Where we live
- Details
- Written July 2020
Some of my earliest memories are of a small, Cape Town semidetached, now gentrified. That’s where I would play with my Dinky cars, making roads in the sand. My parents told me that I would cry when away from ‘my lane’ for too long.
Fifteen growing up years were spent in the Eastern Cape, Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown, some of them in a sometimes overcrowded but happy home where our family of four welcomed other relatives and ‘lodgers’ who needed a place. Eventually an extension gave me my own room. Many of my university years were in a balcony converted into a comfortable room. Then there was our first home as a married couple in the doctors’ residence where, in the days before bleeps, I had to listen as the telephone operators called out in the corridor loudspeakers. ‘Dr du Plessis, Dr du Plessis.’ Was I needed somewhere? As a student I had been assigned a family to monitor the progress of one of the children, discharged home after recovery from kwashiorkor/malnutrition. The family lived in a converted stable in a slum area. Margaret’s sociology and anthropology widened my appreciation for the importance of the environment of home to our health and well-being. And will I ever forget tripping over people sleeping on stairs in a grossly over-crowded house in Cape Town’s notorious District Six when called out for an obstetric house-call. The ‘overcrowding’ days of an earlier home and the single room of our early married years paled by comparison.
We arrived in England in 1967, and moved from a few months in a south London bedsit to a year in a room on a corridor in the Salvation Army training college. After that it was the twelve Zambian years in the house that became home for us at the mission. We resisted the expectation of others to move into the bigger house that went with the job when appointed chief medical officer. Was it that we disliked change or was I just doggedly digging my heels in?
Observing home life in rural Zambia gave wider insights as we sat drinking sweet beer with our hosts or stretching hands to a shared plate of maize meal and relish, all over conversation in my broken Tonga. Then there was sitting on the dung-smeared floor to help with delivery of a child born into a home with pole and mud walls and thatched with grass. A few years later that family would probably move on to virgin land and a fresh beginning.
And that’s what we did too, becoming suburban Londoners for another ten years, followed by Madras with its solidly built and very hot house that was almost a mansion, and then Johannesburg locked up behind high walls, iron gates and house alarms with security we’d never experienced before. Both appointments - India and South Africa exposed us to how ‘the other half’ lived - from crowded tenements to what might be described as absolutely palatial alongside densely packed pavement shelters.
Work has taken me into homes like the tatami-floored house of Tokyo where you remove your shoes on entry; to the isolated valleys of Papua New Guinea, their houses similar to those in a Zambian village; to the cracked homes of Mexico City many of its people housed in temporary accommodation following another earthquake - I’d shared similar tragedies in southern Italy years before. In both places The Salvation Army provided material and psycho-social support. I saw the same in Bangladesh with people trying to reclaim just a few square feet of land as the waters subsided after yet another cyclone-induced flood.
1999 brought us back to south London, our home in Bickley chosen by Margaret on a business visit to London. Her childhood dreams had included living in Cape Town’s salubrious suburb of Bishopscourt. ‘I can’t offer you anything like that,’ I told her when we’d had the privilege of visiting the house that the suburb takes its name from. We’d been invited to Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s retirement. But on Margaret’s 60th birthday I did name our London home Bishopscourt. Some thought that was cheating! It was the best I could do, I thought. To mark her 70th birthday ten years later the children asked me to write a poem: The Road to Bishopscourt. Margaret loved the home. I don’t think the name mattered. We stayed there until she needed full time care, and we found a nursing home for her (another place where people live). We chose what we hoped was the best.
Before The Salvation Army headquarters on Queen Victoria Street was rebuilt we would find people sleeping at the entrance porch. True to form they opened the underground garage for temporary accommodation. Sadly such provision had not been considered as a more permanent arrangement in the new building. After all the authorities wanted them off the streets and out of sight. Around that time I was asked to participate in a BBC World Service discussion on the topic of homelessness. With me, a Muslim and a council representative; ‘We’ve got to do something,’ I remember saying, as I recalled William Booth’s challenge to his son that led to the establishment of a range of hostels. They’re now a thing of the past. I also told them of a conversation with Mother Teresa when we’d met her ten years earlier. Speaking of our collaboration on the streets of Kolkata she remarked: ‘It’s something beautiful for God when we work together as we did.’
I’m reminded of an essay which Andre’s headmaster thought we should read not long after he’d gone to boarding school. Perhaps there was a little homesickness around. After describing some of his own journey from Zambia to England and then India, he asked himself where home was. ‘Home is where the heart is,’ was his conclusion. That suits me.
I’m not sure where I’ll end my days. There are daily reminders of the need to keep your distance. But there’s the natural desire to get together. We need another. When it comes to where, just about anywhere will suit me, but I suspect I’d be happy with somewhere with a quiet lane. A little soil where I could finger the sand would be an added bonus. I might not need to play with my Dinky toys, but pulling up a weed or two or deadheading the roses will suffice. I’m happy doing that even now.
Click here if you’d like to see where the duPs have lived and visited over the years.
July 2020