Early life -- birth to about 6 years old

Although I wasn’t a “honeymoon baby” I did arrive on the scene earlier than my parents had planned to start a family. I was conceived about 6 months after my parents’ wedding and was born a couple of months before my father finished medical school. The text messages of those days were called telegrams. One had to go to a post office, write out the message on a special form and pay (per word) for it to be sent by telegraph to another post office, where it was printed and then delivered by a messenger, usually on a bicycle. So, not exactly instant messaging, but faster than mailing a letter. I inherited 13 telegrams congratulating my parents on my birth. I recognize the names of a few relatives among the senders, but for many others have no clue who they are (and all have long since passed away).

One of the 13 congratulatory telegrams sent to my parents.

Back then the world was still in black-and-white and out of focus

It is probably not surprising that I don’t remember anything about the first time I lived in Cape Town. After all, we moved away when I was just a few months old. Next stop was Uitenhage, now renamed Kariega, which at least means the place now has a reasonably consistent pronunciation. If you are not South African, don’t even try to pronounce Uitenhage. Even for South Africans, the English and Afrikaans pronunciations are so different that they sound like entirely different places. In Afrikaans it is pronounced ate-en-HAA-gha, whereas in English it is YOU-ten-haig in English (or YOU-ten-ha-jee if you wanted to rile up an Afrikaner). Uitenhage is a few miles inland from Port Elizabeth (now renamed Gqeberha – good luck trying to pronounce that) and is probably best known as the location of a large Volkswagen factory which, according to Wikipedia, is the biggest car factory on the African continent. The Port Elizabeth / Uitenhage area was the center of the South Africa motor industry back in the day, with Port Elizabeth being home to the country’s Ford and GM assembly plants as well as Bus Bodies (later Busaf), which made buses used by public transport companies around the country. That was well before Japanese cars became ubiquitous. (From now on I will use the old names, Uitenhage and Port Elizabeth, because that’s what they were called at the time and the names hadn’t yet been changed when we were in South Africa in 2019.)

 

Don’t know where this photo was taken.  It could have been at the house of my maternal grandparents.  The building in the background looks like the rondawel that was close to their main house.  That house was demolished by developers many decades ago.

My father did his medical residency in Uitenhage. From the Christmas card below, that would have been at the Queen Mary Hospital. There is no longer a hospital of that name there, so either it no longer exists, or its name was changed a long time ago. After his residency he apparently joined a private medical practice. I wrote “apparently” because that’s not something I recall but is suggested by some of his correspondence that I inherited.

Christmas card with our Uitenhage address

A friend / playmate that I had when we lived in Uitenhage was Jonathan Levy. Our mothers had been at the same high school and happened across one another when pushing us in strollers. The Levys later emigrated to Israel. They visited us on a trip back to South Africa several years later. A few years ago I did a web search, which turned up a web page maintained by a cousin of Jonathan’s. The cousin passed on a message to Jonathan and we exchanged a few emails (and also with his mother, who has since passed away). After about two years in Uitenhage, my father moved to a new position, at Livingstone Hospital, a government-run hospital in Port Elizabeth. Until the end of the Apartheid era, Livingstone was reserved for Black patients (actually any race other than white), though the medical staff and administrators included white people. I don’t know whether my father was in anesthesiology right from the start or moved to that specialty somewhat later. When we moved to Port Elizabeth my parents rented a house in Clevedon Road, in the Central area of the city, very close to the Port Elizabeth Provincial Hospital, the main hospital in the area for white patients. I don’t know what our house number was or any details of the house, other than it was on the northwest side of the road. The houses were quite old, even in those days. It looks like most of them have been refurbished over the past 60+ years. I used Google Street View to capture an image of a representative house in the street. The old photo of me may be outside the house we were renting. The dog may have been “Chips”. We definitely had a dog of that name a few years later but I don’t know when we acquired it or what happened to it.

 

Generic house in Clevedon Road, from Google Street View

This may have been at the house in Clevedon Road

After about a year in Clevedon Road my parents bought a house in Malvern Avenue, Fern Glen, about 4 miles from the city center but closer to Livingstone Hospital. I recall my father mentioning several times in later years that the house cost something like 4,500 pounds. (This was before the South African currency system was changed from the British pounds, shillings, and pence to rands and cents, shortly before the country became a republic in 1961.) My parents thought that was a lot of money and I gather they had to get a loan from my paternal grandfather (as well as a mortgage from a bank) to be able to buy the house.

Rough rendition of the floorplan of the house in Malvern Avenue when we moved it.  My parents had it modified a few times later and subsequent owners have modified it further.

This is what the house looked like from the street when we visited Port Elizabeth in 2019.  We didn’t try to ask to be allowed to look around inside.  When we lived there the front wall was very low, being more to mark the edge of the property than to keep anyone out (or in).

Aside: Fern Glen is what South Africans refer to as a suburb, but Americans would call a neighborhood. That is, in South African usage a suburb is an area within the city limits whereas in American usage a suburb is a separate municipality. Many years ago I read somewhere that Port Elizabeth and Pretoria were among the largest cities in the world in terms of the area inside their municipal boundaries. If so, that is probably at least in part because they are not hemmed in by a bunch of separate municipalities. Apart from being very windy, Port Elizabeth has a mild climate. According to Wikipedia, the record high temperature is 105.3 F / 40.7 C and the record low temperature is -0.5 C / 31 F. It is almost always windy. Sometimes the wind dies down overnight, so it may be relatively calm early in the morning, but invariably it picks up again later. Because of the wind, many trees grow at an angle. It wasn’t until I moved to Pretoria many years later that I realized that trees grow reasonably vertically if not constantly battered by wind. I don’t know when my brother Mick was born relative to us moving to Malvern Avenue. He was born soon after I turned 3, which is around the time we moved. I was probably too young to notice that my mother was pregnant, either then or when Ian was born a little under 4 years after Mick. It wasn’t until decades later – maybe only after my mother had passed away – that I heard that my mother had had some pregnancy losses between my birth and Ian’s. With me being an “accident” and the pregnancy losses, it would seem that our family turned out quite differently from what my parents may have intended. Many of my memories from our first several years in the house on Malvern Avenue are very hazy, especially in terms of their timing. For instance, the house below us (marked 2 on the photo below from Google maps) was a vacant lot for the first few years that we were there. One day, while it was still an open lot, one of my mother’s friends, Betty van Tonder, stopped by for a brief visit. She left her car parked at the side of the road, with her two daughters, Annette and Frances, inside. Malvern Avenue is on a hill. One of the daughters released the brake and the car started rolling down the hill. Fortunately it turned into the vacant lot and was slowed by the vegetation growing there. Betty ran after the car to try to stop it, slipped and broke a leg. I recently managed to make contact with Frances and asked her about the incident. She said she was the one who released the brake – because her mom was taking too long for her liking.

 

All I remember about the building of the house marked with a 2 is that we nicknamed one of the builders “Fatty Boom-Boom”. Once it was built Oscar and Ruth Swart moved in. I think their son Anthony was born shortly before or after that and they later had another son, Jonathan, who has Down syndrome. (Strangely, the people who lived in the house marked with an 8 for a short time also had a son with Down syndrome, who died while they were living there.) Ruth was a German Jew who, along with a sister Inge, was able to get out of Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport when Ruth was 13 and Inge was 8. All their other relatives were killed in the Holocaust. Inge died in an airplane crash in Cameroon in 1962. I recall Ruth coming over to our house in tears to tell us the news that she had lost her last relative. When I managed to make contact with Anthony several years ago he’d been with his (male) partner for more than 30 years. Although our families lived next door to one another for 20 years, I hadn’t realized back then that he was gay. Maybe that’s partly because the old South Africa was a rather homophobic society, so he didn’t come out until much later.

Ruth Swart being interviewed for the USC Shoah Foundation https://sfi.usc.edu/

Soon after we moved to Malvern Avenue, Edith Hempe started working for us as a live-in housemaid, a role she held for close to 30 years. Most middle-class white families of that era employed a Black housemaid, usually living on site in the “servants’ quarters”. For that our house initially had just a room behind the garage and a separate toilet, but no bath. Edith had to wash in a metal bathtub like the one in the photo, carrying water in jugs from the kitchen to her room. Several years later, the first time my parents added on to the house, the additions included a proper bathroom for Edith. (The other additions at that time included adding a new master bedroom, with en suite bathroom beyond what is marked as my bedroom in the floorplan, and a new second bathroom plus separate shower, with the old bathroom converted to a laundry room.)

Metal bathtub similar to the one Edith Hempe had to use

During the Apartheid era Black people were not allowed to live in white areas, with this being codified in the Group Areas Act (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_Areas_Act). I don’t know how having Black housemaids (and sometimes also gardeners) living on site fitted in to the Act, but it was definitely allowed. Black people had to carry a pass book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pass_laws) when moving around, and if in a white area at night or over a weekend they also had to have a letter from their employer giving them permission to be there. I remember my mother writing such letters for Edith each time she went home. Edith’s job was more than what I would regard as full time, starting with making breakfast for the family, then making beds and cleaning the house, through to making dinner and washing the dishes afterwards. Housemaids were traditionally given Thursday afternoon and evening off (and local restaurants did good business on Thursday evenings), Edith also had every second weekend off from after lunch on Saturday, when she would go home to her place near Uitenhage. Edith had two children, Reuben who was about my age and Maureen who was a little older. I think that the children lived with Edith’s mother. Edith was a wonderful person. She was very intelligent and could communicate effectively in several languages. It is one of the tragedies of Apartheid that someone such as Edith did not have an opportunity to be more than a housemaid. She was a great cook and had many amusing sayings. One of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t try to find out more about her background and interests or to learn her native language (Xhosa). In mitigation at least of the latter, I am terrible at languages other than English (and passable at that probably only because my mother taught high school English for many years). By the time my “baby” brother Ian reached high school, Xhosa was offered as one of the classes, but it hadn’t been available in my day. Ian has also been much better at languages than me, including studying several languages in college before switching to medicine. If my mother had known back then what she learned later when studying linguistics, she would probably have asked Edith to speak to us (the children) in her own language rather than in English. Children can pick up multiple languages and don’t get too confused as long as each person speaking to them uses a single language consistently. At least that’s what my mother told us before our kids were born. My mother didn’t live to see any of her grandchildren, but we stuck to that advice, with Rietta still speaking to our kids in Afrikaans more than 35 years after Steven was born.

 

Edith Hempe with our son Steven at my parents’ house in Pretoria in 1987 or 1988

Soon after we moved in to our “new” house, my father built (or had someone build) a sandpit in the corner where I have typed “Sandpit” on the image. My father collected bags of sea-sand from the dunes along the coast. He usually took the family for a drive on a Sunday afternoon. He’d first go to Livingstone Hospital to see the patients he would be anesthetizing the next day, while we waited in the car. Then we would typically drive to the harbor where we would often watch a tug maneuvering a ship. After that we’d drive along and past the beachfront, sometimes stopping further on to fill some bags with sand from sand dunes.

Port Elizabeth Harbor as it currently looks on Google Maps.  Back in the day there were usually a couple of ships tied up on the side where it says “Cruise Terminal Port Elizabeth”.

For a while we had rabbits in a hutch next to the sandpit. I don’t recall how long we had them, but think the hutch stood empty for many years after there were no more rabbits. My brothers and I would sometimes find tortoises in the vacant lot next to our house and bring them to our yard. We often pushed them around as if they were toy cars! Picking up and moving a tortoise may have been illegal even back then. Like most other South African families, although we had a washing machine we didn’t have a dryer. Laundry was dried by hanging it outside on the washing line. When I was about 4 years old I started “nursey school”, which is what South Africans called pre-school. Using Google maps and my memory of the approximate location, it was probably a little over 0.6 miles (1 km) from our house. A housemaid used to walk me to there and came to fetch me later. We usually stopped on the way to buy fresh bread at a convenience store. (Milk used to be delivered to our house in glass bottles, but we had to go to a store to buy fresh bread.) I went to nursey school for two years. All I remember about it, other than walking there and back, is a friend, Bryan Heine, who was also there and then went on to the same schools as me through the end of high school. Later I went to his wedding – the only person who was at school with me whose wedding I attended. It was probably a few years after his wedding that his father died in a boating accident. I think I was away at college or doing compulsory military service when that happened. 

Next, on to “big” school.