Here is a story which helps frame the one I posted today:
Arnie marries a Shikse
There is a picture I have of a debonair young man marching down Commissioner street. In the background there is an old Edworks store. He is dressed impeccably in a well-made suit. The Indian tailors used to be based around the bottom of the city alongside the Indian market. And he has a homburg on. It?s not at a jaunty angle. It is just the way men dressed to go to work.
He is an extremely handsome young man. His hat obscures the fact that he was losing his hair at a young age.
But what is truly striking of him is the sense he creates that somehow he has an absolute clarity of what the future holds out for him.
He had grown up in Jeppe on the border of Doornfontein. Just up from what became the Alhambra theatre. Born in Lithuania, he had waited there for two years whilst his illiterate but hard working father had accumulated enough money to bring them to the new country.
It is about this handsome young Jewish chap from Jeppe. The apple of his parents eye; they?d walk the streets at night looking for steak and tomato because that?s all he would eat. From an early age he knew that he would one day be an accountant ? it was an honourable profession for an exacting person. He without doubt, would one day be successful.
And the girls in the neighbourhood fell over themselves to get him to take notice.
But he wasn?t a particularly kind chap. He was known on occasion to have arrived to pick up a girl for a date, and were she not wearing something he deemed suitable, he would ask her to change. But this was a sufferable price the young Jewish girls of Doornfontein and Jeppe seemed to be prepared to pay.
At this time in the diamond town of Kimberley my mother grew up as the youngest of 6 children. My grandfather, whose name was ken Arthur Eden but went by the name of Gompie, came from a line of relatively happy but unsuccessful men. His claim to fame was a cricketing career with Griquas. And so my mother ? Joy Wakenshaw Eden grew up in a small clapboard house between the cemetery and the ginger beer factory.
She was born to a family that had been destined for better things. A great-great grandfather had been the distinguished gentleman who had led a party of 1820 settlers to a new land and away from persecution in the area of Cornwall where he was born. He was an engineer and by all accounts a rather clever one. As testament he left behind to well known landmarks. The castle on the hill in the harbour town of Port Alfred. And a breakwater in the harbour that turned Port Alfred into a viable Port until 1948. A new MP, full of pomp and pampoen, had been voted in on the basis that he would extend the breakwater. The harbour at Port Alfred silted up, it became passable for small boats for only a few days of the year. In fact, I worked with a man who left a good role in advertising to become the marketing manager for a Yachting club in this harbour. I could have told him it was a doomed venture as the harbour remains, to this day impassable to even a yacht.
On the rumour of diamonds the family joined the great northwards trek to Kimberley and there they acquired (and there is a family map to show this) a plot of land. A tiny plot of land found almost at the very centre of what one-day would be an extraordinarily large hole. Right in the middle of the Great Hole. Before it became one.
Joy Wakenshaw Eden?s non-to-wise forbears whose lives revolved mostly around the village green and cricket pitch sold the plot before it became a hole for 10 pounds and invested in dogs.
And for years after their lot was to serve as the security detail for the great De Beers diamond mines of Kimberley.
In the summer of 1951 the debonair young man, recently qualified as an accountant, took a 2 week summer sojourn at the coastal town of Hermanus. He took with him Darwin?s Golden Bough as light reading.
And whilst tanning on the beach, he was accosted by two apparently stray dogs. A young waif-like girl pulled the dogs away.
The dogs, were the offspring of those intrepid guardians of the diamond mines and they had taken a fancy to young Arnie on the beach that day in Hermanus.
He fell in love with this slightly overweight young woman from the clapboard house next to the cemetery. Why? No-one will ever really know.
But the very next day they set off for Kimberley. The resolute young man, never being one to be daunted in his purpose, would present himself and his financial status to her somewhat daunting mother, Daisy Wakenshaw Eden.
Daisy the head of the munitions factory in Kimberley during the war. Indeed she had been known to take to a Baboon at the Victoria Falls, with a stick during a Girl Guides outing she was leading.
She?d never met something so exotic as a dapper Jew like Arnie. And she could not resist his sense of purpose and so, within days they were married at the registry office in Kimberley and headed, full of hope, happiness and complete delusion to Johannesburg to carry the happy tidings to his parents.
His mother wailed. A shikse and fat too.. they were banished. For a year they never saw his parents. Until one afternoon, a year later the shikse appeared on their doorstep. IN her arms she carried a baby swathed in blankets. And brandishing him she said ?this is the grandson, you?ve not seen.? That was me.
The story was told by a young Jewish girl from Jeppe who?d suffered a breakdown and attempted suicide on learning of this betrayal by the young man on whom she had pinned her hopes and dreams. It was published in a magazine called the Purple Renoster, the publication of the lamentedly banned liberal party of South Africa. The copy lay hidden deep amongst papers in a family cupboard.
Whilst the liberal party was a short lived moment of hope this was for them the beginning of a tumultuous, often tortured lifelong passion across a divide that they could never really reconcile even if those around them had let them.