Route 62 begins near Montague two hours from Cape Town, and runs through breath-taking, steep sided gorges and wide mountain valleys. Like any great highway out of the busy city into the big open spaces, it quickly numbs and calms the fretful soul. A beguiling amnesia is carried by the wind and the short season of forgetting begins. We caught a final image of Table Mountain in the misty distance from the hills beyond Paarl before the exertions of Cape Town seemed to fade finally. Just beyond Robertson, a family of baboons on the roadside signalled our passing into another world.
Montague is a sleepy town with charming architecture from an age long gone. People say not much goes on here. But wait. It has a very excellent restaurant. Just don’t tell Sally Weatherall it may beat Suzi’s in Paternoster. Mimosa Lodge is just off the main street, overlooked by the high spire of the imposing Afrikaans church building around the corner. The garden room we have taken for the night is, as Karen says, “to die for”. After two bottles of Windhoek beer and a Karoo lamb curried stew, Montague starts to get even sleepier as I write under a bamboo shade in the garden.
To my left in this small rectangular offshoot of a very large garden, is a line of banana trees under planted with nasturtiums. At the end is a sweep of bamboos next to a cluster of tall fennel. In the corner lemon verbena lops over onto the grass. On the right is a long hedge of jasmine. In the middle, next to where Karen is reading, there stands a thick lime tree. As it is now late in the afternoon, a gentle breeze is generating a symphony of aromas and the bitey ones have come out for their food. I was thinking of how much Margaret, now awaiting take-off at Cape Town International, might have used this peaceful time to reflect on her amazing trip. I was also thinking of the three men adjacent to our lunch table who exuded such menace and made me want to leave, and the charming, elegant old woman called Anna who asked to sit with us and gave her life story, and the book I just picked up from a second hand shop, “Bury Me In My Boots” by Sally Trench, which I first read in 1973 at a counselling centre for the homeless in the crypt St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Contemplating this beautiful and quickly fading afternoon and looking to the feast ahead, I cannot really suppress the memories of my time last night with a small gathering of St. Kizito volunteers in a humble and welcoming home in the middle of a poorly lit township. As I move between these worlds, I am learning what it is like to hold them together. The beauty of the garden and the beauty of the small gathering appear to me as a miracle.
The same miracle.
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