PART ONE

CHILDHOOD

Chapter 1

My father beat up my mother before they were even married. The writing was on the wall.

Yet she chose him. She married my father Desmond, none the less. He was a charmer. He could play with your mind, until you went over the edge and back again. It was almost as if he believed we hungered for more, like bloated refugees dependent on food aid. He dished, and we got what we got – that is, until the early hours of the morning of 26 January 1983, a night when darkness mixed with moonlight, and quiet fought violently to silence a gun…

Mamma says he was enchanting. I was fascinated and often wondered just how enchanting it could be to be beaten around by your date. She should have run then.

My eldest brother Laurence and my sister Lindy were born fifteen months apart, and I came along on the tenth of November, four and a half years later, to spoil an intimate union between my siblings. Still, there were not enough pawns in my father’s game, so my parents produced one more, my baby brother Gregory. With a wife and four willing little spirits, the master could begin. I was going to become acquainted with a vortex that required me merely to be swept down a circular flow into a current of endless cycles. Instead, I built muscle at every ripple in order to develop the capacity to swim against, and eventually out of, this vicious body of water called my birthright.

It was not too bad at first. Des liked little ones. It was when you could talk back, question, or defy him that the decay became evident. I deliberately say this, as he was sick before we arrived. Dedda, as he insisted on being called, was just a master at disguising his symptoms. He conned and manipulated even the sharpest of men, and to my horror people actually said they liked him.

My first clear memories were of going to Trust Bank in the centre of the Jacaranda City, Pretoria. Apartheid was in full swing, and Dedda would vent his hatred of "kaffirs on a regular basis. Mamma, being from England, had a totally different outlook on the world, and the mixed messages we received were very confusing. Mamma liked and helped Black people, while Dedda called them kaffirs" (a grossly racist expression, all too frequently on my father’s lips), and beat them up with eager consistency.

My visits to Trust Bank became more frequent, and I was required by Dedda to look pretty and wear one of my best hand-me-down dresses from Lindy. The lady at the bank would coo at me as I was raised onto the counter, and I clearly sensed some hot stuff going on between the nice blonde teller and Dedda. Somehow the adoration I felt from her evaporated and it was transferred to my father in a wriggly and seductive fashion. I had a feeling Mamma would not like her. My visits to the bank declined as my awareness grew, and Dedda disposed of me like a used rag. A cute little decoy who asked too many questions, I had served my purpose. I was just part of the brood.

Because of the size of her family, my mother had a 1960’s Volkswagen Kombi-bus. As she stepped on the gas, it would raise itself slightly from the wheelbase, and once in gear, erupt into motion with a series of thuds, and race to its destination, as Mamma was always late! She sat forward, the steering wheel hugging her breasts, wearing an intense look on her face, as she dodged traffic, trying to buy back time…

The Kombi came in handy on more than one occasion, as my brother’s large mountain tortoise used to escape from our property, and carry his heavy body slowly down the road, until someone would notify us, which would send Mamma roaring down the road in the stub-nose Kombi to recapture Torty. He would further stress her out by dumping huge poops in her car during the rescue, which would make her really mad. Torty’s liaison with our family ended when my brother swapped him for over a thousand silkworms. Yup, during the negotiation and transaction phase, the silkworms were counted. The census went on for days.

Dedda loved sports cars. In fact he was a real boy, who enjoyed bodybuilding, golf, rally driving, good clothing, and shooting with his large variety of guns. My father was a married bachelor. He claimed his rights to drink, play golf, enjoy evenings at the Club, go on country trips, and then step right back into his God-given right to run, discipline, and abuse his family. He told us on many occasions, I brought you into this world, and I can take you out! He meant this. I believed him, and he went on to prove it. He controlled us in every way, and he would decide whether we’d live or die. He was the almighty Dedda, and whenever we were in doubt, he would remind us, and we’d retreat to accept his absolute authority.

The fear was overwhelming. Dedda had many weapons – fear, mind-games, guns, fists, and more, but his best friend was a metre-long sjambok. This is a wooden stick with eight strands of hard leather that taper off in width, to eventually end in a single strand. A people whip! Dedda would thrash me with all his might and the whip would chew into my flesh as the single strand curled around my thin legs. The results were shocking, and I had to wear tracksuit pants beneath my school dress to cover the cuts and bruises left on my body. Dedda would hiss that if anyone saw the fruits of his severe thrashing, there would be more where those had come from.

One day I knew his spirit was in darkness. This was usual, but this particular day he was ready to explode. I could see Dedda hovering. He was searching for a reason, wishing to be pushed over the edge. He told me to pack up my blocks and walked out of the room. Greggy and I were playing on the floor of the bedroom we shared. I sensed Dedda’s mood, and started coaching Greggy that we had to tidy up. Without notice, he burst in, only seconds after his first request, and said with a slow but determined voice, "If you don’t want to listen, then you must feel! Now you will get a hiding, Jeanette! His eyes were darting all over the room. Look at this mess. Blocks all over the place. I thought I had told you to tidy up! I felt my cheeks being squashed from the grip he had on my face, and now he had his ice-blue eyes directed at mine. When I get back, this room had better be tidy, and you, little girl, are getting a hiding." I knew he had chosen me, and that this one was going to be bad.

I ran to my cupboard, and climbed the shelf. I pulled out all my panties. There were four, one in each colour with a duck embroidered on the front. The label in the back read Princess from Woolworth’s. I quickly put on all four panties, to shield my bottom, one on top of the other. I had seen the look on his face. The time between the warning and the delivery of the hiding felt like an eternity. Please, Jesus, let him come now! I was trembling. Six years old. Petrified! What was taking him so long? Please come now. Just do it! My mind explored all possibilities. What would he bring with him? Please, God, it doesn’t matter. Can it just be over?

Finally, Dedda opened my door. I searched his hands. Nothing! He had big hands. He had a beautiful body. Our home had a full gym rigged out in the garage, for him to enhance his physique. He would announce to all who cared to listen, I am a body man… Dedda was a police reservist, so he needed to be in shape. How much strength do you need to hammer a six-year-old into submission?

He walked towards me. Maybe I would be let off. He grabbed me by the arm, and his flat hand rained smacks down on my bottom. As suddenly as he started, he stopped. By the smirk on his face, I knew I was found out. He pulled my pants down with such force that my legs fought to balance. He exposed my feeble attempt to buffer the blows to my bottom.

Once I was stripped naked, he sat on my bed and pulled my body towards him. I wanted to vomit. I began to struggle and fight. It was instinct. This made him madder. As I lay face down on Dedda’s lap, he placed a leg over both of mine, and pushed down with one of his hands. With his other hand he cancelled out my struggling arms, with my chest and face pushed into my bedding. I heard my own muffled noises as he started hitting me. As I screamed, the pain soon turned into a burning sensation as he hit me wherever he could find areas not shielded by the way he pinned me down.

This went on for the longest time. I felt faint, and the noises that came from my body must have been alarming, as Mamma came into the room and pleaded with him, Dessie, please stop it, Dessie, please! He did not relent. She attempted to pull him off of me. He slowly tapered off the beating and the verbal reprimands that spewed from his mouth, and let me go. I was exhausted. My body ached, and my cheeks felt hot, flushed, and itchy from the tears. My body was heaving involuntarily, and whimpering noises came from my mouth.

He turned to me and screamed, Shut up! Shut up! Or I will give you something to cry about!

I closed my mouth to stifle the sobs, and a whole lot of snot escaped from my nostrils.

Blow your nose! That is disgusting! he spat.

Chapter 2

Since my mother, Doreen Ann (née Wheble), was British, and Dedda was Afrikaans, they reached a democratic agreement: she had to shun the country of her birth, never mention the parasitic British Royal Family, and learn the Afrikaans language.

Also, my father bundled all of us children into Afrikaans schools. Our Grade 1 reader was entitled Baas and Mossie. It was about a parrot, Baas, and a little girl, Mossie. Every time the girl lost something, the parrot would shout, "Soek hom, soek hom, roep Baas! which means, Look for it, look for it, calls Baas!"

Without fail, Mamma would instruct us to find our shoes, clothes or the like, and we would protest at not being able to locate the items. She would gleefully say with pride, in a strong accent, "Sook hom sook hom rup Baas!"

Her Afrikaans was not so hot, but she tried hard. I recall my father’s conservative church-going family were on a rare visit to our home when Mamma announced, "Gistraand, dit was so warm, ek het bo-op die diaken geslaap. She was trying to say, It was so hot last night, I slept on top of the bedspread. But to her horror, she discovered that she had blurted out, to screams of laughter, that she had slept on top of the church deacon! A deacon in the church is a very pure and noble man. She fled the room, professing never to speak that ____ language" again.

The Afrikaners of the Apartheid era were very inflexible about their language. If you could not address an Afrikaner in their own language, some would simply ignore you, or converse with disdain. To this day, there are some diehard shop assistants and business folk that will only speak Afrikaans, even though you initiate the conversation in English. However, this is more the exception than the rule, as South Africa has come a long way since the days of Apartheid.

Mamma complied with the democratic agreement they reached early on in their relationship, and if she mentioned the ____ British Royal Family or the Leech ____ British Queen, Dedda would help her to remember the deal. Should she mention England, he would down the country, the prime minister, and the pound, and would soon smother any thoughts she had of the country of her birth. It would be thirty years before she went home, and in fact I toured England before she did.

Her mother was also free game, and my granny was public enemy number one in the eyes of my father. Martha Jane Wheble Welman (and sometimes Summerton) wove in and out of our lives, as my father’s moods dictated. For years she would be acceptable, then she would be banned from our home, then welcomed back into the fold, only to be banished again. We had to visit her in secret, and Mamma made us promise not to tell.

At one time, Mamma convinced Granny to seek forgiveness for a misdemeanour she was unaware of having committed, and as she approached, Dedda did not even grace her with a look. Without disengaging himself from his task, he simply stated: I have no desire to talk to you, Mrs Welman. I thought he had slipped up, because Granny was married to Dick Summerton (whom I affectionately called Goempah). Perhaps he had forgotten that Mr Welman, the man my mother detested, had died. But my father was deliberate. He was blackmailing Granny; he knew her secret, and he was ensuring that she would not persist with the conversation. In his eyes she had no right to use her married name, Summerton, and he was giving her a message: Back off, or I will expose you. She left in a flood of tears. Our visits to Granny reverted to being conducted in secret.

By the time I was ten, I knew loads of secrets, and many monsters. Some even lived under my bed. The secrets and the monsters had the same DNA. Dark, hidden, scary. Secrets loitered in my eyes, and I was afraid people might accidentally see them, as my brain was so overcrowded. I hated the secrets. They kept wanting to escape, which meant trouble. So I kept them inside, but as they were there to stay, I had to make room for them.

Granny was one of the better secrets I knew. Visits to Granny were wonderful. She lived in a tiny house in Tram Street, Pretoria, next to Ginsberg’s Supermarket, where she worked. This was across the road from the park, and a block away from the Austin Roberts Bird Sanctuary. Granny would take us to the swings, and then down to feed the birds through the wire fence. There were ostriches prancing up and down the fence. The males were black and white, and the females resembled bland, grey feather dusters with beaks. I used to be fascinated to see these big birds eating small stones to aid digestion, and I was certain that this was what made them too heavy to fly. Beautiful blue cranes pranced past our starry eyes, and tortoises were scattered here and there. A camouflaged passageway, covered in reeds, led us to the centre of the sanctuary at the water’s edge. We would shout excitedly while pointing to the birdies as they took off in fright, with Granny hushing us all the while. We soon grasped that this was a quiet place, and tiptoed to the vantage point with the wooden floorboards creaking under our feet.

Granny had a special cupboard below her kitchen sink from which we could choose sweeties she kept just for us: Manhattan Gums, Senties and Gum Bears. We would go to the cupboard and choose a box, and have it all to ourselves. I used to feel spoiled and exhilarated. Occasionally, when she was not a secret, we were allowed to sleep over at Granny’s, and I remember curling up on the lilac rug next to her bed, while her bedside clock tick-tocked me to sleep.

My Granny was Welsh. She came from Merthyr Vale in Mid Glamorgan in South Wales. She spoke highly of her parents, a coal-mining family, and was the sixth of seven children – four boys and three girls. Violet was the eldest, followed by William, who died at eleven months. James died at age four and Thomas at twenty-one. William was born on 7 January 1911, followed by my grandmother in 1913. Betty died at eleven months, and Vivien, the last-born, arrived in 1923.

At age nineteen, after relocating to London, Martha Jane Evans fell in love with twenty-two-year-old Jack Wheble and married him on 22 July 1933 at the Parish Church of Saint Swithun, Hither Green. On 28 February 1935, she produced a daughter, Sheila.

On my granny’s birthday, 3 September 1939, Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. On 7 September 1940 the Blitz began. London was bombed by the German Luftwaffe until 16 May 1941, when most of the Luftwaffe was reassigned for the invasion of Russia, which was imminent. During the Blitz millions of British children, mothers, hospital patients, and pensioners were evacuated to the countryside. For those left in London, blackouts began. Every building had to extinguish or cover its lights at night. My granny, heavily pregnant with my mother, took cover in her garden in an underground bomb shelter which she shared with her sister-in-law, Lillian, who lived next door.

Granny told of a terrifying morning when a Spitfire was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf109 and crashed into Auntie Lilly’s home next door. The engine and propeller burrowed on through the earth alongside the bomb shelter, down the full length of Auntie Lilly’s garden and through the neighbour’s adjoining garden at the far end, before coming to rest just metres from the neighbour’s house. Auntie Lilly had run back into the house to fetch her handbag, and on her return was trapped in the entrance of the shelter at the moment of impact. Her face and arm full of shrapnel, she was taken to hospital in an ambulance. Granny and little Sheila were buried alive in the shelter, and once rescued by firemen, were taken to the hospital in the fire engine. Jack came home to chaos, and it took him hours to locate his family, as no one seemed to know which hospital they had been taken to.

Three weeks after being dug out of the shelter, on 18 October 1940, during the persistent nightly bombings, Granny went into labour. She gave birth to my mother in near-impossible circumstances, and brought life into the world as countless thousands were dying during World War II. Mamma survived in more ways than one, as she fought for her right to survive in the womb despite her mother’s unsuccessful attempt to terminate her pregnancy.

When Mamma was six weeks old, her father Jack was sent to Aldershot for six months’ training, returning briefly for short leave in Wales to visit my granny and the family and then on to training in Scotland before being sent to Singapore, where he was captured by the Japanese. My grandfather was a prisoner of war, who in 1943 was forced to build the Bangkok– Rangoon railway bridge over the river Kwai in the Burma– Thailand jungle. Gunner Jack Wheble from 3 Bty. 6 H.A.A. Regiment, Royal Artillery, died aged thirty-three on Monday 7 August 1944 in a Japanese concentration camp from malaria and dysentery. The only things my granny ever received back from her husband were a watch and dog-tags covered in lime (used to prevent the stench of decay in mass graves).

World War II came to an end in 1945 when Mamma was five. Granny told us how Mamma used to rock herself in an attempt to find comfort during those scary times when planes, bombs, underground shelters, and the dark infiltrated her little world. At the age of three and a half, Mamma, with her older sister Sheila, was placed into boarding school. Granny could not afford the full fees, so her girls had to work in the boarding establishment to help pay for their keep. One night Mamma was found asleep in a bowl of peas she had attempted to shell, and was taken up to bed at midnight by the headmistress.

Mamma felt abandoned and rejected by her mother, had never known a father, and was then introduced to her stepfather, Paul Welman, whom Granny met in a tavern where she worked as a cook. Paul had run away from South Africa, aged fourteen. He had lied about his age, and joined the Merchant Navy at sixteen. He married my grandmother on 9 March 1946, and sexually molested my mother and her sister Sheila from then on.

At the age of sixteen, my mother was to become engaged to Teddy, a gentle boy from London. Her stepfather, an alcoholic who did not pace his liver’s ability to detoxify his burdened body, had a further affliction pertaining to his lungs. Paul Welman was advised that the dry African climate would offer a welcome reprieve from his suffering. So in 1957, his stepdaughter, young Doreen Ann Wheble, and his wife Mattie stepped onboard the Union Castle liner in Southampton, England, to assist with his relocation. Doreen loathed him.

Teddy, Doreen’s future fiancé, waved her goodbye, and knew she would return as soon as she had saved her fare. With all her worldly possessions still in England, her mind was focused on her return, to start a life with her Teddy. My grandmother Mattie and her husband quickly settled in with a distant relative in Pretoria, and as if life just wanted to add its own twisted bit of spice, my Mamma met the man I would fear for twenty years, through a party held by these folk.

Mamma and her English boyfriend Teddy had thought about engagement. The only thing that remained was to relocate the ogre in her life – her stepfather – to another continent, and she would return a free woman. Sadly, she met an ogre that made her stepfather look like cheap candy at a summer fair.

After Paul Welman died in 1970, my granny met Dick Summerton. He did the books at the shop where she worked, and their romance started with him asking her one day, Is it too hot for you to walk up the road for a cool drink?

They had a wonderful life together. The two of them travelled South Africa in a Caravelle named Jenny (not named after me!), and logged hours, days, months, and years of happy memories, which she used to talk about long after Goempah died after a fall in Durban in 1997.

Then Granny lived comfortably at a retirement home in Pretoria where she supplemented her daily meals with a Cup-a-Soup and the many happy memories she feasted on. She died at the age of ninety in January 2004 in the presence of her best friend, Cathy Ohlsen, while my sister held her hand. Nanna, as she was known to her eight great-grandchildren, had climbed the Golden Staircase.

She had a great sense of humour. A year before, when we were all alerted to her ailing condition, I flew from Durban to Pretoria, to be by her side. I sobbed at the possibility of her passing, and told her how sorry I was that she was in hospital, with lots of pipes