Design: The backwater bag lady

Lucy scratches a living from weaving waste plastic into fabrics Bond Street would kill for.

My favourite possession right now is my furry plastic running- away bag, my Nineties version of the carpet bag. It is slightly bigger than a tabloid newspaper and is shaped like a big, flat purse with a long zip running across the top. The bag is just big enough to hold my pyjamas, my going out clothes, travelling toiletries and race gear, walking shoes and two paperback novels.

It was made in South Africa by an elderly lady called Lucy. She makes her bags out of used supermarket carrier bags which she cuts up into one- centimetre strips. Using the best coloured bags she can scavenge, she weaves the strips on to a backcloth of what is locally known as a "mielie sack" - a "mielie" being a corn cob. The sacks are made of that plastic hessian which, in Britain, is used to bag up builders' sand. Lucy first unpicks the sacks and then she launders them by hand.

The weaving technique is one which some readers will remember if they had war-time aunties who made those hooked, half-moon rugs for the hearth so that the home fires could be kept burning without too much overspill of coal dust on to the Axminster. The difference is that Lucy's patterns are very beautiful. They do not come in a kit from the homecraft section of a department store. She says she dreams each pattern after staring hard at the colours of her hoard of plastic, so each bag is unique. Her results are like Kandinski paintings or those brilliant patterns that visit the back of the eye if you stare at the sun on a bright day.

During the decades of apartheid, the South African government, having first used the Group Areas Act to expel large urban black populations from their homes in city centres, then turned its attention to those pockets of rural black communities which had been scratching a living from what the government had by then designated as "white" land. It heaved out these groups of defenceless people to remote hell-holes in no man's land where the life expectancy was such that the authorities often dug rows of graves before the people were resettled there. Barbed wire and open graves met the new inhabitants on arrival.

Lucy's community was one of these groups. Declared a "black spot" within a "white" area of the western Transvaal near the border with Botswana, they were despatched to a piece of land within the "homeland" of Bophutuswana; they and their meagre possessions thrown on to the backs of trucks. Nothing grew in this place except the occasional plastic bag, blown for miles on the wind, that clung to the barbs of the wire fencing. Supermarket plastic bags, with their vivid, acid colours, have become the 20th century's desert flowers.

Joe Lelyveld, in his wonderful book Move your Shadow, has written about how, incredibly, these already dirt-poor groups of discarded people managed, over time, to make their grisly contexts viable. Lucy herself began to make something beautiful out of the ugliness of the vision that had landed her there. A community self-help project had taught her how to weave flat mats from plastic waste and, by varying this basic flat-weave technique, she hit upon her own way of producing a thick nap and turning her cloth into strong, durable bags.

These days, one of Lucy's two sons helps her to sell her bags in Johannesburg by peddling them to the black commuters who wait in queues for the combie taxis that have replaced buses as the means of getting people into work. These are 12-seater vehicles, often in dubious condition, that habitually carry 20 passengers each. (A while back, they were known as "Zola Budds" on account of their dizzy speed.) Although her arthritis and her perfectionism mean that Lucy works slowly, she worries that not enough people will want to buy her bags.

I became aware of the bags through my children. My son Joseph, who had spent time in the Ecuadorean Andes had noted the creative skill and ingenuity of people who have almost nothing and he wanted to set up an exhibition of artefacts made of recycled materials at his art school in England. He enlisted the help of his older sister Anna, who works in epidemiology in Johannesburg. During the course of her research into lung disease among retired black mineworkers, she travels extensively through impoverished rural areas and, everywhere she went, she found beautiful things made out of old rubbish; papier mache bowls made by communities of HIV positive women, beaten tin picture frames and mobiles that look like Mexican silverwork, wire sculpture, bottle top jewellery decorated with tiny still life paintings - miniature rotundas painted within the scolloped frames of Fanta caps - bathmats made out of purple and gold sweet papers; school lunch boxes made from misprinted sheet metal; ornamental poppies made from old Coke tins and, best of all, Lucy's dazzling carpet bags.

When they met, Lucy fell eagerly upon a purple Liberty bag that Anna happened to be carrying. It was the classiest plastic bag she had ever seen. Anna handed it over and was promptly beseeched to bring all the coloured bags she could collect. Naturally, since Lucy's income is modest, she and those around her are very small shoppers. In consequence, it takes her a month to collect enough plastic bags to make one of her bags.

"I want you to collect plastic bags for her," Anna said to me. "Anything with a good colour."

This is the sort of project that my daughter knows I love. For one thing, I have always been a prodigious recycler. When I met my husband, 35 years ago, he commented that I had "learned the first lesson of guerilla warfare; namely how to live off the land", when he saw me cut up my Sixties PVC raincoat and make it into a shopping bag. And for another thing, I am an addict of junk shops, charity shops, skips and dumps. Lucy's plastic bag project has given me an excuse to indulge a long-cherished desire to pick through litter bins as well.

"You're becoming obsessed," a friend said to me, after I'd confessed my excitement about a branch of Waterstones opening near my house, to replace Dillons.

"Waterstones have maroon bags," I'd said to her. "And Dillons have navy bags. Well I can get enough navy bags from Blackwells." Now my gripe is that Waterstones have changed to black bags, when I can get plenty of black plastic from bin liners.

My other bookshop gripe is that WH Smith have replaced their lilac bags with green ones, when they must know that Marks and Spencer gives me plenty of nice green bags. I need lilac. Lilac, pink, red and orange are under- represented among plastic bags. For this reason both the National Theatre and my local shoe shop are my heroes. Each supplies its goods in bright red bags.

Now and again I have a windfall: a skip full of baby pink plastic peeled from a ton of breeze blocks; an extinct sports shop in Cornwall with a cardboard box full of unused burgundy bags placed at its door on dustbin day.

And Kate Jones, my editor at Hamish Hamilton, sent me a large Jiffy bag full of interesting bags collected on her trip to France - some of them smelling strongly of very un-English cheese. I have ordered her one of Lucy's bags as a reward and also because I want us to pretend that we are sisters.

Meanwhile, Lucy's community has applied for restitution of its land and is waiting to have its application processed.

Lucy's bags, as well as tin picture frames, wire sculptures, bottle- top baskets and Mandela fridge magnets (with alternative outfits and speech bubble) can be bought through Africycle, Amabibi Trading, PO Box 1934, Parklands 2121, South Africa (00 27 11 447 0867)

Barbara Trapido's latest novel is `The Travelling Hornplayer' published by Hamish Hamilton