LITMIR.BIZ

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resolved to become a missionary. I could think of no other way of getting myself to China.

      My family was at first surprised and then began to feel a little proud. Although we were of adventurous daredevil stock, so far there had been no religious pioneers in the family. I was unique. Other little girls wanted to become Florence Nightingale, Shirley Temple or the Forces’ Favourite singer Vera Lynn. At tea parties and family gatherings, at bus stops and on train journeys, as I stood plumply and smugly under tight ringlets (engineered nightly by Doris with curling rags), I was introduced as ‘This is the youngest. She wants to be a missionary.’

      As startled amusement gave way to a kind of awe, I could hear the cheers of the heathens as with tears in their eyes they forsook their own gods for a Christian one.

      From then on I was not quite like other children. I would stand apart from their childish games with an air of bemused tolerance and a contemplative face that I had practised for hours in front of my bedroom mirror. I reaped material benefits from my precocious spirituality. Kind aunts, uncles and friends, fearful of the hazards and privations of my intended destiny, heaped luxuries on me while they could – an extra couple of ounces of butter, some lemon sherbets, a bar of Pears soap.

      But the end came, as I somehow knew it would.

      Another novel based loosely on the Orient but set in London’s seedy Limehouse district (where even as I read it Aunt Julia was administering boiled sausages and noodles to Chinese seamen) was the story of arch-fiend Dr Fu Manchu, whose machinations had caused world turmoil and the undoing of many a virtuous maiden. Faced with these unsuspected dangers, I abandoned my missionary plan.

      My family took a long time to forgive me and from that day to this I have wisely never planned a future but have ricocheted from one happening to another.

      Only my father understood. A funny and gentle man, Dick advised me to join the Girl Guides.

      My father was the rock to which all our unstable boats were tethered. Content and complete, he was the only one of the family never to leave England and who never wanted to. He was an orphan from South Shields in the north-east of England, and was brought up by a coal miner and his wife. He himself went down the mines to work when he was only twelve. He never knew who his mother was, but had a prized army document in his possession awarding his father, Private James Wood of the Coldstream Guards, an award for gallantry in World War l for bringing in wounded soldiers from the battlefield at the Somme.

      My son Simon has that document in his possession today.

      In between fostering and feeding our pets, which ranged from rabbits, hedgehogs – Doris used to put out a saucer of milk for one hedgehog who came up from the wood to sip from it – newts and guinea pigs, to a beloved dog called Peter and a feisty white goat called Salome, Rita and I were growing up.

      By the way, we were very unsuccessful with our rabbits. Doris had originally bought a couple of them for a birthday present for me – unimaginatively named (by me) Darby and Joan. But Doris also had an eye to future rabbit stews. Food, remember, was very scarce and bunny-huggers hadn’t even been born. Darby and Joan multiplied at an alarming rate, but both they and their offspring found their way out of the hutch into the wood. After some time the sandy-coloured wild rabbits that lived in the wood got lots of new fluffy little black-and-white brothers and sisters. Although it was obvious that our fertile pair was still at it, Doris had to abandon her culinary plans.

      Rita was possessed of two abiding motives: she was an incurable romantic and she wanted to be a teacher. Consequently, while other children were romping through Cowboys and Indians and Cops and Robbers, Rita and I moved languidly through our wild wood as jungle princesses with glorious exotic names such as Astarte and Bulbutha. The game always ended with me being carried back to civilisation and nuptial bliss by a strong young hunter or prince, while Rita remained supreme and unchallenged in her jungle domain. She was always determined that I would be married but that she would remain single. She was wrong on one count.

      When not bedecked in feathers and leaves, Rita would be assuming her second role, that of mentor. She would sit me high up in a tall tree in our wood on a branch I couldn’t get down from unaided, and make me play spelling bees and school. Thus at the tender age of seven I would sit dutifully on my branch chanting out words like d-i-a-r-r-h-oe (diphthong) –a. If I left out the diphthong I would have to re-spell it. I had the most wonderful vocabulary of difficult words and could astonish friends and family with a facile use of such words as pneumonia, psittacosis and parallel. (I wonder what Rita would have made of text talk today?)

      One evening the vicar came round to deliver the parish magazine. My mother courteously enquired after the health of his wife, who was known to be of a sickly nature.

      ‘Not too well,’ the vicar replied, shaking his shiny bald head.

      ‘Oh,’ I said, before beautifully and slowly delivering my latest word. ‘Do you think it could be gon-orr-hoea?’

      The vicar went purple, my mother looked horrified but then suppressed a giggle, and after that copies of the parish magazine came only by post.

      At Christmas and other festive occasions Rita and I would entertain the family with plays. Emerging from behind the lounge curtains, we would recite everything from Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene and the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, to the first few lines of ‘To be, or not to be …’ or ‘Jabberwocky’ – ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves …’

      All this precocious erudition changed my life. I was five when I went to my first convent school and could already read exceptionally well for my age. On the first day all the new children were asked to recite any little poems we knew for the Mother Superior, who was grading us on the outcome. I recited fully, with great expression as coached by Rita, hardly understanding one word of what I was saying, Gertrude’s speech from Hamlet describing Ophelia’s watery death.

      There is a willow grows aslant a brook,

      That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream:

      There with fantastic garlands did she come,

      Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,

      That liberal shepherds give a grosser name;

      But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them …

      The Mother Superior was convinced she had a prodigy on her hands and placed me in a class two years in advance of my age. Consequently, I was to take my matric at fifteen, go up to university at just eighteen, and be married at 20.

      Had I recited ‘I don’t like beetles, though I’m sure they’re very good / I don’t like porridge, tho’ my Mummy says I should …’, I would never have met Malcolm or Alan, never have gone to Nigeria, never have come to South Africa, never have had four children and nine grandchildren along the way, or would not now be sitting at my desk in Johannesburg telling you the story of my life.

      Have you ever wondered (and of course you have) about the milestones in your life which at the time didn’t seem to signify anything important at all? That phone call, that meeting with somebody new, that moment of electricity when your eyes met a stranger’s, that careless remark a friend let slip, that opportunity you never took?

      Maybe it’s best that way – that we never know until afterwards that our lives are about to change, sometimes in a moment.

      It was actually my father’s throwaway remark about joining the Girl Guides that was to result in an early milestone in my life – my first trip overseas, or ‘abroad’, as it was known in England.

      Our weekly Girl Guide meetings were held at an old English manor house and one lovely July evening when I was thirteen I was introduced to a French Girl Guide who was spending a month with one of my friends and her family. Agnes Blanchard and I exchanged names and addresses and promised to write (of course we never did) and I promptly forgot about her.

      And then the following March our phone rang at home and my mother was amazed to find it was a call from Paris. A chance meeting was to become a milestone and introduce me to a life

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