Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Isme Benni

George or Holidays By the Sea

South Africans who lived in the landlocked Transvaal or Free State provinces would make for the coast for their holidays. These vacationers included my family as well as families from as far afield as the Belgian Congo or Northern Rhodesia, as they were then called. We would go east in July, replacing – for those of us from Vereeniging – the chilly Highveld with the semi-tropical Natal. In December we went south to the beautiful Cape, enjoying either the Atlantic or the Indian Oceans that frame the tip of Africa

The first holiday I remember was with my mother in Port Elizabeth, on South Africa’s east coast. I was pretty young, it must have been during or close to the end of the war, WW11 that is. I don’t think that my little sister was with us – she was born in 1946. I have a vision of my mother sitting with other women on the beach, friends or relatives, and I have a vague memory of a place called Happy Valley or Fairy Glen that we tried to find, or perhaps did visit.

For the next holiday, about three years later when I was about nine, my whole family went to Muizenberg, a few miles outside the city of Cape Town. Muizenberg was the vacation preserve of South African Jews, much like the Catskills for New Yorkers, but without the entertainment factor. Our black maid Paulina came with us to look after my sister who was a toddler then. Paulina would have been accommodated in the hotel’s servants’ quarters. The hotels in Muizenberg were barely two-star, but people went year after year and stayed in the same one year after year. Not my mother. After this first family holiday in Muizenberg and our stay at the Marine Hotel she would never go back.

We went by train, a steam train that took two days to arrive in Cape Town. My mother made friends at the hotel with a woman from London, who was escaping from post-war England, and its rationing and so on. Years later, when I went to live in the UK, I looked her up, but she had no recollection of meeting us.

After that holiday, my father went to Muizenberg alone. He would bring back gifts for my sister and I – one year it was sweaters, another time, the pin-on “nurse’s watch” which I had requested. When I was about eleven, I started going to Muizenberg with my father – just the two of us. We would go on the Blue Train, a luxury express with everything decked out in blue, sheets, blankets and towels. We shared a blue leather compartment with its own blue washroom. We dined elegantly in the dining car, sitting on blue banquettes and eating off blue table linen. It always reminded me of an Afrikaans poem that I had learned at school, about a small girl standing at dusk beside a lonely candle-lit tent looking out “in stomme bewond’ring.” She was looking with wonderment at a brightly lit train racing by, envying the sparkling wines and expensive food being enjoyed within.

The Blue Train was electrified, but as it approached the mountain range, it was hitched to a steam train, to pull it over the passes, and then it made the descent into the low-lying Cape Town and its environs. In Cape Town we switched to the local train that would take us to Muizenberg and to our accommodation. My father and I now stayed at the somewhat better Bayview Hotel.

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