perfectly suited almost all involved as Mrs Williams ran a boarding house, The Williams Arms, and, although elderly and often infirm, preferred to have a hand in the running of her establishment. Given that Mrs Williams’s idea of ‘having a hand in’ consisted of barking orders from the comfort of her armchair, Gemma served as her much-needed eyes, ears, hands and feet.
On that fateful day in July when Mrs Williams (and that was what Gemma called her grandmother, not ‘grandmother’, not ‘grandma’, not ‘nana’, not anything affectionate, but Mrs Williams – and this at the behest of her grandmother) intercepted the BSAP letter, she had come upon Gemma smiling to herself by the Welcome Dover stove in the kitchen while a meal she was preparing was burning to a charred crisp right in front of her.
Mrs Williams had immediately deduced that something was afoot and, when the mail arrived, fetched it herself. She opened the letter from the BSAP clumsily with her stubby and arthritic fingers and in the process tore the envelope, not knowing or caring that previously all envelopes received from the BSAP had been opened with great care by a silver letter opener with a fleur-de-lis handle. Mrs Williams had read the letter … well, not much of it, actually, she only read the name Johan Coetzee, and could read no more because all she could see was red. She had lost her two sons in the Anglo–Boer War, one on the battlefield and the other to dysentery, but she laid both their deaths at the door of the Afrikaners. After these deaths she had been left with only one child, and that child had grown up to give birth to a child who would, in turn, grow up to have something to do with an Afrikaner. This could not be borne. Grabbing Gemma by the hair and parading her through The Williams Arms, Mrs Williams told her just as much.
All appeared to be doomed. Gemma allowed her heart to break. She let herself cry and mope … and to feel ‘blue’, as the music from America suggested she should when dealing with disappointed hopes. Blue … she liked the colour of the emotion, liked that she could feel it because her heart was broken, liked that her heart was broken not because she had been jilted but because Mrs Williams, after everything the Boers had taken from her, would not countenance (her word) an Afrikaner for a grandson-in-law, liked that there was something wonderfully tragic about the whole affair.
Gemma’s mother had done right by her, probably for the first time in her life, when, on one of the rare occasions she visited her daughter, she spirited away a letter addressed to the BSAP and two weeks later clandestinely gave Gemma a letter written on BSAP stationery. Gemma was ecstatic that in his letter Johan said that he would wait for her no matter how long it took, till his dying breath if need be. Ooohhh … it was all just too romantic for words. Gemma, like Bessie Smith, had the Downhearted Blues, but also the satisfaction of knowing that her man still loved her.
Luckily for Johan, he did not have to wait until his dying breath because a few years after the clandestine letter arrived, Mrs Williams suffered a massive stroke that left her speechless and even more dependent on Gemma. Gemma happily nursed her grandmother and, while caring for her, chiselled away incessantly at Mrs Williams’s prejudice, at least where Johan Coetzee was concerned.
Johan was truly the best of men. Both his parents had died and left him to be raised by the exceptionally English ladies of the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings. His mother –- yes she believed Johan had mentioned this in one of his letters – had been very English before her death.
So you see, apart from the name, which Gemma agreed was rather un-fortunate, Johan Coetzee was as English as they came. And truly there was nothing else to be done because he had captured her heart as no other man ever could or would.
Gemma was relentless in her pursuit of her grandmother’s blessings and after almost three years had passed, Mrs Williams made a sound in the back of her throat before resignedly nodding her head. Gemma chose to interpret this as her grandmother’s resounding consent to her union with Johan Coetzee.
An elated Gemma wrote to Johan immediately, but in place of a letter arriving within the fortnight, Johan Coetzee himself appeared and did so just in time because Gemma was on the verge of feeling truly blue. She was happy to see that he was even more dashing and handsome than she had remembered him to be and so, quite naturally, she fell in love with him all over again.
Weakened and suffering the humiliation of defeat, Mrs Williams had no choice but to welcome into her home something she had never thought she would in her long-living life – an Afrikaner. And perhaps she made Johan feel too welcome because … well, because events transpired that made it necessary for Johan Coetzee and Gemma Roberts to be married on 18 December 1926, exactly four months before Emil was born.
Emil would live the first five years of his life with his mother and Mrs Williams and the several tenants who had rooms at The Williams Arms. He would recall nothing of this time: of the frequent trips to the nearby Indian Ocean; of the waiting patiently with his mother for his father to arrive at the train station on one of his many visits; of the tropical vegetation that his mother loved and would always long for after Mrs Williams had peacefully died in her sleep and Johan had come to take his wife and son away from the life that had been theirs.
Before Mrs Williams died there had been talk of Johan moving to Durban to help take care of the boarding house, but Anthony Simons, whose fortunes, like the fortunes of many, had drastically changed in 1929, made his wife take over the running of The Williams Arms after Mrs Williams died and let it be known that he still had not changed his mind about having children about him.
By the time Johan came to take Gemma and Emil to what they would all, from then on, call their home and what the BSAP accommodation listings described as a government-issued, bungalow-style house with whitewashed walls and no veranda, he was no longer a traffic controller. He had been promoted up the ranks to First Sergeant and been assigned to man a BSAP outpost at the foot of the Matopos Hills.
It was here, at the foot of the Matopos Hills, that Emil would have his first memory and fall in love so effortlessly with the veld. It was here that his mother, missing the humidity of Durban and suffering through the dryness of the savannah, would tell him stories, all of which began with a girl wearing an Eveline High School uniform who, in chasing her straw hat across the intersection of Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, captured the heart of Johan Coetzee, a truly remarkable man.
To illustrate the highlights of her story, his mother often produced photographs of the moments she described and this is how Emil knew that he had walked into the Indian Ocean for the first time holding his mother’s and father’s hands, that he had once stood in a cloud of smoke tearfully waving goodbye to his father at a train station, that he had sat on his mother’s lap playing with her string of pearls while she wore a black dress and mourned the grandmother she had only been allowed to call Mrs Williams. His mother told these stories with such great detail that he could see images even from those that had not been captured on celluloid clearly in his mind’s eye.
Yet, try as he might, Emil could not feel a real connection to these memories; though they formed a part of his life, the images they conjured did not move with the pace of real life. The people contained in these memories – his younger self, his in-love parents, his formidable-but-frail great-grandmother, his twice-married grandmother, his shell-shocked grandfather, his paedphobic step-grandfather, his dancing paternal grandmother, his never-doing-well paternal grandfather and namesake, the very English ladies of the Pioneer Benevolence Society of the City of Kings, the tenants of The Williams Arms, the people travelling on Borrow Street and Selborne Avenue, the rows upon rows of Eveline girls with their straw-hatted heads turned at the same angle towards Miss Langdon, the soldiers fighting the Anglo–Boer War and the Great War – all lived in a black-and-white world in which their movements seemed slightly speeded up so that everything they did appeared somewhat awkward, hesitant and haphazard. Their rare smiles, which were bashful, seemed to have been coerced, and all around them was a silence so profound that one felt afraid of breaking it. Their inhabited world was so pristine that all Emil could feel for it was a deep-seated nostalgia that would not allow him to connect further for fear of contaminating its bygone-ness.
CHAPTER 2
In the beginning of the Coetzees’ life together at the foot of the Matopos Hills, there was a happiness that made itself most