Читать книгу Early One Sunday Morning I Decided to Step out and Find South Africa - Luke Alfred - Страница 6

Hope Road, Mountain View, opposite the Victory Theatre, to Modderfontein Dynamite Factory – about 12 kilometres

There is a seldom-visited part of Mountain View that remains idyllic – full of jacarandas with soft shadows and sandstone garages with old, weathered doors. Occasionally, you might notice a feature from a bygone age: a carved wooden spire on the apex of a roof, an outhouse, perhaps, or a sash window. There are converted stables and the sprawl of subdivision and alteration, calmed by a profusion of trees and greenery. Walking here, at the beginning of Hope Road, just off Louis Botha Avenue, is invigorating and spicy. The temperature is lower because of the tree shade, and the trees themselves seem to sponge away some of the suburb’s wearying noise. Everything has a drippy, children’s hideaway kind of feel, a world of tree houses and secret retreats at the bottom of the garden. It was here, early one Sunday morning in mid-autumn, that I decided to step out and find South Africa.

Hope Road was empty at this early hour. There were no cars rushing down its one-way system along the base of the Mountain View ridge and the road was mine, giving me a feeling of well-being and mild propriety. The first person I saw was a homeowner on the other side of the street, out with his Weed Eater as he trimmed his square of lawn. He was wearing a white vest and I could see him through a jagged maze of barbed wire as I tumbled past, feeling my daypack (oranges, pens, notebooks) as it settled on my back, the pleasing rise and fall of my legs in my boots. As I walked quickly down Hope, feeling the vitality that comes from purposeful walking, the barbed and razor wire became more noticeable; the seemingly endless categories of domestic defence gave the suburb an embattled, dug-in feel. It was also dirty. I drive my wife mad because my instinct is always to pick up litter but there was so much of it as I approached the foot of Sylvia Pass that it made this task too awkward. There were too many casually discarded beer bottles and cans of Coke, chip wrappers and bottle tops.

Not to be downcast, I looked for beauty and detail. I noticed a carved wooden door, paint fading like a retreating tide, that wouldn’t have been out of place in Goa. There were mosaic street numbers and the magical sound of Zen fountains, heard but not seen, bubbling away on the other side of a wall. As I swerved through the kink east of Sylvia Pass, I was greeted by a platoon of planes, their brown leaves crinkly in the breeze. I was now walking more north than east. The aspect changed, the sun suddenly more insistent. As I walked along Ninth Avenue, out of the shade of the planes, I found myself stopping. I turned to face the sun, marvelling at the luxury houses perched on Linksfield Ridge, more impressive than one realises when one drives through the area in a car.

Runners and ramblers began to emerge as I walked down Ninth Street. I noticed a pair of joggers, bright with the latest gear, and a lean man on the opposite side of the street running past me, backwards. I saw a group of three 60-something walkers, chicken legs protruding from baggy shorts, briskly launching themselves into their Sunday-morning ritual. A man came towards me with the Sunday papers under his arm, talking on his mobile, before disappearing slowly into the shadows, looking cold and half asleep. I passed a group of stout, severely pruned trees. Ginkgos or mulberries, they were thick, with trunks like powder kegs. Looking at them in their mute rootedness made me boyishly happy, and I strode out, past the Yiddish kindergarten, down through the avenue of planes and the orange leaves of autumn, heading for the Jewish enclaves of Fairmount, Sydenham and Glenhazel.

Johannesburg’s first powered flight took place slightly east of where I was walking, across the grassy cusp of what used to be called Sydenham Hill. Frenchman Albert Kimmerling had shipped out from Southampton on the Kenilworth Castle in 1909 as a representative of biplane manufacturer Voisin. His intention was to be the first man to fly in Africa, and he would hopefully pick up orders for the Voisin along the way. Improbably, he and a mechanic decided that East London was the best place in which to make their grab for immortality and Africa’s first recorded flight duly took place at the Nahoon Racetrack just after Christmas in 1909. Early the following year, Kimmerling crated his plane up to the Rand. What the Rand Daily Mail called ‘a special garage’ was built on the edge of the Orange Grove flying grounds, and by February he was ready to test the Highveld’s thin air in his rickety craft, part pterodactyl, part kite.

The occasion was well organised. Tickets could be bought from the Central News Agency and a flotilla of trams was laid on for spectators to ship down Louis Botha Avenue (then called Johannesburg Road) to Orange Grove. It was an event with a certain shimmer. Flying was the rage in Europe. The year before, John Moisant, the son of an American sugar baron, had dropped in unannounced before 250 000 bewitched spectators at a Paris air show. Here in South Africa, there was less transparent showmanship, although, unlike Paris, refreshments would be served. ‘The public will be notified of the conditions as follows,’ reported the Rand Daily Mail of 1 February 1910. ‘A red flag will be flown from the Corner House buildings, the Carlton Hotel and Messrs Cuthbert building at an early hour on Saturday to denote that conditions are good and the flights will take place as advertised between 3–6pm. Should there be no red flag, the flight will not come off.’

February must have been exquisitely frustrating for Kimmerling because it took until the end of the month for the red flag to eventually be raised. On the 26th, watched by a crowd of thousands, Kimmerling shovelled his unstable biplane after what in all likelihood would have been no more than a couple of hundred metres; the craft wouldn’t have flown more than three or four metres off the ground. Photographs in Museum Africa in Newtown show the Voisin cheerfully plunging along an axis almost due south, with Linksfield Ridge in the background.

Had Kimmerling flown in the opposite direction, he would have headed directly for what was to become Moishe’s Butchery in Raedene, the beginning of the Jewish district. I stopped there for sparkling water and a look around as the cleaning staff were mopping the floor while white-coated butchers (Moishe himself, perhaps?) stood around importantly in white wellies. I remembered an old-fashioned Italian barber in the complex and, nearby, the terminus for the Sydenham bus. The buses in those days were slow, sooty and eternally long-suffering. You paid for your ticket either at the driver’s cab or when the conductor came round. He wore two gunfighter’s straps that diagonally crossed his chest, upon which hung a sort of primitive cash register on one hip, and on the other a little apparatus with a handle for dispensing tickets. The mobile cash register, consisting of upright cylinders stacked side by side that dispensed change, had its merits but the ticket dispenser was by far the funkier affair. It was solidly silver and had dials and wheels out of which emerged rectangular little stubs in pastel greens and yellows. At some point in your journey you would wedge your stubs into the back of the seat in front of you, where it would take its place alongside the Neanderthal graffiti, the lewd anatomical drawings and the word ‘poes’ repeated like a mantra.

From Moishe’s, I walked down a gentle hill, the turf spongy beneath my feet, as I approached the Fairmount Shopping Centre. I fell in with a Zimbabwean vendor in an orange T-shirt. He was selling hand towels, lappies and dishcloths, and at first was reluctant to give too much away, telling me simply that he was from ‘Africa’. He looked a little like one of those clothes horses you see in tiny European flats, with towels hanging from every portion of his raised arms. I explained my mission and we walked a while before he peeled off to buy something at the Shell garage. I later saw him peddling his wares at the shopping centre roughly opposite the Jewish old aged home. By then his face had assumed the careful neutrality that seems, in part, a defence against the worst, in part, the expectation of that worst. Further down the pavement, on another patch, was another vendor. He was sitting in a canvas camp chair selling Manchester United beach towels, among others, talking football conspiratorially to a mate who was complaining about the poaching of players in club football. They talked in neither a whisper nor the tone of a normal speaking voice, so what they were saying seemed vaguely Byzantine, full of intrigues I couldn’t share.

Before reaching the shopping centre, with its kosher deli and outside eating area, the hardware store and Spar supermarket, I stumbled upon the Jabula Recreation Centre. When my sister, Laura, and I were growing up in nearby Lyndhurst, my mother used to bundle us into the car and take us there on a weekly basis. My tastes were non-literary: Asterix and Obelix, Tintin, Lucky Luke and his savvy talking horse, Jolly Jumper. (There is surely a fine book or thesis to be written on Jolly Jumper and Tintin’s soliloquising dog, Snowy, who both sidle up to the reader by gently undermining the hero but are fiercely loyal to him at the same time.) I used to read sports books and devour a series published, I think, by McDonalds on countries of the world like Greece or Chile or Turkey. The books followed a pattern, with items on history, exports, religion and landscape. The section I liked most, though, was the story of a day in the life of an average Turkish family: when they would get up, how long the school day lasted, how much homework was mandatory before they could watch television. I loved finding out what the evening meal consisted of, and what they ate and drank, what they dressed in and what they looked like. I used to pore over these books for hours, lost in silent reverie, trying to imagine what it would be like to live in Marmaris or Santiago or Thessaloniki, and if my name was Orhan or Jaime or Costas.

Thinking back on it, the library became almost sacred for me as a child, a place of quiet abandon. When you borrowed books, you handed over your library cards, bright little envelopes of reinforced cardboard. They were slightly rough to touch and fitted neatly into the palm of your hand or the pocket of a school blazer. Mine, I seem to remember, were a bright buttery yellow. Once you had parted with your cards, the books themselves were stamped with a franking punch, jumping through its work with springy zest. The librarian pounded the books’ return date onto the thin paper folio gummed to the front of the book, and popular books were crisscrossed with these brief reminders of the return date, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping. Depending on the colour of ink used, the trails were either mauve or deep purple, charcoal or black, and you could trace them backwards, burrowing into the book itself to find out how old it was. These prints were an index of ancestry. You could distinguish the popular books from the neglected ones, the inspirational from the dull. Such was the anonymous murmur of the critics of suburbia.

The librarians who presided over this calm island wore blue cotton housecoats. There were often triangular pots of milky glue on their desks and sometimes flowers in a vase. I imagine this forgotten world now with infinitely sad longing, indescribable melancholy. I can hear the withdrawal of a thin drawer of stacked catalogue cards and the return of that drawer into the wooden cabinet with crisp finality, a sound almost plush. On summer’s days there were invariably fans going about their rhythmical business, looking left then right, like pedestrians crossing the road. They would hum good-naturedly through the silence, a background wash to the franking and stamping and the graceful slide of books back onto the shelf.

* * *

Next door to the Jabula Library was the Community Hall – home, among other things, to Round Table 121, of which my dad had a stint as chairman. Round Table provided the opportunity for fundraising, sometimes with a serious theme – such as their ‘evening of ecology’ at the German School, guest speaker Ian Player. But sometimes the men simply dressed up as women, wearing massively outsized bras and high heels as they sang songs from a melodrama or bumbled happily through Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. I remember black-and-white photographs from the era – or I think I do. The men are wearing jeans with belt buckles the size of Texas, checked shirts and scarves wound rakishly round their necks. My father is in his element, the glint of unchecked madness in his eye.

It was the late 1970s, so a time of fondue sets and dinner parties, of red candlesticks wedged into green Grünberger Stein bottles. My parents were both bohemian and fiercely conventional, so they read Edward de Bono and Dick Francis, listened to Jacques Brel and Erroll Garner. Looking back on it, I think colleagues and neighbours might have looked at us slightly askance, with a mixture of envy and mild derision. Our dogs, after all, were called Smuts and Brünnhilde. Smuts, the good-natured German shepherd, so called because he had a big patch of white on his breast and this reminded Dad of Jan Smuts’s goatee. Brünnhilde was the princess of German mythology from Wagner’s opera piece the Ride of the Valkyries. Ours had a docked tail and was probably a combination of Alsatian and boxer – we were never quite sure. I somehow doubt that there were many other dogs in the suburb called Smuts and Brünnhilde.

We owned a green Peugeot station wagon and for holidays we perched our igloo tent on a hill overlooking the Hole in the Wall in the Transkei. Dad bartered for lobster with the locals while my mother cooked pork bangers for my sister and me, fried on our portable gas stove, together with a vile instant concoction called Smash, because we didn’t fancy the idea of eating lobster. Despite sibling rivalries and patches of marital angst, being pernickety about money, we were, I think, as Tolstoy described, a happy family much the same as all the other happy families in the world.

Behind the community centre and library was a play area. Its main attraction was a jungle gym in the shape of an aeroplane. This was no thrown-together afterthought. It must have been four or five metres long, with wings and a tail fin, and three wooden seats in the nose for the ‘pilots’. I’d noticed the aeroplane from the road, and, amazed it was still standing after all these years, edged my way across a damp decline before reaching it. Miraculously, one of its wooden seats was still there and it was, as far as I could see, entirely intact, too cumbersome and well made for the scrap-metal dealers to have cut it up or prised it from the ground. As a boy I spent many enjoyable afternoons in and on the aeroplane, fighting for the pilot seat and taking off through the marshy ground and looping above the surrounding suburbs in my trustworthy old Dakota before landing perfectly, taxiing to a stop exactly where we had started.

I so loved aeroplanes as a child that I made my own back at home in Lyndhurst, building them out of bricks and wooden offcuts I scrounged from the outhouse, launching them into the air through the power of fantasy alone. Laura and I were self-sufficient children. We were constantly playing make-believe games, and making and drawing things. I often played cricket matches against the whitewashed wall of the garage, commentating my way through Test matches between England and Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies. There was no chance of seeing any of these teams live, so I brought them onto our own patch of kikuyu with the clouds of jasmine at deep extra cover and the wooden fence of creosoted planks off to one side. As much as anything else, I was thrilled by the cricketers’ names, sensing that they said something about where they came from. Frank Hayes, from Lancashire, was an Englishman; Bev Congdon was the hardbitten New Zealander; Eknath (‘what kind of name was that?’) Solkar was a fine fielder for India and glamorous beyond compare.

Looking back, there must have been some unrecognised complications. I remember, for example, following the exploits of Maurice Foster, a Jamaican middle-order batsman and occasional off-spinner. Foster boomeranged in and out of the West Indian Test side of the early 70s, always in the frame, never quite cementing a long-term place. With a surname like that, he seemed familiar, yet he couldn’t have been completely familiar because he was clearly black. This was a plus in my eyes, although it also suggested that life was possibly more fraught than I cared to think about. Maybe black people came from certain parts of the world and not others, playing cricket for the places from which they came. This was plausible enough, although it had self-evident limitations, because I rubbed shoulders with black people every day of my life and they didn’t seem to play much cricket. Instead, they were servants, or men apologetically in search of piecework. I saw them walking down the street, steering clear of the dogs, who shared a sharp communal dislike of black pedestrians. At 10 years of age, I didn’t make any connections. In the apartheid of my young mind, these were all separate developments. This was simply how it was.

And none of this could get in the way of the Wednesday afternoons I looked forward to, when my weekly magazines got delivered to the local newsagent. I remember seeing a team photograph in one of them of the 1973 West Indian tourists to England, with Foster playing his customary peripheral role. They were all wearing maroon blazers, and, as a young fan, I was stunned at how snappy they looked, how they shone. Looking back, it was colour that did it for me: the green of a Springbok jersey, the thick red vertical stripe down the front of Ajax Amsterdam’s shirt, the maroon of a West Indian blazer and cap. In political – even literal – terms, we lived in a black-and-white world, yet my eyes and mind were sensitive to explosions of everyday colour.

After touching the metal wings and admiring the fact that the several colours of paint hadn’t faded completely from the fuselage, I walked onwards. There was a seen-better-times bowling club on the other side of the Jabula parking lot, with that overgrown, boarded-up feel of holiday houses in winter. Everywhere in this part of Sandringham at this time of a Sunday morning I was pricked by a sadness borne of neglect. There was too much that was once full of life; there was too much that was empty or abandoned, too many relics and ghosts. The bowls club would once have been a happy place, full of the civilised lyrics of the greens, the buttery-slick woods, the jack rolled into place underneath the crêpe sole of a white bowls shoe, the jolly mayhem of the bar. Now weeds were marching across the once pristine verges. The Highveld sun was cracking the paint, time obstinately levering open the doors, the suburb’s music sombre and receding.

After the kosher deli and the Zimbabwean vendor, I walked down a gentle slope towards Sandringham High School, heading east through the obscure little suburbs of Glensan, Glenkay and Fairvale. Sandringham itself, on the opposite side of the road, was built to accommodate returning servicemen after World War II, and the names around me seemed to pay homage to imperial Great Britain and the Crown. There were streets called Victoria Road and, although I didn’t see them, consulting the map afterwards, I noticed Elizabeth and Wellington avenues. This neck of suburbia had clearly escaped the rage for renaming, although an official with too much time on his hands will shortly be inspired to call Sandringham Julius Nyerere Township and the R25 as it heads towards Edenvale Hospital, Ujamaa Way. Then again, who could fail to see the latent potential in a suburb called Fairvale? Simply add a ‘y’ and in ‘Fairyvale’ you’d have one of the smallest and Peter Pan-like of all Johannesburg’s suburbs.

Despite its slight twilight-zone feel, this was good walking country. The verges were wide and largely clean, with townhouse complexes and demure blocks of 70s flats tucked away from the road, looking tantalising behind their curtains of subtropical growth. The traffic was orderly and, filled with a sense of happy well-being, I crossed the road and swung down to the school, noticing the fence by one of its tennis courts had collapsed like a sleeping child. I crossed the intersection of the R25 and Northfield Avenue, tramping on towards Modderfontein. Over to my right, unseen from view, was the Rietfontein Infectious Diseases Hospital, or the Rietfontein Lazaretto, as it was originally known. Built to deal with those who had contracted bubonic plague, smallpox and tuberculosis, it was situated on what were then the city limits. The hospital staff nursed Chinese labourers, Hindus from the so-called ‘Coolie Location’, and Irish and Polish labourers back to health, doing so under the benevolent gaze of its first superintendent, Dr John ‘Max’ Mehliss. Nowadays there is a retirement village alongside, and despite protests from amateur historians and heritage officials, it looks as if the entire area, which contains five graveyards of various denominations (the Jewish and leper cemeteries have never been found), will be bulldozed to make room for residential developments.

Mehliss, who cared for the ill from the hospital’s inception in 1895 until his death, 32 years later, was an unusually dedicated, gentle man. His formal education was patchy, being limited to a few years at high school in King William’s Town, but he managed to impress the authorities at the universities of Munich and Gutenberg (in Mainz) sufficiently for him to be allowed to study further. He was such a precocious student that he once caught the eye of Otto von Bismarck, who commented crisply that he had some cheek to arrive from the colonies and beat the empire’s best students in their medical examinations. Although Mehliss discriminated against no one, never turning the sick away on the basis of race or creed, his was not a name that slipped easily off the tongue – a cause, perhaps, for dissatisfaction. ‘Mehliss’ was corrupted by his patients to ‘mealies’ or ‘Dr Mealies’, and the Lazaretto became known as the ‘Mealies Hospital’.

* * *

I had decided to walk from Mountain View and Orange Grove to Modderfontein because both suburbs were once home to a sizeable chunk of Johannesburg’s Italian community. Some of the first members of that community had been recruited to Modderfontein from the hill town of Avigliana, in north-west Italy, a day or two’s brisk walk due west of Turin. Avigliana was the site of one of Alfred Nobel’s several European dynamite factories. When Paul Kruger controversially snatched the Transvaal dynamite concession out of private hands, building a new factory on the farms Modderfontein and Klipfontein, he realised that unless he moved quickly, he’d have a staffing crisis on his hands. Today you can still see enlarged photographs of the much sought-after Italians’ visas in the Modderfontein Museum. Signed by Italy’s King Umberto and granted under the authority of the mayor of Avigliana, they authorise the long trip to the Transvaal ‘for reasons of work’. One is for Andrea Molinero, an Avigliana tradesman; he was short, according to the museum item, getting on (33) and, given that he was prepared to undertake the long voyage to Africa from Genoa or Marseilles, probably desperate for work.

Not only were the Italians experienced in working with dynamite, they also came cheap. Unlike the Germans (some of them from Schlebusch, near Cologne) and Austrians (from Nové Zámky), who weren’t prepared to work for less than 20 pounds a month, the Italians would work for between 10 and 12. Their process operators, artisans and cartuccere, or ‘cartridge girls’, numbered about 200 when they started coming to South Africa, and they made up by far the largest portion of the European labour contingent when the factory first opened in 1896. At the beginning, along with a substantial number of recruits from the Eerste Fabrieken near Leeufontein, east of Pretoria, they lived in tents on the factory grounds. By and by, their quarters were upgraded to form the ‘Italian Village’, with structures of permanence as well as pigsties and chicken runs. They made it their home as best they could, sampling local commodities. (Archaeological digs into the tips close to their compound, for instance, have found shards of glass from bottles containing ‘Dr Williams’ pink pills for pale people’.) As well as spending their hard-earned pounds on this ‘multi-purpose panacea’, they owned a communal gramophone. On Sundays they used to have picnics on the banks of Dam No. 3, Verdi’s operas mingling with the breeze. Photos in the museum show them in front of a large, steep-sided white tent. The men are wearing sandals and collarless shirts, and look casually sophisticated. The women’s hair is scraped back and they’re wearing white, high-necked dresses. They are healthy, their skin sun-tanned, and they gaze at the camera without demurral. Given their experience and sustaining sense of community, they might even consider themselves the factory’s first labour aristocracy.

There was a second, more quixotic, reason for starting my walk where I did. Like many Johannesburgers, I had long been intrigued by the whereabouts of the orange grove in Orange Grove. I’d imagined the grove was on high ground, perhaps on Sydenham Hill, where Kimmerling had bounced his Voisin for Johannesburg’s first recorded flight. In my mind’s eye, I imagined row upon row of orange trees with glossy leaves, the oranges luminous with sunshine, bright like Christmas-tree decorations. Prim with order, they marched into the distance, neatly Californian. All that remained – or so went the fantasy – was the odd lucky tree in a suburban back yard, sulkily rationing its riches.

After doing some research, I discovered that the grove, such as it was, grew alongside or close to a natural watercourse that still bubbles on the Houghton side of Louis Botha’s death bend, possibly on one of the oldest farms in the vicinity, called Lemoen Plaas. This stream provided the water for a covered swimming pool close to where the BP garage was until recently, although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly the swimming pool’s location. This is because old photographs of the area are slightly ambiguous. Was the resort’s pool close to the slip road just off Louis Botha, in the vicinity of where the La Rustica restaurant used to be? Or was it slightly further down the road, at the junction of Osborne Road and Louis Botha? It is almost impossible to say exactly, because the area on the southern side of Louis Botha has been built upon, the sense of scale is iffy and no natural landmarks remain because everything has been drowned in brick and concrete. There’s a union headquarters, followed by an old block of flats set back from the road and, after that, a corporate park the entrance to which is exactly opposite Hope Road’s south-western end. The situation was compounded by the fact that, strictly speaking, the orange grove probably wasn’t in Orange Grove at all. To be officious, it was in what subsequently came to be known as Mountain View.

Wherever the resort’s home and the exact location of the grove were, it was a place to which the leisured classes of early Johannesburg were readily attracted. Old sepia-washed postcards show lawns dotted with thatched gazebos and pathways on which to stroll. The resort or guest farm was a place to which you could come to sip afternoon tea and take in the soothing waters of the Sand Spruit. At the height of the resort’s popularity, balloon rides were offered, underscoring the area’s early fascination with flight. As for the orange trees, they might have been the subject of the early workings of the Joburg publicity machine, perhaps the fantasy of a wildly optimistic town planner. There was unlikely to have ever been a grove. It was probably more like a group of orange and other fruit trees mixed with the willows and tall wattles of the spa, although a clue is to be found in the name of the old farm itself. Does Lemoen Plaas not suggest the presence of trees? A lovely article by Brett McDougal published by the Heritage Portal in February 2016 alerts us to the easy connection between Lemoen Plaas and Orange Grove. He also mentions that the suburb had early problems with name and identity. It was called Alexandra, Alexandria Estate and even Cellieria, before finally settling down to long domestic bliss as Orange Grove.

* * *

After passing the hidden remains of the Rietfontein Lazaretto, I found myself skipping down a well-used path that leads to the Jukskei River as it passes beneath the R25. The path here had been softly excavated by many anonymous feet and was, at times, root-crossed and magical in a mossy, Hobbit-like way, deep-sided with time and history. There were dusty old cypresses tucked just inside the fence of the retirement village I was passing, and I was sure the path was broken by the roots of those trees, obdurately seeking out warmth and water and the nutrients of the soil.

The walk here had an airy, big-sky feel. The National Health Laboratory Service offices were over to my left, and the views were good and open as I banged down towards what was probably the walk’s lowest point, before crossing the river and negotiating my way over a concrete culvert. After that it was head-down stuff. The incline past the Edenvale Hospital didn’t offer a challenging gradient but the heat was gathering. I’d been walking quickly and there was now a teeth-gritting, feel-it-in-my-legs dimension to the walk. I sensed the sweat pooling in the small of my back as I nudged up the hill, crossing the road as I watched a group of scrap-metal collectors ferrying their load in the same general direction. There were two or three of them, and they seemed to have difficulty steering their trolley with any degree of even short-term control. This meant they needed frequent stops to realign the trolley wheels and gather breath. It was hot and their load heavy as they inched like Catholic penitents slowly up the hill.

Having passed the entrance to the Edenvale Hospital, the R25 curled left to cross the highway down below, before heading past the turn-offs to the new industrial park (left) and the Greenfields Shopping Centre (right). I crossed over to the shade of some pine trees, seeking the softness of the needle-strewn ground. Heading on, it was all concrete along the overpass, cars now brushing past me as they surged for Edenvale, just down the road, Kempton further afield and sometimes the Modderfontein turn-off.

I grew up in Lyndhurst, vaguely behind me, first in a block of flats called Hessenford and then in a comfortable but very ordinary tin-roofed house at 55 Lyndhurst Road. From certain vantage points in the suburb you could look east and see the area through which I was now walking. It was all farmland then, dominated by a thick clot of blue gums and evergreens that a farmer seemed happy to preserve. The image is fixed in my mind because beyond that, unseen, lay Modderfontein Dynamite Factory, where my father spent many adventurous years being what in those days was called a personnel manager. Sooner or later, either because of a veld fire or lightning strike, and sometimes through malfunction or human error, we would hear the deep reverberations of a faraway explosion. It was Dad’s responsibility to get onto the plant immediately – at one time Modderfontein was referred to as a national key point – to find out what had happened and, if necessary, notify next of kin if lives had been lost. In the excitement and fear we experienced as children after an explosion, we would scan the sky for telltale signs, sometimes seeing a thin vine of smoke creeping upwards before it disappeared.

There was little left of the copse of trees now, although stragglers and an island of well-established pines remained as the R25 split into separate eastbound and westbound lanes. The walking during this period of the route was unpleasant and tricky, a constant effort of negotiation. It was impossible to walk in a straight line, so I had to tack across islands and skirt sets of lights, no provision being made for pedestrians. Cars strained like dogs on a leash as they awaited the green light, gunning down the hill beside me, and I felt simultaneously exposed and invisible, feeling a sort of shadow emotion of what it must be like for so many of the walking urban poor. I remember during this portion of the walk picking my way across a verge and noticing the confetti of discarded takeaway packets, cheap booze bottles and plastic under some young white maples. The homeless and impromptu car washers, the beggars and hands-free-kit salesmen had camped here for the night, hunkering down when their provisions ran out, trying to forget the gathering cold as it gnawed at their bones.

Eventually, the walking began to take on a less claustrophobic, less insistently urban feel. I nosed down the Modderfontein slip road while the R25 spun away down the hill, off to the east and the nondescript formlessness of Edenvale’s townhouse sprawl, each house apparently different, all actually the same. The Modderfontein shops weren’t far away and after a period walking on gravel alongside the road, the path became paved and neatly finished. Restored bangers trundled past me on their Sunday-morning vintage-car outing, buffed and proud, and a sense of fun and frivolity washed over me. Children were having a birthday party in the canopy of pine trees on my right and it seemed more relaxed here, more obviously Sunday morning-ish, now that I had wriggled free of the concrete and the mania. I picked up a pine cone to take home and threaded past a newly refurbished Shell garage, two men sitting sipping coffee in a sunlight-flooded window. I found an old café, tended by a Bangladeshi watching a poorly tuned television, the picture speckled with snowflakes. I bought an ice cream and two square banana-flavoured toffees, and took them down to the grass. I sat down beside the first of Modderfontein’s dams. My first walk over, I texted my wife to come and collect me, and started jotting down my impressions and drawing diagrams with wry captions. It was a Sunday morning. The sun was shining and folk were walking their dogs on the lawn at the edge of the dam, the dogs’ tails wagging, their noses wet with the simple blessing of being alive.

* * *

One cold Saturday morning a couple of weeks later, I drove back to Modderfontein to nail down the final plank of the story. I was met by security at the entrance to the dynamite plant and escorted inside before leaving my car and being chaperoned to the factory cemetery. The graveyard was large and dusty, neither perfectly tended nor completely ignored. There were shrivelling flowers on some of the graves, and although the grass and weeds hadn’t taken over completely, everywhere time was going about its earnest work, nudging the crosses in the faraway black section of the cemetery over the perpendicular, nibbling away at the headstones and the masonry. There were glum cypresses inside the wrought-iron gate, some jacarandas with yellow-green winter leaves and a bottlebrush or two. The colours were muted. We instinctively whispered, gesture and word being squared-off to the minimum. You could feel the early-morning chill muzzle about your legs, and the cloying sadness of the place was impossible to shake.

I was here because in April 1898, approximately two years after arriving from Avigliana, a group of 15 cartuccere lost their lives in an explosion. Their precautions, like wearing pinafores and working in bare feet, had been of no use, for they were obliterated. So poor were the families from which they came, and so reluctant the factory authorities to contribute anything to their gravestones or memorial, that only three of the 15 are commemorated in the cemetery. Two are sisters – Margarithe and Anna Tonda; the third a young woman called Margarithe Gugno, who lies next to the sisters in numbered grave 161. The granite memorial erected to commemorate them is dominating but simple, with the words ‘Qui riposino – killed in an explosion’ stencilled down one side. As I wandered down the pathways, looking half-heartedly for the other graves, it became clear that these early artisans faced daily danger of a kind unheard of today. I noticed two gravestones for Alfred Pleitz, who died on Christmas Day 1896; Bernard Schmedding and Theodore Volkmann both died two years later. Maria Columbino, buried nearby, lost her life in 1907. Everywhere were the dead and their losing battle with oblivion – one that is likely to be escalated in the near future because much of the land has been sold to a consortium of Chinese property developers with big plans for residential compounds and even a university.

My guide, Peet Hattingh, from plant security, kindly pointed out several things that I had missed. The ornate wrought-iron fence wrapped around the Tonda memorial came from HCE Eggers and Co., Hamburg. It, the memorial stones, and the cost of transportation, must have been significant. He pointed out the tiny Italian flags on the Italians’ graves and told me how the plant had shrunk since his arrival way back when. As he drove me back to my car in one of the plant security’s bakkies, I could see the neurotic order in which the factory and surrounds were still preserved. Now it looked more like a beautifully maintained industrial museum than a functioning plant. Once it had been thriving. Goods wagons rolled into the heart of the factory to take the gelignite directly to the Rand mines.

Such was the site’s importance that, until 1948, the country’s weather forecasts came from Modderfontein. Padding round the museum one weekday morning I’d seen photographs of the weather station, a strange raised structure that looked like a Tyrolean cabin, all pitched roof and ornate exterior woodwork. Looking at the photo inspired me to imagine the weatherman, surrounded by his barometers and wind vanes. He was standing on his balcony, looking south at the cumulus clouds, stacked like purple grapes in the sky, wondering when the storm would arrive and, if it did, where lightning would strike.