The Girl from Simon's Bay

by Barbara Mutch

  ‘What!’

  ‘Everyone thinks I’ll be a maid or a nanny but I want to try for more—’

  He looked away.

  I waited for him to say something – even to tell me why I was wrong to be so forward – but he just stared at the lively waves breaking towards shore. I opened my mouth to ask why he wasn’t keen for me, but he turned his narrow shoulder and stared up into the rocky face of the Simonsberg. A breeze eddied down from the mountain and whipped up dry sand, sending it stinging across the beach. I found myself shivering. Maybe ambition was like the black southeaster, or the slithering mist that followed it. An attack. A trap. I’d never thought of my dream like that.

  I picked up a handful of sand and dribbled it through my fingers.

  ‘Is something the matter with Piet?’ Ma raised her voice to me as she brushed my hair before bed a week or two later. The wind had returned, blowing for three straight days, making every conversation a shouting match. Even Pa and old Jack Gamiel, taking an evening dop in the sitting room, were yelling at one another as if they were deaf.

  ‘No, Ma.’

  Ma and Pa knew Piet was often hungry and they knew Amos neglected him. But hunger and neglect were not things we spoke about. After all, there was hunger and neglect in varying doses all around us and you couldn’t fill everyone’s need. If Piet had shown black eyes or weeping wounds apart from his scarred hands, then Pa would have gone round to the Seaforth cottage and shouted at Amos. Instead, Ma regularly invited Piet for supper. In return he promised to look after me when we walked to and from school past the skollies that lurked in Quarry Road and the smooth men in motor cars who might snatch a pretty girl right off the street, although Pa said this was Ma’s imagination overheating. But Ma declared that while boys could mostly look after themselves, you could never be too careful with a daughter. Even a barefoot one who could probably out-sprint any unexpected kidnapper.

  ‘Piet’s fine,’ I reached out to finger the collection of shells that paved the top of my bookcase. Green sea urchins, spiral alikreukel, toothed cowries. Grown-ups had probably forgotten what it was like to have best friends: you protected them, you were loyal to them and kept their secrets, unlike most grown-ups who loved to gossip about theirs. ‘He just gets tired working the nets.’

  ‘Ja,’ said Ma, and kissed me goodnight. ‘Fishing’s no picnic.’

  But it wasn’t about tiredness.

  He’d eventually wished me luck, but with an edge in his voice. And, as the wind built in the coming days, he began to turn away, hoarding his own secret. Not in hope, like me, but furtively. Sly as a leopard hiding its kill in the branches of a tree. Then last week, with clear skies overhead and only the slightest hint of the coming blow, I tried to bring him back.

  ‘Let’s go to Seaforth!’ I whispered, with a backward glance to where Ma was engrossed with sewing new kitchen curtains. ‘We can swim and we’ll be in time to see the boats come in—’

  ‘No,’ he cut in swiftly. ‘I don’t feel like it today. And Pa has enough people to help him.’ He looked towards the glittering sweep of False Bay and thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’ He edged towards the front door. ‘Bye, Mrs Ahrendts.’

  But Piet loved to swim! The sea was our shared playground, the heart of our friendship. I felt a stealing fear. Maybe getting older was less about compiling years and more about what you were forced to leave behind. The bite of salt on your lips, the glide of water between your toes … The friends you’d grown up with?

  I ran out of the door and caught up with him. ‘Piet!’

  He turned, his black eyes defensive. There was a hole in his shirt, on the elbow, where the cloth had rubbed too thin to survive. I caught his arm. The sinews strained like wire beneath my hand. ‘What’s wrong, Piet? Is it your pa?’

  ‘No,’ he shrugged me off. ‘You go if you want to.’

  I watched him stride away, across the stream at the Hewsons’, past the mosque, then down Alfred Lane without his usual look-back-and-wave, and became conscious of a deep and uncomfortable clutch at my heart. It wasn’t a feeling I’d had before, even for the butcher birds that watched me, or the mist that liked to wrap its damp fingers about me.

  You go if you want to.

  He wasn’t worried I might swim alone, something we’d always vowed not to do because you never knew what could happen, a freak wave rising out of a flat sea, a shark gliding close to shore …

  You go if you want to.

  He didn’t seem to care.

  Chapter Five

  Even though Ma gave me an opening, I never told her that Piet had stopped caring for me like he used to. One word from me would have stirred Ma into indignant action – she was always aching for the chance to tackle Piet’s pa who was surely the cause of all the trouble in the Philander household. And through her fuss, Piet might have been prised from his secret plans.

  Instead, I let Ma believe we were as close as ever.

  And I told myself he’d come back to me, that there was nothing to worry about. I just needed to wait. After all, everyone knew boys grew up differently from girls. It was the way they were put together, the way Jesus intended them to be: stronger, sometimes moody, sometimes trying things they never should have in order to know how far they could push before they fell.

  Yet I knew, somewhere inside my own growing heart, that I was neglecting Piet.

  Not in the careless way of his pa, but out of my own selfish distraction.

  I was only fourteen, but all around Simon’s Town, parents of girls my age were staying up late and letting candles burn down while they considered their daughters’ future.

  My future.

  Possible jobs were discussed and, most importantly, marriage prospects.

  Did he have a good heart? Did he have money – or parents with it?

  Was there madness or drunkenness or flightiness in the family?

  There was no time to waste. I must come out with my ambition before it was too late.

  Perhaps I could cry, to add weight? Ma and Pa might pay more attention if there were tears. I already knew they didn’t imagine a future for me that went beyond marriage and domestic service. That was how far I could expect to go, even if I worked hard. I should be mindful of – and grateful for – my place on the pyramid.

  How could I tell Ma and Pa it wasn’t enough?

  That I wasn’t grateful. Or mindful.

  Yet I couldn’t say I was neglected, like Piet. Why, when there was money to spare in Ma’s tin savings box in the kitchen at the end of the year, Ma and Pa took me on a train trip to Cape Town, third class, to see the New Year’s Coon Carnival.

  ‘Much taller than the Simonsberg!’ I craned out of the window at Table Mountain, soaring above feathery cloud.

  ‘Such a crush,’ yelled Ma as we pushed our way down Adderley Street. ‘The whole Cape’s here!’

  ‘Daar kom die Ali-ba-ma!’ sang the painted Coons in their satin costumes.

  The outside world left me in raptures.

  In a rash moment, Pa promised to let me complete my schooling through to eighteen. Most girls left earlier, as soon as they’d been promised in marriage, especially if it was to an older man who might have patted them on the head years before and asked if they were spoken for. Girls, you see, became a burden unless spoken for. But even if I stayed at school, marriage was the target once I finished, with a domestic job hopefully fitted in on the side.

  ‘You’ll be well treated working for a navy family, Lou,’ Pa said, when my future employment was discussed at the kitchen table, ‘and better paid than out there—’ he waved his spoon northwards.

  ‘It’s more than that, Solly,’ Ma interrupted, ladling out tomato soup. ‘They’ll keep you on once you have children, they won’t throw you out. Lou will need to contribute.’

  A prospective husband’s fishing, she was implying, wouldn’t bring in enough to feed and clothe a family. Piet, it seemed, had already been cleared as a potential husband
.

  ‘I told your pa you’ll be happier with a boy you know,’ Ma confided later in the privacy of my room, ‘rather than some older stranger with more money.’

  ‘Ricketts girls don’t get fancy jobs,’ Vera scoffed on the subject of work, teasing her hair into a frizz above her head. ‘We’re here to make babies, Lou, so you better get used to it.’

  My friends were already eyeing up the local boys they knew and the occasional smooth types in cars, setting their caps at the ones seen to be the most promising, and hinting of their interest to their parents. ‘You’re lucky to have Piet in the bag,’ Vera giggled, giving me a little pinch. ‘You don’t have to try so hard.’ She’d perfected a turned-out foot pose in front of the mirror to attract boys into the back row of the Criterion bioscope or around the side of Sartorial House, where the models in the window wore uniforms and gold-braided caps set at rakish angles that imitated her intent.

  But I needed to test my dream before coming out with it.

  ‘Mr Venter?’ I approached my schoolteacher one day after class was dismissed.

  I couldn’t ask Mrs Hewson next door, or Mr Phillips along the Terrace who had grown-up daughters and ought to know about ambition and marriage and if they could be reconciled, or my Sunday school teacher who might know Jesus’s opinion. They’d all be so astonished by my question that they’d have to tell Pa or Ma.

  ‘Yes, Louise?’

  I took a breath.

  ‘Sir, what must I do if I want a career? If I want to become a nurse?’

  ‘Well now,’ he puffed out his cheeks, holding a book halfway between his desk and his briefcase, ‘first you must study hard to get a good matric, then you must apply to a nursing college. What do your parents say?’

  I hesitated. Girls, of course, didn’t ask about careers without the support of their parents, especially poor girls who lived in wind-blown cottages and ran barefoot to the beach. But if I admitted I hadn’t spoken to Pa or Ma, he might not answer my next – and most important – question.

  ‘How much does it cost to become a nurse, sir?’

  He looked me over, from my collar to my shoes.

  I blushed. Ma darned my uniform, but the darns were so neat surely he couldn’t see them?

  ‘I don’t know, Louise,’ his tone softened. ‘Perhaps you could work while you’re training, to cover your tuition.’

  My heart gave a tentative surge. If I could find after-school work as a waitress downtown, or as a part-time cleaner for a navy family, perhaps I could save enough in advance. Fourteen years old was surely sufficient to earn a proper wage.

  ‘I want to apply to the Victoria Hospital,’ I blurted.

  We’d passed the Victoria on the train when we took our New Year’s trip to Cape Town. It was named in honour of the same queen whose letters adorned the gates I’d walked through on my seven-years-and-one-day treat. Wouldn’t it be right – I tried to quell my excitement – wouldn’t it be fitting to go there?

  ‘No, Louise,’ he resumed packing and closed his case with a snap, ‘rather try somewhere else. You’ll struggle to get in to the Victoria.’

  ‘But, sir? If I get top marks in my matric, why won’t they take me?’

  He looked down at his hands resting on the top of his briefcase, spread his fingers as if inspecting his nails, then glanced back at me with a kind of pity. I hated that. I didn’t want anybody’s pity.

  ‘You’ll be competing with white girls from the best schools in the country,’ he said, with a passing glance around our classroom. ‘Even if you study hard, you may never reach the required standard.’

  I looked at the cracked but serviceable blackboard in dismay, at the pile of textbooks we shared, one between two students. I’d never felt deprived before; poor, certainly, a little too brown, sometimes. But never deprived. Not while I lived between the sea and the mountains, with the diamond-bright sand beneath my feet.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said as he buttoned his jacket and took up the case, ‘but it’s best you don’t make the mistake of going after something that isn’t possible.’

  I bit back tears.

  ‘Yes, Mr Venter.’

  He stopped at the classroom door. ‘You’re an excellent student, Louise. It’s not your fault.’

  I nodded and lifted my chin.

  ‘Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, sir.’

  The sun was fierce on my head as I trudged along St George’s Street past the dockyard where I’d first nurtured the seductive hope, foolishly allowed it to grow …

  The palms drooped like collapsed umbrellas. The sea smouldered beneath a white-baked sky. It was the sort of day when fire could spring up on the mountain like an avenging genie and threaten to burn down our cottage and then there would be more to cry over than just a dream going up in smoke.

  I wiped the sweat from my neck and stopped outside the post office.

  If you work hard … Pa’s words goaded me from the glaring sea, the baked sky.

  I queued in a line of white ladies to look in the post office’s telephone directory. One of them smiled at me, the others paid me no attention. Their daughters would never hear what Mr Venter had just told me. I wrote down the address at the back of my homework notebook where Ma, who signed off my work every night, wouldn’t see.

  ‘Louise?’ called Lola from across the road. ‘Coming to the bioscope?’

  ‘Sorry!’ I shouted back. ‘I have to help my ma.’

  ‘Goody two-shoes!’ she yelled.

  ‘Lazybones!’

  Back home, I threw off my uniform and pulled on shorts and a shirt.

  I’d show them!

  I’d show them all.

  I hauled the dry washing from the line and folded it and piled it on Ma’s bed. Then I moved my shell collection off the bookcase, dusted the surface, wiped my sweaty palms and put down a piece of lined paper. I usually did my homework at the kitchen table but what I was about to create required secrecy, even though Ma and Pa weren’t due home for another few hours.

  The muezzin’s afternoon call drifted from the mosque.

  Ricketts Terrace

  Simon’s Town

  Dear Matron, I began in my neatest handwriting,

  My name is Louise Ahrendts. I am fourteen years old. I live in Simon’s Town with my parents and I go to high school. Since I was seven, I have dreamt of becoming a nurse. I want to dedicate my life to the sick and to those who can’t take care of themselves. It would be an honour to be allowed to apply to the Victoria Hospital for training.

  I am already the top student in my class, but I know I must work much harder to compete against many clever girls from all over the Union. Can you please tell me what matric results I must get to be accepted, and how much money it will cost to become a nurse? I can’t ask my parents to pay for my career, so I will work after school for the next four years to save enough to pay for myself.

  With sincere gratitude for your earnest attention,

  I remain,

  Yours faithfully,

  Louise Ahrendts (Miss)

  Sometimes, in my effort to be neat, my pen slipped and made a blot and I had to start again with a fresh sheet of paper. Also, my fingers were so hot the ink smudged if I didn’t let each line dry before going on to the next.

  On the seventh try, it was perfect.

  ‘What are you doing, running about in this heat?’ Mrs Hewson grumbled from her spot on her front step as I dashed by. I hadn’t bothered with shoes and the stony track bit into my feet.

  ‘Posting a letter,’ I shouted, newly emboldened.

  Surely no hospital could look down on a girl applying four years in advance – wherever she came from or whatever mix of Malay, Hottentot and European blood painted her more brown than white?

  The last collection of the day was about to be made. Even now the postman would be approaching with his sack. My letter could be sorted and put on the train today – why, if Matron wasn’t too busy she might write back to me within a week!

 
I ran across St George’s Street, hovered for a moment, looked about to see if anyone was watching – especially any nosy friends loitering near the bioscope – then quickly kissed the letter and slipped it into the red box. It made a light thud as it hit the pile of post inside.

  The tears that had threatened earlier tipped into my eyes.

  Do certain moments carry magic within them?

  To be caught and treasured before they blow away on the southeaster?

  I wanted to tell someone. I had to tell someone – maybe if I found Piet and shared this moment with him, if I took his hand with its hardened skin and asked him to come back to me—

  Workers began to stream out of the Queen Victoria gate, bumping into me as they rushed for the train. These days Piet often hung around the back entrance to Runciman’s General Dealers, hands in pockets, feet scuffing the dirt, waiting for a chance to stack shelves or unpack boxes. I wiped my face with the back of my hand and joined the flow hurrying along Grandpa Ahrendts’s stone wall towards the station. The fiery aroma of curry from the navy canteen drifted over my head.

  ‘He’s not here,’ old Mr Runciman shouted from the back of the shop. ‘Maybe fishing with that no-good Pa of his. Amos Philander owes me money. I’ll dock it from his boy’s pay next time.’

  I turned and began to push against the mass.

  People called out – perhaps friends of Ma’s thinking I was in trouble – you could never be too careful with daughters – but I ignored them and kept going. I should have worn shoes, the pavement was scalding my bare soles. As the crowd thinned, I began to leap from shade patch to shade patch, my hair working loose from its school ponytail and flying behind me. My side began to hurt. I could have stopped and rested, but then the magic might dissolve, slip out of my grasp before I had the chance to share it …

  I panted towards the hill above Seaforth. Out in the bay, two minesweepers steamed in line abreast towards the white pillar of Roman Rock Lighthouse.

  At last! The jumble of cottages with their lopsided roofs, the barking of yellow-eyed dogs, the chorused shouts of fishermen heaving their net ashore, but no sign of Piet. I bent over and gasped for breath on the grass where he liked to sleep in summer. Amos’s boat was pulled above the high-water mark amid strands of seaweed abandoned by the retreating tide.