Open Writing

Mrs M…… taught Afrikaans, but somehow I seem to have missed out on her efficient and dedicated attentions, as my knowledge of that language remained, as it does to this day, elementary. I sometimes wondered how I would survive should I ever be stranded in the middle of the Karroo or in deepest Limpopo, where the only lingua franca is Afrikaans and I do not have a word of that estimable taal to my name.

This rather alarming lady was extremely stout, to use an outdated word, and heavily corseted, and she sported a crisp Eton cut pepper-and-salt hairstyle and bushy grey eyebrows. My clearest memory of her was in a no-nonsense black and white diagonally striped shirt-waister dress which, I’m sure she presumed visually reduced her size. In effect, the diagonal stripes created one of those fuzzy “pop-art” outlines which actually increased her outline rather than making it smaller. But, she was a formidable tennis player, and always managed to position herself on the court in the exact place where, with seemingly psychic divination, she absolutely knew the ball was going to land, and when it did, she hit it back with amazing accuracy and speed and inevitably won the point.

Speaking of tennis, the girls of St ..........’s had general permission to play on the school courts during the holidays, and if the weather was not too extreme – i.e. too cold, too wet (very unlikely) or too hot (frequently) several of us, as we reached our teens, would get together and make up a couple of fours and get ready to play a competitive game – or so we thought.

But before we could start, we had, of course, to get the court ready. The white lines had to be painted with that strange device something like a paint-tin on wheels with a long handle and a small tap in the base from which the paint was extruded. Having done that, we then had to enter the “black hole of Calcutta” otherwise known as one of the semi-cellars on the northern side of the building, to get a couple of tennis nets.

These semi-cellars were not lit in any way, and to crawl in through the small wooden door, not much more than knee high and stand erect in the foul-smelling space was something from which nightmares are made. Spider-webs stretched across and across and of course as each girl moved these brushed against one’s face and clung to one’s hair, but the worst of all, was trying to locate the rolled up nets in the darkness, and then pull the bundle into the open without being suffocated by the appalling smell. This all-pervading odour was a sulphurous stink, caused by sacks and sacks of onions bought and continually added to, by the over-enthusiastic cooks, which had lain in the dark quietly rotting away since time immemorial.

Nothing could have been better calculated to make a couple of teenagers move quickly than this horrible smell, and it took a matter of minutes to crawl in, stand up, reach out for the most quickly identifiable bundle of net and retreat as expeditiously as possible gasping for cool, clean air.

Since that time, I have read many accounts of the dreadful poison gas used against the British and French troops in the trenches of the First World War, certain varieties of which, so I believe, had the same sulphurous smell of rotting onions. I can well understand the terrible consequences produced by that chemical gas and how terrifying it must have been like for those unfortunate and appallingly abused soldiers, many of whom suffered from the damage caused to their lungs by this evil gas for the rest of their lives.

But children quickly throw off unpleasantness and as soon as the nets were rigged, several desultory games were played – usually in the full heat of a Johannesburg summer’s afternoon but seldom without any spectacular success - before we had to remove the nets, roll them up and restore them to their smelly resting place before making our way home at the end of our sporting afternoon.