Noel's Story

Kathy Mansfield

Description

Noel Feldman was born in 1947 in Rhodesia. A mixed-race child classified as 'Coloured' in the lexicon of the day. Born to a violent home and abandoned in a Bulawayo Orphanage as a new-born to be brought up by Catholic nuns. Not knowing his mother, his father or any family. Belonging nowhere. A boy alone.His is an incredible story of courage and fortitude. A bare-knuckle story of a troubled life that would have destroyed most. A mother lost - then found - and lost again. A father - never found and never looked for.A life of optimism and gratitude for being alive. A life not defined by a tragic start but a life to give us heart. And you can meet him, every day, at the famous Froggy Farm kiosk in beautiful Juliasdale, Zimbabwe, where he now lives and laughs and will bring something to your life as you buy your blueberries from him. If you are lucky and he is in the mood, he might give you his famous Ian Smith impersonation!One of the multitude who make their way through an unforgiving world - one of the voiceless. Until now.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Zimbabue
• Memoir
• Zimbabwe

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 07 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800468399
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Noel’s Story
Kathy Mansfield
Copyright © 2020 Kathy Mansfield

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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ISBN 9781800468399

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This book is dedicated to Noel Feldman and all th e ‘Others 1 ’ and ‘ the voiceless’ who are part of Zimbabwe’s rich history.

I acknowledge those people who shared with me what they know about Noel, people who seem to have taken him to their hearts and become part of his story: Judge Chris Greenland who entered into an email conversation with me about his clear and long ago memories of Noel as a baby, a toddler and then a lad; Ray Clutty who, as a manager there, remembers Noel in his mid-life years, a steady worker at Bulawayo Power Station, with a gift for mimicry; Dave Sheenan, and his family, who patiently answered my What’s App questions across continents and who have given Noel a safe haven in Juliasdale in this latter stage in his life. I would not have found Ray Clutty without a chance conversation with Dalrae Dawson at the Claremont Gold Course fete one day; Terry Dawson, her brother, gave Noel his current position, manning the famous Froggy Farm Stall.
Celebrities all! Thank you.

I loved it! It brought back a lot of memories of Rhodesian days. Arcadia was one of my stomping grounds, when I was growing up. can really relate to the history and geography of the story. - Dr Knox Chitiyo
Contents
Foreword

1. The Beginning
2. The Growing Boy
3. School’s Over
4. Mother: Lost and Found
5. Work and War
6. Wife and Life and Family
7. The Road to Nyanga

The Author
Notes
Foreword
I met Noel Feldman in 2018 at the Froggy Farm stall, as do many others as they drive or walk the road to Nyanga. At that first meeting I simply bought fruit and veg and a bunch of gorgeous protea flowers to beautify the cottage in Juliasdale where I stay sometimes. I noticed his way with the stall books – his careful recoding of purchases and prices. I noticed how he spoke to customers – a bit tense, wanting the transaction to go well and be recorded accurately, but friendly and open. I drove away with my purchases.
A year later I was there again, with my friend Lita Goncharova. We were on holiday from Harare. Lita is from Ukraine originally, and talks to people. She is interested in them and asks questions that I would not immediately put to a stranger. She asked Noel about himself – after all he was a new kid on the block as far as she was concerned. The answers were intriguing. This man in his seventies introduced himself as an orphan.
The rest, to use a cliché, is history. I asked more questions and Noel was happy to answer. I went back to the stall and talked some more – he invited Lia and me to his place so we could sit longer and in some privacy. There I asked if I could record what had become an interview. Then we had a series of interviews over a couple of years on my infrequent visits back to Juliasdale, and Noel and I made a plan to write his life story.

The story, as well as being that of one man, also describes something of the life story of Zimbabwe, from a point in its time as Rhodesia, to the present day. Noel could be described as one of the marginalized – a ‘nobody’ – and until now, voiceless. But when you read Noel’s story you will see that this is most definitely a somebody we have before us. A man who has overcome circumstances that might have crushed a lesser sort of man. I tracked down the testimony of an ex-High Court Judge who knew Noel many years ago, at the very start of his life, and he describes Noel as ‘a living legend’.
I write short stories, for fun, and sometimes run creative writing workshops and Noel’s story is one I could not have made up. In places I have had to imagine some of the scenes I put in front of you, the reader. I have used a writer’s license to create details and feelings, thought processes and interactions and dialogue. But I have not imagined the essential content of the course of Noel’s life and what happened in it. I managed to speak to, or communicate in writing, with enough people to substantiate its substance and critical facts.

And so – here is Noel’s Story.
Chapter 1
The Beginning
His name is Noel Feldman. He was born in Bulawayo on Christmas Day in 1947, and in the absence of a coherent mother, or any kind of father, the nuns at the Orphanage to where he was transported, decided Noel was as good a name as any. Would he have been called Pascal if he’d arrived on an Easter Day? Perhaps. And was it as good a name as any? Are you instead, as good as nameless if strangers name you, if you are un-named by your proud grandparent or your father or your mother? Especially if you are un-named by your own mother, your loving mama in whose arms you are placed when you enter the world; the one to whom you are the best beloved. But, motherless and nobody’s best beloved – Noel was named by well-meaning strangers.
How did it happen? This child, taken in and named by strangers?
Of course, Noel was not motherless, not at the very start of his life; after all, everybody has a mother at the very start. Was it her fault, her decision, that her baby son was taken to an Orphanage and abandoned to the future, left completely alone in the world? She was a young woman, an alcoholic Noel tells me, in love with a woman beater she couldn’t drag herself away from.
But the more fragments about his start I hear from Noel, the more I wonder about this young woman and her alcoholism. Was she an alcoholic before the birth of Noel, or did that happen after the loss of Noel?
What he tells me, told to him by the nuns as he grew and as he asked questions about his mom and his dad as children will, is pieced together in this story. The telling of it to me was a bit haphazard and so in these pages you will find it in bits and pieces, here and there, as Noel’s story unfolded to me.
He fought hard to know his story – where he came from, why he grew up alone, in state care in Rhodesia. He persevered in his quest to find out who he was. Some things he was told by others along the way, some things he hunted down on his own. He had to be patient as well as steadfast, and brave, to put together the scattered jigsaw of his life and its raw beginnings.
It was a hard beginning. It must have been, to be taken off to an Orphanage, almost in his swaddling
clothes. His mother was from Goa, called Hilda Feldman. It is hard to imagine that a woman from Goa was named Hilda Feldman. Maybe this name was given to her by some member of the colonial authorities who could not pronounce or spell her real name. It happens. Or maybe it was never her name at all.
In a different world in a different time, she and her family might have found a better life after leaving their own country. We do not know when they left Goa and arrived in Southern Africa but perhaps we can guess that her parents brought their young family to the continent, seeking fortune. In any case she was just one of many from the four corners, whose family had made their way to a new land, full of better opportunities, they hoped, than those available at home in the sub-continent.
Of course, the land was not new – it had been there for ever, but you know what I mean. In those days there was gold fever, and diamond fever, and land fever. Africa was open for business – as long as it was white business. Opportunities for a ‘non-white’ person were of a different sort and quality altogether.
What this meant was that a very significant aspect of Hilda Feldman, in the Southern Rhodesian context, was that she was not white. That was a major element in the catastrophe that was to follow and affected the rest of Noel’s life – she was classified Coloured/Indian. It was important to the Authorities at that time, the Southern Rhodesian Authorities, to sort and categorise human beings by their skin colour – it
measured their antecedents and their worth, and their future.
Hilda therefore lived in the Coloured township of Barham Green with her man, a Coloured man called Bassie Brandt. We know he was violent and that he was a heavy drinker and that weekends were particularly bad in terms of drinking and beatings, and Noel’s mother – young, beautiful and vulnerable, would flee to the nearest police station for shelter and support.
This fleeing from violence happened more than once, and the police station was manned by a tall, handsome – and white, member of the British South African Police. The BSAP was what passed for Rhodesia’s police force in those days. It was a fall-out from militarised days and these policemen were military
men, used to commanding, used to being obeyed. This young, defenceless woman was attractive. Noel was told, at some stage in his life, that she was sometimes known as Black Beauty . We can speculate the name partly derived from the long and lustrous hair that flowed like