Early on in her memoir, Jenny Hobbs writes: “Unlike details you can pin down on a page, memories are elusive and can morph with retelling.”
It’s a truth that memoir and other life writers face when they sit down to write about their lives, but a peculiar alchemy also happens at the page, and the shape of a life emerges.
In Hobbs’ case, it’s a life that has spanned travel, writing the Blossom column for Darling magazine, as well as crafting novels, including the impactful and phenomenally titled Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, now an SA classic. She cofounded and was a director of the Franschhoek Literary Festival for many years. She also enjoyed a decades-long marriage and brought up four children.
Now in her late 80s, Hobbs lives in Cape Town, and has just published her memoir, Through a Dragonfly Eye, which takes a sweeping view of a long and fulfilled life.
Told in a linear manner, it begins with these poetic words: “A dragonfly eye is an ingenious trumpet-shaped device about the size of your palm with a many-faceted lens at the wide end and an eyepiece at the other. Held to one eye, it fractures what you’re seeing into repetitive patterns, each subtly different, which is how a dragonfly sees the world. When you twirl it, the colours in the facets swivel like a kaleidoscope.”
A life, it is suggested in these words, is a kaleidoscope of memories, thoughts and impressions. Born in Durban on the day the Hindenburg disaster — May 6 1937 — Hobbs’ first memory is of being taken to see her newly born brother in a hospital ward after three years of being the only child. The shadow of World War 2 is remembered.
Even though Durban was a long way from the war, it was the last port of call for troop ships going up north, and Hobbs remembers Sunderlands landing near Maydon Wharf on Durban Bay, that everyone wore hats on the streets in those days, and the luxury of white bread was achieved by sieving out the bran of wartime brown loaves.
Hobbs’ dragonfly eyes also reveal other details of those years, from “snazzy milk bars with swivelling stools and jukeboxes”,
X-rays in Ogilvy’s shoe shop to see how well a shoe fitted, and the voluminous skirts of the New Look of the late 1940s. “Discreet lipstick and (eek) blue eyeshadow” were allowed in Hobbs’ mid-teens, and mascara came in “black tablets you had to spit on before applying the gunk to your eyelashes with little brushes”. It’s these granular details that serve to bring Hobbs’ childhood and teens alive, and are repeated through the memoir.
After a happy childhood, Hobbs obtained a BA at the then University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg). She met Ron, her husband of 42 years there at the age of 17, and writes: “Lucky are women who meet a soul mate early — I was 17, Ron about to turn 21 — and hold him in their hearts all their lives.”
Despite different interests, she describes their emotional compatibility, which is a clue as to how a long marriage endures through all of life’s vicissitudes. I must admit that I would have liked a few more clues as to how a marriage evolves and thrives, but this is more a memoir of Hobbs’ life that a deep drill down into the personal.
She asked Ron to wait for her while she sailed away on the Carnarvon Castle to Southampton, spending months in England, seeing that country, and attending a secretarial college in Bayswater Road.
This was also the start of Hobbs’ writing and it was in London that she started writing short stories. She got a job as a supply teacher and toured Europe, a good time to travel as there were fewer tourists and uncrowded venues. Ron did wait for her, though she admits this wasn’t something she should have asked him to do. They were married in 1959: “Marrying young had never been my intention, but I had the good sense to snap up a special man before anyone else did.” They flew across Africa and lived in London, where their first daughter was born. Ron’s work took them to Kitwe, before settling in Johannesburg on a smallholding in Elandsdrift, north of Randburg.
They spent two decades there, bringing up their four daughters. Hobbs writes that “living on a highveld smallholding is a constant challenge. Apart from drains that block up, you have to deal with rampaging fires roaring through long winter grass, ferocious storms and lightning, boreholes running dry, recalcitrant pumps, ticks, drought, floods, flaky neighbours, births, sickness and death”.
In the 1960s the telephone was a wall-mounted party-line phone “that had to be cranked to reach the tannie in the Muldersdrift post office exchange, whose chanted reply would be, ‘Mullies!’!”
Hobbs took up writing short fiction, as well as magazine journalism. She began writing the successful satirical Blossom column for Marilyn Hattingh, then editor of Darling, and her freelance writing career was born.
In 1978, after “15 years of gravel roads, veld fires and smallholding dramas” as well as the threat of a highway that would be built across their property (it never was), as well as the establishment of Lanseria Airport, the Hobbs family moved to Parkview. From 1978-1982 she was features editor on Thandi magazine, and her experience there fed into her later fiction writing.
The idea for Hobbs’ breakout work, Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary, was sparked by a 1985 front-page photograph in the Sunday Times of a young couple lying dead under a sheet in Lesotho. He was a coloured ANC cadre and she a white SA teacher, murdered by apartheid killers.
Hobbs writes: “Two weeks later I sat down one evening with an A4 yellow notepad and started writing a story about a similar tragedy, heading the first page ‘Thoughts in a Makeshift Mortuary’. In tears, I described the young woman in the newspaper photograph, giving her a fictional name and background, and imagined what must have happened when the assassins burst in.” Though it received some mixed reviews, the novel was a success and catapulted Hobbs into author territory, giving speeches.
Ron was diagnosed with Parkinsons in the late 1990s and 42 years of marriage left Hobbs grief-stricken by his decline and death.
A busy decade followed, as well as the establishment of the iconic Franschhoek Literary Festival. Another move followed after having settled in Franschhoek and she now lives in Cape Town in a sunny flat.
The memoir is threaded through with extracts from her work, giving a sense and flavour of, most particularly, her fiction. It’s been a long life. Hobbs now takes pleasure in her family and her writing: “The work I most enjoy.”
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