THE lease on our communal house was coming up for renewal, three of our seven members were planning on leaving the Johannesburg area and we had a waiting list of would-be commune-ists – people who would be only too happy to share our lifestyle – if only we had a swimming pool.
So the house hunt started, with Linda, Geoff, Carl and myself scouring the papers for something suitable. It wasn’t that there was a shortage of houses to rent, but they had all been designed for families, with an enormous main bedroom, complete with sumptuous bathroom and a number of smaller rooms, sharing an inadequate second bathroom.
Not very conducive to commune-ism!
We did find one older house, with seven bedrooms and two separate bathrooms, a marble staircase, a billiard room and a tennis court. The rent was astronomical of course (twice my monthly salary before tax) but one of the biggest attractions of communal living is that rent, divided by six or seven, ceases to be a problem.
We were interviewed three times by the owners, but still failed to convince them that a group of up-and-coming young executives would take better care of their property than would a family with a hoard of up-and-coming wax crayon Picassos. They didn’t consider us quite respectable.
With the swinging sixties only just over, it was difficult to convince conservative homeowners that people who shared a house were not necessarily communists, hippies, perverts, prostitutes, pimps or pill-pushers.
It seemed as if we were going to have as much problem with people as with property.
Then Mike and Maggie came on the scene. Mike and Maggie were respectable. Mike and Maggie were married (to each other, believe it or not) and Mike and Maggie became our passe-partout to social acceptability with prospective landlords. They also required a large bedroom with a private bathroom, which enabled our strange ménage to fit into an architect’s preconceived idea of modern living for all.
Just one look at the house in Bryanston and we all fell in love with it.
Geoff saw himself presiding over the bar during darts matches against other communes; Linda imagined soaking in the over-sized tub in the second bathroom, undisturbed because there was a third; Maggie started working out where, in the two acres, she was going to establish her vegetable patch and compost heap; and I – well, I just visualised armies of freshly-baked cakes and pies, roast sirloins, cheese souffles and chicken casseroles marching out of that magnificent computerised oven!
And luck was on our side. Quick to recognise that six were less likely to be stuck for the rent money than one, the landlady opted not to worry about what the neighbours thought of having a commune next door.
The other communes – there were over a hundred in the recognised Johannesburg circuit at the time – promptly dubbed us as either ‘unutterable snobs’ or ‘jammy bastards’, depending on how they felt about living on millionaires’ row in Johannesburg’s most expensive suburb. The neighbours bided their time before passing judgement.
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