Читать книгу Dandelion Diary - Marguerite Black - Страница 5

I started to dance a while ago, in my own way. I began to think back, remembering a time when I could move freely, like wind breathing through ferns in a forest. And for quite a while now, as my movements became increasingly difficult, I have been tracing the events, people and thoughts that have shaped me through these desperate and wondrous years.

It was only twenty years ago – a morning filled with noisy, laughing children:

I am eight years old and thrilled to be part of the activity on a sports field in Grahamstown that has been going on since early in the morning. It is the annual sports day of the school and the excitement and anticipation can be felt in the air. Mothers rush around in the biting cold of the dawn putting up tents and stalls to protect their children from the sweltering heat which will surely surface later in the day. The Eastern Cape has been described as “a region of fierce opposites – meadows and plains, dongas and waterfalls, ferns and aloes”. Of Grahamstown it is said that there are four seasons in one day. In an attempt to reconcile these opposites, the children sit on the stands in shorts with warmer tracksuits packed into bags by their sides. Among the children I sit, and jump up impulsively when the under nines’ 100m is announced over the microphone.

The gun goes off and I throw my legs forward with exaggeration and gusto. I can feel my body bursting with vitality as the blood rushes through my limbs. Determination and focus allow me to win the race. After the thrill of the moment, the applause subsides and I casually walk off towards the hotdog stand.

At this moment I am unaware of the fact that in the near future I might not have the freedom to amble nonchalantly towards a hotdog stand, absent-mindedly glancing towards the sky and constructing patterns in the clouds. I do not foresee the way in which I will soon have to use my determination and focus. And it will not be for furthering my athletic abilities. It will be for something of a devastatingly different kind – in fact, a fierce opposite.

I was soon to embark on a journey where every step in itself would be a race, and where, whenever in motion, it would be dangerous to be absent-minded for one second. Because that would mean that I could fall and hurt myself.

The regimented order of a day on the sports field wasn’t a patch on a day spent in our garden, which was like a jungle to me. Here, my feet could take me wherever I wished to go. It was 1985, languid days of roaming around and discovering a small green worm, dragging itself along in the dust, or a light blue snake-egg, strange and brittle. I often think back to and long for those days, when I could run freely and when my legs would listen to me and carry me even to the impossible places that my little-girl imagination demanded of me: up a steep tree to scrutinise a leaf or down a flight of steps in a flurry. I was blissfully unaware of what the future held. Now I know the future’s unpredictability is a privilege. When I was a child the mountain could always come to me, I could sing with the cicadas and fly up high with the swallows.

The garden

Loquats

half-maimed,

eaten by mousebirds,

the jungle of a child,

mtwana of the veld.

Here bird funerals

were held

and feasts of prickly pears.

Abakweta-shongololos

were the scarecrows of the plains.

Here warm berg winds

rustled through summer grass.

Goats on the hill

grazed amongst kikuyu.

Here geckos were our snakes

and Datsuns racing cars.

Garden of trampled dandelions,

the jungle of a child.

My brother, Malcolm, and I spent every possible moment after school in gangs made up of the children from the neighbourhood. Down by the dam and up by the railway line on the hill, we conducted funerals for birds with a designated priest and casket carriers, or relentlessly dug unsuccessful swimming pools in the earth during the ruthless heat of summer. Every morning the hill, a mass of rampant natural growth that could not easily be tamed by humans, would slowly come alive with cattle herders, now whistling, now talking in low monotones.

Playing in the garden

On such a day I went to one of my friends’ birthday parties a few blocks away. I ran through the long grass in the field behind our house, the heady fragrance of kukumakranka fruits in the air. From somewhere close by, I could hear the hissing and rapid honking of an Egyptian goose before flight. On arrival, the tune of “Oranges and Lemons” was intermingling with bright balloons bobbing up and down. In the corner of my eye, at the foot of the stairs leading up to their house, I could see an older girl in a wheelchair. Instantly my eyes moved, fixing on her for an immeasurable fragment of time. Confusion took hold of me: I had always thought that walking was everyone’s birthright, not to mention a necessity for survival. It was cruel to deny anyone proper legs. How could anyone carry such a burden? The excited shrieks of the children grew suddenly muffled and remote as a faint sense of familiarity rippled through me and swelled into a wave of recognition. A strange feeling that I had never sensed before tugged at my gut and somehow, in that moment, I felt completely disconnected from myself. But then the ring-a-ring-a-rosies children called out to me to come and hold hands with them and complete the circle. Feeling out of sorts, I reluctantly ran towards the splash of colour in the garden.

After the party, immersed in the day’s last shafts of sunlight, I ran down the hill to our sprawling house. It seemed determined to stand its ground in this harsh landscape. It was a Fifties-style home sandwiched between two hills and cloistered behind fussy white burglar bars that made twists and twirls, reminding me of decorations on a wedding cake. There was a terraced lawn spread out in front of the house and in the flowerbeds was a tangle of petunias, daffodils and geraniums. In fact, just about every conceivable garden flower that was able to withstand the extreme climatic changes had been planted haphazardly, so that I could imagine the lawn being inundated by dandelions and inhabited by all sorts of bush creatures. The piping of a bearded robin echoed across the garden, jolting me out of my sombre mood and catapulting me into a buoyant lightness. I looked up and saw the coppery sheen of a few hadedas, taking leave, in their rasping kind of way, of the wilting sun.