Maybe they would tell us to go, even though Pa worked here? There were unwritten rules about who belonged where. Sometimes it was to do with what colour you were or how much money you had. Other times, it was about who you knew so that your colour or your money didn’t matter. A ripple of applause drifted from above. The smartly dressed officers disappeared inside the ship. This seemed to be a signal for the sailors, who fell into chattering groups and headed for the Queen Victoria gate without paying us any attention. No one leant over Hood’s railings and ordered us to leave.
I stood up straighter and let go of Pa’s hand.
‘They’ve got an aeroplane on board!’ Pa chuckled, not at all bothered by the disturbance, ‘it’s called a Fairey Flycatcher, and it takes off to check for enemy ships over the horizon. You know we spoke about the horizon – the furthest you can see?’
‘A Fairey Flycatcher!’ I shivered. Mostly I wasn’t scared of smart, impatient folk – why should they bother with me? – but I was secretly afraid of the sinister black-and-white flycatchers that swooped through the proteas around Ricketts Terrace. We called them butcher birds because they speared their insect prey on barbed wire before eating them. Curing them, Ma liked to tease; waiting till they were just a little crispy, like raisins …
‘Lou?’ Pa gave me a nudge. ‘Say goodbye to Hood, now, and let’s get on.’
I blew a hasty kiss at the vast ship with its hidden fairy aeroplane and wormed through the crush after Pa. I’d never seen a real plane, like I’d never seen a real ballet dancer. Only a picture of one, fragile as a dragonfly. Pa said its wings were clothed in magical gossamer that could lift it above Simon’s Town, above the heat—
‘Mind!’ Pa caught me as I stumbled on a set of rails that led to a crane with the neck of a giraffe. Why, I gasped, were so many machines in this place built to resemble animals or birds? Maybe it was to encourage them to go faster or reach higher, like wild creatures. To poach their energy. A giant hook lay among a tumble of chains on the ground. I quickly crouched down to feel if it pulsed with some special, savage power …
‘Don’t touch!’ Pa glanced about, then pulled out his handkerchief to wipe the rust off my hand before I might wipe it on my dress. ‘That crane rolls along to where the ship’s moored – see? It bends its head to lift up the cargo’ – I giggled as Pa mimed a heavy load, staggering under its pretended weight – ‘then swings it on board.’
He held me aside as a fresh squad of sailors marched past, their blue bell-bottom trousers flapping about their legs. Without breaking stride, they nodded to Pa and grinned at me. I waved at them.
‘Now what have we here? Hold my hand!’
I started back. It was as if the same almighty force that had thrust up the rocks on Seaforth Beach had now chosen to punch a hole in the sea, drain it of water and set it as a trap for trespassers to fall into.
‘This,’ Pa swung his free hand over the gaping hole, ‘is a dry dock. It’s where we bring ships that need to be out of the water to get mended. We dug it out of the sea and lined its sides – with granite stone all the way from England, mind – before they could collapse.’
‘Why are there people down there?’ I craned forward to see tiny figures scurrying about. Pa tightened his grip on my hand.
‘They’re fixing a wooden cradle at the bottom, exactly the shape of the broken ship. Then,’ Pa’s voice rose with pride, ‘we open the gates and let the water flood in – whoosh! The ship sails in, we pump out the water and it settles on the cradle.’
I stared at the massive gates and pictured the water tumbling in, licking the edges of the dry dock, hungrier than the tides at Seaforth, pouring into your mouth, filling your ears, drowning you before anyone could grab you and pull you clear …
‘Pa?’
The men were gathering together, and then they were lifting someone onto a stretcher and slowly climbing out of the hole, every step a draining effort to keep the stretcher steady. Pa pulled me away and shielded my eyes as they staggered to the surface and lurched past us. I peeped through his fingers and saw a man with a crooked leg. White bone jutted from his flesh. Blood trickled onto the canvas of the stretcher. He was moaning.
Pa waited until they’d gone before he released me.
‘Will he die?’ I sometimes saw death in Pa’s face when he came home. I didn’t ask him about it, but I knew someone had died. And I’d send a prayer to Jesus, and to Allah just in case, to thank them that it wasn’t Pa.
‘Of course not!’ Pa squeezed me and put on a cheery tone. ‘It’s easy to fall down there. They’ll take him to hospital and patch him up. Now, Lou,’ he pointed at the dry dock walls, ‘see those crests? See HMS Durban?’ Around the inner perimeter stretched a row of badges painted in bold colours and decorated with swags like Ma made on her hand-cranked sewing machine.
‘Once a ship is mended, it’s allowed to paint its crest on the wall. It’s a tradition, like your ma making smoked snoek just as her ma before her. Or old Mr Phillips along the Terrace, whittling pipes.’
I stared at this latest wonder of my seven-years-and-one-day treat: a slippery dock carved out of the bright, restless sea that I loved, and decorated with the painted crests of ships returned to health. And I knew it was a sign.
I grabbed Pa’s hand with both of mine.
‘When I grow up, Pa, I’m going to mend things, too!’
Chapter Three
Piet Philander sat on the grass above Seaforth Beach, and rested his forehead on his bare, drawn-up knees. He often came here at night. The sea flowed in and out with regularity, the moon travelled steadily and luminously across the sky, and the sound of breaking surf concealed the shouts and breakages that arose from the Philander cottage up the lane.
It wasn’t that Piet was abused.
His father didn’t actually beat him. Or, he didn’t set out to beat him. But sometimes he fell over and if Piet was in the way then Piet fell over, too. This happened when Piet was trying to help, trying to get his father to sit down, or trying to get him out of his sea boots and into bed. So Seaforth, with its predictable tides watched over by a benign moon, became the antidote to the chaos that gripped the cottage at the end of the day. In the summer, when it was warm, he often took a thin sheet down to the stretch of grass above the sand, and rolled himself in it and slept there beneath the palm trees, with the sea in his ears. Piet never told anyone about this, except Louise. And then only to say that he did it because it was too hot to sleep indoors.
Amos Philander, Piet’s father, was a fisherman, as his father had been before him. As would Piet, Amos liked to boast. The family owned a creaky boat that went out most days to lay nets and then he and Piet and whoever happened to be around would pull them in from the shore. If the weather was fair and Amos was sober and the catch was good, he swiftly spent his earnings in the nearest liquor store. That translated into a lot of stumbling about, some shouting, and no chance for Piet to get to sleep that night. In fact, he didn’t sleep much at all, worrying about his father and whether there would be enough money left over for food and, from time to time, a school uniform. Piet couldn’t help growing but growth cost money, even if you bought from the second-hand store. And you couldn’t arrive at the Arsenal Road School in clothes with holes, the teachers turned you away at the gate.
Piet helped most afternoons with the hauling in of the nets. It was hard, aching work especially if the sea was running high and currents pulled at the ropes, dragging them away. But it was worth it when the net scraped onto the sand laden with silvery fish, jumping and thrashing. Fishing was a living. Well, just about.
He used to hover nearby when the catch was sold, hoping to persuade his father to part with some of the money that changed hands.
‘We need milk and bread, Pa, and I need money for a shirt,’ Piet urged, ‘otherwise I must borrow from Uncle Den or the Ahrendts.’
‘Try your Uncle Den,’ Amos chortled, ‘he’s rolling. Now help me with these nets.’
But U
ncle Den wasn’t rolling.
No one was rolling.
Life was a struggle unless you were lucky enough to work for the Royal Navy. When word got out that there was work in the dockyard, the queues for jobs used to stretch from the Queen Vic gate all the way to the station. The last time that happened was when the Hood had been in, and extra hands were needed to help load stores: eggs and fresh vegetables from the farms at Murdoch Valley, and cases of Cape wine. The Royal Navy not only paid well, it ate well, too.
The morning after the night before, Amos Philander was always apologetic.
‘Won’t happen again, Pietie, I promise. But since your ma died …’
‘Ma would be angry,’ Piet answered back, under his breath.
‘Now you mind your tongue!’ Amos growled. ‘You know nothing about anything.’
‘I know something—’
‘Leave it,’ Uncle Den pulled Piet away. ‘We’ll manage.’
Uncle Den waited until Amos had moved off. ‘I check his trousers before I wash them, Piet.’ He winked. ‘Sometimes Amos forgets money in his pockets!’
Uncle Den was Piet’s father’s older brother. He’d come to live with them when his wife died. At first, Den helped with the boat but then he hurt his back. So now he swept the cottage once a week, did the washing when it piled up, and cooked whenever there was enough money to buy fresh vegetables to go with the fish: galjoen, snoek, kingklip if they were lucky. He also kept the peace between Amos and Piet. What else could he do? Piet needed a mother. Instead, he had a father who drank himself silly trying to forget her. But life was never meant to be fair. Piet would have to learn. After all, if he wanted to inherit the boat from Amos, he’d need to keep his father sweet.
‘Piet,’ Den coaxed, ‘give your Uncle Den a hand with this washing. Hang it out – you know how my back hates bending and stretching.’
Piet came over and grabbed the pile without a word.
Den sighed. Piet was a good boy at heart. And he had a friend in Louise Ahrendts, the pretty, barefoot daughter of Solly Ahrendts up on Ricketts Terrace. They spent their weekends beachcombing, usually with either Solly or Sheila in attendance. If he, Den, had a daughter, he’d also never let her out of his sight. Everyone thought boys were the most valuable commodity, but girls, in Den’s opinion, were priceless. And if Piet played his cards right? Solly had a steady job, his wife worked, there was income. And Louise looked like being an only child.
Piet pegged a shirt on the line Uncle Den had strung up with creaking difficulty between the cottage and the peeling trunk of a gum tree. Before Den arrived, he and his father used to spread their wet clothes inside the house to dry. But Den was getting old, and Piet dreaded what would happen when he and his father were once more alone in the cottage above Seaforth. He could run away, but then he’d give up his right to the place, and to the boat and to the patch of Simon’s Bay they called their own. It would be different if he stayed at school, but already Amos was talking about how Piet would leave in five years’ time when he turned sixteen to man the boat full-time. Piet often listened hungrily to Solly Ahrendts describing how he’d won an apprenticeship at eighteen with the Royal Navy and gone on to become a mechanic, with regular pay at the end of each week that didn’t vary with the Cape weather or if the fish were choosing to rise or not.
And then there was Louise.
His Lou, with perfect golden skin, almond eyes and long dark hair that swirled down her back like the running waterfall above Admiralty House. Piet wasn’t very good with words but you didn’t need words to notice how people couldn’t take their eyes off her. He saw it all the time. Fishermen stared at her when they saw her down by the boat, his classmates’ fathers stared when they saw her on the street. Men looked at Louise with a kind of greed.
There was one other possibility.
Already he’d been sounded out by some of the flashy types who hung around the boats from time to time, men who carried knives in their pockets that weren’t for gutting fish.
‘Looking for pocket money?’ they would say, flashing a roll of notes. ‘Anytime, jong, anytime …’
Chapter Four
While Ma and Pa guarded me from one birthday to the next, the wind regularly tried to uproot our Ricketts Terrace cottage. Ma fretted – with a pleading glance upwards to whichever of Allah or Jesus happened to be watching over us that day – that our place groaned and listed like a weary soul not long for this world.
‘Enough,’ Pa muttered, with a glance at me, ‘you’ll frighten the child.’
If, like me, you were born in Simon’s Town you understood the power of wind without being warned. Wind was in my bones, especially the murderous kind that barrelled over the shoulder of the Simonsberg in the hot glare of summer. Like the unwritten rules about colour or girl-ness, there were unwritten rules about our wind. If the sea inside the harbour wall was choppy, we were probably safe. But if waves were actually cresting and breaking, it meant a black southeaster, a blow so powerful it could sweep you off your feet, drive fishing boats onto the rocks, even uproot a line of cottages. And it could last for days.
‘Inside, Lou!’ Ma yelled as I tried to help her rescue washing off the heaving line. ‘You’ll get blown away! Inside!’
When it ended, a stinging, apologetic rain would arrive and wrap the battered Terrace in mist and reduce the Simonsberg Mountain to a ghost. As a child I dreaded the attack of the black wind, but at least it came at you directly. You could feel it, and set your back against it. The silent creep of the mist was a more subtle assault. To me it was like a snake, a cobra uncoiling through the grass, a threat that might engulf you when you least expected it, when you thought the worst was over.
Today, though, the wind was biding its time behind the Simonsberg and the snake-mist lurked only in my imagination. Piet was taking advantage of the calm by skipping pebbles into the sea at Seaforth Beach. It was low tide, too shallow for bellyflops, and the water rippled satinsoft around our feet. A formation of sleek terns wheeled in the sky and came in to land on a distant rock. Children looked up from their sandcastles to watch Piet’s thin wrist draw back and flick the stone low and hard to make it hop on the surface, dancing two, three, four times before sinking; then taking the next one out of his pocket, aiming, drawing back, flicking, in a rhythm that seemed formed of one smooth movement rather than several separate ones.
Draw back, flick, skip! A low fizzing arc, a trace of silvery droplets …
Piet and I became friends soon after I fell in love with the sea. He taught me to find the spell to make stones skip, and how to surf the curling breakers safely when the wind was up. I couldn’t teach Piet anything as powerful as that, so instead I taught him about the sea’s quieter side, its ethereal whisper when you held a shell to your ear.
Yet lately – in fact since the last heavy southeaster – his throwing seemed less joyful, less skilful, more about flinging than aiming. And he lost interest in my seashell sounds. No one else noticed because Piet could always attract admirers even when he wasn’t trying. But I could tell. I could read Piet’s moods like I could tell the turn of the tide.
We’d swum earlier on, him churning through long swells beyond the protruding rocks, me treading water a little way back among the brown kelp fronds that swayed in the current, their roots anchored to the seabed.
‘Piet?’
Next to me, on the sand, lay three perfectly round sea urchin shells that he’d dived for and brought up from the depths. Each was a pale, delicate shade of stippled green, lighter than a Granny Smith apple but not as yellow as a Golden Delicious. Most urchins were already chipped when you found them, but Piet prided himself on knowing where the intact ones hid, protected under a rocky ledge or between plush anemones. Piet knew the seabed like a farmer knows his land.
‘Piet!’
I loved Piet, just like I loved the sea.
This time he heard me, loped up the beach and flopped down at my side, leaning back on his elbows and turning his face
up to the sun. His black hair was plastered to his head in a neat circumference where Uncle Den had cut it with the help of a kitchen bowl.
‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’
He picked up a handful of sand and let it dribble though his fist, making a tiny, golden cone.
‘I suppose I’ll be a fisherman.’
‘But that’s not what I asked,’ I tickled him in the side. ‘I asked what you wanted to be, not what you had to be!’
He shrugged, reached for another handful of sand and made a second cone. ‘Don’t know.’
I hugged my knees to my chest. A gull swooped down to peck at a rope of seaweed. I’d learnt to wait, with Piet. Sometimes for words, mostly for him to do something. Perhaps he already had? Maybe the wild flinging-stones-into-the-sea was what you did when you happened to be a boy and you hated the life that seemed picked out for you. I could understand that. But you didn’t have to accept it without a fight. Surely he knew that? I tried to help him along.
‘Remember when I went to the dockyard? When the Hood was in?’
He nodded.
‘Well,’ I leant against his bony, sun-warmed shoulder, ‘I saw the dry dock where they fix ships and I said to Pa that I wanted to fix things, too.’
I’d never talked about my dream to anyone before. It brooded in my heart, day after day, too uncertain to be shared, like a Fairey Flycatcher in search of a distant, clouded horizon. And too bold. A Terrace girl studying beyond school …
‘But you can’t work there!’ Piet scoffed. ‘They don’t take girls in the docks!’
‘I know that, silly! I don’t want to fix ships!’
Piet shifted around to look at me. His tanned face was intense but also strangely hesitant.
‘I want to fix people, Piet,’ I bit my lip and plunged on, ‘I want to be a nurse. A sister in a hospital, maybe even a matron!’
The Girl from Simon's Bay Page 2