Why crowds are not for me, but clouds are.

 Tim and Nick drove to Lisbon over the weekend to see Jacob Collier in concert at the Meo Arena.  He is the latest musical genius, plays all the instruments, including the audience, whom he converts into a giant choir.  

He is a phenomenon, and people are amazing by his "playing" the instrument that is the audience, 

The beauteous Cape Town City Hall

I was about 12 or 13 (more than fifty years ago) my dad and I went to a Symphony concert in Cape Town where they gave everyone at the door something to play a beat with, a wooden spatula, clappers, a paper cup to use as a drum, for example.  At a certain time of crescendo the members of the audience had to participate by tapping their little "instrument", which was so exhilarating!  Then the audience was divided into three and we were all taught a simple series of notes, and then suddenly we were all singing this beautiful harmony, the amazing sound rising to the magnificent high roof beams of the Cape Town City Hall!  My dad and I spoke about it years later, this astonishment of being a part of such a grand melody.  

The phenomenal Bobby McFerrin

McFerrin demonstrates this common human ability beautifully in a talk he gave at A World Science Festival event.  He gives an audience four notes of the pentatonic scale and everyone is intuitively able to grasp how it works On top of that, the audience just naturally knows how the scale continues, above and below the range he gives them. Bobby McFerrin says that this works with audiences anywhere in the world! Which surely speaks to a profound collective unconscious that all of us share.

If only crowds always worked in harmony to do good.

Nombulelo students at the school
where I taught.

When we had the twin babies in 1992, I had been teaching at a black school in Grahamstown for ten years, where I was a head of department. After my maternity leave my headmistress kindly arranged my timetable so that I had time to go home mid-morning to breastfeed the babies. I was happily driving our old VW bus down the hill towards the town, anticipating seeing and feeding my beloved little ones, when I saw a boy dressed in school uniform in the road, shouting and looking distressed. I slowed down, thinking something was wrong with him, only suddenly horrified to see him take careful aim and throw a massive rock straight at my car, and the look on his face was actually one of enraged hatred!

A VW bus like ours

With this terrifying realization, I drove on, but as I came around the corner, there were hundreds of school students streaming towards me, all armed with rocks, pelting me, mass manic hysteria! As rocks bombarded the car and broken glass showered over me, my mind went into self-protection mode, and I remember actually voicing to myself, in some little calm part of my head while everything went mad around me, "I have four children, I want to live! I have four children, I HAVE to live!" And so I put my foot down on that accelerator, scrunched down in my seat, ducking the missiles of rocks and glass, and drove through the crowd as fast as I could!

I just carried on driving, once I was through the mob, blood pouring from my face and hands, past the police station, not a thought to stop there! I just needed to get to Tim's office, where I half-fell out of the car, made my shocked way up the stairs, only to find he wasn't there! I sort of slid down the wall in one of those movie moments, and wailed. A very surprised man came out of the office next door, took one look at me and ran for Tim, who went into dealing with a crisis mode, put me back in the beaten-up car and took me to the doctor, where a nurse gently vacuumed glass shards from my hair and carefully extracted them from my hands. The doctor examined the iris of my left eye which had been scratched by a passing shard but would recover.

When Tim examined the car he found that the babys' car seats both held rocks, and every window in our family's sunshine yellow bus was smashed except for one tiny triangular side one. There were more than 20 rocks scattered all over inside the car, and it frankly looked as though a bomb had hit it. Amazingly I had survived!

The students who had stoned several cars, of which mine was the first, were from another school than the one I taught at. They had just attended a hearing in the town for one of their comrades and it had not gone well, so they took it out on the white people in their cars coming down the hill.

So this is why I couldn't go to the concert. I really am uncomfortable in crowds. Also some other experiences have reinforced my deep aversion. Like that mass hysteria in America which has just changed the future of the world forever.

My mother.

And so now I prefer clouds. I will concentrate on the beauty, Truth and Beauty, as Keats reminds us. I think of my mother when I gaze at beautiful clouds.

When I was 8 my mother took me to England for several months while she and my dad sorted out the future of their relationship. My brother went to boarding school and my sister was 21 and a nurse already, with her own little flat. It was such a strange time. I both flourished and declined. School was easy, everyone loved the little girl with the funny accent, and I won all the swimming races in the unevenly heated public pools, I had a little garden of my own, and there was the magical hypnotism of television, sometimes. (South Africa only got television when I had already left school, it was banned by the oppressive Nationalist Apartheid Regime.)

Me and my siblings last year in England.

But I longed for my dad, crying myself to sleep some nights, and I wanted my siblings, and my best friend Trish, and all the familiarity of home. After we had been in England about six months my dad gave my brother one of the newfangled AKAI tape recorders for his birthday. They were enormous things, with huge reels like film reels.

My brother immediately set about making a tape for us, so we would hear his voice and my sister's and my dad's. When we received it in the mail, we had to go to a store which sold tape recorders in order to listen to it. I remember my mum and I standing next to a demo tape recorder, in front of everyone, although we were oblivious to them, listening to the sweet voices of our beloveds. I remember being surprised to find our cheeks wet with tears.

Me and my dad.

The thing about England was that almost every day, it rained. While my little garden grew well with all that water, I really missed being outside constantly in my own country. I remember asking my mother, when I was absolutely frustrated with the weather, "Is the sky EVER blue here, like it is in South Africa? Just blue wide sky as far as the eye can see?"

Clouds with trees.

So she told me that we would go for a walk, and we went along a path and up a hill where there was a view, and we looked at the sky. The big wide sky, with scudding clouds. There were little blue bits, but mostly clouds. She told me to maybe think that clouds make a sky quite interesting, especially if you know what kind of clouds they are. And then proceeded to teach me the names of all the different clouds, which I still look at every day and name to myself.

Seascape with clouds

Homes and their people

Home. 

A bedroom on our travels.

 I am so lucky in that I have always had one.  (Well, there was a period of 18 months when we didn't have one at all, but still we always knew we could find shelter in many different places, so yes, still fortunate.  It amazes me how many people, besides your own family, will just take you in with open arms!)

My very young mum and dad, long
before I arrived.

My very old mum and dad, when they came to 
visit us in Boston, a few years before they died.

I also had really loving parents until I was 50 (my mum died) and 52 (my dad died).  More blessings.

Home for me is synonymous with family.  It takes up an important place in your mind when you are away from it, because it is your nest, your constant.  It has your own people, your own colours, your own bed, your own bathroom.  It is where you think and make and eat and talk and grow children.  A home keeps you warm and safe in the midst of thunder and lightning. 

When people travel they usually leave home to go somewhere else for a while.  Usually quite a short while, and then they return home again, glad to be back.  But when we traveled for nearly one and a half years we had sold our house and only had our suitcases and backpacks.  And after about a month we both really longed for home, a place which was no longer there.  

All the items I deemed necessary for our long long voyage.

We were going to travel for two years to find a new forever-home, but we realised that we needed one sooner than that, and, after searching quite a lot, we finally found one here in the warm Algarve, in Portugal, which reminds us very much of South Africa.  

This is my dream for our garden.  The house is
perfect right now but the garden is a large project.

Now I have a home again I barely want to leave it.  My face is full of smiles every time I enter the gate, walk up to the house, and come through the front door to all our colours, our beloved books and paintings, our place.

My first home was 10 Forest Drive, Pinelands.  Pinelands was created based on a "garden city" design, with five or six houses all backing on to a kind of spare plot that remained empty.  Our "field" was a wide meadow, to my small child's perception, with grass and wild flowers and tall tall pines.  We didn't have a fence so it seemed like a continuation of our garden.  I knew it so well, as only children can know a place, the shadows and sunshine, the trees' ancient presences, their bark, the caterpillars, and all the small creatures who lived there. 

My parents had been suddenly shocked by my mum's pregnancy with me, as she was quite old for those times to have a baby, (34, imagine!) and they had thought their family complete, a gorgeous girl and a beautiful boy.   So when they discovered another baby was about to join them, they knew they would never all fit in the little house they were in and decided to make a brave leap to a larger grander house with four bedrooms, which they moved into just before I was born.  My mum and dad lived there until I was 34, so they (and I as a child) had the same home telephone number until they died in their retirement home, having kept that number, which I phoned every Sunday after I moved out, until their deaths.    

10 Forest Drive from an applique wall hanging I 
made for my parents' 55th anniversary.

10 Forest Drive had a thatched roof and those strange faux-Tudor leaded-paned windows.  There were enormous prolific fruit trees, fig and guava, lemon, loquat, and mulberry (the bane of my mother's life as the starlings loved to eat the mulberries and then defecate purple inky stains on to her lovely white clean sheets hanging on the washing line drying in the sunshine!). My dad always had a little vegetable garden too, and we proudly ate his produce of mainly beans and potatoes.  There was a tall Silver-Oak, which was my friend, and I learned to climb this tree and sit reading or drawing for hours, high up.  I have always loved to be high up when something is not going so well, maybe I was once a bird.  

I went back about 20 years after I had left home and my parents no longer lived there, and the people who lived there kindly showed me around "their" house.  What had been a home with enormous rooms and space and light now seemed much smaller and more crowded.  And there was a house in our field!  And high walls with locked gates everywhere, which had been fences or nothing.  So no more dappled meadow.

My Lemon Tree painting in Casa Aveleira.

My Lemon Tree painting in 
90 Southern Ave.

When people move into a house or an apartment we move in all our "stuff", we put up pictures, our books line the bookshelves, our comfy sofas slot into their places, our beds are under the window so that the light plays on the wall as we wake to the dawn.  We make it ours.  But I always wonder who was there before me, because you hardly ever know, everything with the sale or rental of the property is done by intermediaries.  But does the home miss its people, is it happy to have new ones laughing, weeping, having sex, arguing, creating, washing, cleaning, eating?

Our apartment in Mexico City.

Moving around so much during our travels,  I always tried to make the impersonal apartments home-like, with one of my colourful sarongs as a cover at the end of the uncomfortable bed or sofa, or a little prism my granddaughter had given me, hanging up at each new window.  

We make maps in our heads, all through our lives.  I can walk through all the houses I have lived in, know what is under the desk in the ironing room where my brother used to do his homework, know the specific light reflected off our garden into the window of the kitchen in 16 Cross Street.   We have maps of all our towns, all the places we love, the rooms we stay in.  (Although the city maps may well become a lost knowledge to the new generations, the street maps indelibly etched in the brains of only earlier generations, because now there is GPS?)  

In Santerem, traveling.

You have so many maps in your head, and sometimes still you wake in the night and have no idea where you are.  You have to climb up with effort, from a very deep dark to know who you are, before you even have time to re-orient yourself, because you go on such faraway journeys in your dreams, don't you?  And gradually you find yourself, that Anne, the one who carries all her selves of 69 years in her head, in her heart.  And you are in your own bed, in your new country, where the sky is a dim line along the side of the darker window-blind, and the indistinct shapes of familiar furniture are all sleeping around you.  And your dear husband of 40 years is warmly and easily lining your body with his, his heavy arm softly across you.