Writings / Creative Non-Fiction: Isme Benni

I hung out with my friends from home or with friends made during previous vacations. I walked for miles along the beach when I first went to Muizenberg, looking for a snake park. I did not realize that it was the name for a crowded triangle of beach, edged by a row of bathing huts on one side and the concrete wall of a promenade on another, where all the young people hung out. The air in Muizenberg was invigorating, full of saline, and the sea had breakers to jump into or surf upon. One could stay in for hours. But the Snake Park had the attraction that it brought girls and guys with hopes for a date, or at least a few weeks’ vacation relationship, into close quarters.

In the evening after dinner at our hotel we would meet to walk along the Promenade, the long elevated concrete walkway that ran parallel to the beach. We paraded up and down, a few girls together, a few guys together. Years later in the small beach town of Torres in Brazil, I encountered the same thing: young girls and guys parading around the town square, and it brought back memories of those teenage years in Muizenberg. New Year’s Day usually fell on the weeks of summer vacation, and having a date on New Year’s Eve was important. I never did. However I went once with a group of friends to a New Year’s Eve midnight show, “jailhouse Rock.” I can remember it so well.

I went to camp one summer. If the Muizenberg experience was inadequate for my mother, so was camp for me. I went only once to the annual Habonim Camp organized by the Jewish Youth Movement. I was not particularly indoctrinated, but my friends and I belonged because in a small town that’s what one did. We went overnight by train, with hundreds of other campers, to East London, to a large camp ground near the ocean. Camp was pretty basic. There were six of us to a tent we had to put up ourselves. We slept on bedrolls. If it rained, we got soaked. We had to help with food prep at the large communal kitchen. Showers and toilets were a long walk away. Even accessing the beach for a daily swim was preceded by a trek through brush. Singing round the campfire at night was one of the nicer things we did, so was eating the chocolate cake my mother sent, which we cut with a potato peeler. My tent mates and I were hardly equipped for the rigors of Israeli frontier life! I came home very grubby and with a strep throat.

After I graduated from university, I went to Cape Town most years for my summer holiday, staying at a Sea Point hotel and taking the bus to the beach – Clifton Beach – every day. Clifton Beach, set at the bottom of a rocky cliff, was divided naturally into four mini-beaches or bays – from the Fourth one, which was the family beach, to the First, which was for the older people. One clambered down steep steps set in the rocks to these enclaves, each year or so moving on and up to a more age-appropriate beach. My friends and I would skip the one known to be the Afrikaans intellectuals’ hang out. Pleasantly tired, tanned, glowing with sun and salt, we would leave the beach to shower and change for an evening out at a party or a club.

Sometimes the party might be in one or another of the cottages perched along Clifton’s steep inclines, or in an apartment in one of the luxury blocks at the top. This was during the apartheid era, of course, and these buildings and the hotels, restaurants, beaches and clubs were for whites only. There were a few nightspots that fell under the radar though. We felt quite adventurous patronizing them. Navigator’s Den was one, a low-down multi-racial dive on the docks.

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