RECOMPENSE: - an excerpt
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For thirty-nine years I lived in Salt River. Let me tell you a little about my home town.
Once a booming part of Cape Town, Salt River used to be its industrial heart. They have all since closed due to the influx of cheaper imported clothing but when I was a young fellow textile and clothing factories abounded. I also remember that on almost every street corner there was a grocery shop attached to a house. Each of these corner store houses was lived in by an East Indian family. I was told that it was only by agreeing to these living and working conditions that East Indian immigrants were permitted to live in Salt River.
My father was a black man and the law permitted him to buy a house. This is what he did and it was to this house that my mother came when they married. It was in this very same house that I was born.
My mother was a white woman and of course white people were always permitted to do anything in the world they wished. Being white in a black world guaranteed a life of privilege. But in spite of this life filled with advantage and opportunity my mother had a very difficult time. Loneliness was her constant companion. She had few friends as there were practically none like her in Salt River.
Yes, there were other white women but these others were married to white men. These women looked down on my mother and would have nothing to do with her. No one, not the whites, not the blacks, and not the coloureds: no one looked with favour at a white woman who was foolish enough to marry a black man in Cape Town in those years. Because mother had no white friends come to our house I never met another white woman until many years later when I moved to my mother's Canadian birth place.
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At the time of my parents' death South Africa suffered prolonged recession. Many businesses in Salt River closed. Unemployment and crime had increased. Drug use and a rise in gangs was the situation and this combined with the fact that I had no family left there helped me to make the big decision to immigrate into Canada.
My parents willed their house to me. I was able to sell this property and it was the funds from the property sale that I carried with me into the small town of High River, Alberta.
Like I said, I was forty years old or more when Alison Pierce moved into my little bungalow in High River. Our lives together were simple. We never lived as husband and wife but we never let the rest of High River society know this about us. It was our secret ................................
RECOMPENSE is available on all Amazon sites. You will find it on my Amazon Author's Page at https://amazon.com/author/audreyaustin
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