and playing outside all day long, and holidays by the sea. What she also remembers, vaguely, are the snow-capped peaks of a Boland mountain one particularly cold winter, snow-white linen tearing at a washing line like frisky lambs, long white dresses being whipped up by a wind that blows and blows, a white bonnet with fluttering ribbons being carried off like a balloon, bearded young men laughing and giving chase, jumping in the air to catch the ribbons.
No. The swirling dresses and fluttering ribbons also belong to her sixth year, when the town’s women sat behind their sewing machines for nights on end sewing old-fashioned dresses and bonnets. Almost as if for a concert, like the time Mammie organised a Nativity play on the farm and had to sew deep into the night to turn a pile of threadbare sheets into robes for a host of jubilant angels. Colette’s brothers and cousins got the speaking parts while the very little ones like her were bundled into the choir of angels along with the farm workers’ children, but they didn’t have to sing. Quite enough heavenly voices in that choir already, Mammie had sighed – heavenly! But the next year on the farm Oom Kleingert said ag no, rather leave it, concerts just gave the hotnots ideas.
So Mammie had left it. And in Colette’s sixth year she didn’t sew Voortrekker dresses along with the other women in the neighbourhood either. The paper dress and the paper bonnet for Shirley Temple were all Colette could get out of her, and that only after two weeks of begging.
Yes, like a concert, that was how the commemorative ox-wagon procession seemed, only better, because this concert went on for days and weeks, even months. From the day towards the end of winter when the first wagons left Cape Town, the fields of arum lilies beside the road as white as the women’s brand-new bonnets, the crowds growing bigger and louder with each town they passed through, young men with bushy Voortrekker beards and tearful old tannies in wide Voortrekker dresses, young couples who were married there and then in the field among the wagons, and who knows how many newborn baby girls baptised Eufesia after the centenary of the Great Trek; so the trail carried them northwards, through Stellenbosch, Worcester, Graaff-Reinet, Bloemfontein, Johannesburg, singing and cheering through the winter’s cold and the spring sunshine and summer’s thunder showers, it is the sound of a nation awaking from its oppressor’s hand; more and more voices joining the singing and cheering, from the beaches and up to the highland, all the way to Pretoria where on 16 December 1938 the cornerstone of a future monument was laid before a singing, cheering crowd of hundreds of thousands of people.
Dingaan’s Day, Deddy explained, to commemorate the Battle of Blood River when a small group of God-fearing whites vanquished a vast Zulu army numbering thousands. On this day one hundred years earlier the Voortrekkers realised that God was on their side. But on this day in 1938 Colette understood that her mother and father weren’t always on the same side.
It was both a Friday and a public holiday – the ideal day for a party to celebrate Colette’s sixth birthday, Mammie thought. Her real birthday was only the following week but by then, as happened every year, they would already be on holiday by the sea or on the farm. Shame, Mammie said, the child has never had a proper party with friends who dress up and bring gifts. With table decorations and balloons and party games. Why don’t we make it a fancy dress? In for a penny …
Mammie tackled the planning with great enthusiasm, almost as excited as she had been a year or two before in the build-up to that first and last Nativity play on the farm. She mailed handwritten invitations to ten friends and their mommies, baked dozens of cupcakes and a big chocolate cake, and stayed up late to cut and measure Colette’s Snow White costume for the fancy dress, with pins pinched between her lips and the wheel of the Singer sounding like a high wind in a bluegum forest as she vigorously cranked the handle.
Sneeuwitjie, Deddy admonished, she did, after all, have an Afrikaans name too. No, Deddy, Colette argued. Snow White. Like in the picture Mammie and I went to see at the bioscope. With Grumpy and Sneezy and Dopey …
Some day my prince will come, lala lalalala, Mammie hummed behind the Singer. She and Colette were both besotted with Walt Disney’s first full-length animated film. It was like getting an entire cake for supper instead of just a slice at teatime. The pleasure lasted so much longer than when you only got to watch a short cartoon before the main feature.
But making Snow White’s dress wasn’t easy. Damn difficult, Mammie sighed, although she was clever with a needle and thread. The fitted dark blue bodice, lighter blue puffed sleeves with red insets, a wide yellow skirt and – hardest of all, Mammie declared; most important of all, Colette pleaded – the starched white collar that had to fold out around Snow White’s neck like the calyx of an arum lily.
Mammie even borrowed a black wig from somewhere to pin over Colette’s blonde curls. Mammie’s final touch went on top of the wig – the red Alice band with its tiny bow. Colette stared in amazement at the strange black-haired little girl in the mirror while Mammie painted her a rosebud mouth with red lipstick. She gathered the sides of the long skirt between her fingertips, curtsied a few times, then spun around giggling so the skirt puffed out like a yellow balloon. It was the most beautiful costume in the whole world, she told Mammie. Now they only had to wait for the guests to arrive.
Three little girls turn up in old-fashioned Voortrekker dresses, bonnets and all, and two of the boys are wearing false beards and carrying toy guns. The one says he is Piet Retief; the other he is Dirkie Uys. The girls say no, they don’t have names, they are just Voortrekker wives.
Beatrix picks up the hem of her long dress to show them her bare feet. ‘My mother says they walked barefoot across the Drakensberg.’ Right away the other two Voortrekker wives take off their socks and shoes too. A Boland town grows hot so soon before Christmas, especially when you are not used to wearing long dresses. Colette decides that Snow White can also go barefoot, even though she is really a princess in disguise.
‘Time to cut the chocolate cake,’ Mammie tells the guests and their mommies who are crowded together in the drawing room where Deddy is trying to hear the radio.
‘But it’s the laying of the cornerstone!’ The protest comes from Beatrix’s mother, the stout Auntie Bea. ‘That I won’t miss, not for all the chocolate cake in the world!’
‘The children should really listen too,’ Deddy says. ‘This is something they will remember for the rest of their lives.’
‘But what about Colette’s party?’ Mammie asks.
‘She will have lots more parties,’ Deddy says with a wave of his pipe, ‘but a day like today won’t come again for a very long time. It is the nation’s reawakening, my dear.’
‘Doctor is right,’ Auntie Bea agrees and rounds up the five Voortrekkers in fancy dress and plonks them down on the carpet in front of the radio.
Mammie gives the woman a funny look, then claps her hands to get the attention of the remaining guests – a pirate and a tramp, two princesses, and a mermaid who keeps tripping over her tail fin – and herds them into the dining room with the promise of cake.
Delicious chocolate cake, Mammie smiles. All of a sudden she reminds Colette of the witch trying to tempt Snow White with a shiny red apple. The guests glance at each other uncertainly before following her into the dining room which she has decorated with balloons and paper streamers.
‘Now I am going to light the candles on the cake, and then we will sing for Colette,’ Mammie announces. From the drawing room they can hear thousands of voices on the radio singing. From the beaches and up to the hiiiighland hearts tremble and mountains grow siiiilent. Colette wonders aloud if they shouldn’t rather wait until the centenary celebrations have ended before they light the candles. ‘Until the nation is done awakening?’ Mammie asks in a sharp voice. ‘I don’t think so. You can always blow out the candles again once
