Street Kid (17 page)

My father was spending most of the time on the road, preaching to Spiritualist groups all over Witwatersrand. If I needed anything for school, like a book or a piece of sports kit, I knew I was done for. He was never around to ask.

One afternoon, on coming back to the hotel after school, I was shocked to find Dad in our room. I could tell he’d been waiting for me. He was holding a letter, crumpled in his fist. I guessed it must have been from the school and thought I’d be getting another ‘money doesn’t grow on trees’ rant. I could almost feel my hair standing on end, hackles rising like a dog’s, as I stood there.

‘Who’s the bloody traitor in the camp?’ He spat the words at me.

I didn’t say anything. Just waited. Steeling myself for a beating.

‘How did your mother know you were here? You bloody wrote to her, didn’t you?’

I shook my head. ‘I didn’t! I don’t know how she found out.’

‘Because of you, we’ve now got her damn solicitor sniffing around.’ Dad flourished the letter furiously in my face. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he can do. But he’s trying to make trouble. He’s going to learn that possession’s nine-tenths of the law. He, of all people, should know that. And she can go jump off a cliff for all I care. You’re here with me, and that’s an end of it.’

You’ve got me but you don’t even want me! Why couldn’t you just have left me behind with her? I don’t understand!
I thought as I stood there, listening to his ranting, watching the spittle fall on his beard.

Dad grabbed my arm and forced me to sit on his bed while he got a pen and piece of paper. Dictation time again.
I wonder what rubbish he’ll make me write this time?

‘Sit there. Here, lean on this.’ He put his briefcase on my knees. ‘Write exactly what I say.’

My father forced me to write a letter to my mother’s solicitor assuring him of my happiness. South Africa was a land of milk and honey, and I was having a wonderful time, apparently. Dad invented the most ridiculous, sickly-sweet fairytale. I couldn’t believe for one moment that any educated, sensible person would believe a word of it.

‘I have lots of friends and I love going down to the beach.’

We don’t live anywhere near a beach!

‘When I sit with my friends on our veranda we can see lots of sweet little monkeys in the trees.’

We live in the middle of a big city. Surely they won’t fall for that?

I lay in bed that night thinking about my father. One question had always circled round and round my head:
Why does he keep me, when he finds me so repulsive to have around?
I knew that he needed Freda and me to act the part of his spotless family, giving him a perfectly respectable image. Without it, his congregation of blue-rinse ladies probably wouldn’t trust him.

I always sensed, too, that my father wanted an easy target when he played his sadistic power games. The psychotic in him wanted me – and Freda too – under his control, so that he could twist the knife whenever and however he pleased, even if, for the most part, he couldn’t be bothered.

I reckoned that Dad would have liked to have Mum under his control too, and it had never ceased to irk him that she’d broken free. Wanting to be locked in a perpetual
battle with her, I supposed the best way he could do it was to use me as hostage.

Meanwhile, things at Barnato Park were going from bad to worse. I was the only immigrant child in the school and the teachers picked on me in class. Not one of them stopped to think I might need help and support. Every day I was met with the rigid disapproval of the whole miserable lot of them.

The other girls made me feel just as isolated. They came from homes where they were cosseted; where there were swimming pools and tennis parties. Where maids did all the fetching and carrying. They’d probably never even had to brush their own hair. There was always a servant around to do everything for them. All their lives, they’d been cushioned from the rest of the world, and from undesirables like me.

South Africa in the 1950s was indeed cut off from the rest of the world. The rules of apartheid had never been tougher or more rigid. On my first night in Berea, I’d wondered where all the black people were. Now I knew. They had to go back to their townships at night. After six in the evening, black people on the street who didn’t have a special pass were arrested. I’d once seen two policemen dragging a black man along the street. Each had one of the man’s legs over their shoulder so that he was hanging upside down, head bashing the pavement. The sheer brutality of the regime was clear, even to an eleven-year-old like me.

I’d seen signs everywhere in the city, telling black people which parks they could let their kids play in, which restaurants they could eat at, and which seats on the bus they could sit on. And I’d watched how people behaved.
How the park keeper would shoo away the black kids, pointing angrily at the notice on the gate: ‘Whites Only. Europeans. No Blacks’. Or how a black person would step out into the road to make way for a white person, even if that person was a child. I was living in a place where even the pavement wasn’t equally shared, and I didn’t like it one bit.

The girls at my school were all clones, conditioned from an early age to think apartheid was normal. Fresh from England, I soon realized that I was the enemy. I wasn’t ever going to be a part of the group. I hadn’t inherited the moral superiority of the Afrikaner as my birthright.

One morning, in my Afrikaans class, I spoke up. I hadn’t decided to challenge the status quo and if I’d thought about it beforehand I don’t think I’d have dared. After all, as I saw it, I had eight hundred people against me at that school and no one fighting in my corner. But I’d had enough and I couldn’t prevent myself blurting out. I’d seen intolerance and unfairness everywhere around me in South Africa, especially at Barnato Park.

Mrs Schmidt was our Afrikaans teacher. She was a middle-aged woman, dressed in an old-fashioned brown suit, pencil-thin, and as sour as a lemon. From the first day she had me in her class, she’d made it quite plain that she thought I had no business being there. In her eyes, I was scum – a British immigrant with none of the superior characteristics of her own master race of Afrikaners.

Mrs Schmidt didn’t just teach us the Afrikaans language. She spouted about the superiority of the Afrikaner people like an ugly stone gargoyle. That morning, she was in full flood.

‘You see, girls, God chose the Afrikaners to lead the country from darkness into light,’ she explained. ‘South
Africa needed our superior race – a white people with God on our side – to take the reins of leadership. That’s what the Vortrekkers were fighting for.’

I felt the heat rising in me as she spoke. I looked around the room and saw the other girls all sitting dutifully straight-backed at their desks.
Do you really believe this rubbish?
I wanted to shout at them.

Once Mrs Schmidt had got into her stride, there was no stopping her. ‘You see, the kaffirs, with their smaller and inferior brains – like monkeys’ – needed a new race of leaders to lead the country,’ she said. ‘To give them the moral and spiritual education they were lacking before.’

I couldn’t bear it any more. And besides, there was a question I just had to ask. So I stood up, scraping my chair back in a less than ladylike fashion. There was an audible, indrawn breath from the other girls.

‘But, if the Africans are so bad,’ I asked, ‘why do the whites leave their kids to be looked after by them all day?’

It seemed like a perfectly sensible question to me. I’d seen the black nannies wheeling the white kids along in their prams in the park. There were never any white mums there. If that was so, then what Mrs Schmidt had just said didn’t seem logical. I really did want to know the answer. I didn’t get it though.

I thought Mrs Schmidt’s eyes were going to pop clean out of her head. She looked as though I’d thrown acid in her face. As she stood there, speechless for a moment, I saw an ugly red flush spread upwards from her chest.

‘Out!’ Mrs Schmidt’s scream was harsh. ‘Out!’

Words had obviously failed her in her fury.

I stood outside the classroom waiting for the class to finish. As soon as I heard the bell that marked the end of the school day, I walked out of the building. Every step
of the way home, I chewed over Mrs Schmidt’s remarks until I was seething. I resolved then never, ever to set foot in her classroom again.

When I got back to the Allendene, I stomped into the lounge and flung myself down on the piano stool.
Bang, bang, plonkety-plonk,
I stabbed at the keys furiously. Life was so unfair.

At the end of the room, an old man was sitting. He was always there, never moving from his chair under the window. He’d told me his name was Mr Wolfe, but I’d hardly spoken to him before, except to ask him when I came in if it was all right if I played the piano. Occasionally, he’d ask me what tune I was trying to pick out. I loved Pat Boone’s songs, especially
April Love
and Debbie Reynolds’
Tammy.
I’d sing the line first,
Tammy, Tammy, Tammy’s in love,
then work it out on the keys. Mr Wolfe always nodded his old white head kindly and usually asked me to play it again.

This time, it must have been clear to the old man that I’d had a bad day. When I’d stopped plonking the keys for a moment, he cleared his throat.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ he asked kindly, in his ancient reed-like voice. ‘Have you had a bad day at school?’

I nodded, my eyes suddenly filling up.

‘Why don’t you come over here and tell me about it?’ Mr Wolfe patted the seat beside him.

I told him about Mrs Schmidt and what I’d said to her. He couldn’t help smiling at that. But then he looked serious, gazing with his watery pale blue eyes into my own.

‘There are many people like your Mrs Schmidt in the world,’ he said. ‘Do you see this number?’ Mr Wolfe rolled up his sleeve to show me a faded blue number tattooed on the outside of his withered forearm.

I nodded. ‘What’s it for?’

‘During the war, I was locked up by the Germans in a concentration camp,’ he told me. ‘And I saw some terrible things. Things I can still see and hear. And smell too. My family died, my friends died. And all because a group of people thought like your Mrs Schmidt.’

Mr Wolfe’s shoulders slumped and he looked away. A few moments passed, and I thought he’d forgotten I was there. Then he turned to me again.

‘The world hasn’t changed,’ he said.

I’m sure his words shouldn’t have made me feel better, but somehow they did. It was good to know that at least one person understood, and that I had someone in my corner, after all.

Mr Wolfe struggled to his feet. When he was standing, I saw he was bent over, almost at a right angle to the ground. I thought it must have been odd to spend so much time looking at your shoes.

‘Wait here a moment,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something for you.’

He walked over to a case next to the gramophone on the sideboard. He opened it and pulled out a record.

‘I used to play this when I was upset,’ Mr Wolfe told me, wiping the old ‘78 lovingly with his sleeve. ‘It’s the great Caruso, singing
Pagliacci.
It tells the story of a clown. A clown that laughed while his heart was broken.’

He carefully wound up the gramophone and lifted the arm to place the needle on the record. Then he stood there, as if lost in thought, while the wonderful tenor voice filled the shabby room. I was transported to another place, lit up by the music.

When it had finished, Mr Wolfe looked over to me with a smile. ‘Feeling better now?’ I nodded and smiled back.

‘I’d like you to have my record,’ he said to me.

Words failed me, but I gave my thanks to him silently. I knew he understood how much his gesture meant to me.

Only a couple of months after that Mr Wolfe died. One day he was in his chair by the window, and the next it was empty.

Chapter Sixteen

I
was in the Hillbrow Library one afternoon when I noticed a poster on the noticeboard. None had ever caught my eye before, but I couldn’t fail to notice this one. It was bright red and orange and had a big roaring lion painted on it with the words
Wilkies Circus.
Around the lion were little pictures of flying trapeze artists and a clown. I saw that the circus was opening the next weekend in the grounds just beyond the university.

I knew I had to be there. I’d always devoured every book on circuses I could find, here in the library and also back in Hulme. There was something about the life that really appealed to me. Enid Blyton’s
The Circus of Adventure
was a particular favourite. The performers and stage hands seemed like one big family, and yet they weren’t a family in the real sense at all. I knew that many of them came from distant corners of the globe, and that some of them were probably runaways. And the idea of runaways had always, unsurprisingly, had its appeal.

I loved gymnastics and had always dreamed of swinging from the trapeze, or doing stunts on the back of a palomino pony. In our room in the Allendene, I used to practise doing the splits or walking on my knees in the
lotus position; and outside in the courtyard, I’d do handstands up against the wall. Gym was the only thing I excelled at at school, and my teacher said I must be double-jointed. I was often asked to demonstrate to the other girls how to do a somersault from the wooden horse or backflips on the beam. There were lots of things I couldn’t master though, and I was longing to see how the circus performers managed to get it right.

It was quite a way to the circus grounds. I had to walk through Hillbrow and Braamfontein, and past the jail and the university. I could see the flags on the big top long before I got there, waving cheerily against the cloudless blue sky. When I climbed up a grassy embankment to the fenced-off area there it was – a big cream coloured tent, with red and white striped sides.

I didn’t go in the main entrance but climbed over the fence at the side. I could see families queuing at the ticket office. Some of them were already milling around the caravans and trucks, killing time before the show began. No one seemed to mind them being there.