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  This, to their mother, seemed no bad thing, but their education was another matter. A wife should be educated to a sufficient standard to be of use to her husband; she must not disappoint and shame him with her ignorance. But such an education was not available at Kuruman or within hundreds of miles of it. Mrs Moffat tried to teach the children herself, but by the time young Mary was seven, her mother felt she was failing. She wrote to a friend that soon she would have to find a proper school for Mary and Ann, because ‘keeping them at home is beyond doubt highly improper’.3 She wanted her daughters to be educated enough not only to support their future husbands, but so that they in turn could teach the African children. Mary in particular seemed to have the ability and temperament to be a good teacher. She was patient, conscientious, hard-working, intelligent and eminently biddable – show, or tell, young Mary what to do and she obeyed without argument. But what would be especially valuable in a teacher was her ability to speak Setswana fluently (she was bilingual) and also the difficult language of the Bushmen (because her nurse had belonged to their tribe).

  So young Mary was groomed from childhood to be something more than a good wife. She was to have a vocation, unusual for a girl of her class had she lived in England. But first she would have to go to a good school. The London Missionary Society, unlike the Methodists, had not yet established schools for the children of their missionaries in southern Africa so the Moffats had no choice except to send their daughters to the only school they knew of, Salem, in the Cape Province, near Grahamstown, and so far away that it would mean not being able to see them for years. The arduous, even perilous, journey would take a minimum of six weeks.

  The whole family set off on 15 June 1830 to take Mary and Ann to Salem, arriving at Grahamstown in the first week of August and leaving them at the school in September. Salem was the largest school in the province, catering for sixty boys and fifty girls as boarders. The headmaster was William Henry Matthews, who had taught in Hackney, London, for a while, before coming out to Africa. Mr Matthews was actually self-taught and had no qualification for his post (not that many schoolmasters did then) but he had very decided ideas as to what should be taught to his pupils. He had no time for Mathematics, Latin, Drawing or Music or Art. All that was on offer was a plain education where nothing but the sound teaching of English was attempted. There was only one textbook: the Bible. The pupils learned how to write by copying out verses and to read by reciting them. Mrs Moffat, though she found leaving her girls agony, left feeling that they were in good hands. Some friends at nearby Grahamstown agreed to have Mary and Ann in the holidays (because the journey was too long for them to return home even for the longest vacation).

  Mary was the older of the two and felt responsible for her sister, something of a burden for a girl of only nine, who was of a quiet, even timid, disposition and used to a mother who had always dominated her life. She found it easy, as ever, to be ‘good’, but perhaps not so easy to be the leader. The two years which passed before a visit from her mother were very long, requiring stoicism to endure, and the holiday arrangements were not ideal. Mary and Ann were not welcomed with much enthusiasm by their host families. They were tolerated, fed and looked after, but that was it.

  In 1833, Mrs Moffat (who in the meantime had had two more children) arrived to see them bringing their brother Robert, then nearly seven, to join the school. She wrote to a friend that both girls seemed well and that their academic progress was satisfactory, but two more years later she decided to move all three children to a school in Cape Town and travelled to Salem to oversee the move herself, taking the three younger children with her. By the time she reached Salem she was exhausted. The help of Mary and Ann, reunited with their family, was sorely needed. They all travelled from Salem to Port Elizabeth to look for a ship that would take the three older children on the eleven-day, by no means easy, journey round the coast to Cape Town. The moment the sailing date was fixed, Mary, the calm, sensible, docile fourteen-year-old Mary, fell ill. What precisely was wrong with her was never stated. No symptoms were listed. There was no mention of fever, coughing, vomiting, aches or pains, all of which in letters at other times during different illnesses were minutely detailed. It looks suspiciously as though Mary, used to being absolutely obedient, was, in the only way open to her, registering some kind of protest against being moved.

  Her mother was distraught, all her plans wrecked, but the more her agitation increased, the worse her daughter’s unspecified symptoms became. She decided Ann and Robert would have to go alone, in the charge of a chaperone found from among the other passengers, and they were duly taken aboard. But the wind was not in the right direction for sailing, and while the ship still stood in the bay Mrs Moffat observed that as soon as her siblings had departed Mary began to show signs of recovering. She promptly had her carried on board and reported ‘she bore it well’. The three children had ‘rather a dangerous passage’4 but arrived safely and their greatly relieved mother returned slowly to Kuruman. How Mary adapted to her new school was never mentioned in the Moffat letters that have survived and she appears to have written none of her own. Two years went by and then came the voyage to England.

  By the time the family arrived there, in June 1839, Mrs Moffat had recovered. She had many relatives to visit (though the dearest of these, her own mother, was dead) and only hoped she could fit them all in before Robert’s New Testament was printed, and they were all on their way back to Africa. In the event, instead of staying in England the planned few months, the Moffats were there four years. It was a curious period in the children’s lives. They saw their father being lionised, such was the Victorian reverence for missionary endeavours, and their mother, as his wife, called upon to play quite a different role. While Robert Moffat toured the length and breadth of the country, speaking to rapt audiences and rousing them to contribute financially to the great work of converting the heathen in Africa, their mother was obliged to stay at home with them. ‘Home’ was not even one place but a succession of different addresses before relative permanence was achieved in Walworth. It had to be, because Mrs Moffat had yet another baby, Jane, in August 1840. She was unable to travel with her husband and had the, for her, unusual experience of being very nearly frustrated and bored with her lot. Instead of making all the decisions, instead of labouring from dawn to dusk to look after her family, she was, she wrote, ‘everywhere taken care of as a hot-house plant’.5 It was a reminder that in Victorian England this was the lot of wives of her class. But, interestingly, she did not relish the luxury and longed to get home. ‘We are seldom together as a family’, she wrote, and said: ‘Since my baby was born Robert has never been with us except for a few hours.’

  Her children were not always with her either, except for the baby and the toddler Elizabeth. The older ones went to stay with various friends and relatives, fitting uneasily into an entirely different social pattern from the one they were used to. For Mary and Ann these visits were particularly difficult, since they had neither the right clothes nor much awareness of correct society manners. They were colonial girls, unsophisticated, with strange accents and an ignorance of how the world worked. And for young Mary at least, the British way of life does not seem to have been preferable to life at Kuruman. She hated the cold, quite different from the sharp, clear cold of an African winter’s morning when in a couple of hours the sun would gloriously burn the chill away. She missed the vast African landscapes, feeling cramped and claustrophobic in the overfurnished houses and in the streets of crowded buildings. The cultural opportunities seem to have passed her by and there is no record of her making friends of her own age, of either sex.

  The only real excitement, in fact, was watching the effect her father had on his audiences. She and Ann and Robert dutifully supported him when his wife could not, though keeping well in the background. It was easy for Mary to be unobtrusive – she was unprepossessing in looks, a small, rather thick-set young woman with an unattractive hair-style and a swarthy complexio
n. She looked like her father, but whereas on a man his features were handsome, on a young woman the pronounced nose, strong bone structure and thick, black eyebrows were not thought pretty. Nor did Mary’s personality draw attention – she was quiet, her eyes were habitually cast down, and her most common expression was one of a misleading blankness. She rarely talked in company, and when that company included her voluble mother, not at all. All Mary’s assets were hidden and it would need determination to uncover them.

  David Livingstone certainly had plenty of determination but professed to have no romantic interest in women during this period. He was residing in a lodging-house for trainee missionaries, in Aldersgate, preparing to go out to Africa. His landlady, Mrs Sewell, had tried to persuade him that a missionary needed a wife, as did Mrs Moffat when she visited, on one occasion, with her husband. But Livingstone had told the directors of the London Missionary Society that he was convinced he would work better on his own – a wife, in his confident opinion, would only get in the way. But he was not quite as impervious to female charms as he liked to assert. There was Catherine Ridley, and her sister, whom he’d met while studying in Essex, and there was some mysterious episode in his youthful past: in a letter to Mrs Sewell he once wrote that he knew she thought him ‘foolish and obstinate’ on the subject of marrying, but said: ‘You don’t know my history and the knowledge of it is absolutely necessary before you could understand my apparent obstinacy. If I had the time or inclination to be egotistical you would see neither mother’s nor sisters’ conduct influenced my mind but, on the contrary, certain conundrums.’ What ‘history’, what ‘conundrums’?6 Whatever experience it was, and however vital to understand his resistance to the idea of looking for a wife, it had made him suspicious of all women. Only with his landlady, Mrs Sewell, did he seem to have any kind of rapport, and she was married with three grown-up children, a woman whom he said he regarded as a mother and to whom his own mother desired him to express her gratitude ‘for the happiness and comfort I have enjoyed under your roof’.7

  If Livingstone met the Moffat daughters, he never commented on them, though he had plenty to say about their mother and was greatly influenced by their father. Like Mary, he lacked social graces and, though his background was very different from hers, he shared her sense of not belonging to the fashionable world. He was a working-class Scot, and just as Mary had been brought up in an atmosphere of unremitting toil at Kuruman, so had he in Blantyre were he had worked in a cotton-mill from a young age.

  Livingstone went ahead of the Moffats to Africa, arriving there in March 1841. From the moment he began the long trek from the Cape to Kuruman he loved the country, feeling a sense of freedom in the landscape which he had never felt before. Once at Kuruman, and engaged on the missionary work he had come to do, he was more sure than ever that a wife would be a distraction. The missionary he had travelled out with, William Ross, seemed to him to be burdened rather than supported by his wife, who had moaned and groaned so much throughout the voyage that her husband was fully occupied in looking after her.

  But by the time the Moffats returned to Kuruman two years later, in the spring of 1843, Livingstone’s attitude towards finding a wife had begun to change. He was now thirty years old, and though the change was barely perceptible at first in his correspondence it was there, beginning with a confession that, though he had ‘a good stock of spirits’ and could ‘bear up against loneliness’ it sometimes ‘requires all my philosophy’.8 He had left the Kuruman station to join a Mr Edwards and his wife further north and, though he had little respect for Mrs Edwards (whom he thought a bad housewife) being with them nevertheless emphasised his own solitary state. He still stoutly defended his contention that he did not need a wife, but he gradually admitted that there were practical advantages to having one. It was not that he thought a wife would be useful to protect his reputation – ‘with respect to scandal … married men have been charged with incontinency … I conclude that marriage, like vaccination for smallpox is not specially preventative to scandal in Africa’9 – but that a man with a wife was thought by the African tribes to come in peace. He also had to admit, now that he had visited several mission stations, that the wives there ‘are an invaluable part of the machinery of missions in this country’. Nevertheless, he was annoyed by attempts to find a wife for him. ‘My friends at Griquatown’, he wrote, ‘imagined I must be dying for want of a wife and kindly sent their daughter … by way of experiment.’10 Mrs Ross apparently explained this away by spreading the rumour that he was in love with a young widow in London called Mrs Sewell. This amused him, but also made him think gloomily that a widow might be his only hope, because he found that the daughters of missionaries had ‘miserably contracted minds’ and that ‘colonial ladies’11 at the Cape were worse. He once risked making a joke about the impossibility of his ever marrying and having children, when he mentioned that some baby clothes included in a box of clothing sent out for the Africans were ‘not the thing for me’, but then rather regretted it because it might have been interpreted as ‘saucy’.12

  Saucy was something Livingstone definitely was not. There could never have been a more serious young man when it came to considering whether he should marry and he obviously had met no available woman who appealed to him by the time he was wounded by a lion in February 1844, three years after he had arrived in Africa. Since by that time he had spent several weeks at Kuruman after the Moffats’ return, Mary and Ann, and even Helen, have to be included in his general condemnation of missionaries’ daughters. None of the Moffat girls was ever mentioned in his letters, not even to dismiss them as possibilities. They were invisible, unlike their mother. Livingstone had noted what a brilliant housekeeper Mrs Moffat was, and how superbly the Kuruman station ran, thanks to her, but he also noted how bossy and domineering she was. She ruled the roost and in spite of her efficiency was exactly what he would not wish for in a wife. He wrote to Mrs Sewell that Mrs Moffat never stopped boasting of her own ‘excellencies’ and he found this insufferable.

  His opinion of her obviously put him off the thought of considering one of the Moffat girls as a wife but it cannot be the whole reason why he never mentions them. It is more likely that at first he simply was not physically attacted to them and therefore not interested in getting to know them. But sexual frustration perhaps had more to do with his eventual decision to find a wife than he was ever prepared to admit. He was young, healthy, and so far as is known had had no sexual experience. The ‘history’ he referred to in his letter to Mrs Sewell is unlikely to have involved a serious sexual encounter – he was deeply religious, immensely self-controlled, and on his own admission a puritan. But he noticed women and was compassionate towards them. He is on record later as swearing he could see no beauty in African women, and that he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting ‘criminal sexual congress’13 with them, but he observed them with great interest and frankness, disliking the dismissive way they were treated. There are many instances of his kindness and even tenderness towards women and girls, and all of this side of his personality needed more fulfilment.

  He also had a highly developed sense of family, believing that the family unit worked best for any society. His devotion to his mother and his two sisters, and to his landlady Mrs Sewell, was openly exhibited, and he was a man who loved children. When he was a student, he had asked the directors of the London Missionary Society if they would pay for him to take extra tuition at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, not just in midwifery but in the treatment of children’s diseases. In Africa he treated the children with compassion and wished always that he could do more for them. He also delivered babies, though he always waited to be asked to help, not wishing to usurp the position of the midwives. Inevitably, he would be called on only during a difficult labour, and his skill in safely delivering the baby and preserving the mother’s life made him something of a local hero.

  This, then, was not the sort of man who seemed fated to be a bachelor, but there was still the problem
of finding a wife congenial to him. The lion did him a favour. After three months trying to recover under the far from tender care of Mrs Edwards at Mabotsa, during which time the wound suppurated and he was gravely ill with fever, Livingstone was moved to Kuruman to convalesce. Mrs Moffat was in her element supervising his needs, but it was Mary and her sister who did much of the actual nursing. The invalid had plenty of time to study a young woman he had never appeared to notice before and the more he studied Mary the more he liked her. His biographers, with wonderful male arrogance, have always considered Mary lucky to have ‘caught’ him, apparently considering that because she was not pretty and was rather plump and didn’t sparkle, Livingstone cannot possibly have actually fallen in love with her. It was, they allege, a marriage of convenience. They have not for one moment taken into consideration their hero’s own intelligence and sensitivity, quite sufficient to make him discover in Mary qualities with which he could indeed fall in love. But no, it seems that men cannot love fat, plain women.