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Chapter Two - Schools and Hotels

When I was between 13 and 14, there were two enormous changes in my life - we left Linwood Villa and I had to leave my Junior School, Park View, where I had been happy and start at High School. The reason for the first move was that my mother had worried for a long time that the, at times, rather sleazy atmosphere of Linwood Villa was not a suitable environment for a girl growing up. My father loved the place as I did. The food had improved since the early days of our stay as managers changed hands. It was my home, and when a child has lived in a house since the age of 6, a home is what even an hotel feels like.

Besides, Linwood Villa was so interesting. We were told it had been the home of the first Mayor of Durban, Mr Cato. This is now being disputed but I grew up believing this to be the case. We learned about the two Cato brothers at school. They had rowed Dick King, a sort of South African folk hero, across Durban Bay to make some historic ride. My knowledge of history is now so vague that I have no idea why he rowed or where he was going, or what the problem was at all. But it seemed an important place to live.

Also compared to most of Durban it was so old. The older part of the house, which they said was built in 1850, would not have been remarkable in England, but it was in Durban, where most people seemed to live in modern blocks of flats or beautiful bungalows further out in the suburbs. Linwood Villa was quite creepy; the old part that had been the house still had ancient brass urns everywhere with potted plants and worn carpet. There were many dark nooks and crannies to be explored. There was a tiny room under the stairs which was at first used for any children there to eat in, supervised by one of the Zulu waiters, later this room became the office of the manager. The manager always lived in an unnumbered room downstairs opposite the lounge. I believe there were actually two rooms, a bedroom and sitting room. I never went in there.* There was a second unnumbered room on the ground floor, which was occasionally given to residents; perhaps they were what my parents laughingly called 'star boarders'.

Upstairs, the bedroom numbering began, on both sides of an L shaped passage. Ours until I was too old to share with my parents, was Room 2 which had a verandah and French Doors. Later my father had to pay for me to have a single room in the modern annexe to the hotel. Half way up the stairs, going off at an angle, there was what we unimaginatively called the 'Green Passage', because of the green carpeting. This must have been built later on top of the large hotel dining room and kitchens adjoining which were built when the building was no longer an ordinary house. But the green passage seemed old. It was dark and dusty looking and at the far end was the bathroom.

The toilet there was my favourite in the hotel. It was old fashioned with a wide wooden seat and had a big window next to it overlooking the back yard. Only residents who had a room down the passage usually used it and as a child, it was one of my secret places of escape. I expect many residents in the new annexe adjoining the old building did not even know this bathroom and toilet existed. It was fun living in a place that had seven toilets to choose from, if one wished to hide! Nowadays that would not be considered at all adequate for a hotel with 42 rooms, some of which were double! The hotel as it was then with its additions was like the letter E lying on its back. The green passage was then the left perpendicular and the modern extension the right. The middle upright would be the wooden verandah. This was another favourite place with about 4 bedrooms off the verandah and another 4 underneath it on the ground level opposite the dining room. Again there were bathrooms and toilets at the near end. Many people used the downstairs ones as they were central and on the way to the dining room, but the upstairs wooden verandah toilet was another favourite hideaway of mine, overlooking the large palms in a sort of garden (palm court?) which divided off the modern extension from the old house, with little concrete bridges over it. At the far end of the wooden verandah was a filthy old chaise longue, which of course got drenched every time it rained as although there was a roof of sorts, the verandah was on the whole quite open. I loved this place when it was dryish. I used to buy a cake from the corner shop and take my latest Enid Blyton book and go down and lie on it to read. The filth did not worry me at all, but it probably worried my mother.

The creepiest part of the building was the old attic, up some further stairs off the main landing. No one seemed to be aware of it, except for the occasional children and me of course. It was stiflingly hot and stuffy and full of fascinating old things like cabin trunks thick with dust that certainly looked as if they had been there since 1850. There were old dusty books too, and bits of furniture. The problem was that I was (and still am) terrified of cockroaches and the place was obviously a den of living creatures such as mice and insects, the dust was so thick we used to put scarves over our mouths and could not breathe up there very long. We heard that soldiers had once been billeted there, I don't know when or why, and also that many things had been left there by residents that had not paid their bills and had 'skipped'.

I often regret that I was not able to explore it more fully. It was the sort of place that I took the holiday children up to see as a treat! Two Irish sisters had started Linwood Villa, the Misses Macauley, who came out at the time of the Boer War at the turn of the century and turned the place into a boarding house and fed the soldiers. Which soldiers? What side were they on? Its awful to be so vague about the history of one's native land, but we were fed South African history so heavily at school, that it became boring, and I was not the only one in the class who preferred the French Revolution or Abraham Lincoln's life, as subjects. Anyway by 1943, these two spinster ladies seemed ancient to me, and I suppose were in their seventies. One could no longer see very well and therefore often had food staining the front of her clothes and the more able one ordered the servants around and organised the kitchen. The food was absolutely awful. They certainly knew about economy.

Everything was watered down; the custard had too little milk and was a sort of orangey colour. The roast beef was a thin grey substance on the plate, the cabbage was a faded pulp, the scrambled egg tasted as if it was eggless and made with cornflour. It was rather similar to the custard only with salt added instead of sugar. A young Indian waiter called Stephen used to type out the menus as he was literate, but he often made unfortunate mistakes, like when there was some sort of Andalusian soup for dinner and he typed clearly 'Soup and a louse'. You can imagine the mickey-taking, all the boarders pretending to search for their louse and asking him where theirs was. Then there was 'Fish Surprise' which caused a lot of merriment and it was decided the surprise was there was no fish in it at all! Fish is of course a problem in a very hot country, and my mother was very cautious about it, always teaching me to sniff it very carefully first.

One day, long after the Macauleys had left and a Mr and Mrs Green were running the place, the smell of stinking fish was wafting all over the building about an hour before dinner. My mother went to Mrs Green and said 'The fish is off'. Mrs Green who was rather twittery and very defensive about her standards said 'oh no, Mrs Ford, it was only bought today, it couldn't be!' My mother in her hard voice, (she called it her school teacher voice), said, 'maybe it couldn't be, - but it is'. She then proceeded to warn everyone who came into the dining room not to order the fish. She worried that some people might have a poor sense of smell. She was probably not at all popular with Mrs Green from then on.

However, nothing was ever as bad as the food in the Macauley era when we often used to be so hungry after a particularly inedible evening meal that my father used to take us to the Greek cafe on the corner to have some filling anchovy toast.

One of the nicest things about Linwood Villa was the communal spirit. As everyone constantly says, in the days before people had televisions, they really did 'make their own entertainment'. There was a piano in the lounge, a large room with french windows opening onto the front verandah. One of the permanent residents, a Mrs Albertyn, used to play the piano very well. There was an old Community Song Book inside the piano stool, and quite often, a notice would appear on the board in the hall saying 'Sing Song Tonight' and everyone would flock to the lounge after dinner, and stand round the piano and sing. I loved these evenings. So did my father, who sang out of tune, yet loved music. A lot of parodies were invented. For instance, when we sang 'My Bonny lies over the ocean', some wit made up the song 'They say they put milk in our coffee, they say they put milk in our tea, they say they put milk in our coffee, but it looks more like whitewash to me, Whitewash, Whitewash, it looks more like whitewash to me' etc. etc. I did not drink coffee at this stage, but the Linwood Villa coffee must have been ghastly, because when I was given my first autograph book and took it round the residents, there were items in the book like 'What's better than gold?' and everyone inserted their opinions, but when it came to 'What's worse than castor oil?' quite a few residents wrote variants of 'early morning coffee at Linwood Villa'.

Also, I used to organise concerts when I was about twelve onwards, at least I did when there were holiday children staying there. Sometimes I roped in someone from school as well. They must have been quite pathetic of course, but I used to put up a poster on the noticeboard in the hall and the residents positively swarmed into the lounge after dinner at the thought of such added excitement. We did short plays and also sang, danced and recited, I remember one item was 'The Old and the New' where I sang a sweet ballad and a girl from school sang something raucous.

Returning to Mrs Albertyn, she was an plump and pleasant widow, and although her keyboard skills were fine, I do not think she was very intelligent. She was most insulted when on one occasion she had tried on a hat in Greenacres, one of Durban's largest department stores, and had walked to the outside door with it on, to see it better in the light. A store detective if that's what they were called in those days, stopped her and took her to the Manager's office. She apparently said outraged, 'How dare you suggest I would steal, I am Mrs Albertyn of Linwood Villa'. When one thinks of the strange and disreputable people who lived there from time to time, its hilarious to think how unimpressive this statement must have been to anyone who knew the facts. I think it was realised however that they had made a mistake and she was released to come home and breathlessly relate her terrible experience to all the other sympathetic residents.

There was also a very odd English immigrant family at Linwood Villa. They were called the Testers. There was a mother, old deaf Mrs Tester, her innocuous son, Peter and daughter in law, Joan. Joan must have been in her twenties and she still wore white ankle socks with her dresses, and a ribbon round her head with a bow on the top. My mother said she must have been told she looked pretty like that when she was six years old and she had never forgotten it. She also had a very shrill voice. When her mother-in-law was in the downstairs toilet under the wooden verandah, Joan used to stand outside not far from the dining room shouting to her, and of course receiving shouted answers back through the door. All the other residents I knew from the grown-ups' gossip, found this both strange and amusing. The Testers also carried a lot of paraphernalia to the dining room at every mealtime. They took cardigans in case it got chilly, fans in case it got hot, bottles and jars of sauces of their own chosen brands - and their own personal napkins and napkin rings - it was quite a procession! The thing that amused me most as a child was that Joan called her mother in law 'Horace' which I thought was a very funny name, even for a man!

What a lot of people passed through Linwood Villa in those 7 years that I lived there. I previously mentioned The Little Fairy on whom the potty playwright, Geoffrey Minton, had a crush. Well, she stayed at the hotel with her mother, Mrs. Connell, who talked to my mother quite a lot, as they were both interested in Astrology. Mrs. Connell had no worries about false modesty. She went round telling everyone that she was a 'highly evolved Capricornian' an expression which my father loved. From then on, he said he was highly evolved, as he too was a Capricornian. Mrs Connell once said to my mother' Of course you realise I'm not an ordinary woman, Mrs. Ford'. My mother was astonished and said no, she had not realised that.

Mrs Connell had done a correspondence course in massage, in itself a mind boggling concept! This she felt warranted her wearing a white nurse's uniform complete with upside down brooch watch, flat shoes and navy cloak. She set up a shop selling herbal remedies and with a massage couch in a back room. She constantly told stories of how people had come to her for help. She would say dramatically 'Then they brought him to me'! She always spoke about herself with deep reverence.

Well, her daughter Ngaire had fallen in love with a man who passed briefly through Linwood Villa and asked her to marry him. He was another person not noted for hiding his light behind any convenient bushels and told everyone that he had written the song 'My echo, my Shadow and Me'. His name was Harry King. I believe someone later said they had seen the sheet music and his name was not credited. He went away on a ship towards the East and Ngaire remained faithful (and hopeful!) and Mrs Connell bragged about her talented future son in law. He stopped writing almost immediately after his departure, and after they had not heard from him for about 2 years, Mrs. Connell wrote to him at his last known address saying that if he did not reply by return, Ngaire would break off the engagement!! Ngaire was a pretty girl and she married fairly soon afterwards to a local chap and had a son, about whom of course the doting grandmother continually bragged. When he was about four years old, Mrs Connell told my mother proudly that he had seen a tomato, and said 'Look ganny, Appoo!' - a story that has amused many a mother of a bright under two year old ever since. Later, my mother worried about my somewhat scornful repetition of the story and said maybe she had been unfair and he was only 3!!

I did not want to leave Linwood Villa, with its sing-songs and strange residents, and I do not suppose my father did either but we would have had to, within a few years anyway as it was knocked down and a bank built on the site. It was also quite a wrench to move so far from the Willowtree Milk Bar mentioned earlier, which made me feel as though I was in America, where it would possibly have been called a Drug Store. They had such wonderful varieties of ice cream delights, banana splits, parfaits, milkshakes, sundaes and there were about ten varieties in each of these sections. And then of course the very expensive (two shillings and sixpence) Knickerbocker Glory. There was nothing like that in a residential area further out of the centre of Durban.

Hertford Hotel, in contrast, was quiet and respectable. Its true that the food was much better, but this did not make me love the place. It was high on a hill and from my parents' balcony room, there was a lovely view of Durban and the sea. My room was at the back of the building on a rickety wooden verandah. I tried to make it feel like home straight away by sticking all my film star photos cut out of 'Photoplay' and other film magazines, on to the wall. When we first moved there, rooms still had marble wash stands with a jug and bowl standing on top of them. Later hot and cold wash basins were installed in all rooms. I always wondered what to do with the washstand as naturally one went to the bathrooms at the end of the passage to bath or wash. I had my own record player, which was my pride and joy, and naturally had not only 'Annie Get your Gun' records but also other Betty Hutton records and those of you old enough to remember, will know that she had a rather raucous voice.

On a Saturday morning when I did not have to go to school or do homework, I used to play my records and sing along with them. Very soon after moving in, one day in the middle of 'Doin' What comes Naturally' there was a thundering on the floor from the room below. The record player shook and I was afraid the record would be damaged. I had a terrible fright anyway from the sudden noise and turned the record player off. Old Mrs Lewis underneath me shouted up over the verandah that I must 'stop that noise'. This seemed terrible to me. I was not making a noise when people were sleeping at night nor was it 'between two and four' - a sacred time at Hertford - when all the old ladies had their naps.

This incident was the first of many, and they did not only upset me. My mother also objected to many of the antics of the older residents and as she was a very sociable person, she already had formed a sort of gang of her own, and I was considered old enough to be included, partly because they were all sorry for a teenager having to live in such a stifling atmosphere, and wanted to cheer me up. There was Elsie South, a Canadian lady with a dog, of whom I too was very fond, and Avis Clifford who was about 26 and worked at Native Affairs with my father. She was a college graduate and very witty. My mother and I liked her a lot, but my father did not. He said she was unfeminine and the men at work did not respect her. I think he disapproved of the fact that she was actually having an affair with a married man who she could not often see, though of course she never mentioned this to me. There were the Harrisons from England. Margo Harrison was trying terribly hard to be ladylike, wore hats and white gloves, but spoiled the effect by forever talking about washing her 'smalls' and her ironing. My mother found her a little boring but she liked her and Margo was a pleasant member of our in-crowd. These people were the nucleus of the group though other kindred souls joined in sometimes.

We would take turns and meet in each other's bedrooms in the evenings and laugh and make fun of the difficult residents. Eventually this led to hilarious evenings at which we read out the poems, and sang the parodies we had written about the latest incidents with the old dears! My father did not approve of all this and said my mother would be punished one day for her unkindness.

It was decided to call these people 'Stinkers'. Stinker No 1 was Mrs Lewis who had banged on her ceiling and frightened me. She had been a headmistress she said, at Cheltenham Ladies' College. Stinker No 2 was Mrs Lynch, her crony, a sour old lady who seemed to hate everyone, especially the young. Stinker No. 3 was Mrs Wright who used to shout 'cheeky devils' at the Zulu staff and order people around generally, hissing 'Shhhh' if there was a noise outside her door. She also used to hog the public call box in the hall, and took no notice of the queue of people waiting about for her to finish. And lastly there was Stinker No 4, who was Sister Christiansen, a poker faced lady who we also called Bathsheba. This was because, although there were 2 bathrooms on the first floor, she would always wait angrily outside the biggest one, scowling when you emerged, because she felt you had been in there too long. When someone mildly pointed out that the other bathroom was empty, she snapped emphatically 'I like this one'. To be fair, the one she liked had a handbasin and the other did not.

Several songs and poems were written about Bathsheba but I only remember two.
To the tune of 'Isle of Capri' Avis wrote:

'Twas at the end of the passage I found her
With her soap and her towel on her arm
Oh I can still feel the aura around her
As she guarded her bathroom from harm.
She was as stiff as a grim prison warder
As somehow fate had designed she should be
Watching out that not one other boarder
Would trespass on her property.

Yet another day was over
Workers dreamed of water cool
Still her fortress she defended
By clobber planted on the bathroom stool

Rest assured, she'll not give one iota
With her haven she never will part
Of occupation she must have full quota
She will die with 'basin' graven on her heart!'

and my version was to the tune of 'All through the Night' :

'While the whole hotel is sleeping
All through the night,
A phantom shape its watch is keeping
All through the night.
Don't you try and find a space in,
Don't rush by and try to race in
To the bathroom with a basin,
Morning, noon or night'.

There was also a lady we called 'Swivel' because she had poppy eyes and was always swivelling around in her chair in the dining room to see what was going on. She was not a Stinker, just a very nosey person. She was always popping out her room to see who was passing and which way they were going. Very harmless really. The old cronies loved to gather in the lounge at afternoon tea time, and gossip. They would go silent when the object of the gossip walked in. We used to say 'A.R.G' meaning 'Another Reputation Gone', if passing the open door of the lounge and observing all the nodding heads and whispering voices.

Mrs Lewis used to walk into the dining room and shout at the waiter 'Charles, tell the cook I've come!!' I wonder what the poor cook made of this. Did she think he would clap his hands together, and say 'Goody Goody!' She used to get the salad bowl first and scrabble into it with her fingers to find the freshest leaves. This brought forth my mother's version of a famous poem:

'The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold,
Poor chap, though he knew about wolves in the ballad,
He ought to see Lewis come down on the salad'.

There was a terrible scene once in the dining room when a man called Mr. Love, accused Mrs Lewis of locking his son out of the back door, long before locking up time. He said 'I don't know who you think you are.....etc. etc.' She puffed up with rage, and told him exactly who she was, at great length, detailing the impressive positions of her supervisor husband and magistrate brothers. He had the last word by saying 'Well, its not 'oo you are, its 'ow you behave'. This produced one of the best poems ever, also composed by my mother, at one of our meetings.

'Now let me make you so much wiser, by telling you this startling truth,
My husband was a Supervisor, and not of anything uncouth,
Also I am the lucky sister, of two, not one, two magistrates,
So though I act like a social blister,
What an impression this news creates.
Horrible man, who daring states that its not who I am but how I behave,
What nonsense! its those magistrates, my social status serve and save.
As for my husband, think of him, supervising in Pretoria in his day
Too grandiose and glittering for your eyesight dim
Is this magnificent and high class array.
Two magistrates, and one supervisor, HIP HIP HOORAY!'

On one occasion, I went downstairs to iron one of my father's shirts, for which he paid me sixpence per shirt. Nanny Maria, who still did our washing, although she was obviously no longer my nanny, used to iron his buttons off, so he wouldn't let her do them any more.

The ironing board was around the corner from Mrs. Lewis' room. I was lost in thought as I ironed and suddenly there was a whoosh and she came round the corner in a rage and boomed 'NO IRONING BETWEEN TWO AND FOUR'. The click of the iron on the board must have disturbed her rest.

Avis wrote the following to the tune of 'Coming thru the Rye'

'Gin a body do their ironing twixt two pm and four,
They'll be tackled by a dragon, and never iron no more'.

And to the tune of 'Darling Clementine', she wrote:

'On the stairway, in the passage, never dare to speak a word,
Don't you giggle, sing or whistle, You'll be SHHHD if you are heard.'

To the tune of 'British Grenadiers'

Some talk of dreadful earthquakes, tornadoes and typhoons,
Of storms and anti cyclones and Jupiter's nine moons,
But twas just a noted inmate, her hate of jazz revealing
Was using her umbrella to thump upon the ceiling'

And to the tune of 'Those Endearing Young Charms'

'Oh believe me if you own a small bedside set,
Move it far as you can from the wall,
Or you'll find that your neighbour will soon let you know
She does not like the music at all'

Once, when Bill South spilled some vinegar on the dining room table cloth, Stinker 2 muttered 'Disgusting!' So Avis wrote:

'To Bill this advice is a must,
We hope we'll be able to trust,
Him not to spill vinegar, that is a sin which fills
Someone we know with disgust!'

Elsie wrote only one song, which was to the tune of 'The Campbells are Coming':

'The phone bell is ringing, you've guessed who its for,
She'll go into the booth for an hour or more,
And if you're desirous of making a call,
You can just cool your heels while you wait in the hall'

My contributions were naturally not as clever as those of Avis and my mother, but I wrote quite a few: my Stinker 3 song was to the tune of 'Sam's Song' which went as follows:

'I hear an awful noise, those dratted boys,
I'll sing my SHHH song, People that come in, Make such a din, I'll sing my SHHH Song, After every meal, they laugh and squeal, despite my SHHHH song,
I can't hear my wireless, it makes me boil, Those 'cheeky devils' I'll foil
When outside my door, they hold the floor, I'll sing my SHHH song'.

These songs and poems (and many more which I can't recall) were written over a period of I suppose, about two or three years, and coincided with my most unhappy period at the High School. The fun and laughter at the evening meetings did provide a sunny spot in my life and I also became a great friend of Elsie with the dog. She used to take Koko for walks before the evening meal, probably we set off at about 4.30 as it grows dark quite early in South Africa. It was one of my happiest times. She was also very interested in films and music and she taught me to harmonise during these walks, we had an extensive repertoire and used to sing together loudly in Mitchell Park and Jameson Park whilst walking the dog.

Looking back, I can see how odd it must have seemed. We went walking every day and although there were seldom many people about in the park, the sound must have carried to surrounding houses and everyone must have wondered about this strange show-offy couple, the teenage girl and the lady in her fifties. It didn't worry me at the time though. I felt like Jane Powell or Kathryn Grayson and used to act like they did in the Hollywood musicals and race about the park as I sang. This is I suppose the problem with a child brought up on films, especially musicals. From an early age I had seen folks bursting into song in the street and on trolleycars and so it didn't seem strange to me.

Elsie also taught me to make a sound like a Hawaiian Guitar with my nose! We used to walk along pulling our noses and humming in harmony to songs like 'Now is the Hour'. After a while it makes your nose run a bit, and it also makes it red! But you can hear its meant to sound like a Hawaiian Guitar. There was no end to her talents. She could make a bagpipe noise by knocking her throat with the hard part of her hand and humming. She was very happily married to Bill and later on when I had left school, we all became members of the local theatre scene, and joined all the various music and drama groups. Bill, being a man, was especially sought after and often got leading parts.

At Park View Junior, I was in the A class, got on well with the other children and liked most of the teachers. The teacher in my final year there, was feared by a lot of the children, but I thought she was quite kind underneath. It was when she discovered my interest in acting that she gave me the part of one of the fairies and let me choreograph the fairy dance in the 'Midsummer Nights Dream' when we performed it for the school and our parents.

I was one of the school librarians, chosen by the same teacher, and the library was open in our lunch hour, I think about 3 times a week. I wrote a poem about this, when I was 13, which went as follows:

'I am a school librarian, the other one is Merle
And when 10 books come in at once, our minds are in a whirl
On Wednesday it is Afrikaans and then we have a rest
Or rather have some time to learn for our next history test.
We think that in 3C it has been made a golden law
To keep a book if possible, four months, five months or more.
But when at last the books come in
Through dire threats of fines,
We find to our dismay that we have lost 'King Solomon's Mines'
We see that last to have it out was red haired Antony Bell
He brought it back, so how it went we really couldn't tell.
But when at last our work is done
And all the books are right
We then can smile and say that it was really worth the fight.'

In my last week at Park View, I was chosen to say 'thank you' to the dinner ladies for giving us our school dinners. They could not have chosen a more enthusiastic person to do this. Being used to the inferior hotel food, I was rapturous about the school dinners and mentioned the lovely blancmange and jam and the shepherd's pie. I could see some of the teachers trying not to smile and felt a bit hurt as I was being so sincere. Anyway, it went down very well and I am sure the dinner ladies and cooks were pleased. I don't suppose there was ever such an appreciative customer before or since!

One thing that troubled me a lot was that none of my friends were going to Girls' High. Well, one girl was but she would be in a different class. I was going to take art. Most people were going to Mitchell High, but my mother thought Girls' High would be slightly better. One had to pay but I don't think it was very much. So on my last day while waiting on the steps for my friend Valerie's class to come out, I started casually chatting to a girl in another class who had in fact been at the convent all those years ago. I knew little about her except her name and idly asked her what school she was going to next.

When she said she was doing art at Girls' High, I was ecstatic. I still had a dread of going into new places alone or not knowing what to do. I begged her to meet me on the first day of term so we could find our classroom and sit together. Even now it seems so fated and strange that I just happened to talk to her that day. It really was the start of the unhappiest four years of my life.

Although I continued to enjoy some out-of-school moments, like singing with Elsie, school itself was too awful. In fact until my late twenties, I had recurring nightmares about being back there and walking along the corridors and feeling the atmosphere, and then of course woke up with joy and relief to find it was not real.

That girl I had spoken to did meet me on the first day at the new school and clung to me like glue from then on. I still do not understand objectively what happened, but all I know is that she was hated, not only by the other girls, but also by the staff. True, I found her sweaty, deceitful, sly and untruthful, but maybe there was something else too which I never knew. I was grouped with her in all their minds as we were all new to each other and they saw us as a twosome from the beginning. I very soon realised that I didn't like her at all but I could not get away from her. I spent a lot of play times hiding in one of the toilet cubicles and emerging only when the bell rang.

However, for a long time I pondered as to the real truth that no one would tell me as they thought I was her friend. She was always trying to cheat and copy my work and one day I slid my book across the desk so she could see it as she kept nudging me. A teacher came up and looked with disgust at me and took both our books away. She must have thought at first that it was I who was cheating, because at the next lesson, she apologised and said she realised which way round it had been, but that I should not have been party to it. The fact is that quite a few of the in-crowd type girls would also have been happy to cheat.

The most popular set were not particularly bright, they were good at sport and seemed very sophisticated to me. They talked about boy friends and wore traces of make up after the weekends. However I do not believe that honour was a strong point with them, which it was with me. They pretended to be ill or to faint to get out of tests, another thing which I would never have dreamed of doing. So I still wonder what it was about my deskmate that made them hate her so much. I heard afterwards that the class had decided to send her to Coventry and I was the only one who wasn't told about this plan.

My mother was terribly worried about my unhappiness, I used to try to keep awake at night so the next day would take longer to come, and my stomach used to ache as I got near the school in the mornings. She begged me to leave and said I too could go to Mitchell High, but I felt that would be running away and weak-charactered and told her I would stick it out to the end.

I find it hard to remember all the misery there, only certain things stick out in my memory, like the day when there was a space next to me and one girl came in late and the teacher indicated to her to sit next to me and she pulled a face as if to say 'Not on your life' and went and sat further back. It was as if I had BO! The cause of all my trouble, whose name was Myrna, did do a lot of irritating things. She would fuss with her things and delay the whole class from being dismissed as we all had to stand still in rows before we were told we could go. I was always trying to tell people that she was not my friend, but the people I wished most to tell never listened or spoke to me anyway.

I tried propitiation, and once gave my treasured autographed photograph of Mario Lanza to Josie, one of the sporting in-crowd, hoping it would make her like me. It did not, of course. She smiled and said 'thank you' and that was the end of it.

When I was a teenager, I normally had the most awful period pains, which ended in my being sick or sometimes fainting. Often when the very worst was over I would go into a deep sleep and then wake feeling better. I went to the school sickroom once and an older girl had been kind to me, emptied buckets etc. Then I went to sleep, only to be woken roughly by a teacher, who looked at me coldly and said sarcastically, 'I think you could get up now and go back to class'. I was quite dazed and staggered back. My mother was furious about the incident and wanted to go and make a fuss at the school but I begged her not to, I was so afraid of things getting even worse!

At the end of the first year, Myrna left the school, I don't even know why. I hardly spoke to her any more, I just walked around miserably on the outside fringe of groups pretending to be part of them. I was good at my school work and when I came second in the class, a girl I had thought to be quite innocuous, came up to me and said 'Huh, you must be quite clever, you wouldn't think so, you've got such a silly face!' I was also terribly self-conscious about my artwork. It was a particularly good art class and I was one of the worst.

Being tall, I sat near the back in the art room and our paintings were returned to us from the front of the class, enabling everyone to look at the work before passing it back. I was terribly embarrassed and leaned over trying to get my work before they could all see how poor it was. The art teacher was a very scornful cold sort of woman and said things like 'Well, I'm sure you could do better than that' which I think is extraordinary. One could be slack and not study history dates or French verbs, but being good at art is surely a talent and no one would deliberately paint a poor picture. In fact, a good artist would probably find it impossible to paint as badly as I did.

I should never have gone into the art class, but all my life I had loved drawing, mainly faces, and did not realise how poor I was in comparison to a really talented bunch of students. It was only when we did portraits that the teacher admitted I could get a likeness. In recent years, I started painting again and with a kind helpful teacher at evening class, found I could paint landscapes tolerably well, and was by no means the worst in that evening class.

Sport is a problem in South Africa to unathletic types like me. I found it difficult to catch a ball, was afraid of the gymnasium apparatus and absolutely uninterested in competitive sport. I did not mind swimming as long as it was not in deep water. I had to know that I could touch bottom if necessary. Had I been good at sport, this might have helped. Being clever at English and academic subjects did not impress anyone at all. I became quite round shouldered at school I suppose through creeping round feeling like the lowliest worm and hoping not to be noticed. But as soon as I got home, or at holiday times, I reverted to dreaming of being a film star, practising singing, and walking with Elsie and the dog. I used to dream of how kind and modest I would be when I was famous, how I would remain unaffected by success and all the things that the gossip columnists wrote about the Hollywood stars in the film magazines.

After Myrna left, there was an uneven number in the class and I always sat alone at a desk for two. Even in the last two years of school when I was becoming friendly with a few people in the class, they still sat in the classrooms with their original colleagues. However, the last two years were definitely an improvement on the first, though I still felt that everyone might remember that I had appeared to be Myrna's friend. Maybe this was paranoia, but I believed it.

The four friendships which began to blossom during those slightly easier years were long lasting. The four were Dawn, Hillary, Sue and Nova.

Dawn was a very dreamy, quiet girl, modest though very pretty, unassuming and the type who you could tell would be 'put upon' by more aggressive types throughout her life.
She had a sister called Pam, a year younger, also at the school, who was practical and confident and constantly deriding Dawn for her dreaminess.

Hillary was one of the best artists in the class. She had the appearance of a kitten, she was small with green eyes and black short hair. She had a very quiet voice and was always getting upset because people in shops could not hear what she asked for. Her art may have been wonderful, in fact later she had exhibitions and painted calendars for a wildlife society, but her spelling was atrocious. Nova and I used to laugh at things she wrote in her Study Book. Once I had a holiday postcard from her in which she wrote: 'I'm as red as a beatrute and I look a site'.

Sue and Nova were my closest friends in the following years. Sue had a constant battle with her weight, she was short and a bit of a roly-poly. She had a very Irish look, and was extremely excitable, bouncy and very funny. She had a sweet soprano singing voice and was almost as stage-struck as I was. Although her art was ahead of mine and she loved drawing horses, she was not one of the top talents in the art class. When I first got to know her, she was inclined to say wild things to impress people and was not entirely truthful. Once she said her father was dying of gout. My father seemed to think this strange and of course the man lived for years and years after that. Then she said she had been born at sea and therefore had no definite nationality. Later, her mother mentioned that she had been born in the same Nursing Home as I had! As the years went on, this tendency towards inaccuracy did fade, thankfully.

Nova was definitely the beauty of the class. She had naturally curly shoulder length hair, wide apart dreamy eyes, a teeny waist and a lovely husky speaking voice. She was also extremely witty but in a quieter way than Sue. Her mother had been known as the 'Belle of Port Elizabeth' and I think her mother was distressed about ageing and seeing a daughter growing up to take her place as a beauty. She drank too much and this was a secret worry of Nova's for a long time though I did not always know it. Nova never drank a drop of alcohol when she grew up as she knew too much about its effects. Nova was also, along with Hillary, one of the best artists in the class. Her water-colours were as dreamy and ethereal as she herself was.

During my high school days, I am ashamed to say it, but I was also very self-conscious about my parents. I felt they stuck out like beacons flashing when they attended sports-days, open days etc. I wanted to have parents that merged into the background so nobody would notice me, or them. But they both had loud voices, my father was always speaking Zulu and my mother was not interested in fashion and wore blouses and skirts and looked vaguely peasanty, compared to the other parents, who stood together mousily, dressed in quiet suits. Only a little while ago, Dawn, the gentle dreamer, with whom I am still friendly after nearly 50 years and a distance of thousands of miles, told me she had been very envious of me because of my parents, and had wished she had interesting ones like mine! If only I had known that then!

I used to plan that on my last day at school I would cut up all my uniform clothes and I felt like Jane Eyre when she said words to the effect of 'I'll never come back and see you when I'm grown up' on leaving the orphanage. I actually carried out this plan on the last day of term. My mother would not let me cut up my blazer, however as she said it was a warm and expensive garment that Nanny Maria could take to one of her family. So I took off the badge and cut that up instead!

During these school years, on Saturday mornings I went to a Children's Choir. Sue was also a member. We did quite well in competitions and once were on the radio. I always had to sing alto because I could hold a tune against others with no trouble. But at 16 they expected you to join the Ladies' Choir. This seemed a dreary affair to me - a lot of lumpy ladies of various ages and sizes in long blue dresses that looked like nightgowns
singing in wobbly voices, and so I left and started private singing lessons with an elderly Dutch man called Mr van Zyl. He had been a professional singer in his youth and had concert posters to prove it. He seemed very old to me and I was fond of him and sometimes took him a sweet or a cake. Unfortunately, he seemed to misunderstand the sort of affection I felt for him and later I had to stop my lessons when he became breathless and strange while testing my breathing with his hands around my diaphragm.

Before leaving the subject of school and formal education for good, I must say I was rather a disappointment to my mother in this regard, as she was a real student, who was never happier than with her head in a book and making detailed notes. She once bought me a set of Children's Encyclopaedias which I hardly looked at, and although I was bright at school, I was not particularly interested in deep study. She did try hard. When I was about seven years old, she used to read me as my bedtime story, a book called "Digging for History" all about archaology and Egyptian tombs, that sort of thing. I was quite interested, but still preferred Enid Blyton for entertainment. I think I have a butterfly mind and know a bit about a lot of things, rather than having a great in-depth knowledge of any particular subject.

*A year or two after writing this chapter, I contacted the writer, Errol Lincoln Uys, who collaborated with James Michener on the South African book "The Covenant" and is mentioned in the Foreword, and asked him if he were the same little toddler called Errol Uys, who had been about 2 when I was 8 years old at Linwood Villa. His parents had been one of the earliest owners there. He is the same and it was only after corresponding with Errol and when thinking about it in greater depth that I realised that I had been in the Manager's premises on one occasion when Mrs Uys called me in to look at/play with or take care of her little son. I was not used to younger children being a spoiled only child and I vaguely remember not being sure what to do or say and getting out of the room as quickly as I could. But it really is a very vague memory. How I wish my parents were still here to tell them that little Errol has become a well known writer living in Boston, whose book "Brazil" has had amazingly good reviews both when it first came out in 1986 and now in the year 2000 when a new edition has been printed.

Read on... Chapter Three
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