4. Arriving in Cape Town, May 1957

I can’t remember actually meeting my father, in fact, though I do remember that, by pure chance, some good friends of my parents, Bernadette and Daniel, plus their three children, ex-neighbours who had emigrated many years previously from England to Kenya, were in Cape Town, too, on their way to board a ship back to England, for a holiday. My father was certainly there, at the port, ready to greet us all. He had travelled by train for three days, from Salisbury, Rhodesia, where he was working, and where, soon, we would be joining him, making that same three-day train journey to our new home.

In the meantime, however, we had a few days in a hotel in Cape Town, but all I remember of that experience was the fact that the place was obviously infested with bed bugs. We woke up on the first morning of our stay, horrified to discover that we were all covered in countless bites. My parents moved to another hotel immediately.

Going up to the top of Table Mountain in two hired cars, with our friends from Kenya, was a wonderful experience, and riding the funicular was definitely exhilarating. From there, we could see where the blue waters of the Pacific Ocean, met the grey of the Atlantic, the stark line between the two almost tangible. We had never seen anything like this before.

One event I recall very clearly of that first time in Cape Town, was the fact that my brother, John and I, aged 9 and 7 respectively, were badly sunburned. Although we had been on a ship for almost three weeks, we had been largely protected from the sun by the various decks and their rooftops, I suppose. Not so on land, though, and even less so in water, as we were soon to learn. Sunscreen did not exist in those days, so, when John and I spent a long time in the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool, we didn’t realize, any more than did our parents, that we were getting badly burned, till several hours later. Our skin, especially on our shoulders and our backs, was soon bright red and very painful to the touch. Even having lightweight clothing against our skin was unbearable.

My parents must have sought help from someone, who advised them to put calamine lotion on both of us. This pink powdery lotion felt wonderful when first applied, although we winced and squirmed, because it hurt to put anything on our skin. The lotion helped to keep our clothing, and our bedsheets away from us, too. However, the lotion became hard, cracking in places, rather like the surface of a mud pie baking in the sun. It was both comfortable, because it soothed the heat, and uncomfortable, since, having cracked, it flaked off and fell, whenever we moved.

Days later, John and I were surprised to see that the skin on our backs and shoulders had dried up, lifting slightly away from our bodies, as if it were completely separate from the rest of us. It was rather like having a very thin layer of paper covering us. It didn’t take us long to find out that we could pull off large tracts of dead skin; gruesome, perhaps, but also very satisfying, seeing that new skin was there, underneath, and fun to compete with each other as to which of us could pull off in one piece, the longest sheet of skin. Of course, the new layer of pinkish-white skin underneath was very tender, so we had to be really careful to keep ourselves covered up, so that the fresh layer didn’t burn, too.

I learned my lesson about the power of the sun, and learned it well, since I have never had another sunburn since that time. I am always very careful, knowing that one can get sunburned even on a cloudy day. Being so much older and wiser, I wear sunscreen every day, and wouldn’t dream of going into a swimming pool without putting on sunscreen twenty minutes beforehand.

In those days, though, as we began our new life in Africa, we were so ignorant, so innocent, and so totally unprepared for all that was to come.

Table Top Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa