Girl on the Edge: A Memoir

Ruth Carneson

Description

Ruth was four years old when her father was arrested for high treason and her world was turned upside-down. She grew up in constant fear of Special Branch policemen knocking on the door to arrest her mother or father, prominent South African communist. Ruth learned how to keep her mouth shut, to look out for microphones in the walls and to beware of friends who could betray her trust. At fourteen, Ruth left South Africa, clutching her teddy bear in one hand and her drawings in the other. A plan to England carried her into exile, a new world where she struggled to reconstruct a life fractured by fear. With an artist�s eye for detail and colour, Ruth recalls her life with unflinching honesty: the Treason Trial; her struggle to conform; Friern Barnet Asylum for the �hopeless insane�; LSD, protests, and free love in London, art school and motherhood; communes and camping- all steps in a journey that finally brought her home to South Africa on the brink of change. Heart- wrenchingly sad one minute, bursting with life and vigour the next, seamed throughout by strength and courage, girl on the edge allows us to look deep into one woman�s life and travel with her to the brink and back again.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography

Informations

• Publié par: Cover2Cover Books
• Date de parution: 20 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780994651686
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

ruth carneson



For my children, my goddaughter Martha, and all children – especially those who live on the edge.


Contents
PART ONE
1 I’m a brave, brave mouse
2 Adenoids
3 High treason
4 Kwela music
5 Dad goes into hiding
6 Granny’s house
7 Republic
8 Mum in prison
9 Mum and Dad come home
10 Rhyde Villa
11 Mum and Dad argue
12 Mount Pleasant
13 Secret gardens and bombs
14 Mushrooms for the Minister of Justice
15 Disintegration
16 Learning to smoke
17 A worm for the Prime Minister
18 Hospital stories 1 – three bottles of pills
PART TWO
19 London
20 The White Cliffs of Dover
21 Hospital stories 2 – suicide
22 Hospital stories 2, continued
23 Hospital stories 3 – Friern Barnet Asylum for the hopelessly insane
24 Samson
25 A suitable profession
26 Drugs, sex and rock ‘n’ roll
27 Dad comes home
28 Samson and me
29 On the road
30 Shrewsbury
31 Ruthin
32 Back to nature
33 Wild Wales
34 Newcastle brown
35 On the road again
36 Barefoot and pregnant
37 The joys of motherhood and domesticity
38 Noah and art
39 Like a fish out of water
40 Splitting
41 Tanzania
42 Tug of war
43 Exhibitions and protests
44 No males allowed
45 Totnes, trials and therapists
46 Night walks and poverty
47 Daniel leaves
48 Planting pennies
49 Communal living in London
50 Hospital stories 4 – teenagers
51 Coming home
52 Summer love
53 Elections
54 London: Push me pull you
55 The Island
56 Endings and beginnings

PICTURE SECTION
PRISON LETTERS – Letters to my father 1968–1971

Acknowledgements


Once upon a time a child was born in a windy, troubled city.
She was blown across the world
and back again to an even windier island.
Her body was solid and definable,
her bones, heart and lungs were all contained within her skin.

But inside her body lived grief,
deep like an ocean.
And although this grief was contained within her finite body,
no time or space could contain
the immensity of it.

She stepped into her heart
and the world turned upside down
and there was nothing to hold on to.

So she left her body behind
and wandered into no-man’s land ...



Me, aged nine, with Dad and a friend. Table Mountain, Cape Town
PART ONE
South Africa 1953–1967

1
I’m a brave, brave mouse
I was in a hurry to arrive on that hot January morning in the middle of summer. My mother said that if the traffic lights had changed to red on the way to the hospital I would have been born on the back seat of the taxi. At five o’clock, just as the sun was coming up, I arrived feet first and upside down, a breach baby.
My first clear memory in words and pictures is a dream of Johnny and myself. Johnny is driving Dad’s car. I sit beside him in the passenger seat wearing my nappies, Johnny’s head barely reaches the steering wheel as he drives the car to the edge of a cliff. We are two babies on our own looking down into an empty void, a gaping dangerous chasm.
Johnny and I share a bedroom. We have a record player that we wind up with a speaker shaped like a giant bellflower. We take it in turns to wind up the record player and then we watch the records spinning round and round on the turntable. We have to be careful not to scratch them with the sharp needle.
We march around the house singing songs from our favourite record. We are brave, brave mice and we are never, never scared. BOO! We jump out at each other from wherever we have been hiding. I love my brother, Johnny. We walk everywhere together holding hands. He is eighteen months older than me. When we fight, I measure my strength against him. When we climb trees, I like to climb higher. I have to run faster, I have to eat more than him.
Mum and Dad, Lynn, Johnny and I live in a house in Protea Road in Claremont. We have a three-legged dog called Brindy, and a cat. In the garden we have fruit trees, loquats and plums, and along the fence grape vines grow.
I sit at the dining room table drawing pictures. Giant fish and sea creatures are painted on the walls. Our bathroom wall is painted black like a giant chalkboard, so that we can draw on it.
I have a new colouring book and crayons. Johnny grabs my crayons and runs away with them shouting:
Run, run, as fast as you can.
You can’t catch me, I’m the ginger bread man.
He runs around and around the table. Every time I get near him he runs in the opposite direction.
“I’m telling Mum.” I run into the kitchen.
Mum is cooking tomato bredie. She stirs the pot before she puts the lid on and tightens the pressure cooker valve.
“Stop fighting, you two, go and play outside.”
The pot hisses and steams, bubbles and boils. The smell of meat and potatoes makes me hungry. I stand in the kitchen doorway and watch as the pressure cooker explodes with a mighty hiss. The metal valve flies up and the stew hits the ceiling. Mum jumps out of the way as the food splashes to the floor. She laughs out loud before she cleans the food off the floor. After that I am always scared of pressure building up and exploding.
Johnny and I jump, jump, jump on our beds and try to touch the ceiling. I jump higher and higher and stretch my arms up to touch the ceiling. Mum shouts, “You will break the bed springs.”
Quietly, quietly, I close the bedroom door and we jump more until Mum calls us for supper. Supper is at six o’clock and then it’s bath time. Bed time is at eight.
Mum laughs a lot, I hear her wherever I am in the house, her laugh travels from one end of the house to the other.
When Mum goes out for the night, I sleep with her dress under my head so I can breathe in her smell. I can’t get to sleep until I hear Mum’s footsteps in the hall.
My nanny fetches me from nursery school at lunchtime and I sit and wait for Mum to come home.
“When will Mum be home?”
“She will be back in a minute,” my nanny says.
“How long is a minute? Has it already been a minute? Is she coming now?”
“She is coming in five minutes,” my nanny says.
“How many are five minutes? I can count five on my fingers. One two, three, four, five.”
I cannot settle until Mum gets back.
* * *
In the evenings, when I hear Dad’s car pulling up, I run to the driveway. Dad picks me up and throws me into the air.
At night Dad goes to meetings. Before he goes out he reads us a story. He is reading us a story about Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. He reads us a different chapter every night. In the last chapter Peter Pan’s Mum closes the bedroom window and Peter Pan can never go home again. That night I cry myself to sleep thinking about Peter Pan.
Dad smokes cigarettes, I like the cigarette smell of his fingers when he has been smoking. Dad is bald, we call him Mouldy Baldy. When we are naughty, he threatens to fetch his belt.
“I will beat the living daylights out of you,” he shouts. But he never does. When Dad is cross he only shouts and swears, but one day Mum says something at breakfast time that makes him cross, very cross, and he picks up his plate of food and throws it at the wall. We watch the plate break in two and then the fried egg slides slowly down the wall as Dad storms out of the house.
At the weekend Dad says he will take us to the circus. The circus has come to town with lions and tigers and elephants. Dad says he will take us there. The circus is in a big tent that smells of sawdust and animals and Dad buys us popcorn and bright fizzy drinks. Enchanted, I watch as the trapeze artists and acrobats fly through the air. I leap, I jump, I twirl and grow in leaps and bounds. I am doing magic in my glittering leotards, doing somersaults in mid-air before hooking my legs over the swinging bar.
I swing upside down and then leap to the next bar in a death-defying feat high above the ground. The ground is far, far below with no safety net and below me are the jaws of hungry, roaring lions. The audience gasp and hold their breath before they get to their feet and applaud my incredible stunts. They love me the most out of all the other circus performers.
Every year New Age , Dad’s paper, has a fund raising Bazaar in a big hall. Dad takes me to the Bazaar. The hall is busy, with lots of stalls. There is a stall selling old clothes, I don’t like the stale smells of people’s bodies on the clothes laid out on the trestle tables.
On another table are homemade cakes, chocolate cakes, ginger bread, coffee and walnut cakes. If you guess the weight of the cake with pink icing you can win a prize. I want to win the raffle for the beautiful doll in a frilly dress, I want some sweet candy floss that melts in my mouth and I want a sweet sticky toffee apple and I want coconut ice and fudge. Dad says I can choose one thing.
I hold on tightly to Dad’s hand. He stops to talk to someone. I am bored so I let go of his hand and wander off. When I turn around Dad has disappeared, all I see are legs and I am scared I will never find him again. At last I see Dad’s legs, I run up to him and I take hold of his hand. He looks down at me a