On the days that Sarah took the taxi from her work at Princess Alice, the storm would come around that bend from Orrellaan into Tiendelaan, the bottom of her blue coat flapping while her still shiny polished brown shoes took tired yet firmly planted steps towards the corner house. If the dishes were not yet washed or the ash not yet removed from the Dover stove from the previous night’s cooking, there was hell to pay. How on earth can one pretend not to be playing kennetjie (a two sticks game) and then, on seeing the storm approaching, rush inside to do all those chores in about a minute or two flat while finishing the next day’s homework for school? Impossible! The die was cast. Die was the right word. There were going to be very many Port Jackson leaves to collect from around the house as the whacks rained down on disobedient bodies.
Ek doen myself te kort vir julle, en dit is wat ek kry! (I deny myself so much for your sake, and this is what I get!) ‘I am leaving, and I am only taking (who will it be this time?) Peter with me. Julle bring my niks genot nie. My ouers het net EEN keer gepraat!’ (You don’t bring me any pleasure. My parents only needed to speak ONCE).
Spare the rod and spoil the child, Sarah would say often. Discipline was tight. Those Port Jackson branches were handy instruments for keeping the children in line.
XII
Toughees
Comfortably in charge, Sarah established firm and inflexible routines that would keep the family out of trouble. In isolation, the individual routines made no sense. At the time, they were onerous. Looking back, it is clear what Sarah was up to. She spun a delicate web of influence that kept the family unit together and the children out of trouble in a dangerous part of the Cape Flats. What she accomplished was ingenious, actually.
Sarah’s children wore simple clothes and if you looked closely you would see pants mended with those square patches and that the buttons on a shirt did not exactly match. But there were no holes in pants or buttons missing on a school shirt. Her logic was simple – ‘When you go outside people don’t say your pants are torn. They ask, “What kind of home do you come from?”’ And so Sarah’s children became aware of the fact that they represented the family unit, and that how they behaved in public could lift or drop the Jansen name through a hole in the socks.
With the little money Sarah had there were all kinds of schemes to keep clothes on the children’s backs, quite literally. Nothing was more fascinating than the concept of the lay-by. You walked with Sarah down Retreat Main Road and lay-bys would be placed along the way. K.Y. Ling, the Chinese South African, was popular with his shop at the station end of Retreat Road, selling everything from shining marbles to household appliances. Along the main road Sarah would spot a drop of curtains at one shop and a supposedly bone china tea set at another. For each of these items a small amount of money would be laid down every week until it was ‘paid up’, which meant you could now collect your purchase and take it home.
Wynberg Main Road was the next stop, with crowds dodging the front-of-shop displays flowing over the pavement. Sometimes you walked on the pavement, other times you walked in the street, but all the time you bumped into hordes of people scrambling for Saturday-morning bargains. The Wynberg shops had everything from women’s blouses and men’s suits to Bata Toughees, those dependable children’s shoes. All the Jansen children wore Toughees as school shoes. Until late in her life, Sarah’s gifts to the grandchildren were shiny shoes for the new school year from her modest monthly pension.
Working young mother with at least two of her children born, having coffee in the Steenberg home before the move to Tenth Avenue, with the ever-present Singer sewing machine to make and repair clothes for the children
There was a problem, though. In primary school the soccer-crazy Firstborn often used his two shoes as the markers for the two ends of the imaginary goalposts. Fine, but when the bell rang signalling the end of the break, the boys shot off to class without shifting the goalposts, so to speak. By the time you remembered, the shoes were missing. Firstborn did this twice in one month and what followed was a hiding to remember. It was one of the few cases where a tearful Sarah handed over Firstborn to Abraham. What made that whacking memorable was not the physical discomfort; it was the pain in Abraham’s eyes for this gentle man never raised his hands against the children. For the young parents that was a lot of hard-earned money down the drain – two pairs of Bata Toughees.
No Cape Flats child escaped hand-me-downs, the standard cost-saving measure of families when it came to clothes. The eldest child was the lucky one but thereafter the new school blazer, jersey or shirt went down the line until it was simply too worn out to be patched up. Of course sizes never fitted perfectly on the next body and so you could easily spot a hand-me-down because the sleeves were too long or the shoes too big. No brand names then, only survival clothing, and Sarah was a master at making sure that holes were fixed on everything from socks to sweaters. One of the standard pieces of hardware was the elbow patch on a jacket – a special piece of leather for the one part of a blazer that would quickly wear out. One of the favourite old family photographs is of Sarah working on a Singer sewing machine at the kitchen table mending what was broken and pulling together fabric in the same way that she held together family.
Sarah would join a church women’s initiative where the sisters would bring together used or home-made clothing to be given to the poorer upcountry believers. The sisters would take their boxes of clothes and on the appointed Saturday the dresses and trousers and childrenswear would be hung neatly from a clothing line inside the church. There was no shame here when working-class people did for others what they did for themselves – hand clothes down and across the community in hard times. Sarah enjoyed extending her work of love beyond the home.
Naomi remembers...
The industrious and thrifty Sarah had an almost uncanny relationship with a very thin, weather-beaten, head-scarfed woman who used to walk around the area with a round wicker basket over her arm. This woman never seemed to utter a single word. She’d simply knock, someone would open, call my mother and the two women would have a business exchange. This woman sold herbs like buchu. My mother would then herself drink the brewed broth, which apparently is good for one’s organs and has been a part of the indigenous culture and heritage of South Africa for hundreds of years.
She partnered with and supported a neighbour who lived a few doors away, Mrs Nitzky, who was able to get good-quality, slightly damaged men’s shirts from her place of work. The industrious Sarah would buy up a number of these for her sons and hubby, and sell the rest to her friends and colleagues at a profit. Mrs Nitzky always seemed delighted to do business with Mrs Jansen because she received her money on time and came back repeatedly with more of her wares. Perhaps unknowingly at the time, we were learning to deal honestly with people and to honour our word.
Another person with whom Sarah had business dealings was a certain Mr Petersen. He worked for a clothing outfitter called Buss & Heiman and so he’d often be announced as, ‘Mommy! Mr Buss & Heiman is here!’ This gentleman would arrive by car with loads of new clothes and lay these out for my mother to choose from. She would order what was needed and he’d call by a second time with the right size and colour, and these garments would then be paid off in instalments. Sort of online quality shopping without a personal computer.
Watching Sarah around the house practising her belief in the ‘waste not want not’ principle did not carry much weight, given the sensibilities of a child. One remembers her religiously doing things like using bath water to flush the toilet or water the garden, boiling vegetable peels and left-over food to cook a broth for the dogs, and using the sun as a hairdryer.
Sarah’s position held that poverty was no excuse for being unkempt, smelly or dirty. It was also clear that it was dignified to own school shoes even if they belonged to your eldest brother, were several sizes too big and the wearer was a girl. The rule was that your school shoes were to be pol
ished and shining all the time. The world was pretty much black and white to Sarah and this was precisely the security that children needed in the uncertain world of the Cape Flats.
Why Auntie Lily Fredericks, the next-door neighbour of many decades, never laid any civil charges against this principled woman still escapes me. Sarah Jansen would literally put her hands through the high back fence that separated the two Council properties and tear the slightly torn clothes from the body of Sammy, Auntie Lily’s eldest child. ‘Now go and tell your mommy to sew your clothes properly.’
When one night Auntie Lily’s uncontrollable sobbing could be heard through the thin Council house walls, it was her neighbour Sally who would rush over to console the bereaved mother of four with Scripture to the effect that she would one day meet her suddenly deceased husband again, in a land where there was neither sickness nor death.
XIII
Bras and Brasso
Do not think for one moment that in Sarah’s home you could go to bed at night with unwashed dishes in the sink. ‘Can’t it wait till tomorrow, Mummy? I’m tired now.’ Her answer was unchanged over the years – ‘What if somebody gets sick during the night and we have to call the doctor and people start coming through the house?’ In other words, medical personnel, neighbours and friends would come through your home at night and, horror of horrors, see unwashed dishes in the sink. Of course overnight illness never brought visitors in the dead of night but that was hardly Sarah’s point. It was about being neat and tidy at all times, whether in the privacy of your home or on the way to school.
The children would learn a lasting lesson living under Sarah’s roof. In her words, ‘Jy kan arm wees maar ordentlik!’ (You can be poor and decent at the same time), and you got the distinct impression that those stock Afrikaans gesegdes (sayings) came straight from the Johnson home in Montagu. Nothing signalled that ordentlik philosophy more clearly than those ubiquitous tins of Nugget shoe polish which would spring into action whenever a Jansen child stepped out of the house.
Nursing is perhaps the only profession, outside of the military, that makes such high demands on personnel attire. Staff Nurse Jansen wore a pure white nurse’s uniform impeccably starched days before. Then there was the nurse’s hat, a white folded structure whose open parts pointed backwards. The blue or red name tag was a standard fixture on the chest and then, of course, those immaculate shoulder flaps that changed colour with rank. You could see your face in the brightly polished brown shoes. Like every other nurse, Sarah’s hair was neatly bunned under that arrow-like headgear and there was a matching raincoat for the weather. No teacher or lawyer or accountant dressed with such precision as demanded of nurses.
The starched demands of the professional nurse fitted perfectly with the strict demands of domestic hygiene. Sometimes, her children felt, Sarah went too far. Like when one of your bras (friends, as in brothers) playing on the sand dunes alongside the corner house would knock on the door for ‘’n bietjie water, Meesies Jansen?’ What happened next would cost you some friends. Sarah would tell him to wait and then go and fill the bath with water. The innocent child at the door, with sand and snot (nasal mucus) all over his body, would think he was waiting for water. A few minutes later she would collect the unsuspecting thirsty one, submerge him in the bath of cold water, apply sunlight soap, and scrub. Then, having dried the perplexed child in a large towel, he would be treated to his original request, a glass of water. Needless to say, some friends never returned.
Nurse Sarah on a break at Princess Alice, with a colleague, Nurse Dominic
The youngster on his way to the bathtub would have been a witness to order. Doilies were neatly pressed arrangements made painstakingly with crochet work. Pink, blue and white doilies. The thirsty one would have seen folded napkins in one corner of the kitchen and an imposing green-and-white oven that had been cleaned with liquid polish. The taps would have had the weekly Brasso treatment while Windolene took care of the small, multi-framed Council windows. In the bedroom there were Bibles alongside the bed and evangelical tracts to hand out to complete strangers who crossed your path.
Each room had a photograph or painting on the walls – a neat landscape, a familiar Bible verse, or that one of two pleasant schoolchildren pointing to spots in an atlas. Each photograph had a purpose – to convey the order of nature or the road to salvation or the value of learning. The photo of the children pouring over the atlas was unusual. In those days all the standard photographs in the shops had only white people in them; here was the rare one of a brown boy and girl, immaculately dressed, pointing out different parts of the world. Sarah or Abraham must have thought carefully about this educational picture before making the purchase for that picture still hangs in the dining room after several decades.
Both parents got their Junior Certificate (Standard 8, now Grade 10), Sarah from the Noorder Paarl High School and Abraham from Livingstone High School. JC, as it was called, was a significant achievement in those days. As parents, they wanted their children to go further and so Sarah would fill the house with books brought home from Princess Alice where the authors and heroes were British characters like Enid Blyton and Bessie Bunter. Somehow the house had regular supplies of issues of the Reader’s Digest and there were magazines all over the place. Firstborn, especially, read everything in sight and sometimes more than once as the stories transported child readers into worlds they never could imagine escaping to from the limited confines of the Cape Flats. Sarah’s children were expressly discouraged from reading trashy materials like Chunky Charlie or Zorro, and heaven help you (literally) if the girlie magazine called Scope was found between the mattress and the springs of your bed. These trashy reads were not edifying, said Sarah, and Scope put you in the fast lane to a hot place.
Naomi remembers...
Sarah’s name means ‘Princess’. What made this impressive woman was her regal parentage, her formal religious upbringing in the Dutch Reformed Church, and her faith as a born-again Christian. Anchored in these values, Sarah would come to develop a set of uncompromising standards for her home and her family, something she communicated through daily, repeated social messages — that ‘the people’ outside would blame the mother for an unwashed sink of dishes, the children’s ragged underwear, blown-in litter lying outside the blue front door, dirty fingernails, unpolished shoes, wax in ears, and more.
Sarah’s standards were not to be compromised or the branch of a tree would do the talking. There was also the threat of a body blow so severe ‘dat die muur jou nog ’n hou gee’ (so that the wall gives you another one).
Her hard-working, bleach-scented hands had many functions, including kneading bread for the family. I remember how she would as unobtrusively as possible remove hardened dough from her cuticles as she sat in a church service. It was Sarah’s unstinting caring for her five home-born children, her husband, the boarders, a dog, and litters of unwanted cats that conveyed the understanding that this was a generous household.
Despite the demands of this expansive household, there was to be no divide in Sarah’s home between cleanliness and godliness. After all, there was enough evidence in this working-class community to prove that unkempt and undisciplined children became skollies (gangsters).
XIV
Turning out
On weekends the cleaning routine started in earnest. The children spread floor polish across the wooden tiled areas and then went sliding on towels to turn dark polish into brightly lit floors. ‘You should be able to see your face in it,’ instructed Sarah as if she had forgotten that she had said the same thing the previous week and the one before that. From there the boys had to trample the dirt out of blankets submerged in water that filled up the bathtub.
That weekend routine was broken as Christmas approached for then Abraham took over and the boys had to scrape the walls for the obligatory end-of-year paint job. It was as if there was some divine regulation that the walls had to be paint
ed ‘for Christmas’ and the linoleum (or ‘lino’, as we called it) replaced on the kitchen floor with a fresh layer from K.Y. Ling’s shop. There was always a sense of renewal and freshness in the house around Christmas time.
It was also the time during which a slightly limp piece of string was laid across the ceiling of the dining room for the incoming Christmas cards. You knew the regulars would send the first cards, like sister Ruth Jardine who shared a Christmas birthday with Abraham. Auntie Doris, the energetic sister of Abraham, always showed up on the 25th with her chicken pie and a repeat demonstration of how she karate-kicked her now grown-up boy when he showed the first signs of resisting a routine hiding.
Sarah, married and a mother, outside the corner house – probably in her thirties
It seems impossible now, but then everybody fitted into that small dining room, as it was proudly called. Whatever the financial difficulties in the background, Christmas was the big day, and the meal was something to look forward to – tongue, ham (later to be called gammon as we became fancy) and a leg of lamb all preceded by a delicious pot of curry. This was not jelly-and-custard Sunday; Christmas meant a fruity trifle pudding and the granadilla fridge tart with layers of tennis biscuits and coronation milk.
Song for Sarah Page 5
