Forget-me-not-Blues

By Marita van der Vyver

A letter from Portugal makes Colette Cronjé remember everything she has spent a lifetime trying to forget. The sender is a long-lost relative, found after a decades-long search, and the letter is about saudade, the love that remains after its object has gone. It’s a love that has shaped the lives of three generations of women, trapped between leaving and staying, and between what is unbearable to remember and impossible to forget. Colette is too cautious to change her destiny, her daughter Nandi is too angry to prevent her own. Can Colette’s granddaughter, Tina, find the courage to write a redemptive ending for a family she has never known? Spanning seven decades of South Africa’s social and political evolution, recorded with insight, accuracy and humour, Forget-me-not Blues is above all a novel about family, secrets and the small falsehoods and sweeping deceptions that keep us together while they tear us apart. And memory is the sleeping dog in an unforgettable love story that makes us long to believe that even saudade can have a happy ending.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tafelberg
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780624056454

Marita van der Vyver

Marita van der Vyver het drie romans vir jonger lesers geskryf voor haar eerste volwasse roman, Griet skryf ’n sprokie, die literêre landskap verander het. Sedertdien is sy ’n voltydse skrywer met vele topverkopers agter haar naam, soos ​Dis koue kos, skat​, ​Die dinge van ’n kind ​en ​Griet kom weer. Sy woon in Frankryk.

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Forget-me-not Blues

MARITA VAN DER VYVER

Translated by Annelize Visser

SECRET STORIES

Yea, from the table of my memory

I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet

LETTER FROM PORTUGAL

It may be the most important letter she has ever received. It is possible that it could change everything in her life.

But what does ‘everything’ mean when you are almost seventy-five years old?

She gets up from her bed with difficulty, because she has never been more aware of her age than right at this moment. Beside the window in her bedroom there is an old-fashioned oval-shaped full-length mirror with a wooden base she inherited from her mother long ago. The glass is a little tarnished with age. Or perhaps it is just that her eyes have grown dim. Every time Mammie made her new clothes, Colette stood in front of this mirror to inspect, admire or criticise the result. Mostly, though, to admire it.

She remembers a preschool child in a wig of sleek black hair with a tiny red bow on top, her mouth painted the same red as the bow, breathless with excitement about the Snow White outfit she would wear to her first fancy-dress party. She remembers a teenager with blonde curls and blushing cheeks in a dinner dress Mammie had cut out of luminous dark blue fabric, Dior’s New Look, too-tight-to-breathe in the waist with a long wide skirt, her first grown-up dress for her first evening party. And she remembers the red, white and blue going-away outfit that had made her feel like a French flag. No need to wave to her loved ones on the quay, she could just unfurl herself on the deck of the Union Castle liner.

But what she sees in the mirror now is an elderly woman with neat silver-grey hair, dressed in sober black linen trousers and a beige cardigan. Store-bought clothes. Expensive clothes from an exclusive shop. How disappointed her thrifty and industrious mother would have been again today.

What she sees above all, even without the reading glasses on the silver chain around her neck, is wrinkles. Deep grooves carved all over her face like tree bark punished by a vandal’s knife. Heavy bags under her eyes. Loose skin under her chin.

What has become of Colette Cronjé who discovered her own body with such joyful abandon in Lisbon half a century ago? Praise my flesh with sounds of gladness. Someone stirs in the bed in there. Something stirs in me out here. My lover awakes. It is the most beautiful sentence I have ever written. My lover awakes. Phrases from her Portuguese travel journal, words that sometimes get caught on her like scraps of paper carried on a breeze, as if she had managed after all to tear up the pages from that book and cast them into the wind.

Put another way, what is left for the elderly Mrs Niemand? Just look at those drooping shoulders. She throws back her shoulders bravely, but it doesn’t make her look any younger, just a little less frightened perhaps.

She has been searching for so many years. And now that the search has finally led somewhere, she feels too frightened and too old for all the changes it could bring.

And yet.

On that windy day five months ago in the early autumn when her grandchild called her for the first time, she started to live again. Cautiously, little by little, one small shuffling step back to everything that had happened, one small shuffling step forward to everything that had once again become possible, backwards, forwards, a rolling dance to a mournful tune. Slowly, slowly down that pebble path. Smooth and shiny from its moonlight bath. A song about loss and longing. Fado’s fatefulness.

Saudade, her Portuguese lover explained to her long ago, was a deep, perpetual longing. The love that remained after love’s object had gone. She had been too young and pure to understand, but once she had lost first her child and then her grandchild, saudade had become her lifelong disposition.

She turns her back on the old woman in the mirror and returns to the laptop computer on the bed. For a few moments she stares helplessly at her hands on the keyboard, the skin as thin and dry as crinkle paper, the dark spots with which time has stained the papery texture, the blue veins bulging beneath the surface. How had her daughter put it in her farewell letter again? Skin is after all just the paper wrapped around the gift. Then her stiff fingers come to life.

Write and tell me everything, she types to her granddaughter in Portugal, where this story began fifty years ago.

OX WAGONS

But her story in fact began long before Lisbon. After all, it wouldn’t have been possible for her to turn her life into a lie if she had not been surrounded by lies from the beginning. Big ones and small ones. Black ones and white ones. Silences and blanks. This is how Colette Niemand (née Cronjé) tries to absolve herself in her old age.

She is sitting at Deddy’s feet in the drawing room listening to the poet Totius’s creaky voice on the radio. This is the yeaaar of our Looord nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-eight. Now we will ceeelebrate … Mammie is baking a cake in the kitchen. Usually she likes to help Mammie, but lately Deddy has become so excited about the ox wagons and the old men with beards and their wives with the funny bonnets that he is always listening to speeches on the radio. Come, Letty, he always says, come listen to what is happening in this country of ours. She finds most of the speeches almost as boring as the sermons in church on Sundays, but a tiny bit better because she can play with her paper dolls on the carpet while she pretends to listen.

She has taken her beloved Shirley Temple from the cut-outs in the flat cardboard box. The doll with the golden curls and the cutest dimples on earth is wearing a white vest and panties, white socks and shoes. Colette tries on one beautiful paper dress after the other, carefully folding the paper strips over the paper shoulders, patiently looking for the right outfit. But our meeerciful Father didn’t give a celebration but a reviiival …

Deddy’s pipe is in his hand – his clean, soft doctor’s hand, so much softer than Oupa Gert’s calloused farmer’s hands – but he is so engrossed in the radio voice that he forgets to smoke. He leans slightly forward, his black shoes polished to the same high shine as his sleekly oiled black hair. A gentleman, that is what Mammie calls him, and a gentle man too. The two don’t always go together, Colette. His head is tilted to one side so he can hear better, his eyes filled with a strange light, like when he points out the stars to her and her brothers at night.

‘Look, Deddy, Mammie made Shirley Temple a Voortrekker dress and a bonnet. I coloured them in and cut them out myself.’

He doesn’t hear her. His lips move below his little clipped black moustache as he murmurs the words of the poet-patriot: ‘It is a marvel in our eyes. We see it, but we do not comprehend it.’

Perhaps that is the reason she remembers this moment so clearly, her father repeating an obscure phrase, whispering as if he is telling her a secret, until his voice is drowned out by thousands of singing radio voices. Oh hear ye the mighty rumble? It is soaring across our land.

Because surely it cannot really be her first memory. In the spring of 1938 she was already almost six years old. Of her fourth or fifth year she remembers flashes, sounds and smells, shapes and colours. The smell of boiled soap on Oupa Gert’s farm, the name of the farm on a gate in the gravel road, Somerverdriet, so lovely, so sad and so puzzling. Summer and sorrow – what could the one have to do with the other? Winter, yes, that she could understand, winter was cold and wet like tears. But summer meant sunshine 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 that lot in there have grown tired of the mighty rumble.’

Colette 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

To [e-mail]

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 Mammie gets cross and says it isn’t about Uncle David, it’s about the fight against the Nazis. Everyone must pull their weight, and she is pulling her weight with her knitting needles. Then Kleinboet puts a rolled-up piece of newspaper in his mouth to represent Churchill’s fat cigar, and says in a deep voice: ‘We shall fight them on the beaches, we shall fight them in the fields, we shall fight them behind our knitting needles, we shall NEVER surrender!’ Ever the clown in the family, Mammie always says.

But her father asks, what have the English ever done for us? Why should we help them in their war? Deddy was born in the year 1900 when a handful of Boers were battling the mighty British Empire, as he regularly reminds his children. And ever since he started working at the big new hospital in the city and they came to live among the English in Rondebosch, he has become awfully preachy about Afrikaans.

‘Do you realise, Letty, that our language wasn’t officially recognised until just before you were born? Do you have any idea how long we had to fight the English to accomplish this? When I was at school I was punished if I spoke Afrikaans. Then I would have to stand in a corner wearing a paper hat with dunce written on it.’

‘What does dunce mean, Deddy?’

‘Go look it up in the dictionary. It is important that you learn to speak good English as well. We shall speak the language of the conqueror as well as the conqueror,’ Deddy says with a grand English accent, and gives her a wink. ‘That is our revenge, Lettylove.’

‘But Deddy …’

‘And you may as well stop with this Deddy business now. It was cute when you were small but now you are growing up. Call me Pappie or Pa or Vader or whatever is easiest for you.’

She has been trying for months, but ‘Vader’ sounds too much like praying, ‘Pa’ is so curt, like a dog barking, and she hasn’t managed to get used to ‘Pappie’ yet. Deddy is still the easiest. When she remembers, she calls him Deddy-Pappie. Or Pappie-Deddy.

But however annoyed Deddy may be with the English, at least he hasn’t sided with the Nazis like his brother on the farm. The last time they visited Somerverdriet, her father and Oom Kleingert had argued constantly. About the war, about Mammie’s English relatives and, while they were at it, about Mammie’s dresses that had become so short.

Back at home her father had astonished them all by shaving off his short black moustache.

‘Just so no one will ever make the mistake again of thinking that I admire Adolf Hitler,’ he had announced. ‘My enemy’s enemy is not necessarily my friend.’

Te-dum, te-dum, te-dum, Colette’s heart beats with anticipation when the train pulls into Cape Town. She no longer feels quite such a country bumpkin as when they were still living in Wellington, but the crowds rushing everywhere, the hooting cars, the busy streets and the green-and-creamy-yellow trolleybuses still frighten her a little. And now there are soldiers, too, from all over the world, in all kinds of uniforms she doesn’t recognise, men in kilts with ugly knees that give her the ­heebie-jeebies, boys who seem younger than her sixteen-year-old Ouboet, old men with rows of shiny medals on their chests, even women in uniform!

She keeps a tight grip on her mother’s gloved hand and walks with quick little steps to keep up with her mother’s clacking high-heeled shoes. Her own black mary janes are polished to such a shine she can see her own reflection in them if she bends over far enough.

‘Colette!’ her mother scolds when she almost collides with a lamppost. ‘Pick up your chin and watch where you’re going. Don’t act so provincial.’ But Mammie does walk more slowly now, which means Colette has time to study the advertisements on the sides of buses and buildings properly. Burlington Shirts and Sportswear, she reads above a picture of a boy with a shining white smile in shining white cricket clothes who reminds her of Kleinboet. How lovely the city must look at night when the slogans on the sides of the buildings are lit! It is something she has only ever seen in photographs in newspapers and magazines.

At the start of the war, like everyone else in the suburbs of Cape Town, they got blackout curtains for the house. To Deddy the dark streets at night had been almost like a gift. He fiddled with his telescope every night. To a stargazer a pitch-black night sky is of course something wonderful. Three years into the war no one really believes that Cape Town will come under attack any more, and once again most of the buildings are lit. It is only Mammie who maintains one should rather stay at home in the evenings and knit. Colette wouldn’t tell her mother, of course, but there are times when she rather enjoys the war. At school there are drills in case of a bomb attack, then they must dive under their wooden desks with their arms held above their heads, which usually ends in giggling and joking. Much more fun than arithmetic or Bible study.

Fletcher & Cartwrights for Fashion and Foods, she reads on a building on the corner opposite, but Mammie is already tugging at her arm to cross Adderley Street quickly before the traffic light turns red. She is not yet used to the red-orange-green lights you have to obey, or to the overhead electric wires powering the trolleybuses, nor to the Coloured men in smart suits. She gapes at everything. Close your mouth or you’ll swallow a fly, Mammie says when Colette tries, with her head tilted way back, to count how many storeys there are in the enormous Stuttafords building. Four, five, six … She gets no further, because her mother has seized hold of her shoulders and is steering her through the large entrance into a crowd of people.

Inside the store her jaw drops even more. She doesn’t even care anymore if she swallows a fly. Not that she can imagine ever seeing a fly inside such a smart store. Even Mammie, who doesn’t like to look ‘provincial’, slows down to a snail’s pace on the way to the elevator so they can examine and admire everything along the way, the wonderful wares displayed in shiny glass cabinets, the smart shop girls behind the gleaming wooden counters, and the elegant shoppers, of course. At the elevator they are joined by a woman with long red nails, wearing a whopper of a diamond ring and a black fur coat. Colette wonders if she isn’t sweating an awful lot because the spring day is far too warm for such a coat, but she cannot smell any sweat, just a heavy scent that smells completely different from Mammie’s eau de cologne.

‘If you look around you would never guess there is a war on,’ Mammie says with a sigh. Colette cannot figure out if it is a happy or a disapproving sigh. Then the elevator’s sliding gate opens with a crunching sound. The old man who pushes the buttons greets the fur-coated woman like an old acquaintance. He is also wearing a uniform, a wine-red tunic with a cap on his head, but he looks too old and too jolly to be a soldier, more like someone who works in a circus. Every time the elevator door stutters open, he announces the floor as if it is some place he has always wanted to go, a white beach with palm trees or another planet, and then all the shoppers squeeze out through the doors even more eagerly. When Colette and Mammie get out at Ladies’ Lingerie, he winks at Colette and she quickly covers her mouth with her hand to hide her grin, so Mammie won’t think she is acting provincial again.

‘Can’t I go look at the toys so long?’ she asks while her mother inspects the umpteenth step-in. Mammie holds up the strange contraption, fingers the straps for the stockings, tugs at the fabric to test the elastic, and wonders aloud if she should choose the white or flesh-coloured one. It gives Colette the creeps to think that in a few years’ time she will also have to wear a thing like that.

‘No, not on your own. What if you get lost?’ Mammie says. ‘And we have to get you bloomers, yours are all worn out.’

Colette