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Janet Suzman remembers Wits university and Eve and Tony

Hi Philip - how lovely to read these memories (from John and Wanda Patten and Glenys and Howard Harisson) of our youth at Wits, though it wasn't altogether a lovely time. I remember the march to the City Hall pretty vivdly; I think i was carrying a banner saying "Kenis is kleurblind" - (knowledge is colour blind). And the women of the Black Sash were there, lined up and solemn and brave with their sashes on.

And those hot steps we all sat on endlessly, talking, talking. Or outside the library on the weedy lawn (kikuyu grass is not soft to sit on) in front of the Nissen huts they never took down after the war where we wrote exams, hot as Hades with sweating palms you had to wipe on your skirt so your pen didn't slip from your sweaty palm as you wrote. 

And I remember Michael Laschenger, and Mike Colenso, and others, and Michael Picardie who got arrested one day in the big round-up, and there was a typical cock-up about the wrong set of emergency regulations being sent up from Cape Town and they had to release him for 24 hours and his mother had packed a toothbrush and pyjamas in a bag ready for him to scarpa over the border to Rhodesia which he duly did. And someone hiding in a dust-bin while the police searched his flat...

Somehow those youthful striped blazers in your picture are rather moving; I'd forgotten student blazers, and how small Eve was and how tall Tony was. You know, the Steinhardts arrived from Germany and Eve and I were put together at 8 years or whatever year it was by my mother who was sorry for the refugees, and ordered to be friends, and strangely enough we went right through Kingsmead being just that. Very naughty we were too; Evil was her nick-name though her naughtiness was benign.

It certainly was a love-match; perhaps it's OK to tell you now that they used to borrow friend's flats or digs so that they could have time together over lunch-times. I couldnt oblige as I was living at home but it all seemed rather daring then. I know that we were being tracked by The Greys as when, later I applied for visas for Africa (my father insisted in case the plane came down anywhere on the continent!) I was called in to be interrogated by an officer in the thought police and there was my file in front of him on his desk, and I could read upside down as he slowly turned the pages looking at all the gatherings and parties and meetings one had attended. It was pretty scary how thorough they were.

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