JOHANN
My father Johann was born on 14 August 192I into a predominantly Afrikaans farming community approximately 130km from Cape Town. As the youngest of nine children, he lost his mother when he was only eight years old, which left the children to be raised by their formidable father. We have a singular photo of my grandfather with unusually large dinner-plate-sized hands. A Neanderthal-sized hand that once snapped the neck of a man he’d caught stealing, instantly killing him with a solitary, open-hand slap. A man who used a cattle whip with precision to instill discipline at mealtimes.
At the first opportunity, a few days before his sixteenth birthday, my father enlisted with the allied forces in their war against Nazi Germany. The war left an undeniable mark. An aged, dog-eared newspaper clipping found after his death, together with treasured bits of war memorabilia, told the story of a local hero wounded in the north African desert who could have been sent home but, as a platoon sergeant, had insisted on re-joining his men in Italy. Shortly after, while leading a night-time recon behind enemy lines, his foot was blown to bits. It took three days for the Allied front line to move up to where he’d hidden. By then the wound had turned gangrenous. About twenty operations later his leg needed to be amputated a few inches below his knee. This was my father’s story.
I don’t ever remember my father speaking about the horrors of war; he only spoke about having fun in Cairo, and of blowing up condoms into balloons for fun while watching a movie at a local movie theatre. Perhaps I was simply accustomed to his injury, but as far as I was concerned you wouldn’t notice that he was an amputee. I remember a regal, immaculately dressed father in flannel trousers and navy-blue blazer, finished off proudly with his regimental tie and shoes shined to mirror perfection. Physically, he seemed unaffected by his injury, and I have fond memories of my father wearing his military beret, eating freshly picked chillies from our garden while mowing the lawn or trimming hedges.
According to my mother, with the benefits he received while recovering from one of his many surgeries, he could have bought several properties in a suburb set aside for returning veterans. But at the time, he blew it all on treating the nursing staff to extravagant excursions and nights of drinking at the then-popular dance halls. However, I remember him as the friendliest man you could bump into on his regular walks. And while he continued to enjoy playing soccer, now as a goalkeeper, he was a man who didn’t enjoy socializing but rather preferred to avoid large gatherings. He seemed content being at home following the cricket on the radio and entertaining my sister and me by mimicking a barking British bulldog with his stump.
PAM
My mother Pam was born on 9 April 1934, the middle child of a family of eight children. Her father was an angry violent man and an active alcoholic who’d come home to a terrified family after work. As soon as he walked in the door, the violence started. Dinner would be set out beautifully on the table. No one was allowed to touch it until he sat down to test whether the food was up to his standards. Children were to remain in the bedroom until he was finished eating and had retired for the evening. The food seldom met his standards, meaning that dinner would more often than not be thrown on the kitchen floor for my grandmother Doris to clean up and discard. The children would hear it all, as they cowered together in their bedroom. They’d hear his anger gain momentum; hear their mother being verbally berated, psychologically battered, and ultimately beaten and raped.
Out of eight children young Pam, believing that her mother would quite possibly be killed, would run to the nearest police station in an attempt to save her. But this was the thirties, an era when a man’s right to discipline his family was accepted, rarely interfered with, and in some instances even admired. Movies from the fifties and sixties, such as the iconic James Bond series, continued to portray hitting your woman as manly. No one would get fed and often they would all go to bed terrified and hungry.
Doris, my grandmother, was never allowed to leave the house, not even for groceries. By now, most of my mother’s siblings were afraid of people, so young Pam took over the responsibility of shopping for groceries. When they had no money for food, she’d walk to relatives living sixteen and a half kilometres away in Woodstock. Only all too often she’d return empty-handed, without being offered the bus fare for the return trip.
Pam, like all her siblings, was required to leave home after completing only junior school. She was forced to leave while essentially still a child without a single change of clothing and no shoes, but only the dress and undies she was wearing. Barefoot and without a cent to her name, she once again made the long walk to Woodstock. There, she was able to rent a room from a cousin and ultimately start working.
When I was a teenager I often wondered if she was exaggerating, until I was old enough to evaluate the damage so clearly evidenced in her siblings. Mum and her favourite brother seemed to be the only ones that weren’t periodically institutionalized. Unfortunately, Clifford, a devout Jehovah’s Witness, tragically died in a car accident at the tender age of twenty-eight before I ever met him. Bizarrely, two of her brothers died while undergoing shock treatment for depression, one of whom was the cause of an extensive investigation due to a known pre-existing heart condition. One, aged thirty-four, died from alcohol-induced liver failure. As if her story couldn’t get any stranger, yet another brother, aged forty-five, died of a heart attack while institutionalized. I only got to know her remaining three siblings. The youngest, even to the untrained eye, clearly suffered from severe social anxiety, and the remaining two spent the rest of their lives circling through the revolving doors of various psychiatric wards. Pam took care of her mother and remaining siblings, arranging appointments, getting them to and from the hospital, and assisting with visitations. Even as a young, inexperienced man it became increasingly impossible to question the validity of my mother’s story.
SAMUEL GOES HIKING
Enough cigarettes later, and my journal was full of scribbles. It was late and our neighbours had stopped playing their music. Samuel would be up early, eager to get down to the beach to meet up with his newfound friends. I showered and went to sleep on the couch. I rarely, if ever, slept in a bed. Freshly pressed linen on an extra-length king-sized bed didn’t work for me. Likewise, I don’t dream. Well, maybe I just don’t remember, so I was a little perturbed the next morning by my thoughts of what could have been a dream or a nightmare. Images from my childhood were smashed together as if they were all a singular incident: several beatings, my clothes being set alight and my amazement at how quickly my shirt had ignited and burst into flames, being stripped naked and made to walk along a narrow and dangerous ledge several stories up, a cracked socket that dislodged my left eye, and of being urinated on as I attempted to protect myself in a fetal position.
Sure enough, early the next morning, one of Samuel’s newfound friends arrived. ‘Please, please, please . . . can Samuel come climbing with us?’ He was a lovely child, a mixture of German and Thai, with blue eyes, a tanned complexion, and thick curly hair. I’d met his parents and had already agreed. I got Samuel ready with a bit of a shoelace issue, but thankfully the scratchy sock debacle had disappeared. With kids, socks can be scratchy one day, but not the next. Armed with sunscreen, a bottle of water and some snacks, the three of us walked back to their bungalow. I thanked his parents and let them know how much Samuel was looking forward to their day’s adventure.
On the way back I stopped at a cafe where the owner knew my name. After ordering my usual coffee, I opened my journal. I didn’t feel like writing, so I rather hurriedly jotted down my thoughts. None of what I’d dreamed came as a surprise. I still bore the physical scars as a reminder of some of them, but they weren’t the sum of my childhood. Nowadays, some may find these incidents disturbing, but as far as I was concerned, I’d had a fairly happy, uneventful childhood. That said, I also knew that I was to some extent living in denial, trying my best to avoid a secret that relentlessly raised its head in moments of intimacy.
MY BIRTH
Johann was smitten for life after meeting Pam at her evening job. During the day she worked in a clothing factory as a seamstress, and in the evenings as an usherette for a local movie theatre on Main Road, Woodstock. I was told he relentlessly pursued her until she agreed to marry him. He was, after all, her senior by thirteen years. And mum made no bones about not loving him; according to her, she only married him because she felt sorry for him. Perhaps he believed that with time she would grow to love him as much as he loved her. I never quite understood the nature of their relationship. Pam was decidedly incapable of showing any form of affection. But I suspect that she chose my father because he was the gentlest man she could ever hope to meet. I believe that she chose my father because she felt safe with him, and she knew that he would never even raise his voice, let alone be physically violent. He never reacted, no matter what she threw at him. She would publicly disagree with almost everything he said, belittle and question his intelligence, consistently adding that she never loved him in front of my sister and me. He’d absorb all her verbal abuse and at worst he’d retire to their bedroom.
Growing up, I often wished my father would stand up to my mother. So much so, I vowed I’d never let anyone speak to me that way. Then, I didn’t understand the difference between agreeable and assertive personalities. I later discovered that there are easier, softer ways of being assertive and it often requires more strength to simply walk away. Fortunately, my father seemed more than content to just be with her and to be a part of her life. I suspect that my father knew her rage had little or nothing to do with him. And while she may have believed that she was incapable of love, she was, in her way, always there for him. She dealt with the ghastly nightmares which had him thrashing around in his sleep fighting an imaginary enemy, during which she’d often get accidentally knocked about. She never questioned or attacked him about his nightmares. She understood that they were part of being married to a war veteran. Sadly, she knew all too well what real violence entailed and continued to share his bed till the very end.
Struggling to carry to term, Pam experienced several miscarriages before finally giving birth to my sister Abigail, and I followed eighteen months later. My mother managed to carry me for seven months and I was born in February 1958. Naturally, I should have been incubated, but because the nursing home was experiencing an epidemic of sorts they felt I’d have a better chance at home. Still, I only had a slim chance and I later learned that neither the doctors nor the nursing staff had expected me to survive. Episodic memory does not develop until after age four, so I have zero recollection of my first two years. However, I grew up listening to a story – which my mother seemed comfortable sharing – about a shoebox, an elderly neighbour, and a red potion. I was small enough to fit in a shoebox and on my first night, I was left outside with the trash behind our tiny semi-detached home. I learned how an elderly neighbour, alarmed by my continuous wailing, rescued me and returned me a few hours later covered in some kind of red potion. Dad worked at night as a proofreader for the morning paper so I’m guessing that he wasn’t aware of what was going on, or that my mother was quite likely suffering from a
severe case of postpartum depression. To this day, she freely admits to being incapable of nurturing me. She desperately needed to sleep, and she had lost previous children. Because of this, and what she’d been told at the hospital, she didn’t expect me to live.
As previously stated, I have no memory of my first few years, only of the repetitive stories I grew up listening to. The stories progressed to nightly excursions to a nearby park as a toddler, where I’d often be spotted by neighbours returning from a night out. The earliest memory I have is of my sister Abigail showing me how to drag a chair from our kitchen to open the front door while mum was walking around mumbling her mantras to herself:
‘I can’t feel, I don’t feel.’ . . . ‘I want to die.’ . . . ‘I don’t look after the sick.’ . . . ‘I’m wicked and I’m going straight to hell.’
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