LITMIR.BIZ

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a commercial artist. Art had to come from within; otherwise the figures came out all stiff and awkward.

      ‘I don’t paint fashionable, conventional stuff, or paint for money or to please people,’ she said. ‘You have to be fearless to be original.’

      Everything she drew was gold to me. I’d be beside myself when she crossed out or tore up illustration after illustration which I wanted for my book. When she eventually gave me one, she would pronounce it: ‘Technically fine but devoid of life.’

      I typed my stories on her ageing Olivetti. I had to sit on a box on the dining-room chair to get my little fingers above the typewriter keys. I wrote adventure stories based on what I was reading – Willard Price’s animal adventures; the horse stories of Mary Elwyn Patchett and Mary O’Hara; the exploits of Squadron Leader Bigglesworth by Captain WE Johns.

      My mom had written a novel too. ‘A silly romance,’ she said. ‘Unpublishable rubbish.’ But relatives who had read Shirley’s book said the story was rather good. No one will ever know. On the ocean liner to Belgium in 1971, when I was four years old and we thought the family was emigrating, she flung the typed manuscript, the only existing copy, into the Atlantic. My father was furious.

      Belgium, Papa’s birthplace – and Antwerp in particular – precipitated what for ever after was referred to as ‘the Belgian episode’.

      The whole family would live in terror of a repeat.

      Two

      THE BELGIAN EPISODE

      WE WERE TOLD that my mother became anaemic in Belgium, which was why she got seriously sick. The diagnosis made perfect sense to Shirley. She had looked in the mirror and pulled down her left bottom eyelid and found it to be white inside. Our family by then had been vegetarian for some years and she attributed her anaemia to the fact that she hadn’t been getting nuts or wheatgerm in Antwerp. Wheatgerm was a sort of ‘nerve powder’, she said. But on the whole, she blamed Belgium. This was before it became hackneyed to deride the plucky Belgians. Besides, most South Africans back then couldn’t tell Belgium from Bulgaria even with a map.

      When we emigrated in 1972, it was the first time Shirley had left Africa. She was to be deeply disappointed. With the benefit of hindsight, she later wrote that leaving Africa had been ‘spiritual death’ and she recounted the whole dreadful Belgian episode. My mother kept a diary throughout her life, but the entries are sporadic and sparse, amounting to about two shoeboxes full of her musings and mostly her reflections on life. I always knew she had a passion for keeping various records, such as our medical histories and lists of important purchases, but only after she died did I read her diaries and reread her letters to me. I often presume to know her thoughts. I have lifted these from her journals and from several hundred drawing books but mostly from what she told me during a great many long and intimate conversations we had later in life, when I had grown up.

      ‘A dreadful stench drifted around the Belgian cities, a decadent atmosphere seemed to mingle and combine with the pollution,’ Shirley wrote in her diary. ‘The air was stale and dreadful. The only green thing I could find was a Brussels sprout. They don’t bathe. They just eat garlic,’ she told me.

      Belgium in the early 1970s lacked many things. Greenery was not high on the list of essentials. Half the homes didn’t even have modern bathrooms. People shared their cramped quarters with a great deal of oversized furniture.

      ‘I have seen better servant quarters in South Africa than what supposedly well-standing Europeans live in. Antwerp is about as inviting as a stable,’ she wrote in a letter to my aunt.

      During the year our family spent in Belgium, we only managed a few touristy things in the first month, nothing thereafter.

      Shirley was all aquiver to see the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. At last she was in Europe, and she would visit all those paintings she had only ever seen as tiny black-and-white photographs in the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Modern Art. But what she found at the Royal Museums was how she imagined purgatory would be: galleries full of pernickety landscapes, endless still-lifes with dead pheasants, and over-varnished portraits of boring nobles in black cloaks with white frills. She had never painted, and would never want to paint, as realistically as the old masters.

      Then followed a succession of rooms filled with crucifixions, martyrdoms and medieval Virgin Marys. What was she doing there, she wondered. And what were these pictures doing to her mind?

      There were lots of Brueghels by lots of Brueghels. No Picassos. Finally she found some Delvauxs. She adored his Pygmalion, which depicted a nude woman embracing a classical statue of a nude man in an eerie landscape. This was also the first time she saw Delvaux’s drawings. Looking at them made her itch to start work again.

      In the end, the highlight of the trip to Brussels turned out to be a giant flower carpet of begonias on the Grand Place. By luck, 1971 happened to be the first year the Bruxellois did it. Today it’s an annual event.

      On our only other tourist excursion we went to Ghent and visited the fairy-tale Gravensteen castle. Inside was a torture museum with an iron maiden and a dungeon that left Shirley shuddering. She had nightmares all the next week. In one room, there was a hole in the floor through which prisoners had been dropped. The condemned men usually broke their legs on the stone floor two storeys below, she was informed by a neatly printed plaque. Then they were left to starve to death.

      My mind still sometimes fills with horrid visions of medieval tortures and death by fire as I am trying to drift off to sleep. Some ‘fairy-tale castle’.

      ‘The Belgians,’ my mother said, when looking back on that year, ‘are an ignorant, stupid people. They don’t know how to live. They could have a high standard of living, but they’d rather hoard things. The lengths they will go to for their stinginess … Unbelievable! And all they ever talk about is money and the cost of things.’

      By ‘the Belgians’ what Mom really meant were her in-laws.

      ‘They are so very materialistic, and in a brazen, shameless, grasping way. Such small horizons! What a boxed-in outlook on life. Regulated. Conforming. And so petty! Ugh!’ She often scribbled ‘ugh’ next to drawings she made of people she didn’t like.

      She drew her father-in-law as an apeman carrying a club. He looked Cro-Magnon but without the ability to paint the Lascaux Cave. His bottom lip was always jutting out in a disapproving sulk. ‘A niggardly, covetous, parsimonious wretch,’ said Mom.

      Meanwhile, my grandparents – Bopa and Boma – couldn’t make head or tail of this daughter-in-law of theirs. Who would want to buy her crazy paintings? If she was such a great artist, why couldn’t she illustrate books or paint postcards and sketch people’s portraits on the Groenplaats for a few francs like normal artists? Why was she incapable of doing anything that might make money?

      In her defence, my father unwisely cited Van Gogh and how he had only managed to sell one picture in his life before his genius was recognised.

      ‘Van Gogh cut off his ear and ended up committing suicide in an insane asylum. Is that the kind of person you have married?’ asked Bopa.

      ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ my father said.

      ‘Why must she insist on painting rubbish?’ said Bopa. Shirley must go and get a ‘real’ job and earn her keep, not sit at home and paint black people, he said. What kind of a lazy, rotten mother was she to his grandchildren?

      Boma wanted to know why Churley (that was how she pronounced Shirley) couldn’t get a job as a typist. Churley had done that in South Africa before marrying her son, hadn’t she? But my mom said that the Belgians had rearranged the keys on the typewriter and because she didn’t speak Flemish or French her shorthand skills were also useless in Belgium.

      Boma said that since Churley was obviously an idiot, she should become a charwoman; as it happened, she knew someone who was looking for domestic help. She and Bopa could babysit me.

      My grandparents did next to nothing to support our family during our time in Belgium.

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