Song for Sarah by Jansen Jonathan;

Author:Jansen, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bookstorm
Published: 2017-03-30T07:12:27+00:00

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.

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