I swam to shore and dried myself. Then took a last look at the curling surf …
And hurried back to the Terrace which, come sunset, would no longer be home.
Eviction is a humiliating business.
A date is provided.
Trucks will come by on that date.
Anything more than a truckload per household can’t be taken.
Perhaps it would have been more fitting if bad weather had shrouded the entire event in mist or deluge, but Jesus and Allah took it upon themselves to bless us by keeping the southeaster at bay, and the dust down, so that it was a perfect day for moving. The sea sparkled, the ships in the dockyard gleamed, and the butcher birds perched and swooped through the palms searching for the fattest of prey.
Fine weather, of course, also allows everyone to see – and linger over – your life; your furniture, your private possessions and the bits and pieces that have little value but are, somehow, essential to every home. The chair with a crooked leg that you can’t bear to get rid of, a carpet that usually hides its stain beneath a conveniently placed armchair, the cloudy glasses not shown to visitors.
‘Watch yourself,’ says Pa to Sam – although Sam is by far the stronger – as they lift our faded sofa out of the door and lower it onto the earth. David once sat on it, his uniform splendid by contrast.
I follow with the cushions, wrapped in newspaper to try and keep them clean.
Then the linen from both cottages, crammed into lumpen bags.
‘Here,’ Ma hands me a rattling box of plates. ‘Keep it upright.’ She is close to tears.
‘I’ll take it,’ Sam lifts it out of my arms and stacks it beside a crate of cutlery.
‘Hou die blink kant bo – keep smiling!’ Pa cries hoarsely to us, and to our neighbours who are also dragging their goods outside.
‘I’ll miss the sea,’ moans old man Phillips, carting his pipe collection. ‘And all of you.’ His family are going to Grassy Park, a coloured suburb on the Cape Flats beyond Muizenberg. It’s closer to one of the younger children’s work, but he and his wife have no friends there.
‘Blerrie fools!’ The Gamiels yell at each other as a case bursts open and spills its contents onto the earth; a set of fraying cloth nappies, a purple hat, a tarnished sugar bowl wrapped in a towel. ‘Pick everything up before it gets dirty! Why’d you pack it so full?’
Pa shakes his head and stumps back inside to wrap the mirror from our tiny bathroom.
Millie Phillips’ daughter – the one Vera says wants to try for white – is standing apart, not helping, dressed in a pale-pink dress.
Her brothers and sisters ignore her.
Maybe she has chosen this day to cross over.
I wipe my forehead and catch her eye. She looks away. It would be the right time. She could leave the Terrace, but never arrive in Grassy Park …
‘Sure you can manage, Ma?’ Sam stands at the end of the table he made for me when he was still a schoolboy. ‘Keep looking up when you lift.’ He worries the weight is too heavy for me. Piet should be here, helping. But he hardly ever comes to see us, he lives like a hermit in the old Philander place, also scheduled for eviction.
Once our cottage is empty, I rest on the wall in the sunshine.
The sea winks with a brilliance I must try to remember. Ma comes to sit by my side. We take each other’s hands. Hammering drifts up from the dockyard.
Sam helps wherever he’s needed. I overhear him reassuring Mrs Gamiel. ‘It’ll be a fresh start, Mrs G. I’ll put up your cupboards, just the way you like them.’ But the oldies don’t want a fresh start. The Terrace, its windblown cottages, its sublime view of False Bay, is all they’ve ever wanted.
By eleven o’ clock, our lives sit pitiful and smouldering in the heat.
An hour passes.
We wait.
I massage my aching hands. Pa finds a plaster for young Phillips who’s cut his leg. Ma shares out the sandwiches she made before the last of the kitchen was packed.
‘What if they don’t come?’ someone shouts. ‘What if they’ve changed their minds?’
Ma looks hopefully at Pa. He shakes his head.
The sun passes its zenith.
Millie’s daughter sidles away, past the mosque, down Alfred Lane.
Then the trucks labour up the hill, along with a police van to make sure there is no trouble.
‘Maak gou! We haven’t got all day,’ a huge sergeant yells as his men stand by and watch.
But no one has the heart or the energy for violence. We are cowed by the weight of leaving.
‘Heavy stuff at the bottom!’ shouts the foreman in charge of the loaders, but his warning is ignored. All our goods are thrown on the vehicles in a mighty confusion and in the rush some things fall off or are never loaded and disappear for good.
Haste seems to be essential for our evictors. They want us out of here fast.
‘The photographs, Lou!’ cries Ma, newly distressed.
‘In my bag,’ I hold her close against me. The sepia pictures of Ma and Pa on their wedding day, a toothy Sam as a baby, David’s letters, my most precious shells…
‘It’s not fair,’ she weeps, now that there is no going back. I stay close, to shield her from the rough handling and the shouts of the loaders. ‘Mrs Hewson would’ve dug in her heels. Made them carry her out!’
‘It’ll be over soon,’ I murmur, watching our cracked suitcases being tossed aboard along with the furniture, followed by Pa’s bundle of overalls tied up with string, Sam’s beautifully carved case of woodworking tools. This is what it must have been like for the Jews in Germany. Dear Jesus, I find myself praying to our Terrace guardian for the last time, please let this be as far as it will go. Only banishment …
Pa takes a final look inside.
He comes out and stands in the doorway, his rough hands twitching.
I grit my teeth. I refuse to cry.
Chapter Fifty-Six
My darling,
I have written to you twice but, sadly, both of my letters have been returned address unknown. I sent a telegram when I read of the evictions, but I fear I was too late. Apparently the removals in Simon’s Town have been going on for some time.
I’m writing again, in the hope that this letter might find you.
My daughter, Ella, and I are coming to South Africa to look for you. This may be foolish, because perhaps the success I predicted for you has indeed materialised and you don’t need my help – and would not welcome my unexpected arrival! Forgive me if that turns out to be the case, I’ll be overjoyed for you if it is. But I can’t escape the feeling that you and your family are in danger. The terrible headlines continue here, I scan the pictures, praying that I won’t see you amongst the images of people dragged from their homes.
Ella knows about my love for you, but she doesn’t know about the cruel terms imposed by Elizabeth. I would never want to burden her with that. I’ve encouraged her to believe that I gave you up voluntarily.
And in the matter of giving, you offered me so much that I’ve never been able to repay or reciprocate. I could never forgive myself if you were in trouble and I didn’t come to your help. I can’t sleep at night thinking about you. There is a tightness in my heart that’s been there since the last letter was returned, as if my body is bracing itself for irrevocable loss. Please God it is not so.
All my love,
David
Chapter Fifty-Seven
We rode on the back of the lorry, wedged between our furniture and suitcases, and clinging on to the less secure packages to stop them from sliding off.
The vehicle lurched down from Ricketts Terrace.
I craned over my shoulder. Palm trees. Gimlet-eyed butcher birds. Simon’s Bay.
Our cottage, its door left open.
The jolting lessened when we reached the flat but the pace remained slow as the heavily laden trucks laboured along. White people on St George’s Street stopped to watch. Some held their hands over their mouths, other
s attempted a feeble wave. Apart from the revving of the engines, there was no noise. Even the seagulls were hushed. Mr Bennett’s son leant in the doorway of Sartorial House as we went by. Like other shopkeepers, he could stay by special exemption but only for a limited period. Outside the station, a crowd of coloured and black workers stood in silence as we drove past. The blacks had already been removed from their shacks across the mountain to Nyanga Township, more than an hour away by train. The Indians were going to Wynberg. The fabric of Simon’s Town was ripping apart before my eyes.
No sooner had we left the surroundings of the bay than the sun found a bank of clouds.
It began to rain.
A sign …
I know Ma thought so, huddled beneath a towel hastily pulled from one of our bundles and crying into Pa’s shoulder as the downpour worsened. Sam sheltered me with his jacket. I tried not to worry about the state of my carefully packed uniforms. How would I manage to get one dry and ironed in time for work the next day? We were short-staffed in theatre, I hadn’t been able to take extra time off. We passed Glencairn, Sunny Cove, and then turned into Fish Hoek. Again, white folk stopped and stared at the line of trucks and leant into one another to speculate on the rough convoy. After a while the neat houses, the crescent beach and the gleam of False Bay disappeared behind us. On our left, scrubby hills poked through the murk. To the right, the outline of Chapman’s Peak cleared and blurred behind shifting cloud. The Atlantic was a distant line on the horizon. We skirted Noordhoek and then jolted into the bush down a dirt road lined with gum trees like those that had marked the track to Piet’s reformatory. We came to a halt in a clearing.
Up ahead rose two low apartment blocks, surrounded by an expanse of bare ground.
Ocean View.
‘Everyone out!’ yelled the driver. ‘This is the end, no further!’
The loaders became, if anything, more frenzied in their unpacking than in the packing. The police had already abandoned our miserable procession at the limits of Simon’s Town, so there was no one to watch or possibly temper the loaders’ attitude if they’d been open to persuasion. But it was already late afternoon, and clocking off was uppermost in their minds. Our possessions were hurled off the vehicles with no care at all. Furniture splintered, bags split, suitcases burst open. The Gamiels, in the truck alongside, had used up all their anger at the start of the day and worked silently, gathering up their disarrayed possessions as best they could.
‘Come, Sheila,’ Pa led Ma away from the mayhem and laid down a cloth for her to sit on beneath one of the straggly gums.
‘Mind my plates, Solly,’ she cried, ‘tell them to mind my plates!’
Sam fished a raincoat out of his case and I wrapped it around me. The rain was still falling steadily. I looked around for the Phillipses, but of course they weren’t there. They’d gone to Grassy Park, like Vera and Abie and their children. It would be less lively without Vera nearby.
‘Get everything out of the wet into the nearest block!’ I shouted to our milling neighbours. ‘Then we’ll work out what belongs where.’
I picked up two cases and began to trudge towards the closest building.
The trucks roared off, their wheels spinning, their job done.
We’d been successfully evicted.
Ocean View turned out to be little more than a collection of ugly apartment blocks set in a barren valley with few facilities apart from a bus stop. The flats were barely finished, their walls half-painted. Naked light sockets dangled from the ceilings.
‘A disgrace!’ Pa growled, after we found our allocated place in a dark building. He flicked a disdainful hand at the blistered surfaces. ‘I wouldn’t leave a ship’s badge in this state.’
‘Then get on with it, Solly,’ ordered Ma, revived by the discovery that we actually had a roof over our heads. Terrace rumours had said we’d be left on the open ground where we’d been dumped, surrounded by our boxes, with no water and furnished only with a long-drop toilet. Site and service, it was called, the bare minimum. This was what most blacks got, and they had to build their own shacks with whatever materials they could scrounge. By comparison, we were fortunate.
‘You and Sam better fix everything double quick.’
‘Of course we will,’ said Pa, bending stiffly to give her a kiss. ‘It’ll be like a new pin. Better than what we had before.’
But I knew it wouldn’t. It could never hope to offer what we’d left behind, even though our cottage used to bend in the southeaster or lurch whenever the mountainside slipped. Ocean View might be steady in the earth but it was sightless. There was no sea view, even from the upper-storey windows. In order to get a decent glimpse of water, you had to trek a good half-hour or more over sand dunes, coastal bush and tangled carpets of sour figs that dragged at your feet. There was no Simonsberg to lift you as you trudged, or shade you in its purple shadow, or funnel the wind over its shoulder to cool you down. We’d been moved to a wasteland.
Would Jesus or Allah be bothered to guard us in such a place?
‘We’ll manage, Grandma,’ Sam said, heaving our linen up the stairs. ‘Don’t you worry!’
Thank God for Sam. Thank God for strong muscles and the optimism of youth.
‘Let’s get the beds made up, Ma, then you can rest,’ I said. ‘Look, I saved some sandwiches for us for supper. And here are your pictures!’ I set them on the floor next to where she was sitting with her back against one of the poorly painted walls.
Her wedding photo. One of Sam and myself.
Ma picked them up and clutched them against her breast.
Even though Pa still drew his pension, so far honoured by the South African Navy via the Simon’s Town Agreement, the financial burden for the family now swung heavily onto my shoulders, especially as Sam soon lost his customer base. We were too far away for folk to run up Alfred Lane and offer him work. If he took the bus to Simon’s Town and walked to some of his old customers, many of them worried about employing a coloured because you never knew what restrictive new law might have been passed while you weren’t paying attention. And his woodworking tools were too heavy to take by bus – on the off-chance of finding work.
If you work hard, you can go far …
Pa’s words rang hollow as I watched my diligent son plod back after each fruitless day.
My route to work began with a ten-minute tramp along the dusty road to the bus stop, then a jerking trip to Simon’s Town amid a stream of honking cars. Often, the bus was delayed.
‘I’m so sorry, Doctor,’ I would gasp, flying into theatre where the team waited. ‘The traffic—’
There were days when the late-afternoon bus never arrived and I’d have to walk all the way up Glencairn Valley through thickets of Jackson willow, down into Noordhoek, then a hard mile along the road to Ocean View, my legs aching from a full day’s work, my carefully whitened nurse’s shoes grimed with brown dust.
Some mornings, for moral support, Pa would travel with me.
After saying goodbye to me at the hospital gates, he’d walk along St George’s Street past Grandpa Ahrendts’s wall and look out over the sea. It wasn’t the same as sitting outside the Terrace and watching the bustle of the dockyard, but it was the next best thing. After his walk he couldn’t stop for a cup of tea because all the cafes were whites-only, so Pa would stand in Jubilee Square for a while, and then catch the bus back to Ocean View.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Sam’s father died in a fire at Seaforth before he could be evicted and join the exodus from Simon’s Town. The police said they weren’t sure of the cause, but that foul play couldn’t be ruled out, given Mr Philander’s history.
A dispute over a fishing catch, they speculated.
A settling of scores.
Sam hammered the post for the new washing line into the ground. Self-help, Ma called it. No one will fix Ocean View and make it liveable. It’s up to us.
He stared up at the sky as a drop of rain fell onto his hand. The only thing
he’d truly admired about his father was his unerring ability to read the weather. Ocean View was different, though. Pa’s knowledge had been tied up with the Simonsberg and False Bay, and the swings that resulted from their particular interplay. Here, for example, the southeaster didn’t obey Pa’s rules. It arrived later than it did in Simon’s Town, and fully formed – no warning breeze. Sea fogs rolled in from the northwest when you least expected them. Rain fell from clear skies.
He found himself grinning.
At least Pa would have approved of the weather at his funeral.
‘What a day, Sam,’ Ma said, as unseasonal heat beat down from an autumn sky. She drew his arm through hers as they walked back from the cemetery where they’d laid Pa to rest.
‘He always loved my food,’ Grandma reminded Grandpa. ‘He was a good boy, once.’
Abie Meintjies, looking prosperous in a shiny suit, came over to say Vera was too tied up to come but she sent her love and said Louise was still young enough to find someone new.
Sam led his mother away from the rest of the mourners so they were facing across the bay.
Pink cloud draped the peaks of the Hottentots Holland.
‘I love you, Ma,’ he said. ‘We don’t need to worry any more about Pa arriving to ask for money, or to stay.’ He took a breath. ‘We’ll be better off.’
Ma stiffened.
‘Don’t speak ill of the dead, Sammie,’ she murmured, glancing down at the ring on her finger. ‘He cared for you, in his own way. And I should have done more when he was a boy. The reformatory broke him,’ her voice faltered, ‘he was never the same after that.’
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