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from home without showing a tinge of trepidation or sadness. At eight she was the smiling big sister whom I adored, who with Bokkie taught me to read when I was only three. Bernice could handle anything. Hidings with Bok’s belt, helping with meals, being away from home, picking ticks from my scrotum, reading and telling me stories. But, whenever my siblings boarded the bus, I felt pangs of sorrow on Lena’s behalf. I could never quite forget her suppressed tears and unspoken pleas the first time we dropped her in Hluhluwe. That once, she had almost wept and again — but of this I’m no longer certain — after the first weekend as she and Bernice walked towards the bus. Barely six, two front teeth missing. And off she went. Cardboard suitcase in hand. Thank God for Bernice. How could you bear to be so alone without an older sister to take care of you?
    ‘Jirre, she’s brave,’ Bok said of my youngest sister. ‘Resilient. A will of iron for such a little girl.’ We drove back through Hluhluwe Game Reserve while Bokkie tried hard to hide her tears. I wondered how it would be for me, when the time came: to leave the game reserve, Bok and Bokkie, Chaka and Suz. Even as I begged to go to school already at three so that I could be as clever as Bernice and our oldest cousin Stephanie, leaving home was a fate too terrible to contemplate.
     
    During the years home alone with Bok and Bokkie, first at Mkuzi then Umfolozi, and in response to my recurring appeals, Bokkie and Bernice taught me to read and write. Visiting Dademan and Mumdeman in Charters Creek, Mumdeman allowed me to show off my talent to their tourists. Once I could string together a coherent sentence, my other games alternated with writing in the grey school jotters brought home by my sisters. Bernice, Lena and I invented Gogga, a secret language only the three of us could understand. All the vowels of a word were kept the same, and ten of the alphabet’s consonants were changed: b to bok, d to did, g to gog, k to kyk, 1 to loel, m to mim, n to nee, p to pop, s to soos, t to tit.
    ‘Loeletitsoos gogo aneedid poploelay witith tithe didogogsoos,’ I’d say, and Lena might respond, ‘We firsoostit have tito dido tithe didisooshesoos or weloelloel gogetit a hididineegog.’
    Our speaking in Gogga could drive Bokkie and Mumdeman to distraction and eventually the language was more or less banned from our home and our grandparents’ home. ‘You’re Afrikaners now,’ Mumdeman said. ‘You sound like Makoppolanders from the wrong side of Mount Meru when you speak that gibberish. Talk Afrikaans or English and be proud of your heritage.’ Lena and I continued speaking Gogga later in St Lucia and in Toti when we didn’t want anyone to understand what we were saying. In the Berg I began teaching the language to Dominic. Soon he and I could rattle it off faster than English. And so Dom and I had Gogga and English — even when it was an Afrikaans week in the Berg. Though eventually we seldom spoke Gogga, we continued using it to joke, or, when the need arose for secrecy or simply to tease the others by pretending publicly at sharing something exclusive. Dominic and my Gogga had six further altered consonants: c to coc, f to fick, j to jol, v to vis, w to wow and y to yok. The only other place I used Gogga was in my diary. There I put down the stuff I didn’t want in English or Afrikaans. On the off chance of the book being discovered where I hid it in the slit of my mattress, at least my worst thoughts and actions — those I even dared write in Gogga — would be rendered as partly incomprehensible. Once my Latin is good enough, I told myself, I’ll graduate to using that as my secret language, even though Ma’am said Latin was a very difficult — almost impossible — language to use for modern discourse and idiom. Its real use lies in enhancing your understanding of the music you sing, she said, and of the English we write and speak, and, of course,