Frankie and Stankie, page 18
The new house is being built with money left to Dinah’s mum by the Misses Connie and Louisa. It’s a thousand pounds and it’s completely unexpected. Dinah’s mum likes houses, so with thoughts of the legacy dancing in her head, she sets out to prowl the older residential areas of Durban, looking for her ideal home. She walks all the gracious, shaded streets between the Overport shops and Mitchell Park. One place is called the Elephant House, because the last elephant in Durban was seen right there, in the garden. Sub-tropical vegetation has grown up around these older houses, lush and dense, making a green shade around colonial verandahs, white-plastered walls, and wide French windows. She loves the way the climate encourages a blurring of inside and outside, and one house she looks at has a tree growing right up through the roof. The gardens end in small, scrubby orchards of pawpaw trees and banana palms. Front gardens are full of azaleas and aloes and red-hot pokers. The houses have fixtures dating from a time when ships docked in Durban Harbour carrying stained-glass door panels from England, fan lights, balustrades, whole pressed ceilings complete with borders of acanthus leaves, scalloped brick-roof copings and porcelain sanitary ware bearing the names of Messrs Shanks and Twyford.
But then there’s Ta, who refuses to engage with any of her housing schemes and, having grown up in small rented flats, has no experience of gambling money on property. Having left the Old World behind him, he now dislikes anything that reminds him of Old World domestic interiors. Brass door handles, mantelshelves, wallpaper, washboards, ornamental cast iron, chandeliers and sash windows – all these bring back to him the things that he’d rather forget. He dislikes mouldings and panelled doors. He knows without having to look that old houses are about decrepitude and that any house not built to 1950s local authority planning-office specifications will mean rust, damp, termites, rot, cockroaches, subsidence and probably flood. Plus it will smell of mothballs and old ladies’ fur coats.
So the nest egg is used to buy a plot of red earth on a hill behind the university where bushland is fast becoming new urban sprawl and the balance becomes a down payment on one of the municipality’s approved range of bungalows. The choice is between plans A, B and C. A building contractor is employed but now there’s a hitch, because the house is taking for ever. The builder, being a recent immigrant from Europe, has gone heady on the opportunities available for white-skinned entrepreneurs in the new apartheid South Africa. He has quickly realised that all he needs is an underpaid black craftsperson with no labour rights and no electoral voice who will do all the work for him. So, Dinah’s parents’ builder is a full-time absentee. He’s keen to develop his angling skills while the house is built, start to finish, by a single Zulu labourer who has three words of English in answer to Dinah’s dad’s questions, whenever he visits the site. ‘Boss gone fishing.’
Finally, the little house is built – a tribute to the Zulu labourer’s industry and skill. Lisa and Dinah share one of the three small bedrooms so that their dad can have a study, but there’s nowhere for Dinah’s mum to set up a weaving loom or mess about with paints. The house has a front door that leads straight into an L-shaped sitting room with the dining table and Dinah’s mum’s piano fitted into the smaller part of the L. It has galvanised-steel windows equipped with basic-range burglar bars.
All the same, it’s exciting to have a house and Ta is delighted with it. He’s especially delighted with the plywood flush doors that smell of new glue and with the flecked Emelux finish which has been sprayed on to the walls of the kitchen, bathroom and WC in place of the more expensive ceramic-tile option. He’s delighted with the corrugated asbestos roof and the asbestos drain-pipes which will never rust or crack. He is full of enthusiasm for the septic tank, an ecologically laudable sewage-disposal system which dictates that the family would be ill advised to use soft-tissue toilet roll, and ought to stick with the interleaved sheets of scratchy Jeyes. There’s even a special holder for the scratchy Jeyes that’s been thoughtfully recessed into the wall of the Emelux.
The house has only one lavatory since there isn’t one in the bathroom and this is a source of daily concern for Dinah’s mum who suffers with temperamental bowels. Dinah’s mum needs the loo each morning within five minutes of her first sip of breakfast coffee, or else the day is lost, but this is almost always the time when Dinah’s dad is in there working on the crossword puzzle. Dinah’s mum keeps remedies called Chocolax, Brook-lax, Liquid Paraffin and California Syrup of Figs. She keeps these in her knicker drawers along with the Lux flakes and Nescafé and Swiss chocolate. She also keeps an enamel enema jug with a length of nasty rubber hose in a canvas drawstring bag. This is a thing Dinah uncovers one day while snooping but she has no idea what it’s for and, naturally, she cannot ask. Dinah’s dad always emerges from the lavatory looking pleased.
‘The clue’s “Half-moon”,’ he’ll say. ‘Look. Two letters. The answer’s “Mo”. How about that?’
What Dinah’s parents haven’t taken into account is how expensive the new house will be. Because nobody has lived in it before them, nobody has supplemented the gaps in its basic structure. So Dinah’s house has no garden path, no paved terrace for afternoon tea, no pulley rigged up for a washing line, no lawn, no letter box at the gate, no gate, no fence, no coat hook behind the bathroom door, no bookshelves, no curtain rails. There are no plants in the garden and there’s precious little topsoil. Dinah’s mum’s new garden has three steep terraces of red Durban earth, which erode into mudslides with the first heavy rains. So with no money to call her own and the weekly account book to confront, Dinah’s mum sets out for the botanical gardens to teach herself about plants. And it’s while she’s leaning over the various specimens and taking down their names that she meets one of the people who becomes a part of the family’s life. Francis-the-Gardener is an Indian employee of the parks and gardens department.
‘I’m Francis-the-Gardener,’ he says into her ear. ‘I’ll get you some of these. Cheap, madam. Very cheap. You come back later. Five o’clock. You come back.’
And from that day on, Francis-the-Gardener supplements his meagre council wages by selling Dinah’s mum, lovingly wrapped in damp newspaper, all the odd corms, buds, cuttings and bedding plants that he’s garnered during his days in the flowerbeds. Francis-the-Gardener’s knowledge is extensive, although he’s unable to read. He’s stick thin and suffers from bronchial complaints, which gives them a common bond. For a while he tells her what to do with all the cuttings and the corms, but soon he’s working in the garden with her in every spare minute he has. Francis is always in need of money and soon they are talking trees.
Dinah’s house, as it turns out, is not far from where the gardener lives in a hovel made of corrugated iron, with his wife and his five children. This is because the Cato Manor location starts just below the road that bounds the bottom of Dinah’s family’s garden. Several of the poorest Indian families are living there in makeshift shacks, having been burnt out of their homes during the anti-Indian riots of 1949. Most Durban Indians like Francis-the-Gardener are the sons and daughters of indentured Hindu labourers, the indigent of the subcontinent, who were shipped in to work in the sugar-cane fields of Natal, since the Natal cane fields, unlike those of the Caribbean or Mauritius, post-date the abolition of slavery and local Zulu labour isn’t all that keen. Cutting cane is very hard work and, as Dinah’s junior-school history teacher has already explained, ‘A Zulu’s idea of hard work is to lie in the sun with his hat over his eyes.’
Most of the Indians are still dirt poor, though some, against the odds, have managed to become small market gardeners, or door-to-door vegetable traders with one second-hand van. Some have got their sons and daughters through high school and a few families can even boast a doctor or a lawyer on board. Then there are the other Indians, the free Muslims from Gujarat, who have come with a little money and established themselves as more significant traders and also as shack landlords in the black townships where they, too, are obliged, by law, to live. These are the Indians that both blacks and whites hate most. Squeezed into the Shylock role by racist laws and vicious licensing acts, property-owning Indians are always under threat and are often on the squeeze themselves. Then, in the months following the assault and trauma of the 1948 election, Natal’s more impoverished, underdog Zulus turn, not on whites, but on Indians, who are more visibly in the line of fire. There’s wholesale burning of Indian property and brutal mob attacks that end in a hundred and forty dead. And a mob is not disposed to discriminate between rich Muslims and poor Hindus. Any Indians will do.
Dinah’s mum is at the Grey Street Indian Market when the anti-Indian riots break out. She’s buying flowers for a neighbour who’s in the maternity hospital. Then suddenly she’s in the middle of a roaring crowd and she hears herself being yelled at.
‘Hey, crazy lady, come out of there!’ the policeman shouts, but the mob simply parts around her. She and her flowers are untouched.
Given the high-speed growth rate of any plant in Durban, Dinah’s mum’s garden soon becomes a thing of wonder. The bald terraces of red mud are covered with coarse, un-English grass through which black millipedes crawl. There are avocado trees and pawpaw trees and a tree out front with a nobbly trunk and pendant red flowers, like fuchsias. Passion-fruit vines gallop along the verandah and along the mud wall of the side passage to the kitchen door. There are cobbles around the base of the avocado tree and there’s a little bench in its shade. Some of her trees become protected species, which means that, for ever after, they must be left to loom picturesquely over the little house, threatening the eaves and the guttering.
Dinah’s parents don’t fence their garden. And, since theirs is the only unfenced house, their sideway path becomes a corridor for the black pedestrians of Cato Manor, which enrages the woman next door. Dinah’s parents deliberately don’t fence the garden, partly because they like the open aspect, but also because they’re aware that, with the relentless extension of white suburbia, miles of fencing makes rings of steel around what were yesterday’s public rights of way, and this means black pedestrians, often with heavy loads, are required sometimes to walk mile-long detours, just in order to get back home. And it’s not only the black pedestrians, because these days, there’s Evalina, who’s become a fixture in the bungalow’s native kia.
All houses in Durban are built with a routine hutch for a black domestic at the bottom of the garden. The hutch is something that Dinah’s dad has no choice about. It comes along as part of the package with plans A, B and C. And the family hasn’t been in residence five minutes before Charley, the Vice-Chancellor’s swashbuckling, densely black Moçambiquan chauffeur, has twisted Ta’s arm to ensconce his new girlfriend in the hutch as domestic servant. That way Evalina will be conveniently accessible to him.
Evalina is fabulous and she’s great to have in the house. A big woman with a big personality, Evalina explodes with charm. She bangs about with duster and broom, listening each morning to the catchy sound of 1950s Radio Bantu, the SABC’s ghetto radio station which is right then pouring out the cream of the townships’ Golden Age black music. She has enormous boobs and a huge throaty laugh and all the phone calls that come to the house are for her. This means that, when Evalina is having her afternoon break, Dinah’s parents are her constant messengers. They’re forever running down to the edge of the lawn and calling down to the hutch. ‘Telephone, Evalina!’ Then Evalina, her headscarf awry and her person divested of its undergarments, will come chortling and bouncing up the garden path, clutching at her unbuttoned overall.
‘Hau, master – no bodice,’ she’ll say and she’ll sometimes have a super-quick flash to prove her point about this.
There’s lots of partying and visitors in the hutch, which causes the neighbour almost to fall into an apoplexy – more especially so because she’s somehow found out that Dinah’s dad is paying wages over the odds. This is considered a caddish practice and is commonly referred to as ‘spoiling the native girl’.
‘I never know who’s coming or going,’ she says.
Because most white South African householders observe a strictly-no-visitors rule, the neighbour thinks it’s outrageous that Evalina should be allowed visitors. Yet Dinah’s house is the only one in the street that absolutely never gets burgled. And, mercifully, by the time Evalina is finally unmasked as the long-term receiver of stolen goods for a thriving burglary syndicate it’s decades later, and the neighbour has been long under the sod.
Dinah’s mother is pleased with her garden, but she’s still quite exercised about the little strip of muddy verge that constitutes the pavement beyond her unfenced garden and she decides to distance herself from the mud by marking her property’s boundary with a row of aloes in large tubs. Francis gets the tubs for her. Cheap, madam. Very cheap. So twelve handsome metal tubs appear, which the two of them paint a nice dark-green. The tubs are a source of pleasure to her, until Ta one day watches a small troop of skinny Indian schoolkids pointing and giggling at the tubs. Very soon they are marching up and down, arms swinging, and chanting as they cross and re-cross the garden. Dinah’s dad cocks an ear and listens to the drift of their chant. They are keeping in step and singing lustily.
One, two, three, four,
Five, six, seven, eight,
Nine, ten, eleven, twelve –
TWELVE green shit buckets
Outside of a YELL-ow house!
While the white areas of Durban all have water-borne sewage, the black locations don’t, so Dinah’s mum’s plant tubs, so stylish to her white neighbours, are of course instantly recognisable to a troop of Indian schoolkids. And the revelation that his wife’s plant tubs are knock-off from the location sewage works is vastly amusing to Dinah’s dad, but her mum is mortified and insists that the buckets must go.
Now she’s back to the undemarcated muddy verge and she doesn’t have the money to have it paved. Plus it belongs to the council, doesn’t it?
‘Write to the council for me, Dee,’ she says one day. ‘Tell them to do something about it.’
‘Me?’ Dinah says. ‘They won’t do anything.’
‘They will if you say that your father’s a professor,’ she says.
Dinah laughs at her, because she knows that her mum is daft, old-fashioned daft, foreign daft – that her pre-war German hierarchical Weltanschauung will be a matter for derision. She knows that her mum’s a bit taken with the fact that Ta has recently been made Professor of Maths, and that she probably really does think a strip of mud outside his garden is no longer in keeping with his status.
‘Only think,’ Dinah’s mum says. ‘His colleagues and his visitors having to walk always through all this mud.’
So Dinah writes what she considers to be a completely spoofy, hammed-up letter. She paints a vivid picture of the great man’s distinguished guests – a line of Professor Brainstorms in gowns and mortar boards – all ruining their shoes on rainy nights as they wade through the seas of mud. But, incredibly, her mum seems happy with the letter and posts it right away. Five days later, there’s a team of workmen jumping off the back of a lorry. They pass batches of quarry tiles to each other, hand over hand, and by the end of the day Dinah’s house is the only one in the street to have twenty square metres of classy-looking terracotta paving all along the front.
Ta is astonished when he comes home but he’s immediately suspicious.
‘What did you do?’ he says.
‘Nothing,’ Dinah’s mum says, but she’s a lousy actor. ‘Dee wrote a letter for me, that’s all.’
‘What about?’ he says.
‘About the mud,’ Dinah’s mum says.
But soon he’s plucked it out of them and for a while he’s furious. All his egalitarian sentiments are affronted by the way his wife has gone and pulled rank like this. But he doesn’t mind for all that long, because his new second-hand Vespa is much happier standing on the paving. The Vespa’s previous owner has seen fit to adorn the scooter with diaphanous girlie transfers, but Ta considers them an irrelevance, given that the scooter runs so well. And he’s completely unbothered when the girlie transfers get the odd mention, as they do from time to time, in student publications.
To reach Dinah’s road from South Ridge Road, you turn right at the Manor House which is now a block of expensive two-storey maisonettes. Then you pass the overgrown corrugated tin house that penniless, brainy Eva lives in with her refugee Hungarian dad. A tin house is not really suitable for a white person for all that it has pretty Edwardian fretwork and a balustraded verandah. Tin houses everywhere are going under the bulldozer and there are lots and lots of bulldozers in Manor Gardens right now. It’s a suburb that’s expanding fast, even though no one has yet thought to develop the wooded green valley full of mango trees where white children go to build tree houses and Indian children go to pick the fruit for their parents to sell. This makes occasional brief opportunities for cross-race interaction, even if it’s mainly name-calling.
‘Arrah-charrah-vrot-banana,’ the white children chant.
And Dinah has an abortive friendship with a girl her own age from the Indian Girls’ High. She has long, looped black plaits and her uniform is always snowy-white. They chat all the way on the journey from the bus stop round the valley and always part at the turn-off for the lower road. Yet Dinah can’t remember what they talked about and she doesn’t even know the girl’s name. All she can remember is her own embarrassment when the girl one day uses the word mis-CHEEV-ious. She can remember being ashamed of her embarrassment.
There’s a steep, hairpin bend at Nunhead Road just below where the Professor of Afrikaans-Nederlands lives, with his dapper little beard and his white safari suit. Dinah’s road starts with the Cleggs’ grocery shop which is called a Tearoom and General Store, but it doesn’t serve tea. Most corner shops are run by Greek immigrants, but the Cleggs are immigrants from Shoreditch. Mr Clegg was a Barnado’s boy and he likes to regale his customers with the story of his early life. He’s a small, wiry man with blackened teeth, several of which are missing. Mr Clegg has been in the Merchant Navy and, since he’s often stripped to the waist, but for his sleeveless vest, his nautical tattoos are much in evidence. He has an anchor on one bicep and a crucifix wound around with what looks like barbed wire on the other. Mr Clegg has a cockney accent. He drops his ‘h’ sounds and says ‘v’ instead of ‘th’, but he always tells his customers that he once had an Oxford accent – that’s before he lost it in the Navy.
