Taking a flyer ends in the write stuff
Grounded by the weather, the next best thing was to pen a fascinating book of growing up in the big sky country
IF IT HADN’T been raining, Jennifer Friedman might not have written the Queen of The Free but the weather was bad State and she couldn’t fly.
When she can’t fly, she writes. When she can’t write she flies.
The problem was she was in Sydney, Australia – and her usual language of expression is Afrikaans. It didn’t feel right trying to write about Australia in Afrikaans and, in any case, her grasp of the language was slipping despite being an acclaimed and published Afrikaans writer.
She also wanted her writing to be authentic, so she decided to write about her childhood as a little Jewish girl in the Free State goldfields during the 1950s and 1960s.
As she explained in the garden of a Craighall Park B&B this week, her memoir wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the encouragement and mentorship of celebrated South African novelist, writer and editor Mike Nicol.
“I used to write poetry, in fact I’ve always written. I’ve always had a pen and a notebook handy, but I’d never written prose. I wanted to find a writer’s course offered by South Africans in South Africa to guide me through the process.”
F r i e d man f o und Get Smarter, an online lear ning site which offered a writing course. Buoyed by Nicol’s encouragement she started writing what were initially short stories about life in the platteland of that era, complete with all the references of that time and theeveryday language of the Free State, a mix of Sesotho and Afrikaans.
“I discovered characters appearing and reappearing.
“The stories became a book and then the book became a memoir. I was shocked, I had no intention of writing a memoir, I always thought you had to be important or have lived an interesting life.”
With Nicol and her fellow s t udents’ encoura g ement, Friedman found out that the life she had lived in the Free State was unique. The result is a memoir that is at once compelling, hilarious, poignant and, in parts, tragic; finding joy in the banal and detailing with a child’s innocence with the bigotry and prejudice not just of apartheid but of anti-semitism.
She grew up in Hennenman on the edge of the goldfields, where her father was the first pharmacist and her grandfather ran the family farm with her uncle at Philippolis. Friedman was educated in Afrikaans, until the end of what is today Grade 10, after which she was sent to boarding school in Cape Town until matric, going on to study a BA.
On graduation, she travelled to Europe before coming back to Cape Town. “I was lying on Clifton beach one day and somebody walked up and stood in my sun. Then I went to Johannesburg and married him.”
That person was Allan, her husband, an industrialist who ran the family enamel factory in Joburg, before opening a factory in Israel where they spent two-and-half years. The returned to Joburg, living in Bedfordview and then Sandton, with their son and daughter attending local schools. They led, says Friedman, an idyllic life, before crime committed on a neighbour forced them to think about emigrating.
They made the move to Australia in 1992; Friedman didn’t want to go. She was, she says, dragged “kicking and screaming”.
Emigrating was incredibly traumatic for her, made even tougher by the cancer that Alan contracted, which she nursed him through to his deathbed.
His gift to her had been to pay for her to get her private pilot’s licence after first learning the joy of gliding high above the Free State plains, fulfilling a dream denied her by her parents and the times when women pilots had been seen as an oddity.
“He said to me; ‘you can do it now, because the kids are old enough to look after themselves if something happens to you’. Then he went and died.”
The gift of flight allowed her to pursue her passions, leading to the purchase of her own aircraft 15 years ago, which she flies whenever she can – or writes.
She’s in South Africa publishing her book, with a trip to her beloved Free State this weekend, but she’s also hard at work on a sequel.