Cape Colony in the care of the Garlick family, friends of the Norfolks’, and wealthy shop owners in Cape Town. There exists an intriguing story that Mary received a diamond ring, sent to her from England, on each of her birthdays for several years thereafter. While the story cannot be verified, my mother believed it was true. If it was, then my paternal grandmother might well have been an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Norfolk. For who else in the county could have afforded such a ring, and would have reason to keep the scandal a secret? It would also explain why my grandmother was sent to the colonies in the custody of the Garlicks.
Frederic Abram and Mary had nine children, of which my father, Harold, born in November 1902, was the second youngest. He and his siblings grew up in Cape Town in the Seaman’s Home on Dock Road, of which my grandfather was the director. I remember seeing it years later near the grand old Alhambra cinema, but both buildings were demolished when the Foreshore was redeveloped. Some old photographs of the waterfront and the pier in front of the Seaman’s Home show young children playing on the beach among the rowing boats. I can imagine my father being one of them.
My grandmother Mary died in 1927, twelve years before I was born, but I was told that I had met my grandfather when I was three. I have very vague memories of that occasion, but I know his bearded face from family photographs. I also remember visiting their graves with my parents in Woltemade Cemetery outside Cape Town once long ago; but I have never returned and wonder whether anyone now knows where they are located. How different their final resting place is to Trinity Parish cemetery on Jersey Island.
My father, Harold, went to the South African College (SACS) Junior and High Schools, as did some of my uncles and male cousins. After matriculation, Harold studied at the Technical College, and then became a telephone technician working for the government. He became an expert in setting up communications networks, and later pioneered the first telephone connection between South Africa and the United States. I was at the Cape Town telephone exchange on the night the first phone call was made between the two countries. But that was still some years away.
In his early twenties, Harold was transferred to Port Elizabeth where he met my mother, Mabel, the daughter of Herbert and Lily Hurd, both devout Methodists. Herbert came from London, and Lily’s parents had come to Port Elizabeth from Hull in Yorkshire. They were married in the St. John’s Methodist Church in Havelock Street in November 1896. Within ten years they had seven children, of whom my mother was the third eldest. They lived in Walmer, then a town separate from Port Elizabeth, in a rambling Victorian house I remember well.
By all accounts my grandparents Hurd were down-to-earth, generous people. On occasion they entertained visiting royalty when, during the First World War, Herbert became the mayor of Walmer. He was also the founder of the Methodist Church in Walmer. Much later, one of the high schools in Port Elizabeth was named after him.
Lily, a formidable, small woman who drove an Oldsmobile into her late eighties and sometimes drove the fear of hell into me in doing so, was also a founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. I really liked her.
My mother, Mabel, was born in 1900. She often told me that at that time there were no motor cars in Port Elizabeth, the Anglo-Boer War was in its second year, Queen Victoria was on the throne, there was no South Africa, and the Wright brothers had yet to fly the first aeroplane. Mabel had the honour of switching on the electricity when it finally reached Walmer, but she had little schooling or opportunities to develop her innate abilities. Instead she helped bring up her siblings and served as a nurse aid during the great flu epidemic.
When Harold came courting, Mabel’s parents insisted that they could not marry until he had sufficient income and a house. So he set to, built a house in Walmer, and made all the furniture for it, too. I still have some of the tools he used for this task.
Harold and Mabel were married in St. John’s Methodist Church on 2 August 1928. Four years later my sister, Rozelle, was born. She was named after a small fishing village in Trinity Parish, Jersey.
In 1938 Harold was transferred to Pretoria, where I was born on 18 March 1939. My names, given at birth, were Cedric Walter, but shortly before my baptism they were changed. I only discovered this later when I got married and my parents sent me my birth certificate, accompanied by other documents that registered the change to John Wesley. The reasons for the change are a little unclear, but it seems Cedric Walter was not a name my Hurd grandparents thought I should be burdened with. And so I was baptised John Wesley in the Hatfield Methodist Church in Pretoria on 9 April 1939. Later in life, in order to avoid denominational confusion, I began to refer to myself as John W. de Gruchy – something that our son Steve would poke fun at, especially when George W. Bush was president of the United States.
By the time I was born, my parents were already touching forty and Rozelle was six years old. Her relationship with my parents was firmly established. I was a laatlammetjie (late lamb) as the Afrikaans has it – an unexpected arrival, if not a mistake. But I had no intention of taking the backseat. On the contrary, my earliest memory is of me, probably aged three, wandering away from our house in Hatfield and ending up on the railway station nearby, watching the trains go by. My mother was understandably frantic, but she found me talking happily to a stranger.
In 1942 my father was transferred back to Cape Town. He had not been called up for overseas service in the army, because his communications job was deemed essential for homeland security. So we all caught the train to the Mother City, and it was there that I grew up.
My life would have turned out very differently if we had stayed in Pretoria and I was known as Cedric Walter.
2
The soul of the child I was
When I was a boy and chirruping ten, a decade after the end of the Second World War, when I was Tarzan and Batman and could sing “Rainbow over the River” like Bobby Breen – in those red-white-and-blue days I remember especially the weekends …
(Richard Rive)4
We initially moved into a rented semi-detached house, number thirty-three Bellevue Street, at the top of Kloof Street and within walking distance of the lower cable station on Table Mountain. The house was small but adequate, and had a pocket-sized garden. My father had a tin shanty of a workshop in the backyard where I first learnt some carpentry. He also rented a garage for his 1936 Willys, a half a mile away down the steep hill. That did not make any sense to me, but I guess he had his reasons.
Even after the Second World War we had to live on food rations for some time. I remember the day when real chocolates and fizzy drinks appeared at the corner shop at the bottom of Bellevue Street. The shop was owned by a Muslim family – “Cape Malays” my parents called them. I can still smell the exotic spices in the large sacks that lined the floor and greeted me as I entered. Bellevue Street was very steep, so it was quite an effort to walk back home, but getting chocolates made it worthwhile.
During 1948 grandpa Hurd came to visit. With his financial help, my parents bought a bigger house – number forty-three in the same street, with a large garden and a garage big enough for the Willys and my father’s workshop. Grandpa also bought me my first bicycle, a BSA. It was heavy and without gears, but I manfully rode it around the steep roads in the neighbourhood.
The number four trackless tram’s journey from the city centre ended close to our house, and for two pence I could safely get to the Colosseum Bioscope within twenty minutes on a Saturday morning. That weekly ritual, with the bartering of comic books while we queued outside, and the pandemonium that broke out once we were inside watching cowboy movies we would later re-enact, remains a vivid memory.
Another weekly ritual was church. At first we attended the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Greenmarket Square, where my grandfather Abram had met and married my grandmother Mary.
