She Left Me the Gun: My Mother's Life Before Me (8 page)

Departure

MY DAD IS COMING
with me to the newspaper library at Colindale. It is winter. London is frozen beneath a sheet of black ice. I have decided to do some research before leaving, to get a head start on what I'll find in the archives in Pretoria. This is less a journalistic than a therapeutic urge; if there are going to be surprises, I'd like to confront them in stages.

It is a nondescript building deep in the northern suburbs, known to journalists and family-tree enthusiasts for its extraordinary archive of practically every newspaper—certainly every colonial title—from inception to the present day. There are two I want to skim through in particular, one a defunct Johannesburg tabloid, the other a broadsheet. We order up rolls of microfilm covering the year in question—the year of my grandfather's trial—and, dividing them between us, sit in a windowless research room at neighboring machines. The only sound is the whir and click as the pages scroll by.

I sometimes think you could publish an alternative history of a place just by compiling its newspaper headlines—the dialogue a country has with itself, at least those in the country who are permitted to speak. In 1957, the year my grandfather appeared in court, the South African newspapers were full of the country's then main preoccupations: weather, wildlife, Whitehall, and crime. I scroll through January, and then February.

It is the year Agatha Christie publishes
4.50 from Paddington
. London is fogbound. Those who can afford it can fly from London to Johannesburg in twelve hours on the new Vickers VC10. Readers follow the misfortune and recovery of a woman in the Cape, “bitten by her own Christmas dinner.” In the courts, a man is let off for throwing a hunting knife at his wife, and a woman is granted a divorce from her husband because he looks “like a hobo.” On the inside pages, women are advised they can choose from a variety of knitting machines. I change reels; the microfilm whirs.

“Anything?” I say to my dad.

“Not yet.”

FIVE KILLED BY HUGE HAILSTONES

SHOT HIMSELF WHILE JOKING

BEES ATTACK CHILDREN

SNAKE IN LETTER BOX

ATTACKED BY CIRCUS BEAR

KILLED BY CROCODILE

CAKE SALE FOR SHARK VICTIMS

South Africa in the 1950s is a parochial country, riven with colonial insecurity. “SA Women Equal to Other Women Abroad,” reads one headline; another, with exquisite defensiveness, “Afrikaners Don't Like Only Slap Stick.”

At the same time, it is struggling with a problem that is endemic in the colony and across white Africa.

Like the Puritans who went to America, Dutch settlers in South Africa in the seventeenth century were devout Calvinists in pursuit of religious utopia, and the culture they formed was narrow and repressed. It is hard not to read the behavior that followed—the drinking, the violence—as a kind of manic release, the inevitable counterweight to all that fanaticism, except that when the empire-building Brits turned up a hundred years later, they weren't religious yet went the same way—all those notorious “shooting incidents” in Kenya and Rhodesia, the Happy Valley mob drinking themselves into oblivion night after night. My mother said it was because England sent out its scum to the colonies (she didn't hold it against the Dutch, for some reason). What can you expect, she said, of a people who came only to exploit, who arrived in South Africa with nothing and suddenly found themselves part of a master race?

In an editorial that year, 1957, the Pretoria Society of Alcoholism estimates there are between 40,000 and 80,000 alcoholics in white South Africa—1 in 50 of the population—compared with 20,000 in Holland (1 in 550), putting the problem at almost ten times the severity of the European country. It estimates that 27 million gallons of alcohol are consumed in South Africa every year. The mining communities are a particular problem. The editorial touts the latest treatment orthodoxy, which is to keep bad cases in their own homes, rather than sending them to rehab. There is a quote from the minister of labor, Jan de Klerk, who says, “With our small European population it is important that every person must realize his full labor potential and it is not necessary for me to tell you what effect the misuse of alcohol could have on our military ability.”

Of the two newspapers, I'm surprised to find it's the tabloid that's vaguely left-wing. I didn't know that in late-1950s South Africa a newspaper was even allowed to refer in its editorial to “this sham apartheid.”

After years of discrimination by the British colonial government, under which black South Africans were denied the vote and the right to sit in parliament, the system of racial segregation was formalized and extended in 1948, with the election of the Afrikaner National Party under Daniel Malan. Every baby was issued with an identity card stating his or her race, one that governed every aspect of the life he or she would lead. A slew of laws followed, including, in 1949, the Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act, and a year later, the Immorality Act, which banned sexual relations between the races. In 1950, the Group Areas Act dictated where each race could live, paving the way to forced removals of black South Africans from the economic centers to remote regions of the country. The Bantu Education Act of 1953 segregated schooling and ensured black South Africans were kept undereducated and fit only for menial work. In 1957, in the run-up to the following year's general election, there is some hope in the newspaper that the National Party under Johannes Strijdom might lose out to the more moderate—although still pro-white-rule—United Party, but the Nats win by a landslide.

The film whizzes by; my eyes water.

FIRST FEMALE DENTIST

FIRST FEMALE BARRISTER

FIRST NEGRO AIR-HOSTESS

ENGLISHMAN TO BECOME GHANA CITIZEN

NON-WHITES TO SEE PLAY

Toward the end of that year, South Africa gives asylum to Dutch immigrants fleeing unrest in Indonesia. With brilliant, understated panic, the headline confronts the possibility that “Refugees May Not Be White.”

“Anything?”

“Not yet.”

There is the saga of a woman who poisoned her husband because she “felt like giving him a slow death.” There is the long-running story of Lana Turner's daughter being taken into care. Somewhere in there I stumble on what has become my favorite headline of all time: “Pensioner Forced to Make Cocoa at Gunpoint.”

By the end of the afternoon, I have a notepad full of useless headlines from a strange, brittle culture, confronting such questions of the day as “Have Our Men No Respect for Their Womenfolk?” and “How Old Must a Typist Be?” Either I missed the story in the blizzard of information, have the wrong newspapers, or—the thought resurfaces—there is nothing to find.

My dad, also empty-handed, says, “Oh, love, I'm sorry.”

•   •   •

MY MOTHER TOLD ME
she had been to a therapist once, when she first arrived in London. It hadn't worked out and she didn't try again, which she probably should have. That winter, I go to see one, too. I tell her I'm a journalist, gearing up to fly to South Africa to meet my mother's family for the first time and to bring up potentially painful subjects that they may or may not have talked about before. I am interested in her advice not as therapist to patient but as professional to professional; I don't want to give anyone a breakdown.

She opens her mouth to respond, but before she can get a word out, and to our great mutual surprise, I burst into tears, angrily retract them, drag my arm across my face, and through great hacking sobs suck a large plug of snot back up my nose. She nudges a box of tissues in my direction.

“Ugh, I can't believe I did that.” She looks at me kindly. After I recover, she says it's possible no one will want to talk to me. She suggests I observe boundaries and take my cues from the people I'm speaking to. At the end of the session she recommends I come back next week. I tell her I'll be in touch.

I start reading a history of the country. I buy maps and look at Johannesburg's one-way system, wondering if I'll have the gumption to attempt it. I try to amend my expectations of the city, which are as outdated, I know, as my mother's Dickensian vision of London before she got here. When I think of Johannesburg, I think of a small, bustling city, full of elegant apartment blocks and racially segregated park benches, with the occasional snake making its way down the street.

Not long before leaving, I put in place what I consider to be a brilliant psychological safety net. If there is something you don't want to do, I have discovered, the trick is to find something you want to do even less and then to oscillate between the two, thanking God at each stage that you're not doing the other one. Schedule an unnecessary eye operation. Start reading John Fowles's
The Magus
. Before leaving London, I agree to a book deadline I know I can't meet. I'll work toward it in the mornings, and when I shut my computer at noon, I think, the relief will be so great it will carry me unscathed through the rest of the day.

One evening, a few months before I leave, the phone in my flat rings. A South African voice asks if it's me.

“Yes,” I say.

“It's your mother's friend Joan,” she says. “I haven't heard from her for months. I'm worried.”

Oh God. I knew about Joan, of course. She was my mother's oldest friend; in their twenties they had worked together in Johannesburg and shared a flat. Joan had even visited once, when I was young. My mother let me stay home from school to meet her, an unprecedented honor. Joan was traveling through England with a friend, and the four of us drove to the pub for lunch. While the three adults ate, I played outside on the adventure playground in the rain. I remember my mother was in a bad mood afterward, banging around the house, exuding sour air.

To my shame, I hadn't called Joan to tell her the news. My dad and I had divided up the phone calls so that I had called my friends, he had called his parents and my mum's friends in London, and I had called Fay, the only member of my mother's family for whom I had a reliable number. I just hadn't considered my mother's South African friends.

“Oh, Joan. I'm so sorry. I should have rung you months ago. She died in July.”

There is a low, almost animal-like moan. She and my mother had corresponded faithfully for forty years; my mother had always referred to her with the deepest affection. I knew all of this and yet, when I told Joan down the line that her old friend was dead, I was stunned when she started to cry.

“We were friends when we were girls,” she says. “Oh, I loved her.”

Joan is too upset to talk, and after telling her of my forthcoming trip, which she tearfully receives as wonderful news, I apologize again for my negligence and hang up. Afterward, I'm shaken. I have never given my mother's friends from South Africa much thought. Unlike the letters that came in from her siblings, her friends' letters were conventional, scandal-free, uninteresting to a child. I have certainly never considered them as equivalent to my own friendships. For the first time I do the math and realize my mother was twenty-eight when she came to England, the same age I am as I go back the other way. I try to imagine leaving England tomorrow and not seeing anyone I know for years and then decades, keeping in touch only by letter and the occasional phone call. What was she thinking? The only other people who cried like Joan on news of my mother's death were my own best friends.

•   •   •

BELATEDLY, I GO
to my mother's address book. My mother kept two, one for England—a neat and orderly catalogue of colleagues, hairdressers, contractors, decorators—and one for South Africa, which doubled up as an informal encyclopedia of old friends and family. I had found it in the top drawer of a desk in the living room. It is falling apart at the seams, with tape around the spine and so livid with crossings out that the contents look like hieroglyphics.

I turn the pages carefully. Here are birth dates, death dates, name and address changes—all the annotations reflecting the complicated evolution of a large family, and a dysfunctional one at that. I see that a great many arrows were needed when her brother Tony married his own son's mother-in-law. When Scientology briefly ripped through the family, my mother hesitated long and hard over how to represent her sister's discovery that she was the reincarnation of a First World War cavalry soldier. Eventually, she settled for a faint question mark above her name.

Next to Mike's entry, in my mother's careful hand: “died, 5/10.”

Further back under M, something that shocks me: a series of addresses—Banket Street, Hillbrow; Trafford Close, Germiston—under “Mum.” For later addresses, she amends this to “Mother.” Marjorie's death date is not recorded.

I find a number for Denise, my mother's other regular correspondent, with whom she became friends around the same time she met Joan. They traveled to work on the bus together. I call Denise to tell her the news. She cries, too.

•   •   •

WHILE MY MOTHER WAS ILL,
I scrubbed all of her voice-mail messages from all of my phones. I didn't want to be ambushed after she was gone, but you can't foresee everything. One weekend that winter, a book arrives from the village bookshop, addressed to my mother and with a note attached apologizing for the delay and hoping she enjoys it. It's a true-crime book, about Leopold and Loeb. I remember her talking about it. She was fascinated by the case, how the two strove to commit the perfect kidnap and murder and how it went wrong. I look at the note from the bookseller and experience a milder form of the vertigo I felt when the undertakers removed my mother from the house. It seems a matter of philosophical principle: if actions take place in the world predicated on the assumption of one's continuing existence, must one not, at some level, continue to exist?

I don't go back to the therapist. I tell myself I have things under control. I carry on walking to work instead of taking the bus. After work I go out and I stay out. I'm wound so tight that at a bar with friends one evening I bring my teeth down on the side of a wineglass and a large, clean piece of it snaps off in my mouth. I put it down on the table and carry on talking.