Marion Grammer: All Comments

Our first date and we’re in dangerous, forbidden territory. It is 1976 and blacks, whites and any colour in between, straight and gay, all mixing in apartheid, Calvinist South Africa. But this is louche, seedy Long Street, where anything can happen and sometimes does.

We walk back down into the humid smoke-filled, sex-laden club, not touching. Procul Harem's on the turn-table. I’m sure I hear electricity crackling. We’re combustible. His white shirt glows in the red disco lights, his face a translucent sheen.

“The room was humming harder
As the ceiling flew away
When we called out for another drink
The waiter brought the tray.”

He takes me in his arms and holds me close. I close my eyes as we sway to the music. I turn my head to the side and bare my neck.
‘Bite me,’ I think I hear me say.

“And so it was that later
As the miller told his tale
That her face, as first just ghostly
Turned a whiter shade of pale”.

Still together after 34 years.

Sorry, I posted this after the wrong article.
Apologies.

Your story resonated, but from another perspective. In 1963 we watched in despair as, one by one, families were forced to sell up, usually at great financial loss, houses in which they had lived for generations. Gone were my friends, my cousins too. My parents’ friends who had once vowed never to cave in, all gone. If a buyer could not be found, the government acquired the property for a price which could not be disputed. This is what happened to us. Goodwood was now reserved for ‘Whites Only’. A few days before we left, I woke one night to a sound of such deep sorrow and despair, I thought I would break in two. I stopped at my parents bedroom and in the dark heard mum trying to ease my fathers grief. I was thirteen years old.

On the morning of our departure from Goodwood, mum locked the front door and held the spare key tightly pressed to her cheek, her face blank with grief. I dared not look at my dad. Head down, I sat quietly in my uncle’s car waiting for them to say goodbye to the house he had built for his family. Then we drove off to start our new life.

As an adult , when I come back to South Africa for visits, I drive past the house, always slowly. It still looks unchanged, except for security gates and burglar bars. On one occasion I even considered stopping, trying to pluck up the courage to knock on the door; to ask to be let, but fearing rejection, continued on.