Swimming with Cobras Read online

  Grahamstown funerals always seemed to be enveloped in a dusty, ash-gritty wind. The acrid smell of smoke from frequent fires on the hillsides around the town clung to our nostrils and sometimes, a thin layer of ash settled on the yellow security vehicles patrolling the streets. It truly seemed as if our society was on fire.

  There was no shade in the usually packed football stadium on top of the hill in Joza, one of the three local townships. Skin parched in the sun and dust. Police helicopters buzzed overhead. From time to time we would hear the thud of a tear gas canister as it hit the ground and people would put handkerchiefs to their mouths as an ominous grey cloud floated over the stadium wall.

  The mourning family huddled in black by the coffin, often looking rather startled at the hijacking of the funeral for a political purpose. Marshals and speakers sported Cuban-style khaki shirts and black berets. Young men carrying sawn-off pieces of wood fashioned like AK47s danced to the rhythm of the toyi-toyi: knees up, boots thumping, voices chanting “huss-huss”. “An injury to one is an injury to all!” the crowd called, and then they sang choruses full of invective, fists raised and clenched in the air. “The cart with no wheels: move, Botha, you’re going to be crushed!” or “Mrs Botha is sterile, she gives birth to rats; Mrs Mandela is fertile, she gives birth to comrades!” More chilling would be cries like, “Informers we will kill you, hayi! hayi! Witches we will burn you, hayi! hayi!” But by contrast there would also be the resonantly harmonised hymns and songs, rendered with the pathos and yearning of American negro spirituals. “Freedom is in your hands, show us the way to freedom, let us get away from slavery in this land of Africa.”

  Whenever possible the Black Sash had representatives at these funerals, who would invariably be asked to give a message. I never minded standing in front of large gatherings, but I often felt my message was tight and pallid in contrast to the full-throated deliveries of the main speakers. I was also ashamed of my linguistic poverty. Proceedings were usually in isiXhosa, yet they were always meticulously interpreted for the handful of non-isiXhosa speakers present. There would be some leaders from the churches in town, some students, perhaps someone from a white opposition party. Our presence was a gesture of solidarity with the embattled and mourning community. The Black Sash was also there to monitor and record events. If things went wrong, there had to be witnesses. And perhaps the presence of a few white pastors and women wearing sashes did act as a restraining factor.

  By the time of the TRC I had lived more than 30 years in South Africa. Looking back, as the process forced us all to do, I was sometimes astonished at the experiences I had had, and I was in no doubt that it was through becoming engaged that I too had become a person in this place. It was in sharing the experiences of others that I had found a foothold for myself, and so a country I had at first found alien became the place I would one day call home.

  A sheltered life

  Reminiscing about my early life I recognise myself in the child and the young woman I was, and I realise how formative were the places in which I lived and the things I did; but sometimes I am equally surprised to discover that that was me. Was that really my life?

  I see myself talking to the verger of St Peter’s in the East. He is beaming with pleasure. “What a marvellous sight,” he says. It was the day before my wedding and the small church adjacent to St Edmund Hall in Oxford was bursting with colour. Pink and white cottage flowers filled the windowsills, while large jugs of roses at the chancel steps and on the altar scented the air. It was a far cry from the forlorn building our group of friends had entered that morning to spring clean, and perhaps the old verger was reminded of the church in its heyday, when it was attended by dons and their families and had an organist and priest of its own. I could hardly believe that it was dressed for me and that I would be the bride walking the newly swept red carpet the next day. Malvern and I had had to put off this event for a year, but here it was, a wedding in Oxford in mid-summer 1963. It was a scene straight out of my romantic imagination and the culmination of an idyllic period of my life.

  A university town is a lovely place in which to be young, surrounded by others who share a sense of life stretching out in front of them. I lived in a fat in a converted North Oxford house with three other girls. We had all finished our studies and were now taking our first steps together into the working world. Our “Crammers Club” enjoyed a whirling social life, cramming in as much as we could. Oxford Colleges were not yet co-educational and we were in great demand by the men students for their rounds of parties and balls. We were taken punting along the Isis where we picnicked under the willows. We fed ducks as they trailed alongside the boats, and after yet another College ball we would kick our shoes off throbbing feet and trail our hands in the water. We cycled everywhere, sometimes far into the Oxford countryside. It seemed always to be early summer, trees laden with blossoms and hedgerows full of Queen Anne’s Lace. At weekends we bought packets of horrid-tasting reconstituted potato to bulk up the meals we cooked for the rugby players and oarsmen who came to party. In the end most of us married someone we’d met in Oxford.

  Summing up the Zeitgeist, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan said, “You have never had it so good.” And, as I threw up the sash windows of our fat in the mornings I would wholeheartedly agree. I felt imbued with a confidence I had not experienced before and have rarely had since.

  I worked as a medical social worker at the Radcliffe infirmary, where I was part of a team of 15 white-coated social workers known quaintly as lady almoners. Our work ethos was highly professional and we were expected to have more than a smattering of medical knowledge. The units I worked on were challenging, with patients often suffering from brain tumours or head injuries, but there was always a team behind me, and many professionals to consult.

  Elizabeth Turner, the head almoner, was a punctilious, pint-sized woman with a sharp mind. Nothing escaped her gimlet eye. She was often infuriated by my loquacious prose in the patients' histories or my flustered responses during ward rounds. I was a blusher, a weakness mischievously exploited by the young doctors. From among the dozen or more people participating in a round, a doctor would pick on me to answer a question then watch with glee as I helplessly felt the blush spread from neck to cheeks. Elizabeth’s shrewd advice cured me. “Stop thinking about yourself, Rosemary. Concentrate on the patient and think about the information you need to convey." Her demands were exacting but her influence remained with me always. It was a wonderful training in a professional atmosphere that, years later, I would sorely miss.

  One of my most difficult patients made an uncanny appearance on my wedding day. As my father and I left the fat in a chauffeur-driven car, I glimpsed him standing at a bus stop, a forlorn figure whose head injury had dislocated his personality and made him a stranger to his family and himself. His father-in-law was a peer and I had been receiving difficult phone calls from him regarding the patient’s rehabilitation. There he stood, as though to remind me that when this joyous day was over, my situation may have changed but his, and others’, would not have.

  I was glad that he didn’t see me, and with my father at my side I felt secure and buoyant. It was a quintessentially English summer’s day, a few puffy white clouds in a blue sky. In New College Lane a group of American tourists clapped and called out, “Cheers to the bride!” My father looked handsome in his hired suit, his top hat on his lap. Small and balding, he had a face like Mr Pickwick’s in the Dickens novel he’d read to me as a child. And though he was not much given to enthusiastic emotion, I knew that he felt happy and proud. Acquiring an academic son-in-law was a bonus.

  “NPTD?” he quipped, and we laughed together.

  “NPTD” was an ominous instruction often scrawled in my father’s untidy hand on the calendar that hung above the coal burning stove in the kitchen of my childhood home. “No Play Today!” it commanded, as punishment for homework poorly done or a bad school report.

  I was the only child of middle-class parents, cushi
oned, comfortable and secure. My father had a degree in History and a Masters in Education and worked for the Department of Education, first in Lancashire and later in Cornwall. He read widely and having won his own way with scholarships, revered all things academic. His father had been an erudite North-Country liberal. I never knew my grandfather Mitchell, but many of the weighty tomes on my father’s shelves had come from his library. He had not had the opportunity of a university education himself, and his business had faltered badly in the depression. After the early death of his first wife, my father and his sister Miriam were raised by an unsympathetic stepmother. My father found it difficult to study at home and his clever sister was not allowed to go to university at all. She prospered in spite of her stepmother, becoming the editor of a journal in the textile industry and marrying an eminent scientist. They had no children but were vigorous walkers, played bridge and did crossword puzzles. I loved their vitality.

  My mother, by contrast, was neither vigorous nor academic. Her parents were country people, simple and kind with no pretensions at all. Grandmother Mottershead had the sort of figure every small child loves to draw: round face, round body, hair in a white bun and apple cheeks radiating an all-encompassing love. My mother was described as delicate. Tall and willowy with dark hair and blue eyes, she had had enormous difficulty conceiving. She endured several miscarriages, including one of a baby girl who had gone full term. My birth must have been very special, and yet I sometimes felt excluded from the closeness of my parents’ relationship. They were a little older than most of my friends’ parents and were anxious not to spoil me, but I think they would have appreciated a more conventional daughter. I wanted to be out of the house having adventures, playing at being a heroine. Listening to Lady Baden-Powell on the radio one day I was fired up to become a Girl Guide, picturing myself saving victims from burning buildings, my sleeve covered in proficiency badges. I did have a very happy time in the Guides, with adventurous camps in far-flung places, but alas no heroic deeds.

  On the one hand I lived a protected existence doing all the typical middle-class things like riding, ballet and Guides, but on the other I was allowed to travel alone by train to school, and in the holidays I was free to roam for miles with a gaggle of friends in the sand hills bordering our house. Often we were out for most of the day, returning only for meals and bed. I found it difficult to sit still and above all I loved to talk. At my happy little prep school I earned more black beetles for disruptive behaviour than red stars for good. It was the era of dip pens and inkwells and I always managed to let a blob of ink escape which I then inevitably smudged on the page. My elegant mother was exasperated by my clumsiness. When my teacher told her that I wrote like a chimney sweep, the letters “NPTD” appeared on the calendar and I was given pages from Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty to sit and copy out. How I hated that horse!

  When the usual shadows of adolescence began to creep into my blissful existence, they were compounded by my disappointing scholastic performance. This was something of a surprise to everyone because, although I was no good at arithmetic, I was an articulate child who devoured books. My father had read the Brontës and Austen to me while my friends were still on Enid Blyton. I had always been allowed to join in adult conversation and was considered somewhat quaint and precocious. I loved talking with my friends’ mothers or with a childless couple who lived on our road, and enjoyed conversing with my father’s colleagues when they came to dinner. My parents were keen for me to attend Merchant Taylors, the school where most of my friends would be going, so I sat their 11 Plus entrance exam as well as the one for the local high school. When I failed both, my father summoned me to his study.

  The room smelt of ink and Three Nuns tobacco. Several large official envelopes, some still closed with sealing wax, lay on the roll-top desk. In a glass-fronted pear wood bookcase were the leather-bound encyclopaedias in which I loved to pore over the etchings of my heroines, from Joan of Arc to World War One nurse and spy, Edith Cavell. My father looked at me over the top of his spectacles as I came in, long-legged and awkward.

  “Well, Rosemary,” he sighed, “what are we going to do?”

  I felt the sting of not being good enough when my friends had all made the grade, but I was determined to put on a brave face. I suspected that my maths marks had obliterated my prospects, but I also knew that the high school had been rather impressed with my command of English and had asked for an interview. So to the interview I went and I got into the school. But from the outset I was a fish out of water. The children around me were rougher, their houses smaller, their accents stronger. Suddenly it was clear just how middle class my life and mores were. Single-parent families had been exotic in the novels I’d read; fathers who deserted their children had presented intriguing mysteries. But in real life these situations appalled me. All my snobbish traits rose to the surface and I was unable to sense my adventure in such an alien place. My robust spirit deserted me and I was very unhappy.

  My parents removed me and I was sent instead to Trinity Hall, a Methodist private school where I stayed on as a boarder when eventually, they moved to Cornwall. I loved it and soon made friendships that have lasted for life. Maths remained a stumbling block but an English teacher from Dublin with flaming red hair and a rapier wit brought Shaw's St Joan to life as well as a string of Irish poets. We nicknamed her Peony after the red flowers in the school garden. Town was forbidden but its allure irresistible, and bunking out always involved climbing out of dormitory windows. Years later when I described these adventures to my own daughters they hooted with incredulous laughter. “It sounds just like St Trinian’s!” The boarding school students in the book and films of the same name were infamous for their flaunting of the rules.

  Boys, of course, were a forbidden species and when I encountered them later at university, life took a very exciting turn. My first year as a student in English and History at Birmingham passed in a haze of parties, dances, conversations and fun, and before long, failure loomed once more. Again I found myself facing my father.

  “And now what, Rosemary?” he asked.

  Different study, different house, but the same ambience, with the smell of his tobacco and the sting of my shortcoming. We sat down at a dark oak table laden with his files and reports, the same one on which my father had had his appendix taken out as a small boy, and confronted the question.

  I had shown some early interest in social work, after an almoner had come to speak to us at school, but I’d not been encouraged in this. “Can’t you think of something nicer, my dear?” my grandmother had asked, speaking for the whole family. When my father and I emerged from his study this time, it was to tell my mother that I would pursue training in medical social work. In compliance with social work theory at the time, I would have to work for a year in a menial job. My father would arrange for lodgings and a position at Dingles department store in Plymouth, just across the border in Devon.

  My mother crumpled. “A shop. Oh dear,” she said.

  It was a year of hard, physical work that opened my eyes to the drudgery of many people’s lives and offered a taste of the antagonism that can exist between boss and employee. I began to take more seriously what went on in the world around me and during the next few years at Bristol University I continued to develop this interest. As well as enjoying all the usual student fun I was also secretary of the United Nations Society, voted for the Liberal Party and expressed vehement opposition to apartheid.

  During the university holidays I worked with the archaically titled Association for Distressed Gentlefolk, administering grants to people who had fallen on hard times. My brief experience in a state high school had given me glimpses of a socio-ecionomic reality very different from my own, and from the house-calls I now made, it was clear to me that Harold Macmillan’s cheerful description of the times did not apply to everyone. I saw people living in the most meagre of circumstances. I visited a professor of English from the University of Cairo who had lost his job af
ter the Suez crisis and now lived in a one-roomed apartment with his wife; a musician whose illness had demoted him from the position of first violin in a major English orchestra to an alcove under the arches near one of London’s stations; a colonel’s widow living in a single room in a London house where she played bridge with her neighbours on top of an orange box, her gracious manner disguising an alcohol addiction. Despite their reduced circumstances, many of these people demonstrated a resilience that I admired.

  At last, after a year at the Almoners’ Institute in London, I found myself in my first job at the Radcliffe in Oxford, a job and place that I loved. There followed the happiest of times, during which I worked and played in equal measure. Life was sometimes giddy with fun, but we were all becoming much more engaged with serious issues and I would soon come face to face with a challenging one of my own.

  “I’ve met the man you’re going to marry!” declared my flatmate Patsy Tranfield one late afternoon outside the squash courts where we had gone for a game. A student at the London School of Economics, her chutzpah never failed to impress me. “He’s a Rhodes Scholar…,” she said.

  I flourished my squash racquet. "Well, where is he then?" I asked cheekily.

  “…and a South African.”

  “Forget it,” I shot back. “Never a South African.” I ended the conversation and concentrated on the game ahead.

  Patsy bided her time. She was engaged to be married that summer to a student at St Edmund Hall where she sang in the choir, and it was there that she had spied the South African. Attracted by his looks she had fallen into conversation with him, and finding that his interests coincided with mine, she decided to match-make. She disapproved of the boyfriend I was seeing at the time and was determined that all her friends should be as happily engaged as she was.