In his first novel, Emergency, Rive bestows on his main character, Andrew Dreyer, elements from his own life. Andrew has a tense and ambivalent relationship with his mother, feeling both intimacy and alienation at the same time. The novel accounts for the estrangement from the mother because of colour:
She had always been strange in her attitude towards him. Sometimes gay and maternal and then suddenly cold and impulsive. He wondered whether it had anything to do with colour. She was fair, like James and Annette, whereas he was dark, the darkest in the family. Sometimes when they walked together in the street, he had a feeling that she was ashamed of him, even in District Six.24
Added to this, the young boy in Emergency gets blamed for his mother’s death from a stroke after she had to brave the wind and cold as Andrew refused to run an errand for her. His elder brother accuses him of being a lying ‘black bastard’ and a murderer, violently beating up the younger Andrew, who then runs away from home, never to return.25
Rive’s brother-in-law Freddie Josias remembers him as a clever, even brilliant boy at school. One of the teachers at St Mark’s Primary School, Ursula Reines (née Strydom), who later became a close friend, remembers that ‘in those days there was the famous old composition that you had to write. Give you a title and sit down and write a composition. And Richard just excelled. I think he had a gift for words.’26 It was Georgina and Davey’s wages that helped keep Richard at St Mark’s until Standard 4 and then at Trafalgar Junior School until Standard 6.27 In Emergency Daniel, an echo of Davey it seems, is the only brother with whom Andrew feels some kinship in the home:
Andrew got on well with Daniel. He was quiet and an introvert, something like himself, without the bitterness and resentment. Daniel was good-looking, soft-spoken and understanding. A regular church-goer, he had very little in common with the rest of the family other than his mother and Andrew. They often spoke, Danny and he, in the quiet hours of the morning while they lay next to each other. His brother was appreciative and honest in his opinions. He liked Danny best of all.28
Josias remembers the young Richard as a very independent boy, even at this early age, who did exceptionally well at primary school. Alf Wannenburgh, another fellow writer and a friend until their relationship soured after decades, believes that St Mark’s, which was Anglican, ‘instilled Anglo-Saxon virtues’ in the mind of the young boy.29 These, however, were already present in Rive’s home and the connection to St Mark’s Church and in the royalist sympathies both at home and in the community, so perhaps it is more true to say that the school cemented the values of his home environment. Rive’s own experiences at the primary school are transmuted into fiction in Emergency, as were other aspects of his outer and inner life. Andrew Dreyer fondly reflects on his origins in District Six in an early flashback:
The boys played games during the first lunch-break, but he was too self-conscious to join in. He stared with wide, black eyes at the teachers and the classrooms and the Biblical pictures on the wall and the miniature tables and chairs and the neat pile of worn readers in the cupboard. See me, Mother, can you see me? And life was beautiful and golden-brown on those apricot days when he was seven.30
What he describes here as the boy’s ‘wide, black eyes’ reflects quite literally Rive’s striking dark eyes but also prefigures the title of his memoir Writing Black. Rive’s alluring eyes are described by his old friend Ursula Reines as ‘doleful’.31 In this passage from the novel, the young boy is sensitive, self-conscious, very observant, immersed in texts and on the outside of the throng, often distanced from family yet immersed in neighbourhood, and with a deep subliminal longing to recreate an ideal mother-child bond. His childhood was not only a dreary and often trying time, but equally ‘beautiful and golden-brown’. The image of the time as ‘apricot days’, the sweet and sour of growing up in the District, is more fully and successfully portrayed in ‘Buckingham Palace’, District Six.
While there are echoes in his fiction of his strong sense of alienation from his family, especially after the death of his mother, while he was still at high school, Rive did not write about this in his non-fiction or in reflections on his childhood or his adult years. He shared the more private aspects of his life with only a very few close colleagues and friends. Interestingly, in Emergency, after Andrew has just left his home following the traumatic death of his mother, his fraught relationship with his siblings is described: ‘He had a kind of revulsion about hearing the news of his family, yet his curiosity got the better of him. He would have preferred to wipe out their existence from his mind.’ Earlier in Emergency, we hear that Andrew ‘was afraid of his elder brother; James had beaten him for breaking one of the dining-room chairs. James was very fair-skinned, a play-white, always cold and aloof’ and ‘[James] … despised Andrew, whose dark skin he found an embarrassment’.32 Rive, like his creation Andrew, felt the internalised racism that was prevalent in his family and caused untold strife and disruption, apparently leading to lifelong animosity between him and many in his family. Josias, however, denies that family members who were only ‘a shade lighter’ than Rive were prejudiced against him because of his dark skin. Long-standing friends of Rive’s, Ariefi and Hazel Manuel, recall Rive’s sisters who lived in Woodstock and that Richard was the darkest of the siblings and that this was patently an issue in the family. Much of the time Rive was raised by his maternal grandmother rather than by his mother and, by his teens, he had left home to board elsewhere. He maintained some contact with Georgina, who kept in touch with him throughout his life.33
In Rive’s short story ‘Resurrection’, first published in 1963, there is a similarly fraught family scenario. Mavis, the main character with whom we empathise, has fair-skinned, play-white brothers and sisters who refuse to acknowledge the existence of their dark-skinned sibling. This story dramatically recounts the terrible pain and humiliation felt by Mavis, spurned and ignored as if she did not exist by those supposed to be closest to her – intense emotions that peppered Rive’s relations with his mother and his siblings. And while these emotions undoubtedly affected him in deeply personal ways, he seemed able to confront them only from the distance provided by fiction, rather than in the closer-to-home autobiographical accounts of his childhood and adult life. In this regard, Rive embodies what Virginia Woolf suggests about the almost impossible act of capturing the momentous social and personal forces that constitute one, the ‘invisible presences’ that elude self-memorialisation: ‘How futile life-writing becomes. I see myself as a fish in a stream; deflected; held in place; but cannot describe the stream.’34
Another factor that kept Rive at a distance from his family, particularly beyond his teenage years and throughout his adult life, was his sexuality. He attempted to conceal his homosexuality from family members and most of his friends for as long as he lived. Many, especially those of his generation or older, only realised he was gay because of the circumstances of his murder which, especially after the trial of the two accused, pointed to the murder of a gay man by young boys with whom he had or intended to have sex. Some of his friends, colleagues and fellow writers suspected that he was gay, while a few knew that he had had relations with younger men. As if out of respect to Rive the influential public figure and educationist, the son of the community who had made a name for himself locally as well as internationally and did them proud, and also perhaps respecting his own obvious wish to remain closeted, combined