3–6pm. Should there be no red flag, the flight will not come off.’
February must have been exquisitely frustrating for Kimmerling because it took until the end of the month for the red flag to eventually be raised. On the 26th, watched by a crowd of thousands, Kimmerling shovelled his unstable biplane after what in all likelihood would have been no more than a couple of hundred metres; the craft wouldn’t have flown more than three or four metres off the ground. Photographs in Museum Africa in Newtown show the Voisin cheerfully plunging along an axis almost due south, with Linksfield Ridge in the background.
Had Kimmerling flown in the opposite direction, he would have headed directly for what was to become Moishe’s Butchery in Raedene, the beginning of the Jewish district. I stopped there for sparkling water and a look around as the cleaning staff were mopping the floor while white-coated butchers (Moishe himself, perhaps?) stood around importantly in white wellies. I remembered an old-fashioned Italian barber in the complex and, nearby, the terminus for the Sydenham bus. The buses in those days were slow, sooty and eternally long-suffering. You paid for your ticket either at the driver’s cab or when the conductor came round. He wore two gunfighter’s straps that diagonally crossed his chest, upon which hung a sort of primitive cash register on one hip, and on the other a little apparatus with a handle for dispensing tickets. The mobile cash register, consisting of upright cylinders stacked side by side that dispensed change, had its merits but the ticket dispenser was by far the funkier affair. It was solidly silver and had dials and wheels out of which emerged rectangular little stubs in pastel greens and yellows. At some point in your journey you would wedge your stubs into the back of the seat in front of you, where it would take its place alongside the Neanderthal graffiti, the lewd anatomical drawings and the word ‘poes’ repeated like a mantra.
From Moishe’s, I walked down a gentle hill, the turf spongy beneath my feet, as I approached the Fairmount Shopping Centre. I fell in with a Zimbabwean vendor in an orange T-shirt. He was selling hand towels, lappies and dishcloths, and at first was reluctant to give too much away, telling me simply that he was from ‘Africa’. He looked a little like one of those clothes horses you see in tiny European flats, with towels hanging from every portion of his raised arms. I explained my mission and we walked a while before he peeled off to buy something at the Shell garage. I later saw him peddling his wares at the shopping centre roughly opposite the Jewish old aged home. By then his face had assumed the careful neutrality that seems, in part, a defence against the worst, in part, the expectation of that worst. Further down the pavement, on another patch, was another vendor. He was sitting in a canvas camp chair selling Manchester United beach towels, among others, talking football conspiratorially to a mate who was complaining about the poaching of players in club football. They talked in neither a whisper nor the tone of a normal speaking voice, so what they were saying seemed vaguely Byzantine, full of intrigues I couldn’t share.
Before reaching the shopping centre, with its kosher deli and outside eating area, the hardware store and Spar supermarket, I stumbled upon the Jabula Recreation Centre. When my sister, Laura, and I were growing up in nearby Lyndhurst, my mother used to bundle us into the car and take us there on a weekly basis. My tastes were non-literary: Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Lucky Luke and his savvy talking horse, Jolly Jumper. (There is surely a fine book or thesis to be written on Jolly Jumper and Tintin’s soliloquising dog, Snowy, who both sidle up to the reader by gently undermining the hero but are fiercely loyal to him at the same time.) I used to read sports books and devour a series published, I think, by McDonalds on countries of the world like Greece or Chile or Turkey. The books followed a pattern, with items on history, exports, religion and landscape. The section I liked most, though, was the story of a day in the life of an average Turkish family: when they would get up, how long the school day lasted, how much homework was mandatory before they could watch television. I loved finding out what the evening meal consisted of, and what they ate and drank, what they dressed in and what they looked like. I used to pore over these books for hours, lost in silent reverie, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in Marmaris or Santiago or Thessaloniki, and if my name was Orhan or Jaime or Costas.
Thinking back on it, the library became almost sacred for me as a child, a place of quiet abandon. When you borrowed books, you handed over your library cards, bright little envelopes of reinforced cardboard. They were slightly rough to touch and fitted neatly into the palm of your hand or the pocket of a school blazer. Mine, I seem to remember, were a bright buttery yellow. Once you had parted with your cards, the books themselves were stamped with a franking punch, jumping through its work with springy zest. The librarian pounded the books’ return date onto the thin paper folio gummed to the front of the book, and popular books were crisscrossed with these brief reminders of the return date, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping. Depending on the colour of ink used, the trails were either mauve or deep purple, charcoal or black, and you could trace them backwards, burrowing into the book itself to find out how old it was. These prints were an index of ancestry. You could distinguish the popular books from the neglected ones, the inspirational from the dull. Such was the anonymous murmur of the critics of suburbia.
The librarians who presided over this calm island wore blue cotton housecoats. There were often triangular pots of milky glue on their desks and sometimes flowers in a vase. I imagine this forgotten world now with infinitely sad longing, indescribable melancholy. I can hear the withdrawal of a thin drawer of stacked catalogue cards and the return of that drawer into the wooden cabinet with crisp finality, a sound almost plush. On summer’s days there were invariably fans going about their rhythmical business, looking left then right, like pedestrians crossing the road. They would hum good-naturedly through the silence, a background wash to the franking and stamping and the graceful slide of books back onto the shelf.
* * *
Next door to the Jabula Library was the Community Hall – home, among other things, to Round Table 121, of which my dad had a stint as chairman. Round Table provided the opportunity for fundraising, sometimes with a serious theme – such as their ‘evening of ecology’ at the German School, guest speaker Ian Player. But sometimes the men simply dressed up as women, wearing massively outsized bras and high heels as they sang songs from a melodrama or bumbled happily through Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. I remember black-and-white photographs from the era – or I think I do. The men are wearing jeans with belt buckles the size of Texas, checked shirts and scarves wound rakishly round their necks. My father is in his element, the glint of unchecked madness in his eye.
It was the late 1970s, so a time of fondue sets and dinner parties, of red candlesticks wedged into green Grünberger Stein bottles. My parents were both bohemian and fiercely conventional, so they read Edward de Bono and Dick Francis, listened to Jacques Brel and Erroll Garner. Looking back on it, I think colleagues and neighbours might have looked at us slightly askance, with a mixture of envy and mild derision. Our dogs, after all, were called Smuts and Brünnhilde. Smuts, the good-natured German shepherd, so called because he had a big patch of white on his breast and this reminded Dad of Jan Smuts’s goatee. Brünnhilde was the princess of German mythology from Wagner’s opera piece the Ride of the Valkyries. Ours had a docked tail and was probably a combination of Alsatian and boxer – we were never quite sure. I somehow doubt that there were many other dogs in the suburb called Smuts and Brünnhilde.
We owned a green Peugeot station wagon and for holidays we perched our igloo tent on a hill overlooking the Hole in the Wall in the Transkei. Dad bartered for lobster with the locals while my mother cooked pork bangers for my sister and me, fried on our portable gas stove, together with a vile instant concoction called Smash, because we didn’t fancy the idea of eating lobster. Despite sibling rivalries and patches of marital angst, being pernickety about money, we were, I think, as Tolstoy described, a happy family much the same as all the other happy families in the world.
Behind the community centre and library was a play area. Its main attraction was a jungle gym in the shape of an aeroplane. This was no thrown-together afterthought. It must have been four or five metres long, with wings and a tail fin, and three wooden seats in the nose
