Illuminating Lives

by Vivian Bickford-Smith

  Once a widow, Jane took full responsibility for the farm and her teenage son. If it wasn’t for Richard, she may have left Welcarmas. In a letter to Muriel, she wrote, ‘My one joy is Richard – but for him I’d sell up the whole bloody lot and clear out.’

  In the 1950s, it was unusual for a woman to own and run a commercial farm in South Africa. It’s a role normally assigned at birth to a family patriarch in a very patriarchal society. Farming is a tricky business and requires a commitment to daily toil and submission to nature’s unpredictability. Weather, disease and produce prices are out of a farmer’s control.

  But Jane was a tough-minded and entrepreneurial farmer. She applied herself to what needed to be done and became impatient with others’ incompetence, for which she never apologised. Needing to earn a living and pay for Richard’s private-school fees, she would have felt under pressure.

  Jane complained often of money problems and in 1955 told her sister, Nell, ‘I’m dead broke with bills to the tune of 1 200 pounds outstanding … I shall scrape through.’ But she understood the worth of her assets and that the tea garden, fruit stall and cold store had good value. Some say she was always stressed, and others that the business of farming preoccupied her. Her daughter-in-law, Barbara Follett, says that ‘she begrudged the work and often played victim to a real or imagined situation’.

  Welcarmas was a labour-intense deciduous fruit farm when Jane owned it. Situated on a crest between two mountains, the farm’s hilly terrain meant that orchards of plums, pears, peaches, apples and chestnut trees were planted on slopes and in valleys. In autumn and winter, there would be pruning to do. In spring, swathes of blossom spread across the valleys overlooking Stellenbosch and up towards the surrounding mountains. Weeks after the blossoms fell, young fruit buds would be thinned to allow crops to flourish. Then summer arrived, and at the start of those hot months, a fruit farm, like a hibernating bear, wakes up to a frenzy of labour: of picking, sorting, packing and early morning trips to the market. Jane described in a letter to her niece a typical day during the harvest season: ‘Yesterday I was packing all morning – took a load into Cape Town in this new diesel truck – it’s so stiff to drive still, noise is terrific and the vibration – I’m like jelly when I stop. Arrived home at 7pm. Packed until 11pm. Did my accounts and went to bed!’

  Besides growing and caring for the trees and fruit, there was a packing and sorting shed on the farm that was open for business to the farming community. A couple of years after Paddy died, Jane started a cold-storage facility to serve the same community and to help bring in more money. She also ran a farm stall, where fruit not good enough to be sold at market was sold to passers-by on the road. Initially, she didn’t want to keep the tea garden open, but people would turn up and she saw it as a good opportunity. She roped in visiting family to help. Jean remembers spending her South African summer holidays on the farm baking 200 scones a day to serve guests on the veranda and in the garden. In the mid-1950s, Jane had the tea garden zoned for business and approved by the ‘local Health people’. She told Nell that she had to hide doors by blocking them with shelves and a dresser because ‘I am apparently not allowed to live on the premises so have to remove all signs of doing so.’ She kept the tea garden open until the 1960s.

  Jane employed a farm manager and farm workers, some of whom were permanent employees, while others were seasonal migrant workers. The cold store, Simonsberg Cold Storage Co., was hard work: ‘I’ve been climbing obstacles the whole time.’ She had partnered with Jack Westmoreland, who had cold-storage experience, and her manager, Dolfo, whom she called her ‘tame Italian’. Dolfo did all the buying and selling of fruit. But a few months into the project, Jack abandoned it and left her ‘a helluva mess which will take a couple of thousand to put right,’ she told Nell. ‘Ah well, human nature seems to be pretty bloody and Gawd knows if I’ll ever get sorted out, but anyway I’m having a shot at it … I’m feeling very bitter.’5

  During harvest season, she was ‘dashing around collecting fruit, packing it, rushing into market with it and the weather so hot I feel I’ll collapse at any moment. But I don’t! I’ve come to the conclusion I must be very strong!’6 At work, Jane was incredibly tough and resilient.

  John Clare had never met an adult quite like Jane before visiting Richard, his school friend, at Welcarmas. ‘She was a hands-off parent and let us do what we wanted to do, which was fabulous for teenagers,’ he recalls.

  Typical of some English-speaking children in the Cape at the time, Richard was sent to private, fee-paying schools, which were modelled on the nineteenth-century British public-school system. For primary school, he boarded at Somerset House, about twenty-five kilometres from the farm, but left there to complete his schooling at St George’s Grammar School in Cape Town. It was there that he and John became friends. Richard, after being a weekly boarder in Somerset West, seemed to struggle with term boarding at St George’s at first. He appeared dispirited, fell ill and found reasons to extend his stays on the farm rather than return to school after holidays. Jane believed that he feared missing out on farm activities when he was at school. ‘The main trouble is that there’s always so much going on in this damned house,’ she told Nell. She tried to convince the school to let him come home for weekends, but that wasn’t allowed.

  By the time the two teenage boys came to the farm for their breaks, Richard had moved into the two-bedroomed cottage alongside Jane’s farmhouse. The boys climbed mountains during the day and played games at night, often staying up until the early hours of the morning. ‘Meals were prepared, but if we didn’t arrive she wouldn’t worry.’ John says that mealtimes were pragmatic affairs. Occasionally, Jane would comment on an article she was reading in the radical American investigative journalist Isidor Feinstein Stone’s weekly newsletter, I.F. Stone’s Weekly, to which she subscribed, or she would try to bait Richard with controversial comments. She was anti-authoritarian and non-conformist, quick and clever. She wouldn’t discuss politics much, but ‘we knew she had complete contempt for apartheid’.

  Jane paid close attention to Richard’s academic progress. She complained to a friend when he ‘only came 5th’ because he’d met a girl. And she told her sister, Nell, when he came second in class, ‘only 5 marks behind the first boy, and he took the Latin prize’. At fifteen, Richard went on his first date. ‘Talk about a fuss! I’ve bought him a shaving set for Xmas. He’s certainly maturing fast.’ She hoped that he would get over the love pangs at an early age and then settle down without having to rush into an early marriage. ‘All signs that he’ll be a “Casanova”. I can see myself interviewing a few enraged parents,’ she told Muriel.

  Jane, a ‘personality of great potency’, remained a consistent influence throughout her son’s life.7 This created conflict in him, and he had to struggle against her to find his own independence, but it was under this maternal influence that Richard became a confident, caring and independent thinker. Tony Morphet says that ‘It was from her example as much as from the struggle with her that he learned to realise and depend upon his own autonomous judgments.’ When he finished school, Jane had encouraged Richard to study aeronautical engineering at university, which he did at first. When he switched to philosophy, she was very disappointed, but this decision was the ‘first external evidence that he had begun to shape his own life and make his own independent choices’.8

  Jane was never affectionate with Richard, but it was clear to John, then an insensitive teenage boy, that she adored her only son. She would have found it ‘insufferably sentimental’ to tell him so. ‘I never saw her touch him, kiss or hug him. But the way she looked at him, the way her eyes followed him showed me her unconditional adoration of him,’ John says.

  Unless you’ve experienced the loss of a child, it’s unimaginable to understand the pain that Jane felt after his death. In the funeral note for her only child, she wrote, ‘What can I say of my beloved son? Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh and oh, heart of my heart. That soun
ds so melodramatic but when I think of my dead son, words don’t matter, only feelings, and every part of me weeps.’

  Jane, remarkably for someone who had a full life managing a commercial farm and parenting single-handedly, was also a prolific and talented painter and found time to be a member of the amateur drama group in Stellenbosch. It was only after she left Britain for the Gold Coast that she began to paint. She never received formal art training, but her works, mostly in oils, show a confidence of stroke, a rich understanding of colour and composition, and a deep love of place. From her veranda studio, Jane painted scenes of her farm, the views, the mountains and the people who lived there. She was commissioned to do family portraits but complained about not having enough time to paint and wished that she could give it more solid hard work. She told her family, ‘I do practically none except for my Monday class which keeps my eye in. I haven’t got down to my portrait commissions yet, just can’t get the urge with so many worries.’

  She was both proud and self-conscious of her artistic abilities and concerned that her portraits might not satisfy doting parents. After exhibiting at a group show, she was happy to have sold a painting, which was the only one at the show to be purchased. ‘I put half a dozen in an exhibition a couple of weeks ago and sold one of ’em …’

  Many of her works still hang in Stellenbosch homes. I saw several in the home of Johanna Susanna Mostert, who moved to De Uitkyk, the farm next to Welcarmas, in 1965. Johanna, who still lives in the same house on Helshoogte, remembers Jane as a good actress and says that she often participated in theatre productions at the Oude Libertas on the Braak in Stellenbosch. Johanna says that although it was obvious that Jane was interested in current affairs, ‘we didn’t talk politics’. They shared an interest in yoga and ‘together we travelled into town for classes’.

  Jane was the first person in the area to invite the newcomer Johanna to a cocktail party in order to introduce her to the community. The farmers often had parties, which could become wild with singing and dancing. As Jane said in a letter to London, ‘I’ve fourteen people coming here for Saturday night. They are coming here for food and drink before we set off to see an amateur production in a neighbouring dorp; then back here for cheese, pickles and beer and bit of dance. Means about three o’clock in the morning before we go to bed.’

  Jane formed a strong relationship with her neighbour, John Kitson. She would greet him with a big kiss, turning him bright red with embarrassment. Other than John, who she said was ‘homosexual’, her interest in men seems to have been minimal. She did, though, have romantic adventures on her travels. Once Richard was grown up and could help out on the farm, Jane travelled widely. As a young woman, she and Muriel had travelled often to Europe, and she remained adventurous throughout her life, going on trips to Greece, Afghanistan, Australia, Turkey and South America. She once invited her sister Nell to join her on a trip to India and told her to bring a sleeping bag. They travelled without a plan, letting one adventure lead to another. It was on that trip that she met a man named Ali, and, on another trip to Kashmir, she gave him her ‘huge’ diamond ring. The ring that had been intended for her niece instead funded a hotel kitchen far away.

  On Richard’s wedding day, 27 December 1963, Jane disappeared. She didn’t witness her son exchanging vows with his first wife, Barbara Hubbard. The young couple had spent the previous evening with Jane on the farm, but on the big day Jane didn’t show up. She stopped communicating with them altogether. She also stopped Richard’s allowance.

  Barbara was sixteen when she met Richard, who was seventeen, at a party in Cape Town and they ‘got along right from the word go’. Barbara says, ‘he slowly became the centre of my life – and certainly I think I did for him. From the time I was sixteen until we got married when I was twenty-one, we really were very close – as close as you could possibly be with friends, with everything.’9 When they met, Richard was socially awkward, while Barbara was a confident, articulate young woman.

  Jane didn’t like Barbara and was wary of her at first. Barbara says that Jane didn’t want to share Richard with anyone, and no one, in Jane’s eyes, was good enough for him. Sophie Antony, who lived on Welcarmas, remembers that Jane didn’t like Foszia, Richard’s second wife, either. ‘She would say, “Oh, Richard’s wife is coming in a couple of days.” She would skinner to me, “She can’t even swim.”’

  Immediately after Barbara and Richard’s garden wedding in Cape Town, the couple left for Paris for three years, where Richard studied the philosophy of French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. This trip to France gave Richard an opportunity to reflect on his early life experiences and to break away from his mother.

  Barbara became pregnant in Paris, and once Jane heard that Richard would become a father, and she a grandmother, she couldn’t resist making contact. Jane ‘started sending Richard little itsy bits of money, and putting pressure on him to come home and help operate the farm’.10 Barbara did not want to return and told Richard that if they did, he would be killed for his political views. But Richard worried about who would run the farm when his mother retired. And so, in 1966, the couple and their little girl, Jann, returned and moved onto Welcarmas, into Jane’s home, while she moved to a smaller cottage. Barbara remembers Jane waiting for them on the dock as the ship sailed into Cape Town in July of that year. Jane’s expression, as Jann toddled down the gangplank, was one of pure joy.

  Jane always had itchy feet, and when her family returned she took a break from farming to travel while Richard took over management of the farm. He’d returned from studying the political implications of existentialism to a culture of farming that was entrenched in a centuries-old colonial structure of master and slave. He wasn’t interested in the farm stall or the tea garden, and he raised worker wages without being particularly interested in raising more income from farming. During this time, Richard would invite students, friends and thinkers to the farm in order to exchange ideas and discuss politics.

  The farm, they knew, was under surveillance. Barbara told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the 1990s that she and Richard had been subjected to the general kind of police harassment that was typical of the time: telephones were tapped, mail was opened and they were followed. In the 1960s, there were few fences separating farms. Security police gained access to Welcarmas from the neighbour’s property. From a farm on the other side of the Helshoogte Pass road, now the Delaire Graff Estate, the police had a good vantage point of the Turner farm. Helmine Mostert remembers the police coming to the farm stall where she did holiday work as a child, asking about Richard’s visitors and his whereabouts. She says that she always feigned ignorance.

  While he was good at attracting the state’s attention, Richard’s farming was less successful. His relationship with his wife had also been deteriorating. When he left Stellenbosch in 1969 to take up a post at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, he went alone and Barbara went to Cape Town with their daughters (Kim, Jann’s younger sister, had been born after their return from France). Jane resumed control of the farm and shook it back into shape. Two years later, she sold it to the Mosterts, keeping a small piece of land with the cottages and her abundant and wild garden.

  While the state brutally tightened its control of apartheid laws, and resistance against the government intensified, Jane, consciously or unconsciously, created a space on the top of Helshoogte that gave her tenants an escape from the oppressive system. Did she agree to rent only to the artists, musicians, poets, philosophers and their friends? Was it the verligte students who came looking to live with the old woman up on the hill? Or was Jane’s offering best suited to the bohemian students?

  Sophie Antony was sixteen when she moved with her parents, Mary and David Louw, to live in one of the little cottages on the farm in 1979. They had been living in Kylemore, a village five kilometres over the mountain towards Pniel. Jane was already grey when they arrived. ‘My mom helped Jane out in the house doing cooking and cleaning while my dad worked in Stelle
nbosch,’ Sophie recalls.

  Sophie loved Welcarmas. ‘If you were away, you just wanted to go back there. It felt free,’ she says. ‘I remember playing under the chestnut tree in front of Jane’s house.’ She also remembers spending time with the students there and the neighbouring farm children. She was coloured and they were all white. She had an affair with a white student and often shared a bed with another. ‘Sometimes I would be too stoned to go home and slept with him in his bed. My mother would find me in his kooi. There were no curtains and anybody could have seen us together – a white man with a coloured girl. Nothing happened, but who could be sure of that then. Ons was net lekker dikgerook.’

  Vernon Swart, a fine artist, describes the farm as being a safe space. ‘South Africa was like Nazi Germany. But on Welcarmas, we had a haven. It was a forward, free-thinking space.’ Vernon is sure that the security police watched Jane and the students. But despite their interest in the farm, students lived a permissive life. ‘We all smoked [dope],’ says Vernon.

  Jane complained about her tenant problems. She moaned about non-payments, drunkenness and termite infestations but found solace in her large garden. She told her niece, ‘the garden is a riot of colour, fruit trees in blossom, and by cutting down the trees a lovely vista opened up. So I console myself with that and spend hours on the stoep lapping it all up.’ Jane didn’t like it when people used her garden, nor did she go into it often. If anyone tried to clear or tidy it up, Vernon says, she would go ‘ballistic’. For these reasons, Vernon thought it would be the perfect place to grow dope. ‘I bought a book from the US with advice on how to grow the crop,’ he recalls. ‘My friends helped monitor the garden. It was my pride and joy. But one day I came with a touring party to find it had all disappeared.’ Years later, Jane admitted to Vernon that she had removed his crop, not out of judgement of it, but most probably to punish him for having used her garden.