As an only child I had vowed that one day I would have a house full of children. My mother had been an only child and my father's sister had no children, leaving me not only without siblings but without cousins too. I was determined to remedy the situation. Our four did not quite reach the vast numbers I had imagined, but they certainly filled our home. Malvern was a hands-on dad long before it was fashionable to be so, changing nappies, blowing noses and wiping away tears. Between us, he, Hilda and I fed and bathed the children, plaited the girls' hair, sewed on buttons and took up hems, fetched and carried, comforted and scolded â and attended endless swimming galas. Our children were all excellent team swimmers and Malvern was an avid supporter. I cooked meals, Hilda baked bread, Malvern helped with homework. The result was a fairly ordered and very cheerful home.
In the early days we took in lodgers to help pay for renovations to the house. One philosophy student spent most of the time in his room asleep behind closed curtains, until it became necessary for tutors and parents to intervene and psychiatric help to be sought. An American economics lecturer seemed to have difficulty communicating and related best to our cat. His silent, gangly presence in the house was depressing and fortunately he stayed only a few months. One of HW van der Merwe's researchers, a relation of the Rothschild dynasty, came for a while and she became a friend. I often wondered what she thought of her lodgings, where some of the walls were still unpainted. We also took in several English Honours students whom Malvern knew, two of whom subsequently became his colleagues.
Impecunious students often took their meals with us, which inevitably led to dinner table discussions on
Hamlet
or
Heart of Darkness.
But the point came when these debates interrupted family conversation. The children were impatient to tell their own stories and in fact we were all becoming keen to have more space. One year we holidayed in a large house in Cape Town where the children could each have their own room. A blissful silence descended, as bedroom doors were closed and each child nestled into his or her own special space. That was when we realised that they'd shared rooms for long enough.
Matthew's new room had fish in an aquarium and a shelf of books on Churchill. During his Manchester United phase it was draped in red scarves and flags. Charlotte had an old kitchen table on which she made a doll's house. She spent hours filling the rooms with furniture made out of matchboxes and tiny lampshades ingeniously fashioned from toothpaste tube tops covered in foil. Lucy would close her door and deliver lectures to the walls in a variety of voices, so that sometimes we genuinely wondered who was in there with her. Anna and her friend Fiona played at being grown-ups, mostly marching around with carrier bags full of old bills.
Over the years, troops of friends were in and out of our house. During the high school years, when boarders were given lunch on a Sunday there was never any difficulty persuading anyone to wash up. The kitchen, cosy and warm, was a great place for socialising, with apparently many an assignation made and broken there. Years later Anna complained that Matthew had seduced most of her friends within those walls. Malvern and I wondered how we could have missed this Casanova in our midst.
My real passion was Christmas. Matthew once remarked, “My mother is an activist the whole year round, but at Christmas she becomes as bourgeois as anyone.” I loved baking pies and puddings, the smell of turkey basting, the twinkling of Christmas lights and decorations and the chatter of many voices around the table, where we would often be joined by friends and their families. Sometimes we chose themes. One year everyone dressed up as Victorians, another, Anna and her boyfriend organised a treasure hunt that took us around town. On Boxing Day, which was also Malvern's birthday, we usually had an open house. This meant a great furry of cleaning after the Christmas Eve dinner, and then Malvern would make gallons of punch, which he would personally stand and ladle out the next day. Friends milled about our garden meeting each other's extended families visiting for the holidays. It was fun but exhausting. As a child Malvern had always felt somewhat cheated having to share his birthday with Christmas, so we were determined to make his day special, but sometimes I think we just wore him out.
Life in Merriman's House was varied and happy, and always very busy. If sometimes I was out of the house more than I should have been, or if schedules became hectic and nerves became frayed, we always knew that the holidays would come and we would set off into the countryside to find ourselves and each other again.
Each year in the late summer we would go up into the mountains at Hogsback and pick blackberries. These outings reminded me of my childhood when my grandmother came to stay with us in August. I would help her pick the dewberries that grew in profusion among the sand-hills of our North Country home, and we cooked jam while she told me stories of her own childhood. Years later when Malvern introduced me to the poetry of Seamus Heaney, his poem
Blackberry-Picking
brought back memories of those summers.
Now though, when I re-read that poem, it's our Hogsback holidays I conjure up. Our good friend Nova de Villiers and her four children would drive up into the mountains in her large brown station wagon, and we and our four in ours. Our destination was a stone cottage in a magnificent mountainside garden, planned, planted and tended by its owner over many years. It was a delight in spring with azalea and rhododendron, in summer with hydrangea, iris and rose and in autumn with the rusts and golds of many trees.
As soon as we arrived, the children would leap from the car to see if their favourite places and people were still there. There were the local Xhosa children, whose parents worked on the property and lived there. And there were the magical hiding places under low-branched fr trees, by the azalea-fringed duck pond, and up by the swimming pool in the orchard, nestling in natural rock. Arguments would ensue about who had to carry the luggage into the house and in which room each group of children could sleep. The younger ones always woke so early, while the older ones slept so late. There would be boxes heaped with food and Malvern would struggle to get the paraffinâburning fridge working properly. The lamps would have to be filled and the gas cooker checked. The smells from these appliances would permeate the house, mingling with the scent of wood and ash from the fireplace.
There were many feasts in that house. One particularly balmy night we dragged the dining room table and chairs outside and ate our supper in the darkness, enveloped in warmth and silence. The only sound was the distant singing of isiXhosa hymns, and apart from our lanterns, the only light came from the tiny pricks of fireflies darting amongst the trees.
Hogsback is a settlement strung along a ridge below the Amatola mountain range. Cascading waterfalls formed deep pools amongst the forest glades and the rich, fertile soil provided an oasis for many English flowers and berries. Come summertime, streams were flanked by carpets of arum lilies. In the forests there were grey parrots and the raucous cry of the loerie could be heard. If lucky, one might catch a glimpse of its scarlet wing.
Over the years we walked up most of the mountains, plodding through long grass while keeping a wary eye out for snakes. The leaves and twigs of sage bush and everlasting flowers caught on our boots and socks and their scents clung to our clothes. Matthew and his friends, like sure-footed mountain goats, would get to the top long before the rest of us. Catching our breath when we got there, we looked at fold upon fold of hill and valley stretching to the horizon, with here and there a tiny dot of a settlement. It was very peaceful and difficult to reconcile with the turmoil of the country in which we were living.
We left the doors and windows of the cottage wide open while we hiked, fearing no disturbance in the tranquil garden. But one morning when we woke and flung back the curtains, we saw that Nova's car had disappeared. Flapping around in our nightclothes we soon found it upended in a ditch. It had been stolen in the night and we had heard nothing. Without keys the thieves had connected up wires to get it started but had then misjudged their get-away route. A helpful mechanic among the forest workers got the car in working order for the journey home.
The blackberry-picking would be left until our last day so that we could take the fruit home as fresh as possible. We would set out for an area mysteriously called Siberia, where the blackberries abounded. Equipped with plastic boxes and bowls, we would pick from the berry-laden bushes, prickled by the brambles, stung by midges, burnt by the mountain sun. By the end of the expedition, hands and mouths would be dyed purple and the children's clothes would be stained. At Easter time when the blackberry pies appeared on the table, the pain and discomfort and arguments about who had not done their share of the picking would be forgotten. Instead, the juicy mouthfuls would bring back memories of idyllic Hogsback days and with them, a feeling of contentment.
Returning home was usually tinged with sadness as school, work, and the routine and stresses of reality would soon impinge. So we'd delay our arrival, stopping for a ritual picnic supper at the same spot half way down the mountain pass. Back in Grahamstown, bunches of pungent everlasting flowers on the table and bramble prickles in the laundry formed the last link with our summer idyll.
As a child in England I had always loved being out of doors and particularly enjoyed the smells and sounds of the countryside. But on holidays we had stayed in hotels and I had little experience of camping. Now in South Africa, with little money and a large family, hotels were not an option and so during many a summer holiday, we camped. Packing the car before we left was a logistical feat. We had to ft in pots and pans and tents, while leaving space for passengers too, and try to remember all the important items like toilet paper, paraffin and torches. Malvern had a checklist and was a meticulous packer, yet somehow the day before departure was always one of short tempers and fare-ups. But once we were all squashed in the car and driving towards the heat haze on the horizon, our excitement knew no bounds.
Transkei, one of South Africa's artificially created homelands, was a poor, eroded area and fraught with problems for the people who lived there in thatched rondavels hugging the rolling hills. But the coast was paradise for camping holidays. With few people around and no access to radio or newspapers, we were able to suspend the world and its anxieties. We'd drive down to the sea on dusty, rutted roads then bump over grassland to find the perfect place for setting camp. We passed homesteads with thorn hedges where pigs and chickens rootled around, noticed the odd clinic or school, and took care to note where the nearest trading store was, where our water and food could be replenished.
The smells of those stores assailed us as we stepped across the threshold: a mixture of paraffin, mealie meal, cotton, tobacco and sweat. Zinc baths, brooms and baskets hung from ceilings while racks of clothes and stacks of mattresses gathered dust behind wire netting grilles. Sugar, four, meal and beans were all stored in large metal bins with scoops. On the shelves behind the storekeeper were condensed milk, tea and a range of patent remedies from Vicks cough syrup to Grandpa's headache pills. The children loved the bead necklaces, bangles, brightly coloured sweets, and the strange looking bits of fur, bone and other accoutrements of the local sangomas. Sometimes youths with transistor radios would sit along the road outside the shop, probably on holiday from the mines. Their city clothes were the outward sign of their migration to a new and distant life, but one could not help wondering how children of this deeply rural place were adjusting to the snares of urban life, let alone the gruelling conditions underground.
At Ndumbi we camped in the sand dunes, just a dip between us and the sea. Being great swimmers, Malvern and the children would dash into the waves and spend hours in the water. Sometimes schools of dolphins would pass by and on the far-off horizon we might see a tanker. Nothing else disturbed our view. I was a bather, preferring a gentle river or lagoon to the sea, but I loved peering into rock pools and listening to the sounds of my family in the waves. Charlotte collected small shells which she carefully preserved in cotton wool to take home and convert into dolls house furniture. I would frequently remind the family how lucky we were to be wandering on deserted beaches, when up the coast people were paying a great deal at smarter places without the benefit of this privilege. As they grew older, Matthew and Anna would groan audibly, thinking of what they were missing.
We scoured our pots and pans with sand and washed them in the sea. Sometimes it would rain and then I was always glad that everyone could read to while away the time. Malvern would peer out of the tent and talk gloomily of packing up, while I would irritate everyone with my bright forecasts of chinks in the clouds and the imminent lifting of the sky.
I especially loved the evenings, sitting around the campfire under a tapestry of stars, telling stories as we watched the embers glow. By bedtime everyone smelled of wood smoke. We slept with tent flaps open and the roar of the waves in our ears. The only footprints on the beach besides our own were those of wandering cows.
But in fact others were not far away. One night we were woken by torchlight shining on our faces and a cluster of young black heads peering into the tent. Our hearts raced as we stumbled out, only to discover that they wanted us to buy their crayfish. They had two buckets full done which they had caught at nearby pools, stunning them as they swam towards the torchlight. Of course we bought the crayfish, even though it was illegal. Then we stood for a while under the stars, watching the moon cast a path across the sea. The next evening we enjoyed our feast, which would have been exorbitantly expensive had we had it in a restaurant.
At Shixini Mouth we watched a cow with a damaged horn become so entangled in thicket that she eventually died. Then there unfolded in front of us a sequence of events as in a children's fairytale. First came the herd boy, berated by his grandmother, the owner of the cow. Then came a procession of villagers to inspect and discuss the disaster. This group was followed by people carrying knives who proceeded to skin, disembowel and chop up the cow. In the end every piece of flesh and bone was tied up and carried off in the blanket of the skin. Finally the crows and insects came and very soon there was no cow left. To us this pageant was a lesson in ecology and a parable about living without waste.