Back home again

Rested, relaxed, sober and grateful, happy to be back home again.

 

It was a wonderful break, just what we needed. We stayed in a rambling old seaside villa  with courtyards and verandahs overhung with purple bougainvillea, frangipani and palm trees,  Swam at dawn before the heat became to intense, lay in hammocks watching mousebirds and Black Oystercatchers in the old milkwood trees while the puppies puzzled over large tortoises in the garden. In the late afternoon we walked along the beaches and went to buy fresh fish from the shabby little fishing boats pulling into the harbour.

 

The coastal reserve was crowded with Cape Vultures, bontebok and ostriches, flowering ericas, proteas, wild daisies. We went up to Bredasdorp to browse around the old shipwreck museum, with its tragic but fascinating collection of ships heads and old ducats and other coins, Dutch East Indies porcelain and brass chronometers, cannon and salvaged bullion, old compasses, huge flaking iron anchors,  lifejackets, rusted metalware and pewter teapots, musical boxes and sea-stained cloth dolls, the pitiful debris of any human disaster. Since the Joanne went down with Spanish bullion in 1682, there have been more than 250 shipwrecks along this coast, including the Thames Queen, the Oriental Pioneer and the Arniston. Such romantic names! Most tragic of all, perhaps, the Birkenhead, carrying wounded soldiers from Ceylon to Portsmouth along with women and children. The captain had no chronometer and went aground off Waenhuiskrans in the early hours of the morning in 1862. Only six people survived of 387 and drowned bodies washed up on the rocky shore for weeks afterwards.

 

This is Agulhas, the ‘graveyard of ships ‘ or Cape of Needles named by the old Portuguese seafarers because of the jagged treacherous rocks as well as the fact that the compass here does not distinguish between true north and magnetic north. It is a terrifyingly dangerous and wild coast where the Atlantic meets the Indian Ocean. There are only a few lighthouses and fishing boats go down each year in the winter storms, with terrible loss of life.

 

For centuries only the Khoisan strandlopers, nomadic coastal peoples, wandered along the coast, building fishtraps that cn still be seen in tidal pools and leaving behind middens of shells, old hearths and clay pottery fragments. Inland there is the arid and scrubby Strandveld with Cape vultures, bontebok, tortoises and a wealth of wild salt-tolerant fynbos. Farmers here grew wealthy on merino sheep and the oil from local fat-tailed sheep was used to power the lamps of the Agulhas lighthouse for a century. There are still Cape carts drawn by donkeys in use on older farms.

 

And there are ghosts. The young woman who struggled ashore from a 19th-century shipweck only to die in a cave up on the mountainside is seen waving her long narrow hands at passing motorists on moonlit nights. An oversized oytershell is nailed above the door of the old Van Breda farmstead to recall the young bride who choked to death on oysters at her wedding feast and whose spirit still walks the beaches  at the low spring tide when oysters are gathered ( very South African, that anecdote!).

So I lay in hammocks dozing, listened to an African grey parrot named Knuckles swear at my puppies while friends played vingt-et-un and the sea roared away in the distance. I collected paper nautilus shells and sea urchins and driftwood to burn with a green flame at night.

In the balmy evenings we sat out in the garden under a landscape of stars, the great glittering constellations of the Southern Cross and by the light of a hurricane lamp  I read the poetry of Trakl, the Tibetan Book of the Dead  and As Bill Sees It, a curious combination.

 

And there was time to think and dream and play. No melodramas, no remorseful mornings-after, no thoughtless and regrettable incidents, no making myself ill. The old obsession as far away as China, it seemed.  I flt free to play with that happy unself-consciousness we all have as children. And swimming in those aquamarine bracing seas was like a new kind of ecstacy, the feeling that all life begins in the ocean depths, that the ocean and its deep tides inhabit us and fill the unconscious.

And after the ecstacy, the laundry – as Jack Kornfeld says about the Buddhist experiences of satori and everyday life. I have to unpack and wash and wipe and remind my wild beasts of puppies that they must be good dogs now we are home. They swam in rock pools and chased spider crabs and rolled in a dead seagull on the beach, rotting and delightful for small dogs!

Such a pleasure to be tanned, rested, brimming with good health and  clearheaded as a bell. Now to begin revising the novel, after doing the laundry…