I Have Come a Long Way. John W. de Gruchy
life earlier than the norm. At the end of standard one, I was awarded a copy of Aesop’s Fables for not missing a single day of school. I later learnt that Aesop was a Greek slave whose fables still have much to teach us about ourselves. I never won any more prizes for the rest of my school years; certainly none for academic prowess.
Our age difference was too great for Rozelle and me to be playmates; her role was to look after me, organise birthday parties, and sometimes take me to movies with her friends. On one occasion, we saw The Wizard of Oz; on another we watched Esther Williams and her water nymphs perform endless manoeuvres in a large pool.
My parents came to Scout functions and church concerts, but I don’t recall them watching me play sport or attending a school prize-giving – well, yes, there was no reason for them to do that.
Our family outings included Saturday nights at the cinema, and Sunday drives in the Willys to The Doll’s House in Sea Point for an ice cream. The Green Point lighthouse, painted in red and white stripes, stood nearby. I recall the comforting sound of its horn on misty nights, even from as far away as the city bowl.
We also visited my parents’ (mostly boring) friends, and the wider circle of our family. All my cousins were older than me, though, so I had no one to play with, and had to use my imagination to amuse myself.
At home there was little intellectual stimulation, few books and little encouragement to read or even study hard. But I read the boys’ magazines that arrived from England on the mail ship every Thursday. I collected stamps and developed an interest in photography, and eventually had a darkroom in the cellar.
Though by no means well-off, Rozelle and I never lacked anything, and we were loved. Our mother was always at home, waiting for us after school with food and drink on hand.
The 1936 Willys was a faded blue vehicle with black bumpers and the licence plate CA 6. This indicated that it was registered in Cape Town, but 6 would normally mean that its owner was some civic dignitary, which was not the case. The car, so crude compared to the posh new American cars of our friends, made a grinding noise going up hills, and became an embarrassment to us children. We asked our dad to park some distance from the school when he came to fetch us. On family outings, though, we happily chugged along a narrow De Waal Drive, past the Old Mill and the University campus, down to Muizenberg for a picnic on the beach. Back then there was no Black River Parkway or Blue Route Parkway, let alone Ou Kaapse Weg over the mountain into Noordhoek Valley.
I once rode my bicycle along the coastal road to Hout Bay and then over Chapman’s Peak Drive to Kommetjie. After a few days’ camping, I pedalled back in the rain, but gave up when, drenched, I reached the house of an acquaintance in Bakoven. On that occasion, I was glad when the Willys arrived to fetch me for the final haul over the mountain. When it was finally sold, my dad got far more for the licence plate than he did for the vehicle.
My mother persuaded my father to move me to St. George’s Grammar School for standard two in 1947. From now on my schooling would always take place in a male environment. Situated next to St. George’s Cathedral at that time, the school was an alien environment to me, with daily morning prayer following the Book of Common Prayer.
1947 was memorable, though, because King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and their two princess daughters visited Cape Town. I was one of the many pupils lining the fence of our school along Government Avenue, waving Union Jacks to welcome them. As a Wolf Cub pack leader, I shook hands with Princess Margaret at a Scouting parade, and was struck with awe on a guided tour of the battleship HMS Vanguard. Those were what Richard Rive would’ve called “red-white-and-blue days”. My mother was an ardent royalist, and we were all part of the Empire, whether we lived across town in Rive’s District Six or in Kloof Nek. I was oblivious of the fact that there were Afrikaners who had a very different opinion.
By the end of the year, my father put his foot down. He feared I might become a choir boy if I stayed at St. George’s, so I was moved to SACS Junior at the top of Government Avenue, where Cape Town High School is now located. SACS High was nearby in Orange Street, in the historic buildings that have since become the UCT Hiddingh Hall campus. I walked to school down Hof Street every morning, a distance of three kilometres, carrying a case full of books and sports togs.
At junior school I learnt the basics, did woodworking, played rugby and cricket, flunked boxing and received cuts (corporal punishment) from the headmaster for telling our singing teacher, Miss LaCock, to the raucous amusement of the class, that she had sung a false note. Once a week we watched travelogues provided by various embassies in the city, and I decided that I would one day visit these exotic places around the world. At lunchtime we played marbles or bok-bok makierie on the dusty playground, which left us dishevelled and sweaty for the rest of the day.
I was mad about sport. In standard four I was captain of the under-eleven rugby team, and I have the photograph to prove the fact. Saturday after Saturday, I made the train journey to Newlands Rugby Stadium to watch senior club rugby, sitting with other school boys on the touchline in front of the old Railway Stand. In 1948 I went to the Newlands Cricket Ground to watch the test match between the Springboks and the touring MCC or English side – the first after the War. The next year I was at the Newlands Rugby Stadium, watching the Springboks beat the All Blacks from New Zealand fifteen to eight. Sport has remained an integral part of my life.
Living on the slopes of Table Mountain, I spent much time exploring its terrain. On one occasion a friend and I – probably aged eleven, for we had just become Sea Scouts – climbed too far up the mountain face above the cableway station to turn back, and had to be rescued in the late evening. As the years passed, my friends and I thought little of walking for almost two hours over Kloof Nek on a Sunday afternoon, for the pleasure of swimming in the icy water of the world-famous Clifton beach.
Another boyhood memory was being introduced to Prime Minister Jan Smuts, who regularly passed by our house after his Sunday walks on Table Mountain. One evening, not long after, my father and I sat listening to the national election results on that fateful day in 1948, when the National Party came to power on the ticket of its apartheid policy and Smuts was ousted. I was vaguely aware that something ominous was happening.
My father, a follower of Smuts, declared that the results were disastrous. He was no political liberal (nor was Smuts), but he had experienced the influence of the secretive and powerful Afrikaner Broederbond at his work, where he was denied promotion in favour of younger broeder colleagues he had taught. He had learnt Dutch at school and could speak Afrikaans reasonably well – he had to, in order to progress at work. But he thought I needed to improve my ability in this regard, so one holiday I was sent to a farm in Citrusdal for this purpose. I recall picking oranges every day and sleeping in a bed with three other boys every night. I am not sure my Afrikaans improved.
My parents were probably more bothered by the rise to power of Afrikaner Nationalism than they were by the new apartheid laws. After all, racial segregation was nothing new, and their heritage was colonial. What was new, was the strict racial classification and obsessive racial controls that changed the social fabric and demographic face of Cape Town. When I turned sixteen, I had to register as a “white person”. I then received my identity document, which was my passport to privilege. By then I had already witnessed the segregation of our street and the buses, which now had a limited section at the back for those deemed “coloured”. I felt embarrassed, as I had always been taught to stand up and let older people, irrespective of who they were, have my seat. As a “coloured” Capetonian wryly observed, “Only roads and telephones were allowed to remain non-racial.”5
In SACS High, where I started in 1952, I received a classical education, which included Latin, and was selected to play cricket and hockey for the first teams when I was only in standard eight (now grade ten). I was good at table tennis and learnt to play chess, but I was bored to death by religious instruction, which, in my first year, meant reading the Bible in class from beginning to end. We never seemed to get beyond Leviticus and Numbers.
Many of my classmates were Jewish, mainly the children of families from eastern Europe, who had fled pogroms early in the century. There were also boys from St. John’s Orphanage, and many more whose families were struggling to make their way after the Second World War. Several of