117 Days

In the Matron’s office a bird chirped in a cage on a pedestal and an irritable looking Pekingese with tiny teeth bared in blackish gums lay on the carpet. The windows looked out on to a bed of snapdragons. ‘Ah, what the hand of woman can do,’ the two detectives cooed ingratiatingly. Nel, Van Rensburg, and the Matron put their heads together and repeated after one another the instructions in Afrikaans about what to do with me. No visitors whatsoever. No books. No contact with anyone of whatever kind.

She looked to the doorway where a row of wardresses in khaki skirts, starched pink shirts and khaki forage caps perched on stiff lacquered hair had formed. They stiffened to attention and the entire row rushed forward and ranged itself about me when the Matron indicated that I should be escorted upstairs. ‘Not all of you!’ the Matron ordered, and three of the wardresses disentangled themselves from the body of eight and ushered me to the stairs. I minced in my high heels and thrust my bosom out firmly in my charcoal suit, free to impress them, I thought, while I was still outside a cell. I was so preoccupied with making a dignified exit that I dropped the biscuit tin I was carrying and had to get down on hands and knees to scoop up the biscuit pieces.

The ‘nice room’ was at the head of the stairs. It was two-and-a-half times the size of my Marshall Square cell, as bright as the previous cell had been gloomy. The bed had sheets. One barred window high in the wall overlooked the front of the prison; a second was an excellent vantage point from which to view the staircase. The cell had double doors: one was solid steel with a peephole in the centre; the inner one was of mesh and bars at two-inch intervals. The wardresses carried in an enamel water jug, a china cup and saucer and plate, a fork and a spoon, and a gleaming white tablecloth. My housekeeper instincts surged and I arranged these acquisitions in tidy rows, hung my jacket from the bars of the stair window, and placed my shoes under the bed.

I would have an hour a day for exercise and could take my bath then, the Matron said. Couldn’t I bathe in the morning? I pleaded and the Matron conceded. I asked when I would be let out to the toilet. She looked at me in astonishment. ‘But you’ve got the po,’ she said and pulled from under the bed a large enamel bucket with lid. I couldn’t possibly use that, I said. I couldn’t and I would not. She pressed me for a reason but I persisted stubbornly without giving a reason and, afraid perhaps that I was reticent about divulging some intimate detail of my personal hygiene, she conceded again. I would be let out to bath in the morning, for an hour of exercise at midday, and briefly before lock-up time in the late afternoon to go to the toilet block. For the rest of the time I would remain in my cell.

The wardresses withdrew, pulling the two heavy doors behind them, and the noise subsided to the ground floor below me. I rushed to the peephole but it looked on to a blank wall. I was blinkered like a horse. Only when I was taken out of my cell three times each day could I steal hurried glances to left and right of me as I was hustled up and down the stairs. This was the only time I could see my surroundings on the first floor. There were two endless parallel corridors on each side of my centred cell, each corridor lined with rows of standardized barred cells, bank safety deposit boxes for humans. But no sound came from these cells. Only the one nearest me seemed to be occupied. A high stool stood in front of this cell which was closed only with the inner bar and mesh door. All day and all through the electrically lighted night a wardress perched silently on the stool. Inside the cell an African woman sat at a table. Her head was bare and lowered on her propped elbows. I could not see her face. I never saw her look up or heard her speak. Four days in succession I asked the wardresses why she was guarded day and night. They never replied; they were under orders not to speak to me. On the fifth day she had been moved. I don’t know where they took her. I had suspected all along, and now it seemed confirmed, that she had been a condemned prisoner in the condemned cell.

To see through the larger window I had to stand on tiptoe on the iron bedhead and hang from the bars of my cage. Immediately under the window was the main road of the Prison Department estate and across the way—mocking my incarceration—stretched a splendid swimming pool, complete with high diving board and trampoline, lawns and flower gardens, and, farther afield but still well within my view, two bowling greens and several tennis courts. These were the recreation grounds of the (white) Prisons Department staff and their families. From the barred window I watched weekend goings-on with curiosity that soon soured to resentment. Warders in khaki uniform would go through the turnstile at the entrance to emerge at the edge of the gleaming pool as the bronzed muscled young men of the airline travel posters that advertise Sunny South Africa. Their girlfriends wore bikinis and carried Italian straw bags. The couples sunbathed and swam, dived and splashed, lazed and flirted. It was as normal a scene as anywhere on a South African weekend and the very normality was a rankling affront to me. I found myself watching the arrival of every sporting warder and wardress to see if they would raise their eyes to the barred windows opposite. No one ever did.

I hung from the bars for hours at a time. All week gangs of African convicts laboured in preparation for the weekends, sweeping, hosing, planting, weeding, rolling the grass, and trimming its edges to nail-scissor-clipped neatness. Armed guards stood duty over them as they worked at the bent, half-running jog which seems to be required prison posture and pace for African men. They wore dirty off-white singlets and shorts and were shoeless. Lean to the bone, they were animated stick figures, incongruously subservient to the watching, armed guards in such carefree surroundings. By the weekends the convicts had been herded back into their jail; their labour was done and the water and the lawns lay invitingly at the feet of their guards. The more distant bowling greens seemed the preserve of the senior prison staff and their portly figures and slow rolling gait told of greater dignity and heavier responsibility.

On the second day of my stay in Pretoria my door was flung open to reveal the colonel. I did not know that prison regulations demand that every prisoner must stand to ramrod attention every time a wardress, let alone the chief, appeared. I had been lying on the bed and the Matron was aghast. Even she stood up for her colonel, she reproved me later. I reminded her that she had voluntarily enlisted in the force; I had not. After that reproof, though my stance would not have passed muster on any parade, I did rise to my feet whenever the Matron or one of her superiors came to the cell. Colonel Aucamp seemed wary of coming in. He stood in the doorway and looked hard at me with small, pig-like eyes in a fleshy face, the faintest suggestion of a smirk on his mouth. On the second day his smirk was a little wider and I decided that he was warming to the idea of having a woman Ninety-Dayer in the clutches of his jail. By contrast Major Bowen was a demonstrative, garrulous man. On his inspection days he marched right into the cell and moved his swagger stick up and down in time to his query: ‘Well? How’s things? This is a prison and we are bound by regulations but if there is anything we can do to make your stay pleasant, you can tell us.’ Major Bowen was exceeding himself as a host, but by his query to the Matron accompanying him on the inspection we both understood that he knew nothing about the conditions of Ninety-Day detention. ‘Have you told her she can have her family to visit?’ he asked, probably thinking that as I was dressed in my own clothes I must be an awaiting-trial prisoner. ‘Oh no!’ the Matron said. ‘She can’t see anyone. The Security Branch said so.’ Between us we conveyed to the major that I could see no one, was given no work to do, had nothing but the Bible to read. He was readily sympathetic. Nothing to read, he said, ‘Dis swaar’ (That’s hard) and then, encouragingly to me, ‘You’ll make the best of it. Read the Book. And get down on your knees, down on your knees.’

I revelled in the energy of the Creation and the narration of the exile, in the tumultuous Revelations; I skipped with impatience through the elaborate collection of taboo and ritual, the wearisome census reports of the Book of Numbers, the bewildering time sequences of the Chronicles. I felt close to the melancholy of Jeremiah and Lamentations. I wondered how comfort could be found, by those who use the Book for refuge, in the baleful and avenging God of the Old Testament. The Gospels revealed a new divinity: compassionate and man-size. But then along came Paul with his rabbinical training to out-argue points of doctrine with the most astute dogmatists of the older school, to advocate submission to earthly rulers and non-involvement in questions of the righteousness of kingdoms on earth.

I had been reading the Bible steadily for two months in Marshall Square and there were days—for all the lurid visions and attractive prophecies of disaster—when I could not bring myself to open the covers. Given commentaries I might have advanced to a more profound examination of the Gospels and Paul’s sermons and letters but the Security Branch conceded us the Bible not to deepen our faith and understanding and improve our religious erudition, but out of deference to the Calvinist religion of the Cabinet and the Nationalist Party which, mysteriously, justifies apartheid policy by its interpretation of divine teaching, and could therefore deny the ballast of this theology to no prisoner, not even an atheist political.

I stayed in the cell for all but ninety-five minutes each day. But I stuck to my resolve never to use the po. I hung on till the day shift took over from the night shift at about seven o’clock in the mornings and freed me from my cell to lock me in the bathroom block for thirty minutes. At midday I was fetched once again and locked in the exercise yard for an hour. Lock-up time was at half past four, and about twenty minutes before the day shift left the prison I was let out for a few minutes. This was the usual routine but it was disrupted on Sundays and on prison holidays. In the second week after my transfer to Pretoria lock-up time was inexplicably brought forward to two o’clock and I remained locked in for a stretch of seventeen hours, still without using the po. My bladder passed the jail endurance test as well if not better than any other part of me.

The day began with a hooter blast at seven o’clock and a great din from down below. I could not tell what was happening except by the bedlam clatter of tin plates and the shouting of orders by the wardresses. I imagined the communal cells being opened to let prisoners out for their platefuls of cold caked porridge, the standard prison fare in the morning. By the time it was my turn to be let out there were no prisoners to be seen, only giant trolleys on which the food must have been brought from the kitchen. Two wardresses—whenever I was escorted anywhere it was by two wardresses, a walking sentinel on each side of me—trotted me off to the bathhouse, and when I was locked inside, the sick parade of the prisoners was called. This was my chance to see some of the inmates of the jail. There was generally a delay while the wardresses went to await the arrival of the doctor, so I moved to the bathroom window to gaze at the African women.

They wore coffee-brown wrap-around overalls and bright red doeks, and, under their brown skirts, short petticoats of striped white and blue flannel. Several of the women had young babies on their backs. Tied to their skirts were mugs and spoons. When there were no guards standing over them they relaxed in their own company and talked and laughed together. Several of them would generally catch sight of me staring at them through the grille of the bathroom and point me out to the others, and we would make gestures to one another across the yard.

By midday, when I was taken out, the yard was deserted (the African prisoners were locked in their cells for their midday meal) except for rows and rows of washing hanging everywhere, on washing lines and the split pole fence round the yard, and covering the grass. The prison had become a laundry. I did a painstaking scrutiny of every item of washing, as though it had been laid out for my inspection. The fence was draped with rough mailbags. Everywhere I looked were office towels marked SAP—South African Police—which must have been collected from the police stations. The prize exhibits hung from the lines. There was every conceivable article of clothing, mostly in good condition. Each item was marked with a number and a well-known Afrikaans name. I wandered between rows of dresses, shirts, vests, blouses, shorts, and jeans marked Van der Merwe, Kemp, Prinsloo, Erasmus, Van Wyk, Buitenkamp, Rossouw, Potgieter, Coetzee, Van Zyl, and Du Plessis. On the last line three large pairs of aertex underpants with nifty American-type press studs hung side by side. They were marked P K Le Roux. P K Le Roux is South Africa’s Minister of Agriculture. Suddenly the shot went home. The prisoners were earning the jail’s keep by taking in the washing of Cabinet Ministers, important civil servants, and well-to-do Pretoria families who were having a good laundry job done cheaply and were at the same time aiding the rehabilitation of the country’s reprobates. The women scrubbed for their sins the sheets of the Director of Prisons and the hand-towels of the myriads of civil servants who stamped, cancelled, and countermanded their passes and their permission to remain in the city; and I took my exercise amidst the underpants of the Minister of Agriculture.

I meandered round the yard, picking my way through the washing laid on the grass, balancing on one foot on the low polished walls round the flower beds. Everything that could take a surface of polish was rubbed up daily: the paving stones, the large flowerpots, the window sills, the drains. The place was as neat as a box of pins and only a steady hum from the ground floor cells disturbed the lunch-hour quiet. Except for the day that blood-chilling screams came from a little brick building in the farthest corner of the yard. The building was labeled Isolasie—Isolation and was the punishment block. The screams began in a low register at regular intervals, then mounted steadily in shrillness and frenzy to become a horrifyingly demented human siren with a noise volition of its own. Five wardresses moved in a body to the isolation block. They emerged a few minutes later. I don’t know what they said or did to the inmate, but the howling stopped. One of my two walking sentinels come to take me back to the cell that day was the Matron. I asked about the howling. ‘This is a prison, you know,’ she said.

The Matron was an old-timer in the service. Like the others ‘long at this game’ (her words) she was approachable, at times even sympathetic. She must have been thirty years older and thirty years longer in the service than the oldest member of her staff, and she was due for retirement in a few years. Her pre-Nationalist Government vintage was fast being replaced in the prison service with staffs who accept apartheid wholeheartedly and judge wrongdoers by apartheid lights: they despise all non-whites as inferiors bound, sooner or later, to land in prison; and they are contemptuous of the whites in jails as malicious or failing creatures who have let their (white, superior) side down.

The wardresses were semi-educated teenagers; in South Africa girls and youths can enter the prison service at the tender age of sixteen. Prison service seems to run in families and many a policeman’s daughter becomes a wardress to keep the service in the family. The young wardresses came on duty primping their hair and chattering to their fellow wardresses about the previous night out with their boyfriends; when the hooter blew they rushed off pulling straight their stocking seams and impatient to take up with their boyfriends where they had left off the night before. They were incurious, uninterested creatures, callous not by deliberation but by an utter lack of responsiveness except on the most superficial level. They were unseeing, unfeeling, uncaring keepers of the hundreds of women whose daily lives they ran.

Yet the young girls in uniform were less frightening than the prison graduates who fill the higher ranks in the service and become assistant matrons and matrons. These superior creatures are promoted to supervisory posts after they have emerged from courses laid on for the Department of Prisons by the University of Pretoria. The prison graduates hold certificates for their prowess in the theory of subjects like criminal psychology and penology. The youngsters are ignorant and insensitive; the intellectual prison viragos are high-handed, opinionated and inflexible: their innate prejudices against the African, the poor and the socially maladjusted have been moulded into doctrine by glib lectures on criminal types.

South Africa is in the throes of penal reform. To this end certain improvements, mainly for whites, in uniform, food, and privileges, have been introduced; but basically the prisons cling to the idea that their function is not reform and rehabilitation but vengeance. The accent is on punishment, the harsher the better; longer and longer sentences; less freedom; higher walls; thicker bars. The prisoner is locked in, his horizon shrunk to the area bound by the bars of his cell; he is left to do labouring routine for most of the week and contemplate his sins for the rest. The prisons are judged by their state of cleanliness, not by the responsiveness of the prisoners to rehabilitation, or by good relations between prisoners and prison staff, for of these there is nothing to see. ‘Netjies’ (neat, or tidy) was the word the Matron most liked to use, and when she came round her gaze inevitably went first to the state of the bed. Hence the regulation, relaxed in my case, that no prisoner should use the bed between rising and lock-up time in the late afternoon. I could not easily read the Bible by the electric light because the bulb was obscured by a protective mesh basket; the cover could not be left hanging ajar regardless of what the dim covered light was doing to my eyesight because it would not look ‘netjies’.

During the day the noises of the prison moved from the building in which I was locked to the laundries and the drying yards, but at night the prisoners, the guards, and a turbulent crowd of sounds returned. For an hour or two before the jail settled down for the night, the night-shift wardresses’ voices were stridently abusive. When there was a clamour from a cell the wardresses would bang on the outside of the door with their fists and yell insults and vulgarities by way of rebuke for the noise. They called the African women ‘swart slange’, ‘kaffer-meide’, ‘swartgat’, ‘aap’, and ‘swartgoed’ (black snakes, kaffir-girls, black holes, apes, and black rubbish), and the swearing seemed to reassure them of their elevation in authority over the inferior and the delinquent. But the noise did not last long and the stretch of night slid into quiet and loneliness for me, and overcrowding in the foetid stench of the downstairs cells for the African women who slept beside open sanitary buckets during the night.

I was in Pretoria Central Prison for twenty-eight days. It was like being sealed in a sterile tank of glass in a defunct aquarium. People came to look at me every now and then and left a ration of food. I could see out of my glass case and the view was sharp and clear, but I could establish no identity with what I could see outside, no reciprocal relationship with anyone who hove in view. In Marshall Square my sooty surroundings and the general air of gloom about the old police station would have justified melancholy, but I had been buoyant and refractory. Pretoria shone of bright polished steel and I grew increasingly subdued. My imprisonment was an abandonment in protracted time. I reflected on the newfound skill of the Security Branch in subjecting people to an enforced separation, a dissociation, from humanity. I felt alien and excluded from the little activity I saw about me; I was bereft of human contact and exchange. What was going on in the outside world? No echoes reached me. I was suspended in limbo, unknowing, unreached.

I read the Bible, daydreamed, tried to shake myself into disciplined thinking. I devised a plot for a novel. The characters were me and my friends, all cast in heroic mould. We planned and organized in opposition to the Government, called for strikes and acts of civil disobedience, were harassed and chivvied by the police, banned, and arrested. Then we were locked in prison cells and here I was again, grappling with life in a cell. I did better than that. I spent hours getting behind the political declarations of my characters, dissecting their private inclinations, scrutinizing their love affairs and marriages, their disillusionments and idle talk. When my imagination faltered I turned again to the Bible. I was ravenous for reading matter. One day during the early part of my stay in Pretoria I was in the yard during exercise hour and saw a scrap of paper in the dustbin for cinders from the kitchen high combustion stoves. I fished it out and held it between my thumb and forefinger to devour the words. It was a prison card and recorded prisoner ’s name, number, crime, and sentence. Perhaps a dozen words in all but to me they were like an archaeological find, proof that some people in this society recognized the value of written language and were able to use it. Even better than this find was the ration of brown sugar that started to arrive every few days, for the six or eight ounces were rolled in a cone of paper, printed paper, torn from old magazines. This way I feasted on a few torn paragraphs from the War Cry, organ of the Salvation Army, and once only, tantalizingly, I got a short jagged piece from the Saturday Evening Post. Around this extract I tried to improvise a version of a serial à la James Bond in which all the action centred round a jail break from Pretoria Central—my cell. Generally, though, my sugar ration was wrapped in an advertisement.

Unlike the Zweig character in The Royal Game, I chanced upon no chess manual in a visit to Gestapo headquarters and even if I had I doubt if I could have summoned the powers of concentration to learn the game without board or pieces. I played childlike games in my head: going through the letters of the alphabet for names of writers, composers, scientists, countries, cities, animals, fruit, flowers, and vegetables. As the days went on I seemed to grow less, not more proficient at this game. This was the time I should have been able to feed on the fat of my memory, but I had always had a bad memory (the Security Branch did not believe that one!) and had relied all my life on pencil, notebook, press clipping, the marking in the margin of a book to recall a source, a fact, a reference. Poetry that I had learned at school fled from me; French verbs were elusive. I lived again through things that had happened to me in the past: conversations and involvements with people, glowing again at a few successes, recoiling with embarrassment at frequent awkwardnesses. I put myself through a concentrated self-scrutiny but in a scattered, disorganized fashion and I found myself not with a clearer insight into myself in this abnormal situation, but with a diffused world of the past diverting me from the poverty of the present. I was appalled at the absence of my inventive and imaginative powers. But I determined to survive by adjusting to a state of enforced hibernation. This was life at quarter-pace. It was a matter of waiting for time to go by, a matter of enduring, an anaesthetizing of self to diminish problems and defeat the dragging passage of days. Life in suspension was the perfect trap for a meandering mind like mine. Day-dreams replaced activity and purposeful thinking. Partly it was confinement in a vacuum that was doing this to me, but it was partly a succumbing to my own nature and to the difficulty, which I felt acutely, of thinking and composing systematically without the aid of pencil and paper.

The routine activities I could organize for myself were few, and, however I struggled to stretch them out, they were over disappointingly soon and I had to sink back again into inertia. I made the bed carefully several times a day, I folded and refolded my clothes, repacked my suitcase, dusted and polished everything in sight, cleaned the walls with a tissue. I filed my nails painstakingly. I plucked my eyebrows, then the hair from my legs, one hair at a time, with my small set of tweezers. (When I got into the sun I pulled out the strands of grey hair growing at my temples.) I unpicked seams in the pillowslip, the towel, the hem of my dressing gown, and then, using my smuggled needle and thread, sewed them up again, only to unpick once more, and sew again. The repetition of these meaningless tasks and the long loneliness made me a prisoner of routines and I found myself becoming obsessional, on the constant lookout for omens. I listened for the sound of motorcar tyres on the gravel road outside the window, tried to guess the make of the car, and then climbed to my observation post to check and to give myself black marks if I were wrong. I found myself arranging bets with myself on the day of the week the Security Branch would call; whether it would take me ten or fifteen seconds to suck in my breath and then dive under the cold shower in the mornings. I threw pips into a paper bag I used as a waste-paper basket; if I missed Vorster was winning, if I hit target three times in succession I would be released at the expiry of the first ninety days.

Ninety days, I calculated the date repeatedly, did not trust my calculation, and did it all again. Every day I repeated that little rhyme ‘Thirty days hath September’ and I counted days from 9 August, the date of my arrest. My wall calendar had been left behind at Marshall Square; in Pretoria my calendar was behind the lapel of my dressing gown. Here, with my needle and thread, I stitched one stroke for each day passed. I sewed seven upright strokes, then a horizontal stitch through them to mark a week. Every now and then I would examine the stitching and decide that the sewing was not neat enough and the strokes could be more deadly exact in size; I’d pull the thread out and remake the calendar from the beginning. This gave me a feeling that I was pushing time on, creating days, weeks, and even months. Sometimes I surprised myself and did not sew a stitch at the end of the day. I would wait three days and then give myself a wonderful thrill knocking three days off the ninety.

I riveted my eyes to the window trying to make time pass in the activities of others but I was conscious all the while of what I was trying to do and time, I now learned, did not move while you watched it. Like sand dribbling through an hourglass the passage of time became a physical act dribbling through my consciousness. It seemed I had to push time on for it to move at all, for in my cell it had lost its own momentum.

While time was passing it crawled. Yet when it had passed it had flown out of all remembrance. When I thought back I could not recall how previous days had passed, or what I had done in the weeks gone by in Marshall Square and Pretoria. There was so little to distinguish one day from the other. Feeling, experience, accumulated, but without relation to days or nights or artificial markings of time. The stitches behind the dressing gown lapel were certificates of endurance. What I had endured now became rapidly buried in part oblivion, like any unpleasant and humiliating experience.

It was not only the pain of existing in a vacuum. It was the indefiniteness of it all. As the Security Branch detectives said at every possible opening: ‘This is the first period of ninety days; there can be another after that, and yet another.’ I was convinced that everyone, myself included, could make an adjustment to a known situation. Unknown numbers, many of them in South Africa my closest friends, are living through prolonged prison terms, splendidly adaptable. But the greater part of this matter of adjustment is knowing to what to adjust. Deadly boredom can be withstood if there is an end in sight. A prisoner, even one facing a life term, has some security in the cessation of fear of the unknown.

The Security Branch had devised a situation in which its victim was plagued with uncertainty, apprehension, and aloneness; every day that passed in a state of active anxiety about the outcome of the incarceration and the purpose of the interrogation sessions stripped the prisoner of the calm, the judgement, and the balance which were required equipment to cope with continued isolation and the increased strain of interrogation sessions.

Yet, I told myself, I was subjected to no beating, no physical pain. The passage of time in anxiety was painful, and my ulcer was the recording instrument of that discomfort. But theoretically one could endure for years like this, in cold storage, with the pulse reduced. I was determined to endure the first spell of ninety days, and then make a further adjustment to whatever came after that. It would be ignominious to be defeated by enforced solitude and those inept boorish inquisitors of the Nationalists. Any weakening to them would be a waste of the unending days spent holding out against them. I would accommodate myself to life in the Pretoria cell as I had done in Marshall Square.

W got out of a car. She was carrying a basket. This must be the day she took laundered clothes and food to Y, sitting a mile away in Pretoria’s Local Jail, and on her day’s prison round she was doing a stint for my mother by bringing food for me. Y, W always said, was contemptuous of people who sat in jail doing nothing. He had organized himself a stub of pencil, kept a diary in the form of letters to W, and miraculously smuggled them out to her.

. . . about myself here. My cell is approximately ten by eight. It has a table and a hard wooden stool, backless. In one corner is a raised platform on which I enthrone the sanitary pot so-called. That is all. There is a square window about eight to nine feet up, barred with wire mesh over glass that is so heavily crusted in dust that you really see through a glass darkly. Through it I can see the sky and just the tip of a brick gable of the jail hospital. Blankets and the felt mat on which we sleep must be kept rolled and folded against the table from 6 am to supper. Clothes, food, toilet articles are either neatly laid out on the table or kept in paper carrier bags. For some reason known only to the obscure civil-service mind, no suitcases or bags of any sort are allowed, only paper carrier bags or topless cardboard boxes. At supper-time shoes must be placed outside cell doors, for some equally obscure reason, and must remain there until breakfast. The light is recessed into the wall behind wire mesh so as to throw a beam of light across the cell and leave everything below four feet in shadow.

I am finding the nights worse than the days. Lights out at 8 pm. I try to find exercises to keep me up till 8.30 but then I wake too early and from dawn to 5.30 is spent turning and tossing having fearful nightmare dreams. Quite awful and I contemplate getting up and pacing. But no shoes! So I just stay and suffer. I recounted to myself memories of childhood, not in full but to try to discover what makes a man face trial for treason twice in a matter of seven years.

I keep my vocal cords exercised with an evening song session, taking advantage of the captive audience, B, H, and two warders outside, and the quite remarkable bathroom-type acoustics of the cell which enable me to go from basso profondo to mezzo-soprano! Aided of course by the fact that I’ve cut this smoking jazz down to two a day for the second thirty days and intend to drop it entirely for the third. Just one of the gimmicks I’m trying to ensure that I stay strictly non-obsessional and as non-neurotic as possible in circumstances specially designed for creating neuroses.

My nerves are still pretty jumpy but much better than the awful period of sixty/seventy days when I really thought I would not be able to see this through. Ten days ago, especially at breakfast time, I used to sit on my stool so utterly broken and beaten that it took me all my strength to get myself to stand up and face another day. I feel easier, less tense . . . but sleep less, wake earlier and pace the floor more and more. Most days I am up and pacing half an hour or more before the 5.30 bell and lights go on. And today, for instance, have been pacing almost all day except for time at writing. But still, relatively slow, controlled pacing, not the frenzied speed-gathering pacing of my worst days . . . I know I am pretty close to the end of my nervous tether. I am at my worst at breakfast and a few hours thereafter, then pick up during the day. The prospect is really bleak—unless I am charged, which is what I hope for. Just to be able to talk to people!

It is hell, not just the aloneness and solitude of tedium, but the devilish neurotic fears, anxieties, and tensions that can work up with only one’s mind for company and nothing to move it to think except one’s own troubles. You can’t imagine what this does to you. You become not just the centre but the whole of your universe, your own fate, your own future. Nothing you do or say can possibly affect the life of anyone else, or so it seems.

Esmé did know that Dennis was in chains. S had come to see Hilda. ‘I’ve been doing Dennis’s washing,’ she said (Esmé was a thousand miles away in Cape Town with the two Goldberg children, trying to earn an income that would keep the family during the long term of the trial when the Rivonia men would emerge from solitary confinement into open court). ‘When I collected his clothes yesterday they were torn and bloodstained . . . I’m terribly disturbed. What do you think has happened to Dennis?’ The two women inspected the clothing. There were bloodstains on the trousers and two huge tears in the back of the jacket. The women thought that only police dogs could have ripped the cloth. (They were not to know until later that Dennis had ripped the holes himself and had used the jacket over his face and neck to protect himself from the jagged glass on the top of the fourteen-foot-high prison wall he had scaled in his escape attempt.) Dennis, the women knew, was no longer in Pretoria. He had been moved to Vereeniging Prison, and the alarm of the women grew when they realized that the food parcels they were leaving for Dennis at The Grays lay untouched for days. There was nothing for it but to urge Esmé to come north to press the Security Branch for news of her husband. Colonel Klindt was abrupt and uninterested until Esmé held up the gashed and bloodstained clothing. Then he told Esmé about Dennis’s escape attempt over an impossibly high wall and how he had been caught by some mischance at just about the last wall or barrier. Esmé was granted a visit to Dennis. She saw him, in chains, but cheerful. He asked about the children and told Esmé to keep her courage up. As the interview ended he said: ‘Oh Esmé, don’t send in any pyjama trousers; I can’t get them on over the chains.’ One month after this Esmé was herself arrested under the Ninety-Day law. On the day of her arrest Swanepoel went to Dennis to put his proposition once again. ‘Tell us all you know,’ he said, ‘or we will arrest Esmé.’

The men arrested at Rivonia were taken out of their solitary cells on 9 October and brought to trial on charges of organizing sabotage and an armed uprising against the South African Government. Sisulu, Mbeki, Mhlaba, Kathrada, ‘Rusty’ Bernstein, Dennis Goldberg found to their surprise that Nelson Mandela was in the dock with them. Mandela had been serving a sentence of five years for organizing the March 1961 strike and for leaving the country to speak for the African National Congress at the Addis Ababa PAFMECSA conference, but despite this the Security Branch had put him under Ninety-Day detention as a preliminary to the strain of the trial. Also joined with them in the dock were cheerful rotund little Elias Motsoaeledi and tall silent Andrew Mlangeni, both just out of solitary detention cells.

I knew nothing of these events. I was shaken, though, when on Monday, 7 October, a smart navy blue frock and matching coat with a red silk lining were sent in to Pretoria Prison with my laundered slacks and shirts, and soup in a thermos flask. This, I realized, was my mother’s warning that I should expect to be taken to trial any day, and her equipment for me to mingle in the world again. But nothing happened. The next days went by in yawning emptiness.

From the time I was moved to Pretoria the visits by Nel, the Security Branch officer, had been perfunctory. On the average he came once a week; sometimes eight or nine days went by without a visit. Nel’s air was one of bored indifference whether I talked to him or not. Sometimes his visits degenerated into brief sterile sessions of a formal inquiry and answer. ‘Are you prepared to answer questions or make a statement?’ ‘No, I am not.’

Some days went by after the arrival of my blue dress and coat, and then one morning Nel had me brought down from the cell into the Matron’s office and he opened the interview by saying, ‘Well, Mrs Slovo, you have not been charged after all. Now you can talk.’ I feigned ignorance. ‘Charged with what?’ I asked. ‘Ah, come now,’ he said, ‘you know you were worried you would be charged in the Rivonia trial.’

I felt there was room now for me to manoeuvre in, and I began to agitate Nel to have me moved back to Johannesburg. I had no doubt that my shift to Pretoria had been to deepen my isolation, but it had also in part been anticipation that when I stood trial with the Rivonia men in a Pretoria court my cell would not be far away. Now courtroom and cell did not have to be near one another and the deathly stillness of Pretoria—I actually missed the hustle and tumult of Marshall Square Police Station—was eating away at my nerves. I told Nel how my ulcer was playing up and that erratic food deliveries from outside—my overtaxed mother had to travel thirty-six miles there and back to deliver a basket—were not making the situation any easier. I asked Nel to convey my request to Colonel Klindt. He said he would but I did not trust him to, so I asked for paper and pen, which he gave me, to my surprise, and I addressed a letter to the colonel asking for a ‘transfer’ back to Johannesburg.

Colonel Aucamp heard of this request and found it funny. Fancy a prisoner trying to arrange her own transfer; once you were in jail you stayed there until ‘we’ moved you, he said. He and I were having a wrangle of our own. I had asked to be allowed to purchase from the prison canteen, with my money locked in the Matron’s safe, a tin of powdered milk called ‘Klim’ so that I could make a drink of coffee extract in my cell at night. He refused permission for the purchase. When I asked the reason he said ‘Regulations’. The next time I saw him during an inspection I asked if I might read the regulations. He did not reply. One morning I was being interrogated by Nel in the Matron’s office when the colonel walked in. I interrupted Nel to ask the colonel again for permission to buy the tin of ‘Klim’, and when he refused I asked him to give a reason. ‘Security,’ he said. ‘Do you know what “Klim” is?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s powdered milk, like babies use.’ I appealed to Nel that babies’ powdered milk could not endanger security, and there and then in front of me he told the colonel that he had no objection to my getting a tin. The colonel was unmoved. No ‘Klim’.

Nel spoke a stilted awkward English. For the most part he stuck strictly to the purpose of his visit, digressing rarely. Once or twice he departed from the strict text. Bantustans would work, given time, he opined, and I disagreed vehemently and wanted to know if one of the purposes of my interrogation was to get me to accept the ideology of the Nationalist Party. I taxed him once with the arrest of my brother, Ronnie. This was after he had said that the Government used its Ninety-Day detention powers with unerring knowledge of who was a danger to the security of the State. ‘My brother could not be called a danger to the security of the State,’ I said angrily. The only chairmanship he had ever filled was that of a Johannesburg golf club. ‘We don’t arrest an innocent man,’ was the reply. ‘We know what we are doing. We assess every man before we make an arrest.’ ‘On the contrary,’ I jeered. ‘You arrest first, assess afterwards.’

They would not permit me to see the children in Pretoria. One morning Nel arrived and opened the interview with, ‘I see in the Sunday papers that your children are being taken overseas.’ As he had hoped, I was immediately in a state of agitation. When, I asked, when were they leaving? He knew nothing except that the news of their impending departure had been carried in newspaper columns. ‘I must see them before they go,’ I said. ‘Will you let me see them?’ ‘Why do you want to see them?’ he asked. ‘You have seen them already.’ I took a deep breath. ‘You,’ I said, ‘are a cold-blooded callous fish of a man.’ ‘Why do you say I’m a fish?’ he muttered.

I had not been aware the solitude was giving me a craving for conversation, any conversation, even with a detective, and one day, to my consternation, I found that his question, ‘What were you doing in South West Africa?’ set me off on a round of inconsequential anecdotes and jokes. I chattered and he listened intently and suddenly took me up on my remark, ‘But surely you know all this . . . ? You know exactly where I went and what I did . . . you had me followed all the time.’ How did I know I was being followed, he wanted to know. I had seen the Security Branch men, I told him. ‘Couldn’t you have been mistaken? If you saw me in the street would you know I was Security Branch?’ ‘Yes,’ I said emphatically and he looked disconcerted.

Relations between us continued in a state of unexpressed enmity, except for my one outburst about his callousness. He wanted to know what secret meetings I had been to, who had been at them, who supplied the money spent by the Congress movement, who kept it, where it was kept, what went on in inner Congress circles, who ‘gave the orders’, what plans there were for the future. I had been a journalist, I said. Everything I knew about I had written up in our columns; he should consult the files. Make a statement, he urged me. Tell about the money. I knew nothing about any money, I told him. ‘If they didn’t tell you about the money they couldn’t have trusted you?’ Nel said. ‘Trust me with money? No, I suppose not. I’m notoriously extravagant,’ I said irrelevantly.

I was taken out of my cell one morning to meet not Nel, but my mother. The Grays had granted permission for an interview to discuss business and family affairs only. The detective sitting in on the interview was from Pretoria’s Security Branch staff, he knew nothing of me, and was not very interested. I asked my mother if she was taking the children out of the country. She had made no such plans yet, she said, and she knew nothing of a report to that effect in any newspaper. She had news of a different kind. Colonel Klindt was away on leave but his deputy, Colonel Venter, had told her that I was to face a charge at the end of the ninety days. I could barely ask but I did. ‘What charge?’ Possession of illegal literature, it seemed, and once more I was enormously relieved. But if this was their intention, why hold me until the end of the ninety days? My mother said that she had put the same question to Colonel Venter but he had ignored her. We had a jolly interview, my mother telling me that my brother had been released, and that my father was safely out of the country.

I had seven days to go before the end of ninety days. That week I found I was talking to myself, repeating over and over again, ‘Now, then, get a hold on yourself. These last days will drag worse than any other. Take it easy. Try to coast through the time, not long now . . . and whatever happens you’ve made the first ninety days. Don’t build your hopes too high; be ready for a let-down. The chances are they will not let you go.’

I packed my suitcase to the accompaniment of a thumping heart. In twenty minutes two wardresses took me down to the Matron’s office. The colonel was there, and two men I had not seen before, one with a pimple-scarred face, the other with light brown hair receding on an asymmetrical skull. I was breezy and cheerful. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked them. ‘To Johannesburg,’ they said. ‘But where in Johannesburg?’ I insisted. ‘There are so many places in Johannesburg, among them my home.’ The fairer of the two men answered. ‘I’m afraid you’re not going to your home this trip,’ he said.

The detectives carried my suitcase and odds and ends, signed for the custody of me from the Pretoria Central Prison and led me to their car. There I noticed, lying on the front seat, a bulky charge sheet made out ‘The State v. The National High Command’. They said nothing about serving a charge on me and I said nothing and kept my eyes averted from the document. If they were going to charge me they would enjoy making me endure the suspense of the thirty-six mile journey to Johannesburg. If they were not going to charge me, the threatening nearness of the official charge would build my suspense anyway. Van der Merwe, the detective with the pimply face, took the wheel, and J J Viktor (the Js stood for Johannes Jacobus) turned in his seat to watch me during the journey as we set off in the direction of Johannesburg.