28th day

Rushed from the house to the car in the early black icy morning, 14F (-10C), drove through the dry cold, headlights and brake-lights illuminating the streets, until a smudge of blue on the otherwise milky horizon indicated the arrival of dawn and announced there would be a weak winter sun later. When I reached school, I grabbed my bags and ran from the car to my classroom, and that was all my exercise today!  Apart from a few up- and down-the-stairs.

I have recently read two books in a row where the main protagonists are eight-year-old girls.  The first one was Orphan Train, which describes the lives of two women separated by about seventy years.  Their stories both begin when they are eight years old, at a catastrophic turning point in their lives.  One loses both her parents in a fire, the other her father to a car crash.  The other one is A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, which I didn't actually finish because it was far too horrifying and sad.  It begins with the murder of the father of one of the main characters, another eight-year old girl, and details the awful terrifying living conditions for people during the Chechen wars.

The age of eight seems to be a kind of turning point for many children, whether or not they suffer something calamitous.  When I became an adult and thought about when I first knew there was no God, nor a Father Christmas, or when I realised what sadness was, or fear, the answer would always be, "When I was about eight."  My friend said that she had come to the conclusion that she was a lesbian when she was eight years old.  Eight is no longer a little kid, but not yet one of the big kids, definitely the age of a certain type of cognizance, a recognition of the state of being human.  

When I was eight my mother left my father, taking me to England with her, leaving my brother in boarding school and my father alone with the dog.  My sister was a nurse and had already left home.  It was quite lovely in England, I loved my little school and my garden and living with my friend Penelope, going on road-trips to Scotland, two mothers named Joan and their young daughters, laughing and exploring lochs and castles and museums, with the long road stretching ahead of them, running safely away.   

But the sky was never that azure blue of Cape Town, we didn't live anywhere near the ocean, and my dad, my DAD, my big strong rock of a DAD was not there with me.

I missed that big man with such a sharp misery sometimes, especially at night, as he had always been the one to read to me and put me to bed, although of course I had been reading to myself for years, but I still loved that nightly ritual.  He was so strong and would lift me and make me into the best acrobat in the whole world, twirling me about effortlessly.  I couldn't fall asleep without his kiss.  But mentioning him caused my mother pain and anger and so I learned very quickly not to ask about him.

Technology was very primitive, and if you wanted to phone internationally not only did it cost a small fortune, but you had to book a "trunk call" (which made me think of an elephant, of the phone line going along the trunks of elephants) a few hours in advance!  So it was rarely that I got to speak to him.  I guess there were phone calls between my mother and my father discussing the state of their marriage, but I was kept in the dark about all that.  In August we received a tape from my brother and my father and we had to go to a HiFi shop to play it, not owning a tape-recorder, which was a very new-fangled gadget then. 

 

We stood there awkwardly and when I heard my brother talking I felt a lump rising in my throat, and then my dad came on and I felt as though I was falling apart, and my face was suddenly wet and I had to sit down.  

Huge things happen to us when we are children over which we have no control.  We are quite helpless, dependent on adults for kindness, for love, for example.  And just so lucky if we have good adults around us, people who care. 

Soon we were travelling back across the seas on a passenger liner, seeing flying-fish, whales, the wide wide ocean and once, passing another big ship near the equator. 

And as eight-year-old girls are both natural and man-made I will end there, back with Table Mountain, at home in Cape Town, where my parents' mended marriage lasted 64 years in the end.