“Lieutenant Edwards and I have shared many intimacies,” she said in her affidavit, "and I do not believe that he can objectively and honestly apply his mind to the question of whether or not detention in terms of the emergency regulations is justified." The case did not succeed, but a courageous stand had been taken.
We were disappointed to discover one year that Lloyd and his contingent were holidaying at the same beach resort as we were on the Eastern Cape coast. We were paddling on the river in our canoe, watching a kingfisher diving for fish and a water rat emerge from a hole in the bank, when Lloyd and his pals, beers in hand, roared past us in a boat. On another occasion while swimming in the lagoon I spotted Lloyd's partner and some other police wives lounging on the bank while a domestic worker in full maid's uniform served tea. On the tray, I was alarmed to see a gun.
There was an occasion that gave everyone in the struggle community great pleasure and inspired a resurgence of courage. Louise Vale, a Sash member who worked in informal education, had been detained. Her husband Peter tried every available avenue to get her released, from challenging the law and seeking publicity, to petitioning people in high places. All to no avail. One evening Peter went to drown his sorrows at a local hotel. After several drinks he noticed that Lloyd Edwards had appeared at the bar. Striding over to him, with a full tankard in hand, Peter struck a blow for us all by emptying his frothing beer over the surprised policeman's head. The graffiti artists wasted no time. "Down a Lloyd: Feel Satisfied!" they scrawled on the wall of a local supermarket. The parody of Lion beer's advertising slogan gave us all great satisfaction. Shortly after, while visiting Louise in Port Elizabeth's North End prison, Peter's car was stolen. We were convinced that it was not the work of an ordinary car thief.
Various other escapades gave us heart in the fight against the monolithic state. Two American friends of Peter's simply walked into North End prison one day, claiming to be Louise's lawyers. They got deep into the building before the sting was detected. In another incident the boyfriend of our detained fieldworker Janet Small dressed up as a dentist's assistant when he heard that Janet was to be brought in to the local surgery for an emergency visit. Unfortunately Mike Kenyon was himself a closely monitored activist and the Special Branch soon arrived to escort him out.
The security police were both canny and brazen in their infiltration of groups, especially on campus. Malvern and I knew several students who had been taken out for drinks and offered financial inducements to act as spies. A local pharmacist told us we would be surprised at the number of students' chemist bills that were paid for by the police. There was no doubt that a dense network of amateur spies was in operation even in this small town.
A
cause célébre
on the Rhodes campus was the case of Olivia Forsyth. Olivia belonged to all the activist groups, where she was highly regarded for her strong leadership qualities. She had a habit of disappearing once a month to Port Elizabeth where, she told her friends, she visited an old uncle. In reality she was meeting her police handler. Olivia's regular reports must have done her so-called comrades much damage. Certainly many of them suffered harassment or detention. She was herself detained for a short period, no doubt to make her cover plausible. It was only after she had left Rhodes amid fanfares of praise that her deceit was eventually exposed.
It turned out that Olivia had been a lieutenant in the security police. Her next mission after leaving Rhodes was to infiltrate the ANC in exile. This did not go smoothly and she landed up being detained in Quatro, the ANC's prison camp in Angola. She eventually escaped to Britain, where she was reunited with her father.
Malvern concocted many a false application for masters and doctoral projects so that young detainees could have access to literature in jail. He was well respected for his political voice on campus, especially at a time when the principles of academic freedom and freedom of expression were being radically undermined. One particular protest march has left a vivid vignette in my mind. Malvern and a few colleagues were leading a student demonstration against the state's threat to university subsidies when the police, armed with batons and quirts, charged onto the university lawns. The ensuing clash resembled a football riot, but in the midst of the mayhem the phalanx of academic gowns stood firm. Malvern's thick white hair stood out like a beacon among them.
Malvern's role and image on campus made life difficult for Anna, who did her degree at Rhodes. All eyes were on her to join left-wing activities, but no 19-year old wants to be a clone of her parents and she steadfastly refused to be radical. Meanwhile her brother was undergoing his political blooding at the University of Cape Town. As a member of the Students' Representative Council he was arrested during a mass demonstration, beaten up and jailed for the night. I was proud of him of course, but secretly relieved that arrest for political protest did not result in a criminal record. I was also grateful that he was never detained. Lucy, our youngest, confessed that she too felt pressure to be involved in anti-apartheid activities, but when she eventually went to UCT she found her niche in non-racial sport. She eschewed the inter-varsity leagues, playing tennis and hockey in township leagues instead, where poor infrastructural facilities were a small price to pay for the authentically South African experiences she was exposed to. She learnt to speak isiXhosa and made more black friends than any of us had ever had. She became active in the organisational side of sport too, and once found herself at a sports congress where she was one of only four white delegates in a gathering of 900.
I often felt guilty that my involvement took me away from the children too much and once asked Charlotte whether they had felt neglected. “Good heavens, no!” she said. “You would have been too much for us!” Our children know us too well. While Queen Mary was said to have the word “Calais” written on her heart, my children knew that they were most likely to find words like "meeting" and "agenda" engraved on mine. Often, of course, Malvern and I brought our political concerns home with us and many discussions took place around our dining room table, which sometimes bore the brunt of our impassioned conversations. There is a nasty scar where Anna once , in a furious argument about some forgotten topic, scored the tabletop with a fork. There's also a grease mark down the wall where she threw a salad bowl at her Italian boyfriend, Roberto. After she'd spent her post-matric year in Italy, Roberto came to visit. Unwisely I decided to cook my version of
osso
bucco
for him. When he commented in Italian to Anna that my political activities clearly did my culinary skills no good, she threw the bowl at the startled young man.
We were proud of our four youngsters, and though we were aware that our activities put pressure on them, we felt that the diverse ways in which they were developing bore testimony to a democratic openness in our home. We dispensed many cups of tea in our sitting room to parents of young students who had been detained and were often surprised at how out of touch they were with their young. Some parents, the more politically aware, felt a mixture of pride in their offspring and outrage at the security police; but for many this was their first wake-up call to the reality of living in a police state.
At the beginning of July 1986 the security net tightened to include one of our closest friends. Malvern and I were home for lunch when a phone call came from Katherine, Priscilla Hall's elder teenage daughter. “The police are here,” she said. “I think they're taking Priscilla.” I went straight to the house and there in the study stood Lloyd Edwards and his henchmen, searching through her papers.
Priscilla was a formidable and highly respected activist who did especially crucial work in relation to the plight of resettled people, the needs of detainees and later, the area of informal education. We'd had little doubt that the Special Branch was watching her. She'd been subjected to a chilling campaign of anonymous phone calls and in her usual thorough way she'd kept transcripts of them all. An example recorded at 3.21am was a male voice saying, “You are going to be sorry, you bitch.” Her final warning had come a few days before Lloyd's arrival at her door, when a lone security policeman had stepped into the office where she was doing some photocopying after hours. Her heart thumped as he searched her handbag and rifled through some papers. After some pointless picking up and putting down of files, he left the office with the words, "This is just a friendly warning. We don't want to detain you. You have children and your husband is in England. But these are troubled times, we are in an emergency.” And then he added, “You must lie low for a bit.” Priscilla felt intimidated but it was not in her nature to "lie low". In an affidavit made after the event she said, "I take my family duties very seriously, but I am also convinced of the rightness and urgency of my work, and I intend continuing with it.” Her work on behalf of detainees had been invaluable; now she was to become one herself. She was told that she was being detained under the emergency regulations but was given no reason.
I felt curiously tongue-tied as we stood on the doorstep of the Halls' house and watched Priscilla being driven off in a police car. I wished so much afterwards that I had given her a hug. Katherine and Ruth, who were remarkably composed, came to stay with us, and during phone calls to Ron in Cambridge, where he was on sabbatical leave, we all dissuaded him from rushing back. For us the day was also marked by the death of our beloved dog, Sparky. Under normal circumstances we would have gone into a period of collective decline, but now we found ourselves with an extended family and little time for mourning a pet. Amongst other things, Ruth succumbed to German measles during this time and had to spend days propped up on the couch surrounded with books. Watching the royal wedding of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson on a borrowed colour television set, because ours was black and white, provided some diversion. I had been a royalist as a child and still loved the pageantry. I was also glad that Ruth was being kept company while the other children were at school.
Throughout her months in detention, Priscilla was never questioned or interrogated. After three days in police cells she was transferred to Fort Glamorgan in East London, the prison where Malvern and I had visited Guy several years before. On her first night she slept in the exercise yard under the bitterly cold July stars, just a thin blanket for protection. For 34 days she was held in solitary confinement, initially with only a Bible to read. After 14 days she was told that the Minister of Justice had signed a warrant authorising her further detention. Eventually she was given privileges such as reading and study material, one letter in and one letter out per fortnight, and contact with two of the other detainees.
On his return from sabbatical Ron wrote a letter to all their friends in which he typically took the emphasis off themselves. “Priscilla is only one of an estimated 1 400 detainees in the country (200 plus from Grahamstown alone) most of whom are black. We are comparatively well off and privileged, and have suffered no reduction of income due to the detention; the family's health, security and standard of living have not been damaged. The position of many thousands of others is far more grim, and just as arbitrary.”
The National Arts Festival that year was marred by the presence of foot patrols with fixed bayonets and army vehicles cruising up and down the crowded streets, making it impossible to forget that the nation was in the grip of another state of emergency. A spate of detentions occurred in the midst of the festivities. One detainee was a student due to appear in a cabaret, while another was a daughter of the family who shared our Hogsback holidays â virtually a daughter of our own.
Melissa de Villiers was almost certainly a victim of Olivia Forsyth's devious efforts. On the night of her detention I attended the launch of a friend's book on herbs at the Observatory Museum. The museum was housed in a striking 19th century building that had once been the local clock and watchmaker's premises. It was full of fascinating old timepieces and relics of Mr Galpin's once-flourishing business. On the roof was the
camera obscura
which our children loved visiting. They would climb the narrow stairs to the tower where they would observe an image of Grahamstown in the tilting, swiveling mirror. I loved the museum too, but on this particular evening the scene struck me as grotesque. An innovative curator had arranged the Victorian furniture with fair, creating a marvellous hotchpotch of fringes and tassels, candelabra and chamber pots. The hostess was bobbing about with herbs in her hair. People were sipping wine and admiring the artist's delicate watercolours of marjoram and thyme. I admired both these women greatly, but I was on edge. I wanted to shout, “Don't you know what is going on? Melissa has been detained. We are at war!” Like the image in the mirror of the
camera obscura
, this cheerful party presented a weirdly inverted version of what I knew to be the reality of the town. I felt caught between two irreconcilable worlds.
In order to visit Melissa in the police cells of Alexandria, her mother and I had to travel to the Louis le Grange police station in Port Elizabeth to obtain a permit. An imposing tower with rows of windows, the building dominated the city that surrounded it. We entered through a turnstile to find the lobby crowded with African families also awaiting visiting permits. Surprisingly, Nova and I were left to find our own way to the top floor where the security police resided. We soared up in the lift and walked along a corridor where open doors to offices revealed banks of video equipment. There were various policemen around, stockily built, sporting moustaches and speaking in heavy Afrikaans accents â stereotypes of the South African security officer. The view from the top floor was incredible, stretching around Algoa Bay and into the far distance, where we could make out the gold of the Alexandria sand hills, which marked our destination. It was a lovely, cloudless day and we looked down on a city where life seemed to be proceeding normally, apparently untouched by political events. We waited silently, speaking in whispers, until we were finally attended to.