Episode 23: Time's Fool
My Life as an African: A BiograFictional Memoir
I don’t really need money when I’m seventeen — my parents support me with no problem — but I decide to take a summer job at the end of my first year at university.
Through the university employment office I find out about a summer job working at Jaggers, a wholesale department store in St George’s Street that sells to other businesses. I interview and accept it. Jaggers is famous among Jewish families: individuals get to shop wholesale there too if they can claim a link through some friends’ or family’s business. My mother has taken me there to buy things through our cousins’ Queens Hotel account. She bought me my first fountain pen there in Standard 5 when we were first allowed to abandon dipping pens and inkwells — it was a beautiful marbled blue Conway Stewart with a medium nib for £5.
At Jaggers when someone buys something on one of the five or six higher floors, one can’t walk away with it. Instead, after you select, they charge the item to the wholesale account you are using and then send it down a spiral chute to the basement where it is stored in bins labelled alphabetically by customer name. My job will be to collect items that come down the chute and put them in the correct bin. Then, when the customer comes to pick it up, I will retrieve it and wrap it in brown paper.
I earn £8 a week. Working at Jaggers is a bit of a pose for me. I have taken the job more because that’s what self-respect and respect from other students at varsity requires. It’s a real job, if only for six weeks until Xmas. I work from 8:30 until 5:00 on weekdays and then 8:30 to 1:00 pm on Saturdays.
I don’t mix with many people. There is another boy I know from our time in high school, a couple of years older than me, who works there too, There is a Sephardic woman of about 35 or a bit more in charge of the customer receipts. She is a recent arrival fleeing the upheavals in the Belgian Congo. My colleague in manning the chute and the bins is Tokkie, a Coloured boy about my age, but already able to fend for himself. Tokkie is experienced, proves to be a source of condoms for the White boys — he isn’t afraid to ask for them at the chemist, and he resells them at a small profit to his clientele.
Tokkie is a much better parcel wrapper than I am, and tries to teach me. You don’t use Scotch tape. You have to fold brown paper around the item, hold the pointed folded edges in position and get a length of string from the roll to lie over it longitudinally, then make the two ends meet and cross and turn at right angles so they can go around the parcel latitudinally, and finally when you get back to the starting point, tie a firm knot. Tokkie can manage all this with his hands and chin and teeth and produce perfect rectangular parcels. I can’t. They always come out crooked and unrespectable.
Our day is broken by interludes. A mid-morning tea break. Sometimes I chat for five minutes with the Sephardic woman, Mrs Azoulay, whose family turns out to have come to the Congo years before from Rhodos. She has a French accent. Then lunch, when I head out from St George’s Street into town. Sometimes I sit at the counter at the OK Bazaars’ Wimpy’s and buy a hamburger or hot dog and chips for one shilling and sixpence. Then I sit in the Gardens alone and smoke a cigarette. Later a mid-afternoon fifteen-minute tea break again.
At the Jaggers Xmas party at 4 pm one Friday we have music and refreshments. I dance occasionally with some of the Afrikaner girls working there. At some point I ask Mrs Azoulay for a dance, and she accepts. We dance very formally even though the music is mostly pop and rock and roll. We foxtrot to Frank Sinatra, her arm on my shoulder, mine on her back. She’s a lot shorter than me, curved in the way girls aren’t, has pretty even teeth. I notice her gums show just slightly when she smiles.
One day the next week I leave Jaggers at 5 pm and decide to walk home. I head up St George’s Street towards the Gardens and there in front of me is Mrs Azoulay heading in the same direction. We say hello and discover we are both going through the path in the Gardens that leads to the suburbs on the slopes of the mountain. She tells me about Rhodos and I tell her about university. It’s a very very hot December day.
Walking uphill, in about 15 minutes she says that this is the road where she lives.
“It’s very warm,” she says. “We walked a long way. Would you perhaps like to have a quick cool drink before you continue?” She smiles in what seems to me a girlish way.
We go in to the upper part of the house where she apparently lives alone. I sit down and she brings me a cool drink and then some sliced fruit. She tells me a bit more about her family’s link to Rhodos. She excuses herself and says she has to change, and returns in a different dress and says it’s new and turns to show it to me and asks if I like it. She says she will help herself to a bit of cognac and offers me a small glass too. She wipes her brow. She apologizes for feeling a bit dizzy, says maybe it’s the heat. I help her sit down on the couch where she leans back and looks up and sips her brandy. Her eyes seem to blur.
I say I have to be home for dinner soon.
The next morning at tea-time I ask her if she’s feeling better. She assures me that she’s fine now, it was the heat.
I have one week more at work. We don’t walk home together again and she doesn’t invite me in again.