Looking back....
Part of a speech never given
My life’s journey began in Durban: on the day of the Hindenburg airship
disaster and during the week of King George VI’s coronation. I am
as old as the Republic of Eire, the jet engine and the Golden Gate Bridge
in San Francisco and (to quote Xameb the Bushman in R O Pearse’s Barrier
of Spears), ‘As young as my naughtiest thought.’
In the Forties I remember ominous searchlights in the Durban
night sky, the tinny smell of blackout curtains and the pale, wounded soldiers
and sailors who convalesced on our veranda before being sent back to the
hell of war. I remember asking my mother, during a winter evening
walk, why the sunset was so red and being told it was caused by a terrible
new bomb that had been dropped on Japan. I remember the baffled fury
in Natal when the Nats got into power in 1948 and my first hit song: I’m
Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover.
In the Fifties I remember doing the London jive, snogging with boys
in blazers and the almost-adult thrill of going to university. After
graduation I sailed away from Durban harbour on the Carnarvon Castle to
work and travel in Europe, wearing gloves and a hat – though I didn’t get
far. I came home after a year and a half to marry my varsity boyfriend
and start having babies. Almost smothered under a welter of nappies
and baby talk, happy but isolated on a smallholding outside Joburg, I began
writing short stories as the Sixties wore on.
It was only then, after the overwhelming shame of Sharpeville,
that my political journey began. Our former neighbour, chairman of
the Liberal Party, was detained in jail for months without being charged.
My father-in-law, an honest and decent man, was elbowed out of the police
force after 35 years’ service because he had an English surname.
I read Alan Paton, Nadine
Gordimer and Doris Lessing and
wrote between messy meals and noisy bathtimes.
In the Seventies our children were growing up and my writing
focus shifted to freelance journalism, working from home. In that
decade I remember Soweto exploding and still have the sad farewell letter
from the headmaster of a farm school which I managed and had tried to help
by organising a new classroom – a piece of well-meant meddling that resulted
in a successful petition by surrounding plot-owners to have the school
closed. It was attracting too many black children who stole their
peaches, they said. Dr Piet Koornhof, then Minister of Education,
said he was sorry but he had to comply with the wishes of the voters.
It was a salutary introduction to the turbulent Eighties, when
I became features editor on Thandi magazine and for the first time
visited townships and learned just how easy my life had been, compared
with the desperate struggles of black women. Our student daughters
had to cope with hazards we had never dreamed of: freely available dagga
and drugs, dogmatic Marxism, violent student protests and police raids.
Some of their friends and friends’ parents were jailed. Too many
went overseas and never came back.
I had written hundreds of short stories and features and half-heartedly
begun at least three novels, when a single devastating event turned me
into an author. In December 1985, the masked gunmen of a South African
hit squad killed seven ANC activists in Maseru, and the bodies of Jackie
Quin and Leon Meyer appeared on the front page of the Sunday Times
in the most heart-wrenching photograph I had ever seen. It could
so easily have been one of our own daughters lying there. Three weeks
later, unable to get their tragedy out of my mind, I started to write my
first
published novel…
