Book extract: Song for Sarah

[caption id="attachment_214439" align="aligncenter" width="379"] Song for Sarah by Prof Jonathan Jansen, with Naomi Jansen[/caption]

Prof Jonathan Jansen will be in Port Elizabeth this week to discuss his new book, Song for Sarah: Lesson from my Mother. See The Herald today for details of a brunch on Friday and afternoon session on Saturday, August 12.

This is an extract from Song for Sarah: Lesson from my Mother. Chapter XII  Toughees Comfortably in charge, Sarah established firm and inflexible routines that would keep the family out of trouble. In isolation, the individual routines made no sense. At the time, they were onerous.

Looking back, it is clear what Sarah was up to. She spun a delicate web of influence that kept the family unit together and the children out of trouble in a dangerous part of the Cape Flats. What she accomplished was ingenious, actually.

Sarah’s children wore simple clothes and if you looked closely you would see pants mended with those square patches and that the buttons on a shirt did not exactly match. But there were no holes in pants or buttons missing on a school shirt. Her logic was simple – ‘When you go outside people don’t say your pants are torn. They ask, “What kind of home do you come from?”’

And so Sarah’s children became aware of the fact that they represented the family unit, and that how they behaved in public could lift or drop the Jansen name through a hole in the socks.

With the little money Sarah had there were all kinds of schemes to keep clothes on the children’s backs, quite literally. Nothing was more fascinating than the concept of the lay-by. You walked with Sarah down Retreat Main Road and lay-bys would be placed along the way. K.Y. Ling, the Chinese South African, was popular with his shop at the station end of Retreat Road, selling everything from shining marbles to household appliances. Along the main road Sarah would spot a drop of curtains at one shop and a supposedly bone china tea set at another. For each of these items a small amount of money would be laid down every week until it was ‘paid up’, which meant you could now collect your purchase and take it home.

Wynberg Main Road was the next stop, with crowds dodging the front-of-shop displays flowing over the pavement. Sometimes you walked on the pavement, other times you walked in the street, but all the time you bumped into hordes of people scrambling for Saturday-morning bargains. The Wynberg shops had everything from women’s blouses and men’s suits to Bata Toughees, those dependable children’s shoes. All the Jansen children wore Toughees as school shoes. Until late in her life, Sarah’s gifts to the grandchildren were shiny shoes for the new school year from her modest monthly pension.

There was a problem, though. In primary school the soccer-crazy Firstborn often used his two shoes as the markers for the two ends of the imaginary goalposts. Fine, but when the bell rang signalling the end of the break, the boys shot off to class without shifting the goalposts, so to speak. By the time you remembered, the shoes were missing. Firstborn did this twice in one month and what followed was a hiding to remember. It was one of the few cases where a tearful Sarah handed over Firstborn to Abraham. What made that whacking memorable was not the physical discomfort; it was the pain in Abraham’s eyes for this gentle man never raised his hands against the children. For the young parents that was a lot of hard-earned money down the drain – two pairs of Bata Toughees.

No Cape Flats child escaped hand-me-downs, the standard cost-saving measure of families when it came to clothes. The eldest child was the lucky one but thereafter the new school blazer, jersey or shirt went down the line until it was simply too worn out to be patched up. Of course sizes never fitted perfectly on the next body and so you could easily spot a hand-me-down because the sleeves were too long or the shoes too big. No brand names then, only survival clothing, and Sarah was a master at making sure that holes were fixed on everything from socks to sweaters. One of the standard pieces of hardware was the elbow patch on a jacket – a special piece of leather for the one part of a blazer that would quickly wear out. One of the favourite old family photographs is of Sarah working on a Singer sewing machine at the kitchen table mending what was broken and pulling together fabric in the same way that she held together family.

Sarah would join a church women’s initiative where the sisters would bring together used or home-made clothing to be given to the poorer upcountry believers. The sisters would take their boxes of clothes and on the appointed Saturday the dresses and trousers and childrenswear would be hung neatly from a clothing line inside the church. There was no shame here when working-class people did for others what they did for themselves – hand clothes down and across the community in hard times. Sarah enjoyed extending her work of love beyond the home. Naomi remembers ... The industrious and thrifty Sarah had an almost uncanny relationship with a very thin, weather-beaten, head-scarfed woman who used to walk around the area with a round wicker basket over her arm. This woman never seemed to utter a single word. She’d simply knock, someone would open, call my mother and the two women would have a business exchange. This woman sold herbs like buchu. My mother would then herself drink the brewed broth, which apparently is good for one’s organs and has been a part of the indigenous culture and heritage of South Africa for hundreds of years.

She partnered with and supported a neighbour who lived a few doors away, Mrs Nitzky, who was able to get good-quality, slightly damaged men’s shirts from her place of work. The industrious Sarah would buy up a number of these for her sons and hubby, and sell the rest to her friends and colleagues at a profit. Mrs Nitzky always seemed delighted to do business with Mrs Jansen because she received her money on time and came back repeatedly with more of her wares. Perhaps unknowingly at the time, we were learning to deal honestly with people and to honour our word.

Another person with whom Sarah had business dealings was a certain Mr Petersen. He worked for a clothing outfitter called Buss & Heiman and so he’d often be announced as, ‘Mommy! Mr Buss & Heiman is here!’ This gentleman would arrive by car with loads of new clothes and lay these out for my mother to choose from. She would order what was needed and he’d call by a second time with the right size and colour, and these garments would then be paid off in instalments. Sort of online quality shopping without a personal computer.

 Watching Sarah around the house practising her belief in the ‘waste not want not’ principle did not carry much weight, given the sensibilities of a child. One remembers her religiously doing things like using bath water to flush the toilet or water the garden, boiling vegetable peels and left-over food to cook a broth for the dogs, and using the sun as a hairdryer.

 Sarah’s position held that poverty was no excuse for being unkempt, smelly or dirty. It was also clear that it was dignified to own school shoes even if they belonged to your eldest brother, were several sizes too big and the wearer was a girl. The rule was that your school shoes were to be polished and shining all the time. The world was pretty much black and white to Sarah and this was precisely the security that children needed in the uncertain world of the Cape Flats.

 Why Auntie Lily Fredericks, the next-door neighbour of many decades, never laid any civil charges against this principled woman still escapes me. Sarah Jansen would literally put her hands through the high back fence that separated the two Council properties and tear the slightly torn clothes from the body of Sammy, Auntie Lily’s eldest child. ‘Now go and tell your mommy to sew your clothes properly.’

 When one night Auntie Lily’s uncontrollable sobbing could be heard through the thin Council house walls, it was her neighbour Sally who would rush over to console the bereaved mother of four with Scripture to the effect that she would one day meet her suddenly deceased husband again, in a land where there was neither sickness nor death.

•  Song for Sarah: Lesson from my Mother is published by Bookstorm and retails for R240. The book is also available in Afrikaans as Lied vir Sarah: Lesse van my Ma.