Ingrid Jonker. Louise Viljoen

Annie increasingly had to fulfil the role of mother and primary caretaker for the two girls. Their grandfather’s death also left the small household financially destitute. They could not stay on in the house in Durbanville and had to move to the Strand in 1940. Their grandmother Annie’s state pension was supplemented with small allowances from her sons A.C. and Jacob. Because of her health Beatrice could only work intermittently; there was a short stint with the SABC in Cape Town as well as office jobs in Stellenbosch and the Strand. Their father also sent them money;15the divorce order stipulated that he should pay £5 per year towards the support of his children.16Although circumstances were difficult, Anna remembered that the two children were excited about their move to the Strand. They looked forward to living in a little house by the sea and being able to swim every day. To some extent their expectations were fulfilled. Even though they had to move from one house to another in the Strand and Gordon’s Bay over the next few years, they both remembered the devotion with which their grandmother cared for them and their freedom to explore the sea, the veld and books. Although still young – Ingrid started kindergarten in July 1940 and Anna was put in Standard One in the Strand Primary School – their mother and grandmother allowed them greater freedom and mobility than was usual for the time. During their stay in Gordon’s Bay they often wandered off into a pine forest on their way to school, to sit and read their books. Once they stayed away from school for so long that the teacher thought the family had moved again. Here, they were also allowed to keep small animals and continued exploring the veld and beach. They picked fruit from plants in the veld, gathered shellfish from the rock pools, played with tadpoles in the stream behind their house and buried small objects they called ‘secrets’ in the ground. It is not surprising that Gordon’s Bay is one of the spaces that would later gain symbolic importance in Ingrid’s poetry.

      Their mother’s illness cast a shadow over this relatively carefree time. During their first year in the Strand, Beatrice suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be hospitalised in Valkenburg psychiatric hospital in Cape Town. This traumatic experience greatly affected Ingrid and strengthened her bond with her grandmother, who was the only person to whom she could talk about it. In these circumstances their grandmother came to play an increasingly important role in their lives, caring for them as best she could within her limited means. Their meals often consisted of bread, soup or fish-heads and the children had to use a battered handbag of their grandmother’s as a satchel for their schoolbooks. Grandmother Annie was the one who fostered Ingrid’s talent as a writer by reading the poems Ingrid wrote from the age of six to the coloured congregations she preached to on Sundays.

      Not long after her nervous breakdown Beatrice was diagnosed with cancer. When she was hospitalised in Somerset West her children tried to visit her as often as possible, either taking the bus or walking all the way from the Strand. Arriving at the hospital, they usually clambered on to her bed and were given food and cold drinks by the nurses. Despite the illness they were still able to share a bond of female confidentiality with their mother, telling her things about boyfriends and growing up that they could not mention to their devout grandmother. Ingrid would later write a short story, ‘Eerste liefde’ [First love], in which she expressed a young adolescent’s desperate need to tell her uncomprehending grandmother about the first awakenings of love and desire. When Beatrice was later moved to Groote Schuur and then to the Conradie Hospital in Cape Town, they could not visit her as often. After spending almost two years in hospital, Beatrice died on 6 August 1944.17The bare facts of this narrative no doubt conceal great heartbreak and suffering for the grandmother and two children. Ingrid recalled her mother with great tenderness in the poem ‘Ladybird’:18

      Glans oker

      en ’n lig breek

      uit die see.

      In die agterplaas

      êrens tussen die wasgoed

      en ’n boom vol granate

      jou lag en die oggend

      skielik en klein

      soos ’n liewenheersbesie

      geval op my hand

      [Gleaming ochre

      and a light breaks

      from the sea.

      In the back yard

      somewhere between the washing

      and a pomegranate tree

      your laugh and the morning

      sudden and small

      like a ladybird

      fallen on my hand]

      She wrote elsewhere: ‘My moeder, sterwend, was so sonnig soos ’n liewenheersbesie, so vol geheime, so verrassend, so teer …’ [My mother, dying, was as sunny as a ladybird, so full of secrets, so surprising, so tender …].19

      Ingrid’s early years, spent in the company of her mother and grandmother, had a profound influence on the rest of her life. Theirs was a home that gave the two girls tender and loving care but also exposed them to the suffering brought about by nervous disorder, illness and death. It was also an unconventional upbringing that allowed them to some degree the freedom to move outside the constraints of Afrikaner society of the day. Although their grandmother upheld strict religious values, their mother did not keep them on a tight rein. They could read what they liked, they were not as housebound as most children then and they treated people of other races with less of the prejudice and condescension usual at the time. They had little contact with their well-off relations, who seemed to lead more regulated and ordered lives. Their cousins in Stellenbosch lived in a house that was almost too neat and organised for them, while their rich aunt Joey Malan, who lived in Constantia, regarded them as ‘wilde, ongetemde kinders’ [wild, untamed children], according to Anna’s unfinished memoir.

      Beatrice’s death brought an end to Ingrid’s life within the intimacy of the maternal family. After the death of their mother in August, the two girls stayed on with their grandmother until their father Abraham came to fetch them in December 1944 and took them to live with him in Cape Town. The loss of two mothers within such a short space of time must have had an incalculable effect on the young Ingrid. A studio portrait, taken shortly before they left for Cape Town, shows Ouma Annie with her two granddaughters. Her face is wizened with age and her eyes deep-set; she is soberly attired in a black dress with a white crocheted collar. In contrast we see the freshness and youth of her two granddaughters. Dark-haired Anna on her right is 13 years old and on the brink of puberty; the blonde Ingrid on the other side is 11 and her wide smile is guileless, if somewhat posed. The photograph’s pronounced contrast between youth and age emphasises rather than obscures the closeness between the old woman and the children. Surreptitiously Anna wrote their father a letter to say that they would prefer to stay with their grandmother and go to one of the local schools because they did not have clothes that were grand enough for Cape Town. But the letter had no effect and they had to leave their grandmother behind when Abraham fetched them. Although Ouma Annie died only in 1956 or 1957,20the children rarely saw her after that painful farewell during which Ingrid tried to hold on to her grandmother’s hand as long as possible.

      Cape Town

      In the years before their mother’s death, the two children’s contact with their father had been minimal. After his divorce from Beatrice there was a short-lived second marriage to one Barbara Gill before Abraham Jonker married Lulu Brewis, a writer of children’s books, in 1941. Anna Jonker remembered that he once came to fetch her to spend a weekend with him while they were still living in Durbanville. Although he brought Ingrid a red top on that occasion, he did not acknowledge her presence at all.21Because their father’s house was not large enough to accommodate the two girls, Anna and Ingrid were put into lodgings in central Cape Town and attended a nearby school for the first six months of 1945.22They were fetched on Sundays to spend time with him and, after he bought a larger house in Plumstead, they went to live with him and his new family, wife Lulu and their two young children, Koos and Suzanne.

      Anna and Ingrid each gave different accounts of their