With no legislation to regulate the employer/employee relationship in this sector at that time, workers were universally – and sometimes grossly – exploited. Long hours, poor wages and unreasonable expectations were commonplace. I dealt with a case where a worker was left in charge of a small child who caught the flu. She was dismissed on the grounds of neglect, and the employer was intent on deducting from her final wages the price of the cough medicine and the cost of the visit to the doctor. I managed to persuade her not to take such gratuitous action, but this small victory made little difference to the dismissed worker’s plight. One employer, giving me a catalogue of her worker’s misdemeanours, grumbled, “She’s becoming too white!” A similar attitude was revealed in an advertisement in the Situations Vacant column of the Grocott’s Mail, placed by a well-meaning employer: “Domestic worker looking for full-time employment. Owner leaving town.”
One worker complained that she had too little time off to go to church on Sundays. “They won’t bury you if you don’t attend church!” she worried. She told of how the maids (there were three of them in the house) were kept waiting for what seemed like hours while dinners were in progress. Her employers were well-known members of the Grahamstown community with a high profile in the Progressive Party, so it was a tricky interview the advice office worker had with them, but more free Sundays were negotiated. Years later, when this employer was old, widowed and quite disabled, he told me during a bedside visit of his gratitude to this same domestic worker, not only for her years of service but also for the many intimate things he now needed her to do for him.
The house I’d grown up in had a small maid’s room upstairs and electric bells, even by the bath, wired to numbered hammers in a glass-fronted box in the kitchen, but these belonged to a bygone age. There was no maid and no ringing of bells when we lived there. My mother employed a series of chars with whom she often sat down and had a cup of tea. There was Mrs Shaw, whose husband was a lorry driver and whose passion was ballroom dancing. And Agnes who had spent her early life “in service” in a large country house. I think I grew up respecting them as I would anyone else who came to tea. And yet – I have an embarrassing memory. When Agnes was new in our employ I once unpacked our silver and glassware from the dining room cupboard and proudly displayed it for her benefit. It seems a strange thing to have done.
Still, when I arrived in South Africa I had very idealistic intentions as an employer of domestic help. I vowed never to use the word “servant” or to demean older women and men by calling them “girl” or “boy”. I was determined that my employees would be treated as equals and regarded with dignity. I fear that my practice did not always match my principles.
Once when English friends came to visit, they confided in us about a conversation they’d had with Hilda. When they had remarked to her that she must be very glad to have such good employers, her response had been rather lukewarm. I was taken aback. Was it just a bad day, or did I have cause to be ashamed? I reflected on how hard it must be to care full time for someone else’s home and children. On top of these demanding duties, domestic workers still had their own homes and families to care for and their own worries to contend with. Considering the indispensable contribution they made to the middle-class lives of others, one had to concede that the wages they earned and acknowledgement they received were nowhere near an adequate recompense. Small wonder that Hilda sometimes arrived at work in a dark mood, which our children called a “munch” and I confess I found irritating. Other friends from England once pointed out that I often had conversations in front of Hilda without including her. No doubt Hilda’s dignity sometimes hindered her from speaking up, but at other times she was not, as my mother would have said, “backward at coming forward,” and she told me in no uncertain terms when she felt something was not right. This could lead to a robust debate, or it could make me feel annoyed and guilty.
In 1980, Black Sash member Jacklyn Cock produced a book about domestic workers called Maids and Madams. Her research was done mostly in the Eastern Cape, which she called “the Deep South”. The book contained some revealing interviews. “They call me one of the family,” said one worker. “How can they say that?” “Holidays?” said another worker sardonically; “I go with the family to the seaside and work harder there than I do when they’re at home!” “I live on the smell of their meat,” said yet another. Discussion of Jackie’s book at a Grahamstown Black Sash meeting caused quite a furore, as some members became defensive about their own treatment of the women who worked for them. A slide and tape show of the book was aired around the country, and abroad by organisations such as Christian Aid. My voice, with its English accent, was used to represent the madam!
The subject of domestic work was very controversial and legal measures to regulate the practice were long overdue. It was no surprise in the early 1990s, during pre-democracy discussions, to find black caucuses citing domestic work as a matter of deep grievance and hear the wish expressed that there should be no more domestic labour once liberation had come. In the meantime, however, it was the conservative camp who reacted to Jacklyn’s book as though it were a threat. After its publication she began to be pestered by anonymous letters and phone calls. At times she received up to five calls a day. She’d hear an alarm bell ringing, or the ticking of a clock, or what sounded like an electronic scream. Once after a very nasty attack of encephalitis a voice said, “You have been sick; we are going to make you sicker.” Then one night the lights in her house went out and there was a crash through the window. A 20cm stick of dynamite had been hurled through the window, landing on the dining room table. Police and explosives experts arrived and neighbouring houses were evacuated. Fortunately, although the dynamite smouldered for about half an hour, it failed to explode.
At GADRA and in the advice office we increasingly sensed that dynamite was smouldering all around us. The relentless poverty and deepening discontent, together with the escalating conflict between the forces of oppression and resistance, would surely soon explode. The Black Sash steadfastly stood against any form of violence but we grew fearful that the worst might be inevitable. The kind of treatment to which Jacklyn Cock was subjected became only too common in the years that followed, as the security forces tried to intimidate and clamp down on all elements of the liberation struggle.
Time out
As an only child I had vowed that one day I would have a house full of children. My mother had been an only child and my father’s sister had no children, leaving me not only without siblings but without cousins too. I was determined to remedy the situation. Our four did not quite reach the vast numbers I had imagined, but they certainly filled our home. Malvern was a hands-on dad long before it was fashionable to be so, changing nappies, blowing noses and wiping away tears. Between us, he, Hilda and I fed and bathed the children, plaited the girls’ hair, sewed on buttons and took up hems, fetched and carried, comforted and scolded – and attended endless swimming galas. Our children were all excellent team swimmers and Malvern was an avid supporter. I cooked meals, Hilda baked bread, Malvern helped with homework. The result was a fairly ordered and very cheerful home.
In the early days we took in lodgers to help pay for renovations to the house. One philosophy student spent most of the time in his room asleep behind closed curtains, until it became necessary for tutors and parents to intervene and psychiatric help to be sought. An American economics lecturer seemed to have difficulty communicating and related best to our cat. His silent, gangly presence in the house was depressing and fortunately he stayed only a few months. One of HW van der Merwe’s researchers, a relation of the Rothschild dynasty, came for a while and she became a friend. I often wondered what she thought of her lodgings, where some of the walls were still unpainted. We also took in several English Honours students whom Malvern knew, two of whom subsequently became his colleagues.
Impecunious students often took their meals with us, which inevitably led to dinner table discussions on Hamlet
or Heart of Darkness. But the point came when these debates interrupted family conversation. The children were impatient to tell their own stories and in fact we were all becoming keen to have more space. One year we holidayed in a large house in Cape Town where the children could each have their own room. A blissful silence descended, as bedroom doors were closed and each child nestled into his or her own special space. That was when we realised that they’d shared rooms for long enough.
Matthew's new room had fish in an aquarium and a shelf of books on Churchill. During his Manchester United phase it was draped in red scarves and flags. Charlotte had an old kitchen table on which she made a doll’s house. She spent hours filling the rooms with furniture made out of matchboxes and tiny lampshades ingeniously fashioned from toothpaste tube tops covered in foil. Lucy would close her door and deliver lectures to the walls in a variety of voices, so that sometimes we genuinely wondered who was in there with her. Anna and her friend Fiona played at being grown-ups, mostly marching around with carrier bags full of old bills.
Over the years, troops of friends were in and out of our house. During the high school years, when boarders were given lunch on a Sunday there was never any difficulty persuading anyone to wash up. The kitchen, cosy and warm, was a great place for socialising, with apparently many an assignation made and broken there. Years later Anna complained that Matthew had seduced most of her friends within those walls. Malvern and I wondered how we could have missed this Casanova in our midst.
My real passion was Christmas. Matthew once remarked, “My mother is an activist the whole year round, but at Christmas she becomes as bourgeois as anyone.” I loved baking pies and puddings, the smell of turkey basting, the twinkling of Christmas lights and decorations and the chatter of many voices around the table, where we would often be joined by friends and their families. Sometimes we chose themes. One year everyone dressed up as Victorians, another, Anna and her boyfriend organised a treasure hunt that took us around town. On Boxing Day, which was also Malvern’s birthday, we usually had an open house. This meant a great furry of cleaning after the Christmas Eve dinner, and then Malvern would make gallons of punch, which he would personally stand and ladle out the next day. Friends milled about our garden meeting each other’s extended families visiting for the holidays. It was fun but exhausting. As a child Malvern had always felt somewhat cheated having to share his birthday with Christmas, so we were determined to make his day special, but sometimes I think we just wore him out.
Life in Merriman’s House was varied and happy, and always very busy. If sometimes I was out of the house more than I should have been, or if schedules became hectic and nerves became frayed, we always knew that the holidays would come and we would set off into the countryside to find ourselves and each other again.
Each year in the late summer we would go up into the mountains at Hogsback and pick blackberries. These outings reminded me of my childhood when my grandmother came to stay with us in August. I would help her pick the dewberries that grew in profusion among the sand-hills of our North Country home, and we cooked jam while she told me stories of her own childhood. Years later when Malvern introduced me to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, his poem Blackberry-Picking brought back memories of those summers.
Now though, when I re-read that poem, it’s our Hogsback holidays I conjure up. Our good friend Nova de Villiers and her four children would drive up into the mountains in her large brown station wagon, and we and our four in ours. Our destination was a stone cottage in a magnificent mountainside garden, planned, planted and tended by its owner over many years. It was a delight in spring with azalea and rhododendron, in summer with hydrangea, iris and rose and in autumn with the rusts and golds of many trees.
As soon as we arrived, the children would leap from the car to see if their favourite places and people were still there. There were the local Xhosa children, whose parents worked on the property and lived there. And there were the magical hiding places under low-branched fr trees, by the azalea-fringed duck pond, and up by the swimming pool in the orchard, nestling in natural rock. Arguments would ensue about who had to carry the luggage into the house and in which room each group of children could sleep. The younger ones always woke so early, while the older ones slept so late. There would be boxes heaped with food and Malvern would struggle to get the paraffin–burning fridge working properly. The lamps would have to be filled and the gas cooker checked. The smells from these appliances would permeate the house, mingling with the scent of wood and ash from the fireplace.
There were many feasts in that house. One particularly balmy night we dragged the dining room table and chairs outside and ate our supper in the darkness, enveloped in warmth and silence. The only sound was the distant singing of isiXhosa hymns, and apart from our lanterns, the only light came from the tiny pricks of fireflies darting amongst the trees.
Hogsback is a settlement strung along a ridge below the Amatola mountain range. Cascading waterfalls formed deep pools amongst the forest glades and the rich, fertile soil provided an oasis for many English flowers and berries. Come summertime, streams were flanked by carpets of arum lilies. In the forests there were grey parrots and the raucous cry of the loerie could be heard. If lucky, one might catch a glimpse of its scarlet wing.
Over the years we walked up most of the mountains, plodding through long grass while keeping a wary eye out for snakes. The leaves and twigs of sage bush and everlasting flowers caught on our boots and socks and their scents clung to our clothes. Matthew and his friends, like sure-footed mountain goats, would get to the top long before the rest of us. Catching our breath when we got there, we looked at fold upon fold of hill and valley stretching to the horizon, with here and there a tiny dot of a settlement. It was very peaceful and difficult to reconcile with the turmoil of the country in which we were living.
We left the doors and windows of the cottage wide open while we hiked, fearing no disturbance in the tranquil garden. But one morning when we woke and flung back the curtains, we saw that Nova’s car had disappeared. Flapping around in our nightclothes we soon found it upended in a ditch. It had been stolen in the night and we had heard nothing. Without keys the thieves had connected up wires to get it started but had then misjudged their get-away route. A helpful mechanic among the forest workers got the car in working order for the journey home.
The blackberry-picking would be left until our last day so that we could take the fruit home as fresh as possible. We would set out for an area mysteriously called Siberia, where the blackberries abounded. Equipped with plastic boxes and bowls, we would pick from the berry-laden bushes, prickled by the brambles, stung by midges, burnt by the mountain sun. By the end of the expedition, hands and mouths would be dyed purple and the children’s clothes would be stained. At Easter time when the blackberry pies appeared on the table, the pain and discomfort and arguments about who had not done their share of the picking would be forgotten. Instead, the juicy mouthfuls would bring back memories of idyllic Hogsback days and with them, a feeling of contentment.
Returning home was usually tinged with sadness as school, work, and the routine and stresses of reality would soon impinge. So we’d delay our arrival, stopping for a ritual picnic supper at the same spot half way down the mountain pass. Back in Grahamstown, bunches of pungent everlasting flowers on the table and bramble prickles in the laundry formed the last link with our summer idyll.
As a child in England I had always loved being out of doors and particularly enjoyed the smells and sounds of the countryside. But on holidays we had stayed in hotels and I had little experience of camping. Now in South Africa, with little money and a large family, hotels were not an option and so during many a summer holiday, we camped. Packing the car before we left was a logistical feat. We had to ft in pots and pans and tents, while leaving space for passengers too, and try to remember all the important items like toilet paper, paraffin and torches. Malvern had a checklist and was a meticulous packer, yet somehow the day befor
e departure was always one of short tempers and fare-ups. But once we were all squashed in the car and driving towards the heat haze on the horizon, our excitement knew no bounds.
Transkei, one of South Africa's artificially created homelands, was a poor, eroded area and fraught with problems for the people who lived there in thatched rondavels hugging the rolling hills. But the coast was paradise for camping holidays. With few people around and no access to radio or newspapers, we were able to suspend the world and its anxieties. We’d drive down to the sea on dusty, rutted roads then bump over grassland to find the perfect place for setting camp. We passed homesteads with thorn hedges where pigs and chickens rootled around, noticed the odd clinic or school, and took care to note where the nearest trading store was, where our water and food could be replenished.
The smells of those stores assailed us as we stepped across the threshold: a mixture of paraffin, mealie meal, cotton, tobacco and sweat. Zinc baths, brooms and baskets hung from ceilings while racks of clothes and stacks of mattresses gathered dust behind wire netting grilles. Sugar, four, meal and beans were all stored in large metal bins with scoops. On the shelves behind the storekeeper were condensed milk, tea and a range of patent remedies from Vicks cough syrup to Grandpa’s headache pills. The children loved the bead necklaces, bangles, brightly coloured sweets, and the strange looking bits of fur, bone and other accoutrements of the local sangomas. Sometimes youths with transistor radios would sit along the road outside the shop, probably on holiday from the mines. Their city clothes were the outward sign of their migration to a new and distant life, but one could not help wondering how children of this deeply rural place were adjusting to the snares of urban life, let alone the gruelling conditions underground.
At Ndumbi we camped in the sand dunes, just a dip between us and the sea. Being great swimmers, Malvern and the children would dash into the waves and spend hours in the water. Sometimes schools of dolphins would pass by and on the far-off horizon we might see a tanker. Nothing else disturbed our view. I was a bather, preferring a gentle river or lagoon to the sea, but I loved peering into rock pools and listening to the sounds of my family in the waves. Charlotte collected small shells which she carefully preserved in cotton wool to take home and convert into dolls house furniture. I would frequently remind the family how lucky we were to be wandering on deserted beaches, when up the coast people were paying a great deal at smarter places without the benefit of this privilege. As they grew older, Matthew and Anna would groan audibly, thinking of what they were missing.
Swimming with Cobras Page 8