NEELS AND ANNIE'S THREE DAUGHTERS

The three Du Plooy sisters were very close. My mother, Nellie, was the middle one. Sue was only a year older than my mother: she was born in 1901. When they were little girls, they shared a bed. Sue was afraid of the dark and she used to go to sleep clutching a matchbox in her hand, two matches protruding so that she could easily strike one to light the bedside candle.

When I was three years old, my father was transferred to Kimberley, and we went to live with Ouma and Oupa du Plooy at 16 Tapscott Street until I was five, when my sister was born and we moved to a house of our own.

Ouma and Oupa had the extended family living in their house: besides us, there was my Auntie Sue, who was (whisper it!) divorced and had come back to her parents' house with my cousin Ian.

When Auntie Ann came on holidays from Pretoria, where she worked as a typist, the three of them would gather in the kitchen or in one of their bedrooms and chatter for hours. They laughed a lot. I liked to hang around and listen, and I soon learnt not to draw attention to myself, or they would send me out to go and play. Under the kitchen table was a good place for an inquisitive five-year old.

During the War cosmetics were scarce: they would scrape out the stubs of their lipsticks with a hairpin and melt the bits together in a spoon over a candle flame. There would be enough to pour into a tube and make a new lipstick. Auntie Ann usually donated four or five stubs to my mother and Auntie Sue's one each.

Auntie Ann was six years younger: she was a city girl and had lots of different colour lipsticks. Mum and Auntie Sue wore quiet pink lipsticks.

The matter of Auntie Sue's divorce was not mentioned, except in hushed tones among adults. Divorce was a bit of a disgrace in those days, no matter who was the "innocent party". Auntie Susie was once bitten, twice shy ... I never knew her to have a boy friend. She went everywhere with her friend Madge Bennie, who was a fellow-teacher. Madge wore suede shoes and smoked through a cigarette holder. Those were two new and fascinating things to me.

Auntie Susie was also a teacher and she was the headmistress of the Newton Primary School. The nail of her middle finger grew down like a parrot’s beak. She had slammed the finger in a door when she was young. She was a keen knitter and a keen reader - always doing intricate patterns, while reading from a book propped up on a cushion in her lap.

I, too, was a keen reader. I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. I don't think the grown-ups realised I could read, or at least how well I could read, so nobody cared what I had hold of. They mostly thought, if they thought about it at all, that I was looking at the pictures. This gave rise to the notorious sex maniac episode, after which I found gaps in the bookshelves and Auntie Sue started to keep her library books in her room.