Saturday Weekend Argus, 3 January 2015 The Midnight Mass and Peaches & Herb Fred Robertson, Leslie Kleinsmith and I stood on the corner of Nelson and Chapel Streets. We were the pensive remnant of a Christmas Midnight Mass congregation which had long reached their homes scattered across the Cape Flats. Anne Davids was probably asleep in her Kannabasie Flat in Kew Town; Leonard and Beatty Patensia in Lentegeur; Mr Bam, who once played the drums in a lang-arm band with Vincent Kolbe, would’ve parked his combi in the driveway of his Rocklands home by then. The Kemp’s in Fairways. Eventually we parted. We had stood outside the gates of St Phillip’s for over an hour. Our memories, in step to the slow-dance of the Group Areas Diaspora, had kept us there. It was past 1am, just as I was falling asleep, when a bus pulled up in the vicinity of the Donsons on Queen Street. Voices. Instruments tuned. A banjo chord. Then a rousing tenor-alto-baritone saxophone of “Christians awake, salute the happy morn!” summonsed the Gabriel Detachment of angelic hosts from distant Bethlehem. Here on Upper Orange it is another clear, still night. I miss the occasional robust chaos of Roger Street. The neighbours. The inquiring welcome when I had been away and out of town for a while. Then those moments when there would a sudden rise beyond the humming drone of children at play: It could be an irate wife confronting an indignant mistress a few houses away. The object of their mutual desire, a silent, scar-faced Adonis, looking on as one in a detached, anthropological study mode. Or, it could be a klopse troop shimming their peacock-coloured finery past our door and left into Nelson Street, their goema-rhythms drawing the neighbourhood kids along onto their next stop in Gympie Street. This seasonal measure of year’s end, an umbilical knot in the cord of memories that binds us to each other and references our place in this city. Principal in those rites of year-end gathering was the Boxing Day excursions to the Kalk Bay tunnels. In the seventies it was our beach retreat from Fortieth Street, or Bluegum Avenue or any of the courts of Heideveld or the NY’s. We would overnight in one of the seven or eight tunnels under the railway line. Once after a noisy night, during which Peaches & Herb’s “Let’s Fall in Love,” For Your Love and, Love Is Strange, had held repetitive pride of place on the Tunnels Top Ten, I took an early stroll along the beach at about 7am. From my distance on the pier I witnessed three of my matronly tunnel neighbours, their floral dresses tucked into their bloomers, wading waist-high into the harbour waters. Animated in their early morning chit-chat, one singing Close Your Eyes” to her companions,, they left streams of dark-yellow flow in their wake. I avoided that section of the Kalk Bay waters for the rest of the day.
Posted on: Mon, 05 Jan 2015 15:01:34 +0000
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