Norman Edwards

IN ALBIE’S WORDS: It was Norman Edwards who introduced me to mountain climbing. And he also invited me to his darkroom when he would be printing and developing pictures. The experience was quite wonderful. You had the negative which showed the image in reverse. You would then make a print and place it in a chemical tray and see the black and white picture slowly emerge. The next intervention would be to crop the image for design purposes. This was to open up my imagination in later life for designing pictures, newspaper layout, and books. It also opened up my ways of seeing art.

So, the mountain climbing and the photography darkroom were two big things that I got from Norman. The third was classical music - he played the French Horn in the Cape Town Symphony Orchestra. He constructed a hi-fi gramophone on which he played 75-inch shellac records using needles made of prickly pear thorns which he would sharpen on sandpaper. One day he trapped me into listening to the scherzo from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony No 8. I heard it out and ran from the room as quickly as I could. But later in the year when staying at the home of my Aunty Sarah in Johannesburg, I discovered a set of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I had time on my hands. I think there were something like 5 records which dropped one-by-one. You then took them out, turned them over and played the reverse sides. I studied the programme notes and played the records again and again. Slowly themes began to emerge. Bit by bit, I could recognise structure and began to feel beautiful shapes emerging. It was hard work but is proving to be immensely enjoyable. Da-da-da-daaaa! – fate knocking at the door! This theme has stayed with me throughout my life. When I was thrown into solitary confinement and the cell door resounded behind me, I responded by hearing my voice singing out loudly and defiantly, ‘Da-da-da-daaa!’

Norman and my mother had married a year after the war in 1946. Johnny and I called him Norman. We had a correct rather than loving relationship with him. When we left cheese rinds on our plates with plenty of cheese still on them, he would be shocked and cut off the protruding bits for us to eat. His mother had been a cook and his father a gardener on an estate in Surrey, England, and he couldn’t bear seeing us waste good food. He had loved music and the only way he had been able to become a musician had been to join the Royal Marines. The war had broken out. His ship had docked in Cape Town. The officers had been fêted in Constantia and Bishopscourt and the ratings and musicians had gone to the People’s Club in the centre of Cape Town. That’s where he had met my mother, Ray. The years had passed, letters had taken months. Once she had heard that his ship had been torpedoed but learnt later that he had been saved. She told us one day that Norman was coming to stay with us in Cape Town. This was not news to me. I have a dim memory of having discovered a stash of letters she had tucked away in a drawer and had secretly read about his love for her and his intentions to join her in Cape Town.

Dentistry was pretty brutal in those days. Whenever I went to the dentist I hated the pain and cried. But on one visit I started crying before the drilling had even started. The dentist asked my mother whether something was happening in my life, and she said, yes, she was going to marry Norman Edwards.

About 5 years later he left my mom, which was a very hard time in her life. And then he died while I was in exile. When I came back, she mentioned this to me when I asked after him. She added that before his death he had called for her to come to his bedside.