Telling Times Read online

  The mine people and the townspeople did not by any means constitute a homogeneous population; they remained two well-defined groups. Socially, the mine people undoubtedly had the edge on the people of the town. Their social hierarchy had been set up first, and was the more rigid and powerful. There was a general manager before there was a mayor. But even when the town did create civic dignitaries for itself, even when we did get a country club, there were those among us who neither knew nor cared about the social scaffolding that was going up around them, whereas at each mine the G.M. was not only the leader of society but also the boss, and if one did not revere him as the first, one had to respect him as the second. The dignitaries on both sides – the G.M.s and their officials from the mines, and the city fathers, the presidents of clubs in the town, and so on – invited each other to dinners and receptions, and the teams of the sports clubs of mine and town competed with each other, but there was little mixing on the more intimate levels of sociability. The mine officials and their wives and families lived on ‘the property’; that is, the area of ground, sometimes very large, that belonged to each mine and that included, in addition to the shaft heads and the mine offices and the hospital, a sports ground, a swimming pool, a recreation club, and the houses of the officials – all built by the mine. The G.M. lived in the largest house, usually a spacious and very pleasant one, situated in a garden so big that one might almost have called it a park. The garden was kept in full bloom all year round, right through the sharp, dry Transvaal winter, by African labour diverted from the mines, and the liquor stock indoors was ample and lavishly dispensed. The assistant manager’s house was smaller, but decent enough; then came the underground manager’s, and then the compound manager’s (he was in charge of the four-sided barracks, with all its windows opening on a courtyard and only one gateway, always guarded, to the world without, in which the African labourers were fed and housed in celibacy, having left their families in distant kraals), and then the mine secretary’s, and so on down the salary and social scale, the houses getting smaller, the gardens getting less elaborate. Most of the mine families lived only a few miles out from the town, but their self-sufficiency surrounded them like a moat. Their offspring could go from the cradle to the grave without having anything to do with the town other than attending its high school, placing weekly orders with the butcher and the grocer, and paying three visits to church – one for christening, one for marrying, one for burying.

  We, of course, were town people. All my childhood, we lived in the little house, in one of the town’s earliest suburbs, that my parents had bought before I was born. Other people moved to the newer suburbs of flat-roofed villas, pseudo-Tudor houses, and, later, houses inspired by American magazines, with picture windows looking out on the bare veld. But we stayed. Ours was a bungalow-type house with two bow windows and a corrugated-iron roof, like almost all the other houses that were built in the Witwatersrand gold-mining towns during the twenties and early thirties. It stood in a small garden, one of several similar houses on a street along whose sidewalk grew leathery-leaved trees, which in summer put out bunches of creamy, bell-shaped flowers. When my sister and I were little, we used to fit these flowers over our fingertips, like tiny hats; when we were old enough to own bicycles, we would ride up and down beneath the trees, feeling rather than hearing the swish of their leaves above our heads. The trees were kept clipped in the shape of bullets, in order that they might not interfere with the telephone wires, and so were not beautiful. There was, in fact, no beauty in the whole town. We children simply took it for granted that beauty – hills, trees, buildings of elegance – was not a thing to be expected of ordinary, everyday life.

  The town had already grown up and hardened, as it were, into permanent shape before its leaders became sophisticated enough to consider orthodox municipal planning, and so, although it kept expanding in all directions, it remained essentially a one-street affair. As is so often true in such cases, that street was too narrow, and the land on either side of it was too valuable to make widening feasible. The street had the authentic jostle and bustle of a thriving business centre, and we children loved to walk ‘downtown’ on Saturday mornings with our mother. This was as much a social as a shopping expedition. During our early years, the only places of refreshment in the town were two or three hotel bars (in South Africa, closed to women anyway) and the Greek cafés, where black-haired Minos or Mavrodatos sold cigarettes, sweets, polony and fruit, and where one could sit at a table with a flyblown cloth and be served terribly weak tea or coffee adulterated with chicory. But by the middle thirties there were one or two genteel teashops, where the local women met for mid-morning refreshment, and the Greeks had installed shiny soda fountains, which we children used to patronise heavily after Saturday matinées at the local cinema.

  Most of the shops were family businesses, but with prosperity came Woolworth’s – from whose gramophone-record counter dated jazz swung out into the main street – and branches of various big department stores in Johannesburg. The owners of the family businesses became the city fathers, and their families became the ‘old families’ of the town. We were one of these ‘old families’ and were known to everyone in the town and even at the mines – there by sight rather than by association. My father took no part in civic affairs and remained what he had always been, a simple man and a shopkeeper, but my mother, a woman of considerable energy and not much scope, served on endless committees. Some years, she was president of several organisations at once, with a secretaryship or two thrown in as well. She baked cakes and she prepared reports; she was honorary cashier at charity concerts, and she taught first aid to children. Her position was a curious one. Unlike most of the other women, she did not confine herself to the particular section of the community to which she belonged. The fact was that she didn’t seem to belong to any particular section. Although my father kept up some sort of token allegiance to the Jewish community, contributing to the upkeep of the ugly little synagogue and even going to pray there once a year, on the Day of Atonement, my mother did not fit in very well with the ladies of the congregation. She got on much better with the Scots ladies of the town, and I remember her working (or, rather, baking) like a beaver for the annual cake-and-sweet sale in aid of the Presbyterian Church.

  Our life was very much our mother’s life, and so our pleasures, into which we plunged with gusto, knowing no others, were charity bazaars, the local eisteddfods that were held in the town hall by members of the Welsh community, and dancing displays by the pupils of local teachers (my sister and I were often performers), along with – staple stimulation for the entire population – the cinema. In summer, we went to the municipal swimming baths. Walks or rambles about the outskirts of the town were unknown to us, except for those furtive excursions in the direction of the burning dump. There was nothing to see beyond the limits of the suburbs but ‘the location’ – an urban slum where the African industrial workers and servants were huddled in segregation from their white employers – and a dammed-up pond, created by waste water pumped from one of the mines, in which a yellow cyanide dump was reflected, its image broken by bulrushes and the occasional passage of a small wild duck.

  There were junior and senior state schools in the town, where education for white children was free, but my sister and I were sent as day scholars to the local convent; the Dominican nuns had come, like everything else, with the town’s prosperity. Many of the townspeople, torn between the businessman’s natural suspicion of getting something for nothing and the fear that their children would be converted to Catholicism (the town was largely Protestant), resolved the issue by sending their children to neither the state school nor the convent but to boarding school in Johannesburg. My mother, a fearless nomad when it came to social and religious barriers, had no such misgivings. My sister and I spent our school life at the convent, and were taught English by a bun-faced nun with a thick German accent. At school, I showed some of my mother’s bland disregard for the sheeplike gr
oup consciousness of the town, and struck up a long and close friendship with the daughter of an official at one of the oldest and most important mines. So it was that I came to cross the tacit divide between the mines and the town, and to know the habitat, domestic life and protocol of ‘the mine people’.

  Like middle-class children everywhere who live within reasonable reach of an ocean, we were taken to the sea every year. The hot months of December and January are the popular season for family holidays in South Africa, the Indian Ocean is the nearest ocean for Transvaalers, and Durban – 400 miles from Johannesburg – is the nearest city on the Indian Ocean coast. So almost every summer we spent our three weeks in Durban or in a village on the South Coast, not far from Durban. We could, of course, have gone to Lourenço Marques, the gay little port in Portuguese territory, which is about the same distance from Johannesburg, but we never did, because that was a place to which grown-ups went without their children (and preferably without their wives or husbands) and only in the winter season of July and August. When we were very small, we adored Durban, where we stayed in one of the solid, cool, high-ceilinged hotels along the Marine Parade and, leaning out of the steamy bathroom in the evening, after we had been sent off to bed, could see the coloured lights strung like beads on an abacus from lamp post to lamp post along the sea front while the trams thundered past, and a strange fading and rising cry – a mingling of laughter, squeals, and juke-box and hurdy-gurdy music – rose, between the roaring advance and hissing retreat of the sea, from the amusement park.

  When we grew a little older and entered that dreamy, remote, soulful state that comes sometimes in early adolescence, we found the crowded beach, the sand lumpy with popcorn, and the vulgarly lit sea front, where all the wires and cables of an electrically contrived fairyland showed on the lamp posts in the light of day, utterly abhorrent. Nothing would have persuaded us to enter the amusement park, from which wonderful teddy bears and even a felt Mickey Mouse had once come, won by our mother by dint of Heaven knows how many tickets at the sideshows, and placed at the foot of our beds for discovery in the morning. Nothing would have bored us more than the slow, chugging trips around the bay on a pleasure launch named the Sarie Marais, which only a few years back had had all the solemn thrill of departure for a new continent. And most of all we revolted against the nagging of the Indian vendors on the beach, with their ‘Mangoes? Litchis? Banana? Very nice p-ruit? Grandailla parfait? Ice cream?’ Gesture one angrily away, and another, sweating, scowling, barefooted on the burning sand but dressed from head to foot in white drill embroidered with some unlikely name – Joe’s Place, or the Top Hat – came at you like a persistent blue-bottle. You must want something. ‘No, no, no, no!’ my sister would shout in rage, and the vendor would stare at her, waiting for her to change her mind.

  What we wanted at this stage in our lives, and what we usually got, since, like many parents, ours acquired the tastes of their children, being formed rather than forming, was a holiday at a South Coast village beyond the reach of even the little single-track railway. In this village, the hotel was a collection of thatch-roofed rondavels, the water was free of refuse, and the beach – ah, the beach lay gleaming, silent, mile after mile, looping over flower-strewn rocks; there were, indeed, many beaches, and always one where for the whole day there would be no footprints in the sand but my sister’s and mine. In fine weather, the village was, I suppose, a paradise of sorts. In front of the little hotel was the warm, bright sea, and, curving around behind it, hill after hill covered with the improbable green sheen of sugar cane, which, moving in the breeze, softened every contour like some rich pile, or like that heavy bloom of pollen which makes hazy the inner convolutions of certain flowers. Streams oozed down from the hills and could be discovered by the ear only, since they were completely covered by low, umbrella-shaped trees (these are seen to better advantage on the hills around Durban, where their peculiarly Japanese beauty is unobstructed by undergrowth), latticed and knitted and strung together by a cat’s cradle of lianas and creepers. My sister and I would push and slither our way into these dim, secret places, glimpsing, for the instant in which we leaned over, the greenish, startling image of our faces in water that endlessly reflected back to the ferns the Narcissus image of their own fronds.

  More cheerfully, in the bush along the road we would sometimes hear that incredibly light-hearted, gossipy chatter which means that monkeys are about. The little Natal coast monkeys are charming creatures, in appearance exactly the sort of monkey toy manufacturers choose; in fact, they are just what one would wish a monkey to be. They bound about in the treetops, nonchalant and excitable at the same time, and unless they are half tame, as they have become around some of the road-houses on the outskirts of Durban, they move off almost too quickly to be clearly seen; you find yourself left standing and gazing at the branches as they swing back into place and listening to the gaiety as it passes out of hearing, and the whole thing has the feeling of a party to which you have not been invited. If the monkeys, like distant relatives who wish to make it clear that there is no connection, ignored us, there were creatures who, because their movements were attuned to some other age of slime or rock, could not escape us. On the trailing plants near the rocks, sleepy chameleons stalked shakily, or clung swaying, their eyes closed and their claws, so like minute, cold human hands, holding on for dear life. If they saw you coming for them, they would go off nervously, high-stepping across the sand, but with a kind of hopelessness, as if they knew that all you had to do was lean over and pick them up. And then, unable to bite, scratch, sting, or even to make any protest other than to hiss faintly and hoarsely, they wrapped their little cold hands around your finger like a tired child and went as pale as they could – a lightly spotted creamy beige that was apparently their idea of approximating the colour of human skin. My sister was particularly fond of these resigned and melancholy creatures. Twice we took one home to the Transvaal with us on the train, and twice we watched and wept in anguish when, after two or three happy months on the house plant in my mother’s living room, the poor thing lost first his ability to change colour, fading instead to a more ghostly pallor each day, and then, literally, his grip, so that he kept falling to the floor. The Transvaal winter, even indoors, was too much for chameleons.

  In the heavy green water of the lagoon at the South Coast village where we used to stay, there appeared to be no life at all, though some people said that under the rocks at the bottom there were giant crabs. When the weather was bad for a few days, and the combination of the sea’s rising and the lagoon’s flooding washed away the sandbanks between the lagoon and the sea, the dark river water in the lagoon poured in a deep channel down into the waves, and the waves mounted the river water, frothing over the swirl. Decaying palm leaves, the rotten ropes of broken lianas, and fallen vegetable-ivory fruit, as hard and round as cricket balls, were washed out of the stagnant bed of the lagoon and brushed you weirdly while you swam in the sea. Once, late one afternoon, my mother and I were lying on the sand watching a solitary swimmer who evidently did not mind the dirty sea. Suddenly we saw the rhythmic flaying of his arms against the water violently interrupted, and then he heaved clear up into the air, gripping or in the grip of a black shape as big as he was. My mother was convinced that he had been attacked by a shark, and went stumbling and flying over the sand to get help from the hotel. I went, with that instinct to seek human solidarity in the face of any sort of danger towards humankind, to stand with some excited children who had been playing with toy boats at the water’s edge. I was four or five years older than the eldest of them, and I kept holding them back from the water with the barrier of my outspread arms, like a policeman at a parade. What danger I thought there could be in two or three inches of water I cannot imagine, but the idea that there was a monster in the vicinity seemed to make even the touch of the water’s edge a touch of menace.

  In minutes, the whole village was on the beach, and out there, but coming nearer with every wave, w
ere the swimmer and the dark shape, now together, now apart, now lost, now discovered again. As the lifesaving rope was unreeled and the volunteer lifesavers plunged into the sea, supposition was shrill, but hastily silenced at the occasional cry of ‘Look, there he is!’ There was a feeling of special horror, oddly, because it was obvious that the creature was not a shark; with a shark, one knew exactly what it was one had to be afraid of. And then the cry went up: ‘It’s a crocodile! It’s a crocodile!’ Even the lifesavers heard it, and looked back towards the shore, confused. Before they could get to the swimmer, he was in water shallow enough for him to stand, and we could see him very clearly, his face grim and wild with water and effort, his hands locked around the long snout of a big reptile, which seemed to gather up the rest of its body in an attempt to kick him, rather than to thrash at him with its tail, as crocodiles are said to do. ‘A crocodile!’ the cry went up again. ‘Enormous!’ Men rushed into the shallow water with pocketknives and weapons of driftwood. Yet the man staggered up on to the beach with his monster alone. He was a short, stocky man, and it was true that the thing was as big as he was. It seemed stunned, and he kept hitting it across the snout with his fist, as if to say, ‘That will show you!’ Amid the screams and the squeals, and the confusion of lifesavers, rope, brandished driftwood, and Boy Scout knives, he beat it to death himself; it was plain that, exhausted though he was, he wanted the privilege of being the conqueror. Then he sat on the sand, sniffing deeply, his chest heaving, a flask of brandy trembling in his hand; I remember so well how he said, in an incredulous, rasping voice, ‘Crocodile that size could’ve torn one of those kids in half.’