Weekly Meeting - Schools Creative Writing

The winning essay and picture of the winner, Alex Van der Wielen from Morrison’s Academy getting his prize

Seeing Things in Black and White

Brick paving boiled in the summer heat, stinging my feet as I scampered across the driveway and into the garden bushes, hiding away. I waited for the classic “ready or not, here I come” I had heard so many times before; out of the house came the smiling woman, Bertha. The game of hide-and-go-seek I played countless times is engraved in my memory.  Early childhood was like this: long summer days, running barefoot in a huge expanse of lawn, sprinklers hissing me, and my four siblings shrieking with laughter as we darted in and out of the spray. Rainbow prisms of colour were caught in the droplets, birdsong rang and vivid colours of red-hot poker flowers and intense blue of agapanthus with their leathery leaves blossomed. The vegetable garden grew giant frilly spinach, shiny dark aubergines and flecked green marrows of enormous proportions. Lavender hummed with the traffic of bees, chickens scratched and murmured contentedly searching for worms and pecking at grain scattered by my father. “Kip-kip-kip-kip-kip-kip-kip-kip”, he would call, throwing handfuls of corn to the greedy hens. Inside the house was always cool, a refuge from the heat of the African sun. On the pale marble counter a fruit bowl was mounded with fruit of all colours and shapes; dark wooden floors gleamed and smelled faintly of floor polish and lavender, I think.

The house itself was the grand finale to two previous versions of itself (although at that young age I did not fully recognise this) and was, quite simply, enormous. As a small child, it seemed to me to be the “White Castle”, perched as it was high up above the sweep of the coastline and fringed by vineyards. Everything was there: pool, manicured grounds, spacious rooms, opulent furnishings. And the maid.

I knew Bertha before I knew that I knew her. She carried me on her back; her soft singing soothed my sleep. Her woolly hair smelt of wood smoke from the fire she had at her home. Her voice was quiet, her movements quick and deft. She worked with purpose and finished quickly. She wore a faint frown as she concentrated on her work, but in conversation her face would light up and flash a broad smile of brilliant white. She would bustle around the house picking up the scattered clothing, hoovering, mopping, swishing the broom, and stooping to sweep the crumbs. She’d stretch to hang the washing on the line, which flapped and cracked in the strong south-easterly wind. Us children would run around in the garden wild as she worked; she never minded if we used her as a hiding place and we would swirl around her laughing, and she laughed too. She always arrived in the mornings in a cloud of sweet perfume, her slim frame flattered by the outfits she carefully chose. Matching bag and stylish heels, which only later, much later, I found out were a cast-off from some previous ‘Madam’ (as the lady of the house was always known).  Changing out of her work clothes, she slipped into being a different Bertha: no longer a housemaid, but an elegant woman.

Then one day everything changed. Shaken and distressed, tears rolled down her face distorted from bruising and swelling around her eye and cheek. The adults were talking with her in hushed tones, comforting and trying to sooth her. It took some time for the story to filter down to the level of the children but in the meantime, I watched, wide-eyed and fearful; witnessing for the first time real trauma. Her husband, Saul, was the one who had beaten her so viciously, had left her and ran back to Malawi. Perhaps fearful himself of the possible consequences of his actions, but effectively leaving Bertha homeless and bereft.  It was as though something of her had been rubbed out: her movements slowed, her expressions dulled but always as sweet as ever with us. In time she seemed to recover and we went back to taking for granted her usual capable, strong self but every now and then, I would catch a glimpse of her sadness and remember.

Older now, the world became a bigger place and my knowledge of Bertha grew.  Memories more detailed, curiosity and observation emerging out of childish complacence.  The journey to school took us past landmarks that could not be more contrasting, emblematic of the extremes of South African society: on one side of the road the notorious Pollsmoor Prison and on the other, Steenberg Golf Estate. Ironically both with a high security perimeter fence – one to keep in, one to keep out. As we passed the prison we could hear the shouts of the inmates and could see the dirty clothing hung from their windows whilst the staccato hiss of the automated sprinklers tended the lush grass of Steenberg opposite. Behind the prison and just a stone’s throw from our preppy independent school, lay Westlake Village, a well-intentioned government development of low-cost housing now regressing back towards its previous incarnation as a squatter camp with plastic and metal sheeting extensions to the most basic of houses. Bertha lived here.

Some days, shuttling down to afterschool cricket on the well-tended Oval, we would give Bertha a lift home. She always insisted that we drop her at the end of her street; she would step daintily down from the Range Rover, turn, smile and wave before she walked away. I would look at the houses, which reminded me of ones I would draw as a small child: a door, a window, a path, a pitched roof. I wondered what Bertha’s house looked like inside. I imagined it would be like her: neat, organised and fresh with nice things. One day, she let us drop her right at her door. She had a sore ankle. She gingerly stepped onto the pavement, turned and waved as usual and we drove away. Turning to peer over the backseat to catch a last glimpse of her, I saw her enter not the front door of the house I thought was hers, but instead she lifted the overhanging sheet of plastic that formed a door flap of the adjoining shack and enter. I couldn’t tear my eyes away but she didn’t reappear. In that moment, I saw her in the life she really inhabited and for the first time, wondered how it could be possible for someone to live between two such separate worlds, only a kilometre apart.

Life, as they say, went on even after that disturbing realisation that Bertha’s life was so different to ours. Lulled back into comfortable acceptance of the dual realities of her home life and our own, our childhood continued with its daily round of easy availability of everything we needed. Summer days, family holidays, school concerts, prize-givings, birthday parties and braais by the pool were the backdrop to our lives. Bertha was a continual and reassuring presence in the house, so familiar that she felt like family to us. But we were not her family and hers was the story of so many labourers and domestic workers in Cape Town; migrant labour was the life-blood of the city and a desperate necessity for the poor and the immigrant population of South Africa. She was Malawian and her children were there along with her extended family. This enforced separation which allowed her to make a living, but cost her precious years with her own children, finally came crashing down one terrible day. Her little boy, fetching water, fell in the river and drowned, others helpless to save him and Bertha a thousand miles away. She wept so inconsolably that her face was unrecognisable when she returned to work after just a day away; words spilling from her incoherently, but finally relating the tragedy that so cruelly highlighted the stark contrast between her children’s lives and our own.

Leaving Cape Town was the adventure we had been anticipating for months: packed into the car, possessions crammed into suitcases, we set off on the next chapter of our lives. Bertha parted with grateful tears and went to work for family friends. Soon we adapted to life in the North: part of an older country with a different culture, social order and political view. We were children in South Africa, but grew up in Scotland. Like so many, we saw our childhood in rosy hues, filled with sunlight, innocent years stretching away into the past. Idyllic you could say. Except that, in time, we became acutely aware that our own childhood memories of Cape Town were far from typical. That the majority of the city lived below the poverty line, whilst a small and mainly white minority flourished in the leafy suburbs that clung to the slopes of Table Mountain and the Cape Peninsula. Further out, on the flats, the Cape Flats as they were known, lived the majority of the urban Cape Town population in a sprawling shanty-town that stretches almost as far as the eye could have seen from our pool terrace.

Bertha, in all her peaceable and loyal service, was essentially forced into servitude and endured all manner of deprivation and loss that are the shadows of poverty. That our lives were privileged where hers was subject to the whimsy of fate; that despite all the warmth and familiarity, there would forever be a gulf between us which echoes the divided society that is South Africa. Generations of atonement for centuries of wrong will need to pass before people’s lives in South Africa converge in any meaningful way. The bittersweet reality of life there though is that despite the huge injustices and harboured racial resentments, there are everyday moments of pure beauty where ordinary people reach out to each other with love, truth and compassion. And that human dignity can be preserved even in the most impoverished of existences.