Walking Through Front Doors: Seeking Justice for a Stolen Childhood

By Claudine Shiels

Silence sides with abuse. Every harrowing story needs to be told.On a hot summer evening in 1967, seven-year-old Claudine Brown watched from the back seat of a car stalled on a railway track in the suburbs of Cape Town, as a fast-moving train hurtled towards them. Her mother sat frozen with fear in the driver's seat.The events leading up to this moment were unremarkable, giving no clue to their catastrophic timing. The aftermath was brutal and childhood wrecking, leaving Claudine and her younger sister Lisa world-weary before they had even got started.When her mother, unravelled by post-traumatic shock, abandoned the family, and her father reached for the nearest comfort to ease his pain a new wife Claudine had only one defence against the years of exploitation and physical, emotional and sexual abuse that followed: hope.She remembered what normal life was, and plotted her course back there.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bookstorm
• Release date: Feb 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9781928257783

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Prologue

There is nothing extraordinary about my story of family dysfunction and childhood abuse. Sadly, what happened in our home is no worse than – and even quite tame compared to – the horrendous suffering endured by many children in our country today.

At least, as white children, we had access to escape routes, opportunities selected and reserved especially for our race in the 60s and 70s. Superior education and exclusive schooling just about guaranteed access to tertiary education – or a job, even with minimal further study or none at all. There was always an open door for a white person once he or she left school. With only very basic tertiary education, I was never without decently paid, respectable jobs – each one a good leg-up in experience and training, with work opportunities overseas too.

Though we whites could seldom sidestep hard work, millions of people from other race groups worked even harder to get nowhere, continually treading the waters of poverty and hopelessness. A white person could be drowning in dire circumstances, but there was always the belief in holding your head above water, that more had been given to you, more was expected of you, that you had much more going for you. Apartheid floated many who would otherwise have sunk. I think I was one of them.

What is perhaps unusual about my story is the surprising reliability of justice. After 45 years of believing that no one would be forced to face, in a court of law, what they had done to us, justice suddenly appeared in the distance as if she had been coming all along. Why had we doubted it?

Justice for some might streak in like a hare, but for many others disclosure, exposure, consequences and even punishment can come plodding along like a tortoise. Justice, for me, is not a verdict of guilty and the handing down of a sentence. It is the legal invitation to speak out in equal measure to the bullying to which we submitted. The law can decide what happens next.

The remarkable in my story is, without doubt, to be found in the people my sister Lisa and I have recently encountered who have helped us to grasp the severity of our abuse, and are now enabling our rightful constitutional access to the law, which reaches way back in time. As it should. It is also, I believe, a message of hope to the countless women and children who have been robbed of body, soul and spirit by people who mete out the same cruelty that has rolled down through the generations. The tide has turned against those who abuse others, especially women and children; every victim who finds the courage to expose criminals is one more voice of encouragement to those who are still afraid.

Abuse is essentially about entitlement, and entitlement culture is not only to be found in spoiled millennials. Entitlement was around long before the great-reward-for-little-effort generation we know today. It lurks behind posh suburb walls, in township shacks, workplaces, institutions and schools. It bears down upon those it can dominate, and helps itself to whatever it wants. In the 60s and 70s, when my sister and I were subjected to years of abuse and bullying, entitlement was at the height of its game on a national scale, enforced by military superiority. When you had a gun, you could get anyone to subscribe to your way of thinking, adopt your attitudes and hide what you did not want exposed. My father had a gun. And in almost comedic mimicry of the times in South Africa, the mere presence of his gun hidden in his wardrobe manipulated behaviour, ensured control and silenced voices.

When I have taken a break to sit and reflect during the year in which my sister and I have laid charges, I gather my legs under me and rest my head back on the couch cushions. There is so much to consider, but one line of thought keeps coming to mind. Perpetrators must never think that the years have protected them. Victims must never feel that justice will forget them. Sowing and reaping is really true.

But I also keep marvelling at one extraordinary fact: so many of the people within our legal system who are engaged in working on our case are persons of colour. From the policemen, detectives, social workers and counsellors to the kind, softly spoken woman who makes coffee for the victims and witnesses waiting at court, each one has treated my sister and me with compassion, and with no hint of recognising that we are of an age to have undoubtedly benefited from a system that did nothing for them. They have been a shining light of what human beings can be, in the dark, atrocious world of what they actually are.

Among them all stands one dignified woman, one exceptional woman I will never forget. Her title is Court Preparation Counsellor. She was ample – not only in appearance, but in the abundance of her love and kindness that made me instantly tearful in the safety she represented and courage she invited.

‘Here, my dears, in here.’ She ushered us into a small, empty courtroom, used to prepare victims in a realistic setting. ‘This is to help you know what environment to expect, to make it less daunting.’

She closed the door behind us and invited us to sit on a long bench, facing where the magistrate would be. She stood in front of us.

‘There will be nothing to be afraid of, my dears. I will come in with you and be here all the time if you need me. You just look at me. I’ll be here for you.’

Embarrassed, I could feel tears coming. ‘Come here,’ she said, seeing that Lisa and I were shaky and nervous. ‘Nobody can hurt you now.’

She pulled us both towards her, one on each side, and held us, just like we were two small girls in the safety of a mother’s arms.

‘It was terrible,’ she said, ‘but you don’t need to be frightened any more. I will sit here every minute with you if you want me to. You just call for me and I will come.’

And with that, she pulled herself tall, releasing us to watch her as she declared: ‘And when you see them,’ she spat the word out with distaste, ‘you look neither left nor right. You do not even give them a tiny glance. You hold your head up high and give them The Cold Shoulder.’ And she walked across the room with all the dignity and bearing she could muster, slapping her right hand hard against her left shoulder. ‘There! Like that. The Cold Shoulder. Just The Cold Shoulder. You give them nothing but The Cold Shoulder.’ She strutted and slapped across the room again, head held high, nose in the air. ‘That is all they deserve from you, my dears.’

Then, with an indignant sniff as a finale to her Oscar-winning performance, she fell about laughing – and so did we.

I had a feeling she had done this before.

She would have had to learn many times over when to give The Cold Shoulder and when to just laugh.

I think that is a lesson worth learning.

To this day, I remain astounded that such a mundane and innocent suggestion of taking a drive to look at Christmas lights could toss a grenade into our family, blowing out the holes that let the wolves in. Walls can always be rebuilt, but too often the victim becomes the prisoner.

I

Dad and Mom

Everybody has a story to tell. Not necessarily a page-turning humdinger, reaching an audience of millions – perhaps just an honest-to-goodness tale of a hare-brained adventure or crazy life, enough to hold a small child rapt with fascination and trigger her own dreams.

My dad and mom both had a story. Dad’s was kept in a small suitcase, shoved onto the top shelf of his wardrobe – a battered container filled with his travel memories, all the proof I would ever need that you can kick your way out of any drab life with some imagination and a bit of pluck. Often, I would drag a chair to stand on that was high enough to allow my small arms to grab the suitcase, bumping it down from the shelf onto my head and letting it crash to the floor. It would burst open, its black-and-white photos – hundreds of them – badges, coins and other memorabilia scattering in a random, captivating collage across the carpet. No matter which way they hung together, they spelled one thing: my future = travel.

Dad was quite happy for me to rummage around, picking up postcards, staring at his tiny pictures, turning coins over, and questioning every item, every person photographed, every monument, every attraction. I guessed he was as proud as I was.

‘Where was this, Dad?’

‘Oooh … I can’t remember, my girl … maybe somewhere in Spain. Yes, Barcelona, I think it was.’

‘And this, Dad? Why were you on a ship in those uniforms?’

‘Well, we worked in the Merchant Navy for a while to get around. As waiters.’

‘Who did you go with, Dad?’

‘My friend Roger. You know Uncle Roger. We worked and saved up for two years before we left. Nobody thought we could do it – I came from a poor family – but we did. You know how much we liked fishing, so we found a way to make extra money: fixing fishing reels in the evenings after work for other fishermen, sitting at your granny’s kitchen table. It was hard work, but it paid off. Then we set off, hitchhiking and working on boats. We eventually made it right up Africa as far as Cairo, then across Europe to London.’

‘And that’s where you met Mom, hey, Dad?’

‘Yes! We stayed with Uncle Roger’s dad who lived in Potters Bar. And your gran and granddad lived in the house next door to the pub and that’s where I met Mommy. You remember their house when we went by ship to visit?’

I loved these travel stories, heard them so many times, but each time I came up with another question, another detail I wanted fleshed out.

‘So, why did you get your photo in the London Times, Dad?’ I had held this newspaper cutting proudly countless times – my dad and Roger looking handsome and tanned. The caption described the ‘two swarthy South Africans’ who had travelled thousands of miles across land and sea to finally reach the UK, where they had been photographed in Regent Street. Bulging haversacks lay at their feet, stuck full of regional, national and city badges of the places they had been, and two proudly South African springboks sewn onto the haversacks’ flaps declared where they were from.

‘Well, I guess they had never met two 22 year olds who had travelled so far on so little money. We were a bit of a novelty, I suppose. In 1956.’

‘I can’t wait till I’m grown up. I’m also going to travel.’

My mom’s story was not a top-shelf photo album or a fireside tell-me-again-about-that-time. My mom was her story. Everything about her – looks, accent, clothes, the food she cooked, the things she laughed at – invited a ‘Where do you come from?’, a ‘You’re a long way from home, and so young,’ or a ‘You came all this way to marry a South African?’

My mom’s story was in the pale, wintry colours of her homeland she carried in her eyes, her hair, her fragile, sun-wary skin, so strikingly different from our angry sunburn and the harsh summer glare. As she carted around her two little black-haired, dark-eyed daughters, struggling with language, customs and a million unfamiliarities, she carried a tale of romantic mystery, a journey across a continent, a stubborn love affair whose madcap nature would only strike me as an adult. Long, long after it had thrilled me as a child.

I cannot imagine how brave – or crazy – you would have to be to leave your home in England, aged 21, and follow a young man thousands of miles to a foreign country, taking two days to fly there.

‘It was one of those propeller planes,’ she said. ‘It took forever, stopping all the way down Africa.’

I listened to this story for the hundredth time, but we had only a small file of recollections from which to draw; besides, as we both aged – me nearly 60 and my mom 80 – repetition was no longer the irritant it used to be.

‘Wow, Mom! And what did Gran and Granddad think?’

‘Well, they didn’t want me to go, of course, but they knew they couldn’t stop me. I was so headstrong. Your aunty, Lorna, had already married an American and left for the US, so it must have been hard for them to see another daughter go.’

‘And when you arrived in Cape Town?’

‘Well, I had only known your dad for about a month after he’d arrived in Potters Bar with his friend, Roger, and then he went home and we corresponded for over a year. You know what you’re like when you’re young and full of ideas and adventures.’

‘What did you think when you got here?’

‘I got to your granny’s house and it was a bit daunting. Everybody was in the kitchen wanting to meet me. The wedding was all arranged.’

‘So far away from home, in a strange country, with people you didn’t know? A bit of a frivolous romance.’

‘Yes, well. In those days, when you were young you just did things. You didn’t really think about it too much. If it sounded fun and exciting, you just did it. Well, I did, anyway.’

‘And 60 years later you’re still here. I think you’re more South African now.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m still English.’

‘I can’t believe it, Claudine! You eat your toast just like Dad did.’

I look up, startled, at Lisa, my mouth full of peanut-butter toast, the wholewheat slice still warm in my hand. ‘What? I can’t remember how Dad ate his toast … Well, I know he liked peanut butter. Who didn’t know that?’

It is 2018, and Lisa has flown down from Port Elizabeth (PE) and stayed overnight. We are up early, getting ready for our appointment with the prosecutor at the Wynberg Magistrate’s Court.

‘Oh my word, you fold your toast in half just like him.’

‘I didn’t even know I did that. Remember how he loved his Black Cat peanut butter?’

‘Every single day he had Black Cat on his morning toast or his lunchtime sandwiches.’

‘Remember how, on a quiet day in his shop, he sat and worked out how many jars of peanut butter he had consumed in his whole life? He had started eating it when he was about six, he told me, and was still eating the stuff into his 70s. He wrote to Black Cat and told them. One day, a big envelope from them arrived at the house with an embossed certificate, declaring John Brown the Black Cat Peanut Butter King of South Africa. They also sent him a case of peanut butter to keep him going for the next few months. I remember he finished the case then immediately changed brands to Skippy.’

Lisa laughs. ‘Yes, I remember that. He could be so otherwise.’

‘But interesting. Dad was interesting, you know. Like he forged his own way through the iron bars of a world that would have permanently imprisoned anyone less determined.’

‘Ja, the family was poor, Grandpa was ravaged by alcohol, Dad had mouths to help feed, yet he managed to buy himself a car, go overseas and buy a house in Plumstead after I was born. That house cost £300 in 1960. A lot of money for a guy of 26.’

‘But he was such a hard worker. Always working.’

‘He was. It got him far, but like someone attached to a long length of elastic, once he became overstretched, with nothing left to give, it’s like he was yanked right back into the place of pain and desperation that was his childhood.’

‘Yes. The alcohol and violence in that home.’

‘I think he got hurt a lot. And you know what hurt people do …’

‘They say the 20th century was the bloodiest in history. So much war. So many traumatised men. I know of a man who fought in the Boer War, the First World War and the Second World War. These men received no counselling, no post-traumatic stress treatment. They often went on to hammer their own children, or get hammered by alcohol.

‘I know Grandpa was in the army during wartime. Some of them went up to North Africa. He would always shout Fire! Fire! if he’d had a drink. It was only recently that someone suggested that he might have been in the artillery and been badly affected by it.

‘Shame, there were hordes of men going around devastated and impaired by war, raising poorly parented children. And we expected those children to be good parents.

‘Mom, too, hey Lisa? Her father went to war, he was in the Royal Navy, and came back six years later. She said she would wonder, as a small girl, who this strange man was when he’d come back home occasionally for a few days’ leave.’

‘I don’t really know much about Mom, her family, or her upbringing in England. I was so young when she left. I like it when you relate so many details for me – things you can remember, that I could not possibly. You have so many memories that are meaningless to me, yet also precious, as they fill in the gaps.’

‘I think we all struggle to feel connected. But throw multiple, family-decimating disasters like war into one century and you are bound to have ripple effects for generations. This is exactly the time in history when our parents learnt parenting: from absent parents and fragmented families.’

Which is what ours became.

‘This whole area used to be farmland when I was growing up.’ Dad waved his hand, taking in a sweep of Princess Vlei Road, Plumstead Cemetery and all the houses behind him going up towards the railway line and Steurhof Station.

‘Seriously, Dad?’ I was seven years old, standing with him in the garden while he watered his beloved plants, taking a break from my job cutting the grass edges, the shears swinging in my hand as I chatted.

‘Ja, we kids used to run all over, there were no houses at all here in those days. Just rows of cottages up in Waterford Road where we lived. Near the station. And it wasn’t only white people in those days; all races used to live in Waterford Road.’

Wow. I could not imagine that! ‘Like right next door to each other?’

‘Ja, my girl, no segregation in those days. People were all friendly with each other.’

‘I think that’s a lot better, hey, Dad?’

‘I dunno, my girl. Maybe the government is right to separate people now. I think people all want to be with their own kind. They call it separate development. Maybe it’s for the best. The government seems to know what’s best for the future of this country. I must go with what they say; I have you girls’ future to consider …’

He drifted off, thinking, staring into the jet of water just like I did when I had the daydreamy job of watering the flowers.

‘And the Aklekker shop? Was that there in those days?’ I couldn’t imagine us being kids in this area without the Aklekker shop to buy Star sweets and liquorice strips, or a packet of Simba chips if we had as much as 5c to spend.

‘Yes, the Aklekkers have been there for years. The family has owned that shop since I was young.’

‘You were young, Dad?’ I grinned and, stabbing the shears upright into the grass (‘Never run with scissors, my girl’), I ran through the water jet coming from the hosepipe. The sting of cold water made me shriek and I turned around, running back to do it again.

‘I’ll spray you all over if you aren’t careful,’ Dad chuckled, his handsome face dimpling at the cheeks, eyes sparkling. He always wore shorts in summer, even a safari suit to work, leaving his legs exposed to layer upon layer of deep tanning.

‘Haha, you won’t! You can’t get me!’ I screamed as Dad jerked his wrist, sending a spray of water in my direction to tease me. Lisa, abandoning her tricycle in the driveway, ran over to join the high jinks.

‘Okay, enough now, my girls. Come, finish the edges, I want to light the fire for lunch soon. It’s getting hot out here.’

‘Can’t get me, can’t get me …’ I squealed with delight, running out of reach as Dad flicked that hosepipe over and over, trying to drench me. Lisa giggled and tumbled around on the wet grass.

In moments like this with Dad, happiness coursed warm through my body, reminding me of a photo I had seen of him, aged 24, holding me on my christening day. We were on the balcony of our first home in Rondebosch, a small flat in Main Road. Dad looked joyful, a protective hand clasping his tiny daughter proudly. In fact, in nearly every photo of my dad holding us as we grew from babies into small girls, a safeguarding hand can be seen around us, possessive and vigilant.

As the years rolled on and Dad became more troubled and unstable, I appealed repeatedly to those memories of him to soothe me. Tell me, again, how happy my dad was when I was born. Remind me, please, how much we meant to him. Remember the toy box he made for me? Remember how he painted it black and red with a big Mickey Mouse on the lid? Come back, recollections of his playfulness, dimpled laughing, teasing. And you, too, memories of helping him in the garden or the garage with his precious plants or his woodwork. Oh yes! I remember how he would take me fishing at Kalk Bay harbour, early on a Saturday morning. I had my own little fishing rod he bought me. Bring back the image of it! Yes, red and yellow … a little red-and-yellow fishing rod. He bought it for me and taught me how to fish. Let me remember, now, the Saturday afternoons watching him play cricket at Mowbray Cricket Club and, coming off the field, how he would scoop me up and kiss me as I ran into his arms.

Over and again I would reinforce in my mind and heart the dad I knew him to be, though never letting down my guard for the dad he was becoming.

It is 1967. I am eight years old. I am standing in the doorway of my parents’ bedroom, watching my mother. The bedroom curtains are open and the pitch darkness outside seems to press hard against the windows. I am afraid to move or to speak as my mother, her back to me, reaches carefully into my father’s wardrobe. A rich, familiar smell of tobacco and Old Spice escapes as she reaches in deeply, among sweaters and coiled leather belts.

I want to let it comfort me, that smell I know so well, but not tonight. Something is wrong. Something sinister has crept into our home, and even breathing audibly might arouse its interest. I must stand unmoving, watching, praying for Jesus to make it go away.

I look at my mother, her hands now closing around a flat box pushed back on the top shelf. She has her sleeves shoved up around her elbows and her pale English skin stands out against the browns and greens of my father’s clothes. Draped over her shoulder is a dishcloth; her arms are still damp from the supper dishes she was washing in the kitchen sink.

My heart beats faster as I wonder what has happened to have sent my father driving away, his pale-blue Corsair speeding up our dark neighbourhood street. What has drawn my mother so urgently away from the kitchen, the stark light hanging over the Formica table where my father would push back his chair after supper, light his pipe and let each suck on the stem inch him away from his working day into the comfort of a suburban family evening?

My head turns sharply as my five-year-old sister stirs in her bed in the next room, which we share. I don’t want her to wake up. She must stay asleep, silent, until the darkness has gone and my father comes home again, back to the living room, newspaper in hand, pipe lying warm in the ashtray, waiting to be refilled and lit, and my mother is back at the kitchen sink, keen to finish up and join him on the couch, clasping between slender fingers a freshly lit cigarette.

But not now. I gasp, my breath coming sharply over dry lips. My mother is putting the box down on the bed. She turns slightly and sees me standing there, her eyes open wide. With a quick jerk she grabs the dishcloth from her shoulder and throws it over the box.

It’s too late. I know what’s in that box. It is my father’s gun.

John William Brown was born in Waterford Road, Steurhof, in July 1934, the first boy of six children. His sister, my aunt Milly, was two years older than him. The family was poor, with not much work for my window-dresser grandfather. Dad told me how the kids would go to school – Diep River Primary – barefoot, sometimes hungry. I knew that Dad would often embellish for the sake of a good story, but viewed through the lens of historical time and place, his stories do mostly hold up (although photos of him as a small boy reveal comfortably shod feet).

‘The whole world was in the Depression, and people were poor all over. Sometimes we only had porridge for breakfast, lunch and supper. We were so hungry at one stage that Grandpa went to the church asking for