The Sword and the Pen: Six Decades on the Political Frontier by Allister Sparks

Author:Allister Sparks [Sparks, Allister]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Editors; Journalists; Publishers, General
ISBN: 9781868425600
Google: 8cbnDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Jonathan Ball Publishers
Published: 2016-02-29T20:26:51.455210+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Road to Recovery

THE HUMAN SPIRIT is a resilient thing. It takes time, of course, as friends are wont to say when trying to comfort the bereaved, but it is true that there can be life after great bereavement. Having my parents next door was a major blessing, for they were able to provide emotional as well as practical support. The children spent their after-school hours, those problematic homework hours, with them, and then came home to me when I returned from work in the evening. How ironic that my parents’ decision to leave Hotfire and come to live in Johannesburg was so that they could spend their evening years near me and I would be at hand to support them as they aged, yet here they were playing the supporting role while I was the one in need of help.

Friends and colleagues from the Mail rallied around, too, visiting frequently and bringing children to play with mine. Mary’s newly married younger brother David and his wife, Pat, came as well, often accompanied by Pat’s closest friend, Sue Matthey. I had come to know Pat and Sue through David, and now they started visiting quite regularly, especially on Sundays when I had to fill the editor’s chair at the Mail while Ray Louw took the day off. They would take the children on outings to give my parents a break.

And so it was that as the months passed Sue gradually drifted into my life. She was a slightly built, delightful person with a bubbly personality. She was 11 years younger than me, well-travelled and smart. I was attracted to her from the start, but our relationship developed slowly as my state of emotional turbulence gradually stabilised.

Sue brought a new dimension of vitality and fun into our lives. Her parents were Swiss, from the French-speaking canton of Vaud, and had immigrated to South Africa during the Second World War. Her father, André, a brilliant engineer, had founded a company manufacturing metal tubing that had been highly successful, but he was not satisfied with that. To him, true engineering success could be claimed only if he succeeded back in his homeland. So the day came when André Matthey announced to his family that he had designed a machine to manufacture stainless-steel tubing faster than any other process in the world, and that they were all to go back to Switzerland and work together as a family to prove his success in the only place where it really counted.

To his dismay, Sue baulked. ‘I’m not going with you,’ she told her father. ‘I was born here, I’m a South African and I’m staying right here.’ What put her back up particularly was that her father had sent her to the famous university city of Heidelberg to learn German, and she now realised his purpose had been to prepare her to head up the German sales branch of his planned enterprise. He had told her nothing of his plans for her at the time, but now she twigged − and rebelled.

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