Breakfast was at six that day because the tour buses were due to leave earlier than usual. My dad told me I couldn’t go back to the cabin until later, in case I was discovered on board after everyone else had left.
‘The steward will have finished cleaning it in another hour so you can go down then,’ he said. ‘Wait in the dining room and then move when the coast is clear.’
I had no intention of doing what Dad told me that morning, so I waited until I knew he and Freda had left and then, instead of slipping down to the cabin, I went up on deck. The warm air smelt fresh and spicy and I breathed it in hungrily. Freedom felt so good that morning, and I revelled in it.
I was dazzled by the smells, the sounds, the colours of everything around me. On the dockside, native women in the most glorious clothes – rich magentas, greens and golds – had laid out carved animals, jewellery and scarves. I’d never seen anyone wearing that rich, deep orangey yellow colour before. In Manchester people wore only a few colours, and they were always drab and boring.
These woman had gleaming, dark skin and I thrilled to hear them shouting across at each other in a language I’d never heard before. Some of them had babies strapped on their backs, others were carrying baskets of yellow fruit on their heads. It was like one of my storybooks come to life. And it was as different to my life in the grey smoggy streets of Manchester as I could have imagined.
People were still streaming off the ship, and as I looked down at the gangway I saw a woman on her own, struggling with two kids and a pushchair. I knew I shouldn’t speak to anyone but I found myself moving forward to help her anyway.
‘Thank you, dear,’ she said to me gratefully. ‘If you wouldn’t mind carrying my little girl, that would be a great help.’
When we reached the bottom of the gangway, I was about to turn and push my way back up when I felt a heavy hand on my shoulder. I spun round in panic.
‘You wait here.’ A man in uniform stood beside me, looking stern.
I almost gave a sob, feeling overwhelmed with panic.
I’ve got to get away. He’ll find out who I am. My dad will kill me.
It never occurred to me that the man was simply holding me back so that I didn’t get in the way of the other passengers. Instead, I was immediately convinced that I was going to be taken away and never seen again. My dad’s horror of officials had rubbed off on me to the extent that I couldn’t imagine any other scenario.
I knew I had to escape and cast around desperately for an opening in the crowd, but the people were still streaming down the gangway. Come on! Hurry up! I willed them to stop dawdling. Then I saw a gap and, giving a sharp wriggle, violently tore myself away from the man’s grasp.
‘Hey, you!’ he shouted after me. ‘What do you think … ?’ But I didn’t hear the rest of his words as I’d already gone.
I was convinced that the official would come after me in his heavy boots and that he might find me if I went down to the cabin. So instead I went down to the first-class deck and looked for a place to hide. I found a broom cupboard and sat there for hours in the dark. The smell of polish reminded me of St Joseph’s.
Sometime in the afternoon, a steward opened the door to fetch a broom and nearly got the fright of his life when he saw me.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he said. ‘You’re a naughty boy, playing games in here and giving honest people a fright.’
I shrank back from his wagging finger.
‘Now get lost. I don’t want to see you again.’
I didn’t need to be told twice and in a few seconds was back in our cabin. Lying in my prison cell was preferable to the beating I’d get from Dad if he discovered I’d been outside.
We finally reached Durban on 31 December 1956, after a journey of almost four weeks. During that time I had hardly left our dank and airless cabin. I felt an enormous sense of relief wash over me as I left my prison cell behind.
As I stood in the baking sun, outside on the dockside, I noticed a banner attached to the rails which read ‘Happy New Year’. I wondered then what it would bring in this new land, full of possibilities.
Chapter Fourteen
Durban was blisteringly hot. I reckoned it was easily hotter than any day we’d ever had in Manchester. I stood on the station platform and looked around me. In the glare of the shimmering sunlight a host of lean black porters strode back and forth, carrying bags. They looked like glossy, ebony carvings, and I couldn’t help feeling a buzz of excitement as I took in the scene.
My father was in his element, wearing a new khaki safari suit, the jacket tied at the waist with a belt. In his new suit and hat, I thought he looked like someone out of a Tarzan film, and I could tell he was really into the idea of himself as some sort of colonial grandee. As we had to carry our own bags, though, I’m sure everyone else recognized we were just steerage passengers on a ten-pound immigration ticket.
We stayed one night in Durban. As we walked to our hotel, along a street lined with palm trees, I thought how wonderful this wide avenue was after our narrow cobbled streets in Hulme. I was even more amazed to see that natives in costume were running along it, pulling brightly painted carts behind them. They were wearing huge headdresses and had tinkling bells around their ankles. I heard Gladys Rippon explain to Cathleen that the little carriages on poles were called rickshaws. White people were sitting inside them, some of them dressed in safari suits like my dad’s.
Next day we took a long train ride to Johannesburg. I spent the whole time looking out of the carriage window, marvelling at the scenery. I couldn’t get over how wide and bright the sky was or how far the horizon stretched. In England I’d never seen the long edge of the sky as all the grey roofs and chimney pots, churchtowers and factory chimneys got in the way. Now, as I saw the bushveld in all its glory, the flat sandy expanse of it, the scrubby bushes and strange reddish mountain ridges in the distance, I felt very much alive.
We didn’t arrive in Johannesburg until late in the evening. The warm night air smelt of flowers and spice. We passed through streets of white wooden houses encircled by verandas and finally came to the hotel we were to spend the night at, the Casa Mia. It seemed very grand to me. I had never had a bath with hot water coming out of the tap before and was very impressed. I spent as long as I could in it that night, topping it up with steaming water again and again until the hot ran cold.
The next day we took our bags further down the same road to our boarding house. The Allendene Residential Hotel wasn’t half as impressive as the Casa Mia. In fact, it was pretty dilapidated. It was a typical refuge for poor white immigrant families in Berea, a decaying area of Johannesburg. We were shown to our room by the landlord, Mr Adams, who was a lardy, pasty-faced man with greasy strands of hair pasted over his bald head.
‘Here you are, then,’ he said. ‘Tea’s at six, breakfast between five-thirty and seven. Bath at the end of the corridor. Not to be used more than once a week for the kids.’
We put our cases down and looked around the room. I noticed that the window was cracked and stuck up with tape. The floor was bare wooden boards. Freda went over to the double bed and pulled back the cover. A couple of brown cockroaches skittered across the mattress. They must have been all of three inches long.
‘Bloody hell, Jack,’ she sighed. ‘This place is a bit of a dump.’
My father just ignored Freda and, with his back to her, began to unpack his suits and shirts and hang them in the wardrobe.
‘Just remember who’s paying the rent,’ he reminded her curtly, without turning round. ‘And don’t go shouting your mouth off about it and moaning to Gladys and Alec.’
To give them their due, the Rippons didn’t make a single complaint themselves when we all collected downstairs in the dining room later. The general scruffiness of the Allendene must have seemed a shocking change for them – a far cry from their comfortable Victorian house back home in Manchester. Gladys was definitely tougher than her manicured hands and carefully ap
plied make-up would lead you to imagine. She had clearly resolved to support Alec one hundred per cent in his mission to do Christ’s duty. I’d always thought, with her posh voice like a teacher’s, that Gladys was like royalty. Now I was even more impressed by her.
At one point, a cockroach scuttled across our table and I saw Gladys’s eyes flicker. Cathleen let out a small squeal.
‘Shush, Cathleen,’ her mother admonished her. ‘Just remember what I said.’
This is what God has meant me to learn, I read in her eyes. We have to do these things, even when it’s hard.
After tea, I went outside. In the hour or so before it got dark I wandered about the streets nearest the Allendene. The houses in Berea had obviously been built in better times and although they were dilapidated now, I still thought they looked very grand. The large wooden bungalows had elegant verandas at the front and their gardens were full of exotic trees and shrubs. All along the roadside were heaps of blossom, little mauve trumpet-shaped flowers, that had fallen from the trees.
In Hulme, people always sat indoors in the evenings, doing their sewing or listening to the wireless; but here it was different. I walked past the houses, enjoying watching groups of people sitting on the verandas or on low walls, laughing and talking with each other. Some of them had brought their radios outside and they chattered away over the sound of the dance music, drinking Coca-Cola from the bottle. I noticed there wasn’t a black person among them.
‘I just think you could tell me where you’re going, that’s all.’
It was our third week in the Allendene and it was clear that things weren’t going well for Freda.
‘Just let me get on with my business, will you?’ My father had his back turned away from Freda in their double bed. He was lying as far away from her as he could possibly get.
‘And what am I meant to do while you’re in the surgery with Gladys all day?’ Freda almost spat her name.
‘Look, we’re all working bloody hard here to set up the sanctuary, so just shut up and give me a break, will you?’
My father and Alec had rented a room downtown in an office block. This they’d furnished as a surgery for the Triangle Band Healing Sanctuary, which they’d set up for a new Spiritualist circle they’d got in with in Johannesburg. The only trouble was that Freda had not been invited to join in. It was Gladys who had been kitted out in a smart new nurse’s uniform. Freda was hopping mad about it. After all, she’d been promised by my father that she’d be the one sitting at his right hand and sharing in the glory once they’d set up the new sanctuary.
Freda wasn’t letting up. ‘And I suppose that little tart, Bunty, you keep going down the road to visit isn’t my business either?’
I’m glad that I couldn’t see my father’s eyes when she said that. I didn’t know how Freda dared tackle him head on. We both knew he could get really scary.
But he just called her a sour-faced cow and told her to shut up.
I knew, when they went to bed, that Freda was brewing for a fight. I’d seen her put on her pink nighty with ribbons earlier on, and when my Dad came to bed she’d tried as hard as she could to flirt with him. It was awful to listen to, especially as he was so cold and curt to her in response. When he saw the nighty he just said, ‘You’ll get cold. You’d better put a cardigan on.’
Another time, Freda had a bug and was throwing up into a bowl over the side of the bed. My father didn’t ask her if she was okay, didn’t even look up from his book. It was as if, now that he’d got to South Africa, he was going to try his hardest to show that he really didn’t need Freda any more. He had other fish to fry, and one of them was obviously Bunty.
I’d tried then, as I tried now, to cut out the sound of their voices by lying with my good ear shoved as hard as it would go into my pillow.
Oh please will you just shut up. I can’t stand it. I found myself furiously arguing with them in my head. I was feeling hot and sweaty by now and was longing to throw back my sheet and turn my pillow to its cooler side, but knew I didn’t dare risk them hearing me move.
I felt like I’d been lying there for hours and was almost sobbing with frustration. I’ve got to get some sleep. I’ve got school tomorrow. Will you just shut up!
The next day, school was as bad as I feared. I’d been there a week now and Barnato Park Girl’s School wasn’t getting any better. Unlike my school in Hulme, this one was full of well-heeled, spotlessly dressed girls from the posh northern suburbs. With their Alice bands and their perfect cardigans around their perfect shoulders, they looked a very different breed to anything I knew. And, once they’d scented an outcast in their midst, they turned from me with a collective shudder.
Although I didn’t have to play the part of a boy once we’d left the ship, my hair was still pretty short. That alone made it quite impossible for me to fit in with the young ladies of Barnato Park School. And my father soon saw to it that I would always be an outcast.
He had hit the roof when he saw the clothes’ list. ‘I don’t bloody believe it! Three white piquet cotton dresses, if you please,’ he snorted furiously. ‘Six pairs white cotton ankle socks; two pairs black lace-up walking shoes with eight eye holes; one black blazer with brocade piping and school badge sewn on pocket; one white panama hat with school crest embroidered on hat band –’
At this he’d broken off, throwing the list down in disgust. ‘Where am I going to get all this bleeding money from? Who do they think they are –?’
‘Well, what do you expect me to do?’ Freda asked, knowing that one way or another it would be her responsibility to sort me out.
‘Get her a dress and a pair of shoes that’ll last,’ he said. ‘And they can stuff the rest.’
When I’d gone into school in a less-than-white dress, a pair of shoes far too big for me, and an old pair of socks, I was hauled up in front of the class.
‘Where’s your blazer and hat?’ the teacher, Mrs Poole, asked me.
‘I don’t have them,’ I replied.
‘Well, you’d better come with them tomorrow as there’s a dress drill,’ she said. ‘Now, sit here at the front where I can see you and get out your arithmetic exercise book.’
‘I don’t have an exercise book,’ I said quietly.
The other girls sniggered as Mrs Poole drew herself up indignantly. ‘Were you not given a list of what you had to buy?’ she asked. ‘This is not England, you know.’
‘My father’s got the list.’
‘You cannot come to class without your exercise books,’ she said, closing the conversation.
Mrs Poole then reluctantly gave me a piece of paper to write on. All the other girls had pencil cases complete with set squares and protractors and all sorts of other unfamiliar items that had been on the list. I only had the pencil stub and ballpoint pen Dad had given me, along with one of his half-used jotter pads that he’d thrown in my face with a snort.
What the heck am I going to do now? I thought to myself. I hardly dare ask him for this stuff, but even if I did he’s never in.
However, when I got home he was in and I did find the courage to confront him. I asked about the blazer. He went absolutely bonkers, swiping me across the face.
‘Oh, you think the trees, the bloody trees are going to give me money?’ he shouted. ‘You’ll just have to wait.’
And wait I did.
The next few days, it was the same routine – the dress drill and a ticking off by Mrs Poole – until finally she wrote a letter to my father. He moaned and complained the whole evening about it, finally throwing a couple of pound notes at Freda saying, ‘Buy her a bloody blazer.’
So Freda took me to the shop at last and bought the blazer and hat on the dummy in the window as she didn’t have enough money for one out of a box. The blazer had faded and the hat had a yellow tinge.
A week later, I was still feeling like a gawky sparrow in my grey socks. Only this time my name was being read out by the headmistress in assembly. I got up, blushing with shame, sen
sing several hundred smirking faces turned in my direction.
‘Now girls, I want you to raise your hands if you can see what is wrong with Judith’s appearance,’ she said. ‘We set a standard at Barnato Park which we expect every single girl to adhere to. It is just not good enough coming in looking like this.’
One prissy girl in the front immediately shot up her hand. ‘Yes, Serena,’ the head said, pointing at her.
‘Well, miss, her dress looks all dirty round the hem and isn’t ironed properly, and there’s no school badge on the collar.’
‘That’s quite right. You must all have creases here and here on your dresses,’ the head said, pinching the sleeves of my dress. She then made me kneel down. ‘And you’ll see that Judith’s skirt is not the regulation length above the knee.’
‘Anybody else?’
Another hand went up. ‘She’s meant to have white socks, turned down an inch,’ another girl informed us. ‘Hers aren’t white, they’re a sort of grey colour.’
One by one, every item of school clothing was criticized, until the most humiliating moment of all.
‘And what’s wrong with these?’ The headmistress lifted my skirt so that the whole school could see my knickers, which weren’t the regulation black.
I wanted to run away and never come back.
We got out of school at half past one and the heat on the streets was intense. We were forbidden to take our blazers off until we’d arrived home, which I thought was a stupid rule as by the time I got back to the Allendene I felt like a cooked chicken. I ran straight upstairs and peeled the white dress from my hot and sticky body.
I’d had to get into the routine of washing my dress every afternoon. It always had grass stains on it or muck from the wall we used to sit on at breaktime. I found it very tricky to get it clean as we only had a tiny basin in the corner of our room and the material of the dress seemed to suck up masses of water. It was almost impossible to wring out and there was water all over the floor by the time I’d finished. I had to borrow Freda’s towel and roll my dress up in it in an attempt to soak it up.
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