5 The Beginnings

The Beginnings

There is a pond in a garden with ducks swimming in the water and with one large one, a drake perhaps, standing at the edge. Christina is sitting on the grass with her legs folded behind her to her right side and I am sitting on her lap. Christina is my Zulu nursemaid. I get off her lap and toddle toward the water and the large duck. The duck starts coming toward me and I run back to Christina and sit once more on her lap. I think it is the Bird Sanctuary in Pietermaritzburg. I am a toddler, I imagine about two years old and that is the very earliest memory I have of my being.

I clamber down a steep slope through natural bush where monkey-rope dangles from and between large trees. The ground is damp and the undergrowth is rank and green. Mace is ahead of me and I think Mum or Christina is right behind us. We sit on a monkey-rope suspended between trees and we swing backwards and forwards. The path through the wood leads down below our house to the railway line and beyond into more of the natural forest. We are headed I know not where. I am about three.

I am standing with Mum in front of the house watching the road above where it curves round the head of the valley. Mace is somewhere moving around. We are watching to see Aunt Elizabeth come walking round the road to eventually reach our driveway. Our house is perched on the edge of the valley across which we are looking. Aunt Elizabeth Warrel is not really our aunt. She is someone fairly crippled in legs and hands through arthritis, I think, or from birth. Mum has met her somewhere and befriended her. She is coming for a visit, walking slowly from where she resides down the road from us. I may have been about three or just over.

Mace and I are poking around in the house and we locate a douche syringe in a draw of a chest. We draw water into it in the bathroom and I am standing with it in the doorway of my sister’s bedroom. I aim and push in the plunger and see the stream of water squirt across the room and a wet patch forming on my sister’s blue dressing gown hanging on a hook on the opposite wall. Panic strikes us both and I don’t remember the full sequence of events but now I am hiding behind one of the daisy bushes that line the driveway in front of the house and Mum is looking for me. I am calling out “I’m sorry Mummy!, I’m sorry Mummy!”. I don’t clearly recollect the sequel but I can see Mum’s hairbrush in her hand. It has a handle and a crack down the back of the brush section. It is her usual weapon for dealing out ‘consequences’ to Mace and me. I was possibly four years old.

We are at the Winterskloof school. I am with Mum and I think Mace is with us. We are in a room in the wood-and-iron building looking at the children’s drawings and artwork arranged along the exposed horizontal timbers which are part of the structure of the walls. It may have been Mace’s class. He was a year and a half older than me and this may have been his first year at school. If he was six, I would have been four and a half.

I have a dim recollection of the house itself and of riding on a train, but otherwise I remember little else of my early life in Winterskloof.

According to legend and my birth certificate, I was born on the 16th of November 1933, at Grey’s Hospital in Pietermaritzburg. For some years I thought I had been christened as a baby in the Congregational Church in Pietermaritzburg, but this later appeared to be doubtful. Dad at the time of my birth was 53 years old and Mum was 30 years. The family had moved from Umzumbi near Harding, where Dad had had a Trading Store, to retire in Winterskloof on the mountain-side above Pietermaritzburg in a house which I understand Dad had built himself for he was a carpenter by training and trade and had good knowledge of the building industry.

My Dad was born in England in 1880, the youngest of five brothers all of whom arrived in South Africa to live at the beginning of the nineteen-hundreds. Dad and his one brother, Frank, at one stage had a combined saddler’s and stationer’s shop in Greytown where he and Mum, who worked as a waitress in a tea-room there, met up and eventually married. I learnt later in life that Dad’s father was, as Dad put it, ‘a synagogue Jew’, and from the names and maiden-name of his mother she would also appear to have been Jewish, Dad did not disclose the fact he was a Jew for reasons I can only guess at. He was certainly not a practising Jew.

Mum’s family was Afrikaans. Her grandfather on her mother’s side was a Post who came out from Holland and to my limited knowledge never spoke anything other than Dutch. Mum’s father was a Perry, Afrikaans speaking with little or no knowledge of English, Mum herself was fluent in both languages and also in Zulu. A member of the Dutch Reformed Church, she had been married before to a Swede who apparently soon after the marriage abandoned her and went off to Johannesburg, possibly to look for his fortune on the gold mines. It need no longer be any secret that Dad and Mum lived together for several years before Mum’s divorce came through and the two were married.

When my maternal grandmother died, Mum and her brother, Uncle Bonnie Perry, each inherited half of my grandparents’ farm in the Upper Umvoti district between Seven Oaks and Rietvlei in the Natal midlands. Our half of the farm was called ‘Success’ and we went to live there sometime in 1937 when I was about five years old. I have no recollection of the actual move but my more vivid memories for this autobiography start when we lived on the farm.