wasn’t that exceptionally scrawny. The thing was that Miriam had ample flesh on her bones and anyone who dared not resemble her was the odd one out. I gave her an obstinate look and grabbed her podgy hand which pulled me down next to her.
It was turning into a late-summer scorcher that Sunday morning and I knew to soak up the light and peace and quiet before the pre-week blues would get hold of me later in the afternoon.
I said chirpily: “Miriam, give me the white stuff and I’ll rub it in.”
It was always nice to cloud the pots with the milky substance only to reveal the warm glow later on. Miriam was also shiny from tip to toe – her face was always glistening from the Pond’s cold cream that she smoothed into her skin every morning after washing herself thoroughly with emerald green Sunlight soap.
From as far back as I could remember, Sunlight soap was my pet hate. Firstly, I detested the smell and secondly, when I was a toddler, Miriam religiously and vigorously washed me with it every morning after my spoonful of cod-liver oil, something else that wasn’t particularly popular in my world of Barbie dolls and Lego. Of course, since I was a baby, the loquat tree had also played a role in this daily washing extravaganza – providing shade during mid-summer mornings while I was being washed against my will in the stainless steel tub.
We spread ourselves out beneath the blue sky, soaking in the hazy heat. I had brought along my mother’s pewter jewellery box. The jewellery box was a box of wisdom, containing both my grandmothers’ and my mother’s dearest writings. Hopefully, one day, I would be able to add to it.
After cleaning the copper pots, Miriam would disappear to her cottage at the side of our house. It was a niche where she could put up pictures of the Queen and princess Margaret and her personal cult figure, Bessie Smith, the blues queen of the American South. With the years, the pictures faded, but she merely replaced them with the latest magazine shots. There was never even a vague sign of stagnation in Miriam’s room. every time I went in the place was spick ’n span with not even a speck of dust to be seen, an old transistor radio in the corner blurting out the news in Xhosa. She also had a vase in the corner, on the dark wooden chest, which she religiously filled with fresh flowers every second day.
The sun passed its zenith and the afternoon melted into a brooding limbo. A heavy silence settled on the garden and even the cicadas momentarily ceased their screeching. We hadn’t managed to get very far with the copper pots, we had been pondering over the past week, busy with our own thoughts. For a moment, our attention was diverted by a sugarbird that fluttered in the still air. Flickers of light reflected off its shiny wings. I moved my hand towards the jewellery box. These moments were reserved for very special occasions and I felt an urgent need to read something in the magic container, since Miriam and I had chatted half the day away. We loved this dawdling on a Sunday. I took a little crinkled piece of paper from the box. It was like drawing a prize at a fête. “Eeny, meeny, miny mo.” Miriam’s curiosity got the better of her and she stretched over to see. I was unfolding a poem addressed to me, written by my mother:
My belly is round.
All beauty is bound up inside me.
I walk on a powder veil,
on the surface of the moon.
Little one,
are you there?
Can you feel the earth’s pull?
Or do you float unawares
with the man on the moon?
Broken-winged doves
All through my childhood, I was fascinated by birds. There was something captivating about those bright creatures, suspended in air, effortlessly soaring on the wind. My mom used to read me a book about a little bird that was orphaned when it fell from its nest. It came into contact with the horrible world out there, mistaking a bulldozer for its mother and unsuccessfully seeking warmth from the machine. The book had a light blue cover with sticky marks on it – testimony to being fingered often by toddlers. The book had quite an effect on Malcolm and me. We would rescue doves with broken wings all along Wiltshire Crescent, the street in which we lived. Our rescuing equipment consisted of stainless steel pots. We would put the feathered victims inside the pots, cover them with the lids, carry them home and put them in cardboard boxes lined with leaves and grass. They rarely survived, being pestered by prying cats and dogs, or plagued by colonies of ants, which swamped their man-made nests.
We would often tear ourselves from the allure of nature when the shelves upon shelves of books beckoned us inside. Our love of stories culminated in the publication of one of my mom’s children’s books. She dedicated the book to her children. We swelled with pride and joy. In our eyes, our mom was a literary genius. She told us stories of flying children and aliens, as well as scary ghost stories that had been passed down through the generations from my great-grandmother to my mother. They never failed to enchant us. Magical trains, animated hippopotami and nosy, big-bottomed characters unlocked undiscovered worlds for us.
More stories entered our lives through the enticing little black box in the corner of our living room. Ours wasn’t the most sophisticated I’d ever seen: Despite the bunny ears, perched on top, the picture was still mostly blurred. However, we were never encouraged to watch TV. I once overheard my mom saying laughingly to a friend: “I think they much prefer a glass of Nestlé chocolate milk and a nice book before bed!”
Nonetheless, I was obsessed with our first TV set. I would be glued to it every Tuesday at four o’clock in the afternoon when my favourite children’s show would come up. It was about a baby bird with a broken wing and there was a theme song that was sung soulfully in minor chords: “If Only Cheep Could Fly”. I would often chant it almost ritualistically. I still remember many evenings sitting in front of the hazy screen, relishing a packet of Rowntree’s Fruit Gums and listening to the enchanting theme song of The Thorn Birds and the riveting introductory line: “a love – unattainable, forbidden, forever …”
Perhaps because of the stringent rules concerning TV watching, a prominent feature of my childhood was the cinema, His Majesty’s. The town gathered in this movie house of Fifties charm. I was convinced that the Grahamstown grapevine had its roots here. The velvet curtains, dramatically draped on either side of the rows of seats, had a sort of weathered wisdom about them, as if they had absorbed the town’s melodrama and gossip. The plastic chairs failed miserably at being comfortable and throughout a movie it felt as if your sitting bones were digging through the bucket seat.
One day I went to see ET with Malcolm and some friends. When we all walked out into the glaring sunlight after the movie, everyone looked down in an attempt to hide their tear-stained cheeks. But I heard my friends exclaiming loudly and pointing at the back of my head: “What’s that in your hair, Margs!?” My hand reached up into my hair and I felt a gooey blob of chewing gum firmly rooted in my recently cut bob hairstyle. I felt a pang of intense pity for poor ET as I stood in the middle of a mob of children, pointing their fingers at me and laughing loudly. Instantly I knew ET’s feeling of otherness.
There was one other instance in which I felt this otherness: I started to get asthma and the doctor told me to swim it away. My mom promptly responded by enrolling me (and Malcolm) for swimming lessons that took place at the crack of dawn. We were left to a merciless instructor who hurled abuse at us when our heads were above water: “You miserable little drowning rats! Get your act together!” He screamed instructions at us when our heads were below: “Keep your fingers together when you do the stroke and don’t – and I repeat – don’t come up for breath only on one side!” It was a recipe for disaster that left both of us capable
