Takes more than combat gear to make a man
Takes more than a license for a gun
Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can
A gentleman will walk but never run
If “manners maketh man” as someone said
He’s the hero of the day
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile[1]
Parys, October 2020
I picked up an error with the wrong father and added the correct father…”Fanie Jacobus van Aswegen 1858–1900 who married his cousin 2nd or 3rd cousin – Johanna Catharina Aletta van Aswegen 1860–1949 “… so I had to redo the pedigree chart for you … and you now via the Potgieter branch pick up your 1st – VOC Slave direct ancestry – Lijsbeth Arabus (… I descend from her too she is thought to be of Persian Arab descent but was captured in Madasgascar with her sister & given to Jan van Riebeeck as a gift)
Warren’s message stops my heart. I actually feel it stop, the adrenaline kicks in, and I realise that I should breathe. The shock is immense. Fuck.
I look at the photo of my nan lying on my desk. Did you know, Nanna? Did they hide it from you? Raise you as a WASP Flapper princess, thoroughbred as a racehorse. Henry Hill’s daughter, smart as a button and as English as jam roly poly and blue cornflowers in a meadow. Undiluted Settler stock. Did they lie to you? Or did you lie to me? Did my mother know? Ah, Nanna. Ah, my love, my sweet Winnie.
All that useless, useless and undeserved shame.
My face is starting up its shitshow, it’s been threatening all afternoon. They say when you have Trigeminal Neuralgia your face is a barometer and the clouds outside have been building for a while, the increasing frequency of shocks across my cheekbone and the blinding stabs in my eye and ear tell me the heavens are going to open within the hour. I start to dance, automatically going into my method of coping through a pain flare. I hope this one doesn’t last long; I have a work deadline. Holding the phone, I dance through to my desk, a sort of Apache stomp-dance, with squats every second stomp, breathing into my center, like I learned from Dawn Garisch[3], reading Warren’s text again. The memory comes out of nowhere…
They tied me to General de Wet’s grave with a frayed piece of old rope that had been the tether of Fanie’s horse during our battle minutes earlier. Their dog was his horse, and the minute I had been captured and the rope was taken off him he ran around the back of the museum and we heard the men working there yelling at him to voetsek. One man ran around the far end of the building and picked up a stick, screaming in fear, red dust flying everywhere. My mom said they were non-violent convicts from the jail who were brought here to work in the gardens. They weren’t dangerous, but none of the neighborhood children were allowed to go through the veld to the monument alone, because You Never Know.
Fanie isn’t scared and he says he has even gone alone at night, but he took Rommel along, because his dad says the kaffirs are all scared of dogs. We don’t say kaffir, my mother says it is common; my father works for the newspaper and we say native girl or native boy. Our Marta isn’t scared of dogs; my mom always has to go and fetch Coco from her room outside in our backyard at night when they want to lock up. And there Coco would be, lying right on Marta’s bed, with the legs resting on four paraffin tins, which each stood on two layers of loose bricks, so that the mattress was up at a magical height to my eyes, until I had been told that the reason for the elevation was to enable the sleeper safety from the dreaded tokkolosh. There Coco would be, little mongrel, with Marta next to her, under the plush blanket with pink and red roses on a peacock blue background that Marta combed all into one direction like hair when she made her high bed every morning. Talking to Coco as if the dog was a human infant, and my mother would have wet slippers from having to walk over the grass.
Fanie laughs at the terrified man and hollers at the dog. Rommel! Loop le! The mixed-breed hound slinks under the work gang supervisor’s green municipal van. The man is asleep inside the vehicle, his head resting against the glass of the window between the cabin and the back, where the convicts are conveyed from the jail in town. The sun glints off a piece of tinfoil covering the remains of his sandwiches lying on the dashboard.
Later, when I get into the bath, the water will sting the raw red welts the dirty sisal rope are chafing on my wrists because Flippie has tied them so tightly.
n Rooinek gevangennis, Kaptein. Moet ons haar skiet? They have wooden guns, and I am wearing the straw bonnet Aunty Frances gave me and my white satin flower girl gloves from Uncle Martin’s wedding, because I am The British. It is my favourite of my three hats and my only straw one. Flippie van den Berg bit one of the cherries on the brim the day I got it, and the shiny red lacquer had cracked to expose the white Styrofoam underneath. I had run home to Marta and cried so hysterically that she had to give me extra-strong suikerwater to calm me, and she let me sit on the back step with her and share her pap and morogo without going inside to wash my hands first. I had vowed to never play with the otherchildren again and had lasted for two days before the natural social instinct of healthy children to seek inclusion had kicked in again, and here I am. Sitting on the grave of one of the most important Boer leaders in my country’s history, with the dry, red sandy soil of the Orange Free State coating my grubby shorts, which are slightly damp as a result of my trickle of pee because of my fear and shame at being The Enemy.
I’m 5 years old, and 8 year old Flippie van den Berg says Nee, los haar, Korporaal. Kom ons gaan vang nog van die bliksems. They have yet to catch the evasive Birkett twins, who are always cowboys when it’s their turn to choose our games. The Birketts are moving to Cape Town. My dad said he wishes they would go back to England, bloody Pommies, always talking about back home, when everyone knows old man Birkett was born in Craddock and her ladyship grew up Port Elizabeth.
Fanie and the boys return to the monument with Renette and Amanda, who are being poor Voortrekker women who have been shot by The British. They untie me and I have to change immediately into being Florence Nightingale. I wrap bandages around Amanda’s stomach, because The British killed her baby before it was even born. Then Fanie changes the game and I have to climb right up on President Steyn’s gravestone under the giant stone statues of the ladies with the dead little girl, and be Vera Lynn and sing to them down below, because they are Union soldiers at Delville Wood, which is Overseas, and it’s a different war that we’re all in. Aunty Frances has got a record with all the war songs. My mother says she dances alone at home all the time and it’s too sad, which makes no sense to me, but when I ask she says to stop picking up teeth or she’ll give me a fat lip.
My playmates clap like mad when I sing Long Way to Tipperary, until Fanie says I must sing Kom dans Klaradyn. I sing just the title, twice, because I don’t know any more. I break into the phontetics of the lyrics I know well, Eighty blow from On, say heeeeeere we go, and we all yell out the anthem with lusty patriotism and mangled lyrics. Uit die blou van onse heeeeeeemel and you nighted weeeeeee shall staaaand, we belt out from passionate young lungs, until Fanie, the oldest boy, pulls himself together, and the others go and watch him open the anthill he has spotted in the grounds of the monument. It is to be decades before any of us will try to fit our tongues around the idea that there is a God who may be beseeched by song to save all of Africa.
Morena bolokosetjhaba sa heso.
Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.
Renette, Amanda and I sneak into the deep, dark recesses of the veranda of the Anglo Boer War Museum next to the monument and past the door of the caretaker’s office. Our bare feet sh-sh-sh on the coolth of the polished concrete floor. Inside we look at the dresses and the wagons in the Voortrekker laager diorama. We touch the brass pots and pans sitting on the smoldering coals that you can see are just painted papier mache pretend-hot, and we yearn for the dolls from another world, their porcelain faces cracked inside stiff bonnets. My mother had a doll like that, and I had broken it. I broke her heart for the first time when I broke William, I was to do it repeatedly for the rest of her life.
I was not allowed to play with William, he was my mother’s doll and he sat on a corner of her dressing table. He’d been given to her on her fifth birthday, which would have been in 1938, or thereabouts.
One day, I was playing with my floppy doll, she had a plastic head, arms and legs; with a soft, stuffed linen torso and her name was Dorothy. If you flipped her over, she would let out a maamaa bleat. I decided that it would be a terrific idea to have a tea party and I formally invited all my other dolls and arranged them all around my little table in my room, with a makeshift bouquet from the garden and my little china tea-set. Marta supplied Oros for the teapot and a plate of pink wafer biscuits.
Things went well for a while and then the party seemed to flag, Dorothy was getting fretful and kept laying her head in the biscuit plate and the paper dolls and one of the teddy bears kept falling asleep and toppling from their chairs. It occurred to me that it would cheer things up tremendously if I brought a celebrity to the party.
As is always wont to happen when you don’t listen to your parents, things went horribly wrong and I dropped William. He was not porcelain, but made of a material I don’t know the name of; sort of like a varnish and sawdust mix. As he hit the ground, a million little cracks appeared all over his lovely face and his right leg snapped off. The back of his head was completely crushed.
I was not given a hiding or a scolding when my mother got home, but she said I am so disappointed and went into the bathroom for a very long time and I could hear her blow her nose as I sat on the floor outside the door…
Inside the monument museum, I feel bad all over again about William, and I jostle Renette so that we move away from the broken dolls and I can stop remembering that I am a disappointment. We move along and we stare and stare at the horrible, horrible pictures of the people. Dead people and live skeletons. Women holding dead babies. Grainy photos of houses burning. Families lying in the foreground of scarred ruins, a heap of motherandsistersandbrothersanddeadalldead.
Dead; a little boy’s face half-gone, like a picture of a pale grey flower where a blot of black ink fell on it. Dead little Afrikaans boy killed by The British.
We run outside and climb up to sit on the wide steps and crane our necks to look up at the two huge stone women and the dead girl. Dead little girl. So we look down instead from our great height at the real boys so small in the distance out in the veld beyond the monument platform until our eyes water from the blinding Free State sun. The boys have made a small fire to scare the ants out of the tightly packed anthill.
We will all get heck if the ousies see the smoke from our backyards, where they are chattering to each other while hanging laundry on the rows of washlines planted in newly laid lawns of the dozen little houses that made up the freshly tarred cul de sac.
The boys pull down their shorts and all three pee joyously until the fire is dead. We try to get a good look at their little penises and giggle. By the time they get back to us, they have become soldiers again and they leopard-crawl up the steps to capture us, because we-suddenly-are The Germans; Nazis; almost the Worst Enemy of All, and we scatter in different directions, squealing and whooping and occasionally stopping to remove thorns from our feet.
The Russians were the Worst Enemy of All. My dad said they were Commie Bastards and we had Big Shit coming from them, if he can tell you something for nothing. He had a magazine that featured dinkum spaceships people were building in their gardens in America to hide in for when the Russians came. There was a picture of inside. A modern rectangular burnt orange sofa with an open magazine lying on it, next to a metal cupboard with hundreds of tins of spaghetti and meatballs, corned beef, beans, all with labels far more interesting than our Koo tins of peas and asparagus in brine. For a long time I felt immense guilt for praying every night that the Commie Bastards would come, so seductive the allure to my young mind of that little spaceship hideaway in the garden and those brightly labelled tins of ersatz food, with nothing to do but sit on a beautiful couch and read and eat and wait, while the somebody else went out and killed all the Commie Bastards.
Such was the language of the playtime of my happy childhood; games founded in innocent fear and fertilized with generations of hatred of The Other.
I left home for the first time at five, roughly the same period as I almost peed on General de Wet’s grave. I was going to live at Renette and Amanda’s house. My parents stood next to my bed as I packed my clothes and toys into our big grey holiday suitcase, taken down from the very top of the passage cupboard by my dad when I’d informed them I was leaving and going to live with Uncle Eben and Aunty Dot Coetzee, because they were not Cruel and Unfair parents to Renette and Amanda. The suitcase was big enough that my two friends, four and five-years old, and I battled to lug it down the lush lawned sidewalk to their house only two properties away. We stumbled several times, our short legs unable to coordinate into a march, so that we were like rowers in a raft with our oars paddling against one another. Remember that Renette and Amanda have their own family ways; they won’t always want you to join in. Like bedtime stories and leaving the light on until the sandman has been, and so on. You might feel a bit lonely sometimes, no man is an island. If you get scared you can come home tomorrow, you mustn’t wake everyone up in their house while everyone is asleep. Be a big girl, this is your own decision. My dad kept a straight face, my mother nodded, all mock sad at the gravitas of the occasion, but suppressing her amusement. I wonder if Renette’s daddy will take you to school when you go next year, my mother mused. I don’t think he drives that route in the mornings
I was back home by 8pm that night and my father walked down and fetched my suitcase the next morning. I didn’t understand what my dad had said, what it meant to be an island in the dark in a strange house, but I didn’t want to find out. Not back then.
The grounds of the National Women’s Memorial were the extended back yard of a row of new homes in a start-up suburb in Bloemfontein. My parents bought our house with The Third Party Money from my mother’s face. Later, when I was thirteen and their worlds changed, I saw her kick my father on the shin in our passage. I stood hidden behind the enormous delicious monster that she had grown to cover our dining room wall. My heartbeat thudded out most of her words. I thought they were just playing. She lifted her fists and hit him, three times on his chest. And then he put his arms around her and they just stood there in the dark, in our passage with embossed ferns on the wallpaper. ‘My face bought this house for us, Is it my face you can’t stand? What does she look like?’ And he just said ‘Ssssh, Rosalie.’
The spire looms in the back of the photographs of the developing garden and our growing family. There was no fence between the new houses and the vast expanse of veld that was the property forming the back border of the new suburb, which was the home of the new monument and museum to commemorate the 27000 Boer women and children who died in British concentration camps during Anglo Boer War.
Fifty years later, in my kitchen in Parys, dancing in my bare feet, sandy from that same red Free State sand, it suddenly occurs to me that I wouldn’t have been allowed there at all, not at the monument, certainly not in the main house of that suburb in 1969, if anyone had known what I have just discovered.
Not without a dompas.[4]
Not a half-English girl, with a touch of the tarbrush, to boot.
Is that why my mother got sick, why she lost herself, and why I remember her differently to my siblings; why only I remember her young spirit?
[1] Englishman In New York, Gordon Sumner, © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, permission obtained.
[3] Dance with a suitcase: A Memoir resting on Movement, Dawn Garisch. Tiber Tree Press, 2013
[4] A ‘pass book’ which had to be carried at all times by non-whites entering white areas during the Apartheid regime.
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