Killing Karoline. Sara-Jayne King
rested entirely on my race. As it was, when I was eventually pulled from her on the winter’s evening of 1 August 1980, it was apparently not immediately clear that I was Jackson’s child and I was pronounced a ‘white’ baby, given the name Karoline, and believed to be the first child of an unknowingly cuckolded, but apparently delighted Ken. To this day, it is his name that appears on my birth certificate.
Over the years I often tried to imagine the conversation that must have taken place between Kris and Ken when thinking of a name for me. These regressive fantasies were one of the perverse ways I’d torment myself when the aching, unyielding agony of the unknown became too much to endure.
I imagine the pair of them, like poorly rehearsed movie stars, awkwardly acting out the scene in a plush bedroom filled with congratulatory cards, grand furniture and thick shag-pile carpets. They are young and rich and good-looking, but their Hollywood life is days away from crashing into a low-budget made-for-TV movie. It is 3 August 1980, three days since I entered the world (eight days earlier than expected), cut from the mother’s womb by the doctor’s knife. Mother and baby have been allowed to return home. Ken walks out of the bathroom into the bedroom, oblivious to the wet shadows his feet are leaving on the carpet. A white towel is around his waist, his upper body still red and damp from the shower. She stares at the freckles on his shoulder and imagines how it would feel to suffocate one’s own baby.
He stands over the two of them, mother and newborn; he’s carrying a large portable phone, grinning, with his toothbrush wedged into the side of his mouth.
‘That was the old man,’ he nods his head in the direction of the phone. ‘Says to tell you well done, good job, next one will be a boy.’
He bends down and peers at the baby, milk-drunk on the mother’s breast. Kris inhales sharply. ‘Next one?’ she says incredulously, shaking her head despairingly. He pretends not to notice. ‘Katy, Kitty, Kadance …’ he muses, letting the towel drop to the floor.
The radio hums in the background, playing the number-one hit by local female vocal group, Joy. The song is an anthem for South Africa’s struggle movement and the lyrics speak to the burgeoning sense of unrest in the country. The women sing of burning bridges, blazing skies and a woman weeping while a man lays beaten, but also of the promise of better days, which are to be found down the elusive ‘Paradise Road’.
‘I like Joy,’ she breathes into the room. Steam has begun creeping under the bathroom door.
He turns to face her, his cock erect and aggressive. She baulks. ‘Karoline!’ he announces, winking at the sleeping baby. ‘Ken, Kris and Karoline! With a K.’
[Fade to black.]
Of course none of this really happened. I was given the name Karoline, Karoline Mary, because both Kris and Ken liked the name and wanted to keep up the tradition of Ks in their respective families. Mary was in honour of Ken’s great-grandmother who turned ninety-nine the day I was born.
Kris and I eventually left hospital on 9 August. In those days, a new mother stayed in hospital a lot longer than she would today, but even after nine days, I have been told, there was no sign that I was not the child Kris had hoped I would be. The story goes that it wasn’t until I was three weeks old that she began to see signs that Jackson, and not Ken, was my father. It seems unbelievable, from her side at least, given what she knew, that she would not have realised sooner, instantly even, but so it was that nearly a month went by before my true paternity came to reveal itself.
A referral letter from a paediatrician at Sandton Clinic to child welfare authorities in the UK states:
This is to certify that I saw this child at it’s [sic] Caesar on 1.8.80. Mother’s first pregnancy which was normal … The main problem here was the paternity of this child as we were concerned initially whether this was in fact a Caucasian or non-Caucasian baby. Most of the features were those of a Caucasian baby, the things against it were a slightly flattened nose, a rather darkened vulva and darkened areolas.
Kris considered leaving both South Africa and Ken, and returning to England to decide what to do, but in the end, after a night of candour, reprisals, questions and answers, she confessed her sins to her husband. The husband who had soothed, bathed, played with, loved as his own the child fathered by another man, a black man, employed at his own father’s hotel, just a few short months before his wedding.
Where many men in Ken’s situation may have left the marriage, he decided to stay. Years later I would ask him why. ‘I loved her,’ he had told me. ‘But also I wanted to save face.’ Kris, he said, had not been very well liked by his family and perhaps he felt he had a point to prove.
And so, because Ken stuck around, so did the problem, the problem child, and desperate times required a solution to be found to rectify the problem.
CHAPTER 3
Killing Karoline
After Kris’s revelation, it was decided that the only option in the circumstances was to have me, Karoline, adopted – and because of the laws in South Africa at the time, the adoption would have to take place ‘overseas’, in England. Had they given me up in South Africa, questions would have been asked, charges possibly filed and both Kris and Jackson could have been sent to prison. My future, as I have often been reminded, would likely have been to end up in a ‘coloured’ children’s home. Numerous times I have been told that I should be grateful for having avoided such a fate. Kris once wrote, ‘You would not be living the life you have now.’
Once it was decided that I was to be adopted, a reason, of course, had to be given for why I so urgently needed to be taken overseas. Like many babies, I was born with slight jaundice and it was this jaundice that would be efficacious in ensuring my departure from South Africa went unquestioned. Together with a paediatrician at Sandton Clinic, who knew the real reason for my having to disappear, and being someone they felt they could trust, Kris and Ken concocted a story that I was suffering a rare kidney disease, symptomised by jaundice, that required a level of medical expertise and treatment only available at London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital. A referral letter was written, tears were shed by Ken’s parents, who remained dumb to the truth, and on 18 September, Kris, Ken and baby Karoline arrived in the UK.
They did, as they had said they would, take me to Great Ormond Street, but to see the medical social worker, not the doctors. They explained the situation to the social worker and she put them in touch with the British Agencies For Adoption and Fostering, which immediately contacted the Independent Adoption Service (IAS). The IAS told Kris about a couple who wanted to adopt a baby girl of mixed-race parentage.
In the short time between that first appointment at the offices of the IAS and the day I was given up, Kris and Ken stayed with friends and in hotels, and also visited her parents in her hometown in the North. They confided in her parents the true nature of their visit to England, but not to her sister Karla, who was sixteen at the time. For those few days, the pair lived something of a double life, continuing their façade with Ken’s concerned parents who stayed in regular contact from Johannesburg. The story of my final days with Kris and Ken is detailed in a letter from the social worker, written just over a year after I was given up:
Kris continued to give you every care although as time went by she knew that the day when she must part with you was coming nearer and she felt under increasing stress dreading the moment of parting. When [they] finally bought you to this office, Kris was extremely upset and distressed to part with you and I know that this was a tragic moment in her life.
Kris was apparently watching from a car parked outside when Angela and Malcolm came for me. She watched as two complete strangers walked in through the door and instantly, unconditionally and proudly fell in love with her baby. According to paper work from the agency, Kris was ‘incredibly distressed’ when the time came for us to part. Strangely (or maybe not), I find this information comforting. The thought that she dumped me and disappeared without shedding so much as a tear is unthinkable.
On 10 October, just ten days after handing me over, Ken and Kris left England to return to their lives in South Africa. But of course, they were to return