Your photograph has a special place on
my desk. The intricate metal frame is a bit ornate, but I like the shape and
the way the burnished silver colour blends with the black and white of the
photo. I see it every day when I sit down and flip open the lid of my laptop.
“Hello, Dad,”
I greet you silently, the words only in my head.
You smile. The same crooked smile you
showed me every day. But this is a younger you, before I was born. A young man
in a nonchalant, maybe even a cocky pose, in shorts and a shirt with sleeves
rolled up above the elbows. By now you have served time at the front in Egypt
and back home you’re still in the army but teaching the recruits on the finer
points of being a radio operator. Perhaps they, like you, ended up in the dusty
trenches of the desert. I hope, like you, at the end of their duty, they
travelled safely back to their homes.
You didn’t speak often about the war, except
to tell stories about becoming a radio operator, learning on the job, following
your commander safely behind the front lines. You learned morse code to
transmit vital messages. You learned the value of patience during the long, often
boring days, with the bleakness of a foreign desert around you. You were happy
to go home, on the long voyage by ship, around the bulge of Africa to Cape
Town.
I
have other photos of you in your guise of Dad, on horseback, lounging at the
beach, escorting me down the aisle at my wedding. I like this one on my desk because
I sense the optimism of your whole life ahead of you. The tilt of your head
tells me that you had the same spark of mischief that made life with you so
much fun. Even though the role of single dad wouldn’t have entered your mind at
this young age, you did it so well.
I
was five when Mom and Ingrid left, and our world tilted sideways.
Sifting
through the broken memories, I see Mom laughing and dancing in the new house,
the one with the flat roof. The dining room
is her stage. She has put a record on the gramophone and hums while she dances.
You, Ingrid and I are the audience with Sofie who stands in the kitchen doorway
to watch.
Mom beckons
me. “Dance,” she says, “let’s see what you learned in ballet class.”
I
become part of the act. I point my toes and pirouette around and around until I
am dizzy and breathless. Ingrid joins us on the stage. She holds her skirt and
does a jig. When the music ends, we curtsey and bow. You and Sofie clap loudly
and Fifi lifts her head from where she is dozing and gives a short bark.
That was our last happy day that I can remember as a
family together.
I
don’t think Mom chose to leave me specifically, but it worked out that way in
the end. I know now that she was leaving your marriage, and I was collateral
damage. She took Ingrid and me on a
vacation to a holiday farm. Ingrid and I
were pretty much left to our own devices while our mother hung out with the
grown-ups. Ingrid chummed with some kids about her age and I tagged along and
tried to join in with whatever they were doing. It wasn’t a very fun holiday. When
we left the farm, we went to Johannesburg to stay with Ouma and her mother,
Oumie. It wasn’t a very cheerful household. Oumie spent almost all her time in
bed and we were supposed to be “nice” and visit her bedside each day. She
didn’t say much but she liked to stroke my arms while she smiled gently and her
eyes leaked tears.
As
children do, Ingrid and I found things to keep us busy. There is a photo
somewhere in the now lost family photo archives of the two of us proudly
pushing prams each with a doll in them.
This is the only thing that anchors my memory to Ouma’s house. It was
here that you came to fetch me,Dad.We flew on a noisy Dakota airplane to Cape
Town and went back to our home in Hermanus. At the time of course I didn’t know that
it would be almost five years before I would see Ingrid and our mother again.
For a while, you and I went on as if nothing had
changed, but without Mom and Ingrid. Sofie stayed with us, taking care of us,
cooking cleaning, playing with me. There were many
things left unsaid. I don’t remember you explaining to me why Mom and
Ingrid were no longer with us, but most likely you said something. Much, much
later I learned from one of the aunts that you fought hard to get custody of
me. Of course, because Ingrid was my half-sister and not your child, she stayed
with Mom.
Just as always, you told me funny stories, took me on
hikes and picnics; included me when you went to check on the fishing trawlers
in the harbour.
Even though I was terrified of the rough sea, I was
very proud that you owned two of the fleet of fishing boats, the Ingrid
and the Kontiki, that went out each day to cast their nets in the wild
Indian Ocean. At
the end of the day, we would watch as they plowed their way over the waves to
the New Harbour where they unloaded their catch onto the quay. Town folk would
keep an eye out for their arrival and rush to hand pick their fresh fish for
dinner. Some of the fish were taken to be salted and dried in the shed on the
hill. You and Whitey supervised as the rest of the haul was packed into
refrigerated trucks and whisked away into cold storage.
The
best part of the day for me was when the fish were off-loaded and the crew were
busy cleaning decks, you and Whitey relaxed on the quayside, smoking and
talking. Whitey was so funny and I loved his jokes and riddles. I always felt
very special when it was just you, me and Whitey hanging out together at the harbour
at the end of a day.
After a while, just when life seemed to be getting
back into balance, you said, “We can’t stay in the house anymore.”
Our new home was the Esplanade Hotel, on the sea
front, not far from the Old Harbour. We shared a room. I remember that it had
two single beds, a dresser, two small tables and chairs, and a wardrobe. There
was a sink beside the door where you watched to make sure I brushed my teeth
properly. The bathroom was across the corridor and I had a chamber pot under my
bed to use at night. The window looked out to the wall that separated us from
the house next door.
When
we moved to the hotel, Sofie couldn’t be part of our new life. She left,
wearing an unfamiliar skirt and blouse; her blue dress uniforms and aprons,
which were the only clothes I had ever seen her wear, tidily folded up in the
laundry. I know I cried a lot that day.
First
my mother and my sister/playmate, Ingrid, then Sofie, who hummed when she
worked around the house, sang African lullabies to me and listened patiently to
my chatter; Sofie, who had the warmest, cosiest hug in the whole world. All
gone from my life. I am not sure what happened to our black and white spaniel, Fifi.
She had been my companion as long as I could remember - until she wasn’t there
anymore.
All
gone, except for you. You were the centre of my universe, my anchor in rough
waters.
We got
used to living at the Esplanade Hotel. Like us, most of the guests stayed there
full time. It was as if we were one big family.
We
never spoke about Ingrid or my mother.
You
enrolled me at the Hermanus Primary School even though I wasn’t quite old
enough yet. Somehow you charmed the teachers into letting me stay and I became
the youngest child at the school. I can just see you, with your devilish smile,
spinning them some tale to convince them to accept me. I soon made some friends
and I found out that I liked school work. I was only five and half, so it
couldn’t have been too challenging.
After
school, I joined the group of resident ladies on the front veranda of the hotel
where they knitted, played cards and drank afternoon tea. From there we could
look across the road and enjoy the steady rhythm of waves crashing over the
rocks. Sometimes there were fisherman casting long lines into the ocean. The
fishermen were always showered with sea spray, but they didn’t seem to mind. This
was where I learned to count for the seventh wave, which is bigger than the
others and, if you counted long enough, the seventh, seventh wave is the
biggest wave of all. The ladies, who spent a lot of time watching the ocean,
told me that; and you said it was true. Tea always meant cake or scones and I
was served generous portions.
Something
I have observed about children now that I am long past that age, they only know
what they know. Children adjust; adapt to their circumstances. That’s how I
coped with the dramatic lifestyle changes.
I
realize now that it’s different for adults.
As a
child, I had no idea what you were going through as we adjusted to our new
life. You never shared any of your troubles with me. You had a way of presenting the positive side
of everything, even if we were in some kind of jam. You made it seem as if our
life together was exactly what you wanted. What did I know about the challenges
of being a single parent, the stress of a marriage break up, or the difficulty
of a custody battle, or the topsy-turvy world of re-entering the dating pool, or
the strain of managing a fishing trawler business?
All
I know is that, despite everything, you created a warm space where I felt
comfortable, at home, loved. And then that came crashing down.
It was in the middle of the night, during one of those
rough storms that are common along the Cape coast, when one of your fishing
trawlers broke its moorings. You were scrambling to get dressed, grabbing for a
rain slicker when Whitey, hammered loudly on our door. His phone call earlier was
panicky. Boats had broken loose and were banging into each other in the
harbour. One of them was the Ingrid.
Whitey sat with me while you rushed to out to check on
the damage. Sitting in a chair, head sunk on his chest, Whitey looked crumpled.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to hug him. In the end, I climbed back into
bed and pulled the blanket over my head and stayed like that until you came
back, sometime in the early morning.
After the Ingrid broke her moorings, everything
about our life changed. I don’t know what happened to the Ingrid. You
sold the Kontiki and our ritual of going to the harbour was over. In
time, we moved from the peaceful fishing village, Hermanus, to the big city,
Cape Town. This mean I would have to change schools. Worse than that, I was
enrolled as a boarder at Springfield Convent School. This was a pretty huge change
in my life.
You tried to make it seem like fun,
You tried hard to make me understand the reason for this
drastic move. “I have to get a new job,” you told me. “I’m going to be a
travelling salesman, like I was before we moved to Hermanus. That means that
I’ll be on the road all week visiting clients in small towns. But I’ll be back
on weekends, so we’ll still see each other then.” No
amount of consoling stopped me from being angry and resentful. Boarding school was boarding school no matter how you
coated it; something close to prison.
Because of the timing of our move, I started at the
school in the middle of the year.
We
arrived at the Springfield we me in full flood of tears. I was pried away from your
legs and handed over to the Mother Prioress in the courtyard outside the junior
dormitory. Mother Madelaine was not fazed by my blubbering and pulled me close
with a tight hug. I rubbed my face into the rough fabric of her cream-coloured
habit and cried until I ran out of momentum. When I finally detached myself, you
had gone. Mother Madelaine handed me a big handkerchief. I mopped my eyes, blew
my nose and followed her inside the school. It helped that you had left your
hankie for me, and after a good washing, it lived under my pillow and I could
turn to it for comfort, making you feel closer to me.
Everything
about a Catholic boarding school was strange. I had never been to a church, a
synagogue or any other religious institution. God, angels, saints, prophets,
the Bible; I knew nothing of them. Least of all the notion of praying,
attending a church service, feeling guilty for sins I didn’t know I had committed.
There was a terrifying array of new things to learn. I did, however, like the
idea of having a guardian angel.
In
the school chapel, I was introduced to Mass; kneeling, standing and bowing my
head at the right time. Mass was said in Latin. It sounded like a kind of sing
song gobbledy-gook that I quite liked even though I had no idea what the words
meant. There were English prayers outside of church
services and they had to be learned by rote. They were mostly parroted at high
speed so for a long time I just learned the cadence and kind of mouthed
everything to the right beat. Prayers were said at many times of day - before
and after meals, before bed, first thing after getting out of bed in the
morning, at noon and so on and so on. And, then there were the nuns. With
their long habits and veils, white coifs cinched tight around their faces and
long wooden rosary beads dangling by their sides, they were quite a mystery to
me. They seemed scary at first, but soon they were just part of the daily
routine and were somewhat comforting in an alien environment.
When I joined the ranks of Springfield Convent boarders,
there were about 20 girls in the junior dormitory, from six to eight years old.
It didn’t take long for me to figure out that we all shared something in common;
we felt homesick and set adrift in a strange new environment. But we were in
this together and that in itself was some comfort
The
junior dormitory was filled with rows of iron beds with thin, hard mattresses
covered with white spreads. From early morning to evening, it was bright with
light from the row of windows along the length of one side of the room. There
was a narrow balcony looking over the junior boarders’ play area and beyond
that an expanse of treed terraces and gardens. A couple of tall wardrobes stored
extra blankets which I learned you could take when needed. There were dolls and
teddy bears on most of the beds.
After
dark, everything changed. Night times were the
hardest for the girls new to boarding school. Some girls cried themselves to
sleep. A couple wet their beds and had
to face the humiliation of hanging their damp sheets over the balcony to dry in
the morning. Others found solace in a cuddly toy. I had your hankie. Each night
I put it on my pillow and talked to it, quietly, telling you about my day, just
as if you were there.
On weekdays, we joined the day girls in our classrooms
and got involved in school work. I was six and a half years old and
starting at Springfield in the third term of Sub-B. I was confident this is
where I would shine. As it turned out I had a bit of catching up to do.
I
was assigned to a desk in the second row from the front, close enough for the
teacher, Sister Mary Catherine, to keep an eye on the new girl, but not so
close as to be intimidating.
First
up, real-writing. I don’t think they even teach that in schools today. 26
letters in the alphabet, right? In the first half of the year, the class had
completed 13 letters. So, starting on the first day of this term, first letter
up was “n”. I was quite dismayed. I was eight letters behind.
I
didn’t let on that I had missed letters f-m, but picked up my pencil and
carefully copied the neat “n” that was on the blackboard, over and over
into my lined scribbler. We moved onto o and p and I fell into
the routine of classroom work quite comfortably. I had missed learning f – m
and invented strange interpretations of those letters. My handwriting still
reflects those missed lessons. My writing, it
turned out was quite sub-standard in this private school environment.
Some of the girls were weekly boarders, which meant
they were picked up by the parents on a Friday after school and dropped back on
Sunday.
There were also “long weekends” during which everyone
was expected to go home. This didn’t work for those girls who came from
different parts of the country – or even out of the country as there were a few
students from Northern and Southern Rhodesia (now Zambia and Zimbabwe). As a
result, there were always a few lonely souls left to wander around the empty
halls and school grounds.
Going home for a weekend seemed like a brief escape
from captivity. It was always exciting to see you waiting in the car to pick me
up on those weekends. There was an open invitation for me to bring a friend
home. Sometimes I invited more than one and you were always welcoming and kind
to them.
Most often you
had something fun lined up for the weekend. It aways started with a stop at the
Doll’s House Drive-In Restaurant, where food was delivered on a tray attached
to the open window of the car. Double thick malts were a specialty of the
house. For boarding school students, this was like manna from heaven. When we
got in the car to go back to school Sunday late afternoon, a wave of homesickness
would descend on me.. For years, loneliness was my companion. Like a veil that
was anchored somewhere deep in my gut. At times it was heavy and suffocating.
Other times it was weightless, transparent and floated somewhere around me,
never far, never out of reach.
But these feelings fade when I think of the good
times. The nuns may have had their silly rules, but they taught us good values
and gave us a good education. I enjoyed most of my classes particularly English
Lit. There was a decent sports program where no excuses were accepted. We all
had to take part in at least two sports. I played field hockey in the winter
months and was on the swim team in the summer. I dabbled in ballet and piano
lessons for a few years and then switched to an out-of-school, horse riding program.
Drama classes and school plays were a highlight but it was the Debating Team
where I excelled (at least in my own mind). I got my love of a good debate from
you, Dad. Do you remember, all those
dinner time discussions where you loved to take the opposing position from
mine, so that I had to find counter arguments? You taught me to think on my
feet and to come up with a good story if I didn’t know the answer. You were a
master at that!
At times it felt as if my schooldays would never come
to an end. The days dragged as each year I moved to a more senior dormitory,
ate the same bland food, grumbled about homework and played the regulatory
sports. The
ten years stretched to eternity and later shrunk to a brief episode. And when
it was over, I could finally admit that sending me to Springfield Convent
Boarding School was the best thing you could have done for me.
On
the last day of school, although we felt as if we had been given a reprieve
from a life sentence, my close friends and I huddled together and cried.
Because now we had to face reality; choosing our career paths; earning a living
– yikes; socializing with boys – double yikes. Worst of all, we were moving on
and away from the close comfort of each other, lifelong friends, closer than
sisters.
In
all those years, I only saw Ingrid and Mom once. I am sure you remember. I was
10 years old and we were staying in the flat on Marine Drive in Sea Point. Mom
dropped Ingrid off to spend the summer holidays with us. I was so happy to see
her. Until I was five, Ingrid, four years older than me, was my guiding star;
the sister who played with me, who read to me, who showed me where to find
scorpions under the rocks in the garden. I had forgotten how much I missed
her. Now we had time to have fun
together over the long weeks of the school holidays. We laughed and swam and made
sandcastles on the beach together. All too soon it was over. After Mom picked
her up at the end of the holidays, I never saw either of them again.
Not long after, you introduced your new friend, Pammy,
into my life. She was pretty and very quiet. I learnt over time that she had a
pretty miserable childhood, part of it in an orphanage. You gave her a whole
new lease on life and she adored you.
I was okay with having her around, until you got
married. That made her my stepmother. My reaction was not a pretty one. I was resentful
and petty about this new turn in life. Suddenly I was not the total focus of
your attention. I know that you were hurt by my childish behavior, but you were
patient and never gave me a hard time about it. And Pammy was surprisingly
tolerant. I know it’s too late to make a difference now, but I’d like to say
how deeply sorry I am for being so mean to Pammy. I am really glad you had her
in your life. She was there for you until the end when I wasn’t.
When it was time for me to move on from high school,
we debated my next steps. I had no driving passion to follow a particular
career. The discussion ranged from being a flight attendant, becoming a vet,
working in a garden centre or my favourite idea, being a philosopher. I had a
vision of sitting around a town square, sipping wine and endlessly debating
life’s conundrums. Something I got from reading Greek Mythology - not very
practical and I didn’t see how I could earn money at it.
“You should be a writer,” you told me more than once.
“It’s too hard,” I said.
In the end you were pleased when I chose to go to the
University of Cape Town and study psychology. This meant I could live at home for
the first time in over ten years. And so started the next phase of our journey.
I wish it had lasted longer.
The time at university flipped by so quickly. It was a
shock at first to be in the relaxed atmosphere with plenty of distractions. Suddenly
I had to discipline myself – focus on school work, balance it with social life,
and navigate my first relationships with guys.
As time passed, you tolerated my crazy choice of boyfriends
and supported me when I chose to marry a fellow from Pretoria, which meant I
had to move about 1,000 miles away. I was so grateful when you were
understanding and encouraging when we chose to emigrate to Canada. You were
hopeful that one day you could visit us and your two granddaughters in our new
home in Toronto. Sadly, that never happened and I am so glad I was able to
bring them to see you in Cape Town.
I
don’t mourn when I greet your photo every day, Dad. I rejoice and am thankful
for what you gave me, a belief in myself. The belief that I could be whatever I
wanted to be. You gave me the freedom to explore and navigate my own path. That
is a pretty big inheritance. You were my safe harbour all my growing days; you
still are.
“And
Dad, guess what? I did listen to you all those years ago. It may be a bit late,
but I am trying to be a writer, just as you suggested. Thanks for your
encouragement. Let’s see what we can write today.”
3rd Place winner for Memoir in the Royal Canadian Legion District "E" Seniors Literary Contest June 2025
