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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
A seashell and a sealed letter form a tenuous connection to a forbidden wartime romance 1937. Simon's Town is a vibrant and diverse community in a picturesque part of the Union of South Africa. At the heart of the town is the Royal Navy port, and Louise Ahrendts, daughter of a shipbuilder, nurtures the idea that through hard work she could step beyond a destiny of domestic service. She dreams of becoming a nurse and she has the tenacity to make this dream a reality. When the Second World War breaks out and the port becomes a hub of activity, Louise's path crosses with that of Lieutenant David Horrocks. Despite the gulf in their backgrounds and the expectations facing them from family on both sides, Louise and David are determined to be together. But as the end of the war approaches and a new troubled moment of history dawns, will they find their way back to each other?
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Seitenzahl: 462
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
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The Girl from Simon’s Bay
BARBARA MUTCH
For L
Contents
Prologue
England, 1967
The letter had passed through careless hands.
Once pristine, it was now grey and randomly creased, as if it had been crushed into a ball, aimed at a waste-paper basket, missed, and been trodden upon.
How long did it lie there, she wondered, waiting to be swept up and discarded?
Or idly rescued and thrown back into circulation for one more try?
The scrawled words, in different fists, with different coloured pens, were perhaps an indication.
‘Gone’. The first annotation, in neat black capitals.
Then, ‘Address unknown’. Overwritten – gouged – in red.
And finally, ‘Return to sender!’ Impatient, underlined green, with an arrow towards the address on the back flap. (‘Don’t waste my time’ surely the unwritten postscript.)
Ella’s gaze wandered over the desk with its carefully arranged possessions, as if they might provide the answer to a question – suddenly brought to the fore by the letter – that she’d never been brave enough to ask.
An embossed leather notebook on top of a Manila folder.
A picture of her as a baby beside a brass shell case holding pencils.
A silver inkwell that was always kept full despite the arrival of ballpoint pens.
A lustrous seashell, its jagged spine rubbed smooth from handling.
‘Dad? Did she give you the shell?’
Chapter One
Simon’s Town, Union of South Africa, 1920s
‘Lou!’
Infant waves curled towards me over the crystal sand. Footsteps thundered from behind. I reached out both hands to seize the oncoming water with its lace of bubbles and fell forward. Cold, green liquid gurgled into my mouth, lapped at my forehead and just as it started to trickle into my ears, a pair of familiar hands grabbed me around the middle and pulled me clear.
‘Lou!’ my pa, Solly, hoisted me over his shoulder and gave me a brisk pat on the back. ‘You can’t swim before you can walk!’
From the vantage point of his arms, I could tell that the sea stretched in white-edged ridges until it collided with the mountains, or raced impatiently around them to merge with the sky overhead. I’d already met the sky. I saw its blue dome every day when Ma put me down to rest beneath the palm tree outside our front door.
This sea was far more exciting than the sky!
I twisted in my father’s arms and yearned downwards.
Solly looked back triumphantly at my mother, Sheila, sitting cross-legged on a blanket well up the beach, and waved the arm that was not holding me from plunging back. ‘She wants more!’
Unlike me, Seaforth Beach was shy. It hid between massive grey boulders rounded like eggs thrust up from the ocean by some giant, divine fist. Boys, including my best friend Piet Philander, used to scramble up their smooth sides and do risky bellyflops into the shallows, praying that the water was deep enough to cushion their fall. But before the shock of cold seawater, the best thing about Seaforth was its sand. You could make perfect, five-finger impressions of your hand or your rounded tummy in its sparkling skin. It even tasted pleasantly gritty.
‘No, Louise!’ Ma scrambled to unload my fist.
At the high-tide mark, the sand gave way to a crust of shells. When no one was watching, I’d hide one in my pocket and press it to my ear in the night to bring back the rush of the waves.
It took twenty minutes to walk to the beach on my father’s shoulders from the family cottage on Ricketts Terrace. ‘Careful, that child!’ Ma shouted, as I craned dangerously around to watch her panting in Pa’s wake. Motor cars were only for rich white folk who drove from Cape Town to gawk at our views. Everyone else walked – whether it was to the beach, or the dockyard where Pa worked, or up through the proteas and kek-kekking guinea fowl to admire False Bay, christened by indignant seamen who mistook it for Table Bay at the northern end of our peninsula. It was a happy fact that if you visited the Cape you were never far from the mountains or the sea – even if you couldn’t quite identify your whereabouts. And it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, they swelled your heart with a bursting pride. The mountains even put up with the white-painted towns that spread up their slopes or pressed against the shore with tarmac fingers. We lived in one such town close to the spiny tip of the peninsula. Keep going south, Pa would bellow cheerily, and say hello to Antarctica.
‘Who is our town named after?’ my first-grade teacher used to ask.
‘Simon van der Stel!’ we chanted, rolling our eyes at the obvious answer. Who in the world wouldn’t know that? ‘The first governor of the Cape.’
When I woke up in the mornings, instead of running into Ma and Pa’s bedroom and worming into bed with them for a cuddle, I’d climb onto the table by the window in our cramped sitting room to make sure the sea was where it had been the day before and hadn’t been stolen from me in the night. After all, the water rose and fell, and sometimes drowned the sand completely, or pounded against the rocks and frightened the boys out of their bellyflops. Wind – that livelier version of the breath that passed between my lips – seemed to be responsible for a lot of this erratic behaviour. It whipped the swells into towering crests and drove salt spray into your eyes to make them sting. When the sea and the wind joined forces like this, it was time to bolt the door of the cottage and wait it out.
‘My pa is in it,’ Piet Philander whispered with a mixture of pride and fear, as we stood with our noses pressed against the windowpane and watched the palm trees bending in half and willed his father’s fishing boat back to shore. Even though Simon’s Bay – our scoop of False Bay – was protected by mountains and should have been calmer, everyone knew fishermen who’d died on the water. Piet’s grandfather was one, taken by waves that pounced out of nowhere like the silent leopards that hunted on the Simonsberg peak above our terrace and kept me awake at night with the imagining.
‘You can stay with us if—’
I took Piet’s hand, feeling the hard skin of his palm. Piet helped his father with the nets. If you’ve never fished, you won’t know that when wet rope runs through your hand it tears the flesh like a serrated knife through a peach. Eventually, the skin learns its lesson and mends itself into a tough, scarred shell. Fishing was in the Philander family, but sometimes I felt that Piet hated fish as much as I loved the sea.
The boats that steamed in and out of the Royal Navy dockyard were much sturdier than the Philander fishing boat, and better able to cope with the Cape storms. When I was older and more sensible, Pa explained that the navy boats were warships and their job was to defend the choppy sea route around Africa from something he ominously called ‘foreign powers’. This necessary exertion ensured that Simon’s Town was a thriving port, with the navy at the pinnacle and the rest of us serving in layers below. Pa’s steady job meant that we sat about halfway down this pyramid, below the professional navy but above the poor black labourers who lived in shacks across the mountain and couldn’t read or write like we could. And we were especially lucky, Pa used to say, wagging a finger at me and Ma as we sat at the kitchen table. Brown mechanics such as him earned far more working for the even-handed British than for mean employers in the world beyond Simon’s Town. Out there – Pa flapped his arm dismissively at the rest of South Africa – they take off a discount for colour.
I admired the navy for a deeper reason than money or fairness, a reason connected to the surging tides and to Piet’s grandpa’s fate. Whatever the weather, the navy’s warships managed to stay upright. They didn’t flounder or sink, or casually fling men off their decks. Instead, they cut through the waves with dash, immune as arrows. And, as an afterthought, left behind a wake of filmy bubbles far more ordered than those tossed from the waves at Seaforth Beach.
Chapter Two
When I turned seven, we had a birthday party at the cottage on Ricketts Terrace. Piet came, and my classmates Vera and Susan and Lola, and friends of Ma and Pa. Ma once explained to me that children had to be grown carefully and gratefully year by year, so a birthday was as much a celebration for the adults – in having kept the birthday child alive and well so far – as for the children. The lady grown-ups at my party drank tea, the men drank pale liquids that induced livelier behaviour, while we ate jelly and peaches and a birthday cake made by Ma with a doll encased in a round iced sponge to mimic a ballet dancer’s full skirt. Ma didn’t often go to so much trouble at home, she tended to be too tired at the end of each day for smart cooking. And I couldn’t learn ballet because lessons cost too much, but I’d once admired a picture of a dancer.
‘Thank you, Ma,’ I kissed her afterwards, as we cuddled up in my tiny room at the back of the cottage. ‘It was so pretty, I’m sorry we had to eat it.’
‘Now you’re seven,’ Ma said, stroking my hair, her forehead relaxing out of its normal creases, ‘you’ll have to help more round the house. Put on the vegetables when I’ll be home late from work. Take the washing off the line. But no ironing till you’re ten.’
There was a tap on the door.
‘I’ve got another birthday treat for you!’ Pa sat down on the edge of my bed. It had taken him a while to shoo away some of the noisier grown-ups, especially Vera’s mother who’d moved on from tea.
‘Tell me, Pa, tell me!’ I squirmed onto his lap.
‘Tomorrow,’ he promised. ‘It’s only for girls who are seven-years-and-one-day old.’
When Ma dressed me the next day in my best Sunday frock made by Mrs Hewson next door, with yellow puffed sleeves and a matching ribbon in my hair, Pa said, ‘My! Don’t you look a picture?’ and folded his newspaper and stuffed it down the side of his chair. ‘I remember when I first laid eyes on your ma …’ He winked at her and Ma’s lips curled up at the edges as she scrubbed washing in the sink. Pa loved Ma in an open way, with hugs and winks and smacking kisses. Ma was less generous.
‘You can’t give too much,’ she cautioned when I asked why, ‘otherwise they take you for granted.’
Pa took my hand – I was too big for his shoulders now – and we set off down the dirt track that led to St George’s Street, past the mosque where the muezzin floated his call to prayer every dawn. ‘Some of our neighbours pray to Allah,’ explained Ma, ‘and we pray to Jesus. So the Terrace is always well looked after.’
Pa lifted me over the stream at the Hewsons’ to save my black T-bar shoes from getting muddy.
From the station came the enticing whistle of the morning train to Cape Town, followed by gauzy curls of smoke that bloomed and dissolved, bloomed and dissolved, against the green mountain. So far in my life I had only ever been on a train once. And then only as far as Fish Hoek, which was nothing like as grand as Cape Town, people said.
‘Where are you off to, Solly Ahrendts?’ Mrs Hewson yelled from her front door. Mrs Hewson was hard of hearing. Perhaps Mr Hewson got tired of shouting at her and that’s why he left.
‘Bye, Ma! Bye Mrs H!’ I turned and waved. ‘Where are we going, Pa? On the train?’
‘You’ll have to wait. Maybe we’re just going for a walk?’ He gazed about innocently.
‘Then why am I in my best dress and shoes if it’s only a walk? I’m hot—’
‘Patience, child.’
Pa led me across St George’s Street, crowded with more pedestrians than motor cars, and then beside the wall guarding the Royal Navy base. As we walked, passing men called out to Pa, ‘Day off, Solly?’ or ‘She spoken for yet, Solly?’ and tipped their caps to me. One patted my head as we went by. I wasn’t bothered by their attention, although Ma would hurry me away if it happened while she was with us. I thought the men’s interest was out of politeness to Pa. He was well known. After all, the stone for the navy wall had been quarried out of the mountain above Ricketts Terrace by Grandpa Ahrendts. Not alone, of course, although Pa liked to say it was his father’s contribution that was the most significant.
‘I started at the bottom, Lou, like he did,’ Pa used to say when I sat on his lap and asked him how it was when he was growing up. ‘I wrote an exam and they liked my answers so much they made me an apprentice and then a mechanic. Fancy that! Remember,’ he wagged a finger at me, ‘if you work hard, you can go far.’
It was a message he often repeated: if you work hard, you can go far.
But he didn’t say how far I would reach. Ma was a cook for a navy family. Vera’s mother was a cleaner. Mrs Hewson sewed. It seemed to me that none of those jobs allowed you to go further than the point from which you started. Perhaps it was a rule that girls didn’t progress like boys did.
It was the discount for girl-ness.
We turned towards the iron gates that gave entry to the dockyard. Queen Victoria’s initials wound across them in curly lettering, spelling out ‘VR’.
‘Who was the greatest queen in the world?’ Again, a regular first-grade question.
‘Victoria!’ we shouted. ‘Queen of the Empire and of South Africa! God save the Queen!’
We waited by the gate. Heat from the tarmac rose through the soles of my T-bars.
The gate swung open.
‘Pa?’
He looked down at me and winked. While others in my class had been on the train more than me, no one had ever been inside the dockyard – not Vera, not Susan, not Lola, or Piet! Perhaps, I thought wickedly, not even Queen Victoria Herself when she was alive – after all, Simon’s Town was two weeks’ steaming from Buckingham Palace and you couldn’t leave an empire to run itself while you visited one tiny part of it.
‘Come now,’ said Pa, ‘stop daydreaming and mind where you walk. We can’t have you messing your dress, or your ma will make me wash it myself.’
We pressed on towards a crowd of noisy sailors. And then I saw her, above their bobbing heads: a vast grey ship rearing out of the water, her deck bristling with guns, her two stout funnels flanked by wire towers. Colourful bunting reached from her bow, over her funnels and dipped down to her stern – I already knew the anatomy of ships – making her look as if she was dressed for her own birthday party. Shamefully, in the private excitement of turning seven, I’d forgotten about the arrival of the most famous ship in the world.
‘HMS Hood!’ Pa yelled reverently over the hubbub. He reached out a hand as if to stroke her soaring flanks. ‘The flagship of the Royal Navy. Thirty knots in most weathers. Aren’t you a clever girl to have a birthday just when she came to call?’
‘HMS Hood!’ I rolled the name around on my tongue for the thrill of saying it. Some of my first words had been ships’ names, culled from my father’s conversation: Nep-tee-une, Vy-per. Piet said I knew more than all the officers in Admiralty House.
A hooter blasted imperiously from behind us and Pa pulled me back.
A black motor car swept by and drew up to let out smart ladies in hats and uniformed officers in gold braid who paced up the gangplank and saluted the quarterdeck as they stepped on board.
My heart lurched in my chest.
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 Uncle 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!’
‘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!
