The Girl from Simon's Bay

by Barbara Mutch

  The Girl from Simon’s Bay

  BARBARA MUTCH

  For L

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  1969

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By Barbara Mutch

  Copyright

  Prologue

  England, 1967

  The letter had passed through careless hands.

  Once pristine, it was now grey and randomly creased, as if it had been crushed into a ball, aimed at a waste-paper basket, missed, and been trodden upon.

  How long did it lie there, she wondered, waiting to be swept up and discarded?

  Or idly rescued and thrown back into circulation for one more try?

  The scrawled words, in different fists, with different coloured pens, were perhaps an indication.

  ‘Gone’. The first annotation, in neat black capitals.

  Then, ‘Address unknown’. Overwritten – gouged – in red.

  And finally, ‘Return to sender!’ Impatient, underlined green, with an arrow towards the address on the back flap. (‘Don’t waste my time’ surely the unwritten postscript.)

  Ella’s gaze wandered over the desk with its carefully arranged possessions, as if they might provide the answer to a question – suddenly brought to the fore by the letter – that she’d never been brave enough to ask.

  An embossed leather notebook on top of a Manila folder.

  A picture of her as a baby beside a brass shell case holding pencils.

  A silver inkwell that was always kept full despite the arrival of ballpoint pens.

  A lustrous seashell, its jagged spine rubbed smooth from handling.

  ‘Dad? Did she give you the shell?’

  Chapter One

  Simon’s Town, Union of South Africa, 1920s

  ‘Lou!’

  Infant waves curled towards me over the crystal sand. Footsteps thundered from behind. I reached out both hands to seize the oncoming water with its lace of bubbles and fell forward. Cold, green liquid gurgled into my mouth, lapped at my forehead and just as it started to trickle into my ears, a pair of familiar hands grabbed me around the middle and pulled me clear.

  ‘Lou!’ my pa, Solly, hoisted me over his shoulder and gave me a brisk pat on the back. ‘You can’t swim before you can walk!’

  From the vantage point of his arms, I could tell that the sea stretched in white-edged ridges until it collided with the mountains, or raced impatiently around them to merge with the sky overhead. I’d already met the sky. I saw its blue dome every day when Ma put me down to rest beneath the palm tree outside our front door.

  This sea was far more exciting than the sky!

  I twisted in my father’s arms and yearned downwards.

  Solly looked back triumphantly at my mother, Sheila, sitting cross-legged on a blanket well up the beach, and waved the arm that was not holding me from plunging back. ‘She wants more!’

  Unlike me, Seaforth Beach was shy. It hid between massive grey boulders rounded like eggs thrust up from the ocean by some giant, divine fist. Boys, including my best friend Piet Philander, used to scramble up their smooth sides and do risky bellyflops into the shallows, praying that the water was deep enough to cushion their fall. But before the shock of cold seawater, the best thing about Seaforth was its sand. You could make perfect, five-finger impressions of your hand or your rounded tummy in its sparkling skin. It even tasted pleasantly gritty.

  ‘No, Louise!’ Ma scrambled to unload my fist.

  At the high-tide mark, the sand gave way to a crust of shells. When no one was watching, I’d hide one in my pocket and press it to my ear in the night to bring back the rush of the waves.

  It took twenty minutes to walk to the beach on my father’s shoulders from the family cottage on Ricketts Terrace. ‘Careful, that child!’ Ma shouted, as I craned dangerously around to watch her panting in Pa’s wake. Motor cars were only for rich white folk who drove from Cape Town to gawk at our views. Everyone else walked – whether it was to the beach, or the dockyard where Pa worked, or up through the proteas and kek-kekking guinea fowl to admire False Bay, christened by indignant seamen who mistook it for Table Bay at the northern end of our peninsula. It was a happy fact that if you visited the Cape you were never far from the mountains or the sea – even if you couldn’t quite identify your whereabouts. And it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor, they swelled your heart with a bursting pride. The mountains even put up with the white-painted towns that spread up their slopes or pressed against the shore with tarmac fingers. We lived in one such town close to the spiny tip of the peninsula. Keep going south, Pa would bellow cheerily, and say hello to Antarctica.

  ‘Who is our town named after?’ my first-grade teacher used to ask.

  ‘Simon van der Stel!’ we chanted, rolling our eyes at the obvious answer. Who in the world wouldn’t know that? ‘The first governor of the Cape.’

  When I woke up in the mornings, instead of running into Ma and Pa’s bedroom and worming into bed with them for a cuddle, I’d climb onto the table by the window in our cramped sitting room to make sure the sea was where it had been the day before and hadn’t been stolen from m
e in the night. After all, the water rose and fell, and sometimes drowned the sand completely, or pounded against the rocks and frightened the boys out of their bellyflops. Wind – that livelier version of the breath that passed between my lips – seemed to be responsible for a lot of this erratic behaviour. It whipped the swells into towering crests and drove salt spray into your eyes to make them sting. When the sea and the wind joined forces like this, it was time to bolt the door of the cottage and wait it out.

  ‘My pa is in it,’ Piet Philander whispered with a mixture of pride and fear, as we stood with our noses pressed against the windowpane and watched the palm trees bending in half and willed his father’s fishing boat back to shore. Even though Simon’s Bay – our scoop of False Bay – was protected by mountains and should have been calmer, everyone knew fishermen who’d died on the water. Piet’s grandfather was one, taken by waves that pounced out of nowhere like the silent leopards that hunted on the Simonsberg peak above our terrace and kept me awake at night with the imagining.

  ‘You can stay with us if—’

  I took Piet’s hand, feeling the hard skin of his palm. Piet helped his father with the nets. If you’ve never fished, you won’t know that when wet rope runs through your hand it tears the flesh like a serrated knife through a peach. Eventually, the skin learns its lesson and mends itself into a tough, scarred shell. Fishing was in the Philander family, but sometimes I felt that Piet hated fish as much as I loved the sea.

  The boats that steamed in and out of the Royal Navy dockyard were much sturdier than the Philander fishing boat, and better able to cope with the Cape storms. When I was older and more sensible, Pa explained that the navy boats were warships and their job was to defend the choppy sea route around Africa from something he ominously called ‘foreign powers’. This necessary exertion ensured that Simon’s Town was a thriving port, with the navy at the pinnacle and the rest of us serving in layers below. Pa’s steady job meant that we sat about halfway down this pyramid, below the professional navy but above the poor black labourers who lived in shacks across the mountain and couldn’t read or write like we could. And we were especially lucky, Pa used to say, wagging a finger at me and Ma as we sat at the kitchen table. Brown mechanics such as him earned far more working for the even-handed British than for mean employers in the world beyond Simon’s Town. Out there – Pa flapped his arm dismissively at the rest of South Africa – they take off a discount for colour.

  I admired the navy for a deeper reason than money or fairness, a reason connected to the surging tides and to Piet’s grandpa’s fate. Whatever the weather, the navy’s warships managed to stay upright. They didn’t flounder or sink, or casually fling men off their decks. Instead, they cut through the waves with dash, immune as arrows. And, as an afterthought, left behind a wake of filmy bubbles far more ordered than those tossed from the waves at Seaforth Beach.

  Chapter Two

  When I turned seven, we had a birthday party at the cottage on Ricketts Terrace. Piet came, and my classmates Vera and Susan and Lola, and friends of Ma and Pa. Ma once explained to me that children had to be grown carefully and gratefully year by year, so a birthday was as much a celebration for the adults – in having kept the birthday child alive and well so far – as for the children. The lady grown-ups at my party drank tea, the men drank pale liquids that induced livelier behaviour, while we ate jelly and peaches and a birthday cake made by Ma with a doll encased in a round iced sponge to mimic a ballet dancer’s full skirt. Ma didn’t often go to so much trouble at home, she tended to be too tired at the end of each day for smart cooking. And I couldn’t learn ballet because lessons cost too much, but I’d once admired a picture of a dancer.

  ‘Thank you, Ma,’ I kissed her afterwards, as we cuddled up in my tiny room at the back of the cottage. ‘It was so pretty, I’m sorry we had to eat it.’

  ‘Now you’re seven,’ Ma said, stroking my hair, her forehead relaxing out of its normal creases, ‘you’ll have to help more round the house. Put on the vegetables when I’ll be home late from work. Take the washing off the line. But no ironing till you’re ten.’

  There was a tap on the door.

  ‘I’ve got another birthday treat for you!’ Pa sat down on the edge of my bed. It had taken him a while to shoo away some of the noisier grown-ups, especially Vera’s mother who’d moved on from tea.

  ‘Tell me, Pa, tell me!’ I squirmed onto his lap.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he promised. ‘It’s only for girls who are seven-years-and-one-day old.’

  When Ma dressed me the next day in my best Sunday frock made by Mrs Hewson next door, with yellow puffed sleeves and a matching ribbon in my hair, Pa said, ‘My! Don’t you look a picture?’ and folded his newspaper and stuffed it down the side of his chair. ‘I remember when I first laid eyes on your ma …’ He winked at her and Ma’s lips curled up at the edges as she scrubbed washing in the sink. Pa loved Ma in an open way, with hugs and winks and smacking kisses. Ma was less generous.

  ‘You can’t give too much,’ she cautioned when I asked why, ‘otherwise they take you for granted.’

  Pa took my hand – I was too big for his shoulders now – and we set off down the dirt track that led to St George’s Street, past the mosque where the muezzin floated his call to prayer every dawn. ‘Some of our neighbours pray to Allah,’ explained Ma, ‘and we pray to Jesus. So the Terrace is always well looked after.’

  Pa lifted me over the stream at the Hewsons’ to save my black T-bar shoes from getting muddy.

  From the station came the enticing whistle of the morning train to Cape Town, followed by gauzy curls of smoke that bloomed and dissolved, bloomed and dissolved, against the green mountain. So far in my life I had only ever been on a train once. And then only as far as Fish Hoek, which was nothing like as grand as Cape Town, people said.

  ‘Where are you off to, Solly Ahrendts?’ Mrs Hewson yelled from her front door. Mrs Hewson was hard of hearing. Perhaps Mr Hewson got tired of shouting at her and that’s why he left.

  ‘Bye, Ma! Bye Mrs H!’ I turned and waved. ‘Where are we going, Pa? On the train?’

  ‘You’ll have to wait. Maybe we’re just going for a walk?’ He gazed about innocently.

  ‘Then why am I in my best dress and shoes if it’s only a walk? I’m hot—’

  ‘Patience, child.’

  Pa led me across St George’s Street, crowded with more pedestrians than motor cars, and then beside the wall guarding the Royal Navy base. As we walked, passing men called out to Pa, ‘Day off, Solly?’ or ‘She spoken for yet, Solly?’ and tipped their caps to me. One patted my head as we went by. I wasn’t bothered by their attention, although Ma would hurry me away if it happened while she was with us. I thought the men’s interest was out of politeness to Pa. He was well known. After all, the stone for the navy wall had been quarried out of the mountain above Ricketts Terrace by Grandpa Ahrendts. Not alone, of course, although Pa liked to say it was his father’s contribution that was the most significant.

  ‘I started at the bottom, Lou, like he did,’ Pa used to say when I sat on his lap and asked him how it was when he was growing up. ‘I wrote an exam and they liked my answers so much they made me an apprentice and then a mechanic. Fancy that! Remember,’ he wagged a finger at me, ‘if you work hard, you can go far.’

  It was a message he often repeated: if you work hard, you can go far.

  But he didn’t say how far I would reach. Ma was a cook for a navy family. Vera’s mother was a cleaner. Mrs Hewson sewed. It seemed to me that none of those jobs allowed you to go further than the point from which you started. Perhaps it was a rule that girls didn’t progress like boys did.

  It was the discount for girl-ness.

  We turned towards the iron gates that gave entry to the dockyard. Queen Victoria’s initials wound across them in curly lettering, spelling out ‘VR’.

  ‘Who was the greatest queen in the world?’ Again, a regular first-grade question.

  ‘Victoria!’ w
e shouted. ‘Queen of the Empire and of South Africa! God save the Queen!’

  We waited by the gate. Heat from the tarmac rose through the soles of my T-bars.

  The gate swung open.

  ‘Pa?’

  He looked down at me and winked. While others in my class had been on the train more than me, no one had ever been inside the dockyard – not Vera, not Susan, not Lola, or Piet! Perhaps, I thought wickedly, not even Queen Victoria Herself when she was alive – after all, Simon’s Town was two weeks’ steaming from Buckingham Palace and you couldn’t leave an empire to run itself while you visited one tiny part of it.

  ‘Come now,’ said Pa, ‘stop daydreaming and mind where you walk. We can’t have you messing your dress, or your ma will make me wash it myself.’

  We pressed on towards a crowd of noisy sailors. And then I saw her, above their bobbing heads: a vast grey ship rearing out of the water, her deck bristling with guns, her two stout funnels flanked by wire towers. Colourful bunting reached from her bow, over her funnels and dipped down to her stern – I already knew the anatomy of ships – making her look as if she was dressed for her own birthday party. Shamefully, in the private excitement of turning seven, I’d forgotten about the arrival of the most famous ship in the world.

  ‘HMS Hood!’ Pa yelled reverently over the hubbub. He reached out a hand as if to stroke her soaring flanks. ‘The flagship of the Royal Navy. Thirty knots in most weathers. Aren’t you a clever girl to have a birthday just when she came to call?’

  ‘HMS Hood!’ I rolled the name around on my tongue for the thrill of saying it. Some of my first words had been ships’ names, culled from my father’s conversation: Nep-tee-une, Vy-per. Piet said I knew more than all the officers in Admiralty House.

  A hooter blasted imperiously from behind us and Pa pulled me back.

  A black motor car swept by and drew up to let out smart ladies in hats and uniformed officers in gold braid who paced up the gangplank and saluted the quarterdeck as they stepped on board.

  My heart lurched in my chest.