Friday 1 Aug: These three days are less a Fieldtrip than a road trip, for we are Knysna-bound – about 400 kilometres away from Grahamstown – for a reunion with a friend from Cape Town, and heading towards our own island. Well, someone has to do it!

What has been in my mind, as we travelled, concerns a number of Mary Moffat’s letters worked on at the Cory Library on Thursday that contain many ‘poor Mary, this and that’ comments about her eldest daughter, who married David Livingstone. They also convey great sadness when writing to her daughter, Mary L’s younger sister, Janey, after Mary L’s death, and that at least all the grief and troubles Mary L had experienced had ended. Also Mary Moffat in these letters struggles, and largely succeeds, in writing even-handedly of David Livingstone and his (crocodile?) tears after Mary L’s death. Behind these words must have lain much grief and sorrow and perhaps also the feeling that a man who had become the finger of God as well as a public icon was not to be openly criticised, even when writing to those closest to her.

Saturday 2 Aug: Waiting for everyone else to surface, I’m watching the part of the lagoon that goes past our house emerge from night into day through the dawn mist. Our most interesting things from Cory work so far are… For Sue, this is the long-running dispute that occurred between the congregation, and a man appointed from Britain as the pastor, around a new church being built on Pringle land in Baviaansrivier. This went on for some years and was ended only by an inquiry and reports to Downing Street and the British Prime Minister in London. For Andrea, it is Bessie Price’s constant writing to her children at school in Britain and her perception that a gap of 18 days in writing to them was too long, with at the back of these a regularised weekly Bechuanaland post meeting up with the (less frequent) mail steamers to Britain. For Liz, putting on one side the emergent tragedy of Mary Livingstone in these letters, it is firstly Mary Moffat’s twenty year earlier and by the way comments of a ‘there is an opportunity for the Post’ or ‘the Post has arrived by Mr Miller’ kind, which raise the utter irregularity of such opportunities; and secondly and perhaps relatedly the constant excuses Mary M has inscribed in her letters for not writing to her daughter Janey in a succession of (late) annual non/birthday letters to her. And presumably such excuses also appear in her letters to MM’s slightly older daughter Betsy/Bessie, who was also at school in Walthamstow with Janey.

Sunday 3 Aug: Research notebooks versus blogs? With apologies to readers of these blogs, there’s no competition. The blogs are nice to write, it’s a good discipline to have an audience directly in mind, and there is a considerable satisfaction in seeing them shape up as a set on the WWW webpages. At the same time, their format is that of delivering ‘a point’ and this doesn’t encourage working out ideas over days and meanderings about this in the much more free way that the good ol’ Moleskin (with its French squared lines, my all time favourite) notebook makes possible. What are other archive researchers’ favourite ways of working out ideas while archive working is still in progress? do other people do this in situ or only after the time in the archive has ended?

Arriving back in Grahamstown, the little house seemed familiar and friendly. We were also so tired by late nights, dawn rises and much driving that bedtime is extraordinarily early. I’m off at 7.45, Andrea is getting ready, and a reluctant Sue is moving her jigsaw puzzle…

Last updated: 4 Aug 2014