Cape Town is South Africa’s oldest city, and one of the most socially stratified. So where you live is important – or perhaps not.
When my mother first moved to Cape Town, she set up residence in a granny flat on our property.
Said property is in a suburb called Plumstead, which covers a lot of ground: an area of 4.5km, if the census is to be believed.
It is bisected by a major suburban road, called (unimaginatively) Main Road, and a railway line. And this railway line is Very Important in Cape Town.
How to be rude
As my mother discovered back when she moved here, it’s a “thing” to understand where you live in relation to the line. She joined a study group at a local library and on her first meeting there was asked if she lived above or below the line. Having spent her life in Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and the UK, she had no idea what the question even meant.
When she asked me what the person had been talking about, I had to explain that in old-fashioned white Cape Town society, living above the line meant you were higher up the social ladder than people who lived below the line.
(And can we pause to admire the breathtaking rudeness of that woman in the library asking a complete stranger a question designed to establish where precisely she fitted on this imaginary social ladder?)
Where do we live?
Dear reader, I am sorry to report that we live below the line (yet another way to fail at being middle-class in Cape Town.)
I thought of this when reading a piece by one of my favourite writers, Rosie Spinks, reflecting on a book she is reading about an ageing millennial couple who live in Berlin. The novel, says Spinks, details their lives, which are aspirational, creative, curated – and dull. And quite a lot like the life Spinks herself lived in her twenties. In this kind of life, where you live is a kind of badge, a representation of who you are.
Spinks writes that she is now seeing an anxiety in the world, a wave of people trying to find their perfect place. “Finding a place that matches your priorities and preferences obviously does have some bearing on your quality of life,” she says. But then she writes:
I have… learned that as much as where you live, your relationship and attitude to it shapes your experience there. You have to really be there. The richness and meaning arises in part from choosing it at the expense of all other places you could be and things you could be doing. Accepting a place’s shortcomings, the things it lacks, and its imperfections is essential to appreciating everything it does have to offer.
When I first read this column, this paragraph leapt off the screen at me.
What does it mean to be here?
What, I wondered, are the shortcomings, lacks and imperfections of the slightly shabby below-the-line area we live in?
It’s true that it’s very different from our previous home. We moved here in 2005 from Cape Town’s city bowl, where we had lived in a townhouse with a tiny garden on the slopes of Table Mountain. We could see the full Africa face from our bedroom window. We had a range of cafes and pubs to visit (one of them within walking distance). In general, it felt at the centre of things, a place with edge and buzz and energy.
Plumstead is the exact opposite. It is flat, very flat and suburban, very suburban. Pubs full of trendy people are in short supply and buzz means the sound of someone mowing the pavement on a Sunday morning. The view from our bedroom window includes many tiled roofs, and the mountains in the distance.
I have to say that if I won the lottery I would consider moving back to the city bowl (property prices there are on a scale that the asking price of our three-bedroom Plumstead home would only buy us a small apartment).
But then I would think about what we do have here: a garden big enough to grow vegetables, a motley assortment of entertaining neighbours from a wide range of backgrounds, space for a dog and two cats. A view with wide expanses of sky. A 20-minute drive to a surfing and bodyboarding beach with warmer water than other places in Cape Town.
We’ve put down roots, I guess. Which is, I think, what Rosie Spinks is talking about: taking the time to know a place has its pleasures. And it truly doesn’t matter if those pleasures are above or below the line.
Main picture: A sunset view from our garden, in the Covid-19 lockdown, 15 April 2020.
Other things I have written
How to fail at being middle class – Being middle class is supposed to be a comfy, complacent sort of thing. But there are silent struggles everywhere you look.
How to (not) be a middle-class homesteader – Homesteading means living a self-sufficient lifestyle, with little help from others. Can you be a homesteader in a Cape Town suburb? Sort of…
Growing a jungle garden: Lessons from chaos – I live in a suburban house in Cape Town – and have small, inexpertly cultivated vegetable patches. How can this be jungle gardening?
What I have learned while wearing a wetsuit – You can never be too old or too unglamorous to have fun. And you can shed your dignity in favour of spending time with your child.
How can I help you make order from chaos?
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