If, in the course of this writing, I find myself drifting into reflections about Africa, or India, or anywhere else, that play on some notions of a special or mystical quality in their peoples, I rebuke myself, delete and start again. I am to celebrate Thisness not Otherness, in all I have seen and been through, the Inotic not the Exotic, how much the Same everybody and everything is, not how Different. The Odyssey may be a journey sometimes through the strange, the mysterious – but never the unknowable; then out the other side, towards the holy grail of discovery: how familiar everyone and everything is; how densely, intricately, elegantly, contracdictorily, multifacetedly, everybody is like everybody else. That will be the arrival of my journey.
NOW WE ARE SIX…
...ty something
Now, as the new millennium moves on, we two are well into our Sixties, Eve and I – Dad Mum, Granny Grandpa – starting to feel settled in this lovely place. In this high beam-roofed, tile-floored, galleried house on a hill in a garden surrounded by montane bush on slopes where only wild birds, animals, insects, wild plants and trees live, we are in bliss. After moving house 28 times in 40 years – moving 14 times between nine countries, three continents – we now intend to live, actually settle and reside in our own place, for ten years, maybe twenty, as long as we last; as long as Gezani, Lucky and Nomsa will look after the place, and we after them. As long as our three loving, hardworking sons, Phil, Andy and Chris will visit us with their families once a year or so, and we can be with them in London or Mexico once a year; with Teresa, Kate and Anne, with our ten grandchildren – Natalie, Lucy, John Anthony, Myles, Betty, Carmen, Jess, Alice, Eve and Bobby.
Here we want the children often, as the two of us do, to be jumping into the pool, watching the birds bathing and feeding, looking out for monkeys and duikers and bushbuck coming close, walking into the bush, down to the stream or up the hill into the mountains, sitting in the shade or in the sunny gallery, drawing, reading our books, emailing and surfing the internet, at the sleeper table with the binoculars pointing into the trees, down into the valley, across to the mountain, with the telescope pointing at the carpet of stars, picnicking by the grand old wild fig at the river, driving off for a day in the Game Park, or up to the escarpment lookouts to gaze way down over the lowveld. And other things we don’t yet know to try. So as we grow old with it, they will grow up with it, and some at least will want to come back and back again.
And if anything happens to collapse or dismantle this dream, even after a mere few years of living it, with family, good neighbours and old friends coming round, there will still be nothing to do but exult, and celebrate this arrival with its return to other, South African family, and the odyssey that led to it.
OUR JOURNEY
Of 40 years, house to house, country to country, was partly kicked off and kept going by exile. Not that we, like other middle class white English-speaking South Africans in the 1950s, weren’t fully intending to go abroad for a while anyway after university, to travel in Europe and to live and work in England. Our friend Geoff, best man at our wedding in Johannesburg, used to say Eve was bound to have morning sickness on the Nile, on our way up north. Morning sickness came soon enough, with our Phil conceived on our wedding night, the first time we had ever cast off all precaution, and born just under nine months later. But it was Geoff and Anne who went abroad, while we stayed, and then, just over a year after our marriage, we both jumped with both feet into the ANC-led Congress movement on 21 March 1960, the day of Sharpeville. Eve phoned to join up, and became Johannesburg Secretary of the Congress of Democrats. I moonlighted with COD while working as a reporter on The Star.
We were still at it in full cry – the journalism, the political campaigning, and a multi-racial social life – sixteen months later when our Andy and Chris were born. And so we lived and worked, with our boys tumbling around us, until Eve, so impulsive, so committed, now so brave, surrendered herself to serve the six months prison sentence she had earned, alongside three other white women comrades, for promoting the activities of the banned African National Congress. And soon after she came home we were both Listed, as members of the now banned COD, and were banned from writing for publication. Thus ended my five years on The Star. We started packing, and our odyssey began. But we weren’t condemned like so many comrades, to a move on refugee documents, from Johannesburg or Cape Town, to years in north London. Certainly, our South African passports were refused with a firm flourish: ‘Mister Hall, you must be bluddy joking’ said the Special Branch policemen at The Greys in Johannesburg, where I quite often called on weekend crime reporting rounds, but this time to ask for security clearance to renew my passport. He reached behind him and pulled out a fat file with my name on it, which he slapped on the desk. It must have been full of clippings of my newspaper reports and articles, with little or nothing of genuine subversive interest. But it hit the desk with a decisive thump.
What saved us was that my Pretoria-born father had a copy from Somerset House of his Birmingham-born father’s birth certificate; and that the British consul in Johannesburg responded smoothly and swiftly to my request for UK passports. It was now late 1963. Eve had done her time in Pretoria Central and in Pietersburg Women’s Prison, but was now up on a charge with two former COD leaders, Piet Beyleveld and Ben Turok, of Injuring the Dignity of the State President, no less. It was something dredged up from an earlier campaign: the three had been signatories to a COD leaflet which had fluttered down in thousands from skyscrapers around central Johannesburg one day. It called on the Johannesburg City Council to refuse the freedom of the city to Swart, the first apartheid State President, on grounds among others that as Minister of Justice he had advocated flogging for criminals.
With Eve up there in the dock beside Ben and Piet, I stood in the well of the packed Johannesburg court and found myself near the British vice consul. I leaned across and murmured what our passport problem was – could he help? Yes, if I could provide a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate.
Eve and her colleagues were found guilty and fined. And in February 1964, armed with a British passport, and with Eve and our three toddlers to follow, all as British citizens, I could set off for Nairobi, to work on a newspaper in another part of Africa. My SA passport, like Eve’s, was now a dead memento, stamped ‘Permanent Depareture’ (sic). Our citizenships were taken away, and we could serve up to 18 months in jail if we set foot in the country again. We didn’t, until I crossed the Zimbabwe border over Beit Bridge 26 years later, my ban now lifted, in that wonderful wave of returns after Mandela’s release in early 1990.
Here, another bit of bureaucratic by-play with files. I handed over my British passport along with a special entry visa from the SA Trade Commission in Harare. I watched as the immigration official behind the glass, wondering why a British passport holder should be presenting any visa, pulled across a scrappy looking file roughly scrawled with the words “Swart-Lys” (Blacklist). I read upside down as he ran his finger down the H names. He stopped at mine, still there. He urgently called over a senior, who explained that I was one of those now being let through, subject to citizenship being restored. After my entry was safely endorsed, I pointed to the list, and said in Afrikaans (savouring the moment), Is my wife also still there? He was startled at my presumption, but in this new era, not about to snap at me to mind my own business. He thumbed through again, and murmured “I don’t see it”.
This was an oddity: Eve had been the activist, jailed amid much publicity those decades ago. But her name, as Eve Steinhardt, and next to Joe Slovo, had been grandly swept off the list. I had been left on because however inactive, I was on record as that most-feared thing, a journalist.
Our citizenships were restored after a few months. Our odyssey wasn’t fully over until we returned to stay, but for the first time, we were back.
We should never be ungrateful for our long exile, for it was 26 years out in the world and away from a system which had to taint, at best to morally sideline and culturally stale, the daily lives of our white countrymen and women – families, friends, colleagues – who stayed to live in it (and never acted, so bravely, as many did, to resist from inside). They it was whose sense of what ought to be, of the wider world, of themselves, was over those three decades of hardening racial systems to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast of whiteness, or, the younger ones, to be swept by conscription into a vicious, permanently traumatising military service. By our impulsive, rash responses, we were disgorged, thrown into a life for four years, as a young couple, and young parents, which was not wildly alternative in its style or forms but which in some way almost every day ignored, flouted and opposed established conventional life by flouting and opposing the race divide, its assumptions and fast spreading and sharpening barbs of compulsion and punishment.
Putting down calipers into the rich, rank compost of human history and picking out spans of time as the era of This or the decade of That, the Generation of The Other, risks looking foolish at best. Nevertheless it is clearly possible to say that March 1960, the month of Sharpeville in the year of the Republic, to February 1990, the month of the De Klerk speech, the unbannings, and Mandela's release, was truly, a Thirty Year Era. And it was very much our era, from activism to exile, diaspora, and return.
WHEN I WAS SIX
Photo: Craig Smith's blog
THE STREET WHERE I LIVED was Charles Street, Pretoria. As in Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Charles Street, Brooklyn, Pretoria, South Africa, World, Universe.
Except for school holidays, some Sunday lunches and the occasional long weekends, it was where I lived my early boyhood years, from 1942 to 1948. (And then, at Pretoria Boys High School just up the road, from 1949 to 1953). From the age of six I would spend quite long stretches of my free time at the school gate, dreaming of elsewhere. Or on my knees brrrm-brrrming my handsome 1938 Armstrong Siddeley, and later, my fine-tooled US army jeep with the white star on the bonnet, and other exquisite dinky cars – but not many, and very precious because there was a war on and they weren’t easy to get – down the network of hand-scooped dust roads, in the intricate and beloved Dinky-Town that ran, like a ribbon development, between the sportsfield and the three-strand low wire fence along the Charles Street side of school.
I would have an ear and an eye cocked for the sound of my father’s real car, and him in his grey striped suit with hat on, and a chocolate bar hidden in a pocket for small hands to find. It was a car you could be proud to have arriving to take you away, a Chevrolet sedan, with running boards for boys to jump on for the ride down the driveway, from house to front gate, as he left for work. In those pre-six-year-old days when we lived as a family, mainly in a house with a driveway, not as Hall major and Hall minor, or DJ and MA, and then little Mike, mainly in a school. Feeling for chocolates and jumping on running boards was really pre-school stuff. Now I was six.
It was to the dusty grass pavement beside the Charles Street entrance that the ice-cream cart would come clopping and creaking off the tar road, to park mainly on Saturdays and Sundays, for boarders to come and buy from. It was an all-white wooden cart, an ice cream surrey, with a wooden roof not a fringe, and big wooden-spoked cartwheels, pulled by a spindly brown horse, driven by a spindly white man in a white coat who sat high on a bench seat.
The ice-cream man would jump down, settle a feedbag over the horse’s nose and come round to the back where a few pairs of big eyes were already looking up at the grid of about 20 little white doors with large shiny steel handles and hinges, like ranks of miniature fridge doors. Behind each was a metal tray that slid out, away from the smoking piles of dry ice, to reveal a stack of one thing or another: milk suckers (they were nicest), orange suckers and sometimes lemon suckers: tubes of water ice, about tuppence each. Or wafers, a tickey each: a hand size rectangular block of vanilla ice-cream (no stick) sandwiched between wafer biscuits that got soggy as you sucked them into a squidgy point, then bit a little, until more cold sweet vanilla came popping through the damp carpety biscuit. Even better were the eskimo pies – a sixpence if you had that much pocket money to spare: dark crackly chocolate covering a vanilla ice.
While the doors clacked open, trays slid out and ice creams were unwrapped, the horse was comfortably plopping at the front. And to this day when my teeth crack into a choc bar – if plain, and properly shaped like an eskimo pie – a hint of the immemorial odour of manure can come wafting peacefully into my senses, to keep the chocolate and vanilla company.
Facing Charles Street, just beside the entrance, was – still is – a terrace row of single story buildings that were staff quarters. In one, in my early years there, lived Miss Lloyd, our English teacher. She looked like a Whistler’s mother or a witch in her Welsh gear, always in a long straight black dress, with short straight greying hair, and heavy black shoes. Her total preoccupation with the language infected me. Nothing about it was boring, nothing too pedantic or nit-picking for her. She didn’t put down precocious show-offs in the name of class democracy, provided she detected the true passion of a fellow pedant.
“What does the word ‘prudence’ mean?” she asked one day. “I don’t know” I said, smirking, “but it reminds me of a sausage”. This brought gales of laughter, led by Miss Lloyd herself. And I’ve never forgotten what a hit this was. I loved the burst of laughter, and I never minded, much, that I was often the Fool. To myself, I was the Jester.
She taught grammar like times-tables. “Class” she would say, lifting the cane she walked with, “Relative pronouns!” And the chant would begin, building up like a war dance to her time-tapping cane, until there was a crescendo of voices, raucous young males, stamping and even banging desk lids:
Who Whom Which and That
Who Whom Which and That
Who Whom Which and That
In the mid-1940s someone endowed a grand new gateway, two brick side walls with a thatched roof stretched across, which is still there on Charles Street. The school motto was a copy of a famous one from a British public school: Manners Maketh Man.
Our uniforms, maroon and grey, with cap, had to be worn in public in term-time. One morning at assembly the headmaster gravely announced a punishment for the whole school, because some day-boys, daybugs, had failed to take their caps off when greeted in Pretoria streets: We were lined up in two parallel rows, every boy, in full gear, to file slowly up to the gateway and each doff his cap and say ‘good morning’ to it, before peeling off back to class.
My earliest years there were generally a time of making do, emotionally, as you had to because it was a place of very young strangers thrown together, where there was no one to give love to, or take it for granted from. And the family home was a sometime place, and now cut into two parts.
My Dad was a lovely man, and loving. He smelt nice and felt nice and had attractive energy and would usually arrange to do exciting things. But he wasn’t around, except in holidays, coming in and going out of an inevitably festive relationship with me, and my two fellow-boarding brothers.
*Dad was a loving, lovable father. I always loved the smell and feel of him. He liked laughing and in many ways he tried to share. But there was no space around him in which to be yourself...
With my father and his wife Nola I was a child, to be loved, by him, and well nurtured, by them, but to stay within their conceptions of a child’s place, and well into teenage, never to be exposed to an adult confidence, or an admission of something to forgive.
My Mum was even less there after the earlier years. She lived a gritty, very modest life, but with us she was very natural, much more wry and in some ways real, closer to the ground, and very loving of us boys, and proud of us. She was a woman of spirit, in both senses. As the boyhood years went on, it meant more and more to me, to be her To, an admired ‘young man’ and treated as such - a ludicrous exaggeration that was precious to raise my discounted sense of self.
Already quite senior at our primary school was my elder brother David, three years older – three light years. He was a golden boy, very bright, specially in maths and science, keen on music, good at sports, and with a quick charm and infectious laugh that you longed to bask in. There are a few photographs of him, aged between five and nine, before the divorce set in, where his smile lights up the beach, or the garden, or the group, and you hear again that young laugh. I started hearing it again, after forty or fifty years, when he had found ways to open himself up. But as a child, by the time he was nine he had locked himself away. And, well as he did at school, for all the strong little man and peer group leader that he easily was, many a fatherly visit to our boarding school was an occasion for floods of tears, which made me so sad for him. He would plead sobbingly to go home. But where was that, really?
So school went on being where I lived, mostly, through those impressionable years, with a brother too lofty and achieving to be accessible, and above all, too emotionally locked up.
Michael was five years younger than me, born on the threshhold of the divorce, just before I started at boarding school, and with no memory of a Dad and Mum house. Yet from the first, a firm though far from an aggressive personality, he took a stand on the whole thing, protective of his mother, fiercely resenting Nola. It was in his body language, even before he could talk. He was a fetching little boy, with a charmed blend of humour and intensity, and his father’s darling. Furthest apart in years, he and I became and remained the closest of our family siblings.
I was the middle child, until two half brothers and a half sister came along – my father’s John, with Nola, my mother’s Geoff and Joan Mary, with Budge. I was the consummate adjuster, swiftly working out and working through, so I thought, the worst of parental rows, surfing the overintimate bitterness of my mother, and the bland and total denial of my father. It was my belief that I was closer witness to more of the emotional war than either of my brothers, one too young and one away at school. Yet each reacted more strongly, the eldest with grief, the youngest as a partisan.
[Our brother John, as he grew up, must have wondered at the strange…]
The year before she died, at 81, my mother, in a family group at my lovely, loving sister Joan Mary’s house, sitting with her usual tipple of cane spirit and lukewarm water, suddenly said to me, out of nowhere: “You were always my favourite – you were so good-natured, never any trouble”. Now there was reward, finally, for the adjuster, however whimsically and unfairly bestowed, and I think in hindsight only. I don’t mind that it came with the backhand compliment. I’ll settle for being a favourite, even if only in a moment of misty recall.
RUDDLES
Waterkloof House Preparatory School was known as Ruddles because it was founded and run by the Ruddle brothers from England. The older one was headmaster, not a warm man, reeked of tobacco. I remember going to his study to bend down and be caned on the seat of the pants – four of the best. I still remember the pain that made me walk out in hasty short steps with clenched buttocks, then run gasping and whimpering, to the lavatory, to feel the weals on my backside. I made sure all four were visible, to show off to my schoolmates. The second time I was more prepared, with an exercise book down the trousers. [The only other time I was officially caned was at High School, aged 16, when Wilfred Allen and I were caught smoking. We each got six of the best from the senior housemaster, Stuart Hendry.]
Lorne Ruddle, the younger brother, was a friendly old duffer.
His name doesn’t come to me at first, but he was headmaster after Wilfred MacRobert. He was a reverend from the minority Anglo-Catholic church. He was a little shorter than average, and rounded, without being plump. He spoke in soft mellifluous tones, wore soft clothes – tweeds, flannels and cashmeres, and had a silvering monk-like crown circling his balding head. Like many a priest, he seemed remote, in his own holy mist, usually smiling, but never quite at anybody, or because he was amused. At the same time, he was quite accessible, not embarrassed when I wanted to follow him around, or visit him in his rooms. But he never made any kind of play for me, or for any other boy that I knew of; nor seemed to want to. I remember him best as coming into the dormitory of us 10-year-olds, just before lights-out, and reading us each night, a story from GK Chesterton’s Father Brown collection. I think he liked to leave us with the feeling that he was our Father Brown, and I had no objection to the idea.
A KIND OF EPIPHANY
A moment of revelation. It happened on the train from Johannesburg to Witbank to visit my Mum, one of those journeys which throughout our boyhood, always lifted the spirit a little, despite stepping into the rundown penury of her small town life, from the financial security of my father's hotel near Johannesburg, which was our home - because she was so openly loving and admiring of her boys, never knew how to put us in our place, and because Witbank, however mean and parochial it may seem, was somehow liberated territory, a land of space where many things were possible. It was one of the last of such twice a year journeys, usually with my young brother Mike, before I moved into my late teens and adulthood. This time I was on my own. There was an extra elation. I was 16 or 17 – perhaps I had just passed my mock matric, perhaps even my matric exams proper, and life stretched ahead...On Johannesburg station I had bought a Time weekly newsmagazine. I'd never opened and leafed through one before, it seemed, well, for adults. Of international magazines, I had soaked up all copies I came across through my boyhood, of Life, with its stunning news photographs, of Look, and Saturday Evening Post, with its totally lovable Norman Rockwell covers, and comforting short stories. I was given a subscription for years to National Geographic, with its full-on colour photos, oddly hygienic, sterile writing, as if editors had combed the text to take out the nits and burrs of reality, in the accounts of communities and societies, washed out the way they smelled, and tasted, specially in those days. But it had ads to linger over - smart couples, standing slim, like pencils, beside Cadillacs and Buicks, under hotel porte cocheres, with those GM crests so gleaming and elaborate that in my mind's eye they merge with the Van Cleef and Arpels jewellery that glowed at me from another page. And there was the slogan to conjure with in an ad for watches: Someone you love is hoping for a Hamilton. But Time was on the threshold of a smart complex adult awareness that opened portals for me, on to vistas to gaze over, into labyrinths of wonderful intricacy and complexity. So this was knowledge, where one could wander, hunt, ravel and unravel, shape a view – simply, get to know.
It was a magical few hours on the train. I pored through that first cover story, on David Riesman, learning for the first time what a sociologist was. Later there was another, on Dave Brubeck, which I read with hunger and delight – though we only really got to know the music of his quartet about ten years later, when a friend brought an LP record of Time Out.
Going to Witbank, about twice a year, usually with my young brother Mike, to stay with our Mum, was like stepping out of the ghetto of childness, into a world where you suddenly mattered, and lots of happenings and relationships became possible. This was by no means a step up materially – quite the opposite. My mother was the poor parent, her husband Budge, who had been at the upper crust St John's college in Johanneburg and fought a brave war Up North as a Desert Rat, had slipped down and out of the big city and was managing a timber yard. They lived in a boarding house, a sprawl of wood and corrugated iron bungalows, built in or before the 1920s.They moved, with our little brother Geoff and baby sister Joan Mary, to a Nissen hut complex out of town called Paxton village, then in a final step down, to the rundown Carlton Hotel, overlooking the railway line. It was the end of the line for them...
But always, even into those last years it was a lift for Mike and me to come into town. We'd bring our assortment of old golf clubs, and play round after round, he getting better all the time, me staying totally erratic as I am to this day, the shame of sudden slices, hooks and duffs overcoming my huge love for the game. In school holidays, we'd visit my friend Wilfred Allen from Pretoria Boys High. Or there was the promise of meeting girls and doing things with them
Safari Ants
The rain had stopped. We were bumping down our still slippery murram driveway of black cotton mud towards our house in Langata outside Nairobi, in our VW Beetle, when we saw crossing the road ahead of us, a moving coil, the thickness of a python. It came out of the forest on our left, and went into the grass on our right, down towards the garden. There seemed no end to it, and it was made up of thousands of little glossy black and brown moving parts, safari ants, scurrying over and under each other in several layers. We gaped, and called out for our gardener, Daniel. He hadn’t yet seen the lengthening shape, but he had guessed immediately, and in a minute he came up with a debe of kerosene and quickly sloshed and poured it along the line as it snaked towards the chicken house behind the kitchen. Then he threw down a lighted match and woosh! The flames coursed along yards of the line, which sank down from its python shape with a crackle, into a million charred insect bodies, the front section only about 15 yards from the fowl run. He said that within minutes, they would have turned the four chickens in there into skeletons, and the ant safari would have moved right along.
Our first encounter with the large vicious biters had been weeks before, when the boys first ran on to the lawn of kikuyu grass, as inviting as any Johannesburg garden turf, and rolled on it. The twins screamed, and began clawing at their legs, arms, heads, backs and feet. We rushed down and started pulling off the horrible black brown wriggly bodies – but the head and pincers, dug down into their flesh, sometimes stayed behind, drawing blood.
Our poor terrified boys were the first family victims – we had not yet felt for ourselves how sore the bites were as we brusquely ordered them to stand still while we removed the ants, sometimes leaving a head behind, or responded to a yell: ‘on my head, in my hair!’
But their pincers left no sting and no mark, beyond a tiny hard pinch. The next to feel it was Eve. Walking unwarily in flip-flops (slip-slops, we called them) on the long lawn towards the jetty of rowing boats at Lake Naivasha Hotel, suddenly she screamed and yelled to me – get it out, get it out! What? I said anxiously ‘A bloody safari ant!’. As I bent down to prise between her toes, she twisted my hair, fiercely, so I ended up sharing the pain.
There was, is, a Sikh temple at Sultan Hamud, or is it at Voi. In the days when the long middle stretch of the Nairobi-Mombasa road was still untarred, a meandering dust road through the bush, taking you up and down dongas, through miles and miles of Tsavo game park, you passed right by the temple when you came into the town. It was probably built by the descendants of those Sikhs who came over from India in the 1870s to build the Uganda Railway – the Lunatic Express – and a frightening number of whom were taken by man-eating lions, which sometimes jumped right into the carriages to drag away their screaming prey…
Now I could skitter anywhere. Which way shall I go? Talk about Sikhs, or our Mombasa family holidays… let’s start with our Volkswagen beetle, KGB 778. It was white, with a black roof carrier. The three boys bundled into the back, tent and camping gear on top, and a few pieces in the front, off across the Likoni ferry to our favourite Diani Beach.
By Tony Hall
NOW WE ARE SIX…
...ty something
Now, as the new millennium moves on, we two are well into our Sixties, Eve and I – Dad Mum, Granny Grandpa – starting to feel settled in this lovely place. In this high beam-roofed, tile-floored, galleried house on a hill in a garden surrounded by montane bush on slopes where only wild birds, animals, insects, wild plants and trees live, we are in bliss. After moving house 28 times in 40 years – moving 14 times between nine countries, three continents – we now intend to live, actually settle and reside in our own place, for ten years, maybe twenty, as long as we last; as long as Gezani, Lucky and Nomsa will look after the place, and we after them. As long as our three loving, hardworking sons, Phil, Andy and Chris will visit us with their families once a year or so, and we can be with them in London or Mexico once a year; with Teresa, Kate and Anne, with our ten grandchildren – Natalie, Lucy, John Anthony, Myles, Betty, Carmen, Jess, Alice, Eve and Bobby.
Here we want the children often, as the two of us do, to be jumping into the pool, watching the birds bathing and feeding, looking out for monkeys and duikers and bushbuck coming close, walking into the bush, down to the stream or up the hill into the mountains, sitting in the shade or in the sunny gallery, drawing, reading our books, emailing and surfing the internet, at the sleeper table with the binoculars pointing into the trees, down into the valley, across to the mountain, with the telescope pointing at the carpet of stars, picnicking by the grand old wild fig at the river, driving off for a day in the Game Park, or up to the escarpment lookouts to gaze way down over the lowveld. And other things we don’t yet know to try. So as we grow old with it, they will grow up with it, and some at least will want to come back and back again.
And if anything happens to collapse or dismantle this dream, even after a mere few years of living it, with family, good neighbours and old friends coming round, there will still be nothing to do but exult, and celebrate this arrival with its return to other, South African family, and the odyssey that led to it.
OUR JOURNEY
Of 40 years, house to house, country to country, was partly kicked off and kept going by exile. Not that we, like other middle class white English-speaking South Africans in the 1950s, weren’t fully intending to go abroad for a while anyway after university, to travel in Europe and to live and work in England. Our friend Geoff, best man at our wedding in Johannesburg, used to say Eve was bound to have morning sickness on the Nile, on our way up north. Morning sickness came soon enough, with our Phil conceived on our wedding night, the first time we had ever cast off all precaution, and born just under nine months later. But it was Geoff and Anne who went abroad, while we stayed, and then, just over a year after our marriage, we both jumped with both feet into the ANC-led Congress movement on 21 March 1960, the day of Sharpeville. Eve phoned to join up, and became Johannesburg Secretary of the Congress of Democrats. I moonlighted with COD while working as a reporter on The Star.
We were still at it in full cry – the journalism, the political campaigning, and a multi-racial social life – sixteen months later when our Andy and Chris were born. And so we lived and worked, with our boys tumbling around us, until Eve, so impulsive, so committed, now so brave, surrendered herself to serve the six months prison sentence she had earned, alongside three other white women comrades, for promoting the activities of the banned African National Congress. And soon after she came home we were both Listed, as members of the now banned COD, and were banned from writing for publication. Thus ended my five years on The Star. We started packing, and our odyssey began. But we weren’t condemned like so many comrades, to a move on refugee documents, from Johannesburg or Cape Town, to years in north London. Certainly, our South African passports were refused with a firm flourish: ‘Mister Hall, you must be bluddy joking’ said the Special Branch policemen at The Greys in Johannesburg, where I quite often called on weekend crime reporting rounds, but this time to ask for security clearance to renew my passport. He reached behind him and pulled out a fat file with my name on it, which he slapped on the desk. It must have been full of clippings of my newspaper reports and articles, with little or nothing of genuine subversive interest. But it hit the desk with a decisive thump.
What saved us was that my Pretoria-born father had a copy from Somerset House of his Birmingham-born father’s birth certificate; and that the British consul in Johannesburg responded smoothly and swiftly to my request for UK passports. It was now late 1963. Eve had done her time in Pretoria Central and in Pietersburg Women’s Prison, but was now up on a charge with two former COD leaders, Piet Beyleveld and Ben Turok, of Injuring the Dignity of the State President, no less. It was something dredged up from an earlier campaign: the three had been signatories to a COD leaflet which had fluttered down in thousands from skyscrapers around central Johannesburg one day. It called on the Johannesburg City Council to refuse the freedom of the city to Swart, the first apartheid State President, on grounds among others that as Minister of Justice he had advocated flogging for criminals.
With Eve up there in the dock beside Ben and Piet, I stood in the well of the packed Johannesburg court and found myself near the British vice consul. I leaned across and murmured what our passport problem was – could he help? Yes, if I could provide a copy of my grandfather’s birth certificate.
Eve and her colleagues were found guilty and fined. And in February 1964, armed with a British passport, and with Eve and our three toddlers to follow, all as British citizens, I could set off for Nairobi, to work on a newspaper in another part of Africa. My SA passport, like Eve’s, was now a dead memento, stamped ‘Permanent Depareture’ (sic). Our citizenships were taken away, and we could serve up to 18 months in jail if we set foot in the country again. We didn’t, until I crossed the Zimbabwe border over Beit Bridge 26 years later, my ban now lifted, in that wonderful wave of returns after Mandela’s release in early 1990.
Here, another bit of bureaucratic by-play with files. I handed over my British passport along with a special entry visa from the SA Trade Commission in Harare. I watched as the immigration official behind the glass, wondering why a British passport holder should be presenting any visa, pulled across a scrappy looking file roughly scrawled with the words “Swart-Lys” (Blacklist). I read upside down as he ran his finger down the H names. He stopped at mine, still there. He urgently called over a senior, who explained that I was one of those now being let through, subject to citizenship being restored. After my entry was safely endorsed, I pointed to the list, and said in Afrikaans (savouring the moment), Is my wife also still there? He was startled at my presumption, but in this new era, not about to snap at me to mind my own business. He thumbed through again, and murmured “I don’t see it”.
This was an oddity: Eve had been the activist, jailed amid much publicity those decades ago. But her name, as Eve Steinhardt, and next to Joe Slovo, had been grandly swept off the list. I had been left on because however inactive, I was on record as that most-feared thing, a journalist.
Our citizenships were restored after a few months. Our odyssey wasn’t fully over until we returned to stay, but for the first time, we were back.
We should never be ungrateful for our long exile, for it was 26 years out in the world and away from a system which had to taint, at best to morally sideline and culturally stale, the daily lives of our white countrymen and women – families, friends, colleagues – who stayed to live in it (and never acted, so bravely, as many did, to resist from inside). They it was whose sense of what ought to be, of the wider world, of themselves, was over those three decades of hardening racial systems to be sicklied o'er with a pale cast of whiteness, or, the younger ones, to be swept by conscription into a vicious, permanently traumatising military service. By our impulsive, rash responses, we were disgorged, thrown into a life for four years, as a young couple, and young parents, which was not wildly alternative in its style or forms but which in some way almost every day ignored, flouted and opposed established conventional life by flouting and opposing the race divide, its assumptions and fast spreading and sharpening barbs of compulsion and punishment.
Putting down calipers into the rich, rank compost of human history and picking out spans of time as the era of This or the decade of That, the Generation of The Other, risks looking foolish at best. Nevertheless it is clearly possible to say that March 1960, the month of Sharpeville in the year of the Republic, to February 1990, the month of the De Klerk speech, the unbannings, and Mandela's release, was truly, a Thirty Year Era. And it was very much our era, from activism to exile, diaspora, and return.
WHEN I WAS SIX
Photo: Craig Smith's blog
THE STREET WHERE I LIVED was Charles Street, Pretoria. As in Waterkloof House Preparatory School, Charles Street, Brooklyn, Pretoria, South Africa, World, Universe.
Except for school holidays, some Sunday lunches and the occasional long weekends, it was where I lived my early boyhood years, from 1942 to 1948. (And then, at Pretoria Boys High School just up the road, from 1949 to 1953). From the age of six I would spend quite long stretches of my free time at the school gate, dreaming of elsewhere. Or on my knees brrrm-brrrming my handsome 1938 Armstrong Siddeley, and later, my fine-tooled US army jeep with the white star on the bonnet, and other exquisite dinky cars – but not many, and very precious because there was a war on and they weren’t easy to get – down the network of hand-scooped dust roads, in the intricate and beloved Dinky-Town that ran, like a ribbon development, between the sportsfield and the three-strand low wire fence along the Charles Street side of school.
I would have an ear and an eye cocked for the sound of my father’s real car, and him in his grey striped suit with hat on, and a chocolate bar hidden in a pocket for small hands to find. It was a car you could be proud to have arriving to take you away, a Chevrolet sedan, with running boards for boys to jump on for the ride down the driveway, from house to front gate, as he left for work. In those pre-six-year-old days when we lived as a family, mainly in a house with a driveway, not as Hall major and Hall minor, or DJ and MA, and then little Mike, mainly in a school. Feeling for chocolates and jumping on running boards was really pre-school stuff. Now I was six.
It was to the dusty grass pavement beside the Charles Street entrance that the ice-cream cart would come clopping and creaking off the tar road, to park mainly on Saturdays and Sundays, for boarders to come and buy from. It was an all-white wooden cart, an ice cream surrey, with a wooden roof not a fringe, and big wooden-spoked cartwheels, pulled by a spindly brown horse, driven by a spindly white man in a white coat who sat high on a bench seat.
The ice-cream man would jump down, settle a feedbag over the horse’s nose and come round to the back where a few pairs of big eyes were already looking up at the grid of about 20 little white doors with large shiny steel handles and hinges, like ranks of miniature fridge doors. Behind each was a metal tray that slid out, away from the smoking piles of dry ice, to reveal a stack of one thing or another: milk suckers (they were nicest), orange suckers and sometimes lemon suckers: tubes of water ice, about tuppence each. Or wafers, a tickey each: a hand size rectangular block of vanilla ice-cream (no stick) sandwiched between wafer biscuits that got soggy as you sucked them into a squidgy point, then bit a little, until more cold sweet vanilla came popping through the damp carpety biscuit. Even better were the eskimo pies – a sixpence if you had that much pocket money to spare: dark crackly chocolate covering a vanilla ice.
While the doors clacked open, trays slid out and ice creams were unwrapped, the horse was comfortably plopping at the front. And to this day when my teeth crack into a choc bar – if plain, and properly shaped like an eskimo pie – a hint of the immemorial odour of manure can come wafting peacefully into my senses, to keep the chocolate and vanilla company.
Facing Charles Street, just beside the entrance, was – still is – a terrace row of single story buildings that were staff quarters. In one, in my early years there, lived Miss Lloyd, our English teacher. She looked like a Whistler’s mother or a witch in her Welsh gear, always in a long straight black dress, with short straight greying hair, and heavy black shoes. Her total preoccupation with the language infected me. Nothing about it was boring, nothing too pedantic or nit-picking for her. She didn’t put down precocious show-offs in the name of class democracy, provided she detected the true passion of a fellow pedant.
“What does the word ‘prudence’ mean?” she asked one day. “I don’t know” I said, smirking, “but it reminds me of a sausage”. This brought gales of laughter, led by Miss Lloyd herself. And I’ve never forgotten what a hit this was. I loved the burst of laughter, and I never minded, much, that I was often the Fool. To myself, I was the Jester.
She taught grammar like times-tables. “Class” she would say, lifting the cane she walked with, “Relative pronouns!” And the chant would begin, building up like a war dance to her time-tapping cane, until there was a crescendo of voices, raucous young males, stamping and even banging desk lids:
Who Whom Which and That
Who Whom Which and That
Who Whom Which and That
In the mid-1940s someone endowed a grand new gateway, two brick side walls with a thatched roof stretched across, which is still there on Charles Street. The school motto was a copy of a famous one from a British public school: Manners Maketh Man.
Our uniforms, maroon and grey, with cap, had to be worn in public in term-time. One morning at assembly the headmaster gravely announced a punishment for the whole school, because some day-boys, daybugs, had failed to take their caps off when greeted in Pretoria streets: We were lined up in two parallel rows, every boy, in full gear, to file slowly up to the gateway and each doff his cap and say ‘good morning’ to it, before peeling off back to class.
My earliest years there were generally a time of making do, emotionally, as you had to because it was a place of very young strangers thrown together, where there was no one to give love to, or take it for granted from. And the family home was a sometime place, and now cut into two parts.
My Dad was a lovely man, and loving. He smelt nice and felt nice and had attractive energy and would usually arrange to do exciting things. But he wasn’t around, except in holidays, coming in and going out of an inevitably festive relationship with me, and my two fellow-boarding brothers.
*Dad was a loving, lovable father. I always loved the smell and feel of him. He liked laughing and in many ways he tried to share. But there was no space around him in which to be yourself...
With my father and his wife Nola I was a child, to be loved, by him, and well nurtured, by them, but to stay within their conceptions of a child’s place, and well into teenage, never to be exposed to an adult confidence, or an admission of something to forgive.
My Mum was even less there after the earlier years. She lived a gritty, very modest life, but with us she was very natural, much more wry and in some ways real, closer to the ground, and very loving of us boys, and proud of us. She was a woman of spirit, in both senses. As the boyhood years went on, it meant more and more to me, to be her To, an admired ‘young man’ and treated as such - a ludicrous exaggeration that was precious to raise my discounted sense of self.
Already quite senior at our primary school was my elder brother David, three years older – three light years. He was a golden boy, very bright, specially in maths and science, keen on music, good at sports, and with a quick charm and infectious laugh that you longed to bask in. There are a few photographs of him, aged between five and nine, before the divorce set in, where his smile lights up the beach, or the garden, or the group, and you hear again that young laugh. I started hearing it again, after forty or fifty years, when he had found ways to open himself up. But as a child, by the time he was nine he had locked himself away. And, well as he did at school, for all the strong little man and peer group leader that he easily was, many a fatherly visit to our boarding school was an occasion for floods of tears, which made me so sad for him. He would plead sobbingly to go home. But where was that, really?
So school went on being where I lived, mostly, through those impressionable years, with a brother too lofty and achieving to be accessible, and above all, too emotionally locked up.
Michael was five years younger than me, born on the threshhold of the divorce, just before I started at boarding school, and with no memory of a Dad and Mum house. Yet from the first, a firm though far from an aggressive personality, he took a stand on the whole thing, protective of his mother, fiercely resenting Nola. It was in his body language, even before he could talk. He was a fetching little boy, with a charmed blend of humour and intensity, and his father’s darling. Furthest apart in years, he and I became and remained the closest of our family siblings.
I was the middle child, until two half brothers and a half sister came along – my father’s John, with Nola, my mother’s Geoff and Joan Mary, with Budge. I was the consummate adjuster, swiftly working out and working through, so I thought, the worst of parental rows, surfing the overintimate bitterness of my mother, and the bland and total denial of my father. It was my belief that I was closer witness to more of the emotional war than either of my brothers, one too young and one away at school. Yet each reacted more strongly, the eldest with grief, the youngest as a partisan.
[Our brother John, as he grew up, must have wondered at the strange…]
The year before she died, at 81, my mother, in a family group at my lovely, loving sister Joan Mary’s house, sitting with her usual tipple of cane spirit and lukewarm water, suddenly said to me, out of nowhere: “You were always my favourite – you were so good-natured, never any trouble”. Now there was reward, finally, for the adjuster, however whimsically and unfairly bestowed, and I think in hindsight only. I don’t mind that it came with the backhand compliment. I’ll settle for being a favourite, even if only in a moment of misty recall.
RUDDLES
Waterkloof House Preparatory School was known as Ruddles because it was founded and run by the Ruddle brothers from England. The older one was headmaster, not a warm man, reeked of tobacco. I remember going to his study to bend down and be caned on the seat of the pants – four of the best. I still remember the pain that made me walk out in hasty short steps with clenched buttocks, then run gasping and whimpering, to the lavatory, to feel the weals on my backside. I made sure all four were visible, to show off to my schoolmates. The second time I was more prepared, with an exercise book down the trousers. [The only other time I was officially caned was at High School, aged 16, when Wilfred Allen and I were caught smoking. We each got six of the best from the senior housemaster, Stuart Hendry.]
Lorne Ruddle, the younger brother, was a friendly old duffer.
His name doesn’t come to me at first, but he was headmaster after Wilfred MacRobert. He was a reverend from the minority Anglo-Catholic church. He was a little shorter than average, and rounded, without being plump. He spoke in soft mellifluous tones, wore soft clothes – tweeds, flannels and cashmeres, and had a silvering monk-like crown circling his balding head. Like many a priest, he seemed remote, in his own holy mist, usually smiling, but never quite at anybody, or because he was amused. At the same time, he was quite accessible, not embarrassed when I wanted to follow him around, or visit him in his rooms. But he never made any kind of play for me, or for any other boy that I knew of; nor seemed to want to. I remember him best as coming into the dormitory of us 10-year-olds, just before lights-out, and reading us each night, a story from GK Chesterton’s Father Brown collection. I think he liked to leave us with the feeling that he was our Father Brown, and I had no objection to the idea.
A KIND OF EPIPHANY
A moment of revelation. It happened on the train from Johannesburg to Witbank to visit my Mum, one of those journeys which throughout our boyhood, always lifted the spirit a little, despite stepping into the rundown penury of her small town life, from the financial security of my father's hotel near Johannesburg, which was our home - because she was so openly loving and admiring of her boys, never knew how to put us in our place, and because Witbank, however mean and parochial it may seem, was somehow liberated territory, a land of space where many things were possible. It was one of the last of such twice a year journeys, usually with my young brother Mike, before I moved into my late teens and adulthood. This time I was on my own. There was an extra elation. I was 16 or 17 – perhaps I had just passed my mock matric, perhaps even my matric exams proper, and life stretched ahead...On Johannesburg station I had bought a Time weekly newsmagazine. I'd never opened and leafed through one before, it seemed, well, for adults. Of international magazines, I had soaked up all copies I came across through my boyhood, of Life, with its stunning news photographs, of Look, and Saturday Evening Post, with its totally lovable Norman Rockwell covers, and comforting short stories. I was given a subscription for years to National Geographic, with its full-on colour photos, oddly hygienic, sterile writing, as if editors had combed the text to take out the nits and burrs of reality, in the accounts of communities and societies, washed out the way they smelled, and tasted, specially in those days. But it had ads to linger over - smart couples, standing slim, like pencils, beside Cadillacs and Buicks, under hotel porte cocheres, with those GM crests so gleaming and elaborate that in my mind's eye they merge with the Van Cleef and Arpels jewellery that glowed at me from another page. And there was the slogan to conjure with in an ad for watches: Someone you love is hoping for a Hamilton. But Time was on the threshold of a smart complex adult awareness that opened portals for me, on to vistas to gaze over, into labyrinths of wonderful intricacy and complexity. So this was knowledge, where one could wander, hunt, ravel and unravel, shape a view – simply, get to know.
It was a magical few hours on the train. I pored through that first cover story, on David Riesman, learning for the first time what a sociologist was. Later there was another, on Dave Brubeck, which I read with hunger and delight – though we only really got to know the music of his quartet about ten years later, when a friend brought an LP record of Time Out.
Going to Witbank, about twice a year, usually with my young brother Mike, to stay with our Mum, was like stepping out of the ghetto of childness, into a world where you suddenly mattered, and lots of happenings and relationships became possible. This was by no means a step up materially – quite the opposite. My mother was the poor parent, her husband Budge, who had been at the upper crust St John's college in Johanneburg and fought a brave war Up North as a Desert Rat, had slipped down and out of the big city and was managing a timber yard. They lived in a boarding house, a sprawl of wood and corrugated iron bungalows, built in or before the 1920s.They moved, with our little brother Geoff and baby sister Joan Mary, to a Nissen hut complex out of town called Paxton village, then in a final step down, to the rundown Carlton Hotel, overlooking the railway line. It was the end of the line for them...
But always, even into those last years it was a lift for Mike and me to come into town. We'd bring our assortment of old golf clubs, and play round after round, he getting better all the time, me staying totally erratic as I am to this day, the shame of sudden slices, hooks and duffs overcoming my huge love for the game. In school holidays, we'd visit my friend Wilfred Allen from Pretoria Boys High. Or there was the promise of meeting girls and doing things with them
Safari Ants
The rain had stopped. We were bumping down our still slippery murram driveway of black cotton mud towards our house in Langata outside Nairobi, in our VW Beetle, when we saw crossing the road ahead of us, a moving coil, the thickness of a python. It came out of the forest on our left, and went into the grass on our right, down towards the garden. There seemed no end to it, and it was made up of thousands of little glossy black and brown moving parts, safari ants, scurrying over and under each other in several layers. We gaped, and called out for our gardener, Daniel. He hadn’t yet seen the lengthening shape, but he had guessed immediately, and in a minute he came up with a debe of kerosene and quickly sloshed and poured it along the line as it snaked towards the chicken house behind the kitchen. Then he threw down a lighted match and woosh! The flames coursed along yards of the line, which sank down from its python shape with a crackle, into a million charred insect bodies, the front section only about 15 yards from the fowl run. He said that within minutes, they would have turned the four chickens in there into skeletons, and the ant safari would have moved right along.
Our first encounter with the large vicious biters had been weeks before, when the boys first ran on to the lawn of kikuyu grass, as inviting as any Johannesburg garden turf, and rolled on it. The twins screamed, and began clawing at their legs, arms, heads, backs and feet. We rushed down and started pulling off the horrible black brown wriggly bodies – but the head and pincers, dug down into their flesh, sometimes stayed behind, drawing blood.
Our poor terrified boys were the first family victims – we had not yet felt for ourselves how sore the bites were as we brusquely ordered them to stand still while we removed the ants, sometimes leaving a head behind, or responded to a yell: ‘on my head, in my hair!’
But their pincers left no sting and no mark, beyond a tiny hard pinch. The next to feel it was Eve. Walking unwarily in flip-flops (slip-slops, we called them) on the long lawn towards the jetty of rowing boats at Lake Naivasha Hotel, suddenly she screamed and yelled to me – get it out, get it out! What? I said anxiously ‘A bloody safari ant!’. As I bent down to prise between her toes, she twisted my hair, fiercely, so I ended up sharing the pain.
There was, is, a Sikh temple at Sultan Hamud, or is it at Voi. In the days when the long middle stretch of the Nairobi-Mombasa road was still untarred, a meandering dust road through the bush, taking you up and down dongas, through miles and miles of Tsavo game park, you passed right by the temple when you came into the town. It was probably built by the descendants of those Sikhs who came over from India in the 1870s to build the Uganda Railway – the Lunatic Express – and a frightening number of whom were taken by man-eating lions, which sometimes jumped right into the carriages to drag away their screaming prey…
Now I could skitter anywhere. Which way shall I go? Talk about Sikhs, or our Mombasa family holidays… let’s start with our Volkswagen beetle, KGB 778. It was white, with a black roof carrier. The three boys bundled into the back, tent and camping gear on top, and a few pieces in the front, off across the Likoni ferry to our favourite Diani Beach.
By Tony Hall
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