In South Africa of the 1950s and 1960s it was a cultural mandate that white children should succeed academically because it was our patriotic duty to advance our race on the Dark Continent. My parents’ focus on education went far beyond this: they valued intellectual development as a good in itself, as the very beacon of honorable personhood. Even though each successive year of drought or hail or infestation of cutworm plunged my father deeper into debt with the Land Bank, and even though my siblings and I wore homemade clothes and the hand-me-downs of our better-off cousins, my parents drilled us in our times tables and my father coached us in the arithmetic, algebra, and the science of the everyday world at every opportune moment from breakfast to bedtime. We started learning English before we even started school through my mother’s daily after-dinner reading from children’s classics mail-ordered from overseas, including standbys like White Fang, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island, as well as finds like Enid Blyton’s Adventure Series, which were instrumental in preparing me for boarding school. (It would be many years before it would occur to me that none of this anticipation would have featured in the dreams of the black children on our farm, upon whom I had for the past six years looked down from my seat on the bus as they ran to school on the shoulder of the road, their lower limbs grayed by the dust their feet raised from the road’s narrow shoulder.)
Even though my boarding school would have hardly any resemblance to the one in Blyton’s novels, in January 1961 I confidently set out for Rustenburg Hoërskool. My whole family made the drive—about an hour by car from our farm—to deliver me to the complex of buildings constituting the school hostel (what Americans would call a dormitory), where I would live for nine months out of the year.
My family accompanied me into the annex—a temporary building of the kind today being dismantled with asbestos caution methods—where an overflow of two dozen standard sixes and a prefect would live in two identical sleeping halls, or dormitories, under the supervision of a “housefather” who occupied an apartment at the end of the hallway with his family. Once we had located my bed, it was time for my family to leave. Since, in my intellectually snobbish family, my attainment of boarding school was by fiat an occasion of pride, there were no tears. Within the span of five on-the-mouth kisses, I was alone with my suitcase. I set out the school clothes that I helped my mother sew over Christmas on the light blue bedspread bearing the letters TOD/TED (Transvaal Onderwys Departement/Transvaal Education Department): two dark green gyms, or pinafore dresses (with matching panties—bloomers, rather); five white blouses; and a church dress, also white.
My dormitory was almost as large as our storeroom house. The space was divided in half by a double row of army-green metal cabinets, arranged back-to-back. On each side of the divider, a black metal cot, head end abutting the opposite wall, mapped one-to-one onto each cabinet. Six girls were assigned to each side. At the bed next to mine, a yet unnamed roommate was just finishing her unpacking. The girl’s cabinet doors were open, revealing a closet with eighteen inches of hanging space on one side and eighteen inches of shelving on the other—an entire closet that did not have to be shared with anyone else!
I savored the luxury of placing my treasures, each according to its kind, in the first roomy space I could ever claim as my own. Already I was gluttonously attached to this territory, where my possessions would stay as I had decreed, where the vanity case where I magpied away my special things—the powder-puff-soft tuft of rabbit fur I pulled off a fence barb; the three spotted guinea fowl feathers I salvaged from a spot next to the coal heaps behind the tobacco kiln where our laborers plucked wild birds to roast in the always-lit fire; my pads and belt for when I would get my first period; and the lemon facial astringent I had made from a recipe in Die Sarie, an Afrikaans woman’s magazine—would not be raided by a covetous or curious sibling.
If the thirteen-year-old girls on my side of the dormitory were surprised to find a flat-chested and periodless eleven-year-old among them, they showed it only by taking a patronizing stance toward the “Little One.” It would be many years before I would fully comprehend the extraordinariness of my teenage roommates’ indulgence during that year. How naïve, decades later, was my expectation as an immigrant mother that my own children, accents obvious, would be embraced by their peers as they set forth into the foreign territory of American teendom.
About a month into the term, our first “hostel weekend” arrived, one of the twice-per-quarter paroles when we could go home. My father picked me up on Friday afternoon. During the hour-long drive home, he quizzed me about algebra, beaming proudly when I reported that our class had not yet worked up to the difficulty of the equations he had already taught me to solve. When his inquisition turned to Latin, he surprised me with an off-color joke—albeit by the standards of the day—that he had apparently been hoarding since his own high school Latin years. “Translate apis potand abigone,” he said. Desperate not to let him down, I talked out my meager vocabulary: apis, didn’t that have something to do with bees? Could potand be an odd conjugation of potere, which means “to be able to do.” Abigone? The ablative absolute of a verb I hadn’t yet encountered? The more I speculated, the more my father guffawed, setting off his smoker’s cough so vehemently that we momentarily swerved into the oncoming traffic. After regaining his grip on the steering wheel, he spilled out the solution. “Punctuate it like this,” he said. “A pis pot and a big one.” We laughed until Pa’s cough nearly took us off the road.
At home, the lamps were lit, the table set, the food ready to serve. Although it was our house servant* Anna’s night off, she stayed until I got there to show me her new baby, a girl named Kagiso. My siblings seemed a bit shy at first and passed me the gravy and the butter as if I were a guest. By the end of the meal, though, things were back to normal. My brothers’ protests against bathing drowned out the news on my father’s radio, and Lana and I got into a row that repaired our attenuated sister bond. In the morning, demonstrating a complete lack of appreciation for the fact that I never got to sleep in on Saturdays at school, my mother woke me before the grid of window sun even got to my feet so I could hem a set of flannel nightwear for our new little brother or sister, who was due to arrive six weeks later.
When I rejoined my roommates on Sunday night at the dormitory, some girls were crying, but that ended as soon as we started exchanging goodies from home. It felt a little bit lonely after all the noisy family togetherness, but it also felt good to be back in an ordered space where bells chimed the days into predictable chunks, meals automatically appeared in the dining hall, and every building of the hostel uncannily went quiet for study. I loved being able to do my homework in the neon glow of overhead lights, without the acrid smell of moths immolating themselves in the lantern flame.
That night, I was borne into sleep on a wave of belonging, my worlds having been sewn together like the pieces of a baby’s night wrap. I was shocked when, within days, unpredictable spasms of homesickness cramped my insides. Sometimes there was a reason, such as the day a sudden rainstorm struck while our whole hostel, two girls abreast, was snaking up the hill to school. With squeals and shrieks our formation splintered, every girl for herself, even the prefects. Never having been a good sprinter, I fell behind. When I tried to catch up, I slipped, skinning my knee. As I hobbled through the gate after the last of the other girls had already made it inside, I felt more alone than ever before in my life.
Though the shame of being left behind wore off somewhat as the days passed, icy shards of longing still impaled my innards at unexpected moments. While I did feel loved by my roommates, I also yearned for someone I could really talk to, like my friend from back home, Jacoba, who was the only person I knew who read the same books as me and loved to discuss them. The girls in my sleeping hall did not read any books other than those required for school or talk about anything other than the upcoming interschool sports day when the whole school would go by train to Pretoria. Jacoba attended one of the most prestig
ious schools in the country, Pretoria’s Afrikaanse Hoër Meisieskool. Though only seventy miles from Rustenburg, Pretoria might as well have been Pluto as far as Jacoba and I were concerned: neither of our families had the means for frivolous travel, and, besides, Jacoba’s home weekends fell at different times in the school term than mine.
As I lay awake listening to the slumbering breaths from the beds beside me, I imagined Jacoba in her hostel, luxuriating in a warm bath, since surely her hostel had enough hot water for even the standard sixes; snuggling with a book among her down puffy pillows and plump comforter until she was sleepy, and then clicking off her own light, which was right next to her bed.
Eventually, my thoughts would return to our farm, the lands, the night sky where my father—that magnificent atheist in deacon’s clothing—and I would track the planets, locate newly rising constellations, and during the giddy twenty-one days of Sputnik, try to spot it as the satellite whirled cheekily around Earth, at one hour and thirteen minute intervals, until it sank below our horizon.
I thought, too, of the noisy bustle inside our house after my mother had given her last warning for us all to come in: my father tickling five-year-old Carel and seven-year-old Klasie off the couch so he could claim his seat by the radio for the seven o’clock news; my mother threatening from the kitchen that someone had better light the lamps and set the table; my jealousy of the praise my mother heaped on Lana for not only having lit the lamps but also washing their glass globes; and after dinner, my father again claiming the couch, grinding out his stompie in the overflowing ashtray on the side table by the radio, and lighting another cigarette before scrutinizing the newspaper. I thought of my brother Klasie’s yells when I accidentally tunneled into the quick beneath his bark-like soles while needling out a thorn; after my mother took her place in the wicker chair, we children jockeying for space on the nearby blanket we named Wollie; and my mother’s head bobbing in and out of sight behind the book she was reading out loud, translating the story for us, sentence by sentence, from English into Afrikaans as it unfolded.
Calling home to alleviate my homesickness was not an option. The pay phone in the main hall was reserved for emergencies. Trying to recall my family members’ faces made it even worse—in place of their images appeared instead a desolate wasteland swirling with snow, like the one the girl Gerda from Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale had to cross to save her dearest friend, the boy Kay, after the Snow Queen had spirited away his memory and frozen his heart. Nothing could save him but Gerda’s tears, rivers of warmth that melted the frozen crust that trapped his heart and rekindled his memory, upon which they sped home on a fleet-footed steed—what Gerda, then, would weep hot tears for me?
In Elegy for Iris, John Bayley writes, “I was far too preoccupied at the time to think of such parallels, but it was like living in a fairy story—the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending—in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing.”
During my research on dementia, I read a review of Bayley’s memoir that cited this baneful observation about his and Iris Murdoch’s relationship. Reading it out of context, I assumed that it referred to the period when Alzheimer’s was encroaching on the couple’s lives. I was surprised to discover that the passage instead describes the early years of their marriage. For years after their marriage, by his own admission Bayley grappled with his wife’s need to seal off areas of her life from him. In the “fairy story” chapter, Bayley tells an anecdote that illustrates his early awareness that their relationship was going to be challenging. His insight came the first time he and Murdoch went dancing: when they stepped onto the floor, filled with Bayley’s friends and acquaintances, hardly anyone was dancing, chatting loudly over the music instead. After Bayley introduced his date, Murdoch got along so swimmingly with her new friends that Bayley, a bit miffed, invited her to dance. When they moved to the music, “there seemed to be no correlation among the different parts of [their] bodies.” Leaving Bayley to his “unconfident… hops,” Murdoch broke away to execute her own “ungainly… arm twirling and arabesques.” When, seconds later, she inadvertently bumped into a couple dancing together, the man smiled and, breaking away from his partner, took Murdoch in a dance embrace. “She melted into him,” Bayley writes, “and the pair swung off in perfect unison.”
After submitting to many even-harder-to-stomach instances of Murdoch’s “going away”—including her multiple affairs—Bayley launched an effort to cultivate a similar “apartness” for himself, a state of mind in which he, like Iris, would be “hermetically sealed.” His “solitudes,” however, would not include sexual or romantic infidelity. A few years after the start of his quest, he claimed that his sealed-off realms had become pleasurable, “a little like having a walk by oneself and knowing that tomorrow, or soon, one would be sharing it again with the other, or, equally perhaps, again having it alone.”
To some of Bayley’s readers and critics, Bayley’s professed acceptance of Murdoch’s need for extreme privacy rings hollow. They perceive his exposure in his memoir of intimate details of her mental infirmity—while she was still living, albeit in a state where his revelations could not hurt her—as a betrayal. A revelation they find offensive, for example, is his description of a trip to the bathroom where, after she’d had a bowel movement, he “wiped her bottom and scrubbed her hands and her brown fingernails,” soiled as a result of her own efforts to clean herself. Critic Carol Sarler interprets Bayley’s “demeaning, diminishing, reducing and insulting” of Murdoch as a form of Schadenfreude by a man who had been overshadowed by a “hugely achieving” woman. Other critics explain Bayley’s unflattering disclosures about Murdoch as a phenomenon sometimes found in memoir or other biographical writing about the dead.
Like Bayley, I myself tell tales out of school in order to expose the unsavory realities of dementia, and I come down on the side of those who believe that through his shocking disclosures combined with his unfailing care “Bayley demonstrates how love still thrives in such uncompromising familiarity [and that] this book reveals itself as one brave enough to face such ambivalence as well as the horror of dementia.”
The last of my three brothers, Hennie-Boshoff, was born in 1961 on big brother Klasie’s eighth birthday, May 16. There was still almost a month to go before my next weekend home. My father had driven my mother to the maternity home in Rustenburg near my school for the birth, which, as was customary in the 1960s, he did not attend. Once my brother had been delivered, he went home to take care of the other children. When my father visited her the next day, he got the housefather’s permission for me to see my mother and the baby. Hennie-Boshoff’s mouthful of name was intended to distinguish him from my father, who went by Boshoff. The baby wriggled in my arms, contorting his face as if practicing for laughing, crying, being surprised. I only visited once, though my mother stayed three days. On the third day my father fetched her and the baby home.
A week or so later, I was lying on my bed during the mandatory rest hour after school. I was practicing Latin declensions when I noticed through the open curtains that the tree to which I sometimes fled to read my book was starting to turn the orangey-brown of autumn. The curtains were breathing in and out unevenly in the slightly moving air. I squinted to make out the red TOD/TEDs stamped across the surface. With my eyes scrunched up, the folds in the corner of my eye became the dunes that edged the white Cape Town beach. In an instant, I was four years old again, huddled in my father’s arms at the edge of the lands. Berrinkies, my lips said. Berrinkies.
When the study bell rang, I made no move to get up. Piekie, my window-side neighbor, came over and nudged me. “Study hour,” she said. Her words made my father, the farm, the dunes vanish. I wasn’t angry. I just felt flat. I knew I could get up if I put my mind to it, go to my desk, say hello to Rina, a prefect with whom I shared a desk, and spend the rest of the hou
r reading the chapter we were assigned from De Kleine Maja.* Something unyielding inside me, though, made me just stare slightly to the side of Piekie’s nose as if I were looking right through her.
Piekie tried a few more times to get me to respond, but her coaxing just reminded me of how, back home, my mother sometimes sweet-talked me into reading a story to my brothers, but I would usually refuse because my own book was so much more interesting. I now felt bad that I hadn’t listened to my mother, hadn’t been kind to my brothers. I wished it was my mother by my side now, not Piekie, asking me so nicely. If only she were here, I would get up immediately, would apologize for having been selfish. Was I being selfish now? Was I even here? Who was that girl lying on the bed, her tongue heavy, her breath too thin to speak? Why was she being so naughty?
When Piekie called Rina, I was scared that she would immediately detect my misbehavior. However, though she was a prefect, Rina did not see into my sinner’s soul. And so my muteness continued through the housefather’s scrutiny, and that of Matron, the hostel nurse, who had been summoned from the main building. After sitting me up so gently that tears spilled onto my cheeks, Matron gripped me by the elbow and led me over to the main building. My heart womped noisily in my chest as I lay between the sick room’s stiff sheets, my gaze fixed on the halo of gray hair surrounding Matron’s nurse cap. She took my temperature and applied her stethoscope to my rib cage. Even those instruments did not register the deception of my heart, the perdition of my soul. Instead, Matron had the kitchen send me soup and called my parents.
In the morning, I sat waiting on the chair next to the bed in the same clothes I had changed into after school the day before. My school bag was at my feet. Rina had brought it over with my toothbrush and washcloth stuffed among the books. It felt very wrong not to thank her. After she left, I listened and listened for the roar of our Willys in the parking lot. I attempted to read one of the books from my bag, De Kleine Maja. I tried my voice by reading a sentence out loud: it croaked in the silence of the sick room, but it was there. I should have tried harder last night, I thought. I was deeply ashamed of having been naughty. My parents would be so disappointed.
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