Shorelines (13 page)

We sipped at our gins and thought about that for a while. Conjured up the talk on the street, the old cars struggling up the hill, the frilly dresses, the snap-brimmed hats, the flash of thighs and the jazz music. Paradise Road. We cheered right up.

Simon’s Town, I found, had a two-tone history. Cobbled streets, charmingly preserved buildings, harbours, jetties, maritime business, bookshops, restaurants and a naval base all spoke of a former age of purposeful elegance. We walked the ‘Historic Mile’ of Simon’s Town where, in the late 1700s, young Horatio Nelson went nosing around while on shore leave from the HMS
Badger
.

Forget Cape Town, I say. For real action back in the 18
^th
century, Simon’s Town seemed to be the hub of the sailing universe. All sorts of traffic flowed past here, from heavily laden spice ships to slavers to Men o’ War to privateers to grimy whalers to passenger vessels. All good business for the shopkeepers and tavern owners of Simon’s Town.

This was where, if you sat in the right corner and kept your ears open, you would hear all the news from east and west. Which countries were at war, what pirate was in town, which naval captain was out of favour with the Admiralty, who had been lost at sea in the latest shipwreck and were you attending the execution this afternoon? No? Then see you at the ball tomorrow night.

“Simon’s Town was more brilliant than the far larger Cape Town,” says Lawrence Green in
Tavern of the Seas
. “Huge wooden buildings were erected specially for the naval balls, and fireworks entertained those outside.”

We drove down to the Simon’s Town Historical Museum, formerly the Residency, a multistoreyed mansion containing snippets from False Bay’s past eras. One section displayed old World War II posters warning citizens to keep mum about troop and ship movements. Also:

“Save kitchen scraps for hens. Council will collect.”

“Would you like to see the dungeon?” came a disembodied voice from behind. I spun around in shock, to see a kindly lady in her middle years with a look of enquiry on her friendly face. Why not?

A young man called Alan Green took us downstairs to the Black Hole, where misbehaving prisoners used to be stripped naked and tossed in, without so much as a blanket or bucket. After up to three months in the Black Hole, they would end up “seriously touched”.

“The stench down here was horrible,” said Alan. “We used to allow tourists to go into the Black Hole, but we stopped. Too many people found it too deeply disturbing.”

Then Alan put me in the stocks, trapping my legs between two heavy pieces of wood. This was what they used to do with people who were drunk and disorderly in public around here.

“About time,” observed my wife dryly, as she saw me squirm uncomfortably in the throes of ‘participatory journalism’.

“They sat like this for eight hours,” said Alan. “No access to food, water or toilet facilities. A popular Sunday outing for a Simon’s Town family would be to come out here with all the rotten fruit and eggs [probably those damn stinky penguin eggs again] they could lay their hands on – and throw them at whoever was in the stocks.”

The litany of horrors in the dungeon continued. We saw marks on the walls that were made on the down-swing of the lead-tipped cat-o’-nine-tails when a man was whipped.

“After being recaptured, an escaped slave would be flogged and branded on the cheek. If he escaped again, his ears, the tip of his nose and his right hand would be cut off,” said Alan. “They stopped this practice because the sight of mutilated people walking down the road offended the people of Simon’s Town.

“Any child born to a slave woman belonged, of course, to the master. In one particular incident in 1831, a slave woman admitted under torture that she had murdered her baby. She had her breasts pulled off with red hot pincers and then she was ordered to be burnt to death.”

The authorities, in a rare display of ‘leniency’, changed her sentence, sewed her into a sack and dropped her into the deep blue sea. So it wasn’t all quadrilles and quaffing of fine wines around here in the heady old British Navy days. Someone who did have himself a bit of a party back in 1896 was one Edgar Wallace, author and founder-editor of my dear
Rand Daily Mail
. He arrived at the Simon’s Town clinic as a medical corps orderly and later wrote
People
;
Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon
:

“There was a compact little surgery, and in the hours when I was alone I experimented on myself with every drug. I took opium, morphia, cocaine (which made me laugh hysterically), chloroform, ether and Indian hemp. The morphia nearly killed me, but I suffered nothing from the others. And I had no desire to repeat the experiments.”

At the Heritage Museum near the naval dockyards we met Zainab ‘Patty’ Davidson. Her maiden name was Amlay. Patty’s husband Dick was having a snooze upstairs but she was happy to show us around her family home, which had been taken from the Amlays under apartheid legislation in 1975 and, 30 years later, was being reclaimed by the family.

“The Navy asked me to move in while the claim is being processed,” she said. “That’s to stop the vagrants from taking over.” The bottom storey of the house was a shrine to Simon’s Town’s Malay culture and history. Muslim wedding finery, items of Muslim faith and records of the arrival of the Sheik of Macassar were all on display.

“Before the forced removals, everyone had friends across the colour bar in Simon’s Town,” she said, without a hint of rancour. “We, my sister and I, even dared to sit in the Whites-only section of the local cinema. Other families found themselves in ludicrous situations, where fairer ones were classified white and the darker ones, coloured.”

How would she and Dick break their fast that evening, we asked, ever curious about culinary matters.

“We’ll have a couple of dates, some samoosas, then some soup and then I’m planning a cottage pie with vegetables, maybe some caramel-and-banana pudding afterwards,” Patty said, lingering lovingly on the description of each dish. “By the way, would you like to meet a ship builder from Norway?”

Next door was Marton Berg, who had a yacht in his front yard. He thought he might sell it. It wasn’t one of those suburban ‘scam boats’ that never hit the waters. This was a dinkum ocean-going vessel “made for two, but able to be sailed by one”. Marton had toyed with the idea of sailing it back to Norway.

“But now I’m not so sure. I’ll probably just fly over,” he said. We told him we were going to visit the penguin colony at nearby Boulders Beach.

“I think I may have helped start that colony back in the late seventies,” he said. “I took in a few penguins in False Bay that were covered in oil slick. I tried to return them to Robben Island, but they kept swimming back.”

Perhaps it was a case of cartoon overload, but as I sat on the rocks at Boulders Beach watching the clans of African penguins hopping about, they looked to me like short little waiters just before opening time at an open-air beachfront restaurant. You could fix a dishcloth onto their sloping shoulders, perhaps a sling-bag for tips and change about their necks. The Special of the Day could be displayed (in washable ink, of course) on their white chests and you could just tick off what you wanted. The lovable African penguin. Just don’t expect him to serve you the catch of the day without taking a small bite out of your dish.

Known as the ‘urban penguins’ of the Cape, this 4 000-strong colony has many natural enemies, not the least of which is man, who sometimes shows a barbaric tendency to want to barbecue a penguin on the beach. Back in the mid-1600s, however, penguins got a far rougher deal from the human race. Their eggs were part of the local diet. Penguins themselves were used as fuel to supply ship boilers. When people tried to eat a penguin, however, they invariably cursed the fishy meat as “foul fare”.

Today, those big tankers you see on the horizon are the main penguin killers. Whenever they spill oil, it spells potential death for these flightless birds.

Up at Boulders Beach Lodge – not short of penguin-themed logos – we met John ‘Chops’ Craig, a former Simon’s Town Citizen of the Year.

“Back in the eighties, someone came and asked me where the penguins were,” he said. “I said ‘What? There are no penguins in Simon’s Town.’

“A couple of days later I took my dog for a walk along the beach and thought I heard a walrus. Then I thought no, that sounds more like a donkey braying. Then I saw it was a breeding pair of penguins.” I asked him why everyone called him Chops. He said his mates had given him the nickname, but he wasn’t sure why.

“I may have been eating a chop at the time.”

For some reason, I thought this was the funniest thing I’d heard all day. When you’ve been in a world of torture, mutilation, penguin barbecues and forced removals (OK, there was also the little matter of Edgar Wallace’s drugged-up walkabout in the clinic), the story of Chops is welcome wit.

Inside the curio shop at the lodge, full of penguin
tsatskes
, I met Bob the Cat. Bob’s job was to comfort tourists who were missing their own cats back home. For this he received more Christmas cards than anyone else in town. But they were feeding him too much bacon under the table at breakfast, and his kidneys were giving him hell.

Still on the penguin trail, we drove out to Fish Hoek to see Hendrik ‘Van the Penguin Man’ van der Merwe. His wife had just passed away, but he was still willing to receive us in his little flat over Jimmy’s Sports Shop. When he’d retired from the Navy, Van found that he was bored.

“One day I saw some people throwing stones at a penguin on the beach. I chased them off, threw a shirt over the injured bird and took it to a vet. Its leg was broken. From that day, I was a part of the penguin world. I put on a uniform again and went to work every day, looking after the penguins.”

Van became world famous as the protector of the penguins on Boulders Beach.

“I had one penguin that always used to come along next to me, wherever I went,” he said. “One day I was talking to a little girl and I told the penguin to take her for a walk. The penguin took her hand, very gently, and off they strolled down the beach. After about 100 metres, he turned around and brought her back.”

“I even told a penguin to peck someone once,” he said, with a bashful grin. “And it did.”

He showed us his ‘penguin scars’.

“Here, look. One penguin even managed to break my wrist bone. He karate-chopped me with a flipper.” His upper torso was full of peck scars, where anxious, usually oil-polluted penguins had attacked him in pure panic while he was busy rescuing them.

Once he rescued 150 penguins after an oil spill, cleaned them up at his home and drove them off to the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds in his Toyota Corolla.

“Every time I changed gears, I had to move a penguin out of the way. They were under my brake pedals, on my shoulders and staring out of all the windows. Basically giving the world a helluva show.”

National Parks took over the Boulders Beach area and Van found himself being eased out of the job he had created.

“I didn’t need a degree to tell when a penguin was sick or well. I also knew just how to pick them up. They would just relax in my arms,” he said. “I loved my years at Boulders. I still remember things like how the penguins ran up the beach one day when a killer whale came in close. I admire the fact that they mate for life – did you know that a penguin pines away if its partner dies?”

Driving back to Simon’s Town late that afternoon, we landed smack-dab in the middle of a traffic jam of enraptured motorists. They were all looking out at the bay, where a pod of whales had just arrived. And this time, there was no harpoon about to be unleashed …

He sits on the surfboard gazing out at the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Point, the south-easter blowing his hair back into a fashionable wave that billows around a thoughtful face. What kind of a swell is happening out there today? What’s the dreaded undertow going to be like? How about the meaning of the universe? Where does that puzzling, enticing aroma of chocolate and hazelnut come from? And what is this itch between my toes?

This is Surfer Boss Baboon, one of the Cape Point Chacma gang, some of the smartest primates in existence. Right now, they have infiltrated a convoy of young human surfers and are casing the joint, so to speak. Sitting on VW Beetles, surfboard racks and rocks, strolling among the boys in baggies and their adoring girlfriends, this baboon troop resembles a squad of officious Customs men, clad in grey, eyes missing nothing, constantly assessing each detail of the line of cars and their contents. Looking for a gap.

Ah ha. One thoughtless youngster, possibly a little high on life and Indian hemp, leaves his Beetle unattended for a few seconds. That’s all Surfer Boss Baboon and his First Mate need. Quick as striking snakes (don’t say “snake” too loudly around a baboon) they dart into the little car and puff themselves up to twice their size, baring their fangs and barking loud warnings to the world at large.