By Eve Hall
Published in TRANSITION
Volume 4, number 16, 1964
They called her Shiela, because that's what she was, a Sheila, a Johannesburg Moll. She had three different surnames I knew of, Dreyers, the most infamous. She came to the prison with Victor as her alias, and I think she had used van Wyk not long before.
She was not quite 19, and very pretty, tall, with short wild blond hair, (the black dye had grown out when I met her), blue eyes, a very snub nose, long firm legs, large perfect breasts and a small waist. She slouched badly and it was her pride that she had, in the seven months she had been there, worn out three pairs of the prison's shoes. She had tatoos on both her arms and an ornate Micky Mouse on one large thigh.
When I was first hustled into the communal eating room, harassed by the very thorough search given to political prisoners, naked under my striped dressing gown, staggering under a load of blankets, sheets, uniforms, I hardly saw the women sitting around the three tables. When finally I sat and chewed, with no appetite at all, the boiled meat and sweet potatoes on my plate, I had a moment of revulsion and panic. I would be living with theives, prostitutes, murderers.
My naivity and horror soon disappeared. Sharing a large cell, and working with the women in one, not so large, cockroach infested room, I was one of them, unidentifiable, sitting with equinamity through dangerous fights, ignoring tears, wasting many of my own, and listening in fascination to their talk.
Sheila was the least sad, and the most exhuberant girl there.. She never sat still, interrupting her work to fetch water, to annoy one of the old women by pushing against her, or to sing "Micheal Row the Boat Ashore" in a loud, raucous, monotonous voice. She knew two other songs, "Ducktail Boogie" and a dirty Afrikaans song that I only half understood.
She spoke a mixture of English and Afrikaans, but could speak neither language properly. She hoarded her sugar ration and licked it up like a child licking jelly powder, she fought and giggled, she sprayed the old and neurotic convicts with water, she scared herself with the ghost stories she told in the cell at night, and she stripped naked to sunbathe during the lunch lock-up when the wardresses went off.
She saw photographs of my children one day, and she asked me to tell her about them. She listened to me quietly, and then said:
"You'd hate to have a daughter like me, hey?"
"No, I'd love to have a daughter as pretty as you," I answered.
She blushed and laughed loudly at me, but from that day treated me gently, and even polished my floor for me sometimes. I misunderstood her and feeling I had some influence over her, tried to correct her. Her reaction was violent, she swore at me, and I never presumed to interfere again.
I soon knew most of her history. Almost all the prisoners were anxious to tell me why they were in jail, to explain their innocence, or excuse their guilt. Sheila spoke openly, and with gusto, of her past life, revelling in her memories.
She had spent most of her adolescence in reformatories and escaped from them all. At the age of 16 she escaped once again, and coming back to Johannesburg, joined her old gang, dyeing her hair pitch black.
Her father refused to let her live with him, her mother she could hardly remember, she had nowhere to go, and she didn't want to go anywhere. She battled [prostituted herself], lived with her boyfriend, smoked dagga, drank and enjoyed life.
She met her mother once, in a hotel lounge, and they had a tearful and dramatic reunion. Her mother gave her an address and Shiela lost it, and they never saw each other again.
Shortly after this Shiela, her boyfriend, and two others planned to rob a cafe. I don't think it was because they were short of money. Shiela did well battling; she was younger and prettier than most of the girls, and she told me with pride that whenever they felt like having a joll [Johannesburg slang for party] she would battle from six to eight in the evening and get enough money to pay for her gang's night out.
They broke into the cafe and they were caught, all four of them. In spite of her assumed name, and dyed hair the police discovered who she was, and her case was remanded. She was then only seventeen. The magistrate ajourned her case for three months, until she turned eighteen so that he could give her a jail sentence and not send her to reformatory again.
She enlivened those three months in jail awaiting trial by smuggling, fighting and getting her friend Helga to tatoo her name across her breasts. It took her an hour every night for three weeks. Helga patiently scratched her skin with a nib dipped in ink, while Shiela sat without saying a word, tears running down her cheeks from the pain. But it wasn't successful, and when I met her it had almost faded.
When Sheila was eventually sent to one year, she was sent to this prison. She was glad that she hadn't been sent to a reformatory; she said the work was much harder there, the wardesses beat the girls, and the girls beat each other.
But her fame had reached our prison before she ever came to it, and the matron was determined to subdue her. Three days after she arrived, for a fairly mild offence, Sheila was given six days on rice water, which meant, as well as no food, six days in solitary, and six days off her remission. She went into the isolation block kicking and screaming. For two days she sobbed loudly. Then she was silent. When they let her out she sulked for a week, refusing to talk to anyone. Her exhuberance soon came back, but she remained frightened of the matron, and would not open her mouth if she was near.
After this she settled down to the routine of prison life easily, giving the cell she shared with five other girls a boarding school atmosphere. I was not in her cell, but in a large one with eleven women, mostly elderly, many neurotic and one moronic. I listened, after lights out, to the squeals, laughter and shouts coming from Sheila's cell with a kind of longing, for though I was able to read in peace in the evenings, the fights in our cell were violent and ugly, the nagging irritations constant.
I had arrived at our prison two months before Sheila was due to be discharged. As her date grew nearer she became more restless and excitable. She attacked her work with a ferocious nergy and with an irritation often dangerous to those around her. She swept the yard so energetically, she ruined the few, small, tomato plants around the cement.
She banged the chairs so hard to get the cockroaches out she broke two. She would crochet furiously and silently for ten minutes, and scraping back her chair with a loud screech, run to the calendar to count the days again.
"Six more weeks. Thirty six days not counting Sundays, six more Sundays", she would shout, pushing whoever was near her violently.
And those with years ahead of them would not even look up, and those with not much longer looked up and smiled.
When she had counted the days three times, four times, she would jump on a chair and look through the pale green bars to see the time on the church clock, leaping down quickly as the wardress came in, to ask for the tenth time:
"Isn't our coffee here yet Juffrou?"
And when our wardress answered as usual, "Get on with your work, Victor". Shiela with a loud sigh, and a bang of her hair would pick up her work again.
It was a tradition that a prisoner was taken off polishing floors in her last month, during which time she was supposed to lose the tell-tale pads on her knees. So loud and obscene was her reaction when she saw her name down on the list in the last month, that the matron herself came in to enquire what the fuss was about. Shiela flushed, and could hardly make her complaint. But the matron took her off floors and she was given the duty of dishing out food. For the next few weeks we ate large crumbly slices of bread, and while most of us learned to keep our plates well away as she splashed out cupfulls of cabbage, the long timers' dislike of her grew.
In the first week of her last month her suitcase full of clothes arrived. She washed them over and over, and spread them out to dry with care, taking days over the ironing, reluctant to let them go again to be stored in her property bag. She began to talk of what she would do with her boyfriend , who had also got a year, and six cuts.
One Sunday morning, as we were lying on blankets in the shade of the high yellow baked-brick wall that enclosed the exercise yard, looking up at our square of blue sky, and the wheeling hawks, she asked me:
"Would you give me a job looking after your children?"
Ignoring the loud laughter from her two friends I told her I had a maid who was looking after my sons while I was in jail.
"But you could get a job looking after children Shiela, they would love you. Why don't you try for a job with the Child Welfare when you get outside?"
She took me very seriously. "Then I had better stop swearing."
I began outlining a course for her junior certificate, but I went back to my reading: She and Helga had started a scuffle, rolling over each other on the cement and shouting "eina".
The next Sunday morning, the matron called Shiela to tell her that her sister and a welfare worker were coming to see her that afternoon. Shiela was quite with delight. She washed and curled her hair, ironed her overall and sat tensely until the wardress called her. She came back glowing.
"My Sussie says she'll get me a job when I get out. I told her and the lady how lekker I'd like it, if I got a job with kids, and she says she'll get me a job in hospital. And she's got my shoes, and she'll leave them with the matron, and she says I can get them fixed."
"That's wonderful Shiela." I said, "Will she come and fetch you?"
"No man, I'm taking the train, and she and the lady's meeting me at the station, and she says I mustn't be bad anymore."
"Are you going to listen to her Shiela?" I asked, laughing.
"Yes, I'm going to get a job, and be good like you."
"Are you going to live with your father?"
"No, my Sussie says my father doesn't want me with him. I'm going to live in a hostel, the lady said. And my Sussie said that my boet [brother] got 9 to 15 years,and she cried and I asked her if she wrote to him, but she doesn't want to and I said she's got to. Shame, it's not nice in jail when nobody write or visits you."
"How old is your brother?" I asked.
"Twenty five."
"What did he do?"
"Robbery. When I get out I am going to visit him."
The prison call of "Kos Meises" interrupted us and we trooped inside for our food. I sat at the same table as Shiela, and always knew when to turn my head away from her as, just before she slouched over her food, she took out her false tooth. She said she could taste her graze better without it.
The matron came while we were eating, and in the uneasy silence that followed she asked Shiela: "Well Victor, did you have a pleasant visit?"
Shiela blushed and nodded, then asked the matron. "Did my Sussie leave my shoes?"
The matron frowned. "What shoes?"
"My shoes. My Sussie said she'd leave them and that you said I could fix them."
"She must have forgotten them Victor."
Shiela pushed away her food and looked down at the table. When the matron left Helga tried to comfort her, but Shiela swore at her rudely and banged her chair as she got up.
The wardress immediately called: Sit down Victor and Shiela swore at her. "Victor: stap kantoor toe." the wardress ordered, and with great banging of her feet, Shiela walked in front of her to the matron's office.
She came back as we were filing to our cells. She was red eyed and sullen, but I realised with relief that she was not going to be punished. The next morning she was full of laughter, full of energy, more than usually rough and that day her shoes arrived, by post.
I overheard her at lunch telling Helga what she and her "ou" would do when they got out, and boasting how much money they would make. When we started work in the afternoon she burst out loudly into "Ducktail Boogie"
Then she looked at me and laughed and said "I'm going to be good now, hey? I am not going to be a ducktail anymore."
I smiled back at her.
A few days after this I was suddenly transferred to another prison. Later I heard that three days before her discharge the matron had called Shiela to her office window and told her that she would be sent to a reformatory until she was tewenty one. Shiela screamed and shouted and cried so much that the wardresses locked her up alone in the hospital section, where she stayed until the officials came to escort her to the reformatory.
Published in TRANSITION
Volume 4, number 16, 1964
They called her Shiela, because that's what she was, a Sheila, a Johannesburg Moll. She had three different surnames I knew of, Dreyers, the most infamous. She came to the prison with Victor as her alias, and I think she had used van Wyk not long before.
She was not quite 19, and very pretty, tall, with short wild blond hair, (the black dye had grown out when I met her), blue eyes, a very snub nose, long firm legs, large perfect breasts and a small waist. She slouched badly and it was her pride that she had, in the seven months she had been there, worn out three pairs of the prison's shoes. She had tatoos on both her arms and an ornate Micky Mouse on one large thigh.
When I was first hustled into the communal eating room, harassed by the very thorough search given to political prisoners, naked under my striped dressing gown, staggering under a load of blankets, sheets, uniforms, I hardly saw the women sitting around the three tables. When finally I sat and chewed, with no appetite at all, the boiled meat and sweet potatoes on my plate, I had a moment of revulsion and panic. I would be living with theives, prostitutes, murderers.
My naivity and horror soon disappeared. Sharing a large cell, and working with the women in one, not so large, cockroach infested room, I was one of them, unidentifiable, sitting with equinamity through dangerous fights, ignoring tears, wasting many of my own, and listening in fascination to their talk.
Sheila was the least sad, and the most exhuberant girl there.. She never sat still, interrupting her work to fetch water, to annoy one of the old women by pushing against her, or to sing "Micheal Row the Boat Ashore" in a loud, raucous, monotonous voice. She knew two other songs, "Ducktail Boogie" and a dirty Afrikaans song that I only half understood.
She spoke a mixture of English and Afrikaans, but could speak neither language properly. She hoarded her sugar ration and licked it up like a child licking jelly powder, she fought and giggled, she sprayed the old and neurotic convicts with water, she scared herself with the ghost stories she told in the cell at night, and she stripped naked to sunbathe during the lunch lock-up when the wardresses went off.
She saw photographs of my children one day, and she asked me to tell her about them. She listened to me quietly, and then said:
"You'd hate to have a daughter like me, hey?"
"No, I'd love to have a daughter as pretty as you," I answered.
She blushed and laughed loudly at me, but from that day treated me gently, and even polished my floor for me sometimes. I misunderstood her and feeling I had some influence over her, tried to correct her. Her reaction was violent, she swore at me, and I never presumed to interfere again.
I soon knew most of her history. Almost all the prisoners were anxious to tell me why they were in jail, to explain their innocence, or excuse their guilt. Sheila spoke openly, and with gusto, of her past life, revelling in her memories.
She had spent most of her adolescence in reformatories and escaped from them all. At the age of 16 she escaped once again, and coming back to Johannesburg, joined her old gang, dyeing her hair pitch black.
Her father refused to let her live with him, her mother she could hardly remember, she had nowhere to go, and she didn't want to go anywhere. She battled [prostituted herself], lived with her boyfriend, smoked dagga, drank and enjoyed life.
She met her mother once, in a hotel lounge, and they had a tearful and dramatic reunion. Her mother gave her an address and Shiela lost it, and they never saw each other again.
Shortly after this Shiela, her boyfriend, and two others planned to rob a cafe. I don't think it was because they were short of money. Shiela did well battling; she was younger and prettier than most of the girls, and she told me with pride that whenever they felt like having a joll [Johannesburg slang for party] she would battle from six to eight in the evening and get enough money to pay for her gang's night out.
They broke into the cafe and they were caught, all four of them. In spite of her assumed name, and dyed hair the police discovered who she was, and her case was remanded. She was then only seventeen. The magistrate ajourned her case for three months, until she turned eighteen so that he could give her a jail sentence and not send her to reformatory again.
She enlivened those three months in jail awaiting trial by smuggling, fighting and getting her friend Helga to tatoo her name across her breasts. It took her an hour every night for three weeks. Helga patiently scratched her skin with a nib dipped in ink, while Shiela sat without saying a word, tears running down her cheeks from the pain. But it wasn't successful, and when I met her it had almost faded.
When Sheila was eventually sent to one year, she was sent to this prison. She was glad that she hadn't been sent to a reformatory; she said the work was much harder there, the wardesses beat the girls, and the girls beat each other.
But her fame had reached our prison before she ever came to it, and the matron was determined to subdue her. Three days after she arrived, for a fairly mild offence, Sheila was given six days on rice water, which meant, as well as no food, six days in solitary, and six days off her remission. She went into the isolation block kicking and screaming. For two days she sobbed loudly. Then she was silent. When they let her out she sulked for a week, refusing to talk to anyone. Her exhuberance soon came back, but she remained frightened of the matron, and would not open her mouth if she was near.
After this she settled down to the routine of prison life easily, giving the cell she shared with five other girls a boarding school atmosphere. I was not in her cell, but in a large one with eleven women, mostly elderly, many neurotic and one moronic. I listened, after lights out, to the squeals, laughter and shouts coming from Sheila's cell with a kind of longing, for though I was able to read in peace in the evenings, the fights in our cell were violent and ugly, the nagging irritations constant.
I had arrived at our prison two months before Sheila was due to be discharged. As her date grew nearer she became more restless and excitable. She attacked her work with a ferocious nergy and with an irritation often dangerous to those around her. She swept the yard so energetically, she ruined the few, small, tomato plants around the cement.
She banged the chairs so hard to get the cockroaches out she broke two. She would crochet furiously and silently for ten minutes, and scraping back her chair with a loud screech, run to the calendar to count the days again.
"Six more weeks. Thirty six days not counting Sundays, six more Sundays", she would shout, pushing whoever was near her violently.
And those with years ahead of them would not even look up, and those with not much longer looked up and smiled.
When she had counted the days three times, four times, she would jump on a chair and look through the pale green bars to see the time on the church clock, leaping down quickly as the wardress came in, to ask for the tenth time:
"Isn't our coffee here yet Juffrou?"
And when our wardress answered as usual, "Get on with your work, Victor". Shiela with a loud sigh, and a bang of her hair would pick up her work again.
It was a tradition that a prisoner was taken off polishing floors in her last month, during which time she was supposed to lose the tell-tale pads on her knees. So loud and obscene was her reaction when she saw her name down on the list in the last month, that the matron herself came in to enquire what the fuss was about. Shiela flushed, and could hardly make her complaint. But the matron took her off floors and she was given the duty of dishing out food. For the next few weeks we ate large crumbly slices of bread, and while most of us learned to keep our plates well away as she splashed out cupfulls of cabbage, the long timers' dislike of her grew.
In the first week of her last month her suitcase full of clothes arrived. She washed them over and over, and spread them out to dry with care, taking days over the ironing, reluctant to let them go again to be stored in her property bag. She began to talk of what she would do with her boyfriend , who had also got a year, and six cuts.
One Sunday morning, as we were lying on blankets in the shade of the high yellow baked-brick wall that enclosed the exercise yard, looking up at our square of blue sky, and the wheeling hawks, she asked me:
"Would you give me a job looking after your children?"
Ignoring the loud laughter from her two friends I told her I had a maid who was looking after my sons while I was in jail.
"But you could get a job looking after children Shiela, they would love you. Why don't you try for a job with the Child Welfare when you get outside?"
She took me very seriously. "Then I had better stop swearing."
I began outlining a course for her junior certificate, but I went back to my reading: She and Helga had started a scuffle, rolling over each other on the cement and shouting "eina".
The next Sunday morning, the matron called Shiela to tell her that her sister and a welfare worker were coming to see her that afternoon. Shiela was quite with delight. She washed and curled her hair, ironed her overall and sat tensely until the wardress called her. She came back glowing.
"My Sussie says she'll get me a job when I get out. I told her and the lady how lekker I'd like it, if I got a job with kids, and she says she'll get me a job in hospital. And she's got my shoes, and she'll leave them with the matron, and she says I can get them fixed."
"That's wonderful Shiela." I said, "Will she come and fetch you?"
"No man, I'm taking the train, and she and the lady's meeting me at the station, and she says I mustn't be bad anymore."
"Are you going to listen to her Shiela?" I asked, laughing.
"Yes, I'm going to get a job, and be good like you."
"Are you going to live with your father?"
"No, my Sussie says my father doesn't want me with him. I'm going to live in a hostel, the lady said. And my Sussie said that my boet [brother] got 9 to 15 years,and she cried and I asked her if she wrote to him, but she doesn't want to and I said she's got to. Shame, it's not nice in jail when nobody write or visits you."
"How old is your brother?" I asked.
"Twenty five."
"What did he do?"
"Robbery. When I get out I am going to visit him."
The prison call of "Kos Meises" interrupted us and we trooped inside for our food. I sat at the same table as Shiela, and always knew when to turn my head away from her as, just before she slouched over her food, she took out her false tooth. She said she could taste her graze better without it.
The matron came while we were eating, and in the uneasy silence that followed she asked Shiela: "Well Victor, did you have a pleasant visit?"
Shiela blushed and nodded, then asked the matron. "Did my Sussie leave my shoes?"
The matron frowned. "What shoes?"
"My shoes. My Sussie said she'd leave them and that you said I could fix them."
"She must have forgotten them Victor."
Shiela pushed away her food and looked down at the table. When the matron left Helga tried to comfort her, but Shiela swore at her rudely and banged her chair as she got up.
The wardress immediately called: Sit down Victor and Shiela swore at her. "Victor: stap kantoor toe." the wardress ordered, and with great banging of her feet, Shiela walked in front of her to the matron's office.
She came back as we were filing to our cells. She was red eyed and sullen, but I realised with relief that she was not going to be punished. The next morning she was full of laughter, full of energy, more than usually rough and that day her shoes arrived, by post.
I overheard her at lunch telling Helga what she and her "ou" would do when they got out, and boasting how much money they would make. When we started work in the afternoon she burst out loudly into "Ducktail Boogie"
Then she looked at me and laughed and said "I'm going to be good now, hey? I am not going to be a ducktail anymore."
I smiled back at her.
A few days after this I was suddenly transferred to another prison. Later I heard that three days before her discharge the matron had called Shiela to her office window and told her that she would be sent to a reformatory until she was tewenty one. Shiela screamed and shouted and cried so much that the wardresses locked her up alone in the hospital section, where she stayed until the officials came to escort her to the reformatory.
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