Ow! That was a pin prick in my side, damn it, mother, you should be a bit more careful.
I think that was the first memory I ever had, my mother changing my diaper on a table, perhaps in my room at High Riding, a house on the slopes of a majestic mountain in Noordhoek in South Africa. My parents had moved to the Cape Town suburbs when I was just two years old. My mother had moved south from what was then the Belgian Congo to escape the ‘revolution for independence from Belgium.’ There was so much violence, rival tribes killing each other wantonly with complete disregard to whether it was a mother, infant, child or old woman. My grandparents decided to stay, but my mom moved on. My grandmother ran a mineral water factory and my grandfather was an attorney at law, helping the Congolese people in any way he could. My mother met my dad, of Dutch decent, in South Africa. They fell in love and I was conceived in Johannesburg. I was born on October 11 1964 at a hospital in the city. They moved to Cape Town… From what I know, they first lived in a suburb called Constantia, a suburb near the city of Cape Town, where I had a lot of fun in the summer, turning on the sprinklers from a spigot in the yard and running around naked. We were a loving family, my sister being born on December 4 1966. Apparently I was so jealous of her that one day I bit her finger which caused quite a ruckus. I remember having a wonderful birthday party, when I was around three, I got a garage and cars, and I played with them relentlessly. My father built me a wooden box car, it had no wheels, just painted on ones and I spent a lot of time driving around in my imaginary world.
My parents decided to buy a house further down in the valley, an old farm house which then went back at least eighty years. It had stables and a lot of room for paddocks and a huge garden. My mother was a horse fanatic and everything pretty much revolved around that. The house smelled of urine and decay when we first visited and I positively hated it. My dad had been married before and had produced a daughter, Merryl, she and, Tiffany, my youngest sister and I grew up together. We were moved into this house in the valley, called Avondrust. We, the kids hated it at first. It was being renovated, and all Tiffany and I wanted to do was to play in the heaps of sand that trucks had dumped on the property to be used to make cement. She was quite young then, so I ended up playing on my own, making roads and tunnels and parking lots with my ‘super fast’ cars. It was a big adventure and I reveled in every moment of it. I was especially fascinated by the thatcher’s as they re-thatched the roof on either side of the house. You see, it was a double gabled house and the roofs ran parallel to each other.
The renovation was eventually complete, along with double garages which housed two Mercedes Benz’s. Little did I know that this was quite luxurious for that time? My parents were exceptionally social, entertaining on a regular basis, throwing lavish parties and having guests over for dinner. Tiffany, Merryl and I were kept very firmly away in the kitchen with Yaya, our nanny, who virtually raised me, and then Tiffany, on her back, secured in a big towel, in true native style. Yaya was very fat, and I can still smell the vague aroma of her black skin as she would potter around the kitchen and clean the house as I slept like an Eskimo child in a papoose. Mother always very firmly announced to us that children were to be seen and not heard and that is very much how we were treated. It was fine. We didn’t know any better and it was always an added bonus if one of the guests brought a kid along, so we could play and have fun during the long summer evenings, while the grownups indulged in their gins and tonics, whiskeys, wine and beers, which flowed freely. We often went into the garage where they stowed their sodas in big tubs of ice and we stole a few, thinking it was such a big deal. Even their naked frolicking in the pool late at night amused us as the clock ticked towards midnight. Mother would have us tucked away before the clock struck eleven and the party would rage on, some of the guests swimming naked and some making out in some dark corner of the garden. The others dancing themselves into obscurity to the sounds of Roberta Flack, Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, Quincy Jones, and countless others, there was also a hefty dose of Brazilian music that would send mother into twirls with her hands in the air, while everyone cheered.
We often awoke to some drama, if it wasn’t Pop arguing with Mom about money or jealousy, then it was some other thing. The girls were lucky, they had the horses, something that I never got interested in and that contributed to my feelings of remorse and sadness. Some weekends were abuzz with activity, there was a show, a hunt, and the horses were ready to go, either in a trailer somewhere afar, or just right there on the farm. I was in my room, not knowing what to do, bored, depressed, confused, ignored. “What do I do alone in this house while everyone is out on a horse having fun?” I often thought to myself. It was really hard on me and I concentrated on my LEGO, building the stuff of my dreams. I moved the furniture around in my room; I tried to keep myself busy. All this time, I could hear the sounds of the hunt and the dressage competitions, what was I doing here? I needed to break out. My mom had me carry out trays of sherry to the pseudo hunters to drink pre-hunt. Okay, they weren’t all pseudo, but some of them were. It was a way of getting attention, a kind of machismo. It was all so false, the ‘drag’ pulling a burlap sack with the urine scent of the prey that was, thank goodness, instead of a fox. I was so bored; I really didn’t know what to do with myself. My dad would sometimes join in on the hunt, but it was just for show and attention. Once the hunt got started, I retired to my room and resumed my LEGO play. My passions lay elsewhere, in a world so different, but how was I going to get it recognized? Then one day, my mom took us to the ice skating rink in the city. It was magical, as a child I had put on Merryl’s skates which she had brought back from Sweden. Her mom, my dad’s first wife was Swedish. So she was my half sister. I had put on her skates and pretended that I was on ice, much to the annoyance of the neighbors, this I did at my grandmother’s apartment. I first put on skates at the rink in a place called Goodwood. They were having an ice show. I was discovered by some of the cast, they kind of took me in, recognizing that I had a passion for skating. One of the guys sharpened my skates on a weird machine, after I had ruined them on the asphalt of my grandmothers patio. It was a freedom I had never experienced before, I sailed across the ice, almost as if it was completely natural and I fell in love with the rink, the rink that would elude me for so many years, through no ones direct fault.
To be continued.