Daddy says our lives are going according to plan. With overtime pay, he has been able to put down a deposit on a navy-blue van.
“Soon we can enjoy life like the rest of the world and take drives to Brackenfell, or Stellenbosch, or Franschhoek, or anywhere we wish.”
“And you can run to the bar whenever you want,” mutters Mommy, but he ignores her.
“Just think, with a van I can start my own business. Mavis, you’d better find a job.”
“Don’t fret. I chatted to Mr Rosenberg this morning … He’d be happy to take me on as his bookkeeper again.”
“Thank heavens for that.”
Daddy holds me in his arms over the closed half of the stable door into the back yard and pretends to throw me at the mountain. “I’m sending you back to where you belong. I caught you on the mountain and chopped your tail off. Here, feel your stygie where your tail used to be when you were a baboon.”
I don’t know if he is only playing the fool, so I get a funny feeling in my tummy. I want to laugh and cry all at the same time.
I meet a girl named Alice Haroldson. She often walks past, dragging her feet on the pavement outside our Doll’s House. She tells me she was named after a princess. She wears goggles with glass as thick as milk-bottle bottoms. They make her pale blue eyes look twice their size, like the eyes of a googly doll. Alice says she’s blind as a bat without them. There are twelve Haroldsons and they all look the same, with snow-white hair and invisible eyelashes. Daddy says they are descended from Norwegian fishermen and that’s why there’s not a dark one among them. He calls them the white rats, says all Mrs Haroldson is good for is making babies and going to the bioscope.
“She jaws a lot,” says Mommy. “And I’ve never seen the children go to Sunday school.”
“Bunch of bloody heathens.”
“You’ve got room to talk. When last were you in a church?”
The Haroldsons’ house is higgledy-piggledy and upside down. They sleep two to a bed in mismatched striped pyjamas, fighting over pillows. When Mrs Haroldson makes bread for her brood she turns the empty flour sacks into broeks. Wherever poor Alice goes, children chant, ‘Alice, Alice, goes to town, with her flour-bag broekies upside down.’ I teach Alice to shout back at them, ‘Hou jou bek, stuk spanspek’ and ‘Screm, screm, blikkie jam,’ the way the coloured children shout at me. Daddy says it means shut your mouth, you piece of melon, and scram, scram, tin of jam. Desiree and I have cream broeks with ’lastics in the legs and, as long as you don’t run, you can carry an apple or a bun in them.
Our cousins all have wild curly hair. Daddy calls them the coir mattress explosions. The firstborn is Veronica and her younger sister is Susan. The middle one is Andrew and they all go to a posh school in Pinelands, where the children wear real blazers with shiny gold buttons and carry snow-white handkerchiefs. Uncle Norman is married to Aunty Ruby and he works for the traffic department at Gallows Hill in Green Point. He has a big handlebar moustache and kind blue eyes. He bakes cakes and cooks the Sunday roast, but he has never learned how to drive a motorcar. That’s why they live right behind Crawford railway station. We think it’s funny that he works for the traffic department and he can’t even drive.
I am on my way with my cousin Andrew to the babbie shop one day when Andy Pandy tells me a rude joke. “There’s a lady standing on Crawford station with her dog called Titswobble. The dog gets lost and she asks the man at the ticket counter: ‘Have you seen my Titswobble?’ He says: ‘No, lady, but I’d like to!’”
We laugh together until we are doubled over.
“Don’t tell my mother!”
“Cross my heart.”
Whenever he sees me he mouths “Titswobble” and we fall about laughing. It’s our secret. I like Andy Pandy.
Veronica, his sister, is nothing like Andy Pandy. They live on the right side of the railway track and she speaks in a hoity-toity voice because she takes elocution lessons. There are no coloured children walking past their house shouting rude things and swearing. When she has a fight with Aunty Ruby, her mother, she calls her a beast and it causes such a to-do in their house. We don’t understand why. In our house, Daddy strings lots of swear words together, especially on a Friday night when he smells like brandy. Mommy says Daddy’s swear words are enough to make a sailor blush. Our Friday nights could make all the sailors in the world blush, including my Uncle Nicholas who is in the Royal Navy and is married to my Aunty Bubbles.
Our cousins have a big soft studio couch in the lounge and the girls have a real bedroom suite. Because their dad, Uncle Norman, has no car, there is no danger of them ever crashing, says Mommy. Not like in the back of our van, where we have to hold on tight around the bends when my daddy has had the brandy. They don’t have any cats or dogs either, because Aunty Ruby says their hair gets into everything. In their lounge there’s a picture of an English cottage, with its front door wide open and smoke curling from the twin chimney pots. We ask Aunty Ruby about the picture and the words.
“‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ was written by the clever Mr Ivor Novello,” she says, and she sings the song for us. “We’re lucky to be living at the tip of Africa where there are only blackouts and no bombs dropping on our heads. Our men have gone up north to fight Mussolini, Il Duce, and that bloody Hitler and to put some sanity back in the world. They didn’t let Uncle Charles off the hook either. You don’t have to be an able-bodied man to keep the war machine going.” She goes on and on, and sometimes we don’t understand a word she says, but we don’t say anything.
By this time, we are bored stiff, but Aunty Ruby tells us of her plans for a big party when Uncle Charles puts his feet back on South African soil. “You know your grandmother named him after a king?” she drones on. “When he comes home there’ll be a big welcome banner and Uncle Norman’s cake will have Welcome Home iced on the top. Let’s hope he comes home in one piece.”
I swear Aunty Ruby’s eyes aren’t dry.
On the way back home from our cousins I stop to visit my friend Erica. She lives with her grandmother, Granny Slabber, and her father, who is a piano tuner. They have lots of sick pianos and the keys are covered by pretty cloths embroidered with flowers, some with bluebirds and butterflies. The matching candlesticks fixed to the piano are gold and they can swivel at any angle so you can see the notes in the music book when you play. Erica says her father is like a doctor. He has to do house calls, because concert pianists’ lives depend on him being able to fix the sick keys so they can practise their scales.
I brag about my mommy singing ‘The Bells of St Mary’s’ in the Cape Town City Hall when she was little. “She wanted with all her heart to be a concert pianist, but my grandmother had too many mouths to feed. And she had to buy built-up shoes for Uncle Charles.”
I don’t tell Erica that now that my mommy is big she has a husband who drinks and her own children to feed, and I need special boots, and so she still can’t afford piano lessons. When I’m big I’m going to buy my mommy a baby grand with a lift-up lid so she can sit and play all day, with that faraway look in her eyes. My gran can make a pretty cover embroidered in Mommy’s favourite colours and we’ll cover the keys every night before we go to sleep.
Back home, I tell Mommy about Erica’s dad. That he fixes pianos. But before I even finish my story, Mrs Haroldson is calling from the front yard.
“Coo-eeee!” she calls, and Mommy pulls back the lounge curtains and waves. “I have to go to the doctor,” Mrs Haroldson shouts as she closes the gate, leaving her children – I’m not even sure how many – in the yard.
She has a toddler on her hip. We watch as she rounds the corner without a backward glance.
“Why are Mrs Haroldson’s legs so lumpy?” I ask.
“From having so many babies.”
“What the hell are those white rats doing here?”
“Mrs Haroldson has gone to the doctor.”
“And you believed her?” Daddy throws his head back and laughs. “At a wild guess, I would say she’s sitting in the Kritz with her feet up, having the time of her life, filling her big mouth with sweets and Coca-Cola. Probably jawing to the woman beside her and swooning over some film star.”
Mommy later finds out that Mrs Haroldson has used everyone in the neighbourhood to look after her children for the sole purpose of going to the Kritz Bioscope. Daddy says, I told you so!
We love our new neighbours, especially Johnny Richards and his big tan dog, Prince, because Johnny shares his Felix comics and his sherbet and sweets. They live in a brand-new house behind us. His mother is in love with Roy Rogers and plays ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ all day long. The music drifts over the back fence.
The day we moved in Dorothy Finneran brought us tea and biscuits. We are not allowed to call big people by their first names, so we have to call her Mrs Finneran. She lives opposite us with her husband Connor.
“Just look at their lovely house,” says Mommy, “with bay windows, and huge moonflowers and frangipani growing in their garden!”
They have a garage that’s been made into part of their house, with a pipe sticking out of the roof for a queen stove; they have a big black dog named after King George. Mrs Finneran has a picture of the King and Queen hanging in her lounge and she says she is a Queen’s Guide. Maybe that’s why she has a queen stove. She is a nursing sister at the Muizenberg Clinic. The children have red hair and at first they just stare at us, but after a while they invite us into their house and we get to know their ins and outs.
“Why does Mrs Finneran stand to attention when she plays her records?” Gabriel asks Mommy.
“You mean, like ‘Land of Hope and Glory’? She’s English.”
“But she’s here.”
“She still lives up to all things British. She calls the King her sovereign leader and she misses her beloved Brighton.”
Gabriel swears he’s heard her sing ‘All Things Brighton Beautiful’.
“Can we see your finger?” we ask Maureen Finneran when we play at her house.
Desiree goes right up to the missing finger and squints at it. We’re glad we have all our fingers.
Mommy says Mrs Finneran has a stiff upper lip because she is British. I’ve looked, but her lip seems the same as ours. She says we can call her Aunty Dolly instead of Mrs Finneran. She makes beetroot salad and she rolls cold meat up like sausages and invites us on a picnic. We pile into her Ford Prefect with her Spencer and her Maureen and she drops us at Christian beach in Muizenberg. At lunchtime the picnic is laid out at the clinic on a bright red cloth on the examination table. We think it’s funny and we giggle.
“We can’t have our picnic on the beach,” says Aunty Dolly. “Babies don’t wait until after lunch to be born.”
Because she’s a nurse, she’s always right.
Her husband’s face is as red as his hair. Daddy says it’s because Mr Finneran likes his beer, like all Irishmen. Mr Finneran is a traffic cop, he works with Uncle Norman. He seems like a giant to us on his big BSA motorcycle in his khaki uniform. His muscular calves are covered in shiny brown puttees with little brass buckles. He can lift two of us at once, one on each pinkie, still wearing his leather gauntlets.
“Isn’t he a picture!” exclaims Aunty Dolly. “And the man can dance!”
She likes her dancing, Aunty Dolly does. And her music.
Don’t fence me in …
Aunty Dolly turns her music up so loud that we can clearly hear the words echoing round our lounge. She also likes the ‘Tennessee Waltz’. She calls the bioscope the pictures. It’s funny because the only pictures we know are in the Outspan magazine. Sometimes, when Mr Finneran arrives home late, full of the joys of life, they have a fight. She throws his dinner plate at him and it always seems to hit the wall. We hear about the fights between them from Spencer and Maureen. We feel sorry for them because we also have ups and downs at our house, only ours are worse.
Our neighbours are like that, a strange lot. But, says Mommy, it makes life here in this street interesting. “Come quickly. Kom gou, Mrs Le Seuer!”
It’s our neighbour opposite. If my daddy were here, he’d be really cross because she didn’t knock. “It’s my boy André! He’s having a fit!”
Mommy’s long legs are running and I’m running beside her.
“Push his tongue down! Have you got mustard?”
“Ja.”
“Fill the bath with water and add the mustard.”
André jerks and then he goes stiff and his eyes roll back in his head, and then he is quiet. When he does speak, only Afrikaans words come out of his mouth. Daddy is pleased because he wants us to learn Afrikaans.
“Since when do you have to understand a language to play marbles?” he says.
I don’t tell him about the other children we meet out on the street, especially not the coloured ones. I don’t tell him about any of them.
On my way home from Chong the Chinaman one day I meet a girl in the road. Her name is Hilary Selbourne and soon I’m in her lounge. On the wall there’s a picture of people riding on camels against a sunset glowing bright orange. Hilary’s father’s been to Egypt and he brought the picture back in his knapsack. Her little sister’s name is Gracie and her lips are pink like a doll’s, but she lisps because her tongue gets pushed to the front of her mouth. Her brothers are radio hams. I don’t know what that means but I don’t ask, because I know that I will find out later anyway. I like Mr and Mrs Selbourne because they don’t look fierce.
The only family we don’t get to know are the Beelders. Daddy says he’s seen the father in the garden and he doesn’t look white. “Don’t play with the Beelders’ children,” he warns. “That’s an order.”
André teaches me to call them halfnaartjies. He says it comes from the Afrikaans word, hotnotjies, which means little coloured children.
Mommy stops a coloured woman in the road outside our house.
“Do you know Edna?” Mommy asks her.
“Yes, Mêrem.”
“Tell her to come here tomorrow morning.”
“Goed, Mêrem.”
And so Edna arrives, with geraniums in her ears. Mommy shows Edna where she is allowed to sit when she drinks her coffee and eats her bread. She also shows her which plate and cup are hers and where she must keep them, under the sink.
“Why do you put geraniums in your ears?”
“God gave us geraniums to use as medicine. Ons Heilandse Vader, die Jirre,” and she makes the sign of the cross.
We come to love Edna as a mother. She comforts us when we’re upset. She plaits our hair and tries to keep us neat, and when we have earache she brings geraniums.
And one day when Edna answers a knock at our front door – “Madam, can I interest you in a vacuum cleaner?” – she tells Mommy, and they laugh. But Daddy doesn’t think it’s funny. He doesn’t know we play with the children in Mossienes, but we never go inside their houses, because that would be overstepping the mark. We are poor. They are poor. They have lice. We have lice. The only difference is we are white. Daddy gives us a talk before we go to bed.
“Listen, Edna’s skin looks white and her eyes are blue, just like your mother, but just remember she has a kraak, a touch of the tarbrush. Although they walk and talk just like us, their skin is not quite white like ours and her hair is kroes, worse than the coir mattress explosions.”
“Talk about rubbing it in,” mutters Mommy.
I’ve had a busy time meeting new faces and trying to fit everyone into their places. The moon is shining and my daddy isn’t home yet. I’m sitting on the kitchen table and my mommy is helping me into a pair of corduroy dungarees. Other children in other houses are getting into their pyjamas, but somehow we know we are not ordinary children in ordinary houses. Desiree and Gabriel are already dressed in their warmest clothes. Their hair is brushed over their foreheads and they smell of Mommy’s Cashmere Bouquet talcum powder.
“Why aren’t we in pyjamas?” I ask.
“Because it’s Friday,” says Gabriel, “brandy night.”
Just then, Daddy comes bursting through the door, shouting and swearing. His eyes are bulging and the veins stand out in his neck. Mommy scoops me up in her arms and I cling to her, wrapping my arms around her neck. Daddy shoves Mommy round the kitchen. We are all wailing but he is shouting and he doesn’t hear us.
“Uit, loop!”
With Out and Go ringing in our ears, we scatter like frightened animals into the black night.
Daddy has the hokkie key in his pocket, so we have to sleep in Gabriel’s pigeon hok.
“At least our Doll’s House has an outside lavatory,” says Mommy, “so we can empty our bladders like civilised people.”
The shadows with long fingers reach out for me and I’m sure the boogey man is trying to catch me. We huddle close together while Gabriel, the clown of the family, prays. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and please, Lord, don’t let the pigeons poep on my head, amen.”
Desiree and I say amen with him. The first of my bad memories.