Free Swimming with Cobras by Rosemary Smith Page B

the veld. This farmer, like others in the neighbourhood, was beginning to turn his attention to the American tourist trade. We talked about “the staff” and, while feudal, it all seemed humane. I participated with enjoyment and ease in the pleasures of the day, and though anxiety about the lost girl nagged at my mind I behaved myself well, knowing it would be inappropriate to introduce “politics” on such a day.
    So often, even in so-called liberal circles, the mere mention of words like “township” or “blacks” was considered political and therefore off limits. Many English immigrants, enjoying a lifestyle more affluent than they could have dreamt of in Britain, preferred to keep their heads in the sand, and sometimes even those who professed themselves supporters of the Progressive Party or the Black Sash made remarks that showed their liberalism to be merely skin deep. Someone would avoid a certain supermarket, for instance, because it was “too full of blacks”. Once at a very convivial dinner party, at which the wine had been freely flowing, a fellow guest greeted my “political” comments with the advice, “Go back to England where you belong!”
    After our day on the farm we hurried back to town to attend a service in the coloured recreation hall to pray for the Reverend Allan Hendrickse, who had been detained. In the 1980s Hendrickse would become an MP in the tricameral parliament and be seen by many as a sell-out, but in the mid-1970s he was a symbol of the struggle. The hall was packed with people of all ages, from grandmothers to infants, and there was a feeling of anger and tension in the air. A mere scattering of whites was present, mainly nuns. We felt honoured to have been invited to attend by a man who sometimes served Malvern in Birch’s, the local drapery store.
    The recreation hall was like community halls all over the world, functional and cavernous, with that slightly stale smell of past gymnastic activity. In later years it became for me a place of quite special memories as I went there to hear stirring political speeches at the height of the detention campaign in the 1980s, and it was to this hall that Nelson Mandela would come in the 1990s after his release from prison. Malvern and I were impressed with the calm manner in which the Reverend Sonny Leon conducted the service and the message of non-violence he delivered. Nevertheless, the Bible readings, prayers and hymns had clearly been chosen to express strong political feeling and the singing was emotional and rousing. For Malvern the atmosphere was familiar. It reminded him of powerful Dutch Reformed services he had attended as a child. To my ear, the guttural resonance in the Afrikaans words seemed to come straight from the heart. I missed many of the innuendoes of that service, but I remember it as the first time I'd heard the phrase “white oppressor”.
    What a weekend of contrasts that was. Each of the events seemed so isolated from the others, the travails and concerns of the one unknown or unheeded by the other. As polarised and baffling as it seemed to me, and as distressing as much of it was, I was at last getting involved in the kind of work I felt called to, and through it, I was no longer just observing, I was becoming a part of it all.
    At the end of 1981 Gill and I closed our nursery school. The Grahamstown schools were beginning to introduce their own pre-primary classes and in time our little school would be obsolete. It was a good time to shut our doors. But I was not long without a job. I was approached to become a social worker at GADRA, the Grahamstown Area Distress Relief Association, a non-governmental welfare organisation, and since it was a mornings-only position it suited my family commitments. Our children were all well into their school careers by now but still needed a great deal of fetching and carrying in the afternoons.
    I was employed in the advice