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Caitlin Davies – ‘writing is fun’ |
Cruel memories from a once- idyllic country
After a terrifying assault in Botswana, Caitlin Davies is able to tell Ruth Gorb that life is back to normal
IN 1990 Caitlin Davies went to live in Maun, in Botswana.
She was welcomed by her husband-to-be’s family, even though she was a white woman, and she adapted easily to life with them. She and Ron married, built a house by the river, and had a baby, Ruby.
Then one day when Ron was at work, a man broke into the house, trashed the place, and raped Caitlin Davies with her child in her arms.
The man was caught but she had to go through the inevitable procedure in court. “It was awful – but nothing was as awful as being raped.”
She speaks of the horrific experience calmly now, but adds a bitter coda to the story: “They tested me for HIV, but not him; it would have been ‘an invasion of his human rights’.”
It was the death-knell of her relationship with Ron; he offered practical help, but she felt emotionally alone. “For him, his family came first.” She didn’t have the strength to come home immediately – “to move, with a child, no husband, no energy…” But in 2002, after living in Botswana for 12 years, she came back to London.
She lives now in Holloway, near to where she grew up, the daughter of writers Margaret Forster and Hunter Davies. “Coming back here was more of a culture shock than going to Botswana; I worry all the time – how do I cross the road, where does this bus go, how do I get the money out of the supermarket trolley…?”
She earns her living as a writer now, as a freelance journalist and novelist, but she takes issue with the suggestion that writing is in her genes – “what about my sister and brother, who are not writers? But I did know as a kid that you could be a writer, that it was a job. My parents didn’t have that where they grew up. And writing is great for me; how else could I fit in earning a living with looking after Ruby?”
Her first novel, Place of Reeds, received glowing reviews in all the right places, and was based very much on her own life in Botswana. Her second – Black Mulberries, published this month – she describes as more of a saga, the stories of four women of different generations – a description which does not do justice to a book which is most importantly about the destruction of a beautiful country and a way of life, something Caitlin Davies saw happening for herself.
Botswana, she says, was fairly idyllic when she first went to live there.
“Then things started breaking down. Maun changed from a village where you could leave your doors unlocked, which was a safe place for women, where there was respect – I taught English in a school and the children were well-behaved at first. Then came the tourists on safari, the billboards everywhere, television, the first armed robbery. The landscape and the wildlife became an industry, and resentment built up among the people who had lived such a quiet life.”
She began to feel uneasy. The horrific attack she suffered was not the first attack on her personal safety. She had been working for some time as a journalist and was in due course made editor of the local paper. Then one day she was told she had published something “causing fear and alarm”. That, she says, was the beginning of the end.
“I was in and out of court for eight months. I was charged with contempt of court. It got worse. There was woman who had killed her husband and who was on death row, and a women’s group was arguing that she was a battered wife.
“I wrote a piece about it, supporting them. The judge in the case was furious. I no longer felt safe, and I thought about stopping journalism – I was pregnant at the time – but I thought if I stopped, who was going to go on doing this job?”
After the rape, she needed time to recover. She refused to let her parents come to her. “I just wanted to get through it, without having to worry about them. I got through, one day at a time…”
Has the experience changed her? On the whole, she says, she is back to normal. “I have a lovely boyfriend, a lovely child, my family, a lovely job – writing is fun.”
And she writes as if she finds it fun, with enormous vigour and an uncanny gift for getting inside the voices and minds of her four women characters: the matriarch Nanthewa who watches her home being burned down to make room for a safari park; Kazi, her beautiful daughter, who becomes an internationally famous model; Petra, the daughter of the Great White Hunter; strange little Candy, Nanthewa’s granddaughter.
Over a period of 60 years their stories meet and part against a background of dramatic change in a beloved country.
There are moments of comedy: Kazi, promised a glittering modelling career by her appalling white boyfriend, is introduced to life in Britain via a squalid house in Wembley “in a street that seemed to go on forever”.
And there are moments of heartbreak: as Nanthewa’s village burns, she stands there with her child, saving what she can – “my water pots, my cooking pots, a sack of mealie, my precious red blanket and my husband’s wooden chair”.
On the publication of Caitlin Davies’s first book, reviewers compared its gritty realism with the gentler, sweeter portrayal of Botswana in the detective novels of Alexander McCall Smith.
“They forget,” she says fiercely, “that in his first book, Precious had been raped. Not exactly sweet and gentle.”
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