The Backpackers Where Every Sheet Had a Story Written on It in Biro

Twenty Years of Galleys

For twenty years I cooked on cargo ships. Bulk carriers mostly, out of Durban and Richards Bay, sometimes a container ship to Singapore and back. I have made breakfast for twenty-two men in a swell that threw the frying pan off the stove, and I have baked bread on Christmas Day in the middle of the Indian Ocean with nobody to eat it but the second engineer and a stowaway cat.

When I came ashore for good at fifty, my back gave out before my love of the sea did. I had some savings and a stubborn idea, and that idea was a small backpackers on the Wild Coast, near Coffee Bay, where I had spent one week as a young man and never stopped thinking about.

I found a place for sale up the hill above the beach. Twelve beds, a kitchen, a stoep with a view of the cliffs that made me sit down on the step when I first saw it. The previous owner was a woman from Germany who had run it for sixteen years and was going home to look after her mother. She sold me everything as it stood, including, as she put it, "all the linen, which has a lot of history."

The Cupboard of History

She was not exaggerating.

There was one big wooden cupboard in the passage, and when I opened it, I found sixteen years of sheets. Every colour. Every size. Every thread count from cardboard to silk. Some had cartoon characters on them. One set was purple with gold stars. Many of them, I discovered, had names written on the hems in blue biro, because over the years the German lady had a habit of asking guests to sign the sheets they had slept in, as a kind of guestbook.

So there were sheets that said "Mikkel, Denmark, 2011, best waves of my life." And "Thandi and Sipho, honeymoon, never leaving." And one, in very small handwriting, "Sorry about the wine."

I loved it. I stood in that passage reading hems for an hour like they were letters.

The Problem With Love

The trouble with sixteen years of history is that most of it is very thin.

In my first season, I discovered exactly how thin. Sheets tore when I pulled them off the beds. Pillowcases had gone grey in a way no amount of soaking would fix. The towels were so threadbare that guests used two at a time and then the washing doubled. In a place where the water comes from a tank and the electricity is not always on when you need it, doubled washing is no joke.

And then there was the matching problem. A ship's galley is all about order. Everything has its place because when the ship rolls, anything without a place ends up on the floor. I was trying to make up twelve beds every changeover day with sheets that did not match, did not fit, and were all slightly different sizes. A double fitted sheet that had shrunk. A flat sheet that was actually a curtain. I would stand in the passage at seven in the morning, digging through the cupboard like a man looking for one particular sock.

The Review

I am not a man who reads reviews. But in my second year, a young woman I had liked very much, a teacher from Bloemfontein who had stayed three nights and helped me fix the gate, left a review online. It was almost entirely kind. She loved the view, the bread, the dogs. And then one sentence near the end: "Bedding was a bit tired, and my sheet had someone else's name on it."

I read that sentence many times. She was not being cruel. She was being honest. And I realised that the thing I had found charming, standing alone in that passage reading hems, was not the same thing a guest felt at eleven at night when they pulled back the covers after a long drive on a bad road.

Asking the Wrong People, Then the Right Ones

I did not know how to fix it. On the ships, linen came in a big bale from the shore and nobody on board ever thought about where it came from. I asked around in Mthatha, at the shops, and got bedding meant for a family home, which would have been fine for a year and then gone the same way as the German lady's sheets.

A man who manages a bigger lodge further along the coast, who comes to me for bread on Fridays, laughed when I told him. He said I was making the same mistake he made his first year, buying for a home when I was running a business. He explained that there is a whole world of hospitality linen, made to be washed hundreds of times in hot water and dried in the sun and still come out the other side looking like a sheet. He said it as if it was obvious. To him, it was. To an old ship's cook, it was news.

The Arithmetic of Sheets

I sat down at the kitchen table one evening with a pencil and did my sums the way I used to do stores for a voyage.

Twelve beds. Three sets per bed, one on the bed, one in the wash, one in the cupboard. Towels the same. Pillowcases more, because pillows here get sandy and wet. Then I added a few extra for the months when the rain comes for a week and nothing dries.

The number frightened me. I had to save up for it over the winter season, when the place was mostly empty except for surfers who do not care what they sleep on. I read about different Linen Suppliers on my phone at night, standing on the one corner of the stoep where the signal reaches, trying to understand words like percale and GSM that meant nothing to me. On the ships, the only linen term I knew was "dirty."

Changeover Day, Now

The new linen arrived in spring, in big plastic-wrapped bales, and I stood in the passage with a knife opening them like it was Christmas on a ship.

Everything is white now. Every sheet fits every bed it is meant for. The towels are thick enough that guests use one. On changeover days I can strip and remake all twelve beds before ten, and the cupboard looks like a galley store, everything in rows, everything labelled on the shelf edge in my handwriting.

I thought I would miss the colour. I did not. There is something about a white sheet pulled tight on a bed in a room full of sea light that makes people say "oh" when they walk in. I have watched guests do it. They put down their bags and say "oh," and then they look out of the window.

Last month a couple who run a small guesthouse in Port St Johns stopped for lunch and asked me where I had found my bedding. I told them honestly that I had learned about hotel linen suppliers from a man who buys my bread, and that it had taken me two years to stop being sentimental about it.

What I Did With the Old Sheets

I could not throw them away. Not the ones with names on.

I spent a rainy week last winter going through the old cupboard one sheet at a time. Anything plain and torn went to the woman down the road who uses rags for her pottery. Anything with a name on the hem, I cut out the piece with the writing. I ended up with nearly two hundred little strips of cotton with names and dates and countries and jokes in faded blue biro.

My neighbour's daughter, who sews, helped me stitch them together into a long patchwork banner, and it now hangs along the wall of the dining room, above the long table where everyone eats supper. "Mikkel, Denmark, 2011." "Thandi and Sipho, never leaving." "Sorry about the wine."

A New Tradition

Guests read it every night. They stand with their plates and walk along the wall, reading the names, laughing at some, going quiet at others. Two years ago a man found his own name on it, from a trip he took in 2013 when he was twenty, before he had children. He brought those children with him this time. He stood there with his finger on his own handwriting for a long while.

I do not ask people to sign the sheets any more. They are too good for that, and I am too much of a ship's cook to let anyone write on my stores. Instead, there is an exercise book on the dining room table and a blue biro on a string.

The teacher from Bloemfontein came back last summer. She did not say anything about the bedding. She wrote in the book: "Sheets are much better. Gate still sticks."

She was right about the gate.