Rondebosch memories

Rondebosch

The Sasko Mills are still there, but now a high wire fence on the little slip road leading under Rondebosch bridge has replaced the faded green railings with pointed spikes. I can remember slipping off the tiny cement ledge a foot above the ground and the sharp pain as a spike tore through my blue school dress and into my underarm flesh. A fat girl called Ethel helped me down and walked with me to the train, trying to comfort me, cold and shaky and sore. The doctor wanted to cut my dress off, but my mother managed to ease it up to expose the rusty blood marks on my body and the torn material, floppy and soaked. I walked past those railings many times after that and looked for the spike at an angle and the one next it with just its tip bent over. My parents said the weight of an eight-year-old would not be enough to bend iron spikes, but I always believed I had been chubby enough to manage this (though I was not as large as shiny, comforting Ethel.)

From the school to the station is a short walk along the main road, crowded with cosmopolitan students and hawkers selling matches, biltong and toy cars. Rustenburg Shoe Store was there for sixty years, maybe more. I miss the clean sweet smell of leather and the pale green carpets. The new shops on that corner have replaced the soft wool and squeaky leather with loud music and bubble gum. Woolworths and Pick and Pay sell packaged goods with bar codes which you can pay for with a credit card. Harpers had brown sacks full of flour and sugar, white sugar after the war. My mother told me that the sugar in the brown packets used to be brown, when you could get it at all. You paid with silver shillings the size of the trapdoor on a trapdoor spider’s lair, or with florins, almost the same name as Florence with its Ponte Vecchio crammed with ancient merchants who sell the softest black leather gloves with the same clean sweet smell as the shoes and handbags.

The fountain in the middle of the road was put there so that horses pulling carriages along the dusty main road could have a drink of water, and the legs of the circular trough are hooves. St Paul’s on the rise above has a banner proclaiming 180 years of worshipping God. Long ago, I took my mother to Dr Robinson’s funeral there. The wooden step down into the dark aisle is not obvious and she fell headlong, hitting her head on the pale floorboards. I spent most of the service looking at her sideways in case she had been more hurt than she admitted, but she sang Praise my Soul the King of Heaven as lustily as usual, and outside we stood near the family, old friends sharing each other’s rites of passage.

Dorothea Robinson and I listened to Miss Johns at Kirstenbosch telling us about the buchu bush which crawls with little caterpillars at times, regardless of its pungent odour. She could whistle to the birds and they replied from their perches high in the dark green branches. She insisted that when crossing rivers, we should say, “I am crossing the [name] river.” Although still free at Kirstenbosch, the Liesbeek was canalised further down shortly after I impaled myself on the mills fence, concrete walls taming and restricting the brown rippling water. They were not as much fun as the banks of soil which you could watch being scooped away by the bouncing waves. Every now and then the river overflows, flooding Belmont Road and delighting those that remember the time when it was free to do that often.

In the interim, I have crossed some of the many rivers which were tantalising, fairytale names in the cramped geography classroom. I think of wizened Miss Johns, blue eyes in a face creased like leather, as I repeat, “I am crossing the [Orange, Limpopo, Zambezi, Shire, Thames, Danube, Arno, Rhine, Seine, Volga] River.”

The mosaic floor in the Rondebosch Town Hall still glows in antique squares of blue, but the hall itself is now used for the library. Its shelves introduced me to Freckles of the Limberlost, Pippi Longstocking who lived in Sweden and Mary Plain from the bear pits at Berne (I saw the live bears in 1975 over the parapet of a huge concrete wall.) The Saturday Farmers’ Market in the alleyway outside sold honey and sweet home-made jams with pips, as well as toys carved from wood, like the black and white Scottie dogs. Now it is empty, secured with prison wire, and the gates are padlocked during the week. The squat Standard Bank building has given way to yet another retirement block, fortified to make the inmates safe against attacks like the one that killed the blind mathematics lecturer walking home on an autumn afternoon like today, though he never saw the bronze, scarlet and orange leaves making fireworks of the trees.

The chubby eight-year-old child has metamorphosed into a curvy sixty-six-year-old woman. Memories of the tannery smell, leathery smell in the shoe shop, floury smell in the grocer’s shop, money smell in the bank and papery book smell in the library combine, turning the kaleidoscope which is Rondebosch, the changing and changeless one square mile which never abandons its claim to be home.