Writerly coincidences or when your subject stalks you.

I can’t be the only writer who experiences unusual coincidences in relation to my subject. The fictional plot of A. S. Byatt’s Possession (Vintage, 1991) is predicated on these unexpected connections. Perhaps we steer conversation towards a convergence or just become hyperaware of links in our environment?

Maybe.

But sometimes these connections feel more like providence than prodding. There were definitely times I felt Ann Shaw was looking for me as much I was looking for her.

The following experiences are just of few of many writerly coincidences which intrigued me enough to write them down. I have extracted them from the final edit of Ann Shaw.

Coincidence 1

1994. Cambridge. A medieval Church of England (founded circa 1115), known locally as The Round, closed its doors to her congregation and moved its membership to St. Andrew’s the Great, exchanging corners for curves. Ann’s eldest son would have worshipped in much newer (1770s) Sidney Sussex Chapel nearby. Though I am a non-conformist like Ann, as a student I was inclined to the Round’s stony beauty. Obscured by pillars the size of wine vats, I once perched on a pew, knelt on a hassock, and listened to the received pronunciation of the Reverend Mark Ashton.

When the Round closed, I joined with five other Cambridge residents to create an exhibition in the empty nave. We centred it on the sixth-century Saint Augustine Gospels, one of the oldest European books in Cambridge. Together with Elizabeth Sephton, the panel designer, I examined the original manuscript at Corpus Christi College and, weeks later, viewed her finished work -pa the monk’s earthy fire in her watercolours, his cartoon charm in her lines.

The day before the opening of the exhibition, I was distracted by a map of South Africa tacked to the vestry wall. For the first time in my life, I said, ‘My great-great-great-grand-father was the Reverend William Shaw, Methodist minister of the 1820 Settlers to the Cape’. In the pause that followed, I did not expect her reply.

‘And my great-great-great-grand-father was Hezekiah Sephton, leader of his Methodist party on the Aurora,’ she said.

(‘What about me?’ said Ann from the shadows.)

Coincidence 2

Surfeit with writing about colonial Cape politics (including William’s interactions with Thomas Fowell Buxton), I attended a History Conference to take a break…

I sat in a spacious oak-panelled reception room, in a Hertfordshire country house, remodelled by the architect Alfred Waterhouse. Inside and out, were the intricate stone webs that reached spindly apotheosis in his Natural History Museum in London. I was at a conference for historians, where most of the attendees were giving papers on topics linked with Christianity. One speaker displayed the photograph of a white Victorian male missionary in Chinese dress. Then followed with some charming black and white pictures of one of the earliest churches in a country that now hid the most Christians in the world. Wave-crest roofs, cool white walls, tiny men and women who sat or stood under its porch in cane chairs and smiled at a camera for minutes of their lives. The dust of thirteen decades stirred between us.

At the end of this talk, I asked the speaker, ‘Was his wife with him?’ ‘Yes,’ he answered as he flicked his mouse, ‘that’s her in this picture. But I’m not sure if it’s Wife 1 or Wife 2’. He squinted at the tiny blurred face and absence of dates. ‘If it’s Wife 1, her letters were mainly concerned with the treatment of her children, who she’d sent back to her brother in England. They weren’t being sent to the same schools – to Eton – like their cousins’. It was only then his story began to swell for me into its dimensions of pain and virtue. As if a wolf had entered the forest.

At coffee time, I had the room to myself. I stared up at the portraits that complemented the deep warm wood, sipping what could only be called a brown drink. All the oil paintings were of men, except one woman with a child. I slid between the screen and the wall (it was the only picture obscured), and tried to read the label. Only the male child was identified. Nonetheless, their identity staggered me. The toddler was the last in the line of Buxtons.

Then I read all the labels, up to the portrait of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton who sat behind my chair. ‘That most indefatigable and honest friend of Africa’ as Ann’s husband called him.

In 1869, his widow Hannah, I read on a leaflet, wrote to her son about the building in which I stood. She felt it was a residence given by God and that they were to look to the generations to come to use it as a blessing to the world. A hundred years passed. It was a missionary training college for women and men.

There was no break from Ann. She was always tapping on my shoulder.

Coincidence 3

In 1829, Ann and William received intelligence of Chief Shaka-Zulu’s two conditions for peace. The first was he wanted missionaries. The second was he desired access to the Frontier for trade. Though William was strategic in his selection of Chiefs to whom he sent a missionary – influential chiefs, representing a significant people group, and within reach of the latest mission link – his ‘sell’ remained as straight as would be expected from a military Yorkshireman. Before seeking out Shaka, William approached Chief Faku and his AmaMpondo counsellors, nearly 100 leaders, and gave them a brief overview of the sort of thing they could expect a missionary to teach them –

‘Commencing with the being of God, the creation of the world and of man, the fall, the wickedness of all men, the punishment to be inflicted on sinners, the history of Christ, the atonement and resurrection of Christ, the general resurrection, the final judgement, etc. etc.’

William did not promise Faku trade or political clout. But he did lay down his trump card ‘that Chaka [sic] had requested to have a missionary, but that we did not wish the gospel should pass his tribe and be sent to a tribe beyond him [Faku], until it had first been offered to him’. Faku’s counsellors were quick to respond.

‘The news you have told us today is good. It is sweet. It is like the Imfe (sweet cane),’ said one.

‘Make haste and let a missionary come. You talk about peace. It is good. We are tired of war, tired of prowling like amarhamewa (wild beasts) or being hunted like Imnyamakazi (game) [sic]’ said another.

However, within a month, Shaka was assassinated. Nonetheless, Ann and William secured a highly influential mission with Chief Faku, one of thirty-six established in their lifetime.

May 1829. Chief Faku entered William’s hut with Faku’s great men. Faku sat down and one of his counsellors placed a large elephant’s tusk on the polished floor. William looked at the giant tooth, demonstrating the extraordinary generosity of Faku, but also the ethical dilemma of accepting such a gift. He had seen ‘the distress to which [Faku’s] people had been reduced’ and he knew the Chief could buy many cattle with the ivory for the benefit of his people. But Willian could not outright reject this pledge of honour and trust. William studied Faku. He told him missionaries did not desire such things, but instead asked for ‘a handsome bracelet of native manufacture, which [Faku] wore on his arm, as a token of friendship’. William noted, ‘he immediately took it off and presented it to me’.

January 2005. A pile of junk jewellery sat on my mother’s bed. It was her wake and the chatter of friends and family was still humming downstairs. The jewellery was for the younger grandchildren to rummage through and see if there was anything of Mum’s they wanted to keep. This was the leftovers – plastic necklaces from the 60s in neon yellow, wooden beads from the 70s. I spied a solid round bracelet the colour of honey and slipped it onto my wrist. It felt like dense wood. I liked its absolute smoothness next to my skin. I recalled it was part of a job lot sent from South Africa to my Mum from the estate of my Great Aunt Connie. But once I arrived home, I took it off, hung it on a hook, and forgot it.

February 2020. Having read Faku and William’s encounter, Aunt Connie’s bracelet rolled into my mind. Connie, Ann’s great-granddaughter, born in 1904, and her mother, Constance Shaw, born in 1869 in Grahamstown, three years before William’s death. I retrieved the buttery circle and examined it more closely. Indeed, it was not yellow plastic but antique ivory. It had a deep cellular pattern like cross-hatching. How could I have missed the lines on both sides of the bracelet which were not knots in the wood, but etched images of crouching lionesses. Was this one of William’s exchanges? Whatever its provenance, it was a last present from my mothers linking me to the lineage of Ann.