Thresholds Pre-and Post 1968
I stopped piano lessons with Mrs Douglas at the end of Standard 9, because I needed to concentrate on my studies. Poor Mrs Douglas was disappointed, but I had seven subjects, and music was not one of them. I was fifteen, had a serious boyfriend, Derek, a little two-year old sister whom I was easily distracted by, and was not studious. I also did not practise my piano regularly. Even an hour or two delighted her, but often I did not do much in between lessons.
I would wait in her large lounge with the grandfather clock ticking like a metronome, feeling slightly guilty. The stuffy mouldy smell of the old house and furniture and her clothes. She wore an interesting donut-type bun around her head. Her hair must have been rather long, and she wore it wrapped around this knitted ‘donut’ ring. The knitted wool was of mauve and lilac tones. Sometimes, the donut was more green and matched her tartan skirt. A memory of afternoons with Mrs Douglas and her much older sickly husband, whose shadowy presence I could feel somewhere in the house. It was a very silent house. I believe that once, when she was much younger, she might have had a career as a concert pianist. She was also a talented artist and there were many examples of very delicate artwork: landscapes and flowers in heavy dark frames. Looking back now, with compassion, I believe she held deep disappointment in general. My stopping lessons and choosing not to prioritise my music, when I had completed LTCL[1], was just another one.
I left school and started at the University of Cape Town at the beginning of 1968, turning seventeen in my first year of architecture. Very young, much younger than the other first years, some sixty in that first exciting year. And rather soon I had my first romantic encounter, with Michael B. The OPUS production, based on Alice in Wonderland with music from Kubrick’s 2001, set the scene, and he was Romeo/Alice. I was Juliet number one and number eight – the Juliet he returned to after passing through several adventures. A handsome, fresh and talented young man, I remember my parents driving down from Port Elizabeth for the show, and the approving sounds from the audience at the end when we kissed and it was clearly for real!
So, university was exhilarating, but I felt young and naive and became a listener – aware that I had so much to learn. In contrast, my last year at school had been one of achievements all round. I realise, looking back, that I was a genuine and lovely young adult, popular with both pupils and teachers. I was curious, had a good sense of my privileges and an awareness of the injustices all around us. My political awareness was stimulated further when, during our first year, students staged a sit-in around the refusal of permission for Archie Mafeje to take up a teaching post.
So, becoming a listener… I found myself hesitant in ‘crits‘ – those long sessions after we handed in projects having worked through the night – when bleary-eyed we would present and defend our work. Some of us were so confident, so sure of ourselves and our creations. I never had a clear sense of why I produced the work in the way I had – it was usually intuitive. I found myself doing well when the topic had a focus which touched me. I got good marks for a housing project but was not inspired in the designing of a garage. However, the years passed easily and I did well, surprising my father I think.
But during these years, I don’t recall playing the piano except when I went home on holiday. Perhaps I played the piano once or twice in the library at Fuller Hall, the residence where I spent my first two years. But generally, I did not step forward. Michael B was a musician, with a beautiful voice and at ease playing jazz on our Bechstein piano when he came home with me for holidays. We sang ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ together and dressed up for it, and this enchanted my mother.
At home in Port Elizabeth, my father would allow his tears when I played the Apassionata sonata. He was beginning to drink more heavily at this stage, his architectural practice in a quiet phase, and would become quite emotional. I think I completed only the first movement of the Apassionata, but could play it entirely and very well, my fingers agile and remembering, even without the music in front of me.
At the end of my first year I had the wonderful opportunity of being part of a group of senior art and architectural students, who traveled to Italy with the professor. I had begged my grandfather to assist me, giving up my claim to any future inheritance in exchange for a steady stream of postcards! We went by boat, attending seminars each morning and preparing our materials. We were away for almost four months. I was the resource person for Antonio Gaudi and responsible for ‘guiding’’ the group through his fascinating work when we spent a day in Barcelona en route to Brindisi in Italy, from where we traveled by train. I turned eighteen in Rome. We had tea with Felini at the site of Satirycon being filmed at Cine Citta. My eyes were huge. Marcello Mastroianni in the studio next door! What a growth time! Broadening of my horizons. Europe in 1968 – the energy of May ’68 had touched everywhere and here we were from South Africa, getting a taste of it.
This Italian experience was hugely influential, tweaking my curiosity further, suggesting life and vistas and experiences to come. I think Italy in 1968 provided the impetus for my later explorations, rich and varied in old Europe, central and eastern Europe and the Balkans.
***
My life, after Italy at the end of 1968, felt as if it was on hold. I proceeded through the next couple of years of my architectural course… quietly… diligently. And in 1971, our fourth year – the ‘practical year’, I traveled to Greece and several countries in Europe, France in particular to which I was very drawn after the experiences of May ’68. In Paris I had contacted an internationally recognised architect, Georges Candilis, having first written a long letter to him from the UK explaining my desire to join his ‘atelier’ and work on social housing projects in Tunisia. I was twenty years old, and I can recall the details of my meeting with him in Paris very clearly.
I was wearing a fake fur coat, which looked like a rat skin…, bought at a secondhand street market. The lining had come apart and as I slung it over the back of my chair the sleeves began to fall off the main body of the coat. Monsieur Candilis was very polite and ignored this little detail. He had retrieved my four-page letter from his filing cabinet and was re-reading it and looking at me. The outcome was favourable in that he was happy to accept me into his team, but I did not speak French and would need to forfeit two years of my already completed university studies. I really liked this man, the luminous large industrial windows in the busy studio, and the earnest and motivated young people hunched over their drawing boards or deep in heated discussions in French. I really longed to be part of this energy…and wrote a very long, persuasive letter to my father outlining my heart-felt longing.
His response was sensible and to the point. Some ten years later when I was going through his papers after his death, I came across the draft of the actual letter he had written to his beloved twenty-year old passionate daughter, which I had received in Paris explaining that there were no resources. But more important than that, he suggested that I explore what was happening in the rural areas of my own struggling and suffering country before embarking on an adventure into other unknown contexts. He was right of course.
And so in December 1971, for the final few weeks of my practical year, I found myself working in a TB hospital in the Transkei, one of the so-called ‘homelands’ in apartheid South Africa.[2] This was not exactly the architectural professional practice one was expected to compile, but it proved very interesting and further stimulated my political appetite and need for answers about how this country had become so fragmented in its soul and psyche.
After completing my architectural thesis in 1973, surprising some, I think, with the quality of the work and surprising myself with the actual result, I launched myself into the new chapter and experience of being a young, independent, professional woman (only twenty two at the time) and getting a monthly salary.
With almost all of my first salary, I bought myself a very good classical guitar for R300(!) and began slowly to explore the music through the vibration of its beautiful, resonant, strings.
[1] I had passed Grade 8 in practical, and Grade 5 in theory…
[2] With my friend Dinah, whose sister a Doctor had set this up for us.