Inspiration for the book

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Karoo Plainsong

Inspiration for the book

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The Karoo

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Barbara Mutch

The author of Karoo Plainsong

The inspiration for Karoo Plainsong

This book was inspired by my grandparents migration from Ireland to South Africa in the early 1900s. They did not arrive in their new country together: they were engaged for 5 years – grandfather in South Africa, grandmother in Ireland – before my grandmother was allowed to leave Ireland to marry him in SA. But the best-laid plans… During her chaperoned journey, she met another suitor on board ship: an English army officer en route to India to rejoin his regiment. He wanted my grandmother to jilt my grandfather by remaining on board when the boat docked in Cape Town, and sail on to India and marry there. But she knew her duty was to disembark and this she did (with some reluctance, she told me) and married my grandfather on the same day, then took the train to Cradock, in the Karoo, on their honeymoon.

But aside from thwarted romance, it was my grandmother’s recollections of trying to settle in Cradock, and understand the local people, that particularly caught my attention. These memories were the genesis - the seeds - of Karoo Plainsong.

She found Cradock remote and tiny, and was unprepared for the issues of racial inequality that were soon apparent, although they were not yet enshrined in law. She befriended the household maid, and then had to cope with the disapproval of her neighbours. She taught at the local white school, and couldn’t help asking why black pupils could not be admitted.. All these early memories she would murmur to me when I was a child, learning the piano under her instruction.

At the same time, I used to play in our garden with a black child who was the daughter of my parents’ housemaid. I began to realise that copying my grandmother’s early attempts to build bridges was, for my generation, impossible: Apartheid was now law. There could be no relationship between black and white such as she had tried to forge.

While my own and my grandparents’ experience provided the background for the novel, Karoo Plainsong is a work of fiction. It is the story of two journeys: the first being an Irish immigrant family settling into a harsh environment. The second, and the major theme of the book, is the development of Ada, their black maid. She is torn between the white family she loves, and the black township where she teaches. The liberation Struggle threatens to consume both.