One hot Sunday morning, with reluctance, hating to signify the end of my safari, I set out on the last leg of my trip. It was a day of blue sky and brisk winds. I bought a ticket on the train to Simonstown. Though I had varied my journey with chicken buses and cattle trucks and overcrowded minivans and matatus, it was possible to travel by rail between Simonstown and Nairobi. Cecil Rhodes’s plan had been to extend this line to Cairo. But he had always been something of a dreamer. Another Rhodes wish was for Great Britain to take back the United States, so that we would be ruled by the monarchy, the Union Jack flapping over Washington.
First Class and Third Class were clearly marked on the train, yet we all sat in First, in spite of our tickets, black, white and all the other racial variations that characterized Cape Town’s people. The conductor was nowhere in sight; no one punched our tickets. We sat, no one speaking, on this sunny morning.
We stopped at every station — Rosebank, Newlands, Kenilworth, Plumstead, Heathfield — but in spite of the pretty names some looked prosperous and some poor, with bungalows surrounded by shaven lawns, or squatters’ shacks blowing with plastic litter, graffiti everywhere. Some of these places were the addresses listed in the Adult Entertainment ads of that day’s Cape Times. I knew who lived here ‘Amy Kinky to the Extreme,’ and ‘Nikki and Candy for Your Threesome’ and ‘Abigail — On My Own’ and ‘Candice — Come Bend My Fender,’ and the anonymous but just as promising ‘Bored Sexy Housewife.’
Dead silence in the swaying train, people reading the papers, children kicking the seats, the great yawning torpor of a hot Sunday morning. We stopped in the glare of roofless platforms and then carried on. Soon we were at the shore, passing the wind-driven waves at False Bay and Muizenberg, a very stiff southeasterly with wicked chop driving the greasy lengths of black kelp, so thick you’d take it for a chopped up ship’s hawser. It was strewn in such profusion that it obstructed surfers from paddling out to the breaks.
Just after Fishhoek I saw a strange thing. Out the window about sixty feet from shore, sticking straight out of the sea was a great flapping whale’s tail. It was so near, a swimmer could easily have slapped it. The tail was upright and symmetrical, like a big black rubber thing swaying above the water.
A whale standing on its head? I looked around. The adults were dozing and the children seemed to take it as a normal occurrence, a whale’s headstand in shallow water, an enormous creature’s vertical tail glistening in the sunlight, and remaining upright for so long it was still there after the train passed.
‘They do that all the time,’ a man in the next car said, when I noticed that he had seen the whale, and I asked him about it. ‘That was a Southern Right Whale. It’s known as “sailing.” No one knows why they do it.’
At Simonstown, the end of the line, I walked out of the small white station into the high road. This could have been the high road of any English coastal town, with greengrocers and chemist shops and lime-washed bombproof-looking brick houses named ‘Belmont’ and ‘Belvedere’ and ‘The Pines.’ The arcades and shop terraces were dated 1901 and 1910, and even the coast itself looked English — Cornish to be exact, rocky and wind-flattened, as though Penzance might be just down the road.
The naval station was the reason for Simonstown’s existence, so it was not odd to find fish and chip shops, and pubs advertising ‘Traditional Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pud.’ Captain Cook and Charles Darwin and Scott of the Antarctic and Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain and many others who had rounded the Cape had stopped in this beautiful harbor. The funny old self-conscious timewarp, with cottages and villas and little chalets on the bluff above the road, even the bus shelters and the telephone kiosks, mimicked those in the blustery harbor villages of the kingdom by the sea.
I walked to Boulders Beach to see the colony of jackass penguins. Unperturbed by the nearness of bungalows and spectators, they were nesting on eggs, frolicking in the surf, and wobbling up the strand like perplexed nuns.
On the coast road at one of the Simonstown bus shelters I waited for a bus to Cape National Park. All the difficulty was behind me. I was just sitting on a bench, waiting to board a bus for the short ride to Cape Point, the end of my trip. A man sitting on a bench opposite was smoking a cigarette and reading a copy of that day’s Johannesburg Star. Some words caught my eye. Flagged on the front top of the paper was the teasingheadline, ‘PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER WINS NOBEL PRIZE.’
‘Looks like I’ve got the big one,’ I murmured, and leaned closer, to give this stranger some news that would amaze him.
But he hadn’t heard me speak, nor did he hear me sigh. The feeling came and went, like the overhead drone of one of those search and rescue planes that misses the castaway adrift in a rubber dinghy: just the briefest flutter of hope. But no one actually loses, because there is only one winner in the Swedish Lottery.
The man engrossed in the newspaper was fleeing his home in England, so he told me. I found it hard to concentrate after the vision I had just had. His name was Trevor. We sat together on the bus and he related his sad story. Trevor had been a crewman on a merchant vessel carrying ammo during the Falklands War. The ship had come under fire, days of shelling.
‘The net result was the skipper lost it — went round the bend — wouldn’t leave his cabin, had to be dragged on shore, was invalided out. But that wasn’t the worst, was it?’
‘What was the worst of it?’ Still I saw the words, PESSIMISTIC GLOBETROTTER, but I took pleasure in the way Trevor, concentrating on his story, dealt with his newspaper by folding it in quarters and tucking it under his bottom, the teasing headline pressed under one buttock.
‘Went ashore for the post, didn’t I? Was a “Dear John” letter, wasn’t it? And they thought I’d go mental like the skipper, so they discharged me before I could take a header off the ship. Called me wife, didn’t I? She says, “There’s nothing to discuss, Trevor” and “Why are you shouting?” And she bloody hangs up on me, doesn’t she? So I went home and we split up. It was horrible. Now her boyfriend goes around saying, “Trevor refuses to have a drink with me.” ’
Trevor’s story and the Star somewhat colored my view of the Cape Peninsula. We crossed a great empty herbaceous moorland of purply-blue fynbos, low bush shaking in the wind, as aromatic as the maquis in Corsica, miles of trembling herbs. Some wild things roamed here — eland and ostrich, children on school outings, baboons, tourists.
‘Tutta la famiglia!’ an Italian woman on the bus screeched, seeing some peevish baboons by the roadside baring their teeth at her.
When the bus stopped at this, the uttermost end of Africa, I got out. Trevor followed along. He lingered to buy a souvenir baseball cap lettered Cape Point on the crown. I kept walking, to the lookout, down to the sloping trail, to the narrow path in the bright afternoon, through the gusting wind. On my left, the cliff dropped away 200 feet to frothy ocean. I walked to Dias Point — Bartolomeo Dias was here in 1488 — and farther on, to Cape Point itself, jutting like the prow of a ship over the bright sea, until I reached the last of the warnings, No Access Beyond this Point, and Do Not Throw Stones, and End of Trail.