Читать книгу I Have Come a Long Way - John W. de Gruchy - Страница 7

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The soul of the child I was

When I was a boy and chirruping ten, a decade after the end of the Second World War, when I was Tarzan and Batman and could sing “Rainbow over the River” like Bobby Breen – in those red-white-and-blue days I remember especially the weekends …

(Richard Rive)4

We initially moved into a rented semi-detached house, number thirty-three Bellevue Street, at the top of Kloof Street and within walking distance of the lower cable station on Table Mountain. The house was small but adequate, and had a pocket-sized garden. My father had a tin shanty of a workshop in the backyard where I first learnt some carpentry. He also rented a garage for his 1936 Willys, a half a mile away down the steep hill. That did not make any sense to me, but I guess he had his reasons.

Even after the Second World War we had to live on food rations for some time. I remember the day when real chocolates and fizzy drinks appeared at the corner shop at the bottom of Bellevue Street. The shop was owned by a Muslim family – “Cape Malays” my parents called them. I can still smell the exotic spices in the large sacks that lined the floor and greeted me as I entered. Bellevue Street was very steep, so it was quite an effort to walk back home, but getting chocolates made it worthwhile.

During 1948 grandpa Hurd came to visit. With his financial help, my parents bought a bigger house – number forty-three in the same street, with a large garden and a garage big enough for the Willys and my father’s workshop. Grandpa also bought me my first bicycle, a BSA. It was heavy and without gears, but I manfully rode it around the steep roads in the neighbourhood.

The number four trackless tram’s journey from the city centre ended close to our house, and for two pence I could safely get to the Colosseum Bioscope within twenty minutes on a Saturday morning. That weekly ritual, with the bartering of comic books while we queued outside, and the pandemonium that broke out once we were inside watching cowboy movies we would later re-enact, remains a vivid memory.

Another weekly ritual was church. At first we attended the Metropolitan Methodist Church in Greenmarket Square, where my grandfather Abram had met and married my grandmother Mary. We soon moved to the Union Congregational Church in Kloof Street, about a mile and a half from our house, because it was within walking distance. I don’t think my parents had any idea about Congregationalism, but its worship and preaching was barely different from that of the Methodists, and they soon felt at home. My mother later became a leader in the Women’s Association, and my father a deacon. Rozelle and I sang in the junior choir. I even won medals for singing in the Cape Town Eisteddfod, until my voice embarrassingly broke while singing “Who is Sylvia?”. We attended Sunday school of course, and were confirmed in a perfunctory sort of way. Eventually, Rozelle rebelled and left the church, while I, negotiating those awkward years, stayed put.

Sometimes during church services, I read the large plaques on the sanctuary wall. One told me that the first minister of the congregation, when it was founded in 1820, was John Philip, superintendent of the London Missionary Society (LMS) and a leading figure in the anti-slavery movement. Another told me that his wife, Jane, had pioneered schooling for the children of slaves. Their stories intrigued me long before I learnt their significance, or knew that Congregationalism came to South Africa at the end of the eighteenth century through the work of the LMS. Later I also learnt that Johannes van der Kemp, its first missionary, gained notoriety when he married a Khoi woman and opposed slavery on the Eastern Cape border. Basil Brown, our minister, was neither a Philip nor a Van Der Kemp, but he did on occasion speak out against injustice, and later became the general secretary of the Christian Council of South Africa (forerunner to the SACC). I was fortunate to grow up in what was, for those days, a reasonably liberal church environment.

At the age of five I started school at Tamboerskloof Primary, to which I walked every day in the company of Rozelle. At the end of my first year, then named sub-A, it was decided that I should skip sub-B and proceed to standard one (now grade three). This meant that, for the rest of my school and university life, I was a year younger than virtually everyone else in my class. In retrospect, that was not a good thing, but it did mean that I got going on most things in life earlier than the norm. At the end of standard one, I was awarded a copy of Aesop’s Fables for not missing a single day of school. I later learnt that Aesop was a Greek slave whose fables still have much to teach us about ourselves. I never won any more prizes for the rest of my school years; certainly none for academic prowess.

Our age difference was too great for Rozelle and me to be playmates; her role was to look after me, organise birthday parties, and sometimes take me to movies with her friends. On one occasion, we saw The Wizard of Oz; on another we watched Esther Williams and her water nymphs perform endless manoeuvres in a large pool.

My parents came to Scout functions and church concerts, but I don’t recall them watching me play sport or attending a school prize-giving – well, yes, there was no reason for them to do that.

Our family outings included Saturday nights at the cinema, and Sunday drives in the Willys to The Doll’s House in Sea Point for an ice cream. The Green Point lighthouse, painted in red and white stripes, stood nearby. I recall the comforting sound of its horn on misty nights, even from as far away as the city bowl.

We also visited my parents’ (mostly boring) friends, and the wider circle of our family. All my cousins were older than me, though, so I had no one to play with, and had to use my imagination to amuse myself.

At home there was little intellectual stimulation, few books and little encouragement to read or even study hard. But I read the boys’ magazines that arrived from England on the mail ship every Thursday. I collected stamps and developed an interest in photography, and eventually had a darkroom in the cellar.

Though by no means well-off, Rozelle and I never lacked anything, and we were loved. Our mother was always at home, waiting for us after school with food and drink on hand.

The 1936 Willys was a faded blue vehicle with black bumpers and the licence plate CA 6. This indicated that it was registered in Cape Town, but 6 would normally mean that its owner was some civic dignitary, which was not the case. The car, so crude compared to the posh new American cars of our friends, made a grinding noise going up hills, and became an embarrassment to us children. We asked our dad to park some distance from the school when he came to fetch us. On family outings, though, we happily chugged along a narrow De Waal Drive, past the Old Mill and the University campus, down to Muizenberg for a picnic on the beach. Back then there was no Black River Parkway or Blue Route Parkway, let alone Ou Kaapse Weg over the mountain into Noordhoek Valley.

I once rode my bicycle along the coastal road to Hout Bay and then over Chapman’s Peak Drive to Kommetjie. After a few days’ camping, I pedalled back in the rain, but gave up when, drenched, I reached the house of an acquaintance in Bakoven. On that occasion, I was glad when the Willys arrived to fetch me for the final haul over the mountain. When it was finally sold, my dad got far more for the licence plate than he did for the vehicle.

My mother persuaded my father to move me to St. George’s Grammar School for standard two in 1947. From now on my schooling would always take place in a male environment. Situated next to St. George’s Cathedral at that time, the school was an alien environment to me, with daily morning prayer following the Book of Common Prayer.

1947 was memorable, though, because King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and their two princess daughters visited Cape Town. I was one of the many pupils lining the fence of our school along Government Avenue, waving Union Jacks to welcome them. As a Wolf Cub pack leader, I shook hands with Princess Margaret at a Scouting parade, and was struck with awe on a guided tour of the battleship HMS Vanguard. Those were what Richard Rive would’ve called “red-white-and-blue days”. My mother was an ardent royalist, and we were all part of the Empire, whether we lived across town in Rive’s District Six or in Kloof Nek. I was oblivious of the fact that there were Afrikaners who had a very different opinion.

By the end of the year, my father put his foot down. He feared I might become a choir boy if I stayed at St. George’s, so I was moved to SACS Junior at the top of Government Avenue, where Cape Town High School is now located. SACS High was nearby in Orange Street, in the historic buildings that have since become the UCT Hiddingh Hall campus. I walked to school down Hof Street every morning, a distance of three kilometres, carrying a case full of books and sports togs.

At junior school I learnt the basics, did woodworking, played rugby and cricket, flunked boxing and received cuts (corporal punishment) from the headmaster for telling our singing teacher, Miss LaCock, to the raucous amusement of the class, that she had sung a false note. Once a week we watched travelogues provided by various embassies in the city, and I decided that I would one day visit these exotic places around the world. At lunchtime we played marbles or bok-bok makierie on the dusty playground, which left us dishevelled and sweaty for the rest of the day.

I was mad about sport. In standard four I was captain of the under-eleven rugby team, and I have the photograph to prove the fact. Saturday after Saturday, I made the train journey to Newlands Rugby Stadium to watch senior club rugby, sitting with other school boys on the touchline in front of the old Railway Stand. In 1948 I went to the Newlands Cricket Ground to watch the test match between the Springboks and the touring MCC or English side – the first after the War. The next year I was at the Newlands Rugby Stadium, watching the Springboks beat the All Blacks from New Zealand fifteen to eight. Sport has remained an integral part of my life.

Living on the slopes of Table Mountain, I spent much time exploring its terrain. On one occasion a friend and I – probably aged eleven, for we had just become Sea Scouts – climbed too far up the mountain face above the cableway station to turn back, and had to be rescued in the late evening. As the years passed, my friends and I thought little of walking for almost two hours over Kloof Nek on a Sunday afternoon, for the pleasure of swimming in the icy water of the world-famous Clifton beach.

Another boyhood memory was being introduced to Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who regularly passed by our house after his Sunday walks on Table Mountain. One evening, not long after, my father and I sat listening to the national election results on that fateful day in 1948, when the National Party came to power on the ticket of its apartheid policy and Smuts was ousted. I was vaguely aware that something ominous was happening.

My father, a follower of Smuts, declared that the results were disastrous. He was no political liberal (nor was Smuts), but he had experienced the influence of the secretive and powerful Afrikaner Broederbond at his work, where he was denied promotion in favour of younger broeder colleagues he had taught. He had learnt Dutch at school and could speak Afrikaans reasonably well – he had to, in order to progress at work. But he thought I needed to improve my ability in this regard, so one holiday I was sent to a farm in Citrusdal for this purpose. I recall picking oranges every day and sleeping in a bed with three other boys every night. I am not sure my Afrikaans improved.

My parents were probably more bothered by the rise to power of Afrikaner Nationalism than they were by the new apartheid laws. After all, racial segregation was nothing new, and their heritage was colonial. What was new, was the strict racial classification and obsessive racial controls that changed the social fabric and demographic face of Cape Town. When I turned sixteen, I had to register as a “white person”. I then received my identity document, which was my passport to privilege. By then I had already witnessed the segregation of our street and the buses, which now had a limited section at the back for those deemed “coloured”. I felt embarrassed, as I had always been taught to stand up and let older people, irrespective of who they were, have my seat. As a “coloured” Capetonian wryly observed, “Only roads and telephones were allowed to remain non-racial.”5

In SACS High, where I started in 1952, I received a classical education, which included Latin, and was selected to play cricket and hockey for the first teams when I was only in standard eight (now grade ten). I was good at table tennis and learnt to play chess, but I was bored to death by religious instruction, which, in my first year, meant reading the Bible in class from beginning to end. We never seemed to get beyond Leviticus and Numbers.

Many of my classmates were Jewish, mainly the children of families from eastern Europe, who had fled pogroms early in the century. There were also boys from St. John’s Orphanage, and many more whose families were struggling to make their way after the Second World War. Several of my teachers had served in the army, and we all knew families who had lost someone in combat.

We were all drafted into the cadets, and I joined the band and learnt to play the bagpipes – badly. We attended school in cadet uniform on a Tuesday, when we were on parade for an hour to the sound of bugles, drums and pipes. Once a month, we also had shooting practice with antiquated .22 rifles.

Outside of school, I became a member of the Cape Town Photographic Society, and could amuse myself for hours on end in my darkroom at home. I also went on photographic expeditions, invariably the youngest in the group, and with somewhat primitive equipment compared to that of the others. As a Sea Scout, I spent many Saturday afternoons rowing boats in Cape Town’s harbour, Duncan Docks, and learning to tie an endless series of knots.

In 1952 we celebrated the Van Riebeeck Festival – the tercentenary of the establishment of “white” South Africa. In the evenings, I went with friends to watch motorbikes race on a cinder track in the stadium erected for the festival. In the exhibition hall nearby, we gaped at real-life Bushmen on exhibit. The idea that they were “first-nation people” did not vaguely occur to us, or tally with what we were celebrating as a white nation. But the festival was regarded by most English-speakers as an Afrikaner celebration, so no one in our circle was particularly involved.

By the time I was in high school, Rozelle had a life of her own. Family holidays, few and far in between at the best of times, became rarer. Instead I was sent off to spend holidays with cousins old enough to be uncles and aunts, or to innumerable Scout camps. But then, at the invitation of my closest school friend, Rodney Dinan, I went to my first Scripture Union camp and, at age fourteen, I became a “Christian”. This happened one evening around a camp fire on the mountain slopes above Rooi Els, looking down on False Bay. I guess peer pressure played a large part in my decision; after all, as captain of both the cricket First XI and the rugby First XV, Rodney was a good role model. Adolescence, in any case, is a peak time for commitments and enthusiasms of all kinds. Or perhaps my Methodist genes had at last caught up with me.

My parents found it all a little odd, as I already was a Christian – or so they told me. I had been baptised, attended Sunday school, had been confirmed, and my name was John Wesley, for God’s sake! My father, more so than my mother, was bewildered by this “religious” turn of events. It was beyond his frame of reference, and that of his friends and the wider De Gruchy family – if not the devoutly Methodist Hurd one. But according to some of my close school friends, I had become a real Christian.

Whichever way I now assess what happened, it changed the course of my life. I do not regret that for a moment, but I do regret the extent to which I was then drawn into a legalist, fundamentalist Christianity, which made me feel guilty about youth’s peccadilloes, narrowed my perspective on life, and insisted on an understanding of Christian faith and the Bible that became increasingly untenable; though none of this was obvious to me at the time.

I was now part of a new “gang” of teenagers in Cape Town who had made the same commitment, attended rallies organised by Youth for Christ, watched Billy Graham movies, and went to Saturday night house fellowship meetings. I read my Bible every day, aided by Scripture Union notes, and tried to pray. I joined and became a leader in the Student Christian Association (SCA) at school, and, under Rodney Dinan’s influence, I briefly attended a Plymouth Brethren assembly where I was re-baptised, much to my parents’ consternation. But I soon became disenchanted with the narrowness of it all, so different from my home church, though I wished that the latter was more evangelical.

In any case, I determined to remain a member at Union Congregational Church, even though I had little guidance there in negotiating my adolescent faith. Fortunately I was embraced by others who offered the nurturing I needed, even if the explanations given, reinforced by chapter and verse from a narrow selection of biblical texts, soon proved inadequate. I had walked through a narrow door and embarked on a spiritual journey without knowing where it would take me or what it really meant. I still had a long way to go to find out.