looks at the angry red spots on her mother’s cheeks and waits until the candles are burning properly before she takes a deep breath and blows for all she’s worth. Five little flames go out instantly, but the sixth one keeps flickering while she blows more and more desperately. Then the mermaid next to her grows impatient and helps her blow out the last flame, pffff. Colette looks at her mother, alarmed. ‘Isn’t that cheating? Can I still make a wish?’
‘You didn’t ask her to help you blow, did you?’ Mammie soothes. ‘Make your wish while we sing for you.’ And then Mammie starts to sing in a voice which to Colette sounds lovelier than any voice she has ever heard in the bioscope. ‘Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you …’
The mermaid sings along loudly and tunelessly, the other guests join in more tentatively. Happy birthday, dear Colette … But in the drawing room she can still hear the mighty rumble of ‘The Song of Young South Africa’, and the two melodies running through each other make her forget what she wanted to wish for. For a puppy of her own? For her two brothers to stop teasing her about losing her milk teeth? That she will grow up to be as beautiful as Mammie and as clever as Deddy?
‘Why are you singing to me in English, Mammie?’ she asks when her mother reaches the final drawn-out to youoo.
Mammie’s smile drops from her face, boom! The red spots return to her cheeks. ‘I have always sung to you in English. It was how my mother sang to me. My father was English, Colette, don’t you forget that. You never knew him but you have an English grandfather. There were no Voortrekkers on my side of the family.’ And she cuts the chocolate cake so impatiently that she scatters brown crumbs all over the starched linen tablecloth.
Colette wonders how her mother manages to make Voortrekkers sound almost like a swear word. In Deddy’s mouth it always sounds so big and grand. Below Deddy’s clipped little black moustache it becomes a marvel to the ear, like reviiival or comprehend.
Re: Lisbon
• Colette Niemand 7/8/2007
My darling child, it is understandable that you still feel too young and inexperienced for Fernando Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego. Remember, his Book of Disquiet wasn’t published until almost five decades after his death, and I didn’t read the English translation until the late nineties, when I was already a relatively elderly woman who had lost both her child and her grandchild. When I had long borne the wounds ‘of all the battles I avoided’.
That quotation closed around my heart like a fist the moment I first read it. When I was younger, I thought that if I could only keep a safe distance from the war, if I could leave the brutal battles of individual passion to braver souls, I would reach the other side unscathed. The other side of what? I ask myself now.
That is why I am telling you tonight it doesn’t matter if you don’t find what you went to look for in Portugal. If you only end up finding something of yourself, my dearest, your journey will have been worth it. And as far as I can tell that is already starting to happen. You hold onto that, you hear? Don’t ever let go.
When I went overseas it was also, as you know, ‘to find myself’. I found my own voice, I learnt my true sound, and what I heard so frightened me that I fled back home and cut out my own tongue. Silence is golden, Mammie always said when I was small. After I came back from overseas it became my motto, my excuse for avoiding all subsequent battles. If you stay silent, you become neither a soldier nor a contestant, you become a spectator.
But you are not a spectator, sweetheart. You have suffered enough losses in your young life to make you far wiser than I was at the same early age. (Even if it is too soon for you to understand everything Pessoa has to say.) You have inherited your mother’s fighting spirit – but just enough of your grandmother’s cautiousness, too, to protect you from self-destructive daring. I have complete faith in you. Seek, and you shall find.
Love from the Cape.
WAR
Mammie has dolled herself up for their excursion into town, painted her mouth red as a fire engine, waved her blonde hair and pinned it up under a small blue hat that looks almost like a soldier’s cap. She is wearing gloves and high-heeled shoes, and her last unladdered pair of silk stockings. Her dress has big shoulders and a thin white belt in the waist, and a skirt that shows rather a lot of leg. It’s not that she wants to show her legs, she has had to explain to Ouma Trui on the farm, but with a war on cloth has become scarce and hemlines shorter, what can you do?
Colette cannot take her eyes off her mother, all the way from Rondebosch to Cape Town, as they ride gently rocking on the electric train. It is hot and the dark green leather seat feels sticky against the back of her knees. Stop fidgeting, Mammie admonishes, you will crease your dress. Colette too has been dolled up for the city. Her dress was cut from an old dress of Mammie’s, but you would never guess it, because the blue floral print still looks almost new, and of course Mammie is clever with a needle and thread. She has smocked the bodice and sewn on a round white collar and a row of tiny blue Bakelite buttons down the back. Make do and mend, Mammie says, that is every patriotic woman’s motto these days.
Colette has an idea she may be getting a bit too big for smocked dresses but Mammie says nonsense, think of all the poor little girls in Europe who have no dresses to wear at all. Who don’t even have a roof over their heads. Colette doesn’t understand how her smocked dress is going to help the little girls in Europe get a roof over their heads, but she realises it has something to do with patriotism, so she wears the dress without complaining.
They are going shopping, new stockings and a step-in for Mammie, a paper doll for Colette and a pretty headscarf for Sina, the Coloured girl Mammie fetched on the farm earlier this year to work for them. Shame, she misses her people terribly, Mammie says, she is no more than a child, really. Barely a few years older than Colette. It must be awful, Colette says, to be taken away from your home and your family to work for strangers in a strange house. ‘I don’t know what I would do if it happened to me!’ ‘It won’t, dear,’ her mother reassures her. ‘You’re a white child.’
Colette isn’t sure there are any paper dolls left in the city since cloth isn’t the only thing that has become scarce because of the war. But Mammie is always saying we mustn’t complain because this sunny country of ours is paradise compared to overseas. In England there are no stockings to be had at all, not silk stockings or rayon stockings or nylon stockings or anything, those poor English girls rub gravy onto their legs to make them look brown. Colette really hopes they will find stockings today because the thought that Mammie might want to rub the gravy from Sunday’s chicken onto her body gives her the horrors.
After the shopping they are going to order tea and cake at Stuttafords’ tea room in Adderley Street, and then they will go to the bioscope, too, before catching the train home this afternoon. In for a penny, Mammie says, and laughs excitedly. It’s not every day we two girls go to town, right? Colette laughs too. She loves it when her mother talks about ‘we two girls’, as if Colette is much older than nine.
It is true they don’t go to town often, even though they live much closer now than when she was smaller. Mammie says in these dark days it is everyone’s duty to do less buying and gadding about. Don’t STRAIN the trains, they read on big posters at the stations, with funny drawings of travellers in trolleys drawn by elephants and camels. At night Mammie knits scarves and hats for the soldiers, because her younger brother is fighting in North Africa. Colette is also trying to knit a scarf, but she cannot imagine any soldier wanting to wear such a lopsided scarf with so many holes. Deddy teases her and says never mind, what Uncle David needs in North Africa is a fly swatter, not a warm scarf.
Then
