child for once. God, what I have to deal with.’
Back home, we changed out of our smart clothes and rushed to watch Dad set up the TV, which now took center stage in our ‘snug’. With our backs turned to the thirty books of the New Encyclopedia Britannica and Dad’s collection of fossils and minerals, our eyes were trained on Dad as he set up the ‘magic box’, brown and square, with its black knobs and bulging glass eye. Evelyn and Grace peered in from the doorway, chattering quietly to each other in Xhosa.
‘Vorster believes television is going to ruin South Africa by making us dissatisfied with our lot,’ said Dad. ‘He calls this “the devil’s box” and says it’ll make us all become communists and heathens before the year is out!’ We smiled encouragingly as Dad spoke; it was a given that anything Vorster, our President, said was going to be on the churlish side. We had great expectations of what ‘the box’ would bring into our world and didn’t care about Vorster’s opinion or concerns; we just had to have one!
Encouraged by the general positivism of our responses, Dad kept speaking. ‘Bloody Afrikaners spend every Sunday in suits and hats in churches across the country, living in a fantasy where they’re the chosen bloody race or something, terrified of the rest of the world. They’re so bloody controlling and uptight.’
‘You’ve forgotten that my mother is Afrikaans, Ian! You’ve no right to pass judgment—who do you think you are? Just another foreigner thinking he knows something about this country.’ Mom tossed one leg over the other, smoothing down her tights with a flick of the wrist. ‘This would still be a savage wasteland if it wasn’t for our forefathers’ strength, perseverance and high morals.’
I noticed Grace and Evelyn give each other a look. They clucked and shook their heads, leaving to return to the servants’ quarters.
‘Forgive me; I’ve gone and stood on your long toes again, June!’
While the grown-ups were starting to snap and bite at each other, my body involuntarily hunched over itself on the hard, grey, knobbly, carpet-burn-inducing floor. Caught between the excited expectation of what the television would ‘ping’ into our lives—when Dad finally got it working—and the brewing discord between Mom and Dad, which was likely to escalate in a flash and result in any kind of devastation, my chest forgot how to breathe properly. Dad chose to turn his back on Mom, on us, and focus on the technicalities at hand. My chest managed to exhale finally, and then to breathe in again.
It was unusual to have Dad in the snug with us, where we usually listened to radio programs like The Adventures of Tracy Dark or Squad Cars, and on Friday nights to the sounds of David Gresham counting down the South African Top Twenty hit singles for the week. Mom did love the radio. She was passionate about radio dramas, the characters as real to her as anyone she knew. Our lives were lived out to the background music of Neil Diamond, The Bee Gees, Barbara Streisand, Olivia Newton-John and Cliff Richard, the presenters of Springbok Radio a constant presence in our house. Dad never listened to music; if he was around, he listened to the news, alone.
The bulbous glass eye, blank just moments before, suddenly burst into colors, all organised, patterned and dated. We cheered as though Dad had performed a miracle, and sat staring at the wonder of the thing, the magic of it. Dad even looked proud of himself, happy for a moment, an awkward moment when we were just a family. But none of us knew what to do with a moment like that, nor where it should go. ‘Well, no use staring at the thing like a bunch of apes.’ Dad turned a knob—click, hiss, blank. ‘You’ll need to buy a magazine with a guide to the television programs; not that there’ll be much to it, I’d wager. I’m going to the office; got some work to finish.’ And with that Dad turned, left the room, and left the house.
‘For God’s sake, can’t you sit with any kind of modesty? No matter how hard I try, you have the class of a tramp.’
‘Sorry, Mommy.’
‘Fetch my purse, Stinky; you can go to Shortie’s and buy that magazine. And I need more cigarettes.’
I loved the freedom that running errands for her gave. Relief from the tension at home lasted for as long as I was gone. That afternoon I was smarting on behalf of Dad, that he’d been so generous all day and yet had still left the house in a poor mood. ‘Mom’s a horrible cow!’ I muttered, removing my flip-flops to walk the rest of the way barefoot. Neither the too-hot sand, nor the prickly grass stubble on the sidewalks nor the meltingly hot tar between them, could stop me from committing the awful act of being common. ‘So there, Mom!’
Chapter Eight
I wasn’t crazy about school, but it gave me a break from home, with the added bonus of a walk there and back in my own time, with no adults bearing down on me. As the weeks passed, I got used to the many rituals and prayers and songs of the Catholic tradition; I loved the chant-like quality of praying to Mother Mary. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace… Holy Mary, Mother of God…’ I’d never actually thought about praying to a person, let alone the ‘Mother of God’! She seemed a big step up from the stars or St Helena, this dead Mother of God who happened to be able to hear the needs of, and pray for, sinners.
I knew all about ‘sin’, and had no problem being called a sinner. For as long as I could remember, I’d been bad. It was extraordinary to hear that Mary-Mother-of-God, no less, was on the case, praying for sinners like me! I reckoned things just had to get better from then on, and I was very particular about saying the right number of prayers in the right order as soon as I knew how. If I’d been able to get my hands on a rosary, I’d have twiddled my way to holiness and superior happiness in a flash.
We also got to sing a song every morning, and I loved singing. I was always singing under my breath at home. Mom hated it. ‘Stop that bloody humming; you’re such a freak!’
My exposure to religion had been minimal before Catholic school, mostly as a babysitting service when Dad wanted a quiet Sunday morning with his paper or Mom needed a priest to hold her hand and tell her that everything would be all right. Mom was a Methodist and Dad an Anglican; that was his excuse for never going to church with us. Well, not quite never—sometimes he took us at Christmas-time to the old Dutch Reformed Hall at Paradise Beach, when he wanted to make a point that we were all ‘spoiled rotten’. By forcing us to go to the service, he could deprive us of the all-important gift-opening session for that much longer, which is what Christmas is all about if you’re not religious, so I didn’t know why he was always so cross about it. I reckoned he punished himself just as much as us with the service, because he was always even grumpier after it than before. The whole thing was in Afrikaans, which only Mom understood.
At the convent, we filed to mass once a month, snaking our way to the Roman Catholic Church that separated the convent from the Brothers’ College, where Simon and Steven went to school. The Church was like none I’d ever seen before; it brought glamour, and the suggestion of access to another world far from Welkom. Candles glowed en masse in gold and white, a visible symbol of invisible prayers and longings apparently wafting their way to a God who cared—or, rather, who couldn’t care less, if reality was anything to go by. An honesty box stood guard, requesting a fifty cent donation per candle. Blue and square and modern, the box contrasted starkly with the olde worlde glamour of velvet cushions, golden incense baskets hanging from the ceiling, and statues in various sad poses gilded by the candles’ glow.
A lot of special hand-signs went on in the church, which I mimicked badly on purpose, for my own amusement. A sign to the priest as you entered the building always had me in fits of embarrassed giggles; I felt ridiculous about having to pay any kind of homage to the large brown hairy man who stood so severely accepting genuflections from hundreds of young girls.
The
