That beetle and I had lots of adventures. I've a movie of it with just married scrawled across it in lipstick. A 'present' from my best man, Jeremy brooks. Jeremy and I go back to kindergarten. We both started on the same day, a rainy day as I remember it. We were queuing up to get our government issue gill of milk. It used to come every day and it used to go off. By the time we got it, it was usually sour. Some young tough started to push me around, a problem I had to the end of my school days. I had no idea how to deal with it, but Jeremy just flew into him with arms swinging like a windmill, then finally wrestled him to the ground. After that, he went away. Jeremy was at my side for many more adventures.
One day, my father said to me, I have to take you to the dentist. I as six years old. Dad used to go to work on a bicycle. He went up the road on a bicycle and parked his bike and got a bus. My dad was one of those Victorians who believed that hardship was good for the soul and I had to sit on his cross bar while he pedalled up the road. There was a vacant block of land behind our house, that had a kaffir path winding its way though it. There we are. It had just stopped raining, me sitting fearfully on the crossbar, trying to avoid my dads knees, which were pumping up and down on the pedals as we sped along with the winding path. Dad made an error of judgement somewhere and both of us and the bicycle ended up in the mud. It had just finished raining. So we walked back home and dad decided we would get a lift with athol tiffen, who agreed to take us to the bus stop. We got off the bus at the appropriate place and I found myself in Salisbury general hospital. Somebody in a white coat pushed me towards an open door and I'd had a few experiences with people in white coats before and I decided I wasnt going through that door, so I clung to the door frame. My previous experiences were usually injections. Every holiday we all had to be inoculated against the parasites of Africa, to a formula approved of by the British empire-without which you couldn't cross the border or get into school. The yellow Fever injection was put into you with a huge needle like a knitting needle. Eventually they overpowered me by brute force and I was dragged onto a couch, where a voice told me that what was about to happen was painless and just like going to sleep. Then something was out over my nose that smelled very bad. Everything I could see was swirling around in circles. When I came round, everyone was saying comforting things like, everything's alright, and my mouth was very painful. They used a mirror to show me big gaps where my teeth used to be and a lot of blood. I think in those days they used to grab you, get a pair of pliers, hold your tooth and just twist it. What i left out is I had an inspection by the school dentist a few weeks earlier, and everyone was responding to this report.
Life was like that. Then athol came and took me home. I can remember sitting in the car, feeling that I'd been violated. But from then onwards going to school was all much of the same. There were always things going on. I used to go to school on my fathers bicycle as well. I did eventually they my own bike, but I had been considered a unsafe bet for riding a bike. This was because when Charles needed to sell his bike, he brought it around and I was put on it and told to pedal- which felt very unsafe to me as I knew nothing about balance and steering and landed up face down in a patch of Christ thorn. Charles decided that the problem was my feet wouldn't reach the pedals, so wooden blocks were fixed to the pedals. It was many years before I finally taught myself to ride, practicing mounting within my mothers reach. I put my foot of the pedal and I pushed the bike along to achieve some momentum, then swing my leg over the saddle to get on. But once I learned how to do it, I would ride round and round our garden until boredom got the better of me, but we had a big garden of five acres, so I didn't really get bored. Still,nobody was game to let me cycle to school, in case one of my swerves caused me to end up under the wheels of a bus. This doomed me to dad's cross bar and the bus. We used to ride to somebody's house and leave the bike in their front garden and catch the bus to school.
My father was all for pushing you into doing things as was was my mother to tell you the truth. Mum was old school and robust. She could endure a great deal and was always lecturing me not to let things get me down. But this also led me to distrust her. If I asked her to teach me to drive, she would put me in a car and tell me what to do without understanding how much I really understood. For example, she would put my feet on the pedals and tell me one was the accelerator and the other was a brake. But I didn't really understand the meaning of the word accelerator - or brake. When we finally got trundling down the road, she would start yelling "brake"- but I didn't really know what she was saying, which would lead to our raised voices and frustrations.
To this day, I am horrified of being put in charge of something where I don't really understand the controls, such as the time my uncle started a lawn mower, a self propelled lawn mower, and told me to push it order the grass. After the mower had been through his prized flower bed and the mower was taken away from me, all these incidences culminated in my mother's mind to convince her that I wasn't mechanically minded. This heavily influenced what job I could take. I wanted to be a farmer but this was cancelled before I got off the ground because I wasn't "mechanically minded". I'm much more mechanically minded now.
Mother was very conscious of practicalities. After a happy holiday, where I'd spent months fishing and I suddenly decided I was going to be fisherman, she hurriedly dissuaded me from this. Whether I'd have been able to earn my living, I have no idea, but I know that was the only time I really looked forward to doing something with my life.
My dad decided he wasn't an authority about my future and that he'd better get one in, so he had in his office a highly qualified education specialist. His name was Brady. Dad handed me over to his tender care. My Brady talked to me for about an hour and a half and decided that I needed to be an architect. So when this was put to my dad, I remember him sitting behind his desk and telling someone in his office what the finding had been and remember telling this other chap that this was expensive and he would only be able to do it once and he really wanted to send his own sons. To say i was hurt was an understatement. This all needs some explaining. We need to go back really early.
Around about 1940, all the men were enrolling in the forces and rushing off to war. My father decided that Hitler was a bad guy that had to be stopped. He became a navigator on a Catalina aircraft and was killed soon after. The first my mother knew was when an RAF lieutenant presented himself at the door and told my mother. She just couldn't soak up the information. I would have been about six months old. Various relatives also didn't believe it. One was Harold, who said he was still alive somewhere out there somewhere, which left my mother in no mans land. She wrote to the airforce asking for his things, which did eventually rock up because I saw them. They were his uniform, medals, his razor. I've seen these, so I know they must have come, but it didn't soften the blow. People had been collecting the national war fund for some years and this money had been added to by a grant from the state lotteries. But because of the uncertainty about my father, my mother became very pale and anaemic. This went on for many years. I don't know how many as I was a baby. She became very ill from stress. The doctor put her on a tiny dose of strychnine. It pulled her out. She gained weight. My mother was always lecturing to me that what doesn't kill fattens. This period of time really toughened her up.
My real father owned a studebaker, a royal blue one. My mother used to put me in the back of this thing and we'd go. I can see myself leaning out of the window and putting greasy fingers on the paintwork. She also used to take me out in it when I couldn't sleep. At this time, we were living in forts flats with my grandmother and my aunts, yvonne and olga.
Around this time, all the daughters and my mother decided to get married. My mother married jack Armstrong and I became an "adopted" child. My new father reminded me of this on frequent occasions, which didn't make for security. An early experience brought this home. Soon after we moved into his house in greendale, which he had built himself, which in those days in Africa meant employing Africans who thought they knew how to build. The house had a steep pitched thatched roof and numerous extensions. It was cold and drafts and insects came in, while lizards used to run along the walls.
One morning, I told my mother I needed to do a wee-wee. She told me to go through a particular door. This turned out to be the toilet door. I had only just started living there. My father happened to be in the toilet doing his own wee-wee. He slammed the door on me. The last image I have is of this tall, shadowy man with a big penis, squirting into the toilet bowel as the door slammed -- and a feeling of rejection.
I complained to my mother but she simply said that's alright, wait until he's finished. My mothers misjudgement on the painful experience meant that i didn't trust her judgement. Nothing really came out of that, just a sense of distrust. I learned not to trust anything in life but to analyse every situation down to rock bottom. It basically means you're learning to fight for yourself and you've got to learn to fight for yourself. Me against the world. That continued for many years.
STAY SANE AND SAVAGE Gender activism, intellectual shamanism
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