To English-speaking South Africans, the Free State was the heartland of Afrikanerdom, of religious people who disliked ‘foreigner influence’, especially that of the English, the perpetrators of genocide against the Afrikaners during the Anglo-Boer War. No-one dictated the rules that divided white South Africans from each other; rather it was a ‘given’, an idea assimilated and accepted, just like apartheid. We English speakers thanked our lucky stars that we weren’t ‘black’ and that we weren’t Afrikaans, because being white and English meant we benefited from apartheid without the association of guilt that hung about the Afrikaans—or so my Dad’s behavior implied. And he was extra innocent, being Scottish and all.
‘And what’s all this about bloody Wilson being a communist spy? Will we even have a country to go back to if the commies have a foot in like that? Effing commies, taking over the world. If we can’t keep them out, I can’t see the Boers holding them back, what with the blacks fighting alongside them up and down Africa.’ Disheveled, slurring men found their voices on topics rarely spoken of in our day-to-day lives.
‘You guys don’t know what you’re talking about, man!’—the latter from Tent Lady’s husband, who’d lurched up out of his chair, sloshing his glass of brandy and Coke. ‘You come here, throw yourselves around, take our jobs, our money and then eff-off back to your queenie while we Afrikaners try to keep the blacks from destroying this country. We made this country; without us you wouldn’t have your fancy jobs in the mines or holiday houses in the sun, so lekker and different from ‘back home’; but what do you give back, hey? Effing judgment!’
The adults squirmed a little, having forgotten the lone Afrikaner in their midst. ‘Like true colonials, what!’ Uncle Tom mimicked a pompous English accent, and everyone laughed, except Tent Lady’s husband, who seemed to falter between rage and drunkenness, and who finally sank into his chair with a raised glass of surrender. Dad poured him another shot, and the shoulders of the grown-ups around the fire visibly relaxed as they melted into the arms of their chairs or their partners at the diffusion of tension.
I saw Dad glance over the fire in Mom’s direction, but she flicked her hair and turned to Uncle Tom with an enormous smile. ‘Tom, be a dear and light my ciggie for me, would you? I seem to have misplaced my lighter. I’m a simple South African; what can you expect?’
She may as well as have slapped Dad, by the way his head jerked to face the man by his side, pretending to be engaged in his story. It was always like that between them, with Dad looking for Mom’s approval and then withdrawing in the face of her coldness. I wished he’d notice that I adored him—I wished he’d adore me back—but most of the time it was like I didn’t exist. I felt as sorry for him as I did for myself; maybe a bit sorrier, because I knew all the horrible things Mom said about him behind his back. The expats around him on New Year’s Eve 1975, on the very tip of Africa, felt themselves to be adventurers, conquerors staking their claim for Her Majesty in the Afrikaans heartland. A little of that seemed to infect Dad’s usually-withdrawn self as he toasted Uncle Tom and those around him: ‘Sod it! Here’s a bottle and an honest man. What would ye wish for mair, man?’ I made my way out from under the table to find the children who hadn’t found me.
We children spent the later part of the evening dressing our Kombi in streamers and an assortment of ready-to-trash Christmas decorations, preparing it to cheer out the old year and proclaim, ‘The New Year has arrived!’ Steven must have found alcohol somewhere, because he took control of us all in a jovial way that wasn’t his usual style, sending us to hunt for paper, string and sticky tape, or whatever else could be found to dress the Kombi like a massive present. It was always surprising to me that Dad let us decorate the car in that way, as he was usually so particular about order and tidiness. We never got to travel in Dad’s car—the ‘work’ car, the one he got polished every Saturday and vacuumed every Sunday afternoon—because Dad refused to ‘abuse’ his company car the way ‘others’ did. He was a stickler for obeying the rules, for being seen to be doing ‘the right thing’. He’d bought the Kombi because it had vinyl seats that couldn’t be ruined by messy children, especially on the twelve-hour trips down to the coast from the Transvaal, and also so there was enough room for Evelyn, our maid, to come along too, so Mom could ‘relax’ on holiday and not have to ‘slave away’ over us. That year we were maid-less because Evelyn and her sister Grace had been left to unpack the boxes from our move and to keep our new house and its belongings safe from burglary. Maids and burglary were two things we took for granted.
With the clock ticking down the last seconds of 1975, the grown-ups loudly called the countdown, and we kids jammed our sunburned bodies into any available corner of the Kombi, holiday-fever-pitched and high on sugar and up-till-midnight adrenaline. Dad took the wheel and we set off to announce the arrival of 1976!
Happy New Year! Dad intermittently sounded the horn while Steven sat by the open sliding door, golden hair whooshing about his face, jangling a large brass bell that appeared on the scene every New Year’s Eve. Breathing in the dark salty sea-smell that whipped around us, I glowed inwardly at the thought of being my father’s daughter, my father being the provider of our magic carpet of fun. My Dad, my hero, was tipsy on the ‘wee dram’ he’d been sipping all night, blue eyes twinkling under a thick wave of disheveled black hair, an almost empty bottle of scotch wedged between his solid thighs. (Mom loved to comment that I’d inherited his ‘thunder-thighs’, made for ‘kick-starting Boeings’.) The last slug of the bottle was being kept for sharing with the first person of color we might come across on our journey. That was my Dad’s ‘great rebellion’ against the Afrikaans’ rule.
All holiday long, we’d obeyed old Oom Piet as self-appointed minister-of-law-and-order over us all. As a loyal representative of the ruling Nationalist party and a spokesman for the handful of permanent Afrikaans residents left behind after the holiday exodus, he pursued his ‘God-given’ responsibility of protecting us whites from ‘die swart gevaar’ (the black danger). With a long black whip clenched tightly in one hand, its tail turned inward between his sweaty palm and trigger-happy fingers, he was always ready to take a crack at any person of color who might dare to set to foot on the white man’s beach. Oom Piet revolted me, but I feared him, too, because he was deadly serious about his patrols to keep the ‘blacks’ from harming us. If a ‘black’ woman was looking after the white man’s children, she had to be in full maid’s uniform, or Oom Piet couldn't be blamed for ‘taking action’ to ‘protect’ us whiteys. ‘Black’, according to Oom Piet, was anyone of color or any other race than Caucasian. The old man may have revolted Dad too, but I never saw Dad or anyone else take a stand against him.
But New Year’s Eve was an opportunity, and good cover, for a moment of rebellious behavior on Dad’s part, and so as usual we headed off to find a ‘colored’. The ‘colored’ folk lived between Paradise Beach and Jeffreys Bay, in a township called Pellsrus. They were renowned for partying hard all New Year’s Eve, and sleeping off the after-effects en-masse on the ‘colored’ beach on New Years Day. It wasn't unusual, and no cause for alarm, when our jingle-jangle van came across a man staggering home on the arm of his partner, head bleeding, ‘effing’ and blind, the woman’s hair decorated for the occasion in colorful plastic rollers. Dad stopped alongside them to offer his New Year’s bansela—the last slug of whisky—which the two accepted boisterously, wishing the ‘Baas’ a ‘Heppy Nuwe Jaar!’ Mission accomplished, we jangled our way back to Paradise Beach and into 1976.
I lay in bed that night—full to the brim with expectations of good things to come—counting off my wishes like sheep, and I fell asleep clutching tightly to slippery-skinned hope.
That's how 1976 started, and then it carried on.
Chapter Two
The last night of the holidays came way too soon.
Before I knew it, I was lying in bed listening to the ‘grown-ups’ pack up the house, every muffled sound overlaid and surrounded by the thud, crash and sigh of nearby ocean waves that relentlessly pushed and pulled at the shore. Light ebbed and flowed in the dark amid the