How hilarious is this picture of my sister? This was taken forty years ago, when my mum was 30.
When we were growing up my mother did everything she could to prevent us from being in Apartheid. My father has always been in the public eye, but it was my mum who taught him about what was really going on. They got into trouble, and their friends were murdered and banned, and some were never to leave their houses, and my father was on a hit-list. But my mother guided us bravely and seemingly effortlessly through these years.
She fought the government, she got old people pensions, she educated the unions and kept everyone schooled in the rules of English grammar. She didn't flinch when the police came to arrest us for watching cricket, or when tonnes of toilet paper was delivered to a Black Sash and ECC meeting at the Diakonia Centre, just to freak us out. I was freaking out, but she kept calm.
All the while she kept us safe and loved, taught us manners and how to wear halter-necks. We learned how to be good swimmers and play tennis. We did horse-riding, played the piano and the violin. We climbed the mountains to the very top, we went to Malawi and Zimbabwe. She took us out of school and we travelled around Europe. She explained to us about being Irish. We went to England for a while. Our life in South Africa was cushy safe suburbia, but there were always a couple of stowaways in the garden cottage.
We were naughty and got into our own kinds of trouble, but we knew she had our backs. When my sister rode her bicycle into a car and had to be in Addington hospital for two months while her leg repaired, she went to see her everyday, sometimes twice. Once our windscreen wipers weren't working and it was raining so hard we couldn't see our way to the hospital, but undeterred, she showed me how to wipe the glass with raw potatoes so we could get there. Another time, my sister was very sad, so we smuggled kittens into her ward under our jumpers. We took charming men along to distract the nurses and give them champagne.
And when I did the worst thing ever, which was to put my head under a bus and get it run over, my mother did not freak out, well not in front of me. She washed the blood out of my hair and put it into plaits so I might look a bit prettier, a little less squashed.
At 70, she still does all this. When Jack broke his arm at the game reserve and I tried to wrap it up with what turned out to be an eye-patch, she bandaged it practically and properly, but in a kind way, without snorting at me. The children of Chesterville and Cato Manor understand Macbeth thanks to her. They understand Yeats and Keats and can write in rhyming couplets. You can say any line from any poem in the whole world like "You who are bent, and bald, and blind..." and she will tell you what it is and say the rest of it. She gives interviews and goes on marches. She travels and writes and looks after us all. How lucky I am.