Seven Maids with Seven Mops
by
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EVELYN
1953, Cape Town University Soon exams were hanging over us: hard grind now the only way forward so studying together was at least more fun than swotting alone. Armed with lecture notes, books and rugs we set out whenever we could to combine duty with enjoyment of beauty spots around the mountain, and, on rainy days, Pierre’s digs were an interesting prospect…. He inhabited a bed-sit in a tiny two-roomed cottage next to Kolbe House, sharing with a troubled fellow-student obsessed by issues of race and injustice, an ‘Afrikaaner’ who carried South Africa’s pain on his shoulders. One day we found him staining his skin brown, getting together torn and filthy shirts, trousers and worn out shoes, in order to resemble a poor coloured laborer, looking for work. Off he went to the harbour to do research on the treatment of blacks and how it felt to be one. I didn’t know what to think. No-one else I knew wanted to do such a thing. Pierre stood by, concerned, interested, but mainly worried this could backfire in some way, like the police finding out …perhaps the greatest fear in apartheid South Africa. Leanings of dangerous sympathies for colored people were one of the many perils that got one locked up in prison. It was all terribly hush-hush, best not talked about: there could be spies. We were sworn to secrecy. My own awakening about bigger issues was still a long time off, absorbed as I was by lectures, laboratory practicals, lessons at the College of Music and the attentions of my devoted ‘boy-friend’. Still only friends, physical proximity began gently, slowly, surely. He confessed to being an ‘experienced‘ man, who had slept with prostitutes in Beirut, and this information I, an innocent convent girl, took onboard with due interest and curiosity. Both of us Catholics and wary of getting into trouble…Pierre hinted darkly on several occasions that we had to ‘talk’…that there was something I really needed to know... .. “why yes, of course,” I said guardedly, not knowing exactly what he was on about. Perhaps he wanted to get engaged? Perhaps he had some ghastly disease? What could it be…was there someone else? When he finally worked up sufficient courage to tell me I was still none the wiser! We’d devoured our favorite Banana and Bacon toasted sandwich at the Sea Point Drive-In, when he revealed he was not French, as implied, but…Lebanese. Uncomfortably embarrassed, (I had never heard of ‘Lebanese’, and there were so many things I’d never heard of,) I said: “I don’t mind, honestly……… but what exactly is ‘Lebanese’?..” I’m not sure he believed me. Nevertheless, I was given a long spiel about ‘Liban’, and the Cedar of Lebanon, and Phoenicians, and Arabs… and how his family always spoke French. Somehow he managed to convey that there was something wrong with coming from Lebanon, and that I, being German, would mind, would think him an Arab. Feeling deeply sorry for him I was only at the bottom end of a slow learning curve about such things. All I knew was that I cared about him very much. At that point I still had no idea that anybody would ‘mind’. “Why did you say you were French?” I wondered, and his reply was: “because I speak French, because I love the French, and Lebanon belonged to France once.” What he could never bring himself to say was: “I could pass for a French, Italian, Greek or whatever Mediterranean you’d like, but please don’t think of me as an Arab, or Syrian, or a Jew.” He needed that little golden crucifix on his lapel, he needed his golden-eyed German girlfriend, he needed his Belgian cousin (his uncle Mansour had married
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About the Book
‘Seven maids with seven mops’ from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ represent seven successive generations of mothers and daughters. They challenge you to discover if they are getting any wiser, better, liberated, as the decades whizz by. Do they differ, transform themselves, ‘clean up their acts’? Where is the path to contentment?
All of them are first-born - apart from the first, a seventh child. There is little mention of fathers; no more eclipsing perpetually breeding females, caught in nature’s trap! Yet, inevitably some fathers’ tales add colour to those of wives or daughters. Daughters’ lives are intertwined with those of mothers, some more, some less.
From a tiny village in Slovenia in 1880 a trail-finding adventure explores gradual change, gradual British-ness, from mothers and daughters, as two World Wars engulf them. Mingling of DNA from Pomerania in Northern Germany to Austria (Slovenia), as well as Lebanese and Welsh input culminates in mothers and daughters currently living in Great Britain.
This true story will take you through a brush with Napoleon, dramatic events of murder/suicide, near-asphyxiation of a newborn in the snow, life under Colonial Rule on the Gold Coast, then anticlimax of reduced circumstances as political prisoners in South Africa. There will be SS intervention, a Terror raid , flight from invading Russians across the mined Baltic, also unusual contact with the British Military Occupation in Germany, as events are re-lived by both mother and daughter, in different ways.
The story focuses on the ‘Pomeranian peasant’, with troubled relationships and determination to build a career. There are disparate existences in seven foreign lands, revealing how one changes, adapts and lives with the mistakes one has made.
The compelling decade of Hippy-dom, is written by the 5th generation, daughter of the author.
About the Author
Evelyn Chadwick started life as Ingeborg-Evelyn Ihlenfeldt. Born in Hamburg in 1935 she grew up first in Germany, later in South Africa, then again in war-torn Germany. Teen-age years, an endurance test in convents in South and South West Africa, led to three years of study (B.Sc. Microbiology) at Cape Town University. This was curtailed, disrupted, by a passionate love affair with a Lebanese fellow student, with whom she eventually shared ten turbulent years in Northern Rhodesia. It was the sixties, a time of social unrest and emerging African independence.
One decade later, not fulfilled by motherhood and luxurious lifestyle, she ran away with two young daughters to start a new life in a desperate bid to develop not only a dormant passion for the violin but also to ‘become’ somebody, preferably a musician. Having acquired an LRSM Diploma for violin the time had come for an equivalent ARCM for piano, added to all that a relationship with an Englishman, a colonial Civil Servant, soon to shed his role to become a British Council Representative.
Following him around the world for almost thirty years, through vivid times in Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, Brazil, Canada and Poland, with two three-year spells in London, the author met top artists, musicians and politicians, ranging from the Thatchers to Yehudi Menuhin; finally finding a toe-hold in professional circles in London and in Germany.
There have been mini-careers in broadcasting (Zambia) and in journalism (The Strad ).
Divorced a second time she lives with a new partner and teaches, writes, in North London.