A Single Swallow Read Online Free PDF Page A

to the platform, found my compartment and made our farewells. We made each other laugh. The train was very long and there were so few travellers that we seemed to be alone. He stood on the platform; I squeezed my head through the window. It is a strange thing to look at your father and know you are both thinking I might not see you again and this is just the way it is, this Friday the 1st of February.
    â€˜Bye Dad.’
    â€˜Go well.’
    â€˜I will. You too.’
    We stared at each other for an instant, he gave me a nod and a look, turned, and walked away up the platform. Perhaps he could feel me watching his back: he went quietly, unhurriedly, and disappeared.
    Right! I thought, with a jumpy queer feeling, this is it – let’s have some fun! I opened and closed my notebook. Three pages were filled already, with Zeekoevlei. From now on I would write every day.
    The train began to roll. I rattled around inside the compartment, changed position, stood, sat, pulled out my notebook and a pen, laid them aside and stared out of the window. Other trains went by as Cape Town began to give way to the flats. Just over there were Khayelitsha and Mitchell’s Plain. At the edges of these suburbs the authorities have erected very high lamps, like prison lighting, and a row of tin toilets on waste ground, ready for more residents. People sat tiredly in the commuter trains which had doors missing; young men smoked and stared.
    â€˜High summer,’ Dad had said, and it was. Too early for swallows to leave, of course – except certain males, often young and perhaps skittish, who cannot wait to set out, who drive themselves across continents, turning the migration into a giant contest – part survival competition, and part race: the first home will have the pick of the best nest sites, and therefore the greatest chance of attracting the best mates.
    I watched South Africa all day. The train took a leisurely north-east curve out of Cape Town, following the route of the voortrekkers as they pushed north to escape the British. South Africa was first colonised by Bantu-speaking people from the Niger delta two and a half thousand years ago. They lived alongside native bushmen; Khoikhoi pastoralists and San hunter-gatherers. Portuguese sailors paused here on their way to the coast of Mozambique. In April 1652 a party from the Dutch East India company under the command of JanVan Riebeck founded a settlement where is now Cape Town, the purpose of which was to supply ships of the company on their runs to and from the spice islands of the East. Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians were joined by French Huguenots fleeing persecution in the France of Louis XIV.
    The colony began to import slaves from Madagascar and Indonesia. Under apartheid their descendants, mixed with the descendants of their European masters – and the rapidly displaced Khoi-San population – would be known as ‘Coloureds’.
    In 1795 the British took the Cape, rather than risk its falling to Napoleon’s France, briefly returned it to the Dutch in 1803, then took it over again in 1806. In 1820 five thousand British immigrants were shipped to the colony. The ruling White world of the Cape divided: the urban elite was now English-speaking, while the Dutch-speakers were largely farmers – ‘Boers’.
    The early nineteenth century saw the rise of the Zulu nation under Shaka, and increasing Boer dissatisfaction with British rule. In 1835 groups of Boers, accompanied by large numbers of servants, began to trek into the interior. These were the voortrekkers.
    The story of the two peoples, English and Dutch, is written in the names of the stations; Cape Town, Bellville, Wellington, Worcester, Matjiesfontein, which is pronounced Makkeesfontane, after a spring, presumably ‘discovered’ by Matjie.
    â€˜If you get hot,’ Dad had said, ‘think about doing it with a team of oxen, a wife and family and all your worldly