A brilliant, highly intelligent person, who was troubled by mental illness but found peace in writing and teaching.
This is how Robert Nordier described his sister, the woman – called Molly by the few who knew her – who was found murdered in her Umbilo flat last week.
Nordier, 46, spoke to the Daily News this week just hours after police notified him of the death of his sister Marie Thorpe, an award-winning author.
Her body was discovered by the cleaner at Premier Court in Umbilo Road, where she had lived for decades. Police said her hands were bound and her head bloodied. The decomposed state of her body indicated she had been dead for some time, and it had been about a month since she was last seen or heard from.
A “shocked and horrified” Nordier said although his sister’s schizophrenia had made her so paranoid she had refused to see her family for years, he had always been there for her and would be there for her in death too.
The software engineer who lives in Johannesburg, will arrive in Durban tomorrow to see to Thorpe’s cremation. “Her remains will be scattered somewhere of emotional significance to her,” he said.
He and their sister Janine James – who lives in Australia – had last seen Thorpe at their mother, Valerie Filmer’s funeral three years ago.
“Marie had cast us out (of her life) but that one golden day we were all together. Marie played the piano and we drank tea together,” recalled Nordier.
A year-and-a-half ago he wrote to her, telling her he would be in Durban and wanted to see her, but she had told him to stay away, accusing her family of saying “bad things” about her. She did not even see James’s children when they visited South Africa. “I think we reminded her of her problems and to shut out her problems, she shut us out,” Nordier said.
He broke the news of their older sister’s death to James via e-mail yesterday.
Nordier revealed that Thorpe was diagnosed with schizophrenia and anorexia as a teenager. She had a mental breakdown in her first year at the University of Cape Town and was admitted to the Fort Napier Psychiatric Hospital for several years.
They moved to Pietermaritzburg to be closer to her, then eventually to Manor Gardens. The family had originally lived in Pretoria, after moving from London where Thorpe was born.
She went on to obtain a Bachelor of Arts degree with English and philosophy majors, and an Honours degree in philosophy from the then University of Natal, where she also tutored.
She met fellow authors Janet Nicholson and the late Eileen Molver while working as a tutor at the Howick Writing School. The trio co-authored the book, Write from the Beginning: All You Need to Know about Writing the Short Story.
“We formed our own writing workshop. I would pick Marie up from her flat in Umbilo Road and we’d sit and read chapters of our books to each other at Eileen’s. We had a lot of laughs together,” Nicholson said.
That was, until Thorpe “dropped” them. “We never knew why but she just stopped communicating with us. She was a troubled person,” Nicholson said.
Some years ago, they met by chance in Berea. Nicholson remembers being cautious about telling Thorpe she looked well. “She was the kind of person who would have interpreted that as me saying she had put on weight.”
The eating disorder had landed Thorpe in rehabilitation, where she met husband Jim Thorpe, who was struggling with alcohol addiction.
Nordier said Jim was much older than her, close to their father’s age. Jim died of a stroke in the 1990s. “He was more of a father figure for her. They had a good relationship, he did her a lot of good,” Nordier said.
But that did not stop Thorpe from running away from him as she had from her family periodically and continuously over the years, and “hitch-hiking all over the country”.
Nicholson said she would often disappear from her and Jim’s Umbilo flat. “When she came back she would tell us stories of where she had been and they were so wild. We’d often wonder if they were true. She was a complicated person.”
Thorpe transferred her complexity to the lead character in her first fictional book Lucy’s Games. It won bronze in the 1992 Sanlam Prize for Youth Literature.
She also received the Quill award before writing her second book, Limboland.
“They were children’s books but there was angst and conflict of the mind. Marie wrote in the first person, then changed it to the third. I always wondered if Lucy’s Games was a reflection of her own life,” Nicholson said.
The pair were part of the SA Writer’s Circle where Thorpe was a committee member in the 1980s and an honourary lifetime member.
She also met Merilyn Tomkins through the circle. Both women live in Glenmore and had not been aware the “woman found dead in her flat” they had read about in newspapers was their friend.
Although they live just 3.5km away from each other, the pair communicated by mail. “She wrote about a month ago, that she enjoyed my letter and about her activities, her budgie Blessing, just normal, everyday things like you would chat about on the phone with your friend,” Tomkins said.
Thorpe had volunteered to teach street children out of a shipping container in town. She also taught at Westridge High School and tutored for the Howick Writing School most of her career. Lifeline confirmed she had worked there as a counsellor.
Over the years her short stories and article were published in numerous magazines and broadcast on SABC radio.
Nordier felt it was a shame that his sister had met her demise before channelling her brokenness, her “eccentricity, talent and intelligence” into a best-selling thriller.