The House of Dreams and the Red Diaper Brigade

“When I first came to England, after my parents went into exile, I was 13 and extremely unhappy at being uprooted and transplanted…I would have long travels in my mind around the garden at 154 Regent Street, re-living childhood games, the corners of the garden where they were played, which  flowers, trees and bushes were where. It was one of the most comforting things I had…”

(Frances Bernstein in an email to Johanna Kistner).

In the aftershock of the xenophobic violence in Joburg’s inner city suburbs in 2009, Johanna Kistner and her team launched an urgent search for premises that would allow them to expand their “Suitcase Project" for refugee children. 

 

It took several years and a change of principals before Observatory Girls Primary School gave Sophiatown Community Psychological Services the go-ahead to occupy the house at 154 Regent Street in Observatory rent-free, provided the project carried the costs of rehabilitating and renovating the property.

In the intervening years, the project had established a vibrant venture combining gender activism, art and psychological healing at 20 Derby Road in Bertrams.  Interestingly this is where the Chinese hero, Chow Kwai For lived in the early 1900s.  I wrote about him in 2011 in a blog post entitled ‘Suicide for conscience sake – the story of Chow Kwai For". (http://melodyemmettsbezvalley.blogspot.com/2011/10/suicide-for-conscience-sake-story-of.html).

 

The abandoned Regent Street House, originally built in 1918, was a sad place when the school handed over the keys. Destitute people had built shacks attached to the front and back of the house and young sex workers were using the place to hide from the police. “It was horrible: walls not only bulging with water from a burst geyser, but also conveying a profound sense of... misery…Broken furniture lay strewn around, electrical wires hung unconnected, every tap had been removed for illegal recycling, and downstairs in a basement…the ceiling had collapsed and a wide crack surrounded the natural rock…”

 After a long process of reconstruction, community worker Thabo Sepuru stood in the street in front of the transformed building and commented: “It’s the house of our dreams”. Today The House of Dreams is a place of restoration and healing for children from crowded inner city slums and women displaced by war, disease and abuse.   

 

Thotho (Senga Wabulakombe), a project worker who lives on the property, tells the story of a middle-aged man who arrived unexpectedly and asked if he could look around, explaining that he had lived in the house as a child.

 

A few months later, the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation announced that the house had been declared a national heritage site.

The unexpected visitor turned out to be one of four children of the courageous Communist Party stalwarts Hilda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Bernstein) and Rusty Bernstein (http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/lionel-rusty-bernstein) who lived in the house between 1946 and 1963.  In these years of fragmentation, harassment, arrest, detention and solitary confinement, Rusty Bernstein is said to have drafted the Freedom Charter.

Finally the family fled to England.

In the weeks following the revelation about the house’s history, Johanna made contact with some of the adult Bernstein children and with Barbara Harmel, a family friend who spent much of her childhood in the Regent Street house. Barbara coined the phrase “The Red Diaper Brigade” to describe the children of communists who grew up in inner city suburbs in the 1950s.