A Black Heart

1 My doll I was eight when my father died. It was the collapse of my world. Little did I realize at the time just how irrevocable and far-reaching the consequences of this event would prove to be. That morning, a Saturday in May 1966, the whole family went to the neighbouring suburb of Claremont to do shopping. My father was particularly patient with my mother as she shopped for comfortable slippers. “Take your time, Freda. We’re not in a hurry today,” he said reassuringly. She had had an operation some time previously and was still recuperating. That night as my two sisters and I were at home on my mother’s bed waiting for my father to return from a golfing competition, the phone rang. I answered. A strange, male voice verified the telephone number and then continued. “I have bad news,” the voice of the stranger said. “Can I please speak to your mother?” Within a few seconds my mother was weeping and wailing on the phone. “But it cannot be... But it cannot be...” But it was. My father’s Hudson had collided with a badly lit truck laden with cement tiles. My father sustained serious injuries and died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. The shock was immense. My love for my father was at its peak at this stage. I revelled in being his companion: I was the one to see him off to work every day as he left to catch the train at Kenilworth station, and the one to meet him on his return. I was the one to accompany him to his tennis and squash matches, chattering all the way. “One day you should become an advocate, Miriam. The judge will let you win the case, just to get you to shut up!” With love and gentle affection he humoured me, indulged me, and listened to me, talking to me with his dry English wit. Our experience of living with my mother unprotected by the buffer of my father was about to begin. Our family doctor gave us all tranquillizers that evening, which my mother believed was a grave mistake. “Dr Jackson should never have drugged you children. None of us could realistically take in what happened,” she said afterwards. It meant that we all went through the next few days in a trance, with the event of my father’s death somewhat removed from us. Personally I went through the next few days with a strange sense of elation. The funeral seemed to be one enormous party. We were dressed in white. Even the black stripes on our berets were covered in blue and red ribbon respectively. My mother was adamant that neither she nor her children would wear black. On the Monday after my father’s death, my mother had dismissed our nanny, Dollie, while retaining the services of the older housekeeper, Mavis. The firing of Dollie was an alarm signal to my childish mind. I promptly got up at five a.m. each morning to cook porridge for the family and took on the mothering of my two younger sisters, Georgina and Helena. I helped my mother with the tidying of her room, the sorting of the accounts, and numerous other duties fell upon me in the absence of both Dollie and my father. Underlying my motivation to perform duties both expected and not expected of me was the all-pervading terror in which I held my mother. She represented a lack of control, indeed chaos, to my already traumatized self. It was a month later that I had a nervous collapse. Hysterical paralysis, the doctor called it. That day, I unpacked all my jerseys from my cupboard, to tidy them. As I was about to return them to their shelves in an even neater arrangement, my arms suddenly felt uncharacteristically heavy. When I told my mother this, she fixed her dark brown eyes suspiciously on me, and said: “Are you sure you’re not just being lazy?” The injustice of this accusation went deep. For a start, the thought that immediately flashed through my mind was: If I were lazy, why would I have unpacked my jerseys in the first place? But of course I would never have dared utter such a thought to my mother. What happened at this point was that my entire system ceased to function. I spent the next month in bed, had to learn to walk again, and could barely feed myself. After approximately a month of being fed, and being walked to the bathroom, my mother and Dr Jackson discovered a way to coax me to walk independently again. They reminded me of a beautiful doll I had seen in a shop window while out shopping with my father in Claremont shortly before his death. She had curly auburn hair and wore a pale blue smocked frock and an elegant pale blue hat. She was seated on a dignified wicker chair. My father, an accountant, careful with money, said we would think about it. In the interim he died. My mother and Dr Jackson now used this doll as a focal point, as a means of getting me to walk again. “The old man in the shop wants to meet the little girl who wants to buy the doll,” they told me. It worked. I got up and I walked. I met the old man in the shop, who gave me my doll. I still have her − my children have played with her, dressed her, carried her. We call her Catherine. She is a symbol to me of healing; a symbol also of hope, of the power of the will, and of the ingenuity to which a mother’s care may give rise.