1953 in My father's House

So it begins

One well-trodden route a writer may take while awaiting answers from publishers and agents is, get on with the next book. A strategy which has much to recommend it. It means you aren’t dwelling, waiting for that email in your inbox, which is as unlikely to arrive in that moment as the proverbial watched kettle is to boil. Or a beloved person to die when you are sitting at their hospital bedside. From personal experience that’s more likely to occur when you’ve popped out of the room. Starting another project is a bit like popping out of the room.

But these weren’t the only considerations when I set off for Blackheath to trawl through my brother’s cache of 1960-1962 correspondence from our father. Creatively, I was bored and ready to get my teeth into a next project.

What I intended was a memoir of the first six months of 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth 11’s Coronation and my arrival in England to live with my father. Aged ten, an ungainly middle child, owing to a riding accident and six months in an iron back support, leaving behind in sunny Cape Town mother, brother and sister, and in the freezing January of ’53 about to be incarcerated in an English boarding school. With a festering suspicion that the handsome, tall, and rather remote woman accompanying me on the flight, our mother, for the previous five years our sole care-giver, in effect wanted me gone. Me especially. And had plucked me from my siblings. From Judy my cousin and closest friend. From Patch our Fox Terrier. From Rachel our black maid. From the stoep outside the bedrooms where by torchlight I read Enid Blyton long into the night. From Hershel my day school. The tree house in the nearby woods my pals and I had made for our own secret society. The tree in the centre of our V-shaped lawn just then showering us with Cape Gooseberries. My daily walk to and from school, provided with two toffees for the journey (oh teeth! no-one thought like that then) with the shape of Table Mountain as a backdrop. In short, from all that was familiar, that was home. Alongside something I didn’t even register as a loss, so much had its opposite been a given, till I stepped out of the plane onto the tarmac of London Airport, on a grey and frozen January morning – being warm. And that behind our mother’s explanation for this exodus, why only I was being sent at this juncture – the particular boarding school I was enrolled in required my attendance for a full two years in the junior school before the move to the senior school – was a far more troublesome one. I harboured a suspicion that the school’s requirements gave her a pretext to get rid of me for a while, I the least pliant, most emotional of her three children, the difficult one.

Indeed as we walked together toward the arrival building, me trying to match her long stride at a half run, I had the impression that this delivery of me into other hands couldn’t come fast enough. Then she could get back to her life of swims and hikes and record club evenings supported as we all were by the underbelly of South African badly paid and poorly housed staff. Even she with only a modest remittance from our father, from whom she was separated, could live reasonably comfortably. We had a car, a Chevrolet, a suburban house with a wrap-around stoep, one maid who made the best scrambled eggs and pancakes, who lived in a hut in the garden and sent back most of her weekly paypacket to her own husband and children in one of the townships, too far away for easy visits.

We’d moved three times in the five years. Until a formal settlement was made, supported by my mother’s brothers, money had been erratic. I remember her waiting anxiously for the paycheque. I remember many discussions she had with my South African uncle behind closed doors. Sometimes the school fees were late. I was once detailed to deliver them by hand (and received a round telling-off from the Head for the inappropriateness). I was somewhere between six and seven. We never went hungry. There were upheavals but we did not go without. Gradually, as arrangements stabilized with my father, her life in S.A. became more enjoyable, more as she would wish. Now with one child less to concern herself about, the difficult one, no doubt she was looking forward to returning home. and a good six months ahead. That January morning haste was in her stride, the set of her face, the furrow in her brow.

The cold was ferocious. I wondered if people could survive in such temperatures. A hard, grey mist hung over everything, blocking out any colour. I felt for my nose to check it was still there, concerned about frostbite. My legs were leaden. She tugged at me to make me move faster. ‘Your father will be there to greet us,’ she said.

My father. The news brought little reassurance or cheer.

In the years that we’d stayed in Cape Town I had seen him on a few short occasions, when he’d flown over ‘to arrange matters’ and the last trip had left an indelible impression of implacable authority. His sternness was what I remembered vividly and the way his power had been such the last time I’d seen him that it had blown to smithereens my then eight-year-old resolve.

He’d spent a weekend with us. A situation that cannot have been easy for him, emotions at the time running high between my parents and blame meted out in both directions. We’d seen so little of him, we hung back awkwardly from this virtual stranger on his arrival, no leaping into receptive arms. He in his turn awkward and perhaps disappointed had been remote and rather formal. During his time with us we’d driven to Dalebrook, a favourite place of ours by the sea, with an inland lagoon where friends of our parents from England had opened a waterside restaurant. They had installed a drinks machine on the front deck and my father gave me the money to buy Coca Cola for us kids. Still a novelty. I put the money in and pressed the lever. Nothing. I tried again, same result. The machine had gobbled up our money.

‘It’s broken,’ I told our father.

‘Then go to the kitchen and let Aubrey know.’ Our parents’ friends were running the restaurant, she doing the serving out front, he the chef. I imagined him there through the doors in the kitchen in a chef’s tall hat. I imagined possible assistants, all with their hats. I imagined opening the door and how they would stop what they were doing and stare at me. I was terrified, rooted to the spot. No Coca Cola was worth it.

‘No.’ I said.

‘What do you mean, no?’ (maybe he thought away from him we’d grown unruly?) ‘Do what I say immediately. Tell Aubrey –’

‘NO!’ I planted my feet astride (perhaps unconsciously mimicking his familiar stance). Fear was making me brave. Never mind the loss of a drink, I felt the floor would open up underneath me if I went through the door. I couldn’t do it, and I wanted to communicate to him, wanted him to understand that it was panic that was stopping me not obstinacy. I wanted him to take pity on me.

He didn’t shout, didn’t raise his voice, he simply exerted his will against mine. He looked me in the eyes, his as steely as I’d ever known eyes. ‘GO.’ And I felt my smaller will dissolving as completely and unnervingly as if it had been shattered by some superhuman totem in his power. As if working under someone else’s direction, I was propelled across the restaurant floor and through that dreaded door.

This is my most vivid memory of the man she says has come to pick us up, and in whose house I will be staying after she is on her way, until the school term begins.

I don’t remember anything after that till we arrived in Brighton. I don’t remember meeting him or what he said. Yes vaguely now I remember us driving in a spacious car, gleaming dark on the outside, impeccable clean leather in the interior, so highly sprung that I felt sick and longed for our old beaten up Chevvy. I remember the two of them in the front, six-foot-tall each and some conversation going on between them in fits and starts in quiet voices which the wind made it difficult for me to hear, and maybe I wasn’t meant to.

Did he turn and look at me, did he say, you okay in the back, Jo? (Yes Jo. Our mother had a penchant for name changes; her own, our family name, and more recently, unilaterally, mine. A swap of a name must have felt like a new start to her.) If my father did turn in my direction, I have no memory of it. I think I may have asked them to stop at one point while I threw up, and then after a fuss and where to stop and pulling the car over onto the curb, I didn’t. And after a few moments I walked back rather lamely, trying not to focus on my mother’s disapproving face. ‘She needs air,’ my mother said tiredly, ‘but if she rolls down the window we’ll freeze.’

‘Let her,’ my father said.

I must have fallen asleep after that with the cold air fanning my face and my coat buttoned high.

‘Wake up. Won’t be long now.’ His voice.

‘Where are we?’

‘Coming into Brighton, in another ten minutes we’ll be there. This is Seven Dials, where you’ll come to do your shopping.  Take a look, you’ll need to remember all these streets, Jo.’

How was this to be possible, every single one of them looked identical and identically grey. Terrace upon terrace of similar houses, no bright painted walls and doors, no vivid green lawns, no outside space, just this perpetual. Grey. I thought I might cry then. I wasn’t going to, though. Not till I was on my own. I waited, stiff inside my brace on the back seat, clutching the inner lining of my coat till we pulled into the drive and the car came to a standstill.

‘Here we are!’ he said with gusto.  And suddenly he looked at me and smiled.

How much can you write in a blog? I see what I have written here is in fact the beginning of the memoir. As to what happened in that house over the following six months, and what I was to discover in my father’s correspondence to my brother written a decade later, which I was to read many, many years on when I went to Blackheath two weeks ago – for these revelations, and much more, you will have to wait for the next instalment.

.