Black Beech and Honeydew (21 page)

We were nearly three weeks, I think, on the leg to Durban where the ship would spend two days coaling. Everybody was beginning to feel a bit jaded. When, on opening a folded slice of cold meat, I found it encrusted with small shells I made up my mind to cut loose in Durban. My friends were all collecting addresses of nice, clean, cheap little places to stay. I, who could afford it less than any of them, took what I hoped was enough money out of my hoard and resolved to spend the night ashore in a good hotel. I have never regretted doing this sort of thing.

This is not a travel book: I shall not try to write about Durban in any detail. Landfalls and arrivals on a sea voyage are, to me, a strange delight and this, the first in my experience, was immeasurably exciting. The impure land-smell reached out to sea and disturbed senses that had been scoured and simplified by salt air. A coastline, a pilot boat, shipping, buildings, docks, progressively encroached upon our exclusiveness. Details emerged: people on the wharves, a black man wearing, with perfect dignity, a bowler hat and a pair of corsets, who waited among his fellows, for us to berth. He was one of the gang of coalers. The gap between ship and dock narrowed. Bells rang in the engine room. Mooring lines were flung out and caught with bass-voiced ejaculations. The people on the wharf and the people in the ship stared dispassionately at each other. Friends exchanged greetings. Gangways were established. The
Balranald,
temporarily bereft of her somewhat vulgar personality, opened her bilges and indifferently relieved herself.

The pilot boat had brought a letter for my English friend from her fiancé saying he had been delayed by an urgent case in Johannesburg and giving her instructions about trains. Once ashore, she and I went by Zulu-drawn rickshaws from the port into Durban. I was not at all sure that I wanted to do this. I came from a country where it would be beyond the limit of anyone’s imagination to envisage a member of one race running between shafts like a horse for the convenience of a member of the other. I didn’t quite see that what was unthinkable for us should be OK in Natal. The Zulus, oiled, decked out in feathers and beads, superb men, stood by their rickshaws and shouted for custom.

I swallowed my scruples and we went that way from the port into Durban.

At the top of the hill my Zulu shouted and sat at an exact balancing point, on the shaft of his rickshaw. We coasted silently down the slope at what seemed to be a terrific speed, between glaring white houses and flamboyant splashes of colour.

The hotel was in a pleasant square and was cool and lovely. White turbans and white garments moved through shadowed rooms. Bare or slippered feet slapped discreetly down quiet corridors. I booked myself in and then, with some other of our shipmates saw my friend off in the Johannesburg express and set about exploring Durban.

I saw the Valley of a Thousand Hills from a height called the Berea and, returning, wandered about the streets until my heels blistered and the heat was too much to be endured. Back at the hotel I found my cool room and its own dark bathroom and for what was left of the day, I bathed and rested but was too excited to sleep. In the late evening I dined on a wide verandah of the hotel and watched the world go by.

Who was the fair young man who joined me during dinner and ordered, I think, a bottle of champagne? I fancy, he must have been one of a party at a nearby table and I suppose he must have been a fellow passenger: I didn’t just pick him up. But I cannot recall his name or meeting with him on any other occasion. I remember that he asked me to join his party which was celebrating an engagement. I did so and supposed it was a South African custom to link arms and click glasses so ceremoniously. What a fuss! Having, out of excitement, slept not at all the previous night, and having walked, looked and stared myself to a standstill during the day and having taken, moreover, two glasses of champagne and some van der Hum with my dinner, everything now became hazy. I think I refused an invitation to go on somewhere and instead went straight to bed and to sleep for ten hours.

The next morning when, still footsore, I came out of the hotel, there, squatting by the kerb with his rickshaw, was yesterday’s Zulu. He said, with a pleasing smile, that he was my boy and where were we going? My scruples about one human being trotting between shafts for another were honestly held and they now returned but were weakened by my blisters and confused by the attitude of the man himself. Obviously, he had waited there a long time when he might have been working elsewhere. He would therefore be a loser if I offered an explanation (which he would not understand or appreciate) and then, po-faced, tottered on my blisters in search of a taxi. Should I have given him a compensatory sum and a self-righteous commentary? An odious solution which he would no doubt have rightly interpreted as an insult to himself and his rickshaw. I took the rickshaw. He pointed out places of interest, nodded, smiled, trotted and uttered cries of greeting or warning to other rickshaws. Did he hate me in his heart, think me mad or not think about me at all? Without any shadow of doubt – the last.

He carried me to the native market, a place of enchantment. There were no white people about but a great strolling crowd of Indians, Negroes and ‘coloureds’ whose precise races I was unable to define. The shipboard diet of corned beef, suspect mutton, sardines, perpetual beetroot and plum duff had taken its toll. I longed for fresh fruit. Here, in a vast stone building, was a riot of pineapples, pawpaws, bananas and nartjies, that superb cross between a tangerine and an orange. Here were baskets with magenta motifs woven into them and wide beguiling hats. I bought a hat for fourpence and a basket for twopence which quickly became a cornucopea for eleven-pence. I walked all through the market and came out in a colonnade occupied by Indian vendors of vivid cottons. Suddenly I wanted very badly indeed to paint. Without so much as a sketching block or a stick of charcoal to aid me in this desire and with the realization that it would in any case be impossible to set up an easel in the noontide heat and traffic of the market, I stared and stared, scribbled on the back of an envelope and hoped to remember. I
had
got a camera, bought in the ship, and I aimed it at the subject and thought that if the shot came out it would serve to jog my memory. Then I walked out into the glare on the opposite side of the market.

There he was, sitting on the kerb, nobly confident.

The last thing I did in Durban was to go to the theatre and whom did I see? Miss Sybil Thorndyke and Mr Lewis Casson (they hadn’t yet been damed or knighted) and their small daughter, in a revival of an Edwardian drama.

It had been a lovely interlude. I decided to return to the
Balranald
that night as she was to follow her usual practice of sailing early in the morning. Surely, I thought, she will have finished coaling.

A row of taxis waited outside the theatre – I had half expected to find the Zulu – and I took one of them to the hotel to collect my things and then drive to the port. It was now close on midnight: very hot, still and heavily overcast.

The hotel bill was a little more than I had expected and I had treated myself to the play. As we jolted through the dark roads to the port – and it seemed much farther than I had remembered – I looked in my purse and found, as I remember, about ten shillings. Not enough, I thought; almost certainly, at this hour of the night, not enough. I would have to ask the man to wait while I got my hoard
from the purser’s office. A block of ice ran down my chest into my stomach and turned to a coal of fire. The office, of course, would be shut.

I hadn’t noticed the driver and in any case it was very dark and he had a hat pulled over his eyes. I leant forward.

‘Er. I say. One moment.’

‘Yes, Madam? Forgotten something? Shall I go back?’

It was a very pleasant voice.

I explained. I said I was sorry and that I expected if I hadn’t got enough money (I told him what I had) I could perhaps find the officer of the watch and borrow some from him or perhaps there would be time in the morning –

‘Please,’ said the voice, ‘don’t give it another thought. Of course it will be enough. Plenty. Really. I promise.’

Eton, Oxford and the Brigade of Guards thrown in. He did not turn his head. He drove on and made a little conversation. Had I enjoyed the play and was the hotel comfortable? And the ship?

I wondered if I had mistaken a private car for a taxi and he was amusing himself by taking me at my word. But no, it was a taxi and a very ramshackle one at that. Some young Englishman who had got himself into a scrape and was earning his return fare, perhaps?

When we reached the wharves and, finally, the
Balranald,
he said he would carry my things aboard. I said I could manage perfectly. He replied that he wouldn’t dream of letting me go aboard at that hour of the night by myself.

I don’t know what I expected to see when he moved into the light: something out of a glossy magazine I daresay, with a posh twinkle in his eye.

He was of middle height and carried himself like a soldier. When we arrived on deck and I emptied my purse into his hand, he took off his hat and I saw his face. It was grooved and pouched and empurpled. His nose was swollen and netted with veins. He had a three-days’ growth of beard and his eyes were bloodshot. The hand he put out was grimed and tremulous and his clothes were filthy. He looked straight at me and said I’d really given him too much but would I like him to have the extra as a tip? I said yes, of course. ‘That’s awfully kind of you,’ he said. ‘Goodnight.’

‘Goodnight. Thank you so much. Goodnight.’

They hadn’t finished coaling. The decks were gritted with coal dust and as I reached my cabin – a disgruntled night steward unlocked it – the racket started. I suppose there had been a halt for some reason, perhaps a change of gangs. The porthole was sealed and the heat indescribable. The bathroom was locked.

I lay, for what was left of the night, bemused by heat and the crash of coals and by strange remembrances of the last two days.

A number of passengers, including the British Israelite, left the ship at Durban and we took on a great many Afrikaners, some travelling to Cape Town and some to England. The South African Dutch may, on the whole, be better to look at and listen to than this group that chance threw in my way for three weeks or so: better than the friends who came to see them off and stood, arrogant, small-eyed, muddily white, down there on the wharf. There is no value, of course, in a fleeting impression except, perhaps, for the light it may shed upon the observer. It never goes beyond the level of irresponsible journalism; snapshot judgement. If I had stayed for a year in Durban instead of forty-eight hours I would no doubt have learned of Afrikaners who contradicted every generalization I felt inclined to make about these people as we watched them that morning from the deck of the
Balranald.

They had no bodily grace of feature, movement or behaviour and their voices were unlovely. What had they got that made them so sure of themselves? There were Africans down there visually putting them to shame. What had they got, these Dutch Natalese? Mastery, of course, as one saw. Among the Africans was a group of very small black urchins who laughed and danced on the wharf. Passengers threw coins to them and they shouted and grinned and showed off. One of them, a six-year-old, perhaps, executing a particularly lively prance, evidently overstepped some invisible barrier. An enormous Afrikaner turned on him as if he were vermin and hit at him and the child cringed and fell back. It was the ugliest of sights.

Perhaps this episode set those of us who saw it against the Afrikaners who came aboard. Perhaps it made us resent their arrogance and coarseness. They were the only fellow passengers in half a lifetime of long journeys, against whom I have taken in a big way.

There was a high sea running as we stood out from Durban: enormous blind rollers swelled and heaved themselves under a brilliant sun. The ship floundered up them, seemed to hover and then pitched and shuddered into the chasms between, taking it in green. A seasoned traveller now, I stood on the port side, held tight to the taffrail and exulted in the oncoming hugeness of the seas.

As I watched there rose up, astonishingly, quite close on our port bow, a great ship under full sail.

She towered above a crest and we wallowed in a trough: lordly beyond words she was, glittering, tall and a wonder to behold. She shone and strode the waters, making her own miracle, passed us like a dream and was gone. Nobody had seen her name. I would like to believe she was the barque
Pamir,
afterwards bought by New Zealand to carry food to Britain during the war. This was one of those moments that one aches to share with somebody: but with whom?

Heavy seas all the way to Cape Town where I was to be met by Uncle Freddie.

He was one of my father’s six younger brothers. When, as I have related, my grandfather died leaving his widow and ten children less comfortably off than they had expected to be, there was a certain rallying round among the connections and this was matched by a determination on the part of the uncles to get out into the world as soon as they could and be at charge to nobody. There seems to have been no thought of university or profession for any of them. The Colonies, it was felt, were the thing. Uncles Arthur and Teddy plumped for Canada where they made and, in due course, lost, a fortune. Uncle Arthur, following in Great-Uncle Julius’s footsteps (he who, it may be remembered, eloped with his niece’s French governess), returned to England for a visit and persuaded the nurse of his own niece to join him in Canada where he married her without bothering to tell any of his relations. His reputation in the family was for headstrong behaviour. My father told me Uncle Arthur could never go to a prep or public school with any of his brothers because, so my father said, he was so jolly bloody-minded. Uncle Teddy also married in Canada and also forgot for some years to mention the fact. Uncle Teddy, it was, who on leaving school bought himself a
suit which my grandmother considered loud and, in his absence, gave to the gardener’s boy. When Uncle Teddy returned he encountered the gardener’s boy who had foolishly togged himself up in his windfall. Uncle Teddy made him strip, there and then, and strode up the drive with a face of thunder and the suit over his arm.