The Spiral-Bound Notebooks

By Ruth Hartley

Ruth Hartley’s collection has real range, a strong political awareness, beautiful imagery, the dark night of the soul, but finally, light and hope. These are the poems that inspired her provocative novel, The Love and Wisdom Crimes.

I began to write poetry in several spiral-bound stenography notebooks while I was at university. The poems were a way of resisting the apartheid state of South Africa but also a way of discovering who I was and who I wanted to become. The notebooks travelled with me when I ran away to London and by some miracle they have survived all my journeyings and are still with me today. Poetry can be an intense and economic way of keeping a diary. The notebooks remained hidden for long years until the ideas contained in them finally germinated into more poetry, my novel, The Love and Wisdom Crimes and my memoir, When I Was Bad.

Ruth Hartley

APARTHEID

I have been walking through the thick green grasses above the sweating vlei looking for dead bodies.

Under some compulsion I went out among the rich fields where the song birds spill their sweetness among the choking scent of lilies.

Ruth Hartley is also the author of The Shaping of Water, The Tin Heart Gold Mine, The Love and Wisdom Crimes, and When I Was Bad: a memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ruth Hartley
• Release date: Jul 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9782955734421

Book preview

FROM ‘THE LOVE AND WISDOM CRIMES’ - PART ONE

7

THE SPIRAL-BOUND NOTEBOOKS

The scuffed dirty-beige cardboard covers of the two old notebooks both say:-

Croxley

(Lion Brand)

Stenographer’s Note Book

Always keeps flat – open or closed

200 pages

A John Dickinson Product

J.D.125

I can’t remember why I used these notebooks at university. Most girls of my generation were brought up to to know shorthand and expected to do secretarial work so perhaps it was a default choice. Perhaps one of my smarter friends had seen their practical use for taking lecture notes and started a trend. They fitted neatly into our handbags after all.

I pick the first notebook out of my cabin bag on my first night back in South Africa. Its spiral wire binding is rusty and red stains mark the cover which hangs loose from the sides at the back and front. Inside, on yellowing paper, its greenish lines are faint, the pages dog-eared, their edges frayed and nibbled by time. The notebooks seem as familiar as my own skin but they don’t belong to me any more. That’s rather how I feel about Rosa nowadays, she is intimately unknown. It’s not yet how I feel about Tim and Sophie. The writing in the notebook is tidier and has a firmer certainty to it than my present scrawl. It reminds me of Sophie’s.

I don’t feel amused detachment and adult tolerance when I look back at my younger self. I doubt many of us feel that way about our younger selves anyway. What is the connection between me and that younger, but older than me, Jane? Ought I feel motherly towards her when the reality is the other way up or down? Younger Jane is, in fact, the mother of me. She’s made me what I am today. It’s a rather disconcerting idea.

Twenty-eight years ago I was a different person. My skin may have been smoother, my body more supple, but my fears, inhibitions, and my ignorance were greater than my children’s are today. That younger Jane lived