Ingrid Jonker. Louise Viljoen

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СКАЧАТЬ at the time, to help Ingrid negotiate with their father about her leaving. After the children told him that there was ‘space in the house but no place in the heart’ for them, he agreed that Ingrid could move out. Anna then helped her set herself up in a boarding house in the centre of Cape Town.37In this way Ingrid left behind yet another of the many homes she would occupy during the course of her life.

      3

Early adulthood, marriage and motherhood, 1952–1958

      ‘It was still the time of believing in yourself and your own creativity and how you were going to change the whole world before you’re thirty and committing suicide afterwards, dying happily ever after’.

      – Nico Hagen in Ingrid Jonker: Her lives and time

      Office-worker

      That Ingrid did not get the opportunity to attend university is a recurrent theme in many of her friends’ recollections of her. Most of them blamed her father for depriving her of the opportunity. Others attributed it to the influence of Ingrid’s stepmother Lulu.38Abraham Jonker did support Ingrid financially while she attended a secretarial course in Cape Town in 1952, the year after she matriculated. This enabled her to become financially independent and support herself. She held a series of jobs as secretary, proofreader, translator and bookshop assistant in the years that followed, working for firms like the publisher Kennis, Citadel Press, HAUM Publishers, Culemborg Publishers, Nasionale Boekhandel and the Cape Divisional Council. She also helped Louis Hiemstra while he was revising the Tweetalige woordeboek [Bilingual Dictionary].39Her employers’ impressions of her varied. While she was highly commended by Hiemstra as a proofreader, Cor Pama found her a muddle-headed and ineffective bookshop assistant. Many people remembered her dedication as a proofreader, but she often felt frustrated and unfulfilled in the jobs she held.

      Although she had to become a working woman to provide for herself, Ingrid remained dedicated to the vocation of poet which she had set for herself as a schoolgirl. ‘I became an office worker, but the real thing I lived for was to write,’ she professed in the article for Drum. She continued sending her poems for publication in a variety of popular magazines like Die Huisgenoot, Naweekpos and Rooi Rose40 as well as the literary journal Standpunte. It was clear that her poems were gradually becoming more sophisticated and accomplished. During this time Ingrid also pursued other artistic interests. She took lessons with the Spanish sculptor Florencio Cuairan, and attended classes in elocution and drama. It comes as no surprise that, when one listens to tape recordings of her reading her own poetry, what impresses one is the clarity of her diction and articulation. Her voice is that of a cultured woman, calm and confident. Although she gave the impression of being vulnerable and defenceless, there must also have been a measure of resilience and determination in her character to have enabled her to overcome the deprivation of her early years and develop artistically and socially after she left her father’s house. Jack Cope would voice the same sentiment in a letter he wrote to Uys Krige in May 1959, when he said that her friends did not always ‘make allowances for her basic strength and perseverance’.41There are other contradictions in the photographs dating from this time. Some of them portray her as a pert office-worker with a high-collared dress or neat blouse behind a typewriter. Other snapshots show her as a young bohemienne in shorts with tanned legs and a cigarette between her fingers. In an interview conducted a few years later she admitted to smoking 30 cigarettes a day, adding that she did not eat much because she thought food was boring.42

      There is a tendency to define Ingrid in terms of her relationships with men and to forget her friendships and relationships with women. During these first years of her adult life she built up a wide circle of both male and female friends. Her male friends included the actor Jannie Gildenhuys and Ernst Eloff, who are shown in photographs with her. She shared a number of flats with woman friends with whom she kept up a correspondence in later years. Lena Oelofse was one of her first flatmates, and later Jean (Bambi) du Preez. Several other names would crop up in the years that followed: Bonnie Davidtsz, Marie Swart, Marie Prinsloo, Margo Holt, Hélène Roos and Elmie Watson. There were also close, possibly intimate, friendships with the writers Berta Smit (her supervisor at Citadel Press to whom she showed and read her poems) and Freda Linde (who worked for the publishers HAUM and John Malherbe). Ingrid formed strong bonds as well with older women like the artist Marjorie Wallace, who became something of a mother figure for her, and the encyclopaedist Juliana Bouws, whose friendship provided her with invaluable emotional support. In 1954, three years after she left school, she met her future husband Piet Venter at a party in Sea Point.

      First volume, Ontvlugting

      The publication of Ingrid’s first volume of poems, Ontvlugting [Escape], in June 1956 was the culmination of her desire to be a published poet. Although her debut volume attracted the attention of the important critics of the time, their reviews mostly emphasised its adolescent youthfulness and thematic ‘slimness’. While Ontvlugting may be limited in its formal and thematic scope, it was clearly the product of a self-conscious poet who took her work seriously. It suggested that Ingrid Jonker was not just an intuitive poet whose poems came effortlessly, but someone who carefully crafted and revised her work. Although the volume is technically still somewhat awkward because of its over-use of rhyming couplets, most of the poems demonstrate sensitivity for the texture and musicality of words as well as their semantic potential. Uys Krige would later refer to her ‘skulpfyn oor’ (ear as finely tuned as a sea-shell).

      The title poem sets the tone for the rest of the volume as well as for the Ingrid Jonker oeuvre, introducing the contexts, themes and images that would occur again and again in her work. Following after the Afrikaans is a translation by André Brink and Antjie Krog.

      Ontvlugting

      Uit hierdie Valkenburg het ek ontvlug

      en dink my nou in Gordonsbaai terug:

      Ek speel met paddavisse in ’n stroom

      en kerf swastikas in ’n rooikransboom

      Ek is die hond wat op die strande draf

      en dom-allenig teen die aandwind blaf

      Ek is die seevoël wat verhongerd daal

      en dooie nagte opdis as ’n maal

      Die god wat jou geskep het uit die wind

      sodat my smart in jou volmaaktheid vind:

      My lyk lê uitgespoel in wier en gras

      op al die plekke waar ons eenmaal was.

      Escape

      From this Valkenburg have I run away

      and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay:

      I play with tadpoles swimming free

      carve swastikas in a red-krantz tree

      I am the dog that slinks from beach to beach

      barks dumb-alone against the evening breeze

      I am the gull that swoops in famished flights

      to serve up meals of long-dead nights

      The god who shaped you from the wind and dew

      to find fulfilment of my pain in you:

      Washed out my body lies in weed and grass

      in all the places where we once did pass.

      Although СКАЧАТЬ