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 Cafe, 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
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
