Miss Gilbey taught Speech and Drama. Every Friday afternoon as the car speeded down the highway en route to her studio cum house I would learn a poem about ducks or gypsies parrot fashion. As my mother or father said the words out loud to me, I would recite them back verbatim. I was six years old fashioning a posh, whitey English accent with clipped tones that did not win me any friends back at the school I went to and especially on the playing field during break. I was six years old. I had not begun to straighten my hair yet to look like the blonde, horsy looking with long teeth, fair or dark, golden-haired, freckled, hockey and tennis playing children who had names like Miranda who joined me when I started going for lessons. She drilled, ‘Speak with expression, expression, expression into me.’
The first thing I noticed is that they weren’t self-conscious like me.
They were brimming with confidence, made friends easily while I had to battle with bullies who mocked me by imitating my voice that was beginning to change at the predominantly coloured school that I went to. The first time I went to Miss Gilbey’s studio I went with my mother who was taking elocution lessons but she stopped soon after taking me. I sat there, in a corner on a bench, my back against a cool wall, felt in my pocket for the candy my mother had given me and started licking away at a red lolly that tasted like cherry making what my mother told me afterwards in the car were ghastly sucking noises that perturbed the dear old Miss Gilbey.
Every now and then I would catch her looking at me and I would smile at her. She never smiled back. Her eyes felt like laser beams when they connected with mine. I felt them keenly. Only later on the way home with my mother scolding me for bringing that sweet inside with me would I realise that I had been very irritating like only a child could be; completely oblivious to what the grownups around her were thinking without being told that she had done something wrong. Later on when I had moved onto Sharon Rother’s, a past pupil of Miss Gilbey who had done her licentiate, Speech and Drama studio in Walmer, which was held in a room adjacent to a church, Miss Gilbey also moved on.
She moved all the way to Montagu with her sister who suffered from bad bouts of asthma. The air there would be good for her, I reckoned. Two women living on their own for most of their adult life; when did they ever come into contact with men, I wondered? In the aisles of a supermarket when they shopped for groceries going down a long list of perishable items? Did a man ever call Miss Gilbey ‘a good girl’ or ‘you’re a beauty, sweetheart’, wink at her, put his arm around her waist and walk with her for awhile while asking her what her name was (her name was Marjorie and I couldn’t ever imagine even if I tried very hard now that any man, even a brazen man or a boy could call her by her first name) and where she lived and would she like to get a bite to eat.
Perhaps some hot tea and a steak and kidney pie with gravy in a restaurant at a hotel. The English men I had been taught by were gentlemen. They were quiet intellectuals, academics, teachers, soft spoken lecturers at universities and introverted and bookish.
What did the life of a spinster feel like? What did the life of an unmarried woman who did not have to cook for a husband, a small child or children, who never hovered and cooed over a crib of a pretty new-born baby? What did a woman over fifty who was past the age of flirting, the cunning moves of seduction do for fun? Did she attend church, bible study with other young women; serve tea at the end of the Sunday morning service with crumpets and sandwiches made with fish; pilchards and sardines or cheese and tomato or egg with dollops of mayonnaise or chicken, wilting lettuce and mayonnaise, cakes, petit fours, biscuits made with coconut and almonds all laid out on tables with white table cloths?
Was that the appropriate behaviour for a woman her age, a lady? Had there ever been a man in her life? In the time I imagined when she was young had she ever corresponded with a young man writing letters filled with lover’s nonsense that only made sense to them, not to the outside world. Did they write about their unfolding passion, their wonder at their innocent love, the madness of the war, the burning houses, flames licking attics, bedrooms, roofs, charred flesh, bodies burnt beyond recognition?
Did they write in code, draw entwined hearts made out of paper? Did she ever seal the letter with a wet, crimson kiss that peeled off her lips or did she ever put her feet up in the afternoon and watch the soaps as a middle-aged woman or quiz shows as a girl?
Did they even have a television now in South Africa? I knew Miss Gilbey didn’t do that because she gave Speech and Drama lessons every afternoon during the week. I was the only coloured child amongst whites. But I didn’t, not for a long time, see myself as being the only coloured child amongst whites. I played with them because I was a child and when you are child words like racism and prejudice do not ring incessantly inside your head like say in the head of a representative of the local government, the president, his cabinet or a community leader who was voted into power by stalwarts, comrades, communists and people who believed in Biko’s Black Consciousness.
Had she ever gone swimming with friends when she was as old as I was when I first started coming to see her? Had she ever clutched her mother’s hand frightened of the road outside her house filled with screaming cars? What were her parents like? How did she come to live in South Africa? Did she grow up during the war; when bombs rained down from the black skies in England, was she ever stuck with other people, families robbed of their men in bomb shelters? Was she a liberal? She obviously didn’t believe in the politics of the day because she had taken my mother and then me on. So, in her own quiet and independent way she was rebelling against the government.
She was making a political statement. At thirty-one I imagine the woman, the child, the girl and then her middle-aged. Didn’t she ever want to be a wife? Growing up I thought as a very young girl, a child, that everyone wanted to be a wife but at thirty-one and the divorce rate globally so high, the only people getting hitched are those blinded by the alluring volcano that is love. They are not conscious of the other person’s imminent flaws yet, how arguments can erupt from seemingly nowhere, the cancer of talk of divorce in the interim wild in the air while you and the other person in the relationship is waiting to make up. They are not conscious yet of the fall out of an illness that will later on strike the family or an intense, lingering depression that manifests and steeps itself into the bones of either the wife or the husband or the small child whose homework is overlooked over the breakfast at the kitchen table while the parents of that small child or children, who wants the attention of both of the adults his or her features resemble while they are at war with each other over some petty, childish thing.
A thing like who had to take the garbage out, who didn’t come forward and help to make the unmade beds, the smears of toothpaste in the bathroom’s basin or whose turn was to wash the dirty dishes in the sink and put it in the dishwasher. Miss Gilbey must have died already in Montagu; perhaps in her sleep, in her bedroom. Perhaps she is buried there now. Who visits her grave, puts fresh cut flowers on it, clears away the old ones, throws the brown water out and puts clean water in the pots or jars or bottles? Even in death she is a mystery to me; these two lonely sisters in a world of light of their own making; their contemporaries with double chins, sagging bosoms, grandchildren, wearing too much make-up, wearing hats to church that bloomed roses, smelling of perfume.
Miss Gilbey had a solid air about her when I first met her. As if she knew she belonged in the world. She always had a pot of tea on her desk that she poured with poise, a jug of milk, a pretty cup and saucer with patterns of flowers on; very English, very proper, very old-fashioned. She sipped her tea as we recited our poems out loud correcting our enunciation, willing us to speak fluently, with emphasis, willing us to reach for that gold star she would stick in our books that we children pasted our poetry and monologues from the books of Winnie-the-pooh in. If she was satisfied with how our vowels sounded, how we articulated the poet’s language, how invested we were in executing the lull of the text, showing the full range of emotions that was expected of us as a spirited ghost or a highwayman we would see a gold star shining off the page, blinking up at us.
In the room filled with a breeze that felt as cool as a humming fridge (we didn’t have air conditioners in those days) as my voice bounced off the walls of the studio, as I watched the backs of the white children’s heads, tufts of dark or golden hair escaping from ponytails, still in their school uniforms or sport kit sniggering.
There was nothing, nothing said of the forced removals that took place in 1964 in South End in what was once a diverse and cosmopolitan suburb filled with Indians, Malays, Muslims, blacks, whites and coloureds living together harmoniously; religion, awash with their culture at times of thanksgiving and holiness and their loyalty, their faith in their different Gods and to each other were their pillars of strength.
There was nothing, nothing said of the unrest that was brewing in South Africa, the daily disdain and underlying aggression in chars as they faced their employer’s, men and women; comrades being picked up by the Special Branch or plainclothes policemen or police spies, being detained after being questioned, brought before a court of law, imprisoned on Robben Island. There was no talk of a coloured man called Georgie Botha’s apparent suicide in this room where my voice rose and rose and rose higher and higher making an imprint, burning it, a hole in the head of Marjorie Gilbey. In the heads of those privileged whites who also came to the studio. I wanted to achieve what they had.
All those gold stars stuck in their books. I didn’t mind the silver ones but gold spelled something marvellous; something magical.
Something accomplished wonderfully; magnificently. I never got red stars. Seeing a red star gave me a start, a headache started throbbing, butterflies in the pit of my stomach started to flit as if I had failed a test at school, got all the sums wrong, spelled the words incorrectly. You only got a red star when you hadn’t learnt all the words to the poem, stammered and needed prompting from Miss Gilbey. There was no talk of the Rivonia Treason Trial, George Bezos, what was in the newspapers about it, the stories that were running internationally and a man called Mandela.
There was no talk of coloured men like Dennis Brutus and the poet Arthur Nortje who was born in Port Elizabeth, in South End which was now a suburb where white people lived comfortably, well off behind their high walls, their dogs and electric fences. Nortje later won a scholarship to study literature at Jesus College at Oxford. It was on Dennis Brutus’s recommendation that he got that scholarship. But I was only six and didn’t know anything besides school and my family. I was just a colored girl, innocent and wide-eyed, six years old with skinned knees from playing amongst the teachers’ cars, wearing North Stars when I came to Marjorie Gilbey’s Studio for Speech and Drama.
A child bullied by the older kids from other standards, tormented by them as they stalked me speaking in high pitched, squeaky voices making me cry. Mandela was just a ghost of a man. The essence of the man never showed the outward shame of humiliation from his persecutors; the Afrikaner wardens who spoke English poorly at the prison on the island. He never showed pain or suffering. His spirit was the spirit of a child, unfettered. The work of his soul continued to live in the outside world, outside of Robben Island where he was imprisoned, living in his supporters, garnering more and more praise internationally.
There was nothing, nothing of men being found hanged in their cell, tortured with burning cigarettes, told to strip naked so that they could be searched or a detainee slipping on a bar of soap.
