An Unquiet Place – Clare Houston

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve read countless historical novels and memoires about the Nazi concentration camps during World War II. But, admittedly, apart from my (often skewed) high school history textbooks about the South African War (or Second Boer War), and the novel Kamphoer by Francois Smith, I haven’t read very much at all about the British concentration camps during this war.

Too little is known about these camps where more than 26 000 of Afrikaner women and children died. One can’t but wonder why our foremothers never passed the camp stories on to their children and grandchildren; why it was almost regarded as taboo by the old people. Research also shows that it was not just the Boers who were imprisoned in the camps after being driven off their farms. Black people suffered too. In fact, it’s been said that three times more black people were incarcerated in concentration camps during this time.

When I bought An Unquiet Place at the Franschhoek Literary Festival where writer Clare Houston was interviewed, I left it sitting on my shelf for a number of months before I finally dived in. I left it so long simply because stories regarding the concentration camps somehow always fill me with a curious combination of boredom and dread. It was therefore a pleasant surprise, once I started reading, to find that Houston approached a complicated historical issue with a deft, and even light, touch.

The story follows Hannah Harrison who escapes to a small town in the Free State to manage a bookshop. Here she finds a concentration-camp journal from the South African War in a dusty box that reveals the life of Rachel Badenhorst, a young girl separated from her family after being captured on their farm and sent on her own to a concentration camp.

Reading the journal, Hannah becomes intrigued and feels compelled to uncover Rachel’s story and to find out what had become of her. In the process she meets the owner of the farm on which a mysterious concentration camp could very possibly have existed and which is regarded by the old folk on the farm as an ‘unquiet place’. Hannah enlists the help of her archaeologist brother and together they uncover a surprising story.

I found that, apart from meeting a rich cast of small town characters in an almost too good-to-be-true rural community, and wading through a predictable love story, it was the layers of secrets within our complicated history that kept me turning the pages.

It is the revelation at the end that stuns and intrigues most, and made me realise how important it is that our past is continually researched and accurately reported. And more importantly, that we take it upon ourselves to know our history and to tell our children and grandchildren the stories about all our brave and courageous fore-mothers – both white and black.

An Unquiet Place is a meaningful story based on extensive research by the author. This is her first novel and she must be congratulated for making the tragedy of our past accessible by recounting it with humour and charm.