also came cheap. Unlike the Germans (some of them from Schlebusch, near Cologne) and Austrians (from Nové Zámky), who weren’t prepared to work for less than 20 pounds a month, the Italians would work for between 10 and 12. Their process operators, artisans and cartuccere, or ‘cartridge girls’, numbered about 200 when they started coming to South Africa, and they made up by far the largest portion of the European labour contingent when the factory first opened in 1896. At the beginning, along with a substantial number of recruits from the Eerste Fabrieken near Leeufontein, east of Pretoria, they lived in tents on the factory grounds. By and by, their quarters were upgraded to form the ‘Italian Village’, with structures of permanence as well as pigsties and chicken runs. They made it their home as best they could, sampling local commodities. (Archaeological digs into the tips close to their compound, for instance, have found shards of glass from bottles containing ‘Dr Williams’ pink pills for pale people’.) As well as spending their hard-earned pounds on this ‘multi-purpose panacea’, they owned a communal gramophone. On Sundays they used to have picnics on the banks of Dam No. 3, Verdi’s operas mingling with the breeze. Photos in the museum show them in front of a large, steep-sided white tent. The men are wearing sandals and collarless shirts, and look casually sophisticated. The women’s hair is scraped back and they’re wearing white, high-necked dresses. They are healthy, their skin sun-tanned, and they gaze at the camera without demurral. Given their experience and sustaining sense of community, they might even consider themselves the factory’s first labour aristocracy.
There was a second, more quixotic, reason for starting my walk where I did. Like many Johannesburgers, I had long been intrigued by the whereabouts of the orange grove in Orange Grove. I’d imagined the grove was on high ground, perhaps on Sydenham Hill, where Kimmerling had bounced his Voisin for Johannesburg’s first recorded flight. In my mind’s eye, I imagined row upon row of orange trees with glossy leaves, the oranges luminous with sunshine, bright like Christmas-tree decorations. Prim with order, they marched into the distance, neatly Californian. All that remained – or so went the fantasy – was the odd lucky tree in a suburban back yard, sulkily rationing its riches.
After doing some research, I discovered that the grove, such as it was, grew alongside or close to a natural watercourse that still bubbles on the Houghton side of Louis Botha’s death bend, possibly on one of the oldest farms in the vicinity, called Lemoen Plaas. This stream provided the water for a covered swimming pool close to where the BP garage was until recently, although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly the swimming pool’s location. This is because old photographs of the area are slightly ambiguous. Was the resort’s pool close to the slip road just off Louis Botha, in the vicinity of where the La Rustica restaurant used to be? Or was it slightly further down the road, at the junction of Osborne Road and Louis Botha? It is almost impossible to say exactly, because the area on the southern side of Louis Botha has been built upon, the sense of scale is iffy and no natural landmarks remain because everything has been drowned in brick and concrete. There’s a union headquarters, followed by an old block of flats set back from the road and, after that, a corporate park the entrance to which is exactly opposite Hope Road’s south-western end. The situation was compounded by the fact that, strictly speaking, the orange grove probably wasn’t in Orange Grove at all. To be officious, it was in what subsequently came to be known as Mountain View.
Wherever the resort’s home and the exact location of the grove were, it was a place to which the leisured classes of early Johannesburg were readily attracted. Old sepia-washed postcards show lawns dotted with thatched gazebos and pathways on which to stroll. The resort or guest farm was a place to which you could come to sip afternoon tea and take in the soothing waters of the Sand Spruit. At the height of the resort’s popularity, balloon rides were offered, underscoring the area’s early fascination with flight. As for the orange trees, they might have been the subject of the early workings of the Joburg publicity machine, perhaps the fantasy of a wildly optimistic town planner. There was unlikely to have ever been a grove. It was probably more like a group of orange and other fruit trees mixed with the willows and tall wattles of the spa, although a clue is to be found in the name of the old farm itself. Does Lemoen Plaas not suggest the presence of trees? A lovely article by Brett McDougal published by the Heritage Portal in February 2016 alerts us to the easy connection between Lemoen Plaas and Orange Grove. He also mentions that the suburb had early problems with name and identity. It was called Alexandra, Alexandria Estate and even Cellieria, before finally settling down to long domestic bliss as Orange Grove.
* * *
After passing the hidden remains of the Rietfontein Lazaretto, I found myself skipping down a well-used path that leads to the Jukskei River as it passes beneath the R25. The path here had been softly excavated by many anonymous feet and was, at times, root-crossed and magical in a mossy, Hobbit-like way, deep-sided with time and history. There were dusty old cypresses tucked just inside the fence of the retirement village I was passing, and I was sure the path was broken by the roots of those trees, obdurately seeking out warmth and water and the nutrients of the soil.
The walk here had an airy, big-sky feel. The National Health Laboratory Service offices were over to my left, and the views were good and open as I banged down towards what was probably the walk’s lowest point, before crossing the river and negotiating my way over a concrete culvert. After that it was head-down stuff. The incline past the Edenvale Hospital didn’t offer a challenging gradient but the heat was gathering. I’d been walking quickly and there was now a teeth-gritting, feel-it-in-my-legs dimension to the walk. I sensed the sweat pooling in the small of my back as I nudged up the hill, crossing the road as I watched a group of scrap-metal collectors ferrying their load in the same general direction. There were two or three of them, and they seemed to have difficulty steering their trolley with any degree of even short-term control. This meant they needed frequent stops to realign the trolley wheels and gather breath. It was hot and their load heavy as they inched like Catholic penitents slowly up the hill.
Having passed the entrance to the Edenvale Hospital, the R25 curled left to cross the highway down below, before heading past the turn-offs to the new industrial park (left) and the Greenfields Shopping Centre (right). I crossed over to the shade of some pine trees, seeking the softness of the needle-strewn ground. Heading on, it was all concrete along the overpass, cars now brushing past me as they surged for Edenvale, just down the road, Kempton further afield and sometimes the Modderfontein turn-off.
I grew up in Lyndhurst, vaguely behind me, first in a block of flats called Hessenford and then in a comfortable but very ordinary tin-roofed house at 55 Lyndhurst Road. From certain vantage points in the suburb you could look east and see the area through which I was now walking. It was all farmland then, dominated by a thick clot of blue gums and evergreens that a farmer seemed happy to preserve. The image is fixed in my mind because beyond that, unseen, lay Modderfontein Dynamite Factory, where my father spent many adventurous years being what in those days was called a personnel manager. Sooner or later, either because of a veld fire or lightning strike, and sometimes through malfunction or human error, we would hear the deep reverberations of a faraway explosion. It was Dad’s responsibility to get onto the plant immediately – at one time Modderfontein was referred to as a national key point – to find out what had happened and, if necessary, notify next of kin if lives had been lost. In the excitement and fear we experienced as children after an explosion, we would scan the sky for telltale signs, sometimes seeing a thin vine of smoke creeping upwards before it disappeared.
There was little left of the copse of trees now, although stragglers and an island of well-established pines remained as the R25 split into separate eastbound and westbound lanes. The walking during this period of the route was unpleasant and tricky, a constant effort of negotiation. It was impossible to walk in a straight line, so I had to tack across islands and skirt sets of lights, no provision being made for pedestrians. Cars strained like dogs on a leash as they awaited the green light, gunning down the hill beside me, and I felt simultaneously exposed and invisible, feeling a sort of shadow emotion of what it must be like for so many of the walking urban poor. I remember during this portion of the walk picking my way across a verge and noticing the confetti of discarded takeaway
