Forget-me-not-Blues. Marita van der Vyver
also felt that way the first time I wore a step-in. You will get used to it.’
‘I don’t know how I’ll manage to eat anything tomorrow night!’
‘You mean you didn’t know?’ Mammie jokes. ‘Part of the purpose of a step-in is to force girls to eat like little birds. See, there’s about another half-inch of give around the waist …’
‘And if I picked up even half a pound, I wouldn’t be able to wear my dinner dress ever again, and then all your trouble will have been for nothing, Mammie!’
‘You are not supposed to pick up half a pound,’ Mammie jokes again. Although something in her voice sounds more like scolding than joking. ‘Not until you get to my age. Oh, what I would give to have a waist like yours again …’
‘When you were young, Mammie, wasps weren’t in fashion. You flappers all wanted to be flat and straight. Oh heavens, I wish I could rather be a flapper too. Just look at these ridiculous points my brassiere makes!’
‘We also had to suffer in silence in order to be so flat and straight. We had to bind our breasts, bind everything, which was no laughing matter in the scorching African sun.’ Mammie gets a faraway look in her beautiful blue eyes. ‘No, being a woman has never been a laughing matter. Especially not in Africa. Or what am I saying, Sina? All right, let us leave her the half-inch here in the waist.’
‘It’s just like you say, Meddem.’ Sina nods several times. Colette wonders whether it is the lot of women in Africa that Sina agrees about so enthusiastically, or the half-inch in the waist. Then all three of them glance simultaneously at the radio beside the dressing table, because the Andrews Sisters and Danny Kaye have started to sing ‘Bongo, Bongo, Bongo’, that silly song that always makes Mammie and Colette laugh.
‘Quick, turn it louder,’ Colette bids Sina, and moves her body to the beat of the music and feels the wide skirt swish around her legs. How lovely she looks dancing in the mirror, oh, she does hope there will be a bit of dancing at the party tomorrow. ‘So bongo, bongo, bongo, I don’t wanna leave the Congo,’ she and Mammie sing along with the Andrews Sisters, and even Sina, who can still barely speak English, joins in when they get to ‘oh no no no no no’, and arches her back and bends her knees so her wiggling bottom sticks out. ‘I’m so happy in the jungle,’ the three of them sing at the top of their voices.
‘Forget the Andrews Sisters, make way for the Cronjé Girls!’ Mammie cries out.
Colette gasps for breath. ‘I feel like Snow White did when the witch pulled the ribbon so tight around her waist. Can’t we rather let out the dress a little so I can wear it without the step-in?’
‘Oh no, Colette,’ Mammie says sternly. ‘The whole point of Dior’s New Look is that the waist must be as tiny as possible and the hips as wide as possible. Otherwise it is just the ordinary Old Look we wore throughout the war.’
‘If I had known I would have to suffer like this for the New Look, I would’ve stuck with the old one.’ Colette can tell from her mother’s face that this time she has gone too far. ‘I’m not complaining about the dress, Mammie, it is honestly the most beautiful dress in all of Cape Town, it is just the blooming step-in that is getting the better of me. It feels as if all the oxygen is cut off from my brain.’
‘When a girl looks as beautiful as this she doesn’t need a brain as well.’
And for the second time Colette senses a cruel truth hidden behind her mother’s banter. As if her mother is trying to impart something to her but doesn’t know how to go about it. ‘Deddy says with a brain like mine I don’t have to be in too much of a hurry to get married and have children.’
‘Aah, he’s just dreading the day when the apple of his eye will prefer another man to him. Like any father would.’
‘And how about you, Ma? Don’t you want me to go and study after school?’
The question remains unanswered, because right at that moment they hear Ouboet barge in through the front door, call to them excitedly from the hall, then run up the stairs to the top floor. ‘Ma? Colette? Is anybody home?’ Then he looms in the doorway of the bedroom, smiling all over his face. ‘Good afternoon, Ma! Good afternoon, Letty!’
‘Afternoon, Kleinbaas,’ Sina says and quickly makes herself scarce, shuffling down the stairs towards the kitchen. She calls Colette and Kleinboet by their names, jokes with them or tells them off for being messy, but Ouboet has always been Kleinbaas. For him she reserves an exaggerated show of respect, perhaps even something like fear. When she first came from the farm she called Deddy baas and Mammie noi, but Mammie taught her to say Master and Madam instead. It sounds less crude, Mammie maintains. Deddy shakes his head, amused, and asks what makes an English Master less crude than an Afrikaans baas.
Ouboet grabs his mother around the waist, lifts her off her feet, and swings her around.
‘Stop it, Ouboet, don’t be silly, what is the matter with you?’ Mammie protests, laughing, her eyes screwed up from sheer pleasure. It is probably years since anyone picked her up.
‘What is the matter with me? It is the happiest week of my life, that’s what is the matter with me! The government has fallen, our people are in power, everything I ever wanted came true on Wednesday!’
‘Oh, you are still not over the election.’ Mammie is still smiling, but it is no longer such a joyful smile.
‘It isn’t something that you get over just like that. It is History, Ma! History with a capital letter! In Stellenbosch we’ve been celebrating non-stop for two days and two nights.’
He flings himself onto the double bed and grins at them, his hands folded behind his head. He hasn’t even noticed her New Look, Colette realises. He probably doesn’t even see her, lying there in his happy trance, almost as if he is drunk. When he called them from Stellenbosch on Wednesday night after the results for the last five electoral divisions had been announced, and the entire country realised with astonishment that Dr Malan’s Herenigde Nasionale Party and the Afrikaner Party had won the election, he sounded a bit drunk, presumably from joy rather than from liquor. She knew that her eldest brother wasn’t a drinker, but on such a Historical night she supposed anything was possible. ‘We are dancing in the streets of Stellenbosch!’ he had exclaimed on the phone, his voice hoarse from cheering. Colette had struggled to picture her clever and sober brother dancing in the street in his striped Matie blazer and neat tie. Even on a dance floor he didn’t really go for dancing. ‘Smuts defeated in his own constituency in Standerton! Isn’t it wonderful, Pa?’
‘Who would have thought it,’ Deddy had muttered.
‘I told you we were going to win, didn’t I, and you all thought I had lost my mind!’
Deddy’s joy was just as deep as Ouboet’s, but more discreet, quieter. Quite overcome with joy, that’s how her father had seemed to Colette that night. She had shared his joy, and the next day the excitement of many of her classmates was infectious, and she joined the celebration over the victory for ‘our people’. The Afrikaans nation would now have an Afrikaans government. Wasn’t it wonderful?
And yet she is constantly aware that something is impeding her happiness. Like when there is a splinter in your foot, an object that is so small it is almost invisible, but nevertheless prevents you from walking properly. Her splinter is the knowledge that not everyone in her family is equally happy about this Historical victory.
Mammie, she suspects, voted for General Smuts’s United Party. With no intention, of course, of ever admitting it to her husband. And Kleinboet declared loudly last weekend that only an idiot would vote for Dr Malan; we cannot push all the other population groups aside, it will cause a catastrophe. Which had led to him and Ouboet almost coming to blows. We must help our own people first, Ouboet had shouted angrily, before we can help others! Mammie had had to restore the peace, as usual.
‘Where is Kleinboet?’ Mammie asks, concerned. ‘Didn’t you both come on the same train?’
‘Who