There is no quiet rain in Lady Selborne
On summer afternoons it hurtles down
like Godโs vengeance
Drops of water as big as grapes
pound the zinc roofs
and thunder rattles the windows.
We rush from room to room to catch the leaks
in plastic buckets and enamel pots
daisy yellow, baby blue, and avocado green.
When the storm ends at sunset,
it smells of ozone and clean fertile loam
And in the crisp stillness of night, the stars make promises
they cannot keep.
But by morning the soot and smoke
from a thousand coal braziers
soils the sky
and shit flows once again from overflowing outhouses
in rivulets down soggy streets.
How easy it is to forget
when I am in a leafy suburb on the other side of town
at the Waterkloof House Preparatory School for Boys
amidst houses with gables and ivy and tidy green lawns
that I come from a place my family wants me to leave behind
as I move onward, ever upward, away from
the ramshackle houses, the squalor and forgotten people
of Lady Selborne.
In my boarding school, I can pretend to my new friends
that I too have a flushing toilet
And that my parents take tea, with scones and clotted cream
that the maid brings in at three.
Once a week, on Sundays, after morning mass
I am allowed to come home
for a few short hours
to a mongrel dog on a chain who barks at me like a stranger
and a grandmother whose language I no longer know
I show them the tests that the teacher has marked with gold stars
and recite a poem I learned in my after-school elocution class
paid for by my motherโs second job.
But when the sun sets on the township
itโs time for the long drive back to Waterkloof
Back to the new life they have wished for me
far from the muddy roads
of Lady Selborne
Notes
Lady Selborne in Pretoria, Sophiatown in Johannesburg, and District Six in Cape Town were the last multiracial enclaves in Apartheid era South Africa before the National Party government ethnically cleansed the areas by bulldozing them and forcibly relocating the inhabitants to create Whites only suburbs. For more history, see my memoir “Mad Dogs and Masamboengaans”.