The Single parent family

Picture showing Mother, Trusy, Jerry and Berend. Father is "Up North"

War Years: A Single Parent Family

A picture taken of my mother and four toddlers on the lawn of a Benoni city garden tells a picture of radiant bliss and peacefulness. So it must have been for it is for this reason that I only have pleasant and exciting memories about Benoni. When my father went off to war it was unnoticed in the family, although much spoken of in the home. But what was spoken faded and made no impression. There were too many symptoms of war around to make any difference. We lived a very comfortable life and Odiel and I allowed much freedom to interact with neighbours and community with an ever lasting presence of our Alsatian dog Presto, at our beck and call. There were after all the two smaller toddlers at home that needed my mother’s constant care and attention. Presto must have been well aware of the preciousness of his wards as often he came to the rescue of either Odiel or myself when crossing streets or keep us from strangers who dared to venture too near. Presto was a family member who must have learnt from watching the lovingly attention my mother lavished on the younger siblings. 

Everything around us spoke of something very drastic taking place in a far off place where fathers ventured and disappeared, and where horrible things were happening. My mother often took us out to the bioscopes and the messages drummed out by the African Mirror, a newsreel, amplified the fact of war from afar but, as we would discover from near as well. At these bioscope sessions, as with all public events, commencement was by singing out aloud, as if in a church, “God Save our Gracious King” That this was serious business soon became clear to us. For one day at the ‘scopes all were standing to do the honours to the King of England, but seated immediately in front of us were a row of gentlemen who not only refused to stand up and sing, but also refused to take off their hats. Then there was a grand surprise. My mother became infuriated and with one swipe hats went flying and amid catcalls, whistles and insults flying through the air, the lights went on and the offending gentlemen evicted by black ‘watch boys”. On the way home I was hanging onto the hand of my mother and at once dancing zig-zag in front of her. I needed to celebrate and felt excited and proud about what she had done. It was better than what was seen in the movies.        

Then another happening unexpectedly made for great excitement. My mother had rented out a room to friends of neighbours who were said to be in dire straights and in great need of accommodation. The couple involved, middle aged and Afrikaans speaking, took great interest in us as children and treated us to toffees, cool drinks and stories of no real consequence. Out of the blue one day there was great consternation when we learnt that over night the friends of our lodgers, living just across the road, were said to have been arrested for “working with the Nazi’s”. They had been detected having a radio transmitter in their house. A day later our lodgers also mysteriously disappeared. The word “Nazi” rang ominously and Odiel, the cleverer of the two of us, made no bones of the fact that this was a very bad thing. But then he was always to be trusted in whatever he said and did. In his opinion, while riding in the train with mother and fellow toddlers, he was full of praises for the train driver who was so good that he could keep the wheels of the train on the tracks. 

Time came for Odiel to attend kindergarten. He was already acclimatized for a year when my turn to pitch came up. I started protesting because I could not understand English that well and the mistress of the show was attempting to coax me out of my own style of Afrikaans with some English words mix in. There were also the nasty searches of our lunch packets from home to detect any use of white bread. JC Smuts made a proclamation against this and only brown bread was allowed. My mother all the same packed our lunches with white bread. I became fearful for being discovered and unmasked as a “Nazi”. So on a certain day I shat in my pants. As the stink spread from my little desk I was detected by the mistress who sent me home with Odiel. It was then decided by my mother and the mistress that I was not yet ready for kindergarten and that best I should stay at home. Odiel reported to me overhearing the mistress complaining, “He is obstinate. He shits in his pants on purpose”.

Besides these exciting interludes, life was cool, peaceful. Probably I did not know better as I had yet to discover what life could be like if there was no peace, but fighting and arguments at home. The only fighting between us seemed to concern the matter of shitting improperly. Evenings were bath time and the four of us were dumped together in the tub to play around until the soaping, scrubbing and drying off started. Trusy (or it could have been Jerry) took to shitting in the water. I would catch the make believe chocolate sausage, hold it up high and call out to my mother, “hier is kak in die bad” (“here is shit in the bath!”)

This bliss of course did not last for ever. I do not seem to have been aware that wars come to an end, and fathers who survived returned home. All the same one day a certain gentleman in army uniform was dropped off by an army vehicle at the Northmead house with much commotion, hugging, crying, the full Monty. It was the occasion of my father returning home with his kitbag, British army moustache and lots of things to be dished out as presents for my mother and the children. I did not like this at all. Having a man in the house who by then was a total stranger was a total shock. But I had to get used to the idea that this was the long spoken of “father”. I got a toy train engine made of tin. To watch my father smoking looked terrible and was utterly alienating. He was dishing out biltong and even Presto lay at his feet begging for more. I got a taste for the stuff and also, in between huffing and puffing with my train engine outside in the garden, kept coming back for more. And while the huffing and the puffing was going on just outside of an open window of the room where the new acquaintance and my mother were getting to know one another, cigarette butts came flying out. These I stuffed down the chimney of the toy engine. Odiel noticed this and went off laughing, “Berend se trein rook!” (“Berend’s train is smoking”).  But before this was uttered, I managed to squeal in between “wat het jy van hom gekry?” (“What did the visitor give you?”). 

I might be saying things about this first meeting with the absentee father who made this apparition in real life somewhat facetiously, in which case it actually portrays how alienating it felt to have the single mother household turned upside down with his entering the door. Fate soon found an easing out of this situation. My father needed to start working and together with a few of his friends travelled by car to Blyvooruitzicht, where mines were opening up on the West Rand (now also included in Gauteng Province), to find employment. Late at night there was a knock on the door and hastily clad my mother let in a police officer. As I was sleeping in the parlour of the entrance (I had to make way for my mother’s bedroom privacy, before this unwelcome arrival I slept in her room) I was entreated to a drama in the unfolding. The news was that a motor car accident occurred and that my father was very badly injured. For the next weeks my mother regularly travelled to a hospital in Johannesburg where my father was laid up, while a midwifery nurse, who helped all of us children to safely see daylight and shout our first fears for the joy thereof, regularly baby sat in her absence. Eventually my father returned home. He was in a plaster caste from the top of his head, only his face showing, right down to the waist. It was an apparition from outer space. He had broken his neck. This situation endured for some eighteen months. When he was at last liberated from the plaster caste, he moved out to his new job on the West Rand, where he was employed as an underground official, as a Shift Boss. So some peace and quiet continued in the single parent format while he was working and found lodgings away from home. That is, until the time came when he started getting adventurous. The gold fields in the Orange Free State (now called Free State Province) were being opened for exploration work, commencing with the sinking of two of the largest and deepest mine shafts in the world. And not only this, but with my father as a master sinker, in charge of shaft sinking operations, he set a world record for the fastest let alone the biggest hole sunk into the ground worldwide. 

What happened once we, mother and children, joined him in the rapidly quickened life of the sleepy farming town of Odendaalsrus is of another world, something different, and something which seemed to shout down all memory of the peace and quiet of the pleasant single parent family situation that preceded this rude intervention. Once the family was together in the Free State it became dysfunctional.