Green are the fields on the other side

On the grounds of Shannonberg High School lives the sixty year old caretaker Anna Greenfield. She is nearing retirement, and Aaron Levy’s marriage proposal came as a relief. There was never enough money to contribute to a pension fund or medical aid. Aaron is only a security guard, but he would be able to provide for her. They are getting married in two months time, and she will be moving to his house near the Railway Station. A humble house, but a house of their very own. His furniture is old and worn out, but they can use some of her stuff. Her kitchen table only needs a new coat of paint, and the half tin of blue paint in his garage would come in handy.

She has three children, all with varsity degrees and in successful careers. Three intelligent children who received bursaries in their matric years. Her daughter is a physiotherapist, her eldest son completed his doctorate in Psychology very recently and will be joining a friend in private practice as Life Strategist, and her baby boy of 27, her blue-eye, her heart’s delight, is conquering the world with a tenor voice that earned him a two-year contract at La Scala.

Gone are the days of fixing other people’s clothes till the early hours of the morning in the light of a sixty-watt bulb on the old Singer machine she took after grandma died. Albert Greenfield, her ex-husband, was a drunkard who physically and emotionally abused her and the children. For donkey’s years she believed that she loved him, will stand by him no matter what. But love has a bizarre way of dying a sudden death, and one sky-blue Monday morning she left him. With her three young children, all their possessions in a crummy old suitcase and a few Checkers bags she closed the chapter on the abusive life with Albert, and opened a new chapter of heartbreak on the streets of Johannesburg.

The children stayed alone and lonely at night when darkness fell over Johannesburg’s ominous streets. Night after night she stood at the same street corner that grew into her own clandestine sphere, her hush-hush back street office from where she signaled down luxurious cars. From there she built up her clientele, her regulars whom she had to please in many obscure and indecent ways in a small and smelly room somewhere in Hillbrow. Somewhere in Hillbrow with its heavy breathing and load groans from sweaty bodies. Hillbrow with the diamond eye that winks and the gold finger that summons. Hillbrow with the stench of heave from drug abused bellies…………

And the years walked on and refused to wait for her. The children grew up and time painted lines on her face. The children left and took her youth with them. Once again she had to leave and find another life, perhaps a more civilized, a more moral life than the one in Hillbrow…………. In a local newspaper she saw the ad for a caretaker at the Shannonberg High School and applied. She had to lie about her past to get the job. Life pushed her into living with lies and sleeping with her conscience.

Today she drives a 15-year old VW beetle, buys her clothes at the Community Stores and never has the time or the money to paint her nails. Her gray hair is lifeless and dull, but Sunlight soap keeps them clean. She is anxious for the extra security that married life would offer.

And the roses near the Railway Station, is just as pink as the roses in dr. Wright’s rose-garden………, and the morning dew twinkles with the same sparkle on the other side of the station.




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