At the age of eight I was sent to live as a border in a town my parents had wrestled generations to get out of. There was nothing wrong with Kimberley. My grandparents lived there, and the thrill of an old Citroen still powered by hydraulic suspension held me in wonder only young boys can speak of. But it was a country away from the city I lived in. From the deep interior of the Karoo, farmers sent their children here to get formal education in this dry hot city with a ghost in the shape of a deep empty hole. They welcomed me, the strange English kid with plastic figurines and teddy bears. Extremes often find neutral ground.
Until this time I had lived between the spaces left by my parent’s separation. I was happy moving from one to the other depending on the days of the week and the weeks of the year. It might have been an attempt to bridge some familiarity in their parenthood that I was sent, during my third year of primary school, to the Kimberley Boys Junior. The school had served as a bastion to all that was Colonial and Proper and symbolized the single opportunity most would have of ever escaping its hard mineral history and small town devil-thorned churches.
Cherry-on-the-top swayed me. My dad spoke to me with inspirational bribes about the things I would love most. Despite the fact that it didn’t make any sense to me – I liked my school, I got good grades, I made good friends, was in every sports team – despite the fact I was happy with my life in Johannesburg, I was willing to accept his words as the advice I would so badly long for in later years.
He promised me ice-cream, which is again something an eight-year-old latch-key kid responds to. The particular brand, made with sugar, vanilla and milk, with a single glazed cherry on top, was called Cherry-on-the-top. It wasn’t made very well; frozen rapidly at low temperatures the sugar would crystallize and the ice-cream would get a splintery texture. So cold some would peel their tongues off. The wrapping, a waxy thin sheath, would stick to the ice-cream and the cone would often be solid to the touch, then soggy after a few minutes in the hot dry air.
How this convinced me to go has less to do with the hard sell of ice-cream than it did with the sweet soft light I saw in my father’s eyes as he saw his undefendable past melt with the unquestioning countenance of his son.
One night a few weeks into my new life, a major water pipe burst and all water to the town was stopped for three days. It was high summer, and that deep in the interior, temperatures were often on the shy side of 40 degrees – some areas a little further north in the Upington region often sweltering unbearably above that. Windless, hot, and as dry as dirt roads, there was nothing for a hostel of 50 young boys to do but get restless in the confines of housemaster Dr Killop’s heavy-handed and sleek-sticked rules. Imagine, 50 boys, 10 per room, and a weekend with no water.
The first night seemed an adventure. I had long since hidden my toys in a deep locker and had adapted to the less familiar ways of sheep farmer’s sons. I had somehow avoided many of the early aggressive fights to establish supremacy – glasses have always been good for me – and I moved between the cliques that resulted with cautious ease. With nothing to do but experience the first subtle suggestions of dehydration, those of us left for the weekend in the empty halls of the hostel fanaticized about the girls we thought might spend Saturday nights with us when we were older.
Hein was left alone for the weekend because his parents lived on a farm over 150km away and the journey was expensive and difficult for old bakkies. During my second week in the dorm, he had snuck up to me one night and suggested a game I immediately felt uncomfortable with and abruptly ended. He explained that it was common practice amongst the boys, but clearly wasn’t confident enough to pursue it further than my objections. We threw a tennis ball across the room while lying on our backs on opposite ends of the dormitory.
Sunday was the loneliest day in the entire world. Even now, of every day in the year, I can never enjoy what others find so religiously peaceful. Those of us without benefactors for a weekend were left to entertain ourselves. On Sunday morning we were marched to the local Methodist church and made to pray and sing in reluctant foot shuffling, muffled tones of praise.
By midday, it was clear that the water was not going to be coming back soon.
Back at the hostel, during dinner, I recalled the trauma I had experienced the week before when my mother and her new husband had come across to visit. They had dropped me off on the Sunday afternoon, and I could smell the hum of jacaranda trees mixed with the hot scent of tall walls painted stark white. The air was abuzz with the sound of beetles – a sound so piercing the mere friction of its consistency generated heat.
“Ok, you know it’s for the better, be good,” said my mother.
In the background, against the sheen of his electric blue Nissan, my stepfather looked on, not interested in what he anticipated would be a tear-filled scene.
“I know… but it’s lonely here.”
I could see my mother was going to cry – she thought I was motivated by self interest, being here, in Kimberly, eight years old and with dirt under my nails. I smiled, turned, and walked through the double doors into the deep old smell of wood mixed with the breath and footprints of decades of young boys in black leather bata toughies. I closed the massive door behind me – I must’ve looked a site to my poor mother – long hair and skinny arms with no front teeth and a freckled nose. I waved. Inside, seated in our communal hall with plastic cutlery at designated seats, choking back a glass of milk, I stopped the swell of salt water with every gulp.
That was a week ago, I said to myself, and tonight, Hein and I would watch the borders return, one by one till all 50 of us were a family again. Each would arrive with sweets and tales of dogs and lizards and meals mother’s and ouma’s had made. By 17:00, everyone was back and in the eating hall – a Sunday murmur beneath the sound of the senior’s steel and porcelain.
The mood in the hostel was low. No one had bathed, and warm milk was being rationed. The pipes spat shells of odorless warm air.
After dinner, back in the dorm, I looked out the window, waiting for the night sky. If anything felt like a bridge between the place I had been and the place I now found myself in, it was the understanding that night sky singularly had the same stars in Joburg as it did here on Kitchener Street, Kimberley. More than that I figured if a fire broke out, I could safely jump.
Like the moment of first rain, word started. At first, an overexcited shriek made its way across the more senior passage – and eventually burst into our room. The word was good – the word gushed the walls of every walkway and found the ears of every dehydrated tense child… over and over, the only word to be heard… “Water. Water.”
Showers sputtered into life, toilets flushed and we bent over taps in signal file, filling our hands, our faces and cheeks and mouths with water. Did it always taste like this? Boys flocked to the second floor bathrooms, eager to join the frenzy. So great were celebrations that we failed to consider the level of excitement we were beyond capacity to control. The only light that of the moon and all these boys, some naked, equal and wet with the splashing of water.
The solemn footsteps coming up the stairs found their way to the entrance before anyone noticed, and in a flutter of fluorescence the bright light brought authority back to the world.
Not a sound. Just light. No one dared say a word. Any place with that many boys needed rules, and no circumstances could bend them. A drop of water and an echo, followed by another.
Not that Dr Killops was sadistic, but such a transgression was incomprehensible. He’d dressed – he was of that generation that still did; no need for occasion. Standing at the entrance to the massive brightly lit bathroom in between 50 boys and their beds, he lowered his stick and stepped aside. One by one we would pass him. Not one of us cried in pain.
A few months later I was brought back to Johannesburg. Kids at school never really asked where I’d been; as if I had left, but had merely been attending classes somewhere other than theirs for a little while.
“Cool… with you gran, and grandpa – what was it called again?”
“Kimberly,” I would answer, “by the big hole…” and then walk across the road to my home.
(March 2006)
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