Ingrid Jonker. Louise Viljoen
that though her father worked hard he made time for them when he could, reading them poetry and teaching Ingrid to waltz around the dining-room table.23Ingrid, on the other hand, later told Jack Cope and Laurens van der Post that they had to sit apart from the rest of the family at the dinner table and eat the food given to the servants.24Although it is difficult to gauge where the line between truth and fiction lies in these accounts, life with their stepmother Lulu was not easy for the two young girls. Although Lulu was kind to the girls when they were still boarding in Cape Town, things changed once they went to live with the family in Plumstead. In an interview, Anna once painted a dark picture of emotional deprivation and misunderstanding.25The two young girls’ self-confidence was constantly undermined by snide remarks and there was little understanding for their physical needs as young girls entering puberty. André Brink remembered that Ingrid recounted tales – with some exaggeration, he felt – in which Lulu lived up to the harsh stereotype of the fairytale stepmother.26Other friends also spoke of Ingrid’s hostility towards her stepmother.27Although there was no love lost between the two girls and their stepmother, they had a good relationship with their much younger step-siblings, Koos and Suzanne. This is borne out by snapshots dating from this time which show the two sisters on the beach with Koos and Suzanne as well as other children. Although the photographs suggest that they were at least partly able to live out their love of the sea, the presence of rather severe-looking nannies in the pictures hints at a different life-style in Abraham and Lulu’s house: more affluent, but also more structured, supervised and regulated. Outsiders observed that the relationship between Lulu and her stepdaughters was affected by the great difference between them. The children were used to wandering around on their own and expressing themselves freely; their stepmother wanted to exercise control and make them conform to strict middle-class values.28Their father seems to have been either powerless to intervene or too distracted by the demands of his career to take notice.
Who was this father who would influence Ingrid’s life so profoundly? Abraham Jonker was a well-educated man who studied at the University of Stellenbosch from 1923 to 1930. Here he met the music student Beatrice Cilliers, whom he married in 1930. At Stellenbosch he obtained a bachelor’s degree, majoring in Ancient Greek and Dutch, a master’s degree in Ancient Greek and a diploma in theology (the last to please his parents rather than for his own sake). After two more years of studying law, he became an organiser for General Hertzog’s National Party, before embarking on a career in journalism and working for publications like Die Burger, Die Huisgenoot, Die Jongspan and Die Suiderstem. He also had literary aspirations and published several novels and volumes of short stories, from the early 1930s onwards. The critical response to his literary work remained lukewarm, perhaps because his preference for the European-inspired ‘Nuwe Saaklikheid’ (‘Modern Objectivity’) was very different from the confessional mode newly popular in Afrikaans literature at the time. Because of the sombre worldview reflected in his writing, Ingrid Jonker’s Dutch biographer Henk van Woerden typecast him as a secular Calvinist and described him as an aloof, panic-stricken puritan.29Although Abraham Jonker has been portrayed as the archetypal apartheid politician in the minds of those who know of the political tension that existed between him and his daughter, he had a chequered political career. In the election that brought D.F. Malan’s National Party into power in 1948, he won a seat in parliament as a member of General Smuts’s United Party. Together with other dissidents he formed the Conservative Party in 1954, but crossed the floor in 1956 to join the National Party.30Many of his contemporaries spoke of him as a political opportunist and turncoat.31Whether Abraham Jonker’s changing political views were the result of careerism or inner conviction, they would later bring him into open confrontation with his daughter.
While living with their father and stepmother in Plumstead, Ingrid and her sister attended the English-medium Wynberg Girls’ School. Ingrid was still in primary school when she started here in 1945, and she completed her matric in 1951. School reports indicate that she was a reasonably well-behaved girl (‘Conduct: Fairly good and improved lately’) and average student (‘This is quite a creditable record’), who preferred to devote her energy to those subjects that really interested her. Writing seems to have been the one thing she cared about passionately. It was her teachers, rather than her literary-minded father, who recognised and encouraged her gift for writing.32Ingrid remembered that their headmistress, Miss Currie, reprimanded her for writing poems that satirised the schoolteachers, but was also the first person to declare that her young pupil had talent, even though she was undisciplined and disobedient.33Only a handful of Ingrid’s schoolgirl poems survive.
Writing poems and stories seems to have been a way of creating a safe space for herself. In an article for Drum magazine in May 1963, Ingrid said of her childhood: ‘I found a way of making my own happiness and I suppose that was the beginning of my poetry.’ In a letter to André Brink she wrote: ‘Miskien is digterwees maar ’n speelwêreld, nooit heeltemal die “diepe erns” nie, maar vir my safe soos Jesus’ [Maybe being a poet is a play world, never completely serious, but for me safe as Jesus].34Apart from creating a place to which she could retreat and in which she could feel at home, writing also helped her gain self-confidence. Sending her poems to magazines and being paid for them was a means of achieving some independence and a sense of self-worth. An autobiographical short story ‘’n Daad van geloof’ [An act of faith], written shortly before her death, confirms this. It tells how a little girl decides to sell her poems to buy herself a satchel and so help ease the burden on her grandmother who had to care for her. Several poems and stories appeared in the children’s magazine Die Jongspan in 1947 when she was 14.35
It seems that Ingrid was set on a literary career from early on. In 1949, when she was only 16, she submitted a volume of poems to Nasionale Boekhandel titled Na die somer [After the summer]. It was not accepted but she was invited by the publisher’s reader, D.J. Opperman, to discuss her poems with him. As Opperman was one of the foremost Afrikaans poets of the day and a hugely influential figure in the Afrikaans literary world, Ingrid was nervous about meeting him but was encouraged by the fact that he took her seriously and gave her good advice.36On two occasions in 1951 she again sent him poems on which he commented, inviting her to send more. Some of these poems (for instance ‘Skrik’ and ‘Keuse’) include veiled hints at romantic longing and an awakening sexuality, often reined in by feelings of religious guilt. It is difficult to reconstruct the inner life of the adolescent Ingrid on the basis of these poems, because the expression of feeling in them is still guarded, hemmed in by schoolgirl decorum and the writerly rhetoric of a previous generation of Afrikaans poets.
After passing matric in 1951 it was clear Ingrid wanted to leave home. Anna remembered that she came from Johannesburg, where she was working at the time, to help Ingrid negotiate with their father about her leaving. After the children told him that there was ‘space in the house but no place in the heart’ for them, he agreed that Ingrid could move out. Anna then helped her set herself up in a boarding house in the centre of Cape Town.37In this way Ingrid left behind yet another of the many homes she would occupy during the course of her life.
3
Early adulthood, marriage and motherhood, 1952–1958
‘It was still the time of believing in yourself and your own creativity and how you were going to change the whole world before you’re thirty and committing suicide afterwards, dying happily ever after’.
– Nico Hagen in Ingrid Jonker: Her lives and time
Office-worker
That Ingrid did not get the opportunity to attend university is a recurrent theme in many of her friends’ recollections of her. Most of them blamed her father for depriving her of the opportunity. Others attributed it to the influence of Ingrid’s stepmother Lulu.38Abraham Jonker did support Ingrid financially while she attended a secretarial course in Cape Town in 1952, the year after she matriculated. This enabled her to become financially independent and support herself. She held a series of jobs as secretary, proofreader, translator and bookshop assistant in the years that followed, working for firms like the publisher Kennis, Citadel Press, HAUM Publishers, Culemborg Publishers, Nasionale Boekhandel and the Cape Divisional Council. She also helped Louis Hiemstra while he was revising the Tweetalige woordeboek [Bilingual Dictionary].39Her employers’ impressions of her varied. While she was highly commended by Hiemstra as a proofreader,