Looking back, there must have been some unrecognised complications. I remember, for example, following the exploits of Maurice Foster, a Jamaican middle-order batsman and occasional off-spinner. Foster boomeranged in and out of the West Indian Test side of the early 70s, always in the frame, never quite cementing a long-term place. With a surname like that, he seemed familiar, yet he couldn’t have been completely familiar because he was clearly black. This was a plus in my eyes, although it also suggested that life was possibly more fraught than I cared to think about. Maybe black people came from certain parts of the world and not others, playing cricket for the places from which they came. This was plausible enough, although it had self-evident limitations, because I rubbed shoulders with black people every day of my life and they didn’t seem to play much cricket. Instead, they were servants, or men apologetically in search of piecework. I saw them walking down the street, steering clear of the dogs, who shared a sharp communal dislike of black pedestrians. At 10 years of age, I didn’t make any connections. In the apartheid of my young mind, these were all separate developments. This was simply how it was.
And none of this could get in the way of the Wednesday afternoons I looked forward to, when my weekly magazines got delivered to the local newsagent. I remember seeing a team photograph in one of them of the 1973 West Indian tourists to England, with Foster playing his customary peripheral role. They were all wearing maroon blazers, and, as a young fan, I was stunned at how snappy they looked, how they shone. Looking back, it was colour that did it for me: the green of a Springbok jersey, the thick red vertical stripe down the front of Ajax Amsterdam’s shirt, the maroon of a West Indian blazer and cap. In political – even literal – terms, we lived in a black-and-white world, yet my eyes and mind were sensitive to explosions of everyday colour.
After touching the metal wings and admiring the fact that the several colours of paint hadn’t faded completely from the fuselage, I walked onwards. There was a seen-better-times bowling club on the other side of the Jabula parking lot, with that overgrown, boarded-up feel of holiday houses in winter. Everywhere in this part of Sandringham at this time of a Sunday morning I was pricked by a sadness borne of neglect. There was too much that was once full of life; there was too much that was empty or abandoned, too many relics and ghosts. The bowls club would once have been a happy place, full of the civilised lyrics of the greens, the buttery-slick woods, the jack rolled into place underneath the crêpe sole of a white bowls shoe, the jolly mayhem of the bar. Now weeds were marching across the once pristine verges. The Highveld sun was cracking the paint, time obstinately levering open the doors, the suburb’s music sombre and receding.
After the kosher deli and the Zimbabwean vendor, I walked down a gentle slope towards Sandringham High School, heading east through the obscure little suburbs of Glensan, Glenkay and Fairvale. Sandringham itself, on the opposite side of the road, was built to accommodate returning servicemen after World War II, and the names around me seemed to pay homage to imperial Great Britain and the Crown. There were streets called Victoria Road and, although I didn’t see them, consulting the map afterwards, I noticed Elizabeth and Wellington avenues. This neck of suburbia had clearly escaped the rage for renaming, although an official with too much time on his hands will shortly be inspired to call Sandringham Julius Nyerere Township and the R25 as it heads towards Edenvale Hospital, Ujamaa Way. Then again, who could fail to see the latent potential in a suburb called Fairvale? Simply add a ‘y’ and in ‘Fairyvale’ you’d have one of the smallest and Peter Pan-like of all Johannesburg’s suburbs.
Despite its slight twilight-zone feel, this was good walking country. The verges were wide and largely clean, with townhouse complexes and demure blocks of 70s flats tucked away from the road, looking tantalising behind their curtains of subtropical growth. The traffic was orderly and, filled with a sense of happy well-being, I crossed the road and swung down to the school, noticing the fence by one of its tennis courts had collapsed like a sleeping child. I crossed the intersection of the R25 and Northfield Avenue, tramping on towards Modderfontein. Over to my right, unseen from view, was the Rietfontein Infectious Diseases Hospital, or the Rietfontein Lazaretto, as it was originally known. Built to deal with those who had contracted bubonic plague, smallpox and tuberculosis, it was situated on what were then the city limits. The hospital staff nursed Chinese labourers, Hindus from the so-called ‘Coolie Location’, and Irish and Polish labourers back to health, doing so under the benevolent gaze of its first superintendent, Dr John ‘Max’ Mehliss. Nowadays there is a retirement village alongside, and despite protests from amateur historians and heritage officials, it looks as if the entire area, which contains five graveyards of various denominations (the Jewish and leper cemeteries have never been found), will be bulldozed to make room for residential developments.
Mehliss, who cared for the ill from the hospital’s inception in 1895 until his death, 32 years later, was an unusually dedicated, gentle man. His formal education was patchy, being limited to a few years at high school in King William’s Town, but he managed to impress the authorities at the universities of Munich and Gutenberg (in Mainz) sufficiently for him to be allowed to study further. He was such a precocious student that he once caught the eye of Otto von Bismarck, who commented crisply that he had some cheek to arrive from the colonies and beat the empire’s best students in their medical examinations. Although Mehliss discriminated against no one, never turning the sick away on the basis of race or creed, his was not a name that slipped easily off the tongue – a cause, perhaps, for dissatisfaction. ‘Mehliss’ was corrupted by his patients to ‘mealies’ or ‘Dr Mealies’, and the Lazaretto became known as the ‘Mealies Hospital’.
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I had decided to walk from Mountain View and Orange Grove to Modderfontein because both suburbs were once home to a sizeable chunk of Johannesburg’s Italian community. Some of the first members of that community had been recruited to Modderfontein from the hill town of Avigliana, in north-west Italy, a day or two’s brisk walk due west of Turin. Avigliana was the site of one of Alfred Nobel’s several European dynamite factories. When Paul Kruger controversially snatched the Transvaal dynamite concession out of private hands, building a new factory on the farms Modderfontein and Klipfontein, he realised that unless he moved quickly, he’d have a staffing crisis on his hands. Today you can still see enlarged photographs of the much sought-after Italians’ visas in the Modderfontein Museum. Signed by Italy’s King Umberto and granted under the authority of the mayor of Avigliana, they authorise the long trip to the Transvaal ‘for reasons of work’. One is for Andrea Molinero, an Avigliana tradesman; he was short, according to the museum item, getting on (33) and, given that he was prepared to undertake the long voyage to Africa from Genoa or Marseilles, probably desperate for work.
Not only were the Italians experienced in working with dynamite, they also came cheap. Unlike the Germans (some of them from Schlebusch, near Cologne) and Austrians (from Nové Zámky), who weren’t prepared to work for less than 20 pounds a month, the Italians would work for between 10 and 12. Their process operators, artisans and cartuccere, or ‘cartridge girls’, numbered about 200 when they started coming to South Africa, and they made up by far the largest portion of the European labour contingent when the factory first opened in 1896. At the beginning, along with a substantial number of recruits from the Eerste Fabrieken near Leeufontein, east of Pretoria, they lived in tents on the factory grounds. By and by, their quarters were upgraded to form the ‘Italian Village’, with structures of permanence as well as pigsties and chicken runs. They made it their home as best they could, sampling local commodities. (Archaeological digs into