The houses we sequentially lived in and rented in my under-teens were all in Yeoville; their street names rhyme with an internal GPS, coordinates that hit solid bodies in my galaxy, sounding off resonating booms and squeaks through space and time: Yeo, Minor, Page, Percy…
This house on Percy Street (photographed about 6 years ago) is the very home that was ours when my mother brought back from the hospital the tiny parcel that was my baby brother. I was 9 years old and he would be and remains 9 years younger than me to this day. This fact created one of those strong patterns I consoled myself with – like the backbone of a cooked fish – bringing a preordained order to a daily life which flaked apart in a dreamy daze. He was slightly premature and the cord had been wrapped around his neck – I remember the words being said – which imparted to the tiny morsel around which everybody clustered, the first male offspring, a certain gravitas. Like a hangman.
The bris was held in the house. There is a photograph of mother, father, granny (Saphta) sister and me on a bench in the garden adjoining the house (off to the right of the photo) at the event. Strangely no baby brother. Behind the bench is the Catawba grapevine on which my sister and I, in the long days of summer, would graze. The skins of the small black berries we picked were clouded in a white film, sticky from insect damage or glued with spider webs. The skins were tough and sour, the insides perfumed and sweet. The technique for eating was best encapsulated in the Afrikaans “druk en sluk’, press and swallow.
Above the house loomed (looms) a block of flats from which naughty boys would rain down stones on our roof. My father’s reaction was to run outside, shouting and shaking his fist up in the sky hammering the air in impotent fury. For a while the stones would stop.
My sister and I shared a bedroom and it is this feature that I remember best: twin beds covered in lilac self patterned bedspreads made of a popular cloth of the time – Waffleweave. The texture – a grid of squares, paddocks fenced with soft fringes – provided comfort and order in the same way that colouring-in books with sturdy black outlines contained my wax crayon strokes. This was despite a mother who did not approve of colouring-in books which she said blunted her children’s natural creativity.
Walls and roofs do not only shelter people, they create shapes that attach to their very being, as real as bones in flesh.