GILLIAN Slovo remembers December 13th, 1956 with great clarity: it was the day she had two breakfasts. The first breakfast had been normal enough but be tween it and the second one, the news had started to break: Ruth First, her mother, and Joe Slovo, her father - both ANC activists - had been among 156 people arrested over-night by the South African Police and taken away for questioning.
The second breakfast was a re-run set up by a photographer from the Johannesburg newspaper, The Star. The resultant picture featured on the back cover of her autobiographical book Every Secret Thing - shows three small girls spooning up their cereal at the breakfast table. Gillian is four, her sister.. Shawn is six and the youngest, Robyn, is two. "Mummy's gone to prison," announced. Shawn, "to look after the black people."
The front cover of the book shows the girls' parents at a dinner party, with Joe Slovo, relaxed and expansive, beaming at the camera, while his wife, elegant in pearls and designer clothes, looks directly into the lens, an amused, reserved expression on her carefully groomed face. Between these two covers, lies the story of a family blown apart by the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. It's a story of bitterness and acceptance, of betrayal and discovery, of pride and rejection, of pain and salvation. It's the story of one small, nuclear family set in the context of that greater family - the unfree people of South Africa. When those people cried out for help, Joe Slovo and Ruth First set aside their parental duties in favour of the greater good and, in so doing, left their own small children bereft.
It was this feeling of loss that led the adult - Gillian Slovo to explore what it was like to have been the child of such parents and her book begins with what was to be her last meeting with her mother. It is summer, 1982 - and, characteristically, mother and daughter, both strong-willed, have an argument, the continuation of a long-standing one, so that when they say goodbye in London - Ruth is returning to her university job in Mozambique and Gillian is off on a holiday - their farewell is strained and awkward. A month later, when Ruth First, back in Maputo, opens a letter-bomb addressed to her, the force of the explosion leaves parts of her body plastered on the office wall. Gillian Slovo has lost her mother for the final time.
The person who anchored the children during their parents' many absences was Ruth First's mother, Tilly, a matriarchal icon in a family of icons. As committed to the struggle as was Ruth, Tilly "born to rule before her daughter took her space", devoted herself to looking after her young granddaughters. Tilly it was who got the children up and off to school, who drove to the prison to deliver food to her daughter detained in solitary confinement for 180 days, who held the fort when her own husband - also a communist activist - was forced to go into hiding. And it was Tilly, upright, stern and 84 who quelled with one reproving look the attempt by the adult Gillian to exchange whispered greetings with her sister Shawn when the two arrived separately in Maputo to attend a hurriedly-organised memorial concert prior to their mother's burial.
Tilly too who later announced to Gillian, then eight months pregnant, that she had decided to leave London and return to South Africa to lead her own life after years of serving others. "When?" asked the surprised Gillian. "Ten days' time," said Tilly, now 87. Once again we hear the bewildered pain of abandonment in Gillian's voice: her mother murdered, her father in Africa and Tilly, great-grandmother of her unborn child, cannot stick around long enough for the birth.
Throughout childhood, Gillian felt excluded from her parents' lives, as indeed she had to be both for her own safety and for the security which was absolutely paramount if the activities of the ANC and the MK (the armed wing of the movement) were to have any success. One memory of childhood evokes both the ordinariness of a family outing and the very extraordinary nature of her parents. We see the family walking on a beach, children and dog enjoying themselves while ahead of them, Gillian observes her mother and father - safe from eavesdropping police - leaning their heads towards each other to discuss political matters in a gesture of intimacy that will never be shared with their children although their lives have been shared with millions.
In Cape Town, observing the first working session of the post-apartheid government in 1994 I was privileged to watch an array of ANC luminaries rise to make their maiden speeches. The one who stood out, of course, was Joe Slovo who rose up in his legendary red socks and talked, with humour and passion about his new role as Minister of Housing. When I told his daughter this, she listened politely, accustomed to having to share her father with the rest of the world.
But because this is a book in which events are seen through the eyes of the child as well as the woman, there are moments of wry sweetness as when the Slovo children - deprived, because of a boycott, of that staple diets of childhood, the potato crisp - are suddenly presented with a packet - by their glamorous, triumphant mother in celebration - of a rare victory in the courts awarded against a potato farmer whose exploitative practices led to the hitherto unexplained deaths of many of his workers. This is one of the many stories in the book which chronicles the persistent chipping away by the ANC at the iniquities of apartheid while, at the same time, revealing how, in the Slovo home, something as seemingly innocent as a packet of crisps was a hot potato. Politicisation in that home began very early.
Ruth First - with her smart clothes, regular visits to the hairdresser and tapping high heels competing with the tapping of her typewriter - dominates her daughter's memory. But sadness erupts into bitterness when Gillian Slovo discovers at around the age of 10, when her father was on ANC work in England, that her mother - again absent from home - is in fact having a four-year affair with a man to who she was prepared to devote more of her time than she was to her lonely, abandoned children.
"THEY both had affairs with other people," Gillian told me on the phone, "they both lived and played hard but that was the time when I was most missing my mother's love". It was a painful discovery.
Towards the end of Joe Slovo's life - when his cancer had left him only a few more months to live - Gillian pushed him to the limits, pressing him to tell her as much as he could about the private side of his and Ruth First's complex and sometimes damaging relationship and I wondered if she wasn't being too hard both on herself and on her parents. She thought not.
"Because of our upbringing, we had a list of internal prohibitions which prevented us from showing or talking about our emotions but I knew that if I was going to be honest with myself I had to be honest too with them." Her questioning got too much for Joe: "This is my life," he told her, refusing to answer her questions. And that was something she finally had to learn to accept.
Now Joe lies buried in the cemetery in Soweto - one of only two white people to be afforded that honour - while Ruth First's grave is in the ANC plot in Maputo. They have been laid to rest and one can only hope that in offering them to us in their glory and in their imperfections, Gillian Slovo, now 45, has assuaged some of the pain which her idealistic, charismatic parents visited upon her childhood.
