MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER TEN. OUR BEAUTIFUL SON WAS BORN

 

Nicolette’s first Christmas and our second one as a married couple approached.  At my parents’ home we always used to receive dozens of Christmas cards but Séan and I received only five.  The year before we received only four.  The two lots together made a goodly little show on the mantelpiece, although they were mostly from the same people.

Teddy-bear Sandy

However, by that second Christmas we had a little baby who spent her days collapsing with laughter at the antics of her usually so reserved father.  She got a teddy bear at the mine Christmas tree.  It had a tag on it, proclaiming: “My name is Sandy.”  She could speak no English but had mastered a few words in Zulu.  She pronounced her toy’s name as Sheshie, lisping the sibilants and using Aline’s Zulu pronunciation.

She, her father, the teddy bear and I had our Christmas dinner together, she in her high chair, screaming with laughter at the sight of her father wearing a paper hat.

Return to work

The new year approached and we returned to work.  I worked as secretary to a firm in Johannesburg. 

Soon my pregnant state began to show.  Hardened by my warehouse experience, I didn’t hide my situation but once again I had a lovable boss who allowed me to stay on.  He was an ex-army man who was one of the first South Africans to go up north to Egypt during World War II. He had a heart for everyone on the staff, which I really appreciated.

Baby leapt

One day at work as I was typing I felt the baby give an unprecedentedly huge leap in my womb and I wondered what had happened but later I forgot about it.  A colleague at the desk beside me, looked up:

“What was that all about?” she asked. 

“He seems to be very busy today,” I answered.

Though again it was not easy to work during a pregnancy, I had taken pity on Séan.  He had had nothing but trouble with the mine manager’s car which spent more time in the garage than anywhere else and simply guzzled petrol.    The firm I worked for was an auto engineering company, so I had our car done up as new at reduced rates during the last three months of my pregnancy, decking it out with white walled tyres and a new massive curved windscreen because the old one had a crack.  When I had paid for all the parts and repairs,  I retired once more from the working class.  I was seven months pregnant.

Heavy payments for car

The day I left work, I gave back nearly my entire salary and holiday money to finish paying all the car parts I had bought but there was enough left to celebrate that night, Séan took Nicolette and me to bioscope in Benoni.  It was an Oriental kind of show about a girl singing how pretty she felt.  I still become uneasy whenever I hear that song fifty-two years later, because of what happened afterwards. 

Stolen car

Having been up since five thirty, I felt drowsy and handed Nicolette, who was already out for the count, to Séan before falling asleep myself.  Feeling refreshed from my two hour nap, I stumbled out with the rest of the audience afterwards.  Since the car which had looked so shiny and beautiful had been parked in front of the cinema, it didn’t take us long discover that it had been stolen.  A good Samaritan saw us wandering pathetically through the streets of Benoni, looking for the police station and looking lost, and stopped his car.  He took us first to the police and then home, a long distance.  I have known guardian angels in human form.  He was one.

Total destruction

At twelve o’clock that night there was a knock on the front door.  The police told us our car had been found in a veld near Dunnottar, totally destroyed.  What contents the thieves had not removed had been dragged out of the car and sabotaged.  The curved windscreen which had cost two months of my salary had been dragged out and smashed with a hammer and the car seats slashed with a knife.  Worst of all, we weren’t insured.  We sold the car for scrap for a hundred pounds the following week.  I prayed for the perpetrators for many years.  Totally unthinkingly they had done more harm than they could ever imagine.  Séan, who wanted nothing for himself but loved his car, could never bear to mention it again.

Junior bike

Jos had borrowed Séan’s racing bike but when Séan went to ask him for it back Jos confessed that it had been stolen outside his friend’s house and my parents were unable to replace it.  As a quid pro quo Jos gave Séan his own bike, a junior model, which was held together by string and we were back to square one in the transport stakes.  Ten days after leaving work I landed back in the maternity ward in Springs, six weeks before my due date.

I felt no pain.  I went to sleep in the hospital bed at seven in the evening and woke up at midnight. The sister-on-duty attended to me. One hour and forty-five minutes later, our beautiful son was born.  There had been no time to call the doctor.

Our beautiful son

Our son was six pounds in weight and looked more beautiful than Nicolette ever had, but there was a very worrying thing which the sister showed me.  There was a loose knot in the umbilical cord.  I remember again that big leap in my womb at work and wondered if it had happened then. 

“If the knot had tightened any more, the oxygen to the brain would have been cut off,” the sister said.  I understood then that if our son had been a full term baby and that loose knot had tightened during the remaining six weeks, he would probably have been hurt or dead and gave profound thanks to God for bringing him soon.

I thought my mother would tell me now that Nicolette had been a plain-looking baby after all but all she said was:

“I always thought your first child was the most beautiful baby I had ever seen.  But this one is even more beautiful.”

Sad farewell to Aline

Aline got a job with a more affluent neighbour.  Her new employer was not amused when Séan asked her to look after Nicolette when Séan went to see us on Jos’s junior bike.  He had to cross an overhead railway bridge on the way and two or three times on his trips he needed to stop the bike and retie the ropes.

Our son was in an incubator and back at home, after I had left the hospital, I experienced a severe attack of baby blues.

Our son was baptised on 15 August, the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption.  My sister Miekie was still in high school and was wearing her school uniform when she stood as godmother.  Then she said goodbye and had to rush off to school.

Sweet baby

Our son was different from sixteen-month-old Nicolette, who had been like a little monkey, always wriggling out of my arms.  He lay quietly in my arms, barely cried and quietly lay in his pram.  The place looked a shambles because I never was an inspired housewife.  Though I worked with determination, the results were generally below par in the housekeeping stakes.  Nicolette thought her brother was the most beautiful baby in the world.  She cooed and pulled a motherly little face whenever he was awake: “Ag shame, de baba!” she said. Nicolette was trying to say, "how sweet is the baby!"

Good father

Séan made a tremendous fuss of our son.  He was always so good with our babies.  We used to look at our son and laugh and talk with him.

The confinement having come so early had put our finances right back where they had been before I had gone to work.  Fortunately we had the hundred pounds and could cover the doctor and the nursing home.  We also put a deposit on a fridge, no luxury in that climate.  When the bills were settled, we were poorer than ever.  But luckily, as a later colleague of Séan’s would one day say: “Compensitis set in.”  The unemployment fee I received was not massive but it helped to feed us for a number of weeks.

Doing the best I could

I was trying all in my power to refrain from having to go back to work.  Though I was still doing the best I could, I sometimes lost the plot.  A lady in the street behind us had two children a little older than my two.  She was the perfect housewife and mother and I blushed at the thought of the difference between us.  I managed to keep most of the house tidy but my bedroom where the kids were sleeping with us because we could only afford one electric fire between us looked like a building site.

I'll clean when I get back

We had run out of baby formula and Séan was working night shift.  I left him with my pigeon pair and took the ten o’clock bus to go to the chemist and the supermarket.  Before I went I had bathed our son and changed the bedding in his pram and he looked like a little prince.  But the bed was unmade, the ashtray was littered with stubs, there were towels and discarded clothes on the floor and there were pages of newspaper everywhere.  “I’ll clean all this up when I get back,” I promised myself and came back on the very next bus.

Mrs Smith

“Your neighbour Mrs Smith arrived to congratulate you,” Séan told me, “and she left you a present.  She asked to see the baby.”

“Oh?  Did you bring him out?”

“No, of course not, he was fast asleep.  But I brought her in.”

“What?  Into the bedroom?  How could you drop me like that?  What did she say?”

“Well she looked rather stunned but she was too polite to comment.  I said: ‘If we can find the pram, we’ll find the baby’.”

Loan

I had asked my dad and my sister to sign surety for us for a loan to a lending bank.  I thought another hundred pounds should see us right.  My father arrived by bicycle from Springs and I made us coffee.  He had brought the forms over to our house to complete them for me.

“What’s the name of your bank?” he asked.  For a moment I was stumped.  Would I be borrowing money if I had a bank account?  Then I brightened.

“The bank in town!” I suggested.  “That’s if they’ll have me.”

Not so welcome

I was making a huge effort with the garden which had run to seed and had had the entire lawn replanted with grass of the Kikuyu variety. 

“I’ll get my husband to loan you our roller,” said the friendly lady across the road who had explained to my gardener how it was done. 

But when my gardener and I crossed the road one Saturday, she was less forthcoming.  Her husband was all smiles and invited me in for tea.  I was yearning to return to my lawn but did not want to look as if I only visited them to see what I could get out of them.  He went to call his wife and left by the door which led from the sitting room via the kitchen into the passage.  She had recently had an operation and in retrospect I assume she was experiencing some post-operation blues. 

There was a second door in that wall.  This one led straight from the living room in into the passage and stood wide open.  Thus it happened that I saw him arrive at their open bedroom door.  His wife came out.

“That Dutchwoman from across the road is here,” he mimed.

“Oh h***!” she mimed.

“She says she’s come to talk to you,” he said in swift signs.

“I don’t want to talk to her,” she gesticulated.

“You’ve jolly well got to,” he gestured.  “What on earth am I to tell her?”

“I don’t care.  Tell her anything you like but for goodness’ sake, get rid of her!”

Haerendel's "The Old Fisherman"

Suddenly, realising the door behind him was open, he shied like a nervous horse and looked over his shoulder into the sitting room, only to find me gazing in rapt admiration at the reproduction of an old sea salt in oilskins, a pipe clenched between his teeth.  Moments later his wife shot into the room via the kitchen, all black chignon and perfect figure, her face wreathed in hospitable smiles. 

“My dear, how kind of you to call on us!  What will it be, tea or coffee?” 

Talk about tea choking you, my dear, but I manfully drained my cup.  And I must say the garden looked professional after the gardener had worked his magic with the roller.  

*Some names have been changed

Image courtesy of ChatGPT and CN Whittle "Baby booties"