MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER EIGHT. PARENTHOOD AND US

 

Catherine Nicolette, Photograph by Sean Whittle

CHAPTER EIGHT

PARENTHOOD AND US

I became pregnant just two weeks after our wedding.  When I told Sean that we were going to be parents, his face lit up like the lights of a Christmas tree.  Nothing in life ever excited him as much as a baby.  He adored all our children and tried to play as big a role in their lives as I did long before this became politically correct.  From the first he helped me to bathe, feed, and dress them.  I can truly say that the two of us were crazy about our babies and ready to sacrifice our lives for them.

Having left Mr Boom and his ilk, I was working in the mail order department of a massive Johannesburg warehouse.  Every morning at half past six I left the house we had bought though we could not really afford the instalments, to the station of Schapenrust, a suburb in the town of Brakpan where we lived.  Sean would have left for the mine hours earlier.  My journey to Johannesburg took about an hour and I would walk to the warehouse from the station to be at my desk by half past eight.  I worked until five, caught the train back at half past, arrived in Brakpan by half past six and then often had to walk home for nearly a further half an hour. 

When the car was running, things were better but that car, bought second hand from a mine manager by Sean in more affluent times, spent more time in our garage waiting for pay day when we could take it to a mechanic than on the road.  It was a time of financial hardship for both of us which would continue for a long time.

In those days of the year 1960 it was considered infra dig for any woman to work while pregnant and so I tried to cover up my interesting situation for as long as I could.  The office I worked in was known for employment of differently abled.  We had a woman with visual disability on the switchboard, a woman with mobility challenge in the accounts department and the lady who was in charge of the mail was an eighty-three year old senior.  Most of the workers were above sixty and not a few of them were in their seventies.  I have never worked with a stronger team.  When the secret of my pregnancy was discovered, my boss whose wife was expecting their first child didn’t turn a hair.  “You make me think of my wife,” he said, looking sideways fondly at the thought of her.  “She is also pregnant and she fires up just the way you do.  Simmer down!” 

At lunchtime I was sent up to the warehouse nurse who put me to rest in a spotless bed in a white cubicle and woke me up five minutes before I had to go back to work.  That’s how I managed to carry on for eight months. 

Some of the senior ladies were disapproving of me because they thought me unladylike for working.  One of them would say: “Who are you trying to kid that you’re only five months pregnant?  I can tell you’re much further along.  Why don’t you own up to the truth?”  In fairness to her I was swelling up like a balloon because the only thing that quenched my thirst was the king-size bottle of Pepsi I drank every day.  I had no idea of the number of calories I was consuming. 

I was concerned of having a premature baby, because the people of today cannot believe how big a deal it was to be married less than nine months before producing their first infant at that stage.  Exasperatedly, I blurted out: “The baby is only due on the twenty-sixth of March.  I haven’t even been married for six months.”  I was feisty in pregnancy, a fact to which Sean could testify.

I told Mrs Rand what I had said and she laughed it off.  Mrs Rand was my role model, a slim, beautiful brown-eyed old lady with a fabulous personality.  “You never see me having conversations with these women. Leave her to count to nine on her fingers if that entertains her,” was her comment.  

Mrs Rand told me that when she had her first child, a son, she, and the midwife and her husband, had whiled away the time playing cards.  “Stop worrying about the pain of the confinement,” she said.  “I’ve told you there is nothing to it.”  

Another woman told me it was indecorous for a woman in my position to go out to work every day.  “I never worked during my pregnancies,” she said, “and I had three lovely sons.  I was a nurse and a doctor once told me that my family was the healthiest he had ever had as patients.  But I would not have stooped to show myself outside while I was obviously pregnant.”  Well, if I had not done so they would have had to take back our house, the car and the furniture.  

One day, looking like a beached whale on legs, I walked outside and almost bumped into one of my acquaintances, walking with some other girls.  She was supposed to be at university in Cape Town.  I wanted to duck, because to crown the indignity of my billowing curves I was devouring a peach I had bought on a street corner after an interminable day at work and with an hour and a half more to go before I’d be having supper in Brakpan.   She saw me, turned away, then looked again, raised her eyebrows and and looked clean through me.  I wanted the ground to swallow me up and was almost relieved to be ignored.  But I made sure never again to eat a peach in the street and always saw to it that my hair was set and that I wore makeup.

A friend on the train who was also pregnant and made the daily Brakpan-Johannesburg return journey with me, taught me to knit. We knitted our way through dozens of patterns. She was a switchboard operator and knitted more than me because she was allowed to knit at the switchboard when calls eased up. We were due about the same time and her friendship brought me endless comfort. She was deeply spiritual and we had our love of God in common.

Sean and I were living on a shoestring, while trying to keep our various payments up to date. It broke my heart to give notice at work the day I was seven months and to take my departure a month later. My friend and I visited to and fro because she had also retired from work. Her baby was due a week before mine.

I was exhausted after leaving home from seven to seven during eight months of pregnancy and slept away the last month. One day I kissed my husband goodbye when he left for the mine. I thought five minutes had passed before he knocked. I thought that he must have forgotten his bag and opened the door. It turned out that he had spent the entire day at work and had already finished his shift.

One Saturday morning he had gone to work when I went into labour. There were five hours to go before he was coming home because he worked fewer hours on Saturdays.  I put a meal into the oven and cleaned the house.  I got pains but they were not nearly as severe as I had expected.  When Sean came home, the meal was standing on the open door of the oven.  I had burned my hand with the steam as I opened the tin.  He would not wait but took me immediately to the maternity hospital in Springs.

Those slight pains started coming faster and faster, becoming increasingly severe.  Sean sat by my bed, holding my hand, and irritated me dreadfully when he informed me that the pains were only natural.  I was convinced they weren’t nearly as natural as he thought.  Sean took my hand. "Just try and stick it out," he said. "Once our baby is born you and I will never be lonely again." 

The doctor came in and instructed him to go outside.   Shortly thereafter Nicolette was born.  I was totally relieved for suddenly all pain was gone.  I heard a smack and then my baby started crying and her voice sounded as if she was singing an aria like a little prima donna in La Scala.  I wasn’t surprised when by the time she was twenty her voice became exceedingly sweet after she had been trained by a singing teacher.  I had known she would become a singer the moment she was born.  After all, wasn’t she a scion of the Nooij and Hogenhout families?  Later I found out that Sean’s father had also been a gifted singer who had entertained many an audience in Ireland.  Sean himself could not keep a note.  Alas, that never stopped him from lifting his voice in song at good moments.

Joy filled me: “Is it a boy or a girl?” I asked.  “A girl,” the doctor said and I wanted to float to the ceiling with joy.  They called Sean and he took a very good look at Nicolette as did I.  It was two o’clock in the morning, nine months and two weeks after our wedding day.  Oddly enough, the majority of my subsequent infants were premature.

Next morning I had the ward in stitches.  Two new mothers introduced themselves to me and they asked me how I had experienced the confinement.  “Let’s put it this way,” I replied.  “I’m very happy this experience won’t be repeated for at least ten and a half months.”  And I still can’t see why that made them nearly roll off from their beds with mirth.

At ten in the morning my parents arrived on their way to Mass at the church of Our Lady of Mercy around the corner.  I thought my mother was joking when she breathed: “That is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen!”  But she was dead serious.  Sean, Elly and Miekie took the child to church where she was baptized straight after Mass.  Elly was her godmother.

I thought I had known what love was before she was born, but this little creature, who became daily more adorable, had me in the palm of her little hand,

My mother went to the shop and bought three tiny lengths of gingham material in red and white, green and white and black and white before going home and cutting three proper little girl dresses on Oma Nooij’s electrical Singer machine wedding present.  Nicolette picked up very little weight and by the time she learned to walk she still wore those little dresses.  

The sisters at St Mary's Maternity Home at Springs spent a lot of time teaching us how to take care of our babies.  Eventually Sean fetched Nicolette and me and we went home on Easter Saturday. 

“There goes the little guinea pig,” the matron said, and she wasn’t far wrong.  Over her little night dress, our daughter wore a matching bonnet, jersey and bootees, all wrought by my nimble fingers on the seven twenty from Brakpan and the five twenty from Joburg.  She  looked adorable.  We had bought a secondhand cot and on one of its corners I slung her jersey, bonnet and the bootees I had tied together on the cot post.  Sean and I had a good laugh about that but the smiles were soon wiped off our faces.

It was one in the afternoon when we placed her into her cot after which I gratefully got into my bed.  Then she started crying and her piercing screams went on until eleven o’clock that night.  Nothing helped.  Sean went to Easter midnight Mass as exhaustedly Nicolette fell asleep and I did likewise.  On the way out he made a little quip: “I’m going to ask Nicolette to put on her little jacket, bonnet and bootees and put her on the path in the front yard to leave the house.  I’ve never heard so much noise!”  The idea of that tiny little creature marching down the front path made me laugh, despite my anxiety.

At ten in the morning the next day my former library colleague, loaded with presents, all of a very useful nature, came to visit.  Nicolette was awake again and just as unhappy.  “I can do nothing with this baby.  She’s been crying and crying.”  My visitor was expecting her third child and an experienced mother.

“Where’s your pram?” she asked. 

“I haven’t bought a mattress yet.” 

“What about a flat hard pillow?” 

I managed that and she changed the baby into clean clothes, and laid the child down. 

"Poor little soul," she commiserated, rubbing her hand gently. "She's come out of such a little space and now you abandon her in that massive cot. No wonder she's feeling insecure. There you are, my little love. That's right." 

Before she had covered the baby, she was asleep.

When my former colleague had left, all I could think was God bless her. 

Nicolette and I adored each other and I could not bear to think of ever leaving her behind and going back to work.  Although we missed the money, I was getting a little unemployment allowance from the State, although that soon came to an end.  When it did there was a massive tax demand and we barely survived.  But Sean and I, being first generation immigrants, were both able to live frugally.

 

*Some names have been changed

MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER FIVE. MY THREE YEARS AT THE LIBRARY

 

CHAPTER FIVE

MY THREE YEARS AT THE LIBRARY

When I arrived home, my father was waiting for me on the platform of the railway station.  He had parked his bicycle in the shed and picked up my suitcases, preparatory to walking me to the bus stop close by.  I had hugged him and hugged him in my delight at being home and with my own family.  As yet I did not realise that the four years away from home at such an impressionable age had caused me to become ever so little distant from my own family.  It was fine when we were getting on but when there was a quarrel I was able to turn on the remote and retreat within myself.

At home, my mother had made apple tart and put flowers in the sitting room and we sat down to coffee.  “I’m so glad you’re home,” my mother said.  “I have so many jobs for you.  My library books are vastly overdue.  If I give you a pound tomorrow, would you go and pay my fine for me?”  I laughed for that was the first thing she asked me every holiday.

It was early in December when, a day or two later, I presented myself in the library which was situated near the station and now took a bus journey to reach from our home.  There was only one attendant behind the counter.

“Before you look at the date on these books, I must apologise sincerely,” I said.  “My mother gave me a pound to pay her fine because the books have not been changed since the last day I was here on holiday.  She has a job and no car, and she finds it difficult to get to the library.”

“You’re on holiday!  So where do you live the rest of the time?”

“I’m at boarding school at Bloemfontein – well I mean I was but I have just finished writing my matric.  I hope I passed but I can’t be sure.  I always battle with biology.”

“Really?  So what is your plan for the future?  Where do you want to work?”

I looked around the library.

“Do you know,” I said.  “I have always wanted to work in a place like this.”

“Well, we do have a vacancy.  Would you like to come and see the librarian?  Maybe you could apply.”

She handed me back my library tickets and waved away my mother’s pound.  Then she walked me to the librarian’s office and there I met Mr Riet whom I would grow to love almost as much as my own dad.

He was a little man who when in his office wore a black alpaca jacket to protect his clothes from the dust of the books.  His grey eyes blinked myopically through his glasses.  He was a most lovable gentleman, adored by his entire staff.  It was said that he had come from England to be a conductor to an orchestra, where he had met Mrs Riet, who played the violin in the orchestra.  She was as matter-of-fact and down-to-earth as her husband was academic.  When the orchestra had disbanded, Mr Riet had been assigned to the library.

 “Take a seat,” he said, indicating a chair amid the mass of books, journals, magazines and documents on the massive desk which dwarfed him.  “So you would like to apply for work here?  Why?”

I told him how I loved to visit the library and how it would be a dream come true if ever I could work in a place like the one he was running.  He asked about school and I told him the good bits.  I said I wanted to study but that I hoped to help my parents who were now four years in South Africa but were still not very sound financially. I said I would like to register at the University of South Africa and study for a librarian’s degree extramurally.

He gave me an application form which I completed in his presence.  Two weeks later I was invited to meet a town councillor for an interview and the upshot was that I started working at the library.  I was ecstatic.  In my prayers I asked God to help me make my colleagues like me.  In return I promised to work hard, be very polite and always assist everyone who needed me.

I loved the job and the public, and Mrs Anstey, the deputy librarian, a woman who appeared to be in her late sixties, had to speak to me on various occasions for being too lively when I spoke to the people.

“This is a library, Miss Nooij.  Not a restaurant.”

There was a large contingent of Dutch immigrants living in the town at that time.  They were avid readers. Reading books from the free library was an affordable means of entertainment which didn’t take you away from home.

The Dutch had voices designed to reach across roads, as in the case of two Amsterdam ladies.  Mrs Anstey would send me to tell them to hush up, but how could I?  I was only sixteen and they knew my parents.  So I’d go over to them and talk about anything else, just to pretend to Mrs Anstey that I had obeyed her instruction.  Meanwhile, the Dutch kept practising their considerable vocal cords in the hallowed precincts of the library.

From the moment I arrived, Mrs Anstey was cordial and Mr Riet was always the soul of kindness.  I flung myself into my duties with great zeal.    Like Elly, I joined the Commercial College where I studied typing and shorthand.  “Every town has lots of offices but only one library,” my father said.  “Make sure you provide yourself with an option.”  I entered simultaneously for a librarian’s certificate with the SA Library Association, so I had my hands full.  But I was so grateful for my job where I earned a salary.

Taught by Elly’s example, I brought the bulk of my salary home each month.  With what was left I paid my study fees and registration, income tax, the dentist and the hairdresser.  By then there was precious little left but enough for dress material and my mother made my clothes and visited the sales so she could show me where I could get bargains in handbags, shoes and makeup.

“The other day you were a baby,” my father marvelled. “And here you’re bringing home a lot of money to me!”  And for a while my mother, who had bad health, was able to retire from her demanding job as alteration hand.

I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  Even when I heard that I had barely scraped my biology and had failed to obtain the university exemption which I needed to study librarianship I did not despair.

Elly had a boyfriend who taught biology at a local high school and he started teaching me most evenings.  In the end I re-wrote biology at the home of a Methodist cleric invigilator and obtained my exemption.

I liked the older women I worked with and they were kind to me but by about March I saw a change creep in their behaviour towards me.  I was mystified but anxious, for nobody knew the signs better than me.  By about July that year the whole thing came to a head.  One of the ladies had been getting increasingly unhappy with me and when things exploded, I went to speak to Mr Riet.

He called in Mrs Anstey, my colleague and myself and made me repeat my story in front of them.  I repeated it almost word perfect.  The colleague was outraged.  “After all I’ve done for her!” she exclaimed.

“What is it you have done for her?” enquired Mr Riet gently.

“I’ve done nothing but defend her to my colleagues.”

“Defend her, why?  Did she misbehave?”

“No, but from the very start an acquaintance told us that she had been unpopular at school.  So the staff didn’t want her to come and work here at all.”

I struggled to keep a straight face.  The acquaintance was very well known to me indeed.  It was a girl with whom I never had quite seen eye to eye with.  It was all I could do not to protest but a sixth sense told me that Mr Riet was in my corner. Nevertheless I fumed that my job was being torpedoed and I did love the library so dearly.  

“In what way,” asked Mr Riet even more gently, “did those alleged school fights ever affect Miss Nooij’s work performance?”

“They didn’t,” she admitted.  “I’ve always found Miss Nooij a most amiable girl.”

“In that case, why don’t you make up?”  By now Mr Riet and Mrs Anstey were both smiling so we made peace before exiting into the passage.  We lived in harmony for the next two and a half years.

The only other time I remember Mr Riet threatening to fire us was when we jointly decided to perform a little vigilante stint.  One day an elderly man with a leer said to me:

“Haven’t you got something a little spicy to recommend to me to read?”  I don’t know whether I looked like a purveyor of racy literature to him but if so appearances were deceptive.  I gave him a Don Camillo book by Giovanni Guareschi, all about a Catholic priest and a mayor in Italy, which he almost threw at my head the next day.  He got even more cross when I beatifically asked:

“Can I recommend another book to you?”

A pleasant lady walked in, seething, one morning and thrust a copy of a book across the counter.

“This book,” she said, “is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever read.  You people should take it off the shelves.”

Happy to score a point for decency, I passed the book to Mrs Anstey and she took it to Mr Riet, with what story I don’t know.  All I do know is that Mr Riet called me in the following day.  Distastefully holding the book up by a corner, he said:

“I’m told you read this trash and I’m deeply disappointed.  Why don’t you rather read a biography or a book of travel?”

I protested.  At that time I was studying for my second exam in librarianship and my studies left me no time to read any non-academic material.  But I didn’t like my hero to think badly of me.

“If your church had confession as mine does,” I said, “you’d know why I don’t read books like this.”

Next time the staff were at tea we compared notes and decided together to put the books that people told us were not recommendable on the top of the book shelves which had a welded sort of top with a gap inside, plenty of space in which to hide risque books.

Then there was a storm in a teacup when the library was cleaned. A painter climbed up and started whitewashing.  When he swivelled his head he saw more books lying on top of the shelves than on them and he went flying in to Mr Riet.

An hour later we were all on the mat with some outside staff covering the counters for us and being questioned for hiding the library’s publications.  We were threatened with instant dismissal if we ever repeated this behaviour.  Thereafter I lost my erstwhile divine spark of martyrdom.  If our readers wished to read salacious copy, let them get on with it, I decided.  I had my own life to live.

At home we had our fair share of laughs in those days.  I was always aware of my clumsiness and this I had inherited from my father, who, although a magician in the bakery, had no understanding of electricity or plumbing or any other builder expertise.  One of our neighbours, a Hollander named Jan, was as gifted in this line as my father was ignorant of it.

There seemed to be always something wrong with our roof.  Every Saturday Jan arrived with his ladder, climbed into the roof, fixed whatever required his skills and descended down the ladder and my mother would pay him ten shillings for his help.  But in those days ten shillings could take our entire family to bioscope and pay for an ice cream in the interval.

“Now if you could follow Jan up that ladder,” my mother told my father, “and watch what he does that takes him five minutes and costs me ten shillings, I’d be very happy.”

 For a while my father demurred. He said:

“Pay Jan ten bob and you know he’ll do things properly.  Always go to the experts.  If I try to do it, chances are I’ll make a hash of it.”

However, my mother won their verbal battle and when Jan arrived at our house as usual the next Saturday he was edified to find my dad looking businesslike in his overalls, awaiting him in the passage.

Elly and I were reading magazines in our bedroom and giggled as we watched my dad disappear into the upper regions.  We could hear Jan bustling, patiently explaining each move he made.  My dad was eagerly plying him with questions.

Suddenly there was an exclamation, followed by an ominous creaking sound and my father’s shoe appeared through the ceiling of our bedroom.  It disappeared more slowly while an abnormal silence reigned.

A minute later, the shoe’s owner descended from the stepladder and tiptoed into the room.  In mute horror he regarded the jagged hole in the ceiling before holding his finger to his lips to us and leaving again.  Just then my mother came down the passage and put her head around the door.

“Will you be able to fix the roof yourself from now on, Gerard?” she asked.

My dad hastened to reassure her.

“You see, you under-estimate yourself.  Come on everybody, there’s coffee in the kitchen and I’ve made an apple tart.”

All weekend we waited for my mom to discover the hole and for the bomb to explode but it was only days later, when I had forgotten the incident, that she awaited me in the house on my return from work.  She thought it was the funniest thing that ever happened.  That was my mom; she could strain at a gnat and swallow a camel.  From that day on Jan received his weekly ten shillings and my dad was left reading his newspaper in peace.

 

*Some names have been changed

*Image with thanks to Freepik AI generated art with CN Whittle