Tsk-Tsk: The story of a child at large

By Suzan Hackney

'I was made in Coffee Bay. Right there on the beach, in the sand.' From the opening lines, we are drawn in and engrossed by this startling memoir of a singular childhood. Suzan is adopted as a newborn in the late 1960s into a seemingly loving and welcoming family living in Pietermaritzburg. But Suzan is set on a collision course with, most particularly, her adoptive mother, and society, from her very beginning. Suzan's relationship with her mother is fraught with drama, which veers over into a level of emotional abuse and needless cruelty that is shocking.
At the age of thirteen, Suzan is sent to a place of safety as a ward of the state, effectively 'orphaning' her. From there, she spirals out of control – fighting to survive in a world of other neglected, abandoned and abused children. She becomes a 'runner', escaping at every opportunity from her various places of confinement, grabbing her schooling in snatches, living on the edges of a drug and prostitution underworld, finding love wherever she can.
Suzan's young life was the stuff of movies, but it is her writing, in a voice that is unforgettable and true, that transforms her memories into something magical rarely matched in South African literature. A new classic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jonathan Ball
• Release date: Apr 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9781868428731

Suzan Hackney

SUZAN HACKNEY was born in Pretoria, but grew up in Pietermaritzburg, as she tells of in her memoirs Tsk-Tsk. After the events of her childhood and adolescence described here, she worked as a night-club bouncer, a stable hand on a horse stud farm and she farmed. She has grown aloes and other indigenous plants, reared orphaned and injured wildlife, and raised her own children – and a few who weren’t her own. Suzan now manages a resort in the southern Drakensberg.

Book preview

Chapter One

I WAS MADE IN COFFEE BAY. Right there on the beach, in the sand. To this day I despise coffee and adore the sea in equal measure.

My father was young and my mother even younger, a quiet, studious girl who always had her head in a book. When they realised what they had done, he went down on one knee in the kitchen. Dawn felt a brief flash of excitement shoot through her and just as quickly a sharp cold memory of him slapping her hard across the face a few weeks earlier. So she shouted, ‘NO!’ far too loudly and left him there on the floor to see himself out.

Dawn’s parents reacted as parents do, with exaggerated horror, shock, outrage and disgust. There was shouting and screaming and crying and some very ugly things were said. When everyone had calmed down slightly and my mother was now sobbing quietly enough for my grandfather to be heard, he informed her she could either marry the boy or give the baby away. This time she did not shout, ‘NO!’ stamp her feet or toss her dark curls.

I was born in Pretoria, an almost pretty city if you go there in summer, with masses of violet-blue flowers blanketing ancient jacaranda trees and pavements – streets, houses, cars and schoolchildren, all covered in fallen flowers. The warm summer air is sweetly scented with their dreamy fragrance.

I, on the other hand, am born on a bitterly cold winter’s morning. The city looks dirty and grey, the trees are stripped of all foliage and they stand out stark and naked in the gloom.

I like to think she holds me, gazing into my face while her heart fills with love. I hope she at least feeds me before she leaves me and returns to the balmy beauty of the Transkei coast.

You know how some babies look like porcelain dolls, the exquisite hand-painted ones? Pale shades of pink and white, with oh so softly rounded curves of perfection? I most certainly don’t. I’m really, really tiny, I don’t have even a single wisp of hair on my tennis-ball-round head, which looks unnaturally large for a baby. My eyes are too big and my mouth doesn’t shut by itself so even when I’m not crying, it’s open in a small round ‘o’ of surprise. No delicious padding of plump baby fat for me; my arms and legs are as spindly as undercooked spaghetti strands. I am also severely jaundiced and an eerie yellow. On the bright side, my lungs are in absolutely fantastic condition!

The nurses feel as if I haven’t stopped screaming since my birth, when Nurse Hansen slapped me several times – hard – on my behind with her large red hand, while I was trying my best not to breathe. She has since been ostracised by the other nurses at teatime and is no longer invited for any secret ciggie breaks in the furnace room. I’m allergic to cow’s milk and also to the milk replacement they try, and even to the sugar in the water one of them attempts in desperation. I cry and cry and cry until I pass out, exhausted. Three weeks in I’ve developed a textbook-cover-worthy case of oral thrush. It’s blossomed right out of my mouth and is spreading all around my lips and down my chin, a bright shiny red scaly patch. By the time my adoptive parents arrive, the nurses can hardly wait to bundle me up extra tightly and get me out the door.

Bryan and Jill Hackney live in a lovely house in Pietermaritzburg, in the quiet, tree-filled suburb of Scottsville. They drive all the way to Pretoria in their immaculate pale-green and cream two-tone Wolseley. In the back is a painstakingly packed leather suitcase, filled to the brim with enough baby clothing, bedding and paraphernalia to last three months … with triplets. Packed in next to the suitcase is Mavis, sitting up as straight as a pin in a freshly laundered maid’s uniform with a large, sparkly clean apron tied around her waist. Everyone in the car is so excited. The entire adoption process has been gruelling and time-consuming. This day, the very one that’s been prayed for, dreamed about and anticipated for years, is here at last.

There are other babies in the nursery; I’m certainly not the only one in this predicament. A whole gaggle of nurses has lined up against the wall to observe the joyous proceedings. There’s enough time for Jill to scan the bassinets filled with pink and blue bundles. When her eyes land on my face, hers acquires such a look of hopeful denial that the youngest nurse actually lets a burst of laughter escape. The nurse whose dogged persistence had got me breathing, eventually picks me up and thrusts me into my mother’s arms.

My new parents look down at me and my father’s eyes fill with tears. ‘Och!’ he says, ‘Aren’t you just too beautiful?’

Hearing a male voice at last, I open my eyes and with blurry baby vision look smack bang into my mother’s face instead. In that split second they focus and lock into her very soul. I go completely rigid, take a deep, deep breath and start screaming as loud as I can – my dedication to practising this particular gift while other babies feed and dream has paid off. My new mother tries to recoil but she is holding me and can’t get away. Everyone in the room is watching so she tries to smile bravely and to not flinch visibly as the decibels mount.

‘What a marvellously fabulous set of lungs our little lass has!’ my dad yells with genuine admiration in his voice. ‘I’ve read that this is such a good sign in one so young,’ he continues proudly as Jill stands there, speechless for once, all the colour gone from her face.

I scream while they sign the papers. I scream while they try to hear the endless suggestions, instructions, well-meaning advice and good wishes. I scream all the way through the hallways, down three flights of stairs; I scream as they scurry past the toilets, through the reception area, almost running now, towards the exit … and then they burst right out the doors into the wide open space of a welcoming world. I stop my screaming and try to look around, almost hopefully one might say.

Mavis is still sitting in the car in the exact position she’d been left in. My new mother hands me to her and my dad opens the car door and, when she is in, he carefully shuts it. The second it closes, I begin to scream. As we drive away my mother looks up and sees the nurses waving joyfully from the third-floor window. She doesn’t wave back.

My mother says I cry non-stop all the way to Pietermaritzburg but I seriously doubt this. Firstly, it’s bloody far and I am certain I would have lost my voice four or five hours in, or passed out from sheer exhaustion. Mother tends to exaggerate and anyway, everyone survived just fine.

At first my mother wants to name me Lyndall after the little girl in the book The Story of an African Farm. Lyndall is an orphan who has an entire life of hardship made even more difficult by her stubborn and rebellious personality. She’s a precocious child, wise beyond her years but internally very conflicted. Lyndall grows up to be a feminist and then dies quite horrifically while giving birth.

Luckily for me she decides instead to name me Susan after the sensible, motherly and least courageous child in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. This Susan goes on to become known as Queen Susan the Gentle, a beautiful and brave woman with black hair that falls almost to her feet and who has the kings of countries beyond the sea asking for her hand in marriage.

My new life is alarmingly British considering we live in Africa. My mother speaks the Queen’s English – the exact same accent as Her Majesty. It is extremely civilised here, and structured, organised, pristine, well-modulated, painfully polite and prim. This clashes somewhat with my wild tantrums as it does with my poo-smearing pastime. I manage to get it out my nappy all by myself on numerous occasions and I draw with great relish all over my body and the cot. Not even my dad is impressed with these early displays of artistic genius and none of this is helping my mother’s nervous condition.

If my dad holds me I am fine, but he has to go to back to work and this leaves me with Mother and the stoic Mavis. I’ve not been here very long at all when one day, while lying on the bed in my parents’ room, playing around with pitch variations and volume, I feel a soft, warm hand on mine. I turn my head and see a boy with golden-brown hair, warm brown eyes, a lovely tanned skin and two perfect dimples. My big brother Jonathan smiles at me and, as my mother walks into the room, I give him my first and biggest smile ever, rash and all. In an instant I bond with him like a newly hatched duckling. After that my too-big eyes are always scanning around for him, and when I hear his voice my whole body starts wriggling and my toothpick legs and arms jerk with excitement. Jonathan becomes my favourite person in the whole world and he happily takes on this role, as he does everything, in his caring, little boy’s stride.

My dad likes to call my mother when he sees me interacting with my brother or him – to prove to her that I’m able to do this with other humans – because my mother is convinced there’s something very wrong with me mentally. She says I show all the signs of being autistic. I lie there every day and cry and cry and cry. I will not partake of any nourishment willingly, except water and fruit juice. I do not like being indoors, I only want to be outside, and if she pushes me there in my pram and parks me under a tree, I’ll lie as happy as a lark for an unnaturally long time. Here I watch the leaves playing in the breeze, I hear bird calls and see them flying by. Puffy white clouds drift past and I feel the winds across my skin. Every now and then, Jonathan’s curly head pops into my vision over the edge of the carrycot as he stands barefoot and tippy-toed to name and explain his latest find to me. I cannot get out of this pram fast enough. It’s only after I’ve fallen on my head several times (twice onto concrete) while trying to escape that I’m finally released onto the lawn where Jonathan and a world of adventure await me.

My new home has a pretty garden filled with climbing trees and fruit trees, flowers and plants of numerous lovely varieties. A stream runs through the bottom and we have a huge jungle gym built by my dad. There are swings, a swimming pool with a slide going into it and a lovely kitsch statue of a leaping marlin that squirts a long arc of water into the pool. Jonathan can already swim well and by the time I am three, so can I. We spend so much time in the pool that my hair goes a ghostly green and we have perfect, raw circles on each fingertip and under each toe. My dad has built Jonathan a treehouse in a massive old bottlebrush tree. He builds me a Wendy house and makes teeny-tiny furniture to go in it. It has a child-size bed and cupboard, its own kitchen with mini stove and utensils and crockery. He has even made fried eggs, apples, bananas, onions and potatoes out of wood for me to play with. A tea table stands in the centre of my playhouse with chairs around it filled with dolls. A tea set rests on the table. Best of all, I have a bookshelf stacked with books, puzzles and boxes of Fuzzy-Felt. On the floor is a pretty pink fluffy rug. Under the rug I’ve hidden a very sharp pair of scissors and a box of matches. Cutting chunks out of my fringe, snipping holes in curtains and starting fires are a few of my favourite pastimes.

My dad has a work shed around the front of our house where we spend weekends learning to use tools and fix and build things. He is the fix-it man in this neighbourhood. If anything breaks in anyone’s house, they apologetically haul it around and ask my dad to repair it. He also fixes injured animals and we receive a steady stream of these, too; our back veranda nearly always has a box or cage with some orphaned or injured creature inside. My favourite is the baby birds. Their naked newness delights my senses; they are so translucent I can see their bones, veins and muscles. I love their squishy, pear-shaped bodies, the oversized heads wobbling heavily on weak necks, soft down that becomes patchy, quills which begin to protrude holding feathers like foliage in tiny whitish-grey vases. When they start to look too dreadful with patches of moulting fluff, and I can see the trembling of their little hearts, in their almost ugliness, they are most beautiful to me. I feed them with glass droppers and when they see me, they get so excited they squeak and fall and flap to get near me. I lift the dropper and they open their beaks so wide their heads disappear, the inside of their beaks bright pink with slivers of wiggling tongues. I squeeze the dropper so its contents fall drop by warm drop into hungry, open mouths.

My mother’s parents spoil us in the first few years of our lives, before they pass away. They buy us amazing toys, games, puzzles and books from all over the world, including large containers filled with various Lego, Meccano and Matchbox cars. There are pedal cars, go-carts, bicycles and roller skates. My mother teaches speech and drama as well as English and is always putting on plays and speech and drama festivals, so there is an entire cupboard stuffed with almost any kind of stage costume you may ever need, from mice right up to the ethereal Midsummer Night’s Dream outfits. There are boxes and boxes of stage makeup, big chunky delicious-smelling waxy sticks in every colour imaginable, wigs, fake hair for beards and moustaches and the runny brown glue to hold them in place. Huge, heavy bottles of deliciously scented cold creams stand next to boxes of costume jewellery, pirate patches and swords and, right at the top of the cupboard, where we are not supposed to be able to reach, is our most favourite of all – the stage blood. This type of play is encouraged and we spend many happy hours creating characters and acting out made-up scenes, usually involving violence and deaths gory enough to definitely require the bright red hidden liquid.

Jonathan collects model aeroplanes and when I ask, he lets me help build them, patiently explaining what to do, and even messily paint them. I can’t reach yet but if Jonathan stands on the top bunk bed, he’s tall enough to hang the planes from the ceiling with fishing line and drawing pins. Then he switches on the fan, we lie on our backs on the floor and, as he teaches me their names and capabilities and tells me which wars they were used in, we watch them soar.

My mother teaches us to speak, eat, walk and conduct ourselves as though we are active members of the British aristocracy. My dad just goes along with it; he has a slight obsession with marching songs from World War 2. He marches around the house on weekends while the music is blaring, holding his imaginary rifle smartly at his side. I adore marching right behind him and copying his salutes, smart halts and abrupt turns around corners. He also loves Scottish bagpipe music; they both do. We all go to see the pipe band play at various events around town, and there is a lovely display every year at the botanical gardens. But high-pitched screechy noises unsettle me and pain my brain so I am not a fan. My parents collect records and have piles and piles of them – something is always playing on the record player. The National Geographic magazine arrives every month and this is my favourite book; I want to go and live with the tribes. We attend operas, ballets, art exhibitions and the theatre. We are taught that ‘Manners maketh man’ is our family motto. We love and admire the entire British royal family. We know all their names and titles and which castles belong to whom. My mother tells us she is related to Sir Walter Raleigh – he of the cloak-in-the-puddle fame. We gather eagerly but respectfully around the radio each Christmas for Her Majesty’s speech. We have been trained to leap to our feet and stand to attention should we ever hear ‘God Save the Queen’ being played. We quickly learn not to do it in public or at school, though.

We like the British, Scottish and Jewish people, and there is no racism based on colour in our house. We judge others solely on whatever evils a particular race has perpetuated in the past, Catholics and English people not counted. We have been taught that there is good and bad in almost every race (my mother tells us that the very low-class white people in Britain are worse than any black person you will ever meet – she has been there and experienced it for herself).

We also like the Hindu people for their good manners, their lovely curries, long, long hair and reasonably priced fruit. We also feel sorry for them because we know they were brought here as slaves and have had it very rough. We are happy for them that they are doing much better these days, now that they have little businesses of their own, and are prospering and being rewarded for all that hard labour they did in the sweltering heat over the generations. They do their beautiful ceremonies on the banks of the Msunduzi River and send off little rafts of fruit and flowers to their river goddess.

We are definitely on the black people’s side against the ever-present National Party government and its barbaric treatment and oppression of them. We also like coloured people because they are, after all, half us and therefore almost family. We English-speaking South Africans have still not made friends with the white Afrikaners, though, which filters right down to us children. There are so many more of them than there are of us. We have separate schools and although some of our English schools have one or two Afrikaans classes in each grade, we don’t mix at break. When they speak to us in English we think that their accent makes them sound really dof, almost retarded. They in turn call us rooinekke and say our men are soutpiele. We call them rocks because to us they are like big lumps of stupid rock. We fight with them a lot, before school and after. They throw stones at us, they beat us in almost every rugby game and their boys steal our girls, and then we fight them some more. They seem to develop a lot faster than us and their high school rugby players look like 30-year-old men compared to our scrawny English-boy teams. My mother teaches us that we are far, far superior to them. They are beneath us in all ways, ranging from their intelligence and pastimes right down to their manners and diet. She promises me that Child Welfare would never, ever give an Afrikaans baby to English people for adoption, and that no-one would allow an English baby to be adopted by Afrikaans people, come hell or high water.

Both sides are still smarting from the Boer vs. British war days. They will never forget how, deep in the dusty thorn-tree-filled veld, we allowed their women and children to die long, slow deaths from disease and starvation in our concentration camps, or how the British soldiers burned their farms and killed or stole their animals. They are in the pound seats now, however, and looking after only their own kind, with kickbacks and cushy jobs like working for the railways, police, post office, or any of the many government jobs that come with full housing and medical benefits. Plus, if they are poor they don’t even have to pay school fees or buy stationery and books for their kids.

We hear endless things about World War 2 and the Great Depression and are taught to hate Germany and Japan with a passion. It is drummed into us by our mother that the Krauts and the Japs are despicable people and the cruellest of cruel. We are spared no details of the Japs’ wickedly creative methods of torture, including putting bamboo slivers under fingernails and using fire ants. We are suitably horrified and dislike them all intensely but it’s the Krauts who are the real enemy. We know the Anne Frank book back to front and our sympathies lie with her, locked in her tiny attic room without the handy hair-length Rapunzel possesses and, therefore, sadly, any chance of a prince or escape.

My mother will absolutely NOT have anything in our house made in Japan, China (by association) and, obviously, Germany. This message needs to be spread at all costs and everyone else must know we will never support these barbaric bastards. So – because she teaches speech and drama in the main lounge every afternoon and has quite a few pupils whose mothers carefully select and purchase Christmas presents for her each year – Jonathan and I always watch the annual present-giving ritual through the passage window. We watch when my mother unwraps a gift and turns it upside down. Should it say, Made in Germany, Japan or China, into the bin it goes, right in front of the child of the guilty parents. We like to watch their expressions and are very sorry we cannot go home with them to see their mother’s expression, too, when she enquires whether Aunty Jill liked her gift.

(Many