but with no raincoat or umbrella (not essential in South Africa), during a heavy shower of British rain. I stood, liked a drowned rat, in Eysenck’s office and he wisely made no attempt to talk to me. Instead he passed me over to his Administrative Assistant, Russ Willett. The story going around, and I’m not sure how accurate it was, was that Russ had been working on his PhD thesis for 14 years! In any event he looked rather helplessly at my soaked appearance and said, yes, they were expecting me, but he still hadn’t worked out a room or an office for me, could I come back in a month’s time?

              This was an inauspicious start to my academic career, but I bravely checked in to my residence hall, London House (for post-graduate students from Commonwealth and ex-commonwealth countries), opened a bank account at the Midland Bank in Camberwell Green, and set about exploring London as much as I possibly could. A month later I was back at DeCrespigny Park, but being out of sight I was also out of mind, so Russ still had no desk arranged for me. I think feeling a bit guilty at this point, he set me up to share a desk in a small room that had once been a patient room at the hospital, with all the usual paraphernalia of a hospital room except with desks instead of beds dotted around. The desk I shared was with Rosemery (sic) Nelson, who was at the Maudsley for a year on a Fulbright scholarship. Rosemery had graduated from one of the universities in St Louis Missouri with a 4.00 GPA and a strong interest, like me, in clinical behaviour therapy

              The great thing about Rosemery, apart from her being as bewildered as I was about life in London but nevertheless game to experience all it had to offer, was that her father, who worked for GM in Flint Michigan, had bought her a car, an Opel, in Germany and had had it shipped to London for her. Alas it was a manual shift and a left-hand drive, neither of which, when driving on the left in Britain, she could really cope with, so I became her chauffeur and we went everywhere together. We soon became very close and intimate friends, except for actual sexual intercourse, because she, a devout Catholic, was “saving herself for marriage.” Her words.

              Now that I was actually in situ, so to speak, I showed up for my first interview with my PhD supervisor. Hans sat at his desk, flicking a paperclip in his fingers so it span around. This was the famous occasion in which he looked at me and said: “Zee computer is on zee second floor, zee library is on zee third floor…I don’t think there is anything else I have to tell you.” But whereas my letter of offer for admission said I’d first be admitted to the Master’s degree, he quickly told me that he was changing that and enrolling me in the PhD program. This was very helpful, except I had no real idea about what I’d work on. As I remember it, Eysenck had close to a hundred students for whom he was the nominal supervisor, and he didn’t really approach me to ask what I intended to do for the thesis work until a few months later. I rattled off some ideas and he said “You have an embarrassment de riches”—as his French was good but mine was not, I had no idea what he was talking about and he said it again in English after giving me a slightly withering look. Then he gave me the best possible advice: “You can save zee world after you have finished your PhD thesis, right now you need to do something programmatic that we are working on.” He assigned me to work with Irene Martin, a Reader in the department, and together we worked out a possible classical conditioning project for myself. As it happened, Rosemery had also been given some tasks of scoring eyelid conditioning records and had had the scoring template made for her, and I simply took it over. However, neither of us was terribly interested in the lab procedures themselves.

              The reason for our distraction was slightly complicated, but boiled down to this. That year in the Psychology Department, there were a number of overseas visitors. By this stage (late in 1966) the whole operation had moved out of the hospital into the newly built quarters of the Institute of Psychiatry (IoP). There was a major intellectual ferment around behaviour therapy. The American visitors all tended to be operant people. Two of them, Irene Kassorla and Bernie Perloff were recent products of UCLA, where they had worked with Ivor Lovaas on his pioneering work on behaviour modification with autistic children. There were other more advanced post-doctoral pioneers, Jeanne Phillips, Ted Rosenthal, and a student of Lykken’s, all from the US, and Jarg Bergold, from Germany. There were also a number of New Zealand and Canadians there as doctoral students; they were all a good deal older than me, most of them married, and their major goal was to get the PhD within two years and get out. Some of them, like Glenn Wilson stayed on and had distinguished careers, but friends like John Grey (a New Zealander working in Canada), and Peter McClean, a Canadian, were pretty focused (Peter made a name for himself in depression treatment, and sadly died a few years ago—his daughter is also a well-known clinical psychologist). Our little network included Bin Toyama, from Japan, who could speak very little English, and a woman from Poland, who seemed even more lost than Rosemery and myself. It was a veritable United Nations of students and scholars—one of the explanations I was given was that Hans had an affinity for Europeans and Americans because he had been denied a Fellowship in the Royal Society. The British science establishment and jealous UK psychology professors who didn’t like his popular books were thought to be strongly biased against him.

              But the big break for Rosemery and me was that a couple of people had set up some practical behavioural programs in clinical settings. For example, Irene Kassorla was working at Springfield Hospital in Tooting Bec with chronic long-term, very regressed patients and she was shaping behaviour using simple schedules of food reward. She took us out to see her work in her bright red Volkswagen. One day before we set off, she cocked her butt and let out a loud fart, saying “It’s this fucking English milk, it’s not homogenized.” I was totally shocked, both at the language and the flatulence—nothing like that had ever been part of my sheltered life in South Africa with rather proper Scottish parents.

              But the person who took most interest in Rosemery and me was an Australian psychologist who was just finishing his PhD. I can’t remember his name, I’m afraid, maybe Jim something or other, but perhaps it is just as well. He was a lot older—had worked as an experienced clinician in Australia and was a friend of Hans’s—they played tennis together. As part of his doctoral thesis he had set up an operant conditioning program in a Children’s Unit out in Sutton, in Surrey: The Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit. The unit consisted of two houses just outside the hospital grounds in the suburbs—they were residential programmes for children with severe communication disorders, which included autism, developmental aphasia, elective mutism, severe hearing loss (rubella children), and so on. Jim trained us in clinical behaviour modification techniques, briefly, and then a sad thing happened. During his thesis oral defence he lied about getting statistical help from Prof Maxwell, one of the IoP’s biostatisticians. Jim’s stats were flawed, which could be excused, but he claimed in the oral to have had advice from Maxwell, which was not true. He failed the oral and was sent back to Australia in disgrace, without a PhD. The chief psychiatrist for the whole hospital, Dr Minski, had met Rosemery and me and asked us to say on and continue the work—what an incredible opportunity for two first year graduate students.

 

 

Ian (reinforcing with Smarties) and Rosemery (keeping data) with Andrew at the Children’s Unit, 1967

              Meanwhile I saw next to nothing of my supervisor, Professor Hans J. Eysenck, and very little of my appointed supervisor, Dr Irene Martin. There were no required classes or courses, but we were encouraged to take a statistics course with Dr Patrick “Paddy” Slater. The second lecture was so incomprehensible one of us asked him what he was doing with all his equations on the board. He replied that he was giving the mathematical proof of the analysis of variance. I never went to another class. I did go to seminars in the IoP by visiting speakers, spent a lot of time in the library, wrote a couple of papers for publication on learning theory and on the nature of the relationship in behaviour therapy (Evans & Wilson, 1967; Evans & Wilson, 1968; Wilson, Hannon, & Evans, 1968) and devoted all my other time to the Children’s Unit. At the IoP there were mazing pioneers of behaviour therapy, from both psychiatry (Isaac Marks, Michael Gelder) and from psychology (Stanley “Jack” Rachman, Mike Berger). Jack Rachman had set up a seminar series with another behaviour therapy innovator, Dr Victor Meyer, then working at the Middlesex Hospital, somewhere near Goodge Street. The two of them chaired these fascinating monthly case presentation meetings. But when Rosemery and I volunteered to present our operant work with autistic children, Jack was very dismissive and essentially ignored us, after saying he didn’t know what we would have to contribute! Happily Vic Meyer was much more sympathetic and he eventually invited us to present, which was very positive of him.

              By Christmas of my first year Rosemery and I were a definite item. We went together to one of Hans and Sybil’s “at homes” at their house, as I remember it in Herne Hill. As there was little public transport out there, and we were not yet driving her car, we arrived more than two hours late! In any event we found these events terribly awkward, although their intent was admirable. Hans would sit in a large red leather chair, smiling and saying little, and Sybil would flit around with sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and other finger food. I was always highly anxious I’d drop a cream scone on their nice Persian carpet. The annual departmental Christmas party was also in someone’s home, I can’t remember who’s, and Rosemery came up to me all worried: “Look, the professor is sitting all by himself on the sofa and no-one is talking to him”. “Well”, said I, “you go and talk to him!” So Rosemery went up and sat next to him on the sofa and Hans got up immediately and walked away. There’s introversion for you!

              For someone who was such a strong critic in writing, Hans was amazingly tolerant of fools if they were not challenging his ideas directly. A good example was the infamous Irene Kassorla, who was doing a PhD. She was as thick as a post, and talked utter rubbish. Later she even did an interview on her behaviour modification work for the London Sunday Times in which she said that she had invented behaviour modification and had taught Skinner all that he knew about applied behaviour analysis! Hans simply smiled benignly whenever she opened her mouth and I’m amazed that she got a PhD—the level of science in her work was rock bottom. She later became famous back in California for her book Nice girls do, and later entertainer Merv Griffin dubbed her the “shrink to the stars” due to her celebrity clientele and in the summer of 2015 she leased a furnished vacation spot in Malibu that was listed at $20,000 a month. Maybe Hans saw talent that was totally hidden from the rest of us.

At one of Eysenck’s Tuesday afternoon seminars, when he was commenting about an issue and stated there was no available empirical evidence, I piped up that oh, yes there was such an article recently in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical. In South Africa in our Honours year, Terry Wilson and I were show-offs—we read a lot and we remembered stuff well and used to cite chapter and verse whenever we could. So I made the mistake in this seminar of saying, “Yes, Professor, it was in 1965, Volume 83, pages 29-46.”  Hans perked up right away and asked “What were the findings?” “Oh” said I, “I don’t remember the findings.” There was a long silence while he stared at me and then said icily: “What is the point of knowing about a study if you don’t know zee findings?” I learned a valuable lesson from that moment of shame.

              However these seminars were very informative. For example it was during one such seminar that Hans expounded for the first time on his theory of incubation, talking about the Russian experiment with a dog in which after one or two traumatically aversive conditioning trials the presentation of the CS alone did not result in extinction, but a steadily growing fear CR. It was all very interesting but the clinical examples he gave were not at all convincing—I had been doing a little work with a client who felt nausea and needing to vomit during formal meals. This, plus similar phenomena (writer’s cramp, stage fright, “shy bladder syndrome”), could be much better explained as a fear of fear phenomenon and I wrote a paper on the topic (Evans, 1972), which I still think is a very useful model that fits the clinical phenomena far better, but got very little attention, even after Dianne Chambless started writing formally about fear of fear many years later. The basic incubation theory has been analysed and critiqued numerous time since then, by authors such as Beattie and Corr (2010), Bersh (1980), and Malloy (1990).

              I was also playing with conditioning theories to explain systematic desensitization after Jack Rachman had published articles claiming the effects of SD were not due to extinction but to “counter-conditioning”—I think it was the beginning of his conversion to a more cognitive interpretation of behaviour therapy. I wrote a paper on the topic and submitted it to Behaviour Research and Therapy, but it was rejected. Jack wrote me a note saying that as my paper had criticized his theory, he had sent it to two reviewers and they had both recommended rejection (it was not a tradition of BRAT’s to send the actual reviews back to the authors). Being very inexperienced in the publication game I sent the rejected manuscript to Vic Meyer, whom I really liked, to see if it was worth sending elsewhere. He called me in to talk about it and said he thought it was a good paper but he felt a bit awkward because he had been one of the reviewers for BRAT. I started to apologize for putting him on the spot like that, but he quickly said what concerned him was that he had recommended publication! My faith in the fairness of the editorial process took a bit of a beating that day, but Vic Meyer’s encouragement allowed me to re-submit to another journal where it was accepted (Evans, 1973b).

              Gradually I began to understand some of the issues and politics of the department. I had not realized that the qualification I really should have been enrolled in was the clinical diploma. The academic staff of the diploma course, like Jack, Mike Berger, Monte Shapiro (all South Africans, weirdly enough) were not supportive of students in the more “experimental” PhD program, especially as there was open hostility between Hans and Monte, the director of the clinical course. There were some students doing both the clinical diploma and the PhD—one of them Rosemery and I were friendly with, John Teasdale, who went on to an eminent career in cognitive behaviour therapy at Oxford—he was one of the few people who was about our age. Oddly enough he was also the only English student we encountered in the entire doctoral program. John took us up to Cambridge one time and taught us how to punt. However I don’t think that Jack Rachman was really hostile towards me—it was he who told me that Arthur W. Staats, one of my heroes intellectually, had moved to Hawaii and was setting up a clinical program, and that I should enquire about jobs. Which I did and that is how I ended up in Hawaii.

Basically when you are young and inexperienced you don’t always understand the dynamics of a place where you are not really an insider. I remember one occasion when I was sitting in the tearoom with a group of women, some staff and some students, and I happened to mention how pleasant Sybil Eysenck was. They all turned and stared at me, with daggers in their eyes. Finally one said “That’s because you are male, Ian. She is absolutely horrible to all of us!” Their interpretation was that because Sybil had been a student who had broken up Hans’ first marriage, she was dreadfully afraid that it could happen again, so she kept the young females as far from Hans as possible.

              Rosemery and I went everywhere together—to the Oxford-Cambridge boat race on the Thames, to the theatre, to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, to the ballet, to the Tate. We protested the Vietnam War outside the American embassy, and went to nuclear disarmament rallies in Trafalgar Square, daring movies, strip clubs in Soho, and musicals. We had befriended one of the departmental clerical staff, Valerie, the daughter of a fireman and she took us home for “tea”—a full meal served at 5.00pm. She lived somewhere on Denmark Hill and had a wonderful cockney accent, and hers was the first sort of working class English home we had ever visited. We went to a conference in Southampton, and to the BPS annual conference in Belfast, and drove around Ireland afterwards. Rosemery lived in digs in the East End of London and we went to Chinese restaurants there, as well as a strange pub called Dirty Dick’s that hadn’t been cleaned for 400 years. We went to Hampton Court and to Brighton (our station to get to the Belmont Hospital, Sutton, was the first stop on the London-Brighton railway line). Rosemery re-applied to 12 clinical programs in the US that had rejected her the year before and all 12 offered her admission this time around—the power of the Maudsley name! She selected SUNY Stony Brook because my great South African friend Terrence Wilson was starting his clinical PhD there. When it was time for her to leave we parted at Heathrow, both in tears, and holding hands to the very last minute.

 

 

Rosemery O. Nelson in 1967 at Stony Brook

              The following year I did rather play the field. I dated one of the other very young secretaries and we once even had sex in the conditioning lab (nicely soundproofed, no windows, and the doors could be locked). I went out with Hans’s secretary, Tess Maxwell, a few times, usually to the theatre. She was divorced with a couple of young kids and I think it was nice to have a companion to go to plays with. We held hands and kissed a bit on the train rides back to her flat, but nothing more developed, although I think we would both have been happy for it to do so. Tess told me lots of stories about Hans, but they weren’t very scurrilous. She did tell me how he dictated his books and articles to her—walking around his office, twirling his paperclip, while she took it all down in shorthand. She’d then type up the material, he’d correct it, and voilà, a new article, chapter, or book was in the works. Tess also told me funny stories like the time that Sybil had given Hans a very loud tie, which, being an introvert, he didn’t like very much. But he bravely wore it to work, with a nice grey jersey on so that the tie was invisible—Tess came out and told me to try to catch a glimpse of the tie, but I never did.

 

 

Pat Evans at the Belmont Hospital Children’s Unit

              I also dated one of the nurses at the Children’s Unit at Belmont Hospital, a truly lovely person from the midlands, Coventry, called Pat Evans. She and I went to the movies in Sutton a few times and I stayed over in the flat she shared with another nurse, Rosemary Williamson. By Easter of my second year she was inviting me home to meet her parents. But later that year a young woman I had known in South Africa showed up from Johannesburg and she was the person I eventually proposed to, in the Black Forest in Germany on a trip, and we were married in Caxton Hall, Westminster. Of course, this memoir is supposed to be really more about the Maudsley than about me, but the context is clear—this is why it took me 4 years to get a PhD that everyone else was getting in 2!

              During my second and third years I knuckled down and ran my eyelid conditioning subjects, but I did not analyse the data right away. I was really much more interested in the work I was doing with the autistic children at the Belmont, supervised by a marvelous Welsh consultant psychiatrist called Henry Reese (Nelson & Evans, 1968; Evans, 1970b). And it was a big time for autism because at the Maudsley Michael Rutter was doing important research, as were Lorna Wing, Hermelin and O’Connor, and later Uta Frith—they were all more focused on causal issues whereas I was focused on treatment—the BBC Midlands even came to the Children’s Unit and made a documentary of our work for television. I was getting more involved in that area and actually built a small training device with my own hands and tools that later was published in a journal (Evans, 1970a). And my friend Jarg Bergold managed to arrange for me to give a formal talk on operant conditioning with autistic children to the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, and even Rutter was beginning to notice our work at the Belmont and invited me to present at a conference and to submit a chapter to his new edited book (Evans, 1969; 1971).

 

Dr Jarg Bergold and Ian in Munich, 1968

All this time I was pretty sure that Hans had no idea at all at what I was doing, and as far as Irene Martin was concerned, she was distracted with other things, specifically her co-researcher, Archie Levey. I would occasionally see Hans in the IoP, often on a Saturday morning if I had come in to work in the library. He often had his young children with him and he watched them run around a play in the corridors and in the elevator, with a sort of benevolent grandfatherly smile on his face. It is so hard to believe today that he must have been only about 52 or 53. I saw him strictly as an elderly person, very remote, and I certainly never really had any sort of conversation with him. But we began to learn some of his foibles, one of which was a sort of professional one-upmanship. A good example was a lecture given in the department by one of Hans’s doctoral students working in a British prison. This student told an interesting story about how the first “token economy”—rewards for good behaviour—was introduced in the Australian penal service by Governors King and Macquarie. You could see Eysenck pricking up his ears. Later we joked that this totally obscure fact would soon emerge elsewhere—and indeed it did, shortly afterwards. When asked to write a review of Alan Kazdin’s major work on the token economy, Hans gave it a positive review but said it was a pity that the author was so ignorant and had neglected the history and origins of token economies in Australia!

The psychology department was large. At 25 years of age everyone was older than me, including the various women that ran the statistical analyses for people or helped with the Facet machines that ran basic stats. I don’t remember their names, except I knew that at least one of them was a New Zealander who loved London and described New Zealand in the most disparaging terms as a cultural desert. I had a little office and on the wall I hung a poster of Picasso’s Blue Nude. In 1968 I met Phil Feldman, then director of clinical training at Birmingham University, and he invited me up to give a series of lectures on the operant approach to modifying children’s behaviour. Funnily enough it was my connection to the Wolpe/Eysenck tradition in behaviour therapy that had appealed to the clinical group in Hawaii, but in London it was my supposed Skinnerian orientation that was getting attention.

I spent a lot of time in Petticoat Lane and Carnaby Street, and took my staid visiting South African school friends to a transvestite bar near the Oval to shock them slightly. The women in the department were fairly trendy and with-it. Sybil wore short skirts and boots; Irene Kassorla wore even shorter skirts, thigh-high white boots and a large feather boa. All of London seemed to be in fancy dress—old military uniform was de rigeur and girls really did walk around in diaphanous dresses with flowers in their hair. I was working more or less full-time at the Belmont Hospital when the formal job offer from Hawaii came through. I was nowhere near finished my thesis and I hadn’t really looked at it for a year. So I quit the Children’s Unit and stayed at home in our rental flat in Pimlico for about 6 months while my new wife taught high school kids in a low-income comprehensive school near Ealing. I worked night and day to finish the data. It had to be run through the University of London’s central computer, and I hired a computer programmer to write the basic program for analysing the voluminous data. Unfortunately he wrote it in COBOL, a machine language, instead of Fortran, which the people at the computer centre understood, so the job often failed to run—and I had so many punch cards that the “CPU” (central processing time) of more than12 minutes meant that the job always had to be run after midnight. It was a very stressful time, and again I got no advice or supervision on this stage of the thesis writing. I do not remember either Irene Martin or Hans Eysenck reading any drafts at all of my thesis before I submitted it to London House. The external examiner was a professor from the University of York, one of Hans’ former students. All I remember is that I could barely talk because I had had my wisdom teeth taken out two days before; but I had heard that if they took out the sherry decanter, you had passed, and I so naturally I peeked through the door before I walked back in. Happily Hans, the professor from York, and the sherry were all there.

              However neglectful or laissez faire the supervision, inspiration was all around me. Probably one of the more remarkable features of Eysenck’s department was his progress chart for doctoral students. Each person’s name was up on the board, and next to it five little coloured squares. The five stages of progress were: 1. Proposal approved, 2. Subjects being run, 3 Data analysis, 4. PhD awarded, 5, Full Professor. There were an amazing number of the fifth coloured squares after many of the names on the board.

              Looking back, I was incredibly lucky to encounter such an intelligent and interested person as Rosemery, to have had supervision from Irene Martin and clinical supervision from a brilliant and dedicated child psychiatrist, Henry Reese. The intellectual atmosphere at the Maudsley was extraordinary and Hans Eysenck created a place where people could find their own way within a strong theoretical and conceptual system, which I greatly valued. I was very interested in theory—learning theory, behaviour theory, and of course Eysenck’s lofty personality theory. There was great excitement over the possibilities of behaviour therapy and the application of scientific research to direct clinical activity. But it was very much a sink or swim environment; I received very little help and guidance, and had it not been for rigorous early training in South Africa, I could easily have failed rather miserably in such an unstructured academic setting. I was very fortunate to find good people to talk to and who supported me and allowed me to do things that a clinical intern would probably rarely have experienced. London itself was a ferment of creativity and youthful revolt, and although I was very poor financially, so much of its richness was freely available.

 

Publications mentioned from this period:

Evans, I. M., & Wilson, G. T. (1967). Some observations on modern learning theory with special reference to Breger and McGaugh. Psychological Scene, 1, 23-29.

Evans, I., & Wilson, T. (1968). Note on the terminological confusion surrounding systematic desensitization. Psychological Reports, 22, 187-191.

Wilson, G. T., Hannon, A. E., & Evans, I. M. (1968). Behavior therapy and the therapist-patient relationship. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 32, 103-109.

Nelson, R. O., & Evans, I. M. (1968). The combination of learning principles and speech therapy techniques in the treatment of non-communicating children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 9, 111-124.

Evans, I. M. (August, 1969). Behaviour therapy with psychotic children. Paper presented at the Second International Congress of Social Psychiatry, London.

.Evans, I. M. (1970a). A modular teaching unit for research and therapy with children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 11, 63-67.

Evans, I. M. (1970b). Research [with non-communicating children]. In L. Minski & M. J. Shepperd (Eds.), Non-communicating children. London, UK: Butterworths.

Evans, I. M. (June, 1970c). Theoretical and experimental aspects of the behaviour modification approach to autistic children. Paper presented at the first CIBA Foundation Study Group on Childhood Autism, London, England.

Evans, I. M. (1971). Theoretical and experimental aspects of the behaviour modification approach to autistic children. In M. Rutter (Ed.), Infantile autism: Concepts, characteristics and treatment. London: Churchill.

Evans, I. M. (1972). A conditioning model of a common neurotic pattern–fear of fear. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 9, 238-241.

Evans, I. M. (1973a). An unusual phenomenon in classical eyelid conditioning: The double conditioned response. South African Journal of Psychology, 3, 83-89.

Evans, I. M. (1973b). The logical requirements for explanations of systematic desensitization. Behavior Therapy, 4, 506-514.

 

 

 

 

Sense of Place in Fiction

By

 

There are no baobabs on the Vaal River, but there are midges in Glen Rosa

 

A talk delivered to the Honolulu Branch of The National League of American Pen Women

Honolulu

Wednesday, January 9th 2019
 

INTRODUCTION
Good afternoon everyone. Thanks very much for being here. Just to make sure we’re on the same page regarding this talk, here is a baobab tree I photographed in South Africa and here is Glen Rosa, which is on the Isle of Arran.
I need to explain the title of this talk.
Some years ago, when I first started writing fiction, I had a conversation with the wife of one of my oldest school friends. Jenny is a second-generation South African and lives in Johannesburg and we were talking about books we had read, and she told me that she had just started a new novel and had had to put it down after the first few pages and was going to donate it to the library.
“What was so terrible about it?” I asked.
“Oh, it just annoyed me so much. The protagonist is described on Page 2 as sitting under a baobab tree on the banks of the Vaal River—everyone knows there are no baobab trees anywhere near the Vaal River—they don’t start appearing in the South African landscape until at least 200 miles further north. I just couldn’t read any more!”
This comment really struck a chord with me. If you are going to set a story in a certain place, your descriptions of that place need to be authentic. Maybe some readers wouldn’t know the geographic distribution of the mighty baobab tree, but if even one reader does, you are pretty well sunk as a novelist. So, I’m going to address the issue of the writer’s familiarity with a location and why, even though the story is fiction, authenticity matters. The reader has to believe and to feel that they are there, with the characters.
As to midges, anyone who has been to Scotland will know immediately that there ARE indeed midges in Glen Rosa—they’re often referred to as “the curse of Scotland”!
My talk today, therefore, is going to be about the sense of place in fiction and the significance of authenticity and how one achieves it.

PLACE DEFINED
“Place” has always been recognized as central to fiction writing: I say Yorkshire Moors and you’ll say Wuthering Heights; I say Bath, and you’ll say Northanger Abbey, I say Concord, Massachusetts and you’ll say Little Women.
However, the American author Eudora Welty, in her 1994 essay The Art of Fiction, argues, like other professional guides to writing, that place is one of the “lesser angels” and all the wing beating comes from character, plot, symbolic meaning and above all feeling.
But as we shall see, “place” means more than the physical setting, and a novel’s context or milieu permits character, plot, symbolism and feeling to take shape. To quote Amanda Curtin, the Scottish author now living in Australia:
“Place in fiction is not only about setting; it can also inform and be reflected in character, plot, theme, atmosphere, voice, language. A strong sense of place helps readers to make the imaginative leap into another world, whether that world is the past, present or future. Before you can create a sense of place on the page, you need to immerse yourself in the world you’re writing about so that it comes alive for you.”
Thus, I’m going to suggest that place, broadly defined and carefully executed, is what permits many of the nuances of character, plot, symbolism, and feelings, by giving them what we might call verisimilitude: plausibility, authenticity, credibility.

TWO BOOKS
I’m going to illustrate my talk about these issues with—yes, sorry, lots of my own photography—but more importantly with reference to two books.
One of these, published late last year, is my second novel, The Eye of Kuruman, set in Botswana and the Northern Cape in South Africa.
To explain The Eye, let me read how the central protagonist, Alexandra, first heard of it. She’s a little girl of 5 and has just been told a story by her Scottish grandfather, a high school teacher living in Buffalo New York. The story is about David Livingstone, who once lived in Kuruman, :
“I liked your story. Is Kuruman a real place?”
Her grandpa nodded.
“I like the word,” Alexandra went on. “Kuruman. Kuruman. One day I’m going to go there. I’ll take you with me.”
“Thanks, dearie, I’d like that. If you like the sound of the name, it doesn’t matter if it’s a real place or not. I think it’s quite a small place in the middle of nowhere, next to a very dry desert, the Kalahari Desert. But it has a famous spring, an underground fountain, a source of beautiful clear water, called The Eye. The Eye of Kuruman. Another Scotsman, who was a missionary, set up a church there because of the water from the Eye. Do you know what a missionary is, Alex?”

The second book I’m going to talk about, Highland Holiday, was written by my mother, Jean Evans, pen name Jane Shaw, 77 years ago—published in 1942. It was her third novel for girls, and one of 42 books she published in her lifetime. It is set on the Isle of Arran—a slight stretch to call that the “highlands”, but as Arran purports to be ‘Scotland in miniature’, I reckon she could get away with it.
It’s a beautiful island. She set three of her books in Arran and this, the first one, is not considered one of her best. But at the age of thirty-one and in the year my older sister was born, she was just beginning to find her stride, and my reason for choosing it is that she knew the Isle of Arran incredibly well. Ever since she was a little girl her family, the Patrick’s, spent their summers on the Isle of Arran
Highland Holiday is set in the little village of Blackwaterfoot in the Shiskine valley, because it was in Blackwaterfoot specifically that the Patrick and Evans families spent joyous holidays, golfing, playing tennis, swimming and occasionally hiking in the gorgeous hills. Because we moved to South Africa as a child, I had never been there, but I’d heard so many stories of Arran (or ‘Arn’, as my dad called it) growing up that for most of my childhood, that is where I thought my parents were from!
My mother set all her books in places she knew well: Dulwich Village where they lived in London before going to South Africa; Bath, where she had some of her closest friends and I was born; Paris which she loved; Switzerland—specifically the Bernese Oberland–; and Brittany, a little seaside town called Binic—the places on the continent she had visited before she got married.
Women fans of Jane Shaw who had read her books as young girls and still enjoyed them as adults, have made pilgrimages to these locations and take great delight in finding all the places she mentioned or re-named.
One of these women is Alison Lindsay, who after my parents left South Africa and retired to the Isle of Arran, tracked my mother down and edited a marvelous book that is a tribute to her writing, a sort of Festschrift, containing a series of critical essays about her work—it is named after one of my mother’s most memorable teenage characters, Susan. One of the chapter authors, wrote, quote:
“Above all, Jane Shaw’s novels are illuminated by their sense of place. There are few novelists for children who could capture the physical landmarks, the people, the culture, and the thrill of exploring a new or familiar setting as well as she did. She made her readers want to go there themselves and, when we did, made us feel as we knew them already.”
But of all these places she knew and loved, it was the Isle of Arran that she knew and loved the best. Because Jane Shaw knew Arran so well, the physical descriptions are as accurate today as they were 77 years ago. She had a clever way of providing these descriptions through the excitement of the two girls central to the story, best friends, Sara and Caroline:
And then, very soon it seemed, the well-known outline of the island grew clearer, until they could distinguish the hills circling Brodick Bay, and the little white farmhouses dotted along the shore; and the steamer slid along by red rocks in towards the pier”…
“A car load of monkeys could not have been more restless. They hurled themselves from side to side, pointing out the old familiar landmarks as the car left Brodick behind and slowly climbed the String Road, the small white farms of Glen Sherraig lying far below them on the right. At the top of the String the usual argument started about the names of the peaks in the fierce and jagged range lying to their right.
“Then down they went, into the Shiskine valley and there was wild excitement when they first caught the sweet, sharp, reek of the peat—always the sign that they had really arrived: past Balmichael, past the bakery and post office, Blackwaterfoot’s only shops (there are now three) and over the narrow bridge spanning the Black Water and round the harbor and along the shore… ”
The danger of this precise level of detail is that one’s writing starts to sound like a travelogue, and in fact one reviewer of my book, The Eye of Kuruman, described it—slightly rudely, I thought–as quote:
“Part tourist guide book, character sketchbook, and nostalgic homecoming from an emigrant’s perspective…”

ALLOW THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES TO DESCRIBE THE SCENE
Both Jane Shaw and I tried to overcome this travelogue trap by having the actions of the characters depict the scene, both in words and deeds.
There are two forms of this: one is when the characters are outsiders or visitors and so they get to describe the place and their feelings about it. The other is when the characters belong in the place and are an integral part of the physical location—these characters make the place real.
Let me give you an example from The Eye of characters being the ones describing the scene through their behavior. Little Alex is now all grown up, a 27-year-old public health nurse employed by the World Health Organization and stationed in Botswana. She has just met there a Dutch doctor, Johan de Jong, who works for medicine sans frontiers—doctors without borders, if my French accent isn’t up to the task! During her first date, she tells Johan that her great hero, David Livingstone, along with his wife, Mary Moffat, set up his mission near Gaborone at a place called Kolobeng, where he also tried to teach the locals the principles of irrigation by digging a ditch or small canal, that unfortunately failed. Anyway, Johan agrees to go with her to find Kolobeng (pages 90 and 94):
That weekend, Johan entered the name Kolobeng on his GPS. Nothing came up.
“Do you have the actual coordinates, by any chance?”
“Afraid not. Try Kolobeng River,” suggested Alex, but that drew a blank as well.
“Knowing this country, it’s probably a dry river,” Johan smirked.
“Try Kolobeng Mission. If that doesn’t work I’ll have to call Ruth, who seems to know everything, and ask her how to get there.”
Kolobeng Mission was in the system, however, probably because it was protected by the Botswana Ministry of the Environment. As it was only a few miles outside Gaborone, they were soon there. As they stared at the weed-covered foundations of what once might have been a house, and the indentations of what might have been a canal, Johan finally broke down and started to laugh. He sat on a rock, shaking and gasping for air.
“Ah, my dear Alexandra, let me take you to Amsterdam one day. I’ll show you a house that’s more than five hundred years old, and it looks like a house, not a collection of rubble. I’ll show you a magnificent canal that, strangely enough, is completely full of water. And there won’t be any emaciated goats, flies, sand or rocks.”
Alex tossed her head back and pretended to pout. “You’re a monster, not a doctor, making fun of a precious archeological site!”
She bent down and kissed him firmly on the lips. Johan was startled, but he kissed her back….
Johan took a couple of photos with his smartphone, focusing as much as possible on the driest spots of the sandy riverbed.
“I’m going to e-mail these to friends in Europe to show them the wonders of Scottish hydro-engineering.”
“You bastard!” yelled Alex, trying to snatch his phone, but he just ran backwards and took three or four pictures of her in rapid succession.
“And these I’ll send to my friends, to show them the mad American woman I met on the African veld, who attacked me with wild, wet, but very nice, kisses.”

Guides to fiction writing often pose the question of whether the writer must always have lived in or visited the milieu of the novel. I’m an ardent believer in first-hand knowledge, and I’ll give an example. I’ve been to Botswana, but a very long time ago, and never to Kolobeng. So, while my mother had years of knowledge of the subtlest details of the Isle of Arran, I only had Google, which, of course, is where this picture came from.
A further complication for me was that I needed two major settings. It would have been far too coincidental for Alex to have gone straight to Kuruman. The WHO sent her to Botswana first. The crucial plot features of this is that Botswana was once a British protectorate (Bechuanaland) but never a colony as such. Black-white race relations are less strained, and historically somewhat more equitable. Alexandra’s professional mission there is very successful, and she is accepted. South Africa’s history, especially the Northern Cape, which was once one of the Bantustans, is very different, and she had a much harder time. In desperation she calls on the support of a consultant, Fin Mtata, an African man with a PhD in organizational psychology, and they too have a romantic relationship. So, the story becomes a romantic triangle, and a serious cultural triangle as well.
When the action of the story moves to Kuruman, I still had the full resources of the Internet to tell me all about it. I’d long been fascinated by the existence of The Eye and like little Alex I thought “The Eye of Kuruman” sounded mysterious and romantic and a little bit otherworldly. Based on the pictures of The Eye in the guide books, I had already written most of the chapters in which this amazing underground spring is described.
And then I did what I think you must do: I went there. More precisely my wife Luanna along with Jen of the baobab fame, and her husband John, were all dragged there by me to see this amazingly beautiful oasis. And when I saw it, it meant I had to re-write it all!
Like me, Alex and Johan had a guide book, which she consulted on their drive to Kuruman from Gaborone:
“My grandpa told me, a very long time ago, about The Eye of Kuruman and why the missionaries set up their first mission station there. It was the water. Hey, let me read you some stuff from the guidebook.”
She paged past a series of dramatic photos of fish, waterlilies, and weeping willow trees.
“Gee, great pictures. It looks amazing, dear. I’ll show you later. Keep your snoopy eyes on the road ahead. OK, let me read,
“It says ‘it’s the largest underground spring in the southern hemisphere, able to supply the entire town. ‘Twenty thousand cubic meters of crystal clear drinking water a day.’ How much is that, Johan, in terms of something I can understand, like a half gallon of milk in an American supermarket?”…
They were in a good mood when they drove into Kuruman, which was fortunate, because a less prepossessing place would be hard to imagine. To the north was a ridge of low hills, and to the south, one of the flattest landscapes of yellow grass and low thorn trees imaginable. A large, colorful billboard depicting what looked like a tipped-over bucket of fried chicken pieces declared: ‘Follow your nose.’ They didn’t have much choice, as there was only one main street crowded with cars, pedestrians, road-side stalls, and junky looking stores.
Alex was stunned. Her romantic vision was rapidly evaporating in the fumes of a long row of minivan taxis parked in the center of town.
When we ourselves finally got to visit The Eye itself, we felt exactly the same disappointment as Alex and Johan, quote:
First of all, they expected a lovely open area as depicted in the guidebook, with ‘THE EYE’ in big bronze letters on one side of a large rock, and ‘DIE OOG’ in Afrikaans on the other side. Sadly, most of the letters had been stolen, prized off the rock. With only a T and a Y on one side, and an O on the other side, they missed the stone marker entirely.
Eventually, they found the entrance across the road from a series of craft stalls, painted in zebra stripes on the outside, and an Auto One car supply joint. There was an admission fee of fourteen rand, about one US dollar, which they didn’t mind at all, but the entire area was bleak and run-down. The brick pavements around the little lake had missing and irregular bricks, the lights were broken and smashed, and the perimeter was surrounded by an uninviting spikey metal fence.
“Well,” said Alex, trying her best to feel cheerful, “there’s a guy over there raking up leaves, so someone cares. And just look at the water. It is absolutely clear, you can even see down to the roots of the water lilies. Look at the fish, there’s gazillions of them, you can see their shadows on the bottom of the lake. Even I can understand the sign that says Visvang Verbode! This bench gives us a nice view, let’s sit here and have our lunch.”

LANGUAGE AND DIALOGUE IN HIGHLAND HOLIDAY
Turning now to the siting of the characters as being true to place, let’s briefly consider their language and dialogue. Jane Shaw had it a little easier because her visitors to Arran were Scots girls from Glasgow, so the only two style of speech she needed were city girls versus the locals.
While language and dialogue are important features for maintaining authenticity of place, you also have to be kind to your readers, and careful about not overdoing it and thus making is sound false. Jane Shaw slipped in Scottish words and expressions quite seamlessly:
“Wouldn’t this side do?” murmured Caroline, but Sara was already half over the dry-stane dyke. So was the dry-stane dyke.
“Oh blow,” said Sara, “I’ve knocked half the dyke down.”
“Makes it easier for me,” Caroline remarked, lumbering over. “But it also makes it easier for the cows to get out…”
Dry-stane dyke is a lovely term, and is what the locals there call a wall made of stones piled on top of each other without mortar.
Here are some other good Scottish words that crop up in conversation or actions:
 Wheest
 Och away
 Luggie
 girdle for pancakes not to wear
 lassie
 laird

Another nice example of a common expression my mother used all the time, that didn’t need to be explained, comes when the family is planning a picnic:
Then Sara stormed in with two bags of warm, floury baps. “We must have lots and lots of tomatoes” she announced. “I can never do a hill-climb without a lot of tomatoes. And you will remember a wee poke of salt for them, won’t you Mummy…”
In the story the families plan to climb Cir Mhor:
“Let’s go up Glen Rosa, bathe in the pool, and climb Cir Mhor,” said Sara promptly.
“What do you think, Jane?” [Jane is the third girl, but she’s an interloper, inevitably for teen “What do you think, Jane?” Sara’s mother said,” does the idea of Glen Rosa appeal? You needn’t climb the hill if you don’t want to—we’re going to wait by the pool till they come down again—if the midges will let us. They don’t usually”…..
Glen Rosa was looking its best, and they followed the burn upwards by grassy paths through heather until, round a great bend, they came on a clear view up to the head of the glen, with the sharp peaks guarding the Rosa’s source.
“That’s Goatfell on the right, “Caroline went painstakingly on, “and there’s Cir Mhor, the pointed one, and that’s the saddle joining them.”
One of the ways Jane Shaw was so immersed in the dialogue of the story was because she and my father noticed and talked about their childhood experiences all the time. For example, I was always told that the big debate when they went on a climb in the hills as teenagers and young adults, was whether to eat their picnic lunch before or after reaching the top and I’ve got old photos of them as maybe university students, making sure they were well rested and fed before a climb, and apparently once they reached the top. Quote:
Sara was in a sad quandary. “We must push on,” she said doubtfully, looking longingly at the parcels of food her mother was unloading. “But then we must eat.”
“It’s easier carried inside,” decided Caroline firmly.
Parenthetically, Luanna and I have carried our picnic lunch and a couple of beers to the top of Goatfell, with its spectacular views.
There are also some words and sentiments in the book that 77 years later we would probably want to change: fat ass, queer, Hottentot, and a few slightly disparaging things about tinkers and one peddler, who was Indian, but on the whole, I have to say that my mother didn’t have any serious racial prejudices, although she didn’t fancy the Irish very much.
What I think was so important in terms of capturing the rhythm of a place and making the characters, the dialogue, the plot and the scenery all coalesce was that wherever my mother and father went they were acute observers of manners and customs and oddities, and then they’d talk about them for years so that they became ingrained in the family lore.

DIALOGUE AND AUTHENTICITY IN SOUTH AFRICA
South Africans too have a rich slang, some of it based on African languages but mostly on Afrikaans. I used them sparingly. Alex and Johan are outsiders, so that’s no problem, but I wanted the dialogue of the locals to sound convincing but not to be incoherent. The further issue was that having left South Africa fifty years ago, I didn’t any longer know exactly which words were still in common usage. I listened carefully during visits, but of course I had no conversations with Afrikaans receptionists, African night-watchmen, third generation English-speaking South Africans in rural areas, or black journalism students—all characters who appear in the novel. But there are some words that are so common I did use them:
Jislaaik
Voetsek
Just now
Ag, shame
Braai or braaivleis
True’s Bob
Lekker
Dorp
Koppie

I ran an early draft of the novel past a loyal family member, first cousin once removed, Alastair, who manages a radio station in Johannesburg. The only error he found was when I had a character drinking what used to be my favourite South African beer: Lion Lager. He e-mailed me back and said, ‘Lion Lager hasn’t been brewed in South Africa for 20 years!’ Oh my god, nearly a baobab on the banks of the Vaal moment! Better change it to Castle beer. But I nevertheless left it in, in what I thought was a devilishly clever way of showing my deep insider knowledge:
Fin, the black industrial psychologist, had spent the afternoon listening to Alex’s cultural problems and lack of cooperation from the nursing staff at the hospital. He’s now on his way back to Johannesburg from Kuruman:
Just outside town, with dusk turning the flat bleak landscape a lonely purple, Fin switched on his headlights. He didn’t want to hit any wandering livestock. As he was about to speed up and cruise down the main road, the N 14, he noticed a small motel. It had a flashing neon sign proclaiming the wonders of Lion Lager, a row of neat looking cottages, some with cars parked outside, and at the far end a pink building declaring itself to be the RE_TAURANT. Without thinking Fin pulled off the road, parked in front of the ‘kantoor’, and before long was lying on a comfortable bed with three bottles of Castle beer sitting in an ice bucket. The neon sign, like the motel itself, was something of an anachronism.
He told himself it was too late for the long drive home, and it would be better to spend the night here and leave early in the morning. Deep down, he knew his impulsive reaction had nothing to do with the length of the drive. He knew the next morning he was going to go back to Kuruman, to the hospital, and find Alexandra. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she was attractive, engaging, and personable. She needed his help and his cultural skills—he rather fancied himself as a knight in shining armour. That wasn’t exactly it either. He had the hots for her.”

DETAILS

Professional guides to writing about place suggest that the author should offer specific details rather than generalities. I was greatly amused when re-reading Highland Holiday for some good examples, to discover that my mother and I had come up with exactly the same level of detail seventy-five years apart!
Jane Shaw wrote:
“Five to eleven!” Sara shouted. “And where are our elevenses? We must have our elevenses. I’ll nip up to the Shedog store and get some chocolate.”
“I want a dairy milk flake,” said Caroline. “What are you going to have Sara?”
“I’ll see what they’ve got, but what I want is a Peppermint Crisp.”
I wrote:
Fin’s car was looking a real mess. There was a film of red dirt covering the back bumper, and the areas of the window the rear wiper couldn’t reach. Inside, the back of the car was littered with empty bags once containing biltong, and an apple core or two Alex was saving for the next scraggy goat they passed. She was always thinking about nutrition. There were some candy bar wrappers as well. Alex had acquired a taste for Peppermint Crisps. “We don’t get these in America,” she had explained once, opening her third of the morning.
I think it is inevitable that just like my mother and father noticed things when they travelled, my wife and I notice odd things too, especially in a part of South Africa where we’d never travelled before. And if we noticed them, or were bemused by them, so were Alex and Fin
Here are two examples that I made use of:
I was very keen to visit the Moffat mission, as we only had a day and a half in Kuruman. But when we got there it was closed and all we could do was peer through the gate. Quote:
“When Fin arrived at the Moffat Mission there wasn’t a soul around. That wasn’t surprising as the darn place was all closed up. It was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and a gate with a chain around it, and a big padlock. The sign outside said KURUMAN MOFFAT MISSSION UPGRADATION PROJECT. Upgradation didn’t seem the right word. Fin was sure it wasn’t a valid word in English…”
Something else we’d never seen in this part of the country were giant nests built by sociable weavers. Quote:
Some of the telephone poles had enormous nests constructed by little birds—sociable weavers. Alex had marveled at these massive nests the first time she had seen them, but now remarked on them only if one had collapsed under its own weight and was lying derelict on the bare veld. Nothing quite symbolized failure as vividly as the collapsed mass of a weaver bird colony. She pitied the displaced residents, and particularly the one weaver bird who had brought back one piece of straw too many.
Writers’ guides usually stress trying to allow description of place to affect atmosphere, or to foreshadow the character.
So when I wrote, matter of factly, that the health clinic Alex and Fin were visiting had heavy bars over the windows, I hoped to creates a slight sense of threat, being under siege rather than welcoming. Or when Alex and Johan are planning their summer trip to Cape Town, and Alex suggests they visit a wine farm rather than Johan’s suggestion of Robben Island where Mandela was imprisoned, you sense the difference between the serious Hollander and slightly more hedonistic Alex who was very keen to get away from always having to tip-toe through the cultural minefield, or agonize over historical injustices and the politics of the past.

POLITICS, SYMBOLISM AND CULTURE
Culture, politics, and past injustices, however, are central to the novel. One of the trickiest themes in South Africa is dealing with the impact of apartheid. Fortunately there are other aspects of being in a place and noticing things which can provide subtle but important props or cues for tricky issues. Consider the following:
When my friends and I visited The Eye, we discovered two commemorative plaques embedded in the rocks. Neither are in the guide books and you can’t find them on Google. But Alex sees the first of them and calls over Johan, who’s Dutch, to translate it for her, and they work out it is the centennial celebration of the Battle of Blood River, in which three thousand Zulu warriors were killed by the voortrekkers. The plaque “pledges our ongoing trust in the faith and the ideals of our voortrekker fathers.” Because it is nearly 80 years old Alex excuses these very much less than admirable sentiments and says you can’t judge something by contemporary standards. But then they come across the second plaque, a historical marker, also entirely in Afrikaans, commemorating a visit by the prime minister B. J. Vorster:
“even I can read this one,” Alex said. “‘this memorial stone was unveiled by Prime Minister B. J. Vorster in 1971.’ That’s way more recent. I wonder who he was? A goodie or a baddie?”
Johan reached for his cellphone and Googled B. J. Vorster. He read silently before looking up with a deadpan expression:
“Let’s never judge by contemporary standards, my dear. Lots of people were pro-Nazi and vigorously promoting apartheid. It was all the rage, and as minister of justice he oversaw the Rivonia trial and imprisonment of Nelson Mandela. But hey, you have to be tough with terrorists.”
Alex tried to grab the phone. “You’re a truly bad man yourself, Dr de Jong, using irony and sarcasm to bully a poor young nurse just trying to see both sides of a picture.”
Overriding politics per se are the two fundamental themes to my novel. One is about cultural awareness and responsiveness which makes up much of the tension and depth of the story itself, and the other is the metaphor of water in such a dry land with erratic rainfall and chronic water shortages, which is an extended symbol that pervades the story.
Let me give one example of the water symbolism.
Robert Moffat, who was born in Ormiston, East Lothian, and his wife Mary, were appointed by the London Missionary Society. They set up their mission in Kuruman in the early 1820s because of the beautiful clear water of The Eye. But as the area developed and was settled by whites, they managed to control the water, making it harder for black farmers to develop farms beyond their traditional nomadic style. The Eye symbolizes exploitation of natural resources by colonial settlers, which an elderly white woman explained to Fin
Jesus once sat next to the Fountain of Jacob and asked the Samarian woman there for a drink. Jesus told her whoever drank the water He was offering would never be thirsty. The missionaries would have known that and probably stuck it unwisely in their sermons. Fountains of water symbolizing the truth of the Word of God—then the London Missionary Society kept the real water for themselves. Throughout the Bible, thirst, which everyone would have experienced, symbolizes the need for a spiritual life, for God. In Isaiah it is written: ‘And they thirsted not when he led them through the deserts, he caused the waters to flow out of the rock for them, he clave the rock also, and the waters gushed out.’ That was Moses of course—he must have wandered through Kuruman back in the day.”
But it is the cultural challenges and how Alex negotiates them that represent the key theme of the novel. She is influenced by both her lovers—the fact that she has two lovers at the same time raises the tension, but their different approaches to cultural issues bewilders Alex at first—Johan, the medical scientist believes there is only a right way and wrong way to do things; Fin, the social scientist is keen to prioritize local indigenous knowledge. Some resolution is achieved when Alex finds her own confidence to rely on her culturally sensitive instincts, her training in the best preventative principles of public health, and her basic decency. As the youngest in a very bright family of scholars she has never been taken seriously and often feels inadequate as a result, but through her efforts she learns to overcome her insecurities and doubts:
“When I was trying to please others,” Alex explained, “and not feeling comfortable with my own identity, I accepted there was a correct way of doing things, my family’s way, my professors’ way. I didn’t have to think for myself. But now I’m free to make my own mistakes—it’s up to me.”
“You’re over analyzing again.” Johan assured her. “Your work is terrific. You’re doing a great job. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks, dad!” Alex said, with more than a hint of sarcasm. “I knew you wouldn’t fully understand. But I love you anyway—you’re just a man and you can’t help it. Know this, Johan dear, from now on I’m free. I’m an independent adult. Watch out, Africa!”
Before she fell asleep that night, Alex ran over the discussion in her head. She was clear about who she was, and she was clear about her work. She was clear there was no escaping the need for more data—the visits to the villages were critical. She was good at them, the people accepted her, they told her stuff. Fin’s presence helped, but for the first time she didn’t need him. He was the chauffeur; he announced her entry to the village community. She didn’t need Johan, either, and she didn’t need her family.
She accepted and loved them all, but she was no longer beholden to any of them.

FEELINGS AND EMOTIONS RELATED TO PLACE
But this comment leads me to the final point I want to make about place and that is how the author’s emotions regarding the “place” begin to frame or permeate the style and mood of the story. I accept—thinking of my reviewer’s comments– that I often feel nostalgic, when I go back to South Africa and experience the pulse and vibrancy of Africa again, and see the vast display of stars at night out in the veld—all experiences that crop up in the story.
With respect to my mother’s writing. You might have noticed the date of publication—slap bang in the middle of World War 2, and the year my sister was born. My parents were living in London by this stage and had survived the blitz. And I tend to think that Jane Shaw badly needed to write a book for girls that was innocent, escapist, safe, and comforting. Yes, the villain turns out to be a German spy, but that is largely tangential, and the war gets no other mention, not even of shortages, of rations, of difficulty getting petrol, and all the other realities of life in 1941—presumably the year she was writing Highland Holiday. So, when critics describe it as all a little sugary and overdrawn, I’m quite sure that the act of writing it was a real solace for life in war-time London. She works into her plot in great detail places that were so familiar to her, rich in positive memories
“Sara walked up by the edge of the High Field and over the grass and heather until she was on the Doon, far above the Kings Cave. She found a little grassy hollow which just fitted her and was sheltered from the wind. She took out her pencil and began to chew it. ‘What am I going to write about?’ she wondered…. And the sun dipped over towards the Kintyre coast, and the sea and the golf course and the hills became bathed in the rich glow of late afternoon, and the effect of the chocolate had worn off long ago, Sara rose and went home for her supper.”
In that short paragraph we not only have place as a geographical entity described with physical richness as the light changes colour, but we also have a sense of security: a grassy hollow which just fitted her as well as an action that would be familiar to children at the time—today less so: Took out her pencil and began to chew on it. And then she inserts a little joke that is also about internal physical comforts that lead to action: the effect of the chocolate had worn off long ago. Eudora Welty finally admits that:
“The moment the place in which the novel happens is accepted as true, through it will begin to glow the feeling and thought in the author’s head and which animated the whole of her work.” (P. 7)
Unlike The Eye, there is no sex in Highland Holiday and the only boys are annoying little brothers. There is no swearing or blaspheming. There are no cultural conflicts and the local people are all kind and accepting of the summer visitors—maybe they genuinely were. Sara plays golf, goes swimming, writes a play, does some amateur sleuthing, and fights to protect her friendship with Caroline from the unwelcomed intrusion of another girl, Jane. You could probably do all of these things almost anywhere, but a critical and disparaging attitude about a newcomer in the place the two girls knew so well, gives them a strong feeling of belonging:
Jane! a stranger in their very midst, who had to have everybody and everything explained to her, who didn’t know the ways of the place, unalterable as the law of the Medes and Persians, and who didn’t show any signs of appreciating that you were less than the dust unless you have been coming to Blackwaterfoot for at least 10 years.
Is there comparable emotion and nostalgia in my writing in The Eye of Kuruman? I have to admit there is quite a bit of it, particularly in the way wild-life is depicted. Because the game reserves are still one of our greatest pleasures in South Africa, I’ll end with some photos that illustrate a conversation at the very end of the book:
The morning of Alex’s departure, all was bustling in the Reese household. John had promised to take the big [carved] giraffe to a packaging and mailing agency in Sandton for her. He was amused by his own observation that Lexi was shipping back a wooden giraffe, when she was probably the only American to have spent almost two years in southern Africa and not actually seen a giraffe. Or any other big game. It was a travesty, John said, to have been in Botswana and not managed to get to the Okavango, Chobe, or the Victoria Falls, especially given her love for Livingstone.
“I was too busy,” Alex had replied defensively. “Anyway, I saw lots of springbok, a couple of ostriches, a family of warthogs, and there was a pair of lazy jackals hanging around my apartment complex in Gaborone, raiding the trash cans. I did make it to Upington and saw the Orange River and even saw the backs of a couple of hippos. I photographed them in honor of my grandpa.”

When reading a good novel, you are quite unconsciously exposed to many new places and situations that one day may have a faintly familiar ring. Highland Holiday may have been therapeutic for Jane Shaw in London during the war, but it would surely have been therapeutic for the many little girls who could escape to a peaceful, charming friendly world that nevertheless had the ring of realism, of authenticity, being set in an ancient and enduring place. There’s no violence in Highland Holiday and even the German spy turns out to be Austrian and pretty harmless.
There are no villains in The Eye, either—I may have had more in common with my mother than love of Peppermint Crisps!
The tension in my novel comes from recognizing the good and bad sides of being a modern “missionary’—in the cultural sense rather than the religious. David Livingstone made only one Christian convert, but he greatly respected the acquired wisdom of the native people who had adapted to living in such a dry environment that their word for rain, blessings (hoorah!), and their currency is all the same: “pula.”
But finding pleasure in the story, or learning about the history, or gaining an insight into traditional versus scientific knowledge or seeing different cultural perspectives as all equally valid, depends entirely on one thing:
Making sure there are no baobabs on the banks of the Vaal River and that there are plenty of midges in Glen Rosa.