A Childhood Made Up - Brent Meersman

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workers in those days, still can. There was Lettie, then Margaret, then Martha, surnames unknown. My mother painted an affectionate oil portrait of Margaret, which for some reason Margaret didn’t want to take home with her.

      Sometimes my mother forgot the time and there would be a mild panic to get supper ready before my father came back from work. He was starving and exhausted by the time he got home, often late. He was trying to get as much overtime as possible, the only way he could earn enough to make ends meet. Unemployment is one thing, but to work nine to eleven hours a day, six days a week, and still not be able to provide for your family is in some respects worse. I remember how he came home after nine p.m. and was gone by six a.m. for weeks on end.

      I helped Mom prepare supper. We peeled potatoes. The deep lines on her palms were permanently stained brown by the juice of those tubers. I did my best, but my little hands couldn’t keep pace with hers. Our dinner ration was two spuds per person per day and three for Papa. ‘Drudgery, absolute drudgery,’ my mother lamented as we peeled.

      My mom didn’t do homeyness or bake cakes or cook special dinners for hubby. Meals were a perfunctory affair with almost the same seven-day schedule every week: grilled chops, red cabbage and boiled potatoes; chicken pieces and boiled potatoes; frozen hake, green beans and boiled potatoes; celery and tomato stew and boiled potatoes; mince curry and boiled potatoes; fried eggs or pork bangers and spinach mashed with boiled potatoes; tinned pilchards and … rice. But at that stage, there was food on the table every night, something I would later not take for granted.

      My father would on occasion cook a special meal on weekends. He concocted stews of steak and kidney with chips made in a deep fryer he’d specially brought with him from Belgium. But for my mother, cooking was a daily bore; for her, life was this constant juggling of household chores competing with her creative dreams.

      This was why there were so few women artists, she maintained, and what was more, there wouldn’t have been that many successful male artists either if it hadn’t been for the women in their lives behaving like servants. And many artists, like Renoir, for example, wouldn’t have had anything to paint in the first place if there weren’t beautiful women to inspire them. And Mrs Tolstoy wrote out War and Peace by hand seven times for her husband to get the manuscript in publishable form, she said.

      In an ideal world, Shirley would have painted day and night as she chose, without regard to the conventions of three meals a day and the spinning of the earth with its sunrises and sunsets. But despite the household chores and looking after us kids, she was prolific for a number of years.

      She liked drawing men. Her men’s bodies were lithe and muscular, always sensual and slightly romanticised, while her women were more realistic and more diverse. Paintings of nudes were all over the house, causing white South Africans in the 1970s and 80s to stare uncomfortably at the carpet if they came inside for any reason. The carpet was old and worn and the thing that was truly embarrassing as far as my mother was concerned. But it was the nudes the South Africans would snigger at, not the carpet.

      ‘They have such tiny, dirty minds,’ Mom told us. ‘They don’t understand anything beautiful.’ Which was why, I supposed, we had so few guests.

      The few visitors who did manage to get inside the flat, also occasionally workmen such as house painters or the plumber, were agog at the nipples and blushed at the penises. A police constable once slurped a mug of hot chocolate in the lounge, not knowing where to look. He turned beetroot. All that crime and violence hadn’t prepared him for a painting showing a modest Athenian genital. The caretaker of the flats cackled at a work called Drink and Dagga. ‘Look, that bloke’s glasses are falling off,’ he observed. Mom laughed when he had left. ‘He doesn’t understand cubism. They just haven’t got a clue, have they? They are like cats or dogs looking at a film screen.’

      At first, my mother had hidden the nudes in her studio, but my brother and I kept dragging them out. I wonder why we were so insistent? Was it that we wanted to support our mother and say she had nothing to be ashamed of? Were we thumbing our noses at the neighbours for disapproving of us? Or was it that we were tired of so many things being hidden and unsaid at home?

      We won in the end, but my mom did her best to make sure the neighbours didn’t see inside. She had net curtains fitted on all the windows and kept them permanently drawn. Besides the nudes, what might the neighbours have said about the weird and wonderful excrescences of monsters that also adorned our walls?

      My mother didn’t care for pretty pictures, although she appreciated the skills of the Impressionists. She loathed what she called ‘picayune Sunday paintings!’ She had a horror of still-lifes, especially Flemish ones, though she said they could paint exquisitely the two most difficult things of all – glass and water. She would also never paint buildings; she thought them boring and architecture the most boring art of all, best left to people who have to use rulers to draw.

      She did many paintings of her childhood in Vryburg in the 1920s, of the arid Northern Cape with herds of big horned cattle and wranglers on horses. She told us stories about growing up on the ranch, an idyllic, privileged childhood from the sound of it. Her family had been wealthy once and she was raised without having to do any household chores. These tasks were done by black servants. Tasks like beheading chickens. The man whose job this was, he who wielded the axe, was ‘Old Tom’. When she was a little girl, Tom had taken Shirley aside one day and shown her. She told me how the blood shot out like a fountain and the chicken’s body careered around the yard, headless. ‘It looked like it was running,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t of course. It was its nerves making the body convulse.’ Little Shirley didn’t want to eat her supper that night, and when she finally confessed why to her parents, it was Old Tom’s turn to get it in the neck.

      The family in Vryburg had chambermaids, a cook, and a chauffeur to drive Shirley and her sisters to school, leaving plenty of time to practise piano sonatas and draw pictures. I was not yet old enough to know that nostalgia is a form of wish fulfilment, a longing for a time and a place, a make-believe past, where in truth people were often desperately unhappy, and if those really had been the happiest years of their lives, they certainly wouldn’t have known it at the time.

      I loved escaping into my mom’s childhood. Afternoons on the farm were too hot to go out and the sisters would lie on their tummies and sketch or act out stories. At her granny’s homestead someone was always playing Chopin, Liszt or Beethoven, she said. They’d clear the furniture and dance and sing Irish songs. At teatime there were cakes, tarts, scones and cucumber sandwiches. The very young and the very old were all together, four generations of family filling the house. How different life was now, with only she, her husband and her two small children ­– the nuclear family that has made us all neurotics in the West.

      She told me about the day the sky turned black and blotted out the sun, not with clouds but with a mile-long swarm of locusts. Everyone was sent to the fields, frantically beating pans and pot lids ‘like a Chinese opera’. She had always been terrified of those hideous insects with beating wings and spiky legs that kicked. Now there were billions of them landing on every surface and gorging themselves on the fields. The farm workers filled sacks writhing with locusts and ate them.

      There were other vast clouds that swept across the land, but of sand – the great dust storms that blew in from the Kalahari desert like something out of the Bible. In the heat there were also whirlwinds. You’d hear a swoosh and then an explosion as the tiny tornado suddenly detonated into existence out of thin air. Then these dust devils would dance across the desert, causing havoc wherever they went, strong enough to knock a young girl off her feet.

      Rain clouds seldom materialised. Sometimes white marbled clouds would build in the blue sky for a few hours and tease her father before evaporating into thin air. But when it did rain, the whole world changed. Giant drops drummed onto the parched soil. Horses cantered about skittishly; even the cows would liven up. The rain was frequently torrential, flooding the fields and filling dongas. Roads became impassable. There were flash floods in the ravines, sweeping away whole trees and unsuspecting people who were walking along in what a second before had been a dry river bed. Overnight, green shoots would emerge and the whole world was renewed with the smell of wet earth. Shirley missed the farm,

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