On the "Souls" of his feet.

He sailed the seven seas from Cape Town to Antarctica, and many other places, but always returning to the pub down the road before making his way home to face the "music".  This was the travels of my father.

I never got to know my father very well but for the time that he was around, I did get to spend some time with him.  According to my siblings and mother, I was his favourite, and was tasked with asking him anything whenever someone wanted something.  Perhaps it was not I who was his favourite, but that I had the courage to ask.  I have learned that if you don't let someone know your needs, you are not going be open to receiving.

I remember him taking me to work with him when he worked at Freddy Hirsch and then to ballet class on a Saturday morning in Plein Street and going for lunch at the Entertainer afterwards, where we sat and had viennas and chips.  One Saturday we sat and had lunch with some woman and her son.  I guess my father knew her, or would not have been sitting with her.  Little did I know that many years later (not too long ago) I put 2 and 2 together and made four.  I am guessing now, that that woman and her son was the woman my mother eventually told me about in 1999, three months before my father passed away. 

It turns out that when my mother was pregnant with me she was not the only woman pregnant by my father.  My mother apparently got my father to marry her by telling him that if he did not marry her then she was going to tell her mother (who he must have been either scared of or just had great respect for) about the other woman.  In hindsight, my father probably wanted to do the "right thing" and not marry either of them.  I think that would have been the most fair option.  Anyway my mother got her way and married my father but it only lasted ten years and five children later.  So somewhere out there/here I have a brother born the same year as me who I have never met.  Now please guys, do not all rush in to claim you are my brother.  You will have to pass the "litmus test" in order to qualify.

Now armed with this knowledge it occurred to me that perhaps my father's behaviour was justified.  All I know about my father is that he was raised by his aunt after his parents died.  His sister who I have never met was raised by some other aunt and classified "white" (the breakdown of most mixed South African families) if no one took the time (like my maternal grandmother) to make sure that mixed families got to know each other.  Anyway be that as it may, I do not know my aunt on my father's side and the chances are he did not know his sister too.

I recall the "fights or screaming matches" more my mother doing the screaming at my father when he came home on a Friday in his drunken state and telling him that his family has no time for him and that her's would always be there for her.  'Your sister would walk right pass you and you would not know her' she would say.  They never fought in front of us but I definitely could hear my mother.

After my parents eventually got divorced in about 1978, my father tried to see us but my mother refused to let him through the front door.  My father tried to see me one day at school and one of the nuns came to call me to tell me he was there.  But I feared my mother so much that I just told the nun to tell him that my mother said I am not allowed to see him.  I saw him waiting in the school courtyard and can still see the disappointment on his face when he was told, but he tried to smile through it and then accepted it and left.

A few years later after I finished high school I would bump into him on the street when he was helping some Indian woman to sell her wares at the Mowbray Street Market.  There would be an exchange of some uncomfortable "hellos and how are you's" but that is as far as it went. 

I don't know at what point there was a major turn for the worse for my father that he ended up on the street as a "bergie" (vagrant) but it did not matter where in Cape Town I went from the Central Business District, Woodstock to Kalk Bay, I would spot my father either walking the street, sleeping on some "stoep" (porch) of a rundown house.  He looked totally unkept, broken shoes that you could see he was walking on his socks and wearing clothes that probably never saw the inside of a washing machine for years.

I saw him one Saturday afternoon taking a nap in the doorway of Ackermans in Darling Street, Cape Town and I stood for quite some time trying to bring myself to go into KFC and buy him a meal and then just wake him to give to him, but I just could not bring myself to do it.  It was not as though I was embarrassed it was more that I was thinking he was going to feel embarrassed.  Perhaps I should not have done so much thinking.

Prior to his death in 1999 and before I had my daughter in 1993 I saw him coming and going to the night shelter in Woodstock and he was looking a whole lot better.  When my daughter was born I told myself that if I saw him on the street I was going to go up to him and introduce him to her. I never did see him until one day in about 1997 when I was getting out of my car to take my daughter to the park.  I thought that was the perfect opportunity to introduce him to my daughter but I think he must have spotted me first and so he disappeared.  That was the last time I saw him alive.

How I learned of his death was through my mother's cousin who after retiring in the UK decided to come and volunteer at the Woodstock Haven for people who wanted to change their life and discovered that my father was staying at one of the houses.  He was wheelchair bound and what we did not know was that he was terminally ill.  He died on 9 September 1999 and my mother's cousin called me to let me know.  I attended his funeral at the funeral parlour accompanied by one of my sisters, daughter, and best friend (a teacher) who got off from school saying that she was attending a family funeral.  The undertakers knew me so they asked if they should let me know when his ashes were ready or if they should place it in the Garden of Remembrance.  I told them I would collect it, which I did on 23 September 1999 and then kept it for more than a month before going out on a family picnic to Boulders in Simonstown to scatter it in the sea. 

My mother was most distressed by my choice of where I wanted to scatter his ashes as that is where she wanted to go too.  Her cousin who was present at the time of me telling her where I wanted to scatter his ashes said that she should not worry as his ashes would go one way and hers another.  The funny side of divorce.  Anyway my mother came with on the picnic and after scattering his ashes into the sea and sitting down next to my mother on the blanket on the sand a little mouse appeared behind us with some sticks.  I pointed out that there was my father going off to build his house (i.e. his friends called him Mousey).   

Looking back on my father's life of what I now know, he must have been a lost soul in this big world trying to do the right thing and then just eventually gave up, or perhaps it was just his way of coping with what life was dishing out to him.

We all have our issues and some of us are strong and some of us are not, but none of us are better than the next person, so don't go judging.

"It is not until you walk in another person's shoes are you going to know their life"