MY MOTHER DIED BEFORE I COULD MURDER HER

CHAPTER 2

Early days.

      I’m a blue-eyed boy, the only son of Eidel Pandrey who was called Eddie, and Leila Ella Pandrey nee Keidan.

     My dad came from Poland, a small village outside Warsaw, and changed his name when he arrived in South Africa by boat sometime in the 1930s. I think this was when he became Eddie; after all there were a whole lot of government papers and forms to fill out on arrival in South Africa and Eddie sounded a lot less foreign than Eidel.

     Somehow, my mom had made her way from a tiny shtetel in Lithuania across Europe and had arrived by boat in Cape Town and then journeyed by train to Johannesburg with a couple of her sisters and a younger brother also in the 1930s. She was fifteen at the time, an independent soul who had set out to make a life for herself. She enrolled in school, learnt to speak English without a Lithuanian accent, and was soon working as a bookkeeper in some large manufacturing company.

     Times were really tough in South Africa. The depression had found its way down the African continent and like the rest of the world, jobs and money were scarce. The Jews in Johannesburg formed the Jewish Workers Club, and activities at the club seemed to ease the pain of the hard times. They organized theatre groups, gymnastic classes, political discussions and picnic trips to the countryside.

     It was at one of these picnics that Leila spotted handsome Eddie. He was a good looker. Some of her friends compared him to the Hollywood star, Cary Grant, dashing, tall, those soft blue eyes always smiling. She was pretty hot herself-dark, trim, and a great rack. Leila was gorgeous. She had long dark hair and beautiful legs, and she wasn’t too short, although in those days short was in. Tall women never had the same attraction for men, who were seldom more than six feet tall. Eddie was exactly six feet tall. Why isn’t that a surprise?

     Eddie slipped her into his mental filing cabinet. At the time, he was dating a number of other girls. Soon, he’d get around to her.

     Leila knew from day one that this was the man for her. She’d bide her time and one day when the opportunity presented itself, she’d close in.

     At that time Hitler was making all sorts of noises in Nazi Germany, and South Africa became a hotbed of support. There were black shirts, brown shirts, grey shirts, all kinds of shirts and shits eager to join the Fascist movement. Mosley, a British Fascist leader, visited Johannesburg and planned a rally at the city hall.

     The Jewish Workers’ Club held meetings and decided that they would break up the rally. A couple of leaders were picked and plans drawn up to disrupt Mosley and his followers, the fascist bastards. Berel Lipschitz, who was in command, drew up plans equal to those of any military strike unit. The men from the club would mingle in the crowd. They would all carry short batons, some with sand in a sock, others a short metal pipe. They’d all wear long coats or raincoats with a hole cut in the pocket. If stopped by the police they’d drop the weapon through the hole into the hem of the lining. They were just innocent bystanders caught up in the rally.

     At a given signal, the men rushed the podium. Mosley was surrounded by a number of his storm troopers who in turn were supported by members of the Afrikaans fascist movement, Die Ossewabrandwag, and policemen in plainclothes. The battle was nasty, the fighting, vicious.

     Eddie was struck across the face with a leather belt and the large buckle caught him high up on the side of his head. He felt himself losing consciousness and knew that he had to get to a side street where girls from the club were stationed, ready to nurse the wounded. He stumbled down the alley and collapsed in the arms of two girls, Minnie and Hannah.

     Leila was tending to a cut on a young man’s face when she saw Eddie collapse. Immediately she left the young man, shoved Hannah and Minnie out of the way and cradled Eddie’s head in her lap. When he came to, she held him in her arms. That was it! Instantly, before either spoke a word, they were in love.