Good Wives Read online

  This was not how his indomitable mother-in-law saw the situation. Even before her daughter’s letter reached her, she had set out from Kuruman with supplies, not knowing the new baby was dead. When she reached Kolobeng, she was horrified not just at the news of the death and the state of her daughter’s health, but at the conditions she found. The Livingstones appeared to her practically destitute, and the house, once proudly spoken of, had so many broken windows that the wind blew from one end to the other over her sick daughter. To her fury, her son-in-law would not mend them, saying ventilation was a good thing. He himself was exhausted, as she could see, so she managed to restrain her anger. Instead, she busied herself getting Mary well enough to stand the journey to Kuruman, and then she took her daughter and the children off with her, determined to restore them once more to health. The only silver lining of the whole calamitous episode, in her opinion, was that Mary would obviously never again go off on one of her husband’s mad treks while she was pregnant. In fact, she made her daughter promise that she never would – it would be taking obedience and loyalty as a wife to absurd and dangerous extremes. Sometimes a wife had to rebel. When her son-in-law came to collect his family she made it clear what she thought about any future expeditions.

  But as a promise, it proved worthless. Within eight months of giving birth to a baby who died aged six weeks, Mary was once more committing herself to accompanying her husband on another expedition, while pregnant. It was insane, but she wrote to her mother that ‘I must again wend my weary way to the far interior, perhaps to be confined in the field.’7 This was the most provocative way of expressing herself that she could possibly have chosen – the pathetic use of the word ‘weary’, the suggestion of the distance to be travelled in the ‘far interior’, and above all the image conjured up by ‘confined in a field’. It sounded like a woman being forced against her will, and it had what can only have been the desired effect, a blast of rage and disgust from her mother towards her husband.

  Mary, like many women, was certainly aware of the latent hostility between her husband and her mother. Though not wishing to cause trouble between them, she was not above using her mother as an indirect means of challenging her husband. She needed a champion, and like many a wife turned to the only person with the authority to tackle her husband and try to shame him.

  ‘My dear Livingstone’, her mother wrote:

  Before you left the Kuruman I did all I dared do to broach the subject of your intended journey, and thus bring on a candid discussion, more especially with regard to Mary’s accompanying you with those dear children. But seeing how averse both you and Father were to speak about it, and the hope that you would never be guilty of such temerity (after the dangers they escaped last year), I too timidly shrank from what I ought to have had the courage to do. Mary had all along told me that should she be pregnant you would not take her, but let her come here after you were fairly off. Though I suspected at the end that she began to falter in this resolution, still I hoped it would never take place, i.e. her going with you, and looked and longed for things transpiring to prevent it. But to my dismay I now get a letter, in which she writes, ‘I must again wend my weary way to the far interior, perhaps to be confined in the field.’ O Livingstone, what do you mean? Was it not enough that you lost one lovely babe, and scarcely saved the others, while the mother came home threatened with paralysis? And will you again expose her and them in those sickly regions on an exploring expedition? All the world will condemn the cruelty of the thing to say nothing of the indecorousness of it. A pregnant woman with three little children trailing about in the company of the other sex, through the wilds of Africa, among savage men and beasts! Had you found a place to which you wished to go and commence missionary operations, the case would be altered. Not one word would I say, were it to the mountains of the moon. But to go with an exploring party, the thing is preposterous. I remain yours in great perturbation.8 M. Moffat.

  It was a splendid letter, but it had no effect whatsoever. As far as her son-in-law was concerned, he was not going off ‘exploring’ but to establish a new mission, and in his eyes the end justified the means. His wife’s fate, and the fate of his children, were in God’s hands, not his, or his mother-in-law’s. Mary herself appears to have had no influence on his decision. The only comfort for her this time, on this journey, was that her husband intended to settle his family permanently when they reached the end of it. And also she had the reassuring presence of Oswell from the beginning. This ensured that the party was properly provisioned – Oswell’s wealth and experience were invaluable. Mary liked him and he liked her, noting her ‘courage, her devoted attention to her husband and her unvarying kindness to myself’. She was like no wife he had ever known and he marvelled at her stamina, and at her faith in her husband. It was a faith tested many times over on that trip when once again drought proved the worst enemy and the children nearly died of thirst. The heat, as usual, was terrible, the insects vicious, and still Livingstone pressed on towards Linyanti. Thirty miles (48 km) short of it, he decided that the only way to continue, because the undergrowth of the River Chobe’s banks was so thick, was by canoe. Mary and children, with suitable protectors, would have to be left behind. It was, wrote Oswell, the only time he saw Mary ‘fail’.

  It was the end of June and she was eight months pregnant. But she recovered her composure, and her husband and Oswell set off down the Chobe. They were back mercifully quickly, after reaching the Upper Zambesi accompanied by the great chief of the region Sebetwane. The chief had been taken ill and had died, and while they were delayed Livingstone had scouted around the area – and had to face up to the realisation that there was nowhere suitable to build a new mission, even if the new chief gave him permission. Mary’s prophecy, that she would give birth in a field, looked like being fulfilled and he had no alternative but to turn round and make for home. There was no chance of getting to Kolobeng in time. Travelling in the dark, to keep the lethal tetse-fly off the oxen, they lumbered homewards, following another river, spotting leopards by the light of the moon, and on 23 August reached the Zouga river. They went 18 miles (29 km) along its banks, then crossed over, travelling over heavy sand to a hollow where they camped. The oxen were weak, but after a rest they continued slowly, reaching some rapids on 11 September. There, they met two travellers who gave them two bottles of port wine as thanks for help with mending a wheel. ‘It was’, wrote Livingstone in his journal, ‘providential.’

  Indeed. Providential because it helped Mary through the labour of giving birth to a son on 15 September. ‘She never’, wrote her husband, ‘had a better or easier time of it.’ And the baby was strong and healthy. They named him after Oswell, who had not even been aware of what was happening the previous night. He thought they seemed to be camping a long time in a not particularly suitable place; it was only when he suggested they should move on that Livingstone casually mentioned that his wife had given birth. Oswell was astounded, his admiration for Mary increasing even more – she appeared to him to have given birth without making a sound. He was only too willing to stay in the camp to give Mary time to recover, but then Thomas came down with fever and the need to get away from the river with its malarial water became urgent. Mary, Thomas and the tiny baby, plus the other two children, were hustled into the best of the wagons and the whole cavalcade set off again. It had become obvious by then that far from having ‘an easy time’ of it, Mary was once more in the grip of some kind of paralysis. She couldn’t feel anything down her right side apart from some pain – the muscles refused to work. But they reached home relatively quickly, in late November, and she had recovered a little. ‘Mary’, her husband wrote, ‘is much better than she was … but she has had a severe illness.’9

  Severe enough for him at last to realise that if he intended to go on another expedition she and their children could not accompany him. Separation, and a lengthy one, was inevitable. The very thing his wife dreaded most would have to be endured. It didn’t matter
how ‘good’ she was, she and the children were now a handicap to him and the fulfilment of his greater purpose.

  III

  LIVINGSTONE WROTE TO his father-in-law at the end of September 1851: ‘the children must go to England for their education … we have concluded to send them, with their mother, home.’ But ‘home’ was a foreign country to his wife. The place she called ‘home’ was Kuruman. It would have made far more sense for her to stay there while he went off on his travels and for the children to go to Salem or some other school in the Cape. But instead she was to go first to his parents’ house, in Scotland, and then to rent a furnished cottage nearby. Though it was presented as a joint decision, that ‘we’ sounds unconvincing.

  For Mary to choose to leave her husband, upon whom she was so obviously dependent, and travel with four young children to another continent, to a country where she had never felt comfortable, seems unlikely. But she was a wife who obeyed, and perhaps her husband had given her an attractive image of how his family would receive her. His mother, she had learned, was gentle and kind, and unlike her own, never sought to impose her own authority. Mary was a trusting soul, not especially imaginative, and she had absorbed only what was reassuring about her husband’s family. His mother and sisters emerged from their letters as preoccupied with clothes and hats and health, and didn’t seem in the least formidable. They sent things for the children and affectionate messages enquiring after her own health and she could be forgiven for thinking they would be her true friends, taking the place of Ann and Helen (both of whom had by then married and left Kuruman). Janet and Annie Livingstone were near her own age, and unmarried, and would be likely to take Robert, Agnes, Thomas and Oswell to their hearts. Never emotionally close to her own mother, Mary may also have entertained fantasies of becoming close to her mother-in-law.

  But there was Neil Livingstone to consider. Her husband cannot have deluded her about his father, of whom he always spoke with respect but without attempting to deny his severity and rigidly moral conduct. Mary knew this was a father whose word had to be obeyed to the letter, a man who was capable of locking his young son David out of the house because he was not back at the agreed time, a man who could sleep knowing his child was shivering on the doorstep. Her own father was not such a martinet. He had never punished his children, and though a towering figure of a man he never terrified them. If the prospect of life with Neil Livingstone came into Mary’s reckoning it can only have caused her hesitation.

  At any rate, whether she was persuaded or simply allowed her husband to decide, she and the children left Kolobeng in December 1851, Livingstone taking them himself to the Cape to embark. Mary expected, of course, to return, and so left her house full of her husband’s books, and of the furniture brought there with such difficulty, and even of his phials and bottles of valuable medicines; all helped reassure her that this was only a temporary separation. But it also emphasised how little time she had been given to spend there – she was a wife no sooner settled and organised than constantly expected to disrupt her domestic routine. Oswell, and other visitors, had described how she delighted, in her quiet way, in being hospitable and how she busied herself at Kolobeng seeing to everyone’s needs. She was a woman who preferred to be in her own home, and not in other people’s.

  But she enjoyed Cape Town. After the long, hard journey there, it was such pleasure to be settled in what to her seemed to be luxurious lodgings between Table Mountain and Lion’s Head. The family arrived looking like tramps in their worn-out shabby clothes, but Oswell had foreseen the possible embarrassment this would cause Mary (her husband hadn’t, since he was never embarrassed by anything as trivial as appearances) and arranged for them all to have new outfits. Cape Town was a smart place and Oswell would not have the woman he admired so much looked down upon. Wearing the first new dress she’d had for years, Mary took the excited children round the town, eager herself to see how it had flourished since she had last been there. It had fine buildings now, and a Botanical Garden, well kept and pretty, and a few hotels which seemed impossibly grand. The streets were still sandy, though, and too many carts and traps thundered up and down them, making them dangerous thoroughfares, especially for people used to the bush. ‘Mary’, wrote her husband to her father, ‘never was better than at present. The sea air agrees well with her …’

  So did the easy life, the kind of life she could have enjoyed as the wife of one of the many Cape Town missionaries – all of whom Livingstone despised for not going into the interior where the real challenge was waiting. But enforced contact with these people, every one of them eager to meet him since his and Oswell’s ‘discovery’ of the Zambesi (news of which had reached Cape Town and was already on its way to England), made him value his wife more than he already did. He was proud that Mary was, as he put it, ‘impervious’ to any attempt to get her to gossip. She was the soul of discretion, exactly as a good wife should be. On the way to the Cape, they had stayed in Griquatown and there he had been impressed with one woman in particular, describing her as ‘a very good wife, I think, but I thought my own wife better than either of the Griquatown ladies’.1 But it was none the less her place to do as she was told and free him to carry on his great work.

  No sooner had Mary and the children embarked on the Trafalgar (on 23 April 1852) than Livingstone missed them and yet again paid tribute to his wife: ‘How I miss you now …’, he wrote, ‘my heart yearns incessantly over you … You have been a great blessing to me … I loved you when I married you and the longer I lived with you, I loved you better.’2 He worried about her health, and had already written to Arthur Tidman (Foreign Secretary of the London Missionary Society) saying:

  I should feel obliged if you [will] procure the advice of Mr Bennett or some other eminent medical man (Mr Solly perhaps) in reference to a return of the paralysis. The whole right side of the face was perfectly motionless and drawn to the opposite side, and pains along the whole side and extremities ever since may indicate deep-seated disease.3

  The anxiety confessed here ran contrary to the casual way he wrote about his wife’s stroke to others. If she really did have a ‘deep-seated disease’ then Africa was no place for her to be, and sending her to England for a medical consultation was an additional justification for the decision to separate.

  Whether Mary did ever see a doctor in London is not recorded, but Tidman at least met her and organised her ongoing journey, first to Manchester, then to Scotland by train. The train in itself was a shock, as much for her as for her children, but then so was everything about arriving in England with four children and having to make every decision on her own. Her husband had always been the disciplinarian in the family, and even he had found their children hard to silence – they had been born and reared in the bush, where they were used to having plenty of space and no need to consider others. They were not well-brought-up middle-class Victorian children, used to sitting up straight and still. Obedience was so natural to Mary’s own character that it puzzled her when her own children seemed to find it difficult, especially Robert. He was like his father, wilful and obstinate, and she found it exhausting to persuade him to do even the simplest things. On Livingstone’s own admission, his children did a lot of ‘roaring and ranting’, and he complained that whereas other children slept in the burning heat of the day his did not – they were ever energetic.

  Trying to control this energy became Mary’s hardest task, and arriving at her in-laws’ home in Hamilton (near Glasgow) was not the blessed relief she had hoped. Instead, it proved an ordeal of an unexpected, but not exactly unpredictable, kind. She never described what happened (or if she did, the letters have not survived) but it is clear that she soon left the Livingstones’ house and moved into a rented cottage which she could scarcely afford. Neil Livingstone wrote Tidman a stilted and angry letter in which he enquired

  after our grandchildren, having no other way of getting news about them, as their mother Mrs Livingstone was pleased to forbid all communication w
ith us no less than three different times. We received a note from her this morning which I enclose, but owing to her remarkably strange conduct ever since we became acquainted with her, we have resolved to have no more intercourse with her until their (sic) is evidence that she is a changed person.4

  If Neil Livingstone is to be believed (and the enclosed note from Mary has not survived) then this showed more strength of character in his daughter-in-law than she had ever exhibited before, or else was a sign of her desperation. In another letter to Tidman, Neil Livingstone writes:

  we feel anxious about David Livingstone’s children … please be so kind as to inform us … if they are at school and any other particulars you may happen to know regarding them. Mrs L. does not write to us, nor are we anxious that she should, neither do we wish her to know that we are enquiring about them, yet we do love the children much …5

  A fairly desperate situation, then, but not uncommon. The grandparents loved the children but not their son’s wife. They offered, in one of the letters to Tidman, to ‘receive Robert and Thomas, and put them to school’ but they wanted nothing to do with Mary. She had somehow become repugnant to them and the implication was that this was entirely her own doing – she had committed some heinous crime in Neil Livingstone’s eyes, making her unworthy of being his daughter-in-law. Mary, for her part, breathes not a word of criticism of her father-in-law in her own letters to Tidman. She does not even mention him. The fifteen letters she writes during this period are all to do with money and offer no explanation as to what had taken place in Ingraham Cottage, Burnbank Road, Hamilton, in the winter of 1852. But perhaps it needs no explanation: a daughter-in-law arrives tense and nervous, worn out after a long sea-voyage, in charge of four boisterous children she can barely control; she is plain, lacks charm, speaks in an unfamiliar accent (and can barely understand her in-laws) and is, in short, not what was expected; she shivers all the time and complains of the cold, though it is only autumn; she appears to have no money at all and contributes nothing to the household; and – worst of all – she drinks. Only a little brandy to steady her nerves, such as she has been used to since her mother recommended it, and partook of herself on sea-voyages to settle the stomach, but none the less this counted as drinking.