Swimming with Cobras (7 page)

That political blow was followed by a personal one – the deaths of both my parents. My father died of a coronary, after which my mother, who was sick with cancer, came to stay with us. I was pleased to have her close because it lessened my anxiety about her, but when her condition went into remission she insisted on going home. One of the most difficult things I have ever had to do was put my mother on a plane in Port Elizabeth, knowing that I might never see her again. My mild, gracious mother, who had already lost her beloved and protective life partner, was about to face her greatest challenge on her own. I wept to see her go and was glad of the stalwart support of a friend who had taken us to the airport. My mother died a few months later, two weeks after Lucy's birth. The whole family, including me, had chickenpox. It was a bitter trial for me, thinking of her being buried without my being there. And with no siblings to share my sorrow or memories, more than ever I felt the loneliness of being an only child.

When we returned to England in 1972 for a year's sabbatical, we had the difficult job of sorting out my parents' belongings. It was strange to be there without them, but our friends were warm and supportive. We relished the cultural wealth that surrounded us and it was such a relief not to have endless beggars at the door. I felt the strong seductive pull of English life, and when the year was over I did not want to return to South Africa. But we had invested in a house and a life there, and academic jobs were hard to come by. There was also Malvern's involvement with the Progressive Party and there was no question, really, that we would not come back. My children watched me cry copious tears as our ship left Southampton. Years later, when I asked Anna if she remembered my distress, my eldest daughter told me that as a small child she had always felt that I wanted to be somewhere else. Such an unsettling experience to have given my young children.

We'd been back for a year when Malvern's father died after a protracted illness. Fortunately his parents were not as far away as mine had been and he had a brother who shared the responsibility of caring for them. But our relationship with them was fraught. It was a situation of my making, which I later greatly regretted. They were kind and generous people but conservative Afrikaners who viewed me as something of a communist. It does me no credit that I took them head-on, criticising all that I saw wrong in their society. Already feeling alienated from their Oxford-educated son, they now had to watch him defend his wife's arguments against them. Malvern was sorely torn in these situations. I never mended the relationship with my father-in-law but did manage to make amends with my mother-in-law before she died a few years later. She loved her grandchildren and was generous in her acknowledgement of my parenting.

In 1974 Malvern was persuaded to stand again. This time it was trickier as there was no Nationalist Party candidate, making it a straight fight between the two opposition parties. The Progressives were accused of splitting the vote. This meant that a lot of energy which should have gone into attacking the government's policies was dissipated in fighting the official opposition. My own citizenship issue had become clearer in my mind by now. I was feeling much more committed to South Africa but had decided that I would not cast my vote until all citizens could do the same. Malvern supported my stance, and in every subsequent whites-only election until 1994, I was pleased to have friends who too, chose not to participate, condemning apartheid elections as morally wrong and invalid.

This time our children were able to be more involved in Malvern's campaign. Matthew was an energetic little boy of 10. On election day he stood from morning to evening on the steps of the magistrate's court, socks steadily wrinkling down around his ankles while handing out pamphlets for his father. The United Party took Albany again, with the Progressives polling 1 800 votes this time. Nationally, however, the outcome for the Progressive Party was very exciting. Helen Suzman was joined in parliament by six new Progressive MPs, including Frederik van Zyl Slabbert and Alex Boraine, both of whom we knew, admired and trusted. We were elated, but it was to be the last of Malvern's attempts to get into parliament. Three years later the United Party was unable to retain its seat. Sadly, though, it was not the Progressives who ousted them. In 1977 the Nationalists won Albany for the first time ever, to raucous celebrations. “That's the end of the Jews and Little England!” someone called out from the cavalcade of cars celebrating the victory. But four years later EK Moorcroft, a broad-shouldered giant from the Winterberg, at last won the constituency for the Progressive Party. I felt a wry bitterness when I overheard an acquaintance say, “This is the moment we have been waiting for.” Ten years previously those same people had not made their mark for Malvern or the party.

With Malvern becoming more and more politically active, I was happy to be offered a new challenge of helping to run a nursery school. For the next nine years Dickory Dock was to become a large part of my life. For a short time it included Charlotte and Lucy, Matthew and Anna having started school. I had no teaching experience and scant knowledge of nursery schools, while my colleague Gill McJannet, who was English too, was a qualified teacher, played the piano and was altogether more suited to the task than I was. But I loved children and valued the cheerful nature of the work.

Pre-school education was not yet the norm but Dickory Dock met a growing need and was very popular. It occupied part of an old house with a large stoep and hedged garden. Apart from its welcoming, bright red gate it was a little scruffy around the edges and by textbook standards it stretched the rules, with too many children for just one qualified teacher. Inevitably, it was for white children only and very Euro-centric, but it was a happy place, a world of play, stories and songs, excursions to farms, harvest festivals and concerts. One little girl, when confronting the move to “real” school, said with a heavy sigh, “If only Dickory Dock went up to matric!”

I had joined the Black Sash as early as 1968 and was participating more and more in their political and human rights activities. In time the nursery school would become a daily haven from the tensions and cares that were to be my regular fare in that organisation. The Terrorism Act defined terrorism as anything from participating in the armed struggle to “embarrassing the administration of the affairs of the state”. To the Black Sash, embarrassing the administration of the affairs of the state was virtually its
raison d'être
.

The organisation had arisen in 1955 on a wave of outrage regarding the Senate Bill, a Nationalist ploy to remove coloured voters from the Cape voters' roll. Six white women at a tea party set a protest in motion, and support grew rapidly until a league of 10 000 was holding marches, convoys, demonstrations and all-night vigils. The women were mostly middle class, liberal minded, white and English speaking, and they called themselves the Women's Defence of the Constitution League. But the press nicknamed them The Black Sash, after the sashes they wore over their shoulders as symbols of mourning for the death of South Africa's constitution.

The early demonstrations included “haunting” government ministers wherever they went. As an official left Jan Smuts airport in Johannesburg, a coded message would be sent to league members in the next city. An “order for carnations” in Port Elizabeth meant that a particular minister was on his way there. “Orders” for roses, proteas and a whole range of floribunda represented the movements of others. Forewarned by these messages, Sash members in all the major centres would be at the ready to welcome unsuspecting politicians at their destinations. A row of silent white women draped in black sashes must have had a peculiarly discomfiting effect. Running these gauntlets became a matter of acute embarrassment to the ministers of state and turned the Black Sash into a fiercely hated adversary.

When the battle was lost and the Senate Act was passed, the Black Sash turned its attention to the general legislation underpinning apartheid. Membership shrank from the initial furry and enthusiasm, and for the next 40 years it continued as a very small but resilient organisation.

From the first time I heard about the Black Sash I felt drawn to its human rights agenda. But my own start in the organisation was less than illustrious. In the minutes of a meeting in 1968 I am recorded as demurring that “we as mere housewives” could hardly be expected to achieve much. I was of course howled down, and in time my courage and vision grew. I began to feel politically at home, and as I became more and more active in the organisation I was drawn into ever more challenging situations, worlds apart from the seclusion of Dickory Dock. At times these two contrasting sides of my life collided rather absurdly.

In 1974 the State President, Jim Fouché, came to Grahamstown to open the Settlers Monument – English South Africa's reply to the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, which honoured the achievements of the Afrikaner. The Voortrekker Monument is a place of pilgrimage but little else. By contrast, thanks mainly to the remarkable vision of Guy Butler, the Settlers Monument is a living one. It boasts a fine theatre and conference rooms and became home to the annual National Arts Festival, an event which in time became a truly South African celebration.

Perched on a hilltop, the monument dominates the town, square and grey and forbidding. Its building caused some controversy, many people feeling that the money could have been put to better use in the townships across the valley. When, in the turbulent 1980s, the army placed searchlights on the hilltop to rake those townships at night, the Settlers Monument became synonymous with the operations of the hateful police state. It took a long time for that image to be erased. The poet Tony Delius was reputed to have said of the monument that after the revolution it would make the biggest beer hall in the Eastern Cape.

There was controversy surrounding the opening to be performed by the State President, a nationalist Afrikaner, when the monument was dedicated to the British settlers and their reputedly more liberal values. On the eve of the event a small posse of protesters including some Black Sash women furtively daubed anti-apartheid slogans in red paint on the imposing southeast wall of the building, visible from the national road. But in the nursery school, spurred on, I suppose, by memories of royal visits in England, Gill and I prepared the children for the visit of the president's so-called “White Train”. I phoned the railway headquarters and sent a special request that the president should wave as the train passed through the West Hill station as there would be children gathered there. We made small replicas of the South African fag and held a practice ceremony during which I huffed and chuffed like the train passing by, cheered on by the little cluster of republican flags.

The great day arrived and we went up the hill to the small station where we corralled the children with skipping ropes and waited. There were small prep school boys too, pushing and shoving on the platform. What a disappointment it was when the train with its silver insignia finally arrived. The president and his wife were dressed in very ordinary clothes, and although he did wave his top hat, it was the chef who proved far more exciting in his dazzling white uniform and puffy headgear. We regretted not having made a cardboard crown for the State President to wear. While we had much to laugh about on the day, I went home wondering what I was doing encouraging adulation of an official representative of apartheid, when I actually identified far more with those who had vilified him in red paint the night before.

One of the first big events at the new monument was the International Convention of Women held in December 1975. The purpose, besides celebrating International Women's Year, was a critical appraisal of women's participation in shaping the future of the world. It was a glittering event, with a host of diverse women who had achieved remarkable feats on a global stage, arriving in our small South African town. Many of the guests stayed in private homes. We entertained Dame Kathleen Kenyon, the archaeologist who handled the dig of biblical Jericho. She was a past director of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem and had been principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. She was also no mean cricket player. Our small son was at the stage of batting balls and constructing makeshift wickets at every opportunity. He was somewhat startled to be confronted by a large Englishwoman lumbering down our lawn and bowling him out. Her voice was deep and her presence commanding. At the introductory session of the conference she sat squarely on the stage, legs wide apart, displaying her rather awesome knickers, the likes of which I had not seen since my school days.

South African women of different races and life experiences had had few opportunities to live alongside each other and engage as equals. Even anti-apartheid groups like the Black Sash were racially segregated due to divide-and-rule legislation. And though we probably came closer than any other white organisation to representing the cause of the oppressed, as individuals we gained little experience in open and equal relations with black people.

Staying together in the university residences was a new experience for many and the conference gave rise to tensions and conflicts. Many a discussion devolved into a debate along racial lines, often sidelining the international women and their contributions. Margaret Mead, the famous American anthropologist, became an ad hoc conciliator, mediating in several late night debates. She appeared at the conference in a flowing bottle-green cloak, crook in hand, like an ancient goddess from Homer. Years later we learnt that the conference had been underwritten by the controversial Department of Information, a mouthpiece for Nationalist Party propaganda. Whatever they had hoped to achieve by it, they could not have foreseen the controversies that surfaced among the South African women present.

I felt out of my depth in relating to my countrywomen during that conference, and back within the confines of the Black Sash organisation I wasn't feeling much stronger. I often felt intimidated by members such as the then chairperson, Doreen Kelly, who reminded me of my teachers and made me feel as though I was back in school. An Oxford graduate, from a time when it had been unusual and difficult for women from the colonies to go to Oxbridge, Doreen spoke in crisp, precise tones and did not suffer fools gladly. She declined the drawing rooms and bridge tables in favour of political activism, but always appeared in gloves and hat, even at a protest demonstration. Once, when our minute books and papers were seized by the Special Branch, Doreen, undaunted, bearded them in their den. In those days their activities were shrouded in secrecy but she ferreted out the exact position of their offices, found a locked door and hammered on it. Bolts were drawn back and a policeman opened up. “You have seized our records and I have come to take them back,” Doreen said sharply. When a bewildered policeman protested that they had done nothing wrong, she emphatically replied, “I should hope not! You
are
the police.”