A tale of great tragedy and loss
THE GIRL FROM SIMON’S BAY Barbara Mutch Loot.co.za (R199) Allison & Busby Books
REVIEWER: JENNIFER CROCKER
IN SIMON’S Town in 1937 two teenagers swim at Seaforth Beach. One is Louise Ahrendts, the daughter of a shipbuilder. The other is Piet Philander, her friend whose father is a fisherman who likes the bottle a little more than he likes being a father.
The Ahrendts and Philander families live on Ricketts Terrace with the town’s mosque above them.
Louise is beautiful and clever and she dreams of being a nurse one day. She doesn’t want to go into service, she has plans for her life.
Plans that frighten her parents because even though it is 1937 and the Ahrendts family are well respected members of the small-town community that owes its being to the sea and the navy, there are already rumblings of the coming of apartheid.
When Louise explains to her family that she plans to apply to Victoria Hospital in Wynberg to train as a nurse they are frightened for her, scared that she will get her hopes up, and Barbara Mutch demonstrates through this dilemma the skill she has for portraying characters who feel real.
Louise’s mother and father know that her chances of being accepted at the hospital are slight, because of her colour and not because of her lovely nature and dedication to getting good marks.
But they let her write a letter to the matron to apply.
Piet, on the other hand, thinks that his life will be that of a fisherman, tied to the sea and her moods forever, and he expects to marry Louise.
But the young man makes a terrible mistake and is caught out in it. What he does will change the trajectory of his life, and Louise’s, forever.
The war comes to Simon’s Town and Louise, who has been accepted at Victoria as a nursing student, is seconded to the Royal Navy as a nurse in her small home town.
The author creates an image of Simon’s Town that will have anyone who knows it nodding their heads, for much of what she writes about can still be seen today.
Woven around the story about a place and its people, though, is the real heart of the story, the chasms that open in our lives sometimes that change them forever.
A patient is admitted to the hospital, and his relationship with Louise will forever change her life.
This book is filled with an air of sadness for things lost, but also an almost glowing reverence for what can be saved.
Of course, one of the things that cannot be avoided in a book that spans the years from just before the war until long after it are the forced removals from Simon’s Town of the coloured people who lived there seamlessly with the rest of the people who called it home.
In between the human drama of relationships, there is an almost symbiotic tale of a community being torn apart.
It’s sometimes all too easy to go to a place and forget the pain that forged it.
For the Ahrendts, life away from their beloved terrace is unbelievable. The sense of shock and tragedy as they are carted away from their home, their town and dumped in Ocean View is written with a savage slicing curve into the narrative.
It’s a brutal reminder of what happened to a group of people who were plucked from their lives, from the town they had helped build, from the beaches they loved and thrown away, far from their jobs into a barren place.
Louise is a mother to a lovely son now and she sees no future for him in South Africa.
But she must make a life for herself and her parents in Ocean View, where ironically she has no view of the ocean that has sustained her life.
Her life has been professionally successful, but she holds a painful loss in her heart.
The loss of a love for the greater good. A choice she has made through love.
This is a saga-like story with a liveliness and sense of understanding and history in it that makes it more than a gripping read, it also becomes a story about our history.
If you know Simon’s Town and have walked the terraces and through the dockyards you will recognise glimpses of the place it was, and the place it is now. The sense of dislocation that was forced on a town that did not want it.
The ghosts who peer through the cracks in the stone walls. The past is manifest in cracked old buildings in the centre of the town.
You can imagine as you read this Louise as a young woman walking up from the hospital to her home. An ordinary life that is unsettled by love and political cruelty. The culmination of the story is bitter sweet, there will be a resolution but it will hold hope for a younger generation and deep sadness for Louise and her great love. This is not a sentimental or preachy story, it is a breath of fresh air breathed on to a history of great tragedy and loss.
This is not a sentimental or preachy story, it is a breath of fresh air