Why crowds are not for me, but clouds are.

 Tim and Nick drove to Lisbon over the weekend to see Jacob Collier in concert at the Meo Arena.  He is the latest musical genius, plays all the instruments, including the audience, whom he converts into a giant choir.  

He is a phenomenon, and people are amazing by his "playing" the instrument that is the audience, 

The beauteous Cape Town City Hall

I was about 12 or 13 (more than fifty years ago) my dad and I went to a Symphony concert in Cape Town where they gave everyone at the door something to play a beat with, a wooden spatula, clappers, a paper cup to use as a drum, for example.  At a certain time of crescendo the members of the audience had to participate by tapping their little "instrument", which was so exhilarating!  Then the audience was divided into three and we were all taught a simple series of notes, and then suddenly we were all singing this beautiful harmony, the amazing sound rising to the magnificent high roof beams of the Cape Town City Hall!  My dad and I spoke about it years later, this astonishment of being a part of such a grand melody.  

The phenomenal Bobby McFerrin

McFerrin demonstrates this common human ability beautifully in a talk he gave at A World Science Festival event.  He gives an audience four notes of the pentatonic scale and everyone is intuitively able to grasp how it works On top of that, the audience just naturally knows how the scale continues, above and below the range he gives them. Bobby McFerrin says that this works with audiences anywhere in the world! Which surely speaks to a profound collective unconscious that all of us share.

If only crowds always worked in harmony to do good.

Nombulelo students at the school
where I taught.

When we had the twin babies in 1992, I had been teaching at a black school in Grahamstown for ten years, where I was a head of department. After my maternity leave my headmistress kindly arranged my timetable so that I had time to go home mid-morning to breastfeed the babies. I was happily driving our old VW bus down the hill towards the town, anticipating seeing and feeding my beloved little ones, when I saw a boy dressed in school uniform in the road, shouting and looking distressed. I slowed down, thinking something was wrong with him, only suddenly horrified to see him take careful aim and throw a massive rock straight at my car, and the look on his face was actually one of enraged hatred!

A VW bus like ours

With this terrifying realization, I drove on, but as I came around the corner, there were hundreds of school students streaming towards me, all armed with rocks, pelting me, mass manic hysteria! As rocks bombarded the car and broken glass showered over me, my mind went into self-protection mode, and I remember actually voicing to myself, in some little calm part of my head while everything went mad around me, "I have four children, I want to live! I have four children, I HAVE to live!" And so I put my foot down on that accelerator, scrunched down in my seat, ducking the missiles of rocks and glass, and drove through the crowd as fast as I could!

I just carried on driving, once I was through the mob, blood pouring from my face and hands, past the police station, not a thought to stop there! I just needed to get to Tim's office, where I half-fell out of the car, made my shocked way up the stairs, only to find he wasn't there! I sort of slid down the wall in one of those movie moments, and wailed. A very surprised man came out of the office next door, took one look at me and ran for Tim, who went into dealing with a crisis mode, put me back in the beaten-up car and took me to the doctor, where a nurse gently vacuumed glass shards from my hair and carefully extracted them from my hands. The doctor examined the iris of my left eye which had been scratched by a passing shard but would recover.

When Tim examined the car he found that the babys' car seats both held rocks, and every window in our family's sunshine yellow bus was smashed except for one tiny triangular side one. There were more than 20 rocks scattered all over inside the car, and it frankly looked as though a bomb had hit it. Amazingly I had survived!

The students who had stoned several cars, of which mine was the first, were from another school than the one I taught at. They had just attended a hearing in the town for one of their comrades and it had not gone well, so they took it out on the white people in their cars coming down the hill.

So this is why I couldn't go to the concert. I really am uncomfortable in crowds. Also some other experiences have reinforced my deep aversion. Like that mass hysteria in America which has just changed the future of the world forever.

My mother.

And so now I prefer clouds. I will concentrate on the beauty, Truth and Beauty, as Keats reminds us. I think of my mother when I gaze at beautiful clouds.

When I was 8 my mother took me to England for several months while she and my dad sorted out the future of their relationship. My brother went to boarding school and my sister was 21 and a nurse already, with her own little flat. It was such a strange time. I both flourished and declined. School was easy, everyone loved the little girl with the funny accent, and I won all the swimming races in the unevenly heated public pools, I had a little garden of my own, and there was the magical hypnotism of television, sometimes. (South Africa only got television when I had already left school, it was banned by the oppressive Nationalist Apartheid Regime.)

Me and my siblings last year in England.

But I longed for my dad, crying myself to sleep some nights, and I wanted my siblings, and my best friend Trish, and all the familiarity of home. After we had been in England about six months my dad gave my brother one of the newfangled AKAI tape recorders for his birthday. They were enormous things, with huge reels like film reels.

My brother immediately set about making a tape for us, so we would hear his voice and my sister's and my dad's. When we received it in the mail, we had to go to a store which sold tape recorders in order to listen to it. I remember my mum and I standing next to a demo tape recorder, in front of everyone, although we were oblivious to them, listening to the sweet voices of our beloveds. I remember being surprised to find our cheeks wet with tears.

Me and my dad.

The thing about England was that almost every day, it rained. While my little garden grew well with all that water, I really missed being outside constantly in my own country. I remember asking my mother, when I was absolutely frustrated with the weather, "Is the sky EVER blue here, like it is in South Africa? Just blue wide sky as far as the eye can see?"

Clouds with trees.

So she told me that we would go for a walk, and we went along a path and up a hill where there was a view, and we looked at the sky. The big wide sky, with scudding clouds. There were little blue bits, but mostly clouds. She told me to maybe think that clouds make a sky quite interesting, especially if you know what kind of clouds they are. And then proceeded to teach me the names of all the different clouds, which I still look at every day and name to myself.

Seascape with clouds

Homes and their people

Home. 

A bedroom on our travels.

 I am so lucky in that I have always had one.  (Well, there was a period of 18 months when we didn't have one at all, but still we always knew we could find shelter in many different places, so yes, still fortunate.  It amazes me how many people, besides your own family, will just take you in with open arms!)

My very young mum and dad, long
before I arrived.

My very old mum and dad, when they came to 
visit us in Boston, a few years before they died.

I also had really loving parents until I was 50 (my mum died) and 52 (my dad died).  More blessings.

Home for me is synonymous with family.  It takes up an important place in your mind when you are away from it, because it is your nest, your constant.  It has your own people, your own colours, your own bed, your own bathroom.  It is where you think and make and eat and talk and grow children.  A home keeps you warm and safe in the midst of thunder and lightning. 

When people travel they usually leave home to go somewhere else for a while.  Usually quite a short while, and then they return home again, glad to be back.  But when we traveled for nearly one and a half years we had sold our house and only had our suitcases and backpacks.  And after about a month we both really longed for home, a place which was no longer there.  

All the items I deemed necessary for our long long voyage.

We were going to travel for two years to find a new forever-home, but we realised that we needed one sooner than that, and, after searching quite a lot, we finally found one here in the warm Algarve, in Portugal, which reminds us very much of South Africa.  

This is my dream for our garden.  The house is
perfect right now but the garden is a large project.

Now I have a home again I barely want to leave it.  My face is full of smiles every time I enter the gate, walk up to the house, and come through the front door to all our colours, our beloved books and paintings, our place.

My first home was 10 Forest Drive, Pinelands.  Pinelands was created based on a "garden city" design, with five or six houses all backing on to a kind of spare plot that remained empty.  Our "field" was a wide meadow, to my small child's perception, with grass and wild flowers and tall tall pines.  We didn't have a fence so it seemed like a continuation of our garden.  I knew it so well, as only children can know a place, the shadows and sunshine, the trees' ancient presences, their bark, the caterpillars, and all the small creatures who lived there. 

My parents had been suddenly shocked by my mum's pregnancy with me, as she was quite old for those times to have a baby, (34, imagine!) and they had thought their family complete, a gorgeous girl and a beautiful boy.   So when they discovered another baby was about to join them, they knew they would never all fit in the little house they were in and decided to make a brave leap to a larger grander house with four bedrooms, which they moved into just before I was born.  My mum and dad lived there until I was 34, so they (and I as a child) had the same home telephone number until they died in their retirement home, having kept that number, which I phoned every Sunday after I moved out, until their deaths.    

10 Forest Drive from an applique wall hanging I 
made for my parents' 55th anniversary.

10 Forest Drive had a thatched roof and those strange faux-Tudor leaded-paned windows.  There were enormous prolific fruit trees, fig and guava, lemon, loquat, and mulberry (the bane of my mother's life as the starlings loved to eat the mulberries and then defecate purple inky stains on to her lovely white clean sheets hanging on the washing line drying in the sunshine!). My dad always had a little vegetable garden too, and we proudly ate his produce of mainly beans and potatoes.  There was a tall Silver-Oak, which was my friend, and I learned to climb this tree and sit reading or drawing for hours, high up.  I have always loved to be high up when something is not going so well, maybe I was once a bird.  

I went back about 20 years after I had left home and my parents no longer lived there, and the people who lived there kindly showed me around "their" house.  What had been a home with enormous rooms and space and light now seemed much smaller and more crowded.  And there was a house in our field!  And high walls with locked gates everywhere, which had been fences or nothing.  So no more dappled meadow.

My Lemon Tree painting in Casa Aveleira.

My Lemon Tree painting in 
90 Southern Ave.

When people move into a house or an apartment we move in all our "stuff", we put up pictures, our books line the bookshelves, our comfy sofas slot into their places, our beds are under the window so that the light plays on the wall as we wake to the dawn.  We make it ours.  But I always wonder who was there before me, because you hardly ever know, everything with the sale or rental of the property is done by intermediaries.  But does the home miss its people, is it happy to have new ones laughing, weeping, having sex, arguing, creating, washing, cleaning, eating?

Our apartment in Mexico City.

Moving around so much during our travels,  I always tried to make the impersonal apartments home-like, with one of my colourful sarongs as a cover at the end of the uncomfortable bed or sofa, or a little prism my granddaughter had given me, hanging up at each new window.  

We make maps in our heads, all through our lives.  I can walk through all the houses I have lived in, know what is under the desk in the ironing room where my brother used to do his homework, know the specific light reflected off our garden into the window of the kitchen in 16 Cross Street.   We have maps of all our towns, all the places we love, the rooms we stay in.  (Although the city maps may well become a lost knowledge to the new generations, the street maps indelibly etched in the brains of only earlier generations, because now there is GPS?)  

In Santerem, traveling.

You have so many maps in your head, and sometimes still you wake in the night and have no idea where you are.  You have to climb up with effort, from a very deep dark to know who you are, before you even have time to re-orient yourself, because you go on such faraway journeys in your dreams, don't you?  And gradually you find yourself, that Anne, the one who carries all her selves of 69 years in her head, in her heart.  And you are in your own bed, in your new country, where the sky is a dim line along the side of the darker window-blind, and the indistinct shapes of familiar furniture are all sleeping around you.  And your dear husband of 40 years is warmly and easily lining your body with his, his heavy arm softly across you.

Long-ago Childhood and the Joys of Water

Well it's happened again. Tim thoughtfully mentioned my blogspot on his Facebook account and they shut down the link. And meta owning both FB and Instagram (which was the biggest disappointment when it happened), the link doesn't work on my profile now either. What the actual? So now, if you are dedicated enough and really want to read my blogs, please type the link (in the old-fashioned way, one letter at a time) into your web-browser to get there. annebouwer.blogspot.com 

 I had quite an idyllic childhood, besides all the asthmatic episodes. (It is still incomprehensible to me that while I had such an comfortable childhood, there were children just a few kilometers away from my house where everything was very far from idyllic, and that I grew up with no idea whatsoever about them. Apartheid in South Africa was a very well-organised oppressive regime, and if you were a little kid going to an all-white school, living in an all-white suburb, reading highly censored text books and library books, and with no TV {the govt only allowed television to enter the country in 1976, less than 50 years ago. I was already at university when my parents got their first television set, and the programs were heavily censored and controlled until the 90's.} Growing up like that it was not likely you would know anything the govt didn't want you to know.)

Me with my dad and sibings.

I was the baby of my family, and although I was the apple of both parent's eyes, I had so much freedom, as most children did then. We were expected to look after ourselves and only go home if anything went wrong that we couldn't deal with, like someone broke an arm falling out of a tree, or fell horribly while performing a bicycle trick, or was trying to make the swing wrap around the top bar and lost hold and got dragged by the chain for a while. 

 While riding down a hill one day on the way to my friend's house when I was about nine years old, I was distracted by a set of twin toddlers playing on their front lawn (twins have always fascinated me). As I gazed at them I failed to notice the back of a small truck (we called them bakkies) parked on the side of the road, that I was rapidly accelerating towards. The next moment I found myself head over heels in the back of the bakkie, struggling to regain the breath which had been knocked out of me when I rode straight into the stationary vehicle and was somersaulted into the bed of the truck! When I had managed to get my lungs over their shock, I climbed carefully down, found my bike with its front wheel completely buckled, and hobbled the rest of the way (about 1 km) carrying the front of the bike and wheeling it on the back wheel. It was just another day in the independent life of Anne Radford. 

Another time when I was about six and walking to the shops to do an errand for my mother, a man kept on driving slowly past me and then stopping his car, opening the passenger door, and sitting there grinning at me, playing with his thumbs in his lap. I just kept walking, and he kept slowly passing me and doing the same thing. The third time it happened, I had a good look and it seemed as if he had a really big thumb! I arrived at the shops and bought the bread, or sugar, or whatever it was, walked back and casually told my dad what had happened. He became very irate, demanded from me the make and model of the car (I had no idea, it was just blue, I thought I remembered) and he then rushed off in his car and arrived back about half an hour later, shaking his head at my mother, giving me no explanation. 

 A few years later there was a man who exposed himself to all the schoolgirls in the subway which led from one side of the train station to the other, and which numerous schoolgirls who took the train, had to pass through on their way to our school. Mostly girls walked in groups, so the general reaction was to laugh at him, and he became known among my fellow pupils as "Wobbles" Some of us who didn't even take the train just went down there to have a look! 

 It happened to me so often as a young girl, men standing in lonely spots exposing their penises to me. What a strange thing to do! Apparently it is really common, ask any woman my age. We didn't see it as dangerous, because we were so ignorant, so protected, compared to the children of today, who know so much from movies and tv and youtube etc., including watching pornography by the age of 10 apparently, according to recent statistics mentioned in a Guardian article. 

 We knew so little about things like rape and violent murder and all those things which you gradually learn about as you become a teenager, and now which the information age puts so unfortunately, so very thoroughly into our heads every day. There is so much I would rather not know about, would love to forget. I can't watch violent movies because all that happens is so real to me, even though others tell me, "it's just tomato sauce!" or "It's only a movie". 

 But we were lucky indeed to grow up so innocent. The worst swearword we knew was "bloodyfuckinshit" which we thought was one word, having no concept of what any of it meant, except the"bloody" part!  We never dreamed of using it, only knew of it somehow from one of our older brothers,  We played long imaginary games, we read books, we drew pictures with all the art materials we desired, we went for walks, we stole sweets from the shops up the road, we travelled to school on the bus from the age of 6, we played hide and seek and climbed trees and stretched our limits and learned our capabilities and our gifts. 

When I was four I learned to swim in Kalk Bay Baths, man-made constructed tidal pools, which was very scary to begin with but another great endowment my parents gave me. (I believe it is as important as learning to read, and wonder why we lost the knack. After all most mammals can swim, excepting apes {I suppose there is the answer}, giraffes and hippos.) 

 

Dalebrook from above.  We would stand
on the seawall with the waves
breaking over us, to see who
could stand there the longest
without falling in !

Thereafter my love affair with water continued, and as a little girl I spent long days during the summer holidays and weekends with my parents and my best friend and her large family at the beach, usually Dalebrook, which is near Kalk Bay. They were the proverbial halcyon days, pure bliss, getting so cold from swimming for hours, and being warmed by some woman's arms, my mother's or my aunt's, rubbing me with a towel and handing me a plastic cup with sweet hot tea which they had brought in a flask. It is still the most delicious tea I have ever tasted. Then playing in the rock pools, watching all the creatures, little fish, crabs, limpets, anemones, periwinkles and even an octopus once or twice. And going home warm and sunburnt, lying in the back of my friend's station wagon next to her, the two happiest little girls ever. That station wagon took 3 or 4 adults and a whole bunch of childrn, all just piled in, no one had heard of seatbelts yet! 

 

Matt and Leo swimming a length underwater.

During this past summer Jess and her family stayed in a beautiful AirBnB nearby with an amazing swimming pool, and one day Matthew and Nicholas took the little ones on their backs and proceeded to swim a length underwater, to everyone's amazement, including the little boys'! 

 
To this day when I see a body of water, the ocean, a lake, I usually want to get into it and float and swim around a bit, be held in its arms. It is a desire that is maybe genetic, as my mother was like that and so are my children and grandchildren, four generations that I know of. Tim thinks I am secretly a selkie, as he does not share my love of water and the ocean.   When the granddaughters were small, every summer they would come to our house in Massachusetts.  It was near the beach, where we would go every day, and the five of us, my two daughters, the little granddaughters and me, called ourselves the Mermaids.  So perhaps Tim is right.

The selkie

 Every culture has myths about gods and goddesses of the lakes and oceans, and I love the one about Sedna, the Inuit myth, although it is really violent and cruel. Afew years ago I made an image of Sedna, triumphant over her disabilities!  I think if I had to choose some god or goddess to worship, it would be one of the water goddesses.

Sedna Triumphant

Memory and memorials

Sunrise this morning

The nights are getting longer here in Portugal, and we have had quite a bit of rain, which is not the cold endless rain of England, but wondrous and welcome and leaves shiny puddles for us on our daily walks, and tiny spears of grass happily leaping up everywhere, and beauteous clouds!

Being close to soixante-dix (70) I kind of watch my memory, and find, like Billy Collins in his wonderful poem Forgetfulness  , that there are things that slip away, that hide in some corner of the databank of my brain, only to pop out unexpectedly when I'm lying in the bath late at night.  

(Soixante-dix is french for 70.  In our Portuguese classes we are learning numbers, and like English and Afrikaans and Spanish, the other languages I know, Portuguese numbers follow a pattern: cinquenta, sessenta, setenta,  ... (fifty, sixy, seventy etc..  But French is so strange, they make you do calculations for some obtuse reason.  So 70 is sixty + ten, and it gets even weirder, because 80 is quatre-vingt!  Four times twenty!  And ninety is quatre-vingt-dix!  Four times twenty plus ten!  And it gets even worse but I won't go on.  Apparently it is based on the vigesimal or base-20 system used by both the Mayans and the Celts.  Like four-score in ancient texts? )

Information Age

Most of us are probably ADD nowadays, due to the constant technological bombardment, especially by the little computers we carry around in our pockets messing with our brains, so forgetting things is fairly normal, but I do find words not coming to me when I want them to quite frustrating.  

Pregnant with the twins

I think it all began during my first pregnancy at 23, and there is substantial evidence that pregnancy and motherhood affect our brains because of a variety of elevated hormones in pregnancy, and little sleep for years after.   ( I LOVE sleeping for 8 or 9 hours every night now!)

The years of being a student before I had my first child is a time bathed in sparkling light, my own Belle Epoque, when I was drunk on knowledge, philosophy, language.  And my clever mind could memorize poetry and remember vast tracts of books and images in order to write copiously from my memory for numerous 3-hour exams, quite easily and well.  

Emma aged 1.

When Emma was a year old I went back to university to finish my post-graduate teacher's diploma and really struggled with studying and exams.  It was like hitting an unanticipated brick wall at times during those last six months.  

Our lives consist of epochs, and generally we stumble from one to the next, mostly unaware how our lives will change but taking the grand leap into each epoch with faith in the NEXT THING.  How else to explain all the strange things we do as intelligent animals?  

Having my children was a different kind of golden, and each epoch has momentous events.  I'm in the autumn or winter epoch right now, which is so strange how suddenly it comes upon you.  

And memories are like that too, I think.  We have sunny memories of happy endless days, ecstatic blue-skied moments, and charred memories of terrible hours, agonising seconds that stretch forever, hurtful times.  We can somewhat choose which happy things we remember, but the sad or hurtful or terrible things seem to stay stuck fast in some room of our minds forever.  

The other morning Emma sent me a video that had popped up on her phone courtesy of Google, of the little granddaughters singing Happy Birthday to a cousin, when their speech was still quite newly fashioned.  It is only really nine or so years ago, but time is a funny thing.  We both had ready tears watching the sweetness of those little characters, who are now gawky tweens.  

Little Jess on my lap

Children grow so fast in adult time, and although mine are all most definitely adults, their little gossamer-haired heads, their perfect features and their cuddly bodies climbing on to my lap are still perfectly real in recollection.  

I never want to forget those memories.  I want to die before I don't know my loved ones.  

My mother and grandmother were exceptional ordinary women.  As most of us are.  Women do so much in history but are mostly not memorialised with statues or days or streets named after them.  So many men became famous because they had all the time and space in the world to themselves, they didn't have to be bothered with all the washing and childcaring and ironing and cleaning and making and cooking and all those other present participles which women are still doing every day.  

Before good contraceptives, and still sadly in much of the world of today, women just fell or plummeted into this role of primary carer/cook/washerwoman etc. just because they had sex, voluntarily or in-.  And their lives as creatives, their potential for study, for future professions, just came to an end.  

Granny Gracie with her two
small daughters, Joan and Nora.

An article in the newspaper about
the first women in the WRAF. 
Grace Hewitson was my
grandmother.

My British grandmother went to Art School in the early 20th century, I have her portfolio, such exquisite draftmanship and painting ability.  She played the violin, was one of the first Royal Airforce women to work in signals at Suttons Farm Airfield during the First World War in England, was well-educated and beloved of her siblings, her father, an esteemed major in the Army, and her spirited mother.  A South African RAF (Royal Air Force) pilot on leave during the war was invited to her parents' house, quickly proposed marriage, and soon after the end of the war, off she went to South Africa, where she immediately had two daughters, longed for her mother and siblings, never played the violin again, never drew another line. 
 

My gorgeous mother with Timmy

My mother Joan, Gracie's eldest daughter, married an RAF mechanic whom she met when his torpedoed ship was diverted to Cape Town during the Second World War, and then Joan promptly had a daughter herself, and then miscarriages until a son, and then accidentally, years later, me.

My mother with all of us.

She was incredibly intelligent and mathematically sharp, helped my dad study, teaching him maths, gettin him through all his exams to become an electrician and then a refrigeration and airconditioning engineer.  

When I went off to school she found a job at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, working for the professor of Pathology.  He discovered her profound intelligence and empathy and enquired about putting her forward for a scholarship  to study medicine!  But it was rejected because she was too old, the board who decided such things thought it would be a waste.  She was 39!  

I remember my granny, she was a small woman with delicate hands, the best giggle, who spent a lot of her life in pain, but who was always interested in us and loved us.  I loved her.  

I remember my mother.  She still lives inside me.  She was a large beautiful complicated woman with a huge heart who spent much of her later life in pain, but always loved greatly, her children, her friends, all her relatives, and also clouds in a field, seagulls, England.  I still love her.  I still miss her grand encompassing love.  

Great-grandmother Nora

But I don't know my great-grandmother, except that her name was Nora and she looks rather lovely and serious in old sepia pictures, and I know she was most likely a good mother because her three surviving children were allowed to become themselves.  

Plaque at St Stephen's Garden of Remembrance.

So there is a brick in the garden of remembrance at the little church in Pinelands (the same one where I rejected god as a small child).  My sister arranged for it to made and engraved and installed,  remembering our parents.  But that is my mother's only memorial, and she is mentioned under my dad, and in 50 or so years no one will know who she was.

We are these beings, these vivacious spirits, with all our magnificent feelings and passionate experiences, our desperate challenges and substantial successes, our writings, our photos, our paintings, our many many meals made and dishes washed up, the scraped knees bandaged, the hurt child restored, the manifold makings of the enormous landscape that is a life.  

And all this will be gone and unremembered, along with the majority of people who have lived on this earth.  And maybe this is as it should be, millions of lives lived well or poorly, over and forgotten, generation after generation, after all we are just animals like hummingbirds, elephants, fruitflies.  

But I will light a candle tonight for all my women ancestors, known and unknown, a small memorial.   

Georgia!

And here is a large charcoal drawing after Georgia O'Keeffe's flowers.  She was also a "badass", as one of my sons once noted after walking enchanted through an exhibition of her long prolific life. 

She made a whole lot of charcoal drawings which I had not seen before, and although I am not so fond of charcoal, I did enjoy the messy-handed drawings I made this week.

Old friends and Growing up

Our friends, in Portimão

Four days with friends staying, wonderful!  From Australia, but both belong to that vast diaspora of South Africans, the Scatterlings of Africa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiWnHmmRIm8 .  Rob grew up with Tim, as he is the younger brother of Tim's best friend.  Rob and Eurika showed us such hospitality in their beautiful house in Sydney when we visited them in Australia in 2016, and it was wonderful to reciprocate at last!  

Two men on the beach

It is quite seldom as a couple that you find another pair where all four people get on extremely well.  These two make up one of those couples.  So there was walking, and a boat trip, and swimming in the sea (by the women while the men sat under an umbrella), and delicious meals, and shared conversations of varied profundity and hilarity.   

From the boat

Tim and Rob reminisced about people and events, family members and church congregants.  All the everyday things that happen to us through the years of childhood, and these are the ones which we paste into our memories, remembered for a variety of reasons: a kind teacher, a mean girl, a storm during a church picnic, your first crush.  All part of the moving pictures in our heads.  All seen slightly differently, but recollected clearly.  All so long ago now.  But still luminous.  

Tim and Rob spoke a lot about their schooldays and the different characters of the teachers, and the cuts (whippings) that the boys got then, just for failing tests even.  I thought about how many cuts I would have received if I had been a boy!  

My brother and I, long before the letter
that changed my life

When I was about 14 or 15, I decided I had had enough of school.  My brother, who had already moved to England, was the one who wrote me a passionate letter about the importance of EDUCATION, and managed to change my mind about leaving after grade 10.

But grade 11 was hard for me.  I didn't fit in at all.  I went to a strict academic school for girls which spewed out the indoctrinating Christian National Education of the repressive regime of South Africa in the 60's and 70's.  I was too nonconformist for that milieu.  I questioned everything, I was no good at sport (another prerequisite to success), and I didn't believe in god.  I believed in reading, in trees, in Art, in classical music, in sex, in the beach, in love, in poetry, in passion.   (I still believe in all these things.) 

So to save my sanity I began bunking (playing hooky from) school.  Many days, I would ride my bike to school, and I wouldn't even enter the building.  I would just park my bike, walk on down the path at the back of the school which went past the hockey fields and swimming pool, to the subway under the railway, where I would catch a ride on a train somewhere.  It didn't matter where, the beach was one way and the city was the other.  

Cape Town Symphony Orchestra

Most Thursdays would find me sitting in the City Hall watching the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra at their weekly practice.  

Or I would walk up through Adderly Street to the Public Gardens and feed peanuts to the squirrels, having bought an avocado or two from the vendors to eat as my lunch.  I might just spend an hour or so reading on a bench there, surrounded by happy squirrels and pigeons.  (I frequently stole books, falling in love with their covers and the wondrous story that would take me away.  My dad gave me pocket money which bought four books a month, but it was never enough.)

Cape Town company Gardens

Sometimes I went to the Monte Carlo movie theatre, which always had the earliest matinees, and I would sit in the enchanted dark and watch movies. I was put off that though, for there were too many lonely creeps sidling up to this schoolgirl in her uniform and doing stuff with their crotches, so often I had to leave hurriedly and miss the rest of the story.  

I was utterly convinced that no one would notice at school, I thought they would be happy that my rude presence was gone, but of course after some time a teacher would report too many absences and I would be called in to the principal.  She was a tall authoritative woman and I was scared of her.  I really would try then, after her stern warnings, but a few weeks later the wanderlust would grab me and off I would go again. 

In grade 12 my parents were called in and I was threatened with expulsion.  My poor embarrassed mum and dad managed to persuade the principal to give me another chance, but there were three or four of these meetings before I realised my days of freedom were over. If I didn't stop walking out of school I wouldn't get my Matric certificate.  I wouldn't be able to go to university where I could do all the wonderful things I wanted to every day: Paint, Have Sex, Read, Write, Paint etc..  

I wonder if I would have been as brave and determined if I had got a hiding every time I was caught?  

But I am convinced that this was my education.  All children really educate themselves, depending on what they are interested in, what grabs their fancy.  It's why we choose certain subjects to concentrate on, and go all out doing extra work on them, not just what is given by a teacher.  

I educated myself while absconding from school.  I learned independence (like how to make maps of a city in your head, how to ride a train without paying, how to get away from lecherous men, how to steal books {I only stole about 20 books in my life, and never anything else},), I learned everything from books, (the words used for body-parts we never mention, how trees grow to a great age, how the little black letters on a page could show me how someone else had felt the exact same way as I was feeling, more than two hundred years ago).  

I learned to live with my own thoughts, I learned to be alone but not lonely.  I was passionate about Art and Literature and Poetry and could fill all my waking hours happily and productively.  

I was so lucky not to live with the threat of caning.  

I was so lucky not to have the technology of today.

Frontispiece of a book my mother gave
me a few years before she died.

When I apologized to my parents many years later, my mother professed to not remember anything about the fact that I had been such an awful teenager, that she had spent anxious hours wondering when I was coming home, where I was, if I was pregnant, if I would ever make anything of myself.  

She told me instead that I had always been her wonderful daughter!  That she adored me.  Which, I suppose, is all you want from a mother.  Someone who lets you become yourself, knowing you are loved abundantly, always.  

A little study of imaginary plants for today.

Leaves

Friends and bullies

 When you are little it is so much easier to make friends (well more or less everything is easier when you are a small child), you just meet someone randomly and say, "Do you want to come and play at my house?" and then you become firm friends very easily and quickly.  Or you don't see each other for a while and you drift apart but don't feel desperately sad about it. 

A picture I did for Trish from a 
photo of us sharing a towel on
Dalebrook beach in Cape Town

My first friend was Trish, and we met when we were both one-year olds.  Our mothers became friends even though there was a nine-year age-gap between them, and I just loved my friend's entire chaotic family of, eventually, six children!  Her mum became my second mother, just as so many of us become mothering figures to our childrens' friends.  We two were beloved best friends, even though we were quite different, in looks and in our natures.  We used to tell everyone we were twins although it was patently obvious that we weren't even related!  

My friend Maureen, a small woman still filled with
the huge life and vivacity seen in this image from
years ago. She is now 80 (!) and lives in Fremantle.

I have had several such deep and profound friendships through my life, some which have lasted most of my life.  It is a great sadness to me that each of my very dear friends now lives far away, in South Africa, in Zimbabwe, in Australia, in America.  

When we moved to America we left our entire history, from birth to mid-forties, such a jolt to the psyche!  

It took ages to make friends and most of them turned out to be South African, no doubt due to that shared history, that humour, that consciousness, those perceptions distributed only amongst your own countrymen and women.  

Now we have uprooted ourselves once more, and so we lose our American history of 21 years. As even older people it is that much harder to make new friends.  Neither Tim nor I are much good at small talk and we're both a little eccentric and different.  We are both the third child in our families, and we're putting it down to that!  Also, I am even more passionate about those things which outrage me than I was as a younger environmentalist/feminist/pacifist etcist.  This tends to put people off.   

Last year on our travels we stayed for a weekend with an old church friend of Tim's from long ago, who came to Portugal and married an advocate here.  They were astonished that I don't eat meat, as most people in Portugal are astonished.  (You can buy whole entire rabbits at the meat counter here!) Eventually, after several meals, and my refusal to eat even octopus, they asked me why.  So I explained, to the best of my ability, about the cruelty of factory farms and abattoirs and how animals are all sentient beings, with emotions and social structures and whatnot.  That scientists are discovering that the question to ask is not, "Which animals have emotions?" but "Do any creatures not have emotions?" 

And I told them about the book I read about a Giant Pacific Octopus in the New England Aquarium, The Soul of an Octopus by Sy Montgomery, a beautiful study.  She speaks of a friendship between the author and an octopus named Athena, but the book also includes scientific knowledge of what is being learned about octopuses, and it makes us wonder about these magical creatures.  As humans we always look at everything from our own perspectives, our own intelligences, but it seems that even octopuses have their rich intelligence and abstract thought and even a sense of humour, and other strange and extraordinary powers, like the ability to pour their entire bodies into a bottle.  They are truly admirable, beautiful aliens.  

And not for eating.  

And then I spoiled it all by weeping. 

Wonderfully, and in spite of my sentiments for animals, these two have become very good friends of ours, and we love them.  They are kind and lovely people, we just feel differently about meat.     

And, the opposite of friends, 

are BULLIES.

Bullies are on my mind now because of two of my grandchildren starting high school.  Smartphones and social media have made bullying so much worse, as children can exclude others from whatsapp groups, badmouth them online with no reprisals, and a multitude of other sins.  The last few years of my teaching, several of my students were on anti-depressants already, at the tender ages of 15 and 16, and largely, I believe, due to all this kind of stuff, plus the enormous weight of information which bears down on us every day.  

The reader, having a birthday.

So many of us are bullied, and the bullying stays with us our entire lives.  I remember well my own first experience of it, when I was 6.  My best friend and I went to "Big" school the same day and we were happily ensconced together in our little wooden desks, when suddenly, on the second or third day of school, I was whisked away to demonstrate my reading abilities to a group of other teachers, and then to the very intimidating headmistress,  One of the teachers asked me when I learned to read and I replied, "I was born like that." at which they all unexpectedly roared with laughter.  To me it felt like I had always read, as my dad had taught me when I was very little.  And a solitary child with a chronic illness finds great solace in reading for hours and hours, so that she can forget her lungs' labouring breaths and travel far far away with her mind.    

Then just as suddenly I was pushed into another classroom a year above, where I had to read aloud, a lot.  I read to the class while the teacher marked books and prepared lessons, standing on a little stool so that everyone could see me, as I was very small.  Apparently they were amazed that I read so expressively and that I did all the voices. (Maybe that's why I became a teacher.)

When break-time came, we all went outside to eat our packed sandwiches sitting on the grass under the trees, and I went eagerly to find my friend, who was sitting in a circle of little girls all sitting cross-legged, who, when they saw me, the little freak who could already read and was moved up a class, all hurriedly scrunched up until their knees were touching so that there would be no space for me to fit in.  I walked slowly around the entire circle of about 7 or 8 children, and no one moved up to let me in,  So I just walked away.  I was utterly shocked and my heart hurt. 

And still does, to this day.  I was treated as a misfit and so eventually that is what I became.  But while I was becoming myself, I became strong, grew a (slightly) thicker skin, learned that ignoring someone mostly works, found my own different friends.  I wore strange clothes I made myself, went down my own path of poetry and art and stories and the green world of nature.  I was always happy in my own company.

I have heard other people's stories of being bullied, horrendous stories, where mine pale in comparison.  Boys getting stripped down and made to stand while everyone laughs at their genitals, an entire class voting against a child for some made-up issue, horrible physical and mental abuse.  

Margaret Atwood wrote about her childhood trauma in her brilliant book Cat's Eye, where a 'mean girl' bully nearly caused her death.   

The girl who was bullied just tried to deal with it all on her own, only told her mother when the near-death occurred.  It is interesting that, although I am 15 years younger than Margaret Atwood and grew up on a different continent entirely, my generation also just dealt with awful experiences.  Bad things happened to us and we just stoically carried on, we didn't tell our parents or complain to anyone, we just learned how to cope with the trauma.   

You can become quite cynical about human beings, can't you?  

The beautiful seascape

But yesterday we went to an art exhibition in Portimão, and there was beauty and colour and passion and creativity, and a lot of people looking at pictures, and an old artist told us his entire life story, just about, all in Spanish, as he was from Toledo, and had traveled down slowly to Portimão, over many days, in his van.  He is a passionate painter of Nature, and we walked away from his stall with a beautiful little seascape which will now become part of our Sea wall.  

Our Sea wall.

Self-portrait with shadows

And a watercolour self-portrait this week, with leaf-shadows added in Procreate on the Ipad.  I read a lovely description of self-portraits today, which I quote here from a critic writing about the winner of the second biennial Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize in 2013.  "Newbolt demonstrates how self-portraiture offers an opportunity for the artist to present their image as they know themselves - a platform for the individual to explore the potent, confusing, relationship between psyche and body."