Parkhurst to Rosebank, a memory map

In the years when I first left Joburg, I’d go back at least once a year, and on almost every road, street corner memories would rise. They were a palimpsest over my remembered map.

When we first got to Joburg in 1975, we stayed with the Donoghues, Vanda and Paddy, and their children. I think their house was on the corner of Third Avenue and Fifth Avenue in Parktown North. A big old double-story house with a dusty garden. Most of the house was uncarpeted, just the wooden floors. I remember Vanda being careful with food, not wasting the outside onion layer, just under the peel, and there was talk about not using too much toilet paper. After staying there for a while, weeks, days, months? I don’t remember, we moved to a flat in Yeoville at the top of the hill, near the water tower, on the corner of Cavendish and Minors. It had three bedrooms, Gerry and I shared a room, and Mike and Sean shared. My bedroom looked out onto the fire escape and the innards of the building. From the lounge balcony, you could see across to Hillbrow if you leaned forward and craned to your left.

This street over here, Tyrwhitt Avenue, used to have a movie house, the Constantia I think, for arty movies and I remember once seeing Rian Malan there queuing with two older black people to see The Favor, the Watch, and the very big Fish. The two people were dressed formally as though for church. He was a bit scruffy, hair unbrushed, unshaven, creased jeans. I wondered what his relationship with them was. Many years (decades) later at the Franschhoek Literary Festival Rian Malan sat next to me one night at a big table with other writers at Col’Cacchios. He was funny and argumentative. I didn’t mention seeing him at the movie.

Also on Tyrwhitt Avenue was the Rosebank Hotel where a school I taught at had their matric dance. And later when it was renovated into a much posher and trendier version of itself, my friend Rory and I drank cocktails there one afternoon in a lounge with plush couches and designer light fittings, in lime green and neon yellow. We had to leave the car and Uber home after all those cocktails.

On the corner of Tyrwhitt and Cradock Avenue was the United Building Society building where I had my first job at eighteen before I went to the States on AFS. We wore brown or caramel-beige nylon uniforms. And because I wasn’t facing the public, I could wear my clogs, a Norwegian brand. My desk was upstairs in the Accounts department. Sometimes I would walk through the mall to Swiss Miss at lunchtime and buy coconut clusters covered in Swiss chocolate. I saved up to buy a suitcase and a camera, a Pentax K1000, to take on the trip. My father was cross with me for spending so much on a camera. I think it cost me R600, which was two months’ wages. I remember withdrawing money from my account, I had an orange book. And then I walked to the camera shop with all that money in my wallet. I felt both rich and expansive and vulnerable, as though the crisp notes were visible through my bag and wallet, shimmering and vibrating.

Another time my brother, Sean and I hitchhiked from Parkhurst to Rosebank. We lived in Eighth Street, Parkhurst then. You could walk or catch the bus, even now I often dream about walking in Joburg or catching buses, the 79 to Parkhurst, the bus to Craighall Park. Sean was an experienced hitcher, even though he was two years younger than me, I a novice.

Our doctor, Dr. Agranat, had his practice on Seventh Avenue, Parktown North. And his house was around the corner on Jan Smuts Avenue. There was a time when I saw him often as he was treating a painful skin condition on my scalp. I heard years later that he had been murdered in his home.

On Third Avenue, there was a small shopping area, with restaurants and a laundromat. It was a few blocks up from where the Donoghues lived. Now the restaurants there are fancier and more stylish. Once Ewan and I had lunch at the Italian restaurant there with Philip. We weren’t together anymore; it was in the early ’90s. Later Philip told me that Ewan had obviously been unfaithful to me. He didn’t know that, but he would have been in the same circumstances. He was unfaithful to my mother and to his second wife, with whom he had four more children.

On Oxford Road, just before Rosebank, there is the white mansion where a girl from school lived, she once invited me to her birthday party. One day at break, she showed us a photo romance comic, See or maybe Louise, her house was featured as the setting, high wall and bougainvillea as abundantly lush as I remembered.

I left Joburg in December 1995, when I go back now, thirty years after I moved away, there is still familiarity, but not like in the past, and there is so much development there now, that if you don’t visit for a couple of years, parts of it can seem quite unfamiliar. But somewhere layered into that wall, that much taller tree, that little park are memories of people and days, life as I knew it at the time.