33 1996: We return to Cape Town.
33 <> 1996: We return to Cape Town.
Five years had passed. We no longer had anything to keep us in Montagu so DorothyAnne and I thought it time to sell the cottage and return to Cape Town (but we may have had the fleeting notion to keep the cottage as a weekend retreat for ourselves). The artist’s house next door had been bought by two chaps who turned it into a guest house. When we put the cottage in the hands of an Agent, the first potential buyers she offered it to were the two next door! They wanted it as a place where they could escape from the guests in their B&B. The cottage was sold in a matter of days and we hastened to find a house in Cape Town, back here in the southern suburbs where we had always lived.
Once again we encountered one of those strange twists in providence — we set our hearts and minds on a single-storey, three bedroom cottage with an open-plan kitchen and a lockup garage but what we ended up with was a double-storey house with no open-plan kitchen and no lockup garage! The house was newly built in a row of five houses (two units still to be completed at the time) on what had been two tennis courts in tandem in a narrow lane. In many ways it proved to be very suitable for us, probably more suitable than one or two simplexes that we were shown. The stairs are a bit of a bother, and may be more so as we grow older, but after viewing many another house since then we have not found one that would please us more than this one. We named this, our 17th home together, “Figtree House” because of the large wild fig growing in the lane in front, but after a while, DorothyAnne removed the name-plate and replaced it with a bold “8″. Perhaps this was auspicious since another large fig tree growing in the neighbour’s property behind us had cracked our boundary wall and spread its roots under our sewerage pipe blocking it repeatedly. We eventually paid to have it cut down!
One of the two smaller bedrooms became DorothyAnne’s study/sewing/dressing room and the other became my study as a base of operations for Jessop’s Studio CC which Tim, Marcelle and I still kept going as an Internet webpage and hosting business with the domain name of www.activeweb.co.za hosted first by an ISP that soon sold out and we moved to Kingsley.co.za. Tim and Marcelle, stationed at De Hoop Nature Reserve recruited several B&B’s in the region and an hotel at Arniston but could not continue the work so easily when they transferred to Jonkershoek in Stellenbosch. When they left to work in England I continued the business alone, generally maintaining the existing clients and creating one or two web pages for clients, but I couldn’t generate enough revenue to make it pay so I terminated the business in 2001. I de-registered JESSOP’S STUDIO CC as at 28th February 2002.
Even after I closed the CC, I kept the domain name — www.activeweb.co.za — to continue publication of various writings on the theme of the Church, on politics, on economics, and short stories that I had started writing. I gave the domain up eventually when Timothy gave me space on his domain but after a while when Timothy moved his own activities to a new site. I gave up on the web and made use of the Internet via E-mail-based discussion lists.
Since our return to Cape Town from Montagu, DorothyAnne and I have had the good fortune to see some of the world, courtesy of our daughter Jenny and her husband Gordon. In these travels, we have visited everywhere that Jenny and Gordon have made their home — in Toronto, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Phuket, and we also visited England again to see Timothy and Marcelle in Reading.
But the next big events in our lives since we retired has been the arrival and presence of our first granddaughter, Zoë Alexandra Sutton. Suzanne brought Zoë into the world on the 23rd of February 1999, just after we had once more settled in Cape Town.
Then after a lapse of 11 years, our second granddaughter, Jasmine, came as a present to us by Marcelle and Timothy on the 21st of December, 2009.
Jasmine was born in Gauteng so we were not able to spend much time with her as a baby, but for the first two years of her life, Zoë spent the weekdays with us while Suzanne was at work. DorothyAnne fetched her in the City every morning and we both took her home again in the afternoon to meet Suzanne at the door when she arrived home from work. As doting grandparents we have watched her move from being a baby lying in her crib, to sitting up on the carpet, to crawling, to standing holding on to a chair or other support, to becoming a toddler taking little steps from support to support and then walking on her own — and onward to her school days. At time of writing Zoë is an eleven-year old schoolgirl. How time flies, and seems to g even faster as we grow older!
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Zoë In The Garden.
To capture for myself those memorable moments from Zoë’s first years, I penned these thoughts:
The garden is her granny’s, but I hope that Zoë will remember it as her own special place. It is a small garden, just wide enough for a car at the side of the house, and the same width along the back where the living-room opened onto it. A high concrete wall screens it from the neighbours on both sides and at the rear.
Zoë is older now as I write this, but my thoughts go back a few years to when she was only eleven or twelve months old, before she could talk, or walk by herself ……. .
In my mind’s eye, I see myself there with her again in the garden, watching her as she begins to take in some of the more tranquil and beautiful features of the large world of which she has become part – some of its sights, smells, textures and sounds; receiving impressions which will be somewhere in the background of her consciousness in later life. I hope that for Zoë the world will always seem to be good rather than bad, positive rather than negative, because of her bare feet touching cool, friendly soil there in the garden before she will have burnt her fingers in the fires of life.
On days when her grandmother, DorothyAnne, hung out the washing, I would take Zoë into the garden to watch the operation! Sitting with me on the bench placed in the corner from where we could see both sections of the garden, Zoë watched the action at the washing line with great interest, occasionally clapping her hands together and laughing as her Nana shook out a shirt before pegging it to the line. For some reason, this action struck her as extremely amusing; it was also funny to her when Nana bent down to lift an item from the basket and then straightened up again. Zoë’s laughter was infectious, and DorothyAnne and I would join in as she squealed with delight.
I would carry her round the garden, pointing out the features. “Tree”, I’d say as we stopped before the wild peach, and she would seem to be quietly thinking about it. “Petunia”; “Pansy”; “Pomegranate”. She listened, and sometimes responded with a hand lifted up, palm upwards, with two fingers outstretched and the two smaller ones slightly curled, in her own gesture which said everything from “Right, I have it!”, to “That’s a petunia?” or “Isn’t that just wonderful !”
One day she was sitting on the bench beside me, laughing as Nana pegged another item on the line. Then she made a move to get down and I lowered her gently until her bare feet stood on the cold paving slab. She stamped them for joy at this new sensation, then her one foot moved out to rest on the gravel between the slabs, and she shuffled it slowly, testing the massaging action of the stone chips. She then spotted an ant scurrying across the terra-cotta slab and disappearing in the gravel beyond, only to be followed by another and another …. until there was a moving chain of little brown creatures marking a track across the slab. She reached down to catch one, but it was too fast for her, so she left it and turned to pick up a piece of gravel instead. She peered at it in her hand for a while, and then dropped it to go for a wild fig that had fallen and dried out among the chips.
Just watching her experiencing things for a first time, and very obviously enjoying it all, took me right back to my own childhood. I watched her turning her face to let the cool wind blow on it when she felt the fresh breeze ruffling her hair, and I felt again the sheer pleasure I knew as a child running before the wind. She held the position for a while, and then the cu-coo-ing of a dove in the tree above her drew her attention and she looked up in time to see it scurry off to its mate cu-coo-ing from across the road. I felt myself moved again and again as I watched her watching a sun bird busily sipping nectar from hibiscus flowers, and bees fussing around the honey-suckle; as she wrinkled her nose when DorothyAnne crushed a sprig of lavender and let her smell it; as she reached out her hand to pluck a flower for herself.
Together Zoë and I watched a chameleon slowly stepping (as chameleons do) along a branch of the pomegranate tree, its colour changing to merge with the foliage; a dragonfly hovering a while before swiftly veering off; caterpillars munching away at leaves on the wild peach tree; a squirrel crossing along the top of the garden wall. I still see her watching intently as her Nana watered the flowers and Zoë, fascinated, held out her hand to let the water trickle over it, chirruping with delight and coming back for more. I see her one rainy day, as she gazed at the garden through the glass of the large sliding door, something of interest catching her eye and she lifting her hand in her unique ‘showing-pointing-explaining’ gesture, and saying a word which only she understood but which we could interpret to mean “Look at that! Isn’t that just too lovely.”
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That takes me full-circle back to where my story started in another garden, far away from here and many years ago. . . . . . . .
“There is a pond in that garden with ducks swimming in the water and one large one, a drake perhaps, standing at the edge. Katrina is sitting on the grass with her legs folded behind her to her right side and I am sitting on her lap. Katrina is my Zulu nursemaid. I get off of her lap and toddle toward the water and the large duck. The duck starts coming toward me and I run back to Katrina and sit once more on her lap. I think it is the Bird Sanctuary in Pietermaritzburg. I am a toddler, I imagine about two years old and that is the very earliest memory I have of my being. . . . . . . . . “
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