Open Writing

During 1944 I was studying for my matriculation examination, but achieved only a 'D' for Latin, and 'F' for Afrikaans, which was an outright 'Fail' This was not altogether surprising. It was a very disturbed year. The husband of our Afrikaans teacher was in the Army, serving 'Up North' in the Desert, and we had only to ask her about him to be entertained for the rest of the lesson— in English.

Learning anything by rote was never my forte, so for many Latin lessons I would be 'sent out' by an exasperated Sister Juliana, which suited me just fine, because I could sit on the wide verandah which wrapped the stone Convent on the mountainside, and watch the ships' movements in Simonstown, across the Bay.

There were other vicissitudes in that year too. With money inherited after the death of my grandmother, my mother had purchased a genteel tearoom on the Main Road, its wide enclosed verandah overlooking the same bay, and I was roped in to bake hundreds of chocolate cakes and make tons of fudge. I should say that it had previously been 'genteel'—just a few afternoon teas at week-ends for people going for petrol rationed drives. But with the never-ending flood of men being returned to Europe as the camps closed down, it became a mad-house.

At the beginning of the war, the silver paper wrapping had disappeared from the chocolates. But as time went on, chocolates themselves disappeared altogether, so people were desperate for anything sweet; caramel and chocolate fudge, chocolate and orange cakes, all vaporised as if by magic. Of course, my father had to find a source of cocoa on the 'black market', and there was a further complication in that we very soon exhausted out ration of 'white' flour. Only coarse, unsifted, 'boermeel' was available.

So we had to do the sifting ourselves. The sieves consisted of a cradle of fine muslin enclosing wooden paddles which, supported at either end, were rotated by a handle. As the pace, of necessity, increased, gradually the whole house was cannibalised into kitchens and serving rooms and there was a special room for the illegal activity of sifting hundreds of pounds of flour. One of our waiters, a plump Xhosa man whose name was Dougie N'Gobo was incarcerated almost full-time in the thick fog within, emerging covered in flour from head to toe, his eyelashes and eyebrows heavily drooping.

My father had to take long leave. And every visiting relation or friend was swept in to the maelstrom which the 'Arcadia Tea Lounge' had become. The funny thing was, that no one ever wanted to sit or stand at the cash register to collect the money. It was much more exciting to wait at table, or make up the trays, or beat the cream for the waffles, or a myriad other things. So customers had to stand in a queue with their money in their hands while Marie Afrika, our head waitress, fat and gold-toothed in pristine black and white frilly apron and cap simultaneously smiled at the customers and screamed “Cas' . . . Cas' . . . Miss Betty . . . Cas' . . . Miss En . . . Cas'” (she was unable to make the 'sh' sound), while we, in our turn, passed the message on to whoever was nearest.

The other thing that was unsettling for me in that year was that some of my best friends were among those who were returned to the Motherland. And we knew in our bones that the chances of meeting ever again were slight. At 16, I was too young to be 'allowed' to think about boys - we were an innocent lot (the 'bobby-soxers' and Frankie Sinatra were only on the brink of infiltrating). In fact, my parents were determined that I should not form a liaison which might have taken me 6,000 miles away.

But still and all, there was a young RAF Pilot Instructor, all of 21, and too old for me, who had been a mentor for a few years, and led me through Tolstoy, Tchaikowsky's Piano Concerto No 1, and the Pathetique Symphony - and I was as heartbroken as it was ever possible to be. And never really was ever again.

© Betty Collins