Nora Patience Murphy (née Hoare) is near the tail end of thirteen children, the last bar one, born in Port Elizabeth and shunted to Durban. When she was five, Nora and all the young ones but Milton, still a new baby, were removed from their parental home and taken into state care. The boys went who knows where; the girls were kept together in a convenient handful, a short while in the Durban Children’s Home, and then shipped off to St Faith’s, an orphanage in Bloemfontein.
Where you had to have it, and keep it, faith, but it was damn hard, that hard home of your childhood. Though Nora is still on the right side of thirty, and has spent her whole life trying to improve on her bad start, things have not really panned out, yet, her plans, and surely she has grounds for complaint. But she doesn’t complain, not often, or at least not outside her head. She just keeps at it. For now, Ixia Court is the best she can do, so she does it.
Faced with her little family, she makes a home. She becomes unbelievably resourceful, industrious to the point that her voluptuous, womanly body pares down. Not to bare bones, at first, but to a lean muscularity.
And even after that she still had a way to go, and off she went.
Mobility
For Halley, these may be flats, with flat roofs, but Kenneth Gardens is never a flat surface. Okay, she thinks, so yes, if they were seen from high above. But for the tenants this is never, though Halley is always trying to figure out how to climb onto the forbidden roof parapet so she can see down, like a bird, and maybe fly. How would you know unless you try?
For now, though, she’s obliged to live from the ground up, which is an altogether more complicated kind of complex.
At Kenneth Gardens each block has its own main entrance, a single doorless opening into a squat, curved tower. Except for Ixia Court, which has a functional, straight-roofed entrance hall. Halley believes that this is the only block with such a mediocre distinction, and it troubles her, because she likes the surprising accomplishment of the other buildings’ curves, the hint of superfluous style and refinement. The beautiful fullness which swells the access to every block except the one in which they live, where the blunt, straight line rules supreme.
Unfair! And of all places, she thinks, it is the entrance to their block which ought to be rounded, because their family is only females. There’s her mother, and Jen, and Halley. Which altogether makes 3.
Mommy sleeps in the main bedroom, you and your sister in the other one, and there’s a small enclosed porch off the back just for breathing space.
There is no substantial difference, in truth, between the block in which the Murphys live and all the rest. Whether the entrance is curved or straight, any pretence at flourish falls away as soon as you walk into the poky entrance hall, take two steps and come smack bang face to face with three rows of gaping wooden postboxes. Six, triple-stacked: 1 2. 3 4. 5 6.
Whichever block you live in, then, Ixia or Arum, Watsonia or Jasmine, any of the others . . . in all of them your options are limited. You can go up the stairs: on each floor there are two flats, shouldered side by side. Or, if you don’t want to head in, you can turn around and leave, wondering where to go. Or you can forget about what your mother has taught you concerning not messing with people’s private things, and climb into a postbox of your choice. If you could.
Since you can’t, using the matches you’ve stolen from your mother’s bag, or if those are finished the plain old sun forced to an excruciating focus with your pocket magnifying glass, you set alight the bundle of dry leaves and newspaper that you’ve wrapped around your own stinking shit and stuff it into the postbox marked Number 5. And then you scarper, run like crazy and leave people to think it’s the fault of the neighbourhood hooligans. Who of course are boys.
Because you are never naughty. You try not to be naughty. You are good. You try hard to be good. Though you do not yet understand that the existence of love presupposes that damage has been done. People may not know it, but love is a compensation; it must make up for what has been lost.
From the back porch, Ixia Court overlooks Walton Place, which is a short side street. Most of the other flats lie along Queen Mary Avenue, which is very long. If she goes out to the narrow front balcony, shared by all the tenants, Halley imagines she can see everything that’s happening on the avenue.
In the middle of Queen Mary are wide traffic islands, planted with trees. The exotic triumphal march begins way down the bottom in Congella with tall, waving palms, the long trunks thicker than elephants’ legs. Then it’s on to a broad-canopied stand of orange flamboyants, and then delicate pink camel’s foot near the Murphys’ block. After, the pattern almost repeats, but as if it can’t quite remember what it’s supposed to be doing, and then gradually it gives up, disappearing into tall grass and grow what may. But even once the islands end, the avenue continues in an absent-minded way, winding over the hill, up down up, until with some relief it arrives at The University. Here, it is delighted to be reconciled so unexpectedly with King George, and the two, well met, proudly survey the Jubilee Gardens.
Back down the slopes, even the Murphys’ end of Queen Mary would be quite scenic if the men from the flats didn’t use the shady islands as a parking lot and a convenient place to wash and fix their cars. Come weekend, rags, beers, radios and soapy buckets are hauled over from the flats; jumper cables, spanners, the works, are jumbled noisily out of gaping boots. You can’t go barefoot among this tinkering, because the men empty ashtrays and other rubbish on the grass. There’s lots of stompies and crushed papers and spark plugs. Gnarled wire, broken glass. So it’s not at all regal, despite Queen Mary.
And except for Mary, who was obviously a queen, the people after whom the roads have been named are strangers to the tenants of the flats. Nobody can tell Halley about Walton, who is their side street. Or the mysterious Kenneth of Kenneth Gardens, who maybe once owned this whole place when it was really a garden.
Most people don’t seem to care about the anonymity of the names. A road’s a road. The street is just your address, and while it would be nice to live somewhere better, here’s not always so bad.
Nora tells her eldest that whatever it’s called, a road is mainly a way of getting somewhere. From A to B, as people are fond of saying, Nora laughs.
Which Halley doesn’t reckon is really that far, if you look around.
For the children in the flats, what matters most is that you walk half-road down Queen Mary to get to the tearoom, where sometimes you have money for sweets. A sucker. Chappies. Nigger balls. Creamy toffees.
But money aside, for Halley and Jennie there are particular complications, as their mother has decided that her daughters’ singular directional arrow is up.
So they are the only children they know from the flats who are enrolled in a school called Convent High, on the prominent hill at the height of Queen Mary, the crown upon her majestic head. It’s a high school and primary school both, so the adjective ‘high’ means elevated, and perhaps refers also to the panoramic vista over Durban. Indeed, given that the institution is run by the Sisters of the Holy Family, it may also be intended as an invocation to raise the eyes upwards in spiritual aspiration, the dutiful desire of clumpy clay to be transformed into heavenly bliss.
This upwards distinction in the lives of the little Murphys continues an earlier precedent, when they were sent to Davaar Kindergarten, a progressive infant establishment run by two Swiss-German sisters, the Misses Zwinckel.
Kinder Garten: Kenneth Gardens. Perhaps Nora found the sounds pleasing, relished a certain balance in the euphony. Certainly, she knew from excellent repute that the school offered a caring home from home and a sound educational grounding. Both of which, of course, she’d already been working on herself.
People had snorted, called her a hard taskmaster for showing and sounding a boxed series of phonic flash cards to her first-born when she was but a speechless infant. But by the age of two, though still a spindling, Halley Murphy was able to read. The proof of the pudding, Nora knew, lay in the eating. Not that