Wild life sanctuaries
When the cityscape presses in too tightly, head for a park to be as weird or ordinary as you like, writes Lin Sampson
‘I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I am wearied by the follies of the world’
PARKS are a frappé of different cultures and colours and tribes. They are an essential but often neglected part of city life and here in Cape Town we are lucky, thanks to the city council which primps the parks.
The people who gravitate to parks are often unusual. A park offers respite from conditions that cannot easily be explained, filled as they are with emotional spillage.
Here is the woman who carries her gold high heels in a plastic bag and then puts them on when she is seated on the wooden bench.
According to Valentino Jeftha (nicknamed Jaffies), council superintendent of street trees and parks, a surprising lot of drama goes on in parks.
Once in a park I sat next to man who turned out to be dead. The police came and his sole possessions were a stamped envelope (oh how I longed to read the contents), something that looked like a final demand and a shopping list.
And there is the woman always to be avoided who wears a purple turban and writes poetry which she likes to read aloud. All her poems contain the words “in the depth of my sorrow”. The phoniest are always the loneliest.
Children with nannies. The tiniest fairy child is glued to an enormous black woman. He gazes up at her with awe. It must be like holding the hand of Table Mountain.
Most of the people of the parks have had hard lives.
In the City Bowl some parks have attendants who live on the property. “It is a good idea,” says Jeftha. “They can keep an eye on maintenance and vagrants are always a problem.”
Clayton Smith is one such attendant. He has the demeanour of a head waiter and you expect him to flourish a table napkin in front of you. His conversation is set out like a well-laid table, each vowel polished.
Smith is a byword in De Waal Park where he has cut himself out a small, highly individual garden with shards of glass — small glistening monuments to his heroes Princess Di and Nelson Mandela. “Ma’am, they are so close to my heart,” he says in his headwaiter’s voice. “And the succulents, ma’am, so healing, ma’am, don’t you think, I am a fan.”
ABIG bag of Epol stands by the gate, a kind donation to Peaches, Litchi and Mango, the dogs.
Smith’s story is familiar but it deserves to be told, if for nothing other than the enormous gaps that are unfilled and probably unfillable. He was born in the Northern Cape in 1984. “I never knew my father, ma’am, it is a tragedy indeed, ma’am.”
He came to Cape Town, to Jan van Riebeeck High School, a prestigious Afrikaans school in Gardens. “Maybe I am a little bit clever. I thank God for that.” However, because his mother could not get a subsidy, he was forced to leave.
After this he had a lot of shortterm jobs. “I worked in over 32 different restaurants.”
He and his mother landed up in San Remo boarding house, a place many will remember, once the image of an Italian auberge with falling pink bougainvillea and aspirin-white walls, but now in disrepair.
“That is the place where we stayed, ma’am, I don’t know if you are familiar with it, ma’am? It became a place of ill repute, drugs and prostitutes.” He gives a little refined shudder.
Eventually it was shut “and me and my mother had nowhere to go. We were destitute ma’am, homeless, without roof.”
So to cut a long story short, as Smith likes to say, thereby leaving another creaking gap, they landed up in De Waal Park.
“I was saved by Charles Lindsay-Bowman of Friends of De Waal Park. He said that in return for doing the gardening, they would give me and my mother accommodation in the storeroom at the back of one of the toilets. I was over the moon, ma’am, and you can see my appreciation in all the work I have put into my garden.”
The ever-expanding garden, which one regular describes as Disneyland, is not always appreciated.
“I don’t know about you, ma’am, but I am wearied by the follies of the world,” Smith says as we part.
WE find Colin Oliphant with his dog Shabby in the small park at the top of Kloof Street, sitting under an ancient acacia tree that is in bloom like a yellow cloud.
Oliphant is the polar opposite of Smith, a man who takes simple pleasures and seems content.
“I came to the Cape and worked on ships for three months. After the three months I tried to find work, it was very difficult. I was a handlanger on a construction site but it wasn’t for long, these jobs you never have security, they employ you for a few months.
“I was without work for a long time, just living there on the corner of Kloof Nek Road, I used to sleep under the block of flats.
“I was street cleaning and the foreman he knew us strollers for years. He came to us one day and said, if you have IDs, the council has work for you. He took us to an office in Strand Street. It turned out that I would do maintenance on this park. It was in quite a bad state at that time, vagrants, and grass with lots of weeds.
“The contract said we must just keep the park clean and cut the trimmings and water the grass. That’s all we had to do. But for me it was too little. I hate sitting still, so I said to myself I am now going to make my own tuintjie”.
It, too, is a rescue garden, grown from thrown away cuttings, yellow cannas, bright red ancient species of rose, spinach, a clump of viridian vygies. “I built the garden just to keep myself busy and although I was still living in the streets I would come and water my tuintjie every day.”
It was this attention to detail and the beautiful garden he made out of other people’s cast-off plants that caught the attention of Jeftha. “I could see he loved the park so much. Even before he had a job there, he would come and sit for hours looking at the trees.”
We sit in Oliphant’s tiny garden behind the simple room in which he lives. The same big bag of dog food stands by the entrance. “The
mense here is very kind,” he says. He makes a cup of coffee on his primus stove, straining the grinds through a sock in the old boer way. It is difficult to imagine that we are in the middle of a major city.
De Waal Park is hosting a free concert today. Arno Carstens is the headline act.