The Weather in Africa by Martha Gellhorn

Author:Martha Gellhorn [Gellhorn, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906011888
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD

Martha was fifty-two when she discovered Africa; apart from a brief visit to the Duff Coopers in Algiers in 1943, it was an entire continent that she had never visited. It was soon after the Christmas of 1961 and she was in London with her second husband, Tom Matthews. The weather was bitter and profoundly grey and weather, for Martha, was a source of perpetual despair, frustration or delight: she craved sun, heat, blue skies. The title of this collection of stories is no coincidence: the capriciousness of weather is a theme that runs through all of her letters and much of her published writing. Good weather, both blue and hot, spelt happiness; grey skies brought despondency. In the dark and cold of an English midwinter, both she and Tom, as well as Rosario and Lola, who looked after them, had flu. Martha had just sold a short story to a television company; she longed to get away, to be alone, to travel to a new place. It was not the first time.

‘The certainty of the shape of the days’, Martha Gellhorn once told a friend, ‘drives me mad.’ There is no better way to make the days uncertain than to travel and Martha, all her life, kept moving. She was born, as a few people are, restless. The details of the world fascinated her, not just its people and the minutiae of their lives, but landscape, smell, animals, the night sky, fish. She spoke of snorkelling her way around the world from Hawaii to the Seychelles with all her luggage in a small, zippered bag. ‘I mean to keep moving,’ she once told Diana Cooper, ‘guaranteed cure for accidie.’ One restless summer, when she was already in her eighties, she went to Turkey, Corsica, Switzerland and the Sinai desert.

Born in St Louis in 1908, she was first taken to Europe by her German-born father when she was sixteen. From then on, she dreamt only of getting away from Missouri and exploring the world. Something interesting was going on somewhere and she wanted to be part of it. By the age of twenty-two, Bryn Mawr behind her, she was in Paris. The 1930s were spent in France, Germany, England and Spain, covering the Spanish Civil War with Hemingway. The Second World War took her to Czechoslovakia, Finland, the Pacific, North Africa, Italy, the newly liberated Occupied Territories, and Germany. Later came Mexico, where she lived for four years, and Italy, where she lived for a further two, Israel, Vietnam, South America, the Soviet Union, Poland. Occasionally she stayed for a while; mostly she kept moving.

Her idea, now, to escape boredom, rain and cold, was to explore both East and West Africa, starting with Cameroon and Chad, then following the Nile from Khartoum to Entebbe, before travelling on slowly east towards Nairobi. She planned to be away two months, perhaps even three. After consulting old Africa hands, she packed a hot water bottle, a heavy sweater and woollen trousers, a broad

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