The Power of One

EIGHT

It was just after ten in the evening when the train puffed into Barberton station. The conductor woke me before we were due to arrive. My head was dizzy with sleep and mussed up with the events of the day.

Hennie had put me on the train, his mood a mixture of concern for me and the need to get back to the action, where he was such an important cog in the sad machinery of the day. ‘You eat something, you hear. Here’s a tickey to buy a cool drink,’ he said handing me a tiny silver coin.

‘I have money, Meneer Venter.’

But he insisted I take the threepenny bit. ‘Go on, take it, take it, it is only a blêrrie tickey!’ he blustered.

Fortunately he didn’t have to hang around too long, we had only just made it to the Barberton train in time. As we departed with a great chuffing sound that seemed too big for the little coffee-pot engine, Hennie shouted: ‘I will tell Hoppie Groenewald you behaved like a proper Boer, a real white man!’

I climbed down the steps of the carriage onto the gravel platform of Barberton station, struggling with my suitcase which had now become quite heavy with Big Hettie’s tin. I had left its contents untouched, too tired and bewildered to eat. The platform was crowded with people hurrying up and down, heads jerking this way and that, greeting each other and generally carrying on the way people do when a train arrives. My granpa didn’t seem to be amongst them. I decided to sit on my suitcase and wait, too tired to think of anything else I might do. I must have been crying without knowing it, maybe it was just from being tired or something. I had been in worse jams than this one, and I expected any moment that I would hear my nanny’s big laugh followed by a series of tut-tuts as she swept me into her apron. That’s when everything would be all right again.

A lady was approaching, although I could only see her dimly through my tears. She bent down beside me and crushed me to her bony bosom. ‘My darling, my poor darling,’ she wept, ‘everything will be the same again, I promise.’

My mother was here! She was alive. Thin as ever, but not dead from dysentery and blackwater fever.

Yet I think we both knew, everything would never be the same again.

‘Where is my nanny?’ I asked, rubbing the tears from my eyes.

‘Come, darling, Pastor Mulvery is waiting in his car to take us home to your granpa. What a big boy you are now that you are six, much too big for a nanny!’

The hollow feeling inside me had begun to grow and I could hear the loneliness birds cackling away, their oily wings flapping gleefully as they sat on their dark stone nests.

Clearing her throat and reaching for my suitcase, my mother straightened up. ‘Come, darling, Pastor Mulvery is going to take us home to your grandfather.’

Her remark about my not needing a nanny now that I was six struck me so forcibly that it felt like one of the Judge’s clouts across the mouth. My nanny, my darling beloved nanny was gone and I was six. The two pieces of information tumbled around in my head like two dogs tearing at each other as they fought, rolling over in the dust.

My mother had taken my hand and was leading me to a big grey Plymouth parked under a street lamp beside a peppercorn tree. A fat, balding man stepped out of the car as we approached. His top teeth jutted out at an angle, and peeped out from under his lip as though looking to see if the coast were clear so that they might escape. Pastor Mulvery seemed aware of this and he smiled in a quick flash so as not to allow his teeth to make a dash for it. He reached for my suitcase, taking it from my mother. ‘Praise the Lord, sister, He has delivered the boy safely to His loved ones.’ His voice was as soft and high-pitched as a woman’s.

‘Yes, praise His precious name,’ my mother replied. I had never heard her talk like this before. It was quite obvious to me that the concentration camp must have had something to do with it. My finely tuned ear could hear all sorts of crazy bits and pieces going on behind her words.

Pastor Mulvery stuck his hand out. ‘Welcome, son. The Lord has answered our prayers and brought you home safely.’ I took his hand which was warm and slightly damp.

‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, my voice hardly above a whisper. It felt strange to be speaking in English. I climbed into the back seat of the car next to my mother. All the loneliness birds had become one big loneliness bird on a big stone nest and I could feel the heaviness of the stone egg as it hatched inside me.

Granpa Chook was dead, Hoppie had to go and fight Adolf Hitler and maybe he would never come back again, Big Hettie was dead and now my beloved nanny was gone. Like Pik Botha, my mother seemed to have entered into a very peculiar relationship with the Lord that was bound to create problems. My life was a mess.

We drove through the town which had street lights and tarred roads. It was late and only a few cars buzzed down the wide main street. We passed a square filled with big old flamboyant trees. The street was lined with shops one after the other, McClymonts, Gentleman’s Outfitters, J. W. Winter, Chemist, The Savoy Café, Barberton Hardware Company. We turned up one street and passed a grand building called the Impala Hotel which had big wide steps and seemed to have lots of people in it. The sound of a concertina could be heard as Pastor Mulvery slowed the Plymouth down to a crawl.

‘The devil is busy tonight, sister. We must pray for their souls, pray that they may see the glory that is Him and be granted everlasting life,’ he said in his girlish voice.

My mother sighed. ‘There is so much to be done before He comes again and takes us to His glory.’ She turned to me. ‘We have a lovely Sunday school at the Apostolic Faith Mission, you are not too young to meet the Lord, to be born again, my boy. The Lord has a special place in His heart for His precious children.’

‘Hallelujah, praise His precious name, we go to meet Him!’ Pastor Mulvery said.

‘Can we meet Him tomorrow please? I am too tired tonight,’ I asked.

They both laughed and I felt better. The laughter that rang from my mother was the old familiar one, the concentration camp hadn’t stolen it. ‘We’re going straight home, darling, you must be completely exhausted,’ she said gently.

I had almost dropped my camouflage, but now it was back again. Big Hettie had said Pik was a born-again Christian and also that he belonged to the Apostolic Faith Mission. Her tone had implied that both situations left a great deal to be desired. How had my mother come to this? Who was this strange man with escaping teeth? What was this new language and who exactly was the Lord?’

I had seen my return to Granpa and to Nanny first as a means of urgent escape from Adolf Hitler and then, when Hoppie had calmed my fear of his imminent arrival, the continuation of my earlier life on the farm. Living in a small town hadn’t meant anything to me. Living with silly old Granpa and beautiful Nanny had meant everything. My mother had been a nice part of a previous existence, though not an essential one; she was a frail and nervous woman and Nanny had taken up the caring, laughing, scolding and soothing role mothers play in other cultures. My mother suffered a lot from headaches. In the morning when I was required to do a reading lesson and had come to sit on the cool, polished red cement verandah next to her favourite bentwood rocking chair eager to show her my progress, she would often say: ‘Not today, darling, I have a splitting headache.’

I would find Nanny and I would read my book to her and then she would bring a copy of Outspan, a magazine that used to come once a month and she would point to pictures that showed women doing things and I would read what it said about the pictures and translate them into Zulu. Her mouth would fall open and she would groan in amazement at the goings on. ‘Oh, oh, oh, I think it is very hard to be a white woman,’ she would sigh, clapping her hands.

I guessed that was why my mother was always getting splitting headaches, because she was a white woman and like Nanny said, it was a very hard thing to be.

We drew up beside a house which sat no more than twenty feet from the road. A low stone wall marked the front garden and steps led up to the stoep which ran the full width of the house. The place was only dimly lit by a distant street lamp so that further details were impossible to make out in the ghoulish darkness. Two squares of filtered orange light, each from a window in a separate part of the house, glowed through drawn curtains, shedding no real light but giving the house two eyes. The front door made a nose and the steps to it a mouth. Even in the dark it didn’t seem to be an unfriendly sort of place. Behind the funny face would be my scraggy old granpa and he would tell about Nanny.

Pastor Mulvery said he wouldn’t come in and he praised the Lord again for my delivery into the bosom of my loved ones and said that I would be a fine addition to the Lord’s little congregation at the Apostolic Faith Mission Sunday school. My mother also praised His precious name and it was becoming very apparent to me that the Lord was a pretty important person around these parts.

We watched the red brake lights of the big Plymouth twinkle and then disappear down a dip in the road, for we seemed to be on top of a rise. ‘What a precious man,’ my mother sighed.

Lugging my case in front of me with both hands I followed her up the dark steps. Her shoes made a hollow sound on the wooden verandah and the screen door squeaked loudly on its heavy snap-back hinges. She propped it open with the toe of her brown brogue and opened the front door. Sharp light spilled over us and down the front steps, grateful to escape the restrictions of the small square room.

This room, at least, was not much altered from the dark little parlour on the farm. The same heavy, overstuffed lounge and three high-backed armchairs in faded brocade, with polished arms and ball and claw legs of dark lacquered wood, the backs of the lounge and chairs scolloped by antimacassars, took up most of the room. The glass bookcase still contained the red and gold leather-bound set of the complete works of Charles Dickens and the two large blue and gold volumes of The Invasion of the Crimea. The old grandfather clock stood in a new position beside a door leading out of the room into another part of the house, and it was nice to see the steady old brass pendulum swinging away quietly in its glass-fronted cabinet. On one wall was my granpa’s stuffed Kudu head, the horns of the giant antelope brushing the ceiling. Above and on either side of the glass bookcase hung two narrow oil paintings, one showing a scarlet and the other an almost identical yellow long-stemmed rose. Both pictures were framed in the same flat brown varnished frames and were the work of my grandmother who had died giving birth to my mother. The paintings had been rendered on sheets of tin and the paint had flecked in parts leaving dull pewter-coloured spots where the backgrounds of salmon and green had lifted. Alone on one wall was a hand-coloured steel engraving in a heavy walnut frame showing hundreds of Zulu dead and a handful of Welsh soldiers standing over them with bayonets fixed. They stood proud, looking towards heaven, each with a boot and putteed leg resting on the body of a near-naked savage. I had always thought how very clean and smart they still looked after having fought at close quarters with the Zulu hordes all night, each soldier seemingly responsible, if you counted the bodies and the soldiers in the picture, for the death of fifty-two Zulus. The caption under the painting, etched in a mechanical copperplate, read: The morning after the massacre. British honour is restored at Rorke’s Drift, January, 1879. Brave men all.

The tired old zebra skin which, along with everything else, I had known all my life covered the floor and the ball and claw legs of the lounge suite had been placed over the spots where they had worn the hair off the hide in their previous parlour existence. The only change in the room, for even the worn red velvet curtains had come along, was a small, round-shouldered wireless in brown bakelite which rested on the top of the bookcase where the gramophone had previously stood.

Perhaps only the outside of things had changed and the inside, like this room, largely remained the same. For a moment my spirits lifted. Just then my granpa walked into the room, tall and straight as a bluegum pole. His pipe was hooked over the brown tobacco stain on the corner of his bottom lip and he stood framed by the doorway, his baggy khaki pants tied up as ever with a piece of rope, his shirtsleeves rolled up to below the elbow on his collarless shirt. He looked unchanged. He took two puffs from his pipe so that the smoke swirled around his untidy mop of white hair and curled past his long nose. ‘There’s a good lad,’ he said. His pale blue eyes shone wet, and he blinked quickly as he looked down at me. The smoke cleared around his head as he raised his arms slightly and spread his hands palms upwards as though to indicate the room and the house and the predicament all in one sad gesture of apology.

‘Newcastle’s disease, they had to kill all the Orpingtons,’ he said.

‘They killed Granpa Chook,’ I said softly.

My mother put her hand on my shoulder and moved me past my granpa. ‘That’s right, darling, they killed all Granpa’s chooks. Come along now, it’s way past your bedtime.’

I hadn’t meant to say anything about Granpa Chook. My granpa, after all, had never known him. It just came out. One chicken thing on top of another chicken thing. He had been enormously fond of those black Orpingtons. Even Nanny had said they must be Zulu birds because they stood so black and strong and the roosters were like elegantly feathered Zulu generals. She had never commented on Granpa Chook’s motley appearance. While Nanny had never seen him at the height of his powers, like Inkosi-Inkosikazi she knew him to be different, an exception, a magic chicken of great power who had been conjured up by the old monkey to watch over me. Only on one occasion had she ventured the opinion that it was just like the old wizard to choose a lowly Kaffir chicken and a Shangaan at that, when, to her mind, he could have dignified the relationship with one of Granpa’s magnificent black Orpington roosters. If a chicken was to become home to the soul of a great warrior, why then could he not be an exemplary example of chickenhood? She had tut-tutted for a while and then, shaking her bandanna’d head, said: ‘Who can know the way of a snake on a steep rock?’ Whatever that was supposed to mean.

Nanny. Where was she now? Was she dead? Tomorrow I must speak urgently to my granpa. For, while grown-ups never talk to small kids about death, my granpa would tell me for sure. I would ask him when I returned his shilling to him in the morning.

I awakened early as always, and padded softly through the sleeping house to find myself in the kitchen. The black cast-iron stove was smaller than the one on the farm and, to my surprise, when I spit-licked my finger before dabbing it on one of the hot plates, it was cold. On the farm it had never been allowed to go out. The two little orphan kitchen maids Dee and Dum had slept on mats in the kitchen and it had been their job to stoke the embers back to life if the stove showed any signs of going out. This kitchen smelt vaguely of carbolic soap and disinfectant and I missed the warm smell of humans, coffee beans and the aroma of the huge old cast-iron soup pot which plopped and steamed on the back of the stove in a never-ending cycle of new soup bones added and old ones taken out. In the country food is a continuous preoccupation, not simply a pause to refuel. Country people know the sweat that goes into an ear of corn, a pail of milk, a churn of butter, bread warm from the oven and the eggs and bacon which sizzle in the breakfast frying pan. Food is hard earned and requires the proper degree of respect. This stove was bare but for the presence of a large blue and white speckled enamel kettle which looked new and temporary.

The doorway from the kitchen led out onto a wide back stoep which, unlike the front of the house, was level with the ground and looked out into a very large and well tended garden. The fragrance of hundreds of rose blossoms filled the crisp dawn air and I observed that stone terraces, planted with rose bushes, stretched up and away from me. Each terrace ended in a series of six steps and at the top of each set of steps an arbour of climbing roses bent over the pathway. Blossoms of white, pink, yellow and orange, each arboured trellis a different colour, cascaded to the ground in colourful loops. The path running up the centre of the garden looked like the sort of tunnel Alice might well have found in Wonderland. Six huge old trees, of kinds I had not seen before, were planted one to each terrace. It was a well-settled garden and I wondered how it came to be Granpa’s. Nothing on the farm had ever seemed to be well settled except the bits which had broken down forever.

I now saw that our house was situated a little way up a large hill, which accounted for the steps in the front and the terraces behind. Beyond a dark line of mulberry trees at the far end of the garden and a stone wall enclosure which stretched halfway across the last terrace, the hill of virgin rock and bush rose up steeply. It wasn’t an unfriendly-looking hill and its slopes were dotted with aloe, each tall, shaggy plant carrying a candelabra of fiery, poker-like blossoms. A crown of rounded boulders clustered, like currants on a cupcake, at its very top.

As I walked up the path, I saw that each terrace carried beds of roses set into neatly trimmed lawn, though the last terrace was different. On one side it contained the stone wall enclosure too tall for me to see over; on the other it was planted with hundreds of freshly grafted rose stock behind which, acting as a windbreak, stood the line of mulberry trees.

Except for the strange and beautiful trees and whatever might lie behind the stone wall, no plants other than roses appeared to grow in this very tidy garden. Only the fences on either side testified to the sub-tropical climate. Quince and guava, lemon, orange, avocado, pawpaw, mango and pomegranate mixed with Pride of India, poinsettia, hibiscus and, covering a large dead tree, a brilliant shower of bougainvillea. At the base of the trees grew hydrangea, agapanthus and red and pink canna. It was as though the local trees and plants had come to gawk at the elegant rose garden. They stood on the edges of the garden like colourful country hicks, jostling and pushing each other, too polite to intrude any further.

I decided to explore behind the stone wall a little later and ducked under the canopy of dark mulberry leaves. The ground under the trees had been completely shaded from the sun and was bare, slightly damp and covered with fallen fruit. As I walked the moist berries squashed underfoot, staining the skin between my toes a deep purple. I hadn’t eaten since lunch with Big Hettie the previous day, and I began to feast hungrily on the luscious berries. The plumpest, purplest of them broke away from their tiny slender stalks at the slightest touch. Soon the palms of my hands were stained purple and my lips must have been the same from cramming the delicious berries into my mouth. Above me the birds, feeding on the berries, squabbled and chirped their heads off, the leaves and smaller branches shaking with their carry-on.

Emerging from the line of mulberry trees clear of the garden, the first of the aloe plants stood almost at my feet, its spikes of orange blossom tinged with yellow two feet above my head. In front of me, stretching upwards to the sky, the African hillside rose unchanged, while behind me, embroidered on its lap, tizzy and sentimental as a painting on a chocolate box, lay the rose garden.

Without thinking I had started to climb, skirting the rocks and the dark patches of scrub and thorn bush. In half an hour I had reached the summit and scrambling to the top of a huge, weather-rounded boulder I looked about. Behind me the hills tumbled on, accumulating height as they gathered momentum until, in the far distance, they became proper mountains. Far to my left an aerial cableway strung across the foothills into the mountains remained motionless, work had not yet started for the day. Below me, cradled in the foothills, lay the small town. It looked out across a vast and beautiful valley which stretched thirty miles over the lowveld to a slash of deep purple on the pale skyline, an escarpment which rose two thousand feet to the grasslands of the highveld.

It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. The sun had just risen and was not yet warm enough to lap the dew from the grass, but it was sharp enough to polish the air. I could see the world below me but the world below could not see me. I had found my private place; how much better, it seemed to me, than the old mango tree beside the hostel playground. Above me, flying no higher than a small boy’s kite, a sparrowhawk circled, searching the quilted backyards below for a mother hen careless enough to let one of her plump chicks stray beyond hasty recovery to the safety of her broody undercarriage. Death, in a vortex of feathered air, was about to strike out of a sharp blue early morning sky.

Chimneys were beginning to smoke as domestic servants arrived from the black shanty town hidden behind a buttress of one of the foothills to make the white man’s breakfast. The sound of roosters, spasmodic when I had started my climb, now gathered chorus and became more strident and urgent as they sensed the town start to wake. Part of the town was still in the shadow cast by the hills, but I could see it was criss-crossed with jacaranda-lined streets. My eyes followed a long line of purple which led beyond the houses clustered on the edge of the town to a square of dark buildings surrounded by a high wall perhaps a mile into the valley. The walls facing me stood some three storeys high and were studded with at least a hundred and fifty tiny dark windows all of the same size. The buildings, too, were built in a square around a centre quadrangle of hard, brown earth. On each corner of the outside wall was a neat little tower capped with a pyramid of corrugated iron which glinted in the early morning sun. I had never seen a prison, nor had I even imagined one, but there is a race memory in man which instinctively knows of these things. The architecture of misery has an unmistakable look and feel about it.

My granpa, who was an early riser, would be out and about soon and it took no more than twenty minutes to clamber down the hill, back under the green canopy of mulberry trees and into the rose garden. He was cutting away at the arbour on the third terrace, snipping and then pulling a long strand of roses from the overhang and dropping it on a heap on the pathway. He looked up as I approached down the corridor of roses.

‘Morning, lad. Been exploring, have you?’ he snipped at another string of roses and pulled it away from the trellis. ‘Mrs Butt is an untidy old lady, if you let her have her way and don’t trim her pretty locks, she’s apt to get out of control,’ he announced cheerfully. I said nothing. Much of what my granpa said was to himself and asking questions was no use. I was soon to learn the names of every rose in the garden and Mrs Butt, it turned out, was the name of this particular cascade of tiny pink roses.

I pulled the lining of my shorts’ pocket inside out and carefully unclipped the large safety pin which held Mevrou’s doek. Crouching on the ground at the old man’s feet, I unknotted the grubby cloth to reveal Granpa’s shilling, the threepenny bit Hennie had given me on my departure from Kaapmuiden and my folded ten-shilling note. I removed Granpa’s shilling and once again knotted the cloth and pinned it back into the pocket lining of my trousers. ‘This is your change from the tackies, Granpa,’ I said, rising and holding the gleaming shilling out to him. He paused, holding the secateurs like a sword above his head. ‘Here, take it, it’s your shilling, isn’t it,’ I repeated. He reached down for the coin and dropped it into the pocket of his khaki trousers. ‘There’s a good lad, that will buy me tobacco for a week.’ I thought he sounded quite pleased so I took a deep breath and came out with it.

‘Granpa, where’s Nanny?’ He moved back to the roses and now he turned slowly and looked down at me. Then he walked the few paces to the steps leading up to the terrace and slowly sat down on the top step.

‘Sit down, lad.’ He patted the space beside him on the step. I walked over and sat down beside him. He removed his pipe from his pocket, tapped it gently on the step below him and a plug of ash fell from the pipe. He blew through the pipe twice before taking his tobacco pouch from his pocket and refilling it. My granpa was not one for hurrying things so I waited with my hands cupped under my chin. Lighting a wax match on his thigh, he started at last to stoke up, puffing away at the pipe until the blue tobacco smoke swirled about his head. For a long time we sat there, my granpa looking out at nothing, his pipe making a gurgly noise when he drew on it, and me looking at the roof of the house which had once been painted but now only had patches of faded red clinging to the rusted corrugated iron. Coming up the hill in front of the house I could hear a truck, its low gear rasping in the struggle to get up the hill, then a pause as it reached the top and slipped into a higher gear, relieved the climb was over.

‘Life is all beginnings and ends. Nothing stays the same, lad,’ my granpa said at last. Then he puffed at his pipe and seemed to be examining his fingernails which were broken and dirty from gardening. ‘Parting, losing the thing we love the most, that’s the whole business of life, that’s what it’s mostly about.’

Shit, I know that already, I thought to myself. Then my heart sank. Was he trying to tell me Nanny was dead?

He was doing his looking-into-nothing trick again and his pipe had gone out. ‘She was a soft and gentle woman. Africa was much too harsh a place for such a trembling little sparrow.’ With this he struck another match and touched it to his pipe. Puff, puff, swirl, swirl, puff, puff, gurgle, but he did not continue. While it didn’t sound a bit like big, fat Nanny, my granpa was always a bit vague about people and the sentiment seemed appropriate enough, so I waited patiently for him to continue. Taking his pipe from his mouth, he used it to indicate the rose garden around us. ‘I built it and planned it for her, the roses, to a rosebud, were the ones which grew in her father’s vicarage in her Yorkshire village, the trees too, elm and oak, spruce and walnut.’ He replaced the pipe in his mouth, but it had gone out again and he had to light it a third time. This time he cupped his hands around the bowl and gave it a really good stoking up so that at one stage his head disappeared completely behind the clouds of blue smoke. I had already observed that my granpa could waste a great deal of time with his pipe when he didn’t want to give my mother an answer or needed time to think. So I waited and thought it best to say nothing, though none of it made sense. Nanny, who discussed everything with me, had never once talked about the roses in the farm garden, and I knew for a fact that she came from a village in Zululand near the Tugela river. While she had often talked about the crops and the song of the wind in the green corn, of pumpkins ripening in the sun which were as big as a chief’s beer pots, and of the sweet tsamma melons which grew wild near the banks of the river, she had never, even once, mentioned anything about roses to me.

After another long while of looking into nothing my granpa continued. ‘When she died giving birth to your mother, I couldn’t stay on here in her rose garden.’ He looked down at me as though seeking my approval. ‘Sometimes it’s best just to walk away from your memories, just put one memory in front of the other and walk them right out of your head.’

I was beginning to realise that Nanny had nothing to do with my granpa’s conversation.

‘Her brother Richard had come out from England to try to cure his arthritis and decided to stay on. A grand lad, Richard, and a good rose man. In thirty years he hasn’t changed a thing. When the roses grew old he replaced them with their own kind.’ He pointed to a standard rose on the terrace below him. From it rose two perfect long-stemmed blossoms, the edges of their delicate orange petals tipped with red. ‘I’ll vouch that is the only Imperial Sunset left in Africa,’ he said with deep satisfaction. He tapped the bowl of his pipe on the step until the smoking ash fell from it. Then, picking up the garden shears where they lay on the step below, he rose and turned to look about him. ‘Now Dick’s dead I’ve come home to her rose garden. The pain is gone but the roses, the sweet Yorkshire roses, not a day older, bloom forever on.’

They were the most words I could recall having come from my granpa in one sitting. While he hadn’t answered my urgent questions about Nanny, I could see that he had said something out loud that must have been bouncing around in his head for a long time.

‘There’s a good lad, off you go and play now.’ He moved over to resume the tidying up of old Mrs Butt. I rose from the steps and started to walk towards the house. Smoke was coming from the chimney and breakfast couldn’t be too far away. The clicking of the shears suddenly ceased. ‘Lad!’ he called after me. I turned to look at him, his shaggy old head was almost touching the canopy of roses covering the arbour. ‘You must ask your mother about your nanny, it’s got something to do with the damn fool religion she’s caught up in.’

Imagine my delight when I walked into the kitchen to find our two little kitchen maids Dee and Dum. They saw me enter and with a squeal of pleasure rushed over to embrace me, each of them holding a hand and dancing me around the kitchen. ‘You have grown. Your hair is still shaved. We must wash your clothes. Your mouth is stained from the fruit. You must eat. We will look after you now that Nanny has gone. Yes, yes, we will be your nanny, we have learned all the songs.’ The two little girls were beside themselves with joy. It felt good, so very good to have them with me. While they had only been on the periphery of my life with Nanny, who had scolded them constantly and called them silly, empty-headed Shangaan girls but loved them anyway, I now realised how important they were to my past. They were continuity in a world that had been shattered and changed and was still changing. Now that my mother was following the Lord and could no longer be relied upon, my granpa and the two girls were my only constants.

‘Me, Dum,’ one of them said in English, tapping her chest with one hand while covering her mouth with the other to hide her giggle.

‘Me, Dee,’ the second one echoed, the whites of her eyes showing her delight as they lit up her small black face. They were identical twins and were reminding me of the names I had given them when I was much smaller. It had started as Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee and had simply become Dum and Dee. I laughed as they showed off their English.

The room smelt of fresh coffee and Dee moved over to a tall, brown enamel coffee pot on the back of the stove and Dum brought a mug and placed it on the table together with a hard rusk and then walked over to a coolbox on the stoep for a jug of milk. She returned with the milk and Dee poured the fresh coffee into the cup, both of them concentrating on their tasks, silent for the time being. Placing the pot back on the stove, Dee ladled two carefully measured spoons of sugar into the mug of steaming coffee, using the same spoon to stir it. It was a labour of love, an expression of their devotion. Dum brought me a riempie stool and placed it in the middle of the kitchen. I sat down and Dee placed the mug on the floor between my legs so that I could sit on the little rawhide chair and dunk the rock-hard rusk into it just the way I had always done on the farm. The two girls then sat on the polished cement floor in front of me, their legs tucked away under their skirts.

On the farm they had simply worn a single length of thin cotton cloth wrapped around their bodies and tied over one shoulder. Their wrists and ankles had been banded in bangles of copper and brass wire which jingled as they walked. Now these rings were gone and over their slim, pre-pubescent twelve-year-old bodies they wore identical sleeveless shifts of striped navy mattress cotton which reached almost to their ankles.

While I dunked and sipped at my coffee we chatted away in Shangaan. They asked me about the night water and I told them that Inkosi-Inkosikazi’s magic had worked and the problem was solved. They clucked and sighed about this for a while and we then talked about the crops and about the men who came in a big truck and lit a huge bonfire and killed and burned all the black chickens. The smell of burning feathers and roasted chickens had lingered for three days, but no one was allowed to eat the meat. Such a waste had never been seen before. How my granpa had sat on the stoep at the farm for a day and a night watching the fire die down to nothing, silently puffing at his pipe, leaving the food brought to him and letting the coffee beside him grow cold.

At last we reached silence, for the subject of Nanny had been standing on the edge of the conversation waiting to be introduced all along and they knew it could no longer be delayed.

‘Where is she who is Nanny?’ I asked at last, putting it in the formal manner so they could not avoid the question. Both girls lowered their heads and brought their hands up to cover their mouths.

‘Ah, ah, ah!’ they shook their heads slowly.

‘Who forbids the answering?’

‘We may not say,’ Dee volunteered, and they both let out a miserable sigh.

‘Is it the mistress?’ I asked, already knowing the answer. Both looked up at me pleadingly, tears in their eyes.

‘She is much changed since she has returned,’ Dum said.

‘She had made us take off our bangles of womanhood and these dresses make our bodies very hot,’ Dee added with a sad little sniff. Both rose from the floor and moved over to the stove where they stood with their backs to me, sobbing.

‘I will ask her myself,’ I said, sounding more brave than I felt inside. ‘At least tell me, is she who is Nanny alive?’ They both turned to face me, relieved that there was something they could say without betraying my mother’s instructions.

‘She is alive!’ they exclaimed together, their eyes wide. Using their knuckles to smudge away their tears they smiled at me, once again happy that they could bring me some good news.

‘We will make hot water and wash you.’ Dum reached down beside the stove for an empty four-gallon paraffin tin from which the top had been cut, the edges hammered flat and a wire handle added, to turn it into a container for hot water.

‘See, the water comes to us along an iron snake which comes into the house,’ Dee said, moving over to the sink and turning on the tap.

‘I am too old to be washed by silly girls,’ I said indignantly. ‘Put on the water and I will bath myself.’ Apart from wiping my face and hands with a damp flannel, my mother had let me climb into bed without washing, and I hadn’t really washed since the shower with Hoppie at Gravelotte.

The girls showed me a small room leading off the back stoep in which stood an old tin bath. Carrying the four-gallon paraffin tin between them, they poured the scalding water into the bath. Then they fought over who should turn on the cold tap positioned over the tub. Dum won and Dee, pretending to sulk, left the bathroom. She returned shortly with a freshly washed shirt and pair of khaki shorts. I ordered them to both leave the room. Giggling their heads off, they bumped and jostled each other out of the small, dark bathroom.

That was a bath and a half, I can tell you. It soaked a lot of misery away. The thought that Nanny was still alive cheered me considerably and made the task of asking my mother about her a lot easier.

After breakfast my mother retired to her sewing room and several people turned up to see her. They were women from the town and I could hear her talking to them about clothes. When I questioned the maids about this, they said, ‘The missus has become a maker of garments for other missus who come all the time to be fitted.’ On the farm my mother had often been busy making things on her Singer machine, and had always made my granpa’s and my clothes. Now she seemed to be doing it for other people as well.

Apart from a garden boy who came in to help my granpa, Dum and Dee were our only servants. They cleaned, scrubbed, polished, did the washing and prepared most of the food, though my mother did the cooking and the general bossing around like always. The maids slept in a small room built onto the garden shed behind the enclosed stone wall, which also housed the kitchen garden and an empty fowl run, the thought of chickens being too much for my granpa to contemplate.

At the time I was not concerned about how we lived, though later I was to realise that making enough to get by was a pretty precarious business in the little household. My granpa sold young rose trees and my mother worked all day and sometimes long into the night as a dressmaker. Between making dresses and serving the Lord she didn’t have much time for anything else.

I whiled away the morning and after lunch gathered up enough courage to venture into my mother’s sewing room. She had a new Singer machine with an electric foot treadle. It wasn’t like the old one where you had to treadle it up and down to make it work. You simply put your foot on the little electric footrest and the sewing machine hummed away stitching happily. Dee had given me a cup of tea to take in to my mother and I had hardly spilled any by the time I handed it to her.

My mother had looked up and smiled as I entered. ‘I was just thinking to myself, I would die for a cup of tea, and here you are,’ she said as I gave her the cup. She poured the spilt tea in the saucer back into the cup and then took a sip, closing her eyes. ‘Heaven, it’s pure heaven, there’s nothing like a good cup of tea.’ She sounded just like she used to before she went away. For a moment I thought all the carry-on with Pastor Mulvery was exaggerated in my mind because I knew I had been very tired. I sat on one of the chairs and waited. ‘Come in for a bit of a chat, have you? You must have so much to tell me about your school and the nice little friends you made.’ She leaned over and kissed me on the top of the head. ‘I tell you what. Tonight, after supper, when your grandfather listens to the wireless, we’ll sit in the kitchen and have a good old chin-wag. You can tell me all about it. I’m dying to hear, really. Granpa tells me fat old Mevrou Vorster who we sold the farm to says you speak Afrikaans like a Boer. I suppose that’s nice, dear, though thank goodness you won’t need to talk it in this town. Dr Henny wrote to say you’d got into some sort of scrape with your ear. Is that all right now?’ I nodded and she continued, ‘I’m better now, quite better. The Lord reached down and touched me and I was healed. It is a glorious experience when you walk in the light of the Lord.’ She stopped and took a sip from her cup.

‘Mother, where is Nanny?’ I asked, unable to contain myself any longer. There was a long pause and my mother took another sip and looked down into her lap.

Finally she looked up at me and said sweetly, ‘Why, darling, your nanny has gone back to Zululand.’

‘Did you send her there, Mother?’ My voice was on the edge of tears.

‘I prayed and the Lord told me, He guided me in my decision.’ She put down her cup and fed a piece of material under the needle, brought the tension foot down onto it and, feeding the cloth skilfully through her fingers, zizzed away with the electric motor. Then, with a deep sigh, she stopped. Lifting the tension foot, she snipped the cotton thread and looked down at me. ‘I tried to bring her to the Lord but she hardened her heart against Him.’ She looked up at the ceiling as though asking for confirmation. ‘I can’t tell you the nights I spent on my knees asking for guidance.’ She looked down at me again, and pursing her lips threw her head back. ‘Your nanny would not remove her heathen charms and amulets and she insisted on wearing her bangles and ankle rings. I prayed and prayed and then the Lord sent me a sign I was looking for. Your grandfather told me about the visit of that awful old witchdoctor and that it had been at your nanny’s instigation.’ Her face grew angry, ‘That disgusting, filthy, evil old man was tampering with the mind of my five-year-old son! God is not mocked! How could I let a black heathen woman riddled with superstition bring up my only son?’ She picked up her cup and took a polite sip. ‘Your nanny was possessed by the devil,’ she said finally, satisfied the discussion was over.

I tried very hard not to cry. Inside me the loneliness birds were laying eggs thirteen to the dozen. Forcing back the tears, I got down from my chair and stood looking directly at my mother. ‘The Lord is a shithead!’ I shouted and rushed from the room.

I ran through the Alice in Wonderland tunnels and under the mulberry trees to the freedom of the hill, my sobs making it difficult to climb. At last I reached the safety of the large boulder and allowed myself a good bawl.

The fierce afternoon sun beat down, and below me the town baked in the heat. When was it all going to stop? Was life about losing the things we love the most, as my granpa had said? Couldn’t things just stay the same for a little while until I grew up and understood the way they worked? Why did you have to wear camouflage all the time? The only person I had ever known who didn’t need any camouflage was Nanny. She laughed and cried and wondered and loved and never told a thing the way it wasn’t. I would write her a letter and send her my ten-shilling note, then she would know I loved her. Granpa would know how to do that.

As I sat on the rock high on my hill, and as the sun began to set over the bushveld, I grew up. Just like that. The loneliness birds stopped laying stone eggs, they rose from their stone nests and flapped away on their ugly wings and the eggs they left behind crumbled into dust. A fierce, howling wind came along and blew the dust away until I was empty inside.

I knew they would be back, but that for the moment, I was alone. That I had permission from myself to love whomsoever I wished. The cords which bound me to the past had been severed. The emptiness was a new kind of loneliness, a free kind of loneliness. Not the kind which laid stone eggs deep inside of you until you filled up with heaviness and despair. I knew that when the bone-beaked birds returned I would be in control, master of loneliness and no longer its servant.

You may ask how a six-year-old could think like this. I can only answer that one did.