PRESCRIPTION for a dysfunctional family: two parents wholly absorbed outside the home who turn the childcare over to granny and the servants, three children forced to live a double life, suburban conformity concealing conspiracy and subversion.
Did the children suffer? Oh, they did. They lived with pretence, confusion and the daily terror that one or both parent would be either unexpectedly incarcerated - which they sometimes were - or violently,
Their childhoods were distorted reflections of the common experience. For years Gillian Slovo nursed the embarrassing secret that, unlike the rest of humankind, she had no idea what she was doing when John Kennedy was assassinated. In hindsight she realised that on November 22nd, 1963, her mother was entering her 106th day of detention, and at the time nothing else mattered to her.
Worst of all, this fear and anguish was endured under a strict code of secrecy. Thus when South Africa's apartheid regime finally collapsed in 1990, Gillian Slovo set out on a quest to lay bare the secrets, public and private, of her parents' lives. She has written a beautiful book, powerful and moving. It puts appropriate perspective on other childhood memoirs, not to mention the recent debates on the plight of children whose parents are public figures.
Ruth First and Joe Slovo were not so much public as notorious figures for most of their lives. But as a young married couple they were rather glamorous, rebels at the centre of an invincible group of radicals who, their daughter writes, must have felt "they were riding on the crest of a wave that would never break."
Ruth was born into a Communist Party family dedicated to the pursuit of social justice. Joe, son of a Lithuanian Jewish family embraced the same principle from his early teens. They met, married and had their three daughters in what their daughter calls their Camelot years, the 1950s.
With their babies ensconced in a comfortable home in an elite white neighbourhood, Ruth and Joe went merrily about the business of challenging the imposition of apartheid. As fast as political groups were banned, they replaced them under new names as penalties for one form of sedition increased, they changed tack and found another.
They worked alongside the young black leaders in the ANC, including Mandela, Sisulu, Tambo. And played, too, flouting the law with boozy, raucous multiracial parties. Then the wave broke at Sharpeville in 1960. In the wake of protests at the massacre of 69 demonstrators, the government arrested 20,000 people, Joe among them. Ruth put on a red wig and fled in disguise with her family to Swaziland.
From there she wrote to her husband: "I expect it's sheer hell to be a hero... those who achieve heroism by struggle, unwavering and unbreakable spirit, those ones are the real heroes. It needs an experience like this to sift us all out, I expect, and put us to the test."
As all heroes learn, the sheer hell is that you are tested not once but again and again, in constantly changing circumstances - higher stakes, greater danger, further consequences for others. Ruth and Joe were among that band who consistently placed the fight to end oppression in South Africa before all else, and that choice is the recurring theme in this book.
But while the author examines it repeatedly, in the context of her parents' and other leaders' lives, she does so without judgment. She has written her report with a determination to respect their decisions as well as to record their flaws without airbrushing.
Of course, there were parent child tensions. The last time Gillian saw her mother, they battled their way across the familiar terrain of Ruth's parental shortcomings and Gillian's grievances: reproach, guilt, attack, defence. They parted coolly.
As for her father, Joe's reaction to his daughter's decision to search out and expose the hidden past was fury. It's not her business, he shouted at her, refusing to co operate. When the argument ended in an impasse, he held out a hand silently in reconciliation.
Ruth and Joe were as imperfect as partners as they were as parents. In her relentless search into their pasts, Gillian found quarrels, grudges, infidelities, lies. Ruth had one affair that nearly ended the marriage. Joe fathered a son whose existence he never acknowledged, though it was widely known among his comrades.
All told, here were ordinary flawed human beings. One of them was blown to pieces by a letter bomb in 1982, and the most harrowing passage in this book is Gillian's interview with the South African agent responsible for that. The other lived on the run or in exile for 30 years as he organised armed resistance, only to die slowly and painfully from cancer shortly after his triumphant return to a place of honour in Mandela's Cabinet.
Here was an ordinary flawed family. The Slovo children grew up with admiration and anger, resentment, grief, joy, humour and a profound pride in parents who responded to history with heroism. This book is testimony to the fact that love is not a petty business, and human relationships' defy prescriptions.