Next, I took a coathanger and hung the dress at the open window to dry. I managed to borrow an iron from a lady downstairs which you had to plug into the electric light switch. It was pretty hopeless and didn’t do the job of making the proper creases on the sleeves. I tried to get the dress flat but it never looked right – or quite clean.
Chapter Fifteen
Freda and my dad were getting on worse and worse. Their silences filled our room in the rare evenings they were both in and although neither of them hit me any more, they were often sniping at me. Once, I came into the room and found Freda sitting on the bed looking red eyed from crying. I suddenly felt a little bit sorry for her.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked her.
Freda didn’t bother to look at me and I thought she wasn’t going to reply. After a moment, though, she said, ‘I wish I’d never come.’
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t respond. I was waiting for her to say that it was all my fault, that if I hadn’t been in tow, she and Jack would be all right; but she didn’t this time.
My dad refused to be brought down by Freda’s mood. He continued to be in his element, filling the wardrobe with new suits and cravats, bought with some of the ill-gotten proceeds of the sanctuary as it turned out. It was as though here in South Africa he finally felt free to be the con man – a role that had always come naturally to him.
Freda wasn’t the only one upset by my father’s goings on. All his sharp suits and new girlfriends had to be paid for somehow. One evening, only a couple of months after we moved into the Allendene, we had a visit from Alec and Gladys.
Cathleen and I sat on the bed watching the row unfold. I felt a strange sense of relief that the Rippons had found out that my father wasn’t to be trusted. I’d always liked Alec and it made me feel very uncomfortable that he was paying for our room at the Allendene and bankrolling the sanctuary. I had a horrible sense that it would only be a matter of time before my father and Freda had sucked him dry.
Alec was a mild-mannered, kindly man and I was quite amazed that he could be so feisty. He must have been really, really angry with my dad.
‘I’ve had enough, Jack. Absolutely enough!’ Alec was a small man but just now he almost looked tall. Gladys stood at his side, showing the quiet moral support she always gave her husband. I thought again what dignity she had.
My father didn’t answer but wore a relaxed expression. Not quite insulting, but almost.
‘We feel betrayed, quite frankly,’ Alec went on. ‘We’ve given our all to the sanctuary. Sold our house, for Christ’s sake. Patients told us you were taking money out of the donation boxes. We didn’t want to believe them, but Gladys saw you. You’re a lousy fraudster, Jack.’
‘What do you plan to do then?’ my father said, clearly wanting to end the conversation but still sounding nonchalant.
‘I’ve got my wife and child to consider,’ said Alec. ‘And there’s no way we want anything to do with a con man like you. We’re leaving before you can do any more damage. Quite frankly, you’re very lucky I haven’t called in the police.’
‘Well, you’d better please yourself, then,’ my dad said, moving over to the door and opening it.
Gladys took her cue, taking Cathleen with her, and walking out without a backward glance, dignified to the last. Alec looked suddenly deflated and very, very sad. Only a few weeks ago, he and dad had come up with a slogan for the sanctuary: ‘New light, new hope, new truth’. Now his dreams of helping lost souls were in pieces. He didn’t look at my father or Freda as he left the room.
I wonder what they’re going to do now? I thought to myself. Maybe they’ll go back to England and buy their house back.
But I had a feeling that they wouldn’t give up quite yet; wouldn’t want to go back to England so soon. That would be admitting they’d failed. We never saw the Rippons again.
Once they’d left the room, my father muttered, ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish,’ and I knew that he’d put them out of his mind just as soon as they’d walked out of the door. I’d never known him to feel a moment of remorse, or even embarrassment, and he wasn’t going to start now. As far as he was concerned, that was the end of that particular gravy train for him. He’d go out looking for another tomorrow, no doubt.
I could tell that Freda was immediately in a much better mood. No more having to be the poor relation around Gladys; no more being left out in the cold while the other three played doctors and nurses at the Triangle Band Healing Sanctuary. I’m sure Freda thought that being on their own again would allow her to be my father’s right-hand woman at last, standing with him on the platform at Spiritualist church events. After all, back in Hulme, that’s what he’d always promised her.
‘Don’t worry, Jack,’ she said to my father soothingly. ‘We’ll work out a plan. I’ll get a job or something.’
My father didn’t show much grace when she said that, but he didn’t turn away from her.
Freda was true to her word and got a part-time job at a solicitor’s firm called Schwartz, Fine and Kane as a filing clerk. My father happily took her money for the rent but showed no sign of wanting to be around her any more than before. In fact, if anything, they saw less of each other. Dad hardly came home at all, and soon Freda was staying out much more as well.
She’d made some friends at work who encouraged her to join the Italian Club, where she could play tennis and drink in the bar with other ex-pats. I noticed that Freda had started to look different too, wearing what she called her ‘trews’ – checked trousers that were very much in vogue then – instead of her usual frumpy skirts and dresses.
By now, she’d completely washed her hands of me. Apart from the odd gripe to my dad about how useless and sneaky I was, she ignored me completely. It was as if I wasn’t there.
I was relieved not to be bullied as much by Freda any more, but I found myself feeling desperately lonely. There was no one I could talk to at school and instead of coming home to Gyp’s enthusiastic welcome, as I would have done in Hulme, I’d get back to our empty boarding house with hours to kill before bedtime. I managed to while away some of the long hours of the afternoon and evening in the hotel lounge, picking out tunes on the piano; and a couple of times a week I would go to the library. I found that I had an unquenchable hunger for books about animals, particularly dogs. I read Jock of the Bushveld and Old Yella again and again. Reading them helped me grieve for Gyp, for I was still feeling the loss of her keenly.
My father was spending most of the time on the road, preaching to Spiritualist groups all over Witwatersrand. If I needed anything for school, like a book or a piece of sports kit, I knew I was done for. He was never around to ask.
One afternoon, on coming back to the hotel after school, I was shocked to find Dad in our room. I could tell he’d been waiting for me. He was holding a letter, crumpled in his fist. I guessed it must have been from the school and thought I’d be getting another ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ rant. I could almost feel my hair standing on end, hackles rising like a dog’s, as I stood there.
‘Who’s the bloody traitor in the camp?’ He spat the words at me.
I didn’t say anything. Just waited. Steeling myself for a beating.
‘How did your mother know you were here? You bloody wrote to her, didn’t you?’
I shook my head. ‘I didn’t! I don’t know how she found out.’
‘Because of you, we’ve now got her damn solicitor sniffing around.’ Dad flourished the letter furiously in my face. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he can do. But he’s trying to make trouble. He’s going to learn that possession’s nine-tenths of the law. He, of all people, should know that. And she can go jump off a cliff for all I care. You’re here with me, and that’s an end of it.’
You’ve got me but you don’t even want me! Why couldn’t you just have left me behind with her? I don’t understand! I thought as I stood there, listening to his ranting, watching the spittle fall on his beard.
Dad grabbed my arm and forced me to sit on his bed while he got a pen and piece of paper. Dictation time again. I wonder what rubbish he’ll make me write this time?
‘Sit there. Here, lean on this.’ He put his briefcase on my knees. ‘Write exactly what I say.’
My father forced me to write a letter to my mother’s solicitor assuring him of my happiness. South Africa was a land of milk and honey, and I was having a wonderful time, apparently. Dad invented the most ridiculous, sickly-sweet fairytale. I couldn’t believe for one moment that any educated, sensible person would believe a word of it.
‘I have lots of friends and I love going down to the beach.’
We don’t live anywhere near a beach!
‘When I sit with my friends on our veranda we can see lots of sweet little monkeys in the trees.’
We live in the middle of a big city. Surely they won’t fall for that?
I lay in bed that night thinking about my father. One question had always circled round and round my head: Why does he keep me, when he finds me so repulsive to have around? I knew that he needed Freda and me to act the part of his spotless family, giving him a perfectly respectable image. Without it, his congregation of blue-rinse ladies probably wouldn’t trust him.
I always sensed, too, that my father wanted an easy target when he played his sadistic power games. The psychotic in him wanted me – and Freda too – under his control, so that he could twist the knife whenever and however he pleased, even if, for the most part, he couldn’t be bothered.
I reckoned that Dad would have liked to have Mum under his control too, and it had never ceased to irk him that she’d broken free. Wanting to be locked in a perpetual battle with her, I supposed the best way he could do it was to use me as hostage.
Meanwhile, things at Barnato Park were going from bad to worse. I was the only immigrant child in the school and the teachers picked on me in class. Not one of them stopped to think I might need help and support. Every day I was met with the rigid disapproval of the whole miserable lot of them.
The other girls made me feel just as isolated. They came from homes where they were cosseted; where there were swimming pools and tennis parties. Where maids did all the fetching and carrying. They’d probably never even had to brush their own hair. There was always a servant around to do everything for them. All their lives, they’d been cushioned from the rest of the world, and from undesirables like me.
South Africa in the 1950s was indeed cut off from the rest of the world. The rules of apartheid had never been tougher or more rigid. On my first night in Berea, I’d wondered where all the black people were. Now I knew. They had to go back to their townships at night. After six in the evening, black people on the street who didn’t have a special pass were arrested. I’d once seen two policemen dragging a black man along the street. Each had one of the man’s legs over their shoulder so that he was hanging upside down, head bashing the pavement. The sheer brutality of the regime was clear, even to an eleven-year-old like me.
I’d seen signs everywhere in the city, telling black people which parks they could let their kids play in, which restaurants they could eat at, and which seats on the bus they could sit on. And I’d watched how people behaved. How the park keeper would shoo away the black kids, pointing angrily at the notice on the gate: ‘Whites Only. Europeans. No Blacks’. Or how a black person would step out into the road to make way for a white person, even if that person was a child. I was living in a place where even the pavement wasn’t equally shared, and I didn’t like it one bit.
The girls at my school were all clones, conditioned from an early age to think apartheid was normal. Fresh from England, I soon realized that I was the enemy. I wasn’t ever going to be a part of the group. I hadn’t inherited the moral superiority of the Afrikaner as my birthright.
One morning, in my Afrikaans class, I spoke up. I hadn’t decided to challenge the status quo and if I’d thought about it beforehand I don’t think I’d have dared. After all, as I saw it, I had eight hundred people against me at that school and no one fighting in my corner. But I’d had enough and I couldn’t prevent myself blurting out. I’d seen intolerance and unfairness everywhere around me in South Africa, especially at Barnato Park.
Mrs Schmidt was our Afrikaans teacher. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed in an old-fashioned brown suit, pencil-thin, and as sour as a lemon. From the first day she had me in her class, she’d made it quite plain that she thought I had no business being there. In her eyes, I was scum – a British immigrant with none of the superior characteristics of her own master race of Afrikaners.
Mrs Schmidt didn’t just teach us the Afrikaans language. She spouted about the superiority of the Afrikaner people like an ugly stone gargoyle. That morning, she was in full flood.
‘You see, girls, God chose the Afrikaners to lead the country from darkness into light,’ she explained. ‘South Africa needed our superior race – a white people with God on our side – to take the reins of leadership. That’s what the Vortrekkers were fighting for.’
I felt the heat rising in me as she spoke. I looked around the room and saw the other girls all sitting dutifully straight-backed at their desks. Do you really believe this rubbish? I wanted to shout at them.
Once Mrs Schmidt had got into her stride, there was no stopping her. ‘You see, the kaffirs, with their smaller and inferior brains – like monkeys’ – needed a new race of leaders to lead the country,’ she said. ‘To give them the moral and spiritual education they were lacking before.’
I couldn’t bear it any more. And besides, there was a question I just had to ask. So I stood up, scraping my chair back in a less than ladylike fashion. There was an audible, indrawn breath from the other girls.
‘But, if the Africans are so bad,’ I asked, ‘why do the whites leave their kids to be looked after by them all day?’
It seemed like a perfectly sensible question to me. I’d seen the black nannies wheeling the white kids along in their prams in the park. There were never any white mums there. If that was so, then what Mrs Schmidt had just said didn’t seem logical. I really did want to know the answer. I didn’t get it though.
I thought Mrs Schmidt’s eyes were going to pop clean out of her head. She looked as though I’d thrown acid in her face. As she stood there, speechless for a moment, I saw an ugly red flush spread upwards from her chest.
‘Out!’ Mrs Schmidt’s scream was harsh. ‘Out!’
Words had obviously failed her in her fury.
I stood outside the classroom waiting for the class to finish. As soon as I heard the bell that marked the end of the school day, I walked out of the building. Every step of the way home, I chewed over Mrs Schmidt’s remarks until I was seething. I resolved then never, ever to set foot in her classroom again.
When I got back to the Allendene, I stomped into the lounge and flung myself down on the piano stool. Bang, bang, plonkety-plonk, I stabbed at the keys furiously. Life was so unfair.
At the end of the room, an old man was sitting. He was always there, never moving from his chair under the window. He’d told me his name was Mr Wolfe, but I’d hardly spoken to him before, except to ask him when I came in if it was all right if I played the piano. Occasionally, he’d ask me what tune I was trying to pick out. I loved Pat Boone’s songs, especially April Love and Debbie Reynolds’ Tammy. I’d sing the line first, Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love, then work it out on the keys. Mr Wolfe always nodded his old white head kindly and usually asked me to play it again.
This time, it must have been clear to the old man that I’d had a bad day. When I’d stopped plonking the keys for a moment, he cleared his throat.
‘Are you all right, dear?’ he asked kindly, in his ancient reed-like voice. ‘Have you had a bad day at school?’
I nodded, my eyes suddenly filling up.
‘Why don’t you come over here and tell me about it?’ Mr Wolfe patted the seat beside him.
I told him about Mrs Schmidt and wha
t I’d said to her. He couldn’t help smiling at that. But then he looked serious, gazing with his watery pale blue eyes into my own.
‘There are many people like your Mrs Schmidt in the world,’ he said. ‘Do you see this number?’ Mr Wolfe rolled up his sleeve to show me a faded blue number tattooed on the outside of his withered forearm.
I nodded. ‘What’s it for?’
‘During the war, I was locked up by the Germans in a concentration camp,’ he told me. ‘And I saw some terrible things. Things I can still see and hear. And smell too. My family died, my friends died. And all because a group of people thought like your Mrs Schmidt.’
Mr Wolfe’s shoulders slumped and he looked away. A few moments passed, and I thought he’d forgotten I was there. Then he turned to me again.
‘The world hasn’t changed,’ he said.
I’m sure his words shouldn’t have made me feel better, but somehow they did. It was good to know that at least one person understood, and that I had someone in my corner, after all.
Mr Wolfe struggled to his feet. When he was standing, I saw he was bent over, almost at a right angle to the ground. I thought it must have been odd to spend so much time looking at your shoes.
‘Wait here a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something for you.’
He walked over to a case next to the gramophone on the sideboard. He opened it and pulled out a record.
‘I used to play this when I was upset,’ Mr Wolfe told me, wiping the old ‘78 lovingly with his sleeve. ‘It’s the great Caruso, singing Pagliacci. It tells the story of a clown. A clown that laughed while his heart was broken.’
He carefully wound up the gramophone and lifted the arm to place the needle on the record. Then he stood there, as if lost in thought, while the wonderful tenor voice filled the shabby room. I was transported to another place, lit up by the music.
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