Читать книгу Lansdowne dearest - Bronwyn Davids - Страница 8

IN THE BEGINNING, there was fertile land. Soon there was a house. A garden grew. And a family lived there whose certainties over time were buffeted by changes that nobody could have foreseen.

This family’s story began one morning in August 1920 when Joseph McBain from Albion Road, Rondebosch saw a property-for-sale advert in the Cape Times.

At 50-something Joe, as everyone called him, looked at his new-born grandson Joey and read him the advert. There were raised eyebrows, smirks and averted eyes from his wife Sophie – an Afrikaans-speaking coloured woman from the Visser family in Somerset West – his only son Jack and his nervous wreck of a niece Dolly. His twenty-year-old daughter-in-law Florie had eyes only for her Joey, resting in her arms.

‘What do you think, my boy?’ Joe asked baby Joey. ‘Must I take the savings and buy us some land, where you can run and play? And we can grow our own fruit and veg and have chickens and Muskovies and a dog. Just think of it, eh?’

Green-eyed Joey yawned. He was a baby on a mission to have some peace and quiet, but he took the time to give the tall talking shape a blessing of dribble.

With his grandson in mind, Joe walked into the Cape-to-Cairo Building in central Cape Town a few days later. Around him were a Chinese man, an Englishman, an Indian and several born-and-bred Capetonians, all wanting to have a look at the map of plots for sale in Lansdowne.

With his brutally forthright wife Sophie’s words still ringing in his ears, Joe eagerly scanned the map. ‘Is jy mal in jou kop, ou man?’ Sophie scolded, tapping her temple with a finger to show just how mad she thought her old man was. ‘We’re happy here in Rondebosch. Hoekom moet jy alles bederf?’

Joe chuckled. Sophie’s rages always spurred him on to strive harder to improve their living conditions – to do better and to be a worthier person.

Joe’s grandfather had been one of three brothers from Edinburgh, Scotland, who got off the boat in Table Bay Harbour some time in the 1820s. They settled down in Cape Town, started small businesses and eventually married local women. A fourth brother settled in Port Elizabeth.

At the estate agency in the Cape-to-Cairo Building, the English-man bought plots 11 and 13 Heatherley Road. An Indian man bought the plot on the corner of Lansdowne and Wurzberg Avenue. A Chinese started at Lansdowne Road and bought plots as far as number 8 Heatherley Road. On the Dale Street side of the block, his purchase stopped at number 3.

Joe chose numbers 10 and 12 Heatherley Road and numbers 5, 7 and 9 Dale Street. Altogether about 2 000 square metres. For a brief moment, he thought of buying the land as far as Searle Street, which ran alongside a small vlei. But the farmer whose land was being parcelled off for the newly rezoned residential area of Heatherley Estate still lived at his house at number 14. Joe wanted his plots to be all together.

Besides that, hastily made sums in his head revealed that bond payments would be far greater than the £1.10 he was able to afford a month. Better to be safe than sorry, he thought. In the building trade, where he was a bricklayer with a side-line cartage business, things could change in an instant. This made him reminisce about some of the buildings he’d worked on. Like the rugby stadium at Newlands – a grand project, something to be proud of, even if his favourite games had always been soccer and cricket.

His son Jack had his trade as a coachworks upholsterer, but who knew what the future held? Joe was optimistic but also cautious. There had been some harsh years.

There was the Great War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, which led directly to the deaths of nine million combatants and seven million civilians. Indirectly, World War I led to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 spread by soldiers returning after the war. An estimated 500 million people were infected globally. Joe McBain’s sister Laurie was one of 50 million people who died of the flu.

The loss of his dear youngest sister cut like a knife. He and Sophie undertook to look after her orphaned daughter Dolly, a rather frail girl who had just finished school and worked at a dressmaker’s boutique in Claremont.

Although Sophie was a hard nut to crack, she was praised by many for her generosity and willingness to take care of people, either providing food parcels or taking in waifs and strays. Joe’s brother gave Sophie a wide berth after he ended up on the wrong side of her for something quite small. At least his sister Maggie, who lived in a cottage beside the railway line in Wilderness Road, Claremont, still visited and so did his sister Annie.

When Joe’s son Jack married Florie in 1919, Joe could see his family expanding. Florie was a nice young woman with a family background that fascinated him: her father, José Antonio, hailed from Lisbon, Portugal.

In the 1890s, after a few rough months at sea, José and some of his shipmates jumped ship in Table Bay Harbour. The houses that were piled up on the lower slopes of the mountain reminded them a bit of home, and he decided to stay. José Antonio lived in the Loader Street area in Green Point, finding board with a local family, while his friends made their way to the fishermen’s community of Kalk Bay.

José befriended his neighbours, who were descended from Madagascan creoles who had somehow found their way on to a ship to Cape Town. He knew some French and they knew some Portuguese and they added in English bit by bit as their proficiency in the language grew. English, of course, was a necessity for life in Cape Town.

After several odd jobs, José eventually found work as a gardener at Sans Souci Estate in Newlands. He was then able to marry Minnie Du Plooy, the Madagascan neighbour’s sister, at St Mary’s Cathedral in Roeland Street, Cape Town1.

José attended mass at St Mary’s and belonged to the Knights of Da Gama Society, a Portuguese men’s church group. For church feast days he would dress up in his Sunday best and wear the Society’s sash and participate in the processions around the streets of Cape Town, starting at Hope Street and going into Roeland Street.

Minnie continued to work in service at an estate house in Newlands but, once their only child Florentina Rosa was born in 1900, she stayed home. Florie, as she would be called, attended the majority white convent school at St Michael’s in Rondebosch although she was of mixed heritage. Many immigrants sent their children there to be educated.

Due to his own heritage of being a Euro-Cape slave mixture, Joe became the glue that held the McBain and Antonio families together. He came from an English language background, with the usual smattering of made-in-Cape-Town Afrikaans.

Joe’s son Jack and José’s daughter Florie married at St Michael’s in Rondebosch, and it was decided that their children would be brought up Catholic, instead of joining St Paul’s Anglican Church, to which Joe’s family belonged. Although at least three generations of McBains had been baptised into St Paul’s, Joe didn’t mind the line being broken. He had, after all, married Sophie, who’d been raised Methodist in Somerset West. She’d converted to the Anglican tradition when she married Joe.

Jack was their only child, and he’d been indulged. He was scatterbrained but full of strong opinions. His offspring, for instance, was to speak English. He prided himself on having attended Battswood. Many of his classmates had gone on to study to be teachers2. In those years, the much-respected Teacher Training Colleges of Cape Town emphasised discipline, decency, being attentive and obedient, a good work ethic and a willingness to learn. Those were the qualities Jack admired and wanted for his family, starting with Joey the charmer.

As Joe McBain stood in the property development agency in Cape Town that morning some time around 1920, he visualised a better life for all of them: his wife Sophie, his niece Dolly, his son Jack, his daughter-in-law Florie and the baby grandson Joey, who’d been named for him. He imagined a place where there would be space to grow.

When Joe got home, Sophie was still dikbek about his intention to buy land so he celebrated his purchases silently with two helpings of tomato bredie and rice and an extra big helping of bread-and-butter pudding, finishing off with his beer stein filled with moerkoffie.

In time they will come around, he thought as he settled down after supper to read from the American Bible Society’s Centenary Bible3, which he’d bought for himself on the Grand Parade. It was a big edition with cream-coloured pages and he enjoyed poring over the many illustrations, especially the ones of the plants and fruit trees of the Holy Land.

He’d browse through Proverbs and chuckle to himself when he read in chapter 27, verses 15–16: ‘A nagging wife is like the dripping of a leaky roof in a rainstorm. Stopping her is like trying to stop the wind. It’s like trying to grab olive oil with your hand.’

He looked over at Sophie, who was strumming her 16-string lyre to get Joey in his crib off to sleep. Her playing and singing were good. She had sung in the choir in her young days at the Methodist Church.

‘Wat? Wat loer jy?’ she snapped, catching him watching her.

He smiled at her and flipped the page back. And nearly dropped the heavy Bible when he read in Proverbs 19:13. ‘A foolish son is ruin to his father, and a wife’s quarrelling is a continual dripping of rain.’ They lived in the right place for that, he thought, because the Newlands area always has the highest rainfall in the Cape, or so the newspaper said.

The next day he walked from Rondebosch to Lansdowne and breathed in lungs full of fresh air. At the new plots, he dug his hands into the black soil to feel the texture. There was moisture in that soil. This pleased him. He imagined his garden as he stood there surveying the land which would soon be his, once the bond approval and deeds of sale came through.

This was going to be a good place for his family, he thought.

On his walk back home, he didn’t take the back roads but went along the main roads until he reached Sans Souci Estate in Newlands. There he found his daughter-in-law’s father José Antonio picking ripe persimmons from a heavily laden tree and placing them in baskets to be taken to the kitchen.

He told José Antonio what he had done. ‘I will help build casa e jardim, amigo,’ his Portuguese friend told him.

They shook hands to seal the deal. Joe was pleased.

‘Now we go to my casa, time for café e pasteis de nata,’ José beamed at him, using the Portuguese term for Minnie’s melktert.

He led the way to the tiny cottage where they lived, in a row of houses that bordered onto the estate’s grounds.

A few months later with plans in hand, Joe and Jack, José Antonio and a few of Sophie’s brothers and brothers-in-law from Somerset West set about clearing the land. Soon they were laying the foundations and then slowly they began to build a house that could easily be expanded over time.

An outhouse was built on the 9 Dale Street boundary. At the point where all four plots met, a deep well was dug and lined with concrete and bricks. They built a garage for tools and the storage of building materials at 10 Heatherley Road. They marked off where the house would start at number 10, inching a little bit over onto number 12.

Soon the walls were rising on two master bedrooms on either side of a long, wide passage. These were supplemented by a smaller bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a bathroom. In front of the house was a wide veranda enclosed with windows. Joe included long concrete shelves on either side of the entrance below the windows as he intended using the veranda as a greenhouse for his seedlings.

When the extended family – Joe, Sophie, Jack, Florie, baby Joey and Cousin Dolly – moved to their new home, Lansdowne Road was still a dirt track, but everywhere around them, people were building new houses. With the help of José Antonio, the garden was established, soon delivering healthy crops and fruit to feed the family and anyone who came to visit.

Throughout the 1920s, Jack’s family grew steadily with the arrival of John and William. By the time Doreen was born in 1928, Joe McBain’s cartage company was doing well enough, especially with country area contracts. This was when work was scarce, just after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 which led to the Great Depression.

It was a time of great deprivation and hardship. Jack had been in the automobile-coachworks industry and lost his job during the Depression. He was forced to join builder crews that often worked on sites in other provinces, such as Nelspruit in the Transvaal. On his return home he became restless and morose. Soon after his fifth child Rose was born in 1930, he started an affair with Lizzie, a woman from Black River and a good friend of cousin Dolly.

It took only eleven years to sour the safe, secure and rather idyllic home life Joe wanted to create for his family. Jack’s infidelity with Lizzie lasted for decades and led to extreme levels of stress and tension in the house.

Joe remained optimistic in spite of his difficult son Jack. He extended the living room and the kitchen and built a fourth bedroom, expanded the bathroom, toilet and pantry, all of similar dimensions, namely 4 x 3 metres.

He closed off the veranda area for rooms for the three boys and Sophie’s nephews from Somerset West, and even friends of friends who needed a place to stay for a while. They found refuge there until they could establish themselves in the city.

Jack was always away, courting his goose. Joe was disappointed in his son, but he dared not voice this to Sophie, who would have ripped out his guts for extra-extra-large garters.

When things got too much, Joe walked to Kirstenbosch Gardens and climbed up Skeleton Gorge. He often saw General Jan Smuts up on Table Mountain – many mountaineers of the day could attest to be on greeting terms with then Prime Minister of South Africa.

In 1932, Stella was born, Jack and Florie’s sixth child and third daughter. Five years later, on New Year’s Day 1937, Mavie followed, bringing the family to seven children. Jack continued his affair with his mistress, whose jealousy he pacified by claiming that Mavie was not his child. He lied and said that his wife had, in fact, cheated on him with an Indian. After all, look how much darker the child was compared to the other girls!

He distanced himself from the baby and when Mavie grew into a toddler, he was often deliberately spiteful and hurtful by pushing her out of the way. In time, she placed her trust only in her mother and her sisters. Her grandfathers and her brothers became her many fathers.

Florie was a nervous wreck and, what with her husband’s atrocious behaviour and seven children to look after, she aged faster than was necessary. After finishing the household chores at Heatherley Road she spent much of her time with her parents José and Minnie, who by then had moved to a cottage in Chichester Road, Claremont, a twenty-minute walk away.

Florie fretted about what would happen to her and her girls when her father-in-law wasn’t around anymore. Where would they go? How would they live? The boys were in their teens already and would soon be able to carve out their own lives.

The Great Depression of the 1930s flowed into World War II. It was a time of scarcity and fear, but people remained hospitable. They did not close themselves off. They adopted an attitude of ‘just because things are bad, doesn’t mean we must drop our standards’.

Florie endured two big knocks in a row. In Claremont, her mom Minnie died after a short illness. A few months later she learnt her husband’s mistress Lizzie had given birth to baby Kenneth, Jack’s fourth son.

Over time, Florie and Kenny would become good friends. They first bonded when he was ten years old. Jack brought him along one day and left him in the car in the yard while he came in to have lunch. Seeing the boy, Florie insisted that he join them at the table. Kenny became part of the family’s life. He grew up to be a kind man, a person of principle and ethics, independent of his parents’ lifestyle. Kenny always said that he did not know that his father never stayed with them. When he was little, Jack would be there in the morning and he would be there when he went to sleep at night. It was only from the time that he was taken to Heatherley Road that he realised things were not what they had seemed to him.

But all those years before that, without the benefit of hindsight, it was hard for Florie to hide her misery from her children, especially the younger ones who had not yet started school. They were always around to witness Florie calling Jack out into the yard to give voice to her many grievances, including failure to provide money for food and clothing for the children.

All Jack’s money went to supporting his second family and Joe had to keep everyone fed and clothed. Sophie had never been an easy person to live with, and that was another matter that Florie had to grapple with daily. She loved her mother-in-law’s Somerset West family, though, and always kept in contact with them.

Florie was grateful that she could find solace in her religion. Being scorned, enduring mockery, humiliation and hurt, strengthened her faith. She and the girls could also seek refuge during the day at her father’s new home in Lawson Road just down Heatherley Road, in a granny cottage with a separate entrance. They would walk along a narrow pathway past the small lakes, marvelling at how every vlei was being filled in with rubble. They watched the roads being extended and houses being built. And eventually they met the people who moved into their new homes, happy and full of optimism.

As the war progressed, a family friend who was in the Royal Air Force wanted to take Florie’s oldest son Joey with him to England to join the RAF. Joe and Sophie flatly refused to let him go. Florie recognised it as an opportunity, but she didn’t want to see her boy go to war either.

Around that time José Antonio became ill and Florie nursed him. He died just before the end of the war.

The loss of her father renewed Florie’s fears. She thought that without him there, she would surely be facing divorce and homelessness. Her anxiety about where to go with her girls knew no bounds. Fear of ending up in the gutter played on her mind. But her greatest fear was losing her place in church and being denied communion if she was divorced. It was considered a sin for a Catholic to be divorced and it meant you could not receive communion, nor could you remarry in the church. To this day, there are Catholics who will tough out an unpleasant marriage rather than get divorced.

Joe assured her that she and her daughters could stay and that there would be no divorce from Jack in his lifetime. He kept peace with his son too by going along with Sophie to meet Lizzie and her family.

The old man had always been more of a father to his grandchildren than Jack and they worshipped him for it. He taught them how to build and garden and fix things. Some days he’d walk all his grandchildren and their friends to the Youngsfield airstrip, which was busy during and immediately after the war years, to watch the planes come and go.

Some days he would just sit outside the kitchen door on a wicker chair, smoking his tobacco pipe, reading the Cape Times in the morning and the Cape Argus in the afternoon and drinking coffee, waiting for visitors. Somebody would always pop in for a chat eventually.

Hospitality was important to Joe and his family. ‘Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.’ Hebrews 12, verse 12. When he bought his big Bible, which was kept on the sideboard in the lounge, it was one of the first verses he paged to and read aloud to himself.

He missed his Portuguese amigo. The fruit trees and the vegetable patch delivered bounty after bounty. Whatever the season, the McBains had plenty, a blessing with so many mouths to feed.

When Joe sat outside like that, the pergola overhead hanging heavy with bunches of grapes, he would become nostalgic for the times he and the grandchildren would take the train from Claremont to Kalk Bay with José Antonio to visit the Portuguese friends José had arrived in Cape Town with. They had done well for themselves in the fishing community. Joe missed the sound of their strange language, their friendliness and the fact that they did not judge him and his people.

One by one Jack and Florie’s boys grew up, got jobs, found girlfriends and went off to marry and start families of their own.

Joey, the eldest, married Dorothy from Lansdowne and they stayed with her mother Annie in a cottage on Chinaman Lee Pan’s property in Lansdowne Road close to grandfather Joe’s home.

John married Bertha, also from the area. They stayed with her family in a cottage on Racecourse Road, in the years before it became a freeway. In the 1950s, when the City Council officials started going around asking if people wanted to put their names down for houses in Bridgetown in Athlone, they filled in the forms to move there. All their friends were moving there too.

The McBain great-grandchildren were born one after the other, and they were all loved and cherished. But amid the bright spots, there were so many disappointments, so much sadness and fear, especially after the National Party swept into power in 1948. They soon began to implement their segregationist apartheid policies. Joe McBain followed these stories in the newspapers and could not foresee a happy outcome for his family.

In July 1950 the gavel fell: the Group Areas Act was promulgated in parliament. The period of forced removals had arrived and it would last into the early 1980s.

William, the third brother, married Roma from Newlands. They joined the New Apostolic Church as part of their new identity, on the way to being reclassified white in the mid-1950s. If they could become white they could evade the forced removals and stay in Newlands.

Rose married Gerry from Dale Street and in time gave birth to the much-cherished James and Linda. And Joe cried in his heart, along with Sophie, Florie and the girls, when they announced the sale of their house in Chelsea Village, Wynberg. They had also decided to be reclassified white and would be moving to Johannesburg.

Then Cousin Dolly, who had never married, announced that she was leaving for England. They all wanted better lives, they said, instead of being stuck on the ‘wrong’ side of the apartheid laws.

Joe couldn’t help thinking, ‘What is wrong with this life? Are we that bad, that skin colour is more important than family? Yes, their father didn’t do right by them, but to take such a drastic step to find distance?’

Dor and Mavie snapped outside the Movie Snaps, Darling Street, City Centre, 1950s.

Doreen, the eldest of the daugh­­ters, never married. Stella, the second youngest, had been planning to become a teacher when she suddenly decided to quit school after Standard 9. She ended up working in Bawa’s Shop in Chi­chester Road, Claremont. She had a boyfriend, Wilfred Coetzee, who finished matric at Livingstone High School in Claremont and went to UCT to study for a science degree. He obtained a teaching diploma as well and became a high school teacher.

Jack and Joey both admired his profession and facetiously called him Meneer Wilfie, overlooking his brusqueness and his moodiness.

Mavie, the baby of the family, made them all proud when she went to study nursing at Somerset Hospital. Jack did not pay for her college fees, but family friends, Mr and Mrs Frances, insisted that they would do the honours.

In the mid-1950s Mavie McBain and Ivan Davids, a high school classmate, became a couple. Nursing was a noble profession, the elders agreed, but what’s with the boyfriend? Joey, her oldest brother, said outright there was something strange about that ou.

‘The man just talks about himself all the time. “I, I, I … I did this and I did that.” I’m keeping my eye on him,’ he griped. He never made a secret of his dislike of his youngest sister’s choice. The old ladies, Sophie and Florie, were charmed though. Ivan sat and talked to them, made tea for them and served it with the pomp and ceremony that should accompany every cup of tea, he insisted. He dressed well, spoke well, and his shoes shone from polishing. He was well-mannered and even sang hymns with them, although he was not a churchgoer.

Ivan and Mavie on Table Mountain, 1950s.

Stella, Mavie, Grandma Florie and her school friend Mrs Grover from USA; Mrs Williams from Dale Street; Ivan and Dor.

To Mavie, he complained endlessly about his family. Especially how his mother never loved him and one of his younger brothers. He said it was his misfortune that he was like a cat, gravitating towards those who felt no affinity with him. Mavie understood this bitterness in Ivan. After all, she’d been rejected by her father.

Incidentally, Florie and Jack knew his mother, Christina (formerly Adams). She’d grown up in Newlands. She started in the Salvation Army and in time transitioned to the Anglican Church. Christina had never liked Florie, because she simply could not tolerate ‘halwe naartjies’ (half breeds) like her. The actual word was nasies – nations – interesting turns of phrase were created in the Cape community.

Ivan and Mavie snapped by a neighbour who spotted them in Mouille Point before Mavie returned to the nurses’ residence at Somerset Hospital, 1950s.

My baptism certificate from the newly opened Our Lady Help of Christians Church in Lansdowne, 1961.

Christina was of Javanese slave descent, she often said. Yet only the odd Afrikaans word passed her lips. She only spoke the King’s – later the Queen’s – English and sounded very lah-di-dah. She played her black upright piano when she wasn’t crocheting the finest of garments and tableware. She had ten children and she divorced her husband Charles, also of South-East Asian descent, in the 1950s. They lived in a semi-detached house The Oval in 30 Chichester Road, Claremont, next to Bawa’s Shop.

The irony was that at least five of Christina’s grandchildren produced ‘halwe-naartjies’, on three continents, and some have transitioned to other religions.

After Christina’s divorce from Charles, Ivan never had contact with his father again, and Mavie never met him. According to gossip, Charles was a peacock of a man who painted landscapes in oils and played tennis. When he won, he would parade up and down Chichester Road in his all-white tennis gear. When he lost, his family bore the brunt of his bad sportsmanship.

Joe watched and waited for the changes that would inevitably come to his family.

Then Sophie had a stroke, her bad temper finally catching up with her. After she died in 1958, the silence was so deafening that it killed Joe a mere two months later. The doctor said he’d died of old age though – Joe was in his eighties.

Jack inherited his father’s property. Now what? What would happen, where would Florie and the girls – Doreen, Stella and Mavie – go?

Her oldest son Joey said sell ‘the bladdie house’, but John and William vetoed that idea, sensing their mother’s anxiety. And so the house was not sold and everybody stayed.

Mavie married Ivan in July 1960 at the Catholic Chapel on Lansdowne Road. They wanted to rent a place of their own in Kromboom, but the ever-anxious Florie, fearing for her daughter and for herself, asked them to stay. She’d heard the rumours about Ivan’s father, just like everybody else, and she worried that his son would be like his father.

I was born in June 1961 at home in Heatherley Road, delivered by Nurse Hansen. Grandpa Jack, Grandma Florie, Aunties Stella and Dor (my appointed godmother), Uncle Joey and even the always-cross Meneer Wilfie all doted on Bronnie. They all had a new toy to play with and I had lots of visitors.

‘What the hell!’ Ivan was said to have exclaimed just after my birth. ‘She has a bladdie crown of thorns on her head. Look how it stands up. And look at the button nose. Have you ever seen any­thing like it?’

It was to be my first inkling about how important appearance and looks were to the community I had been born into. Coloureds were weird that way: they’d roll an imaginary dice and take bets on what a pregnancy would deliver. Would it come out dark to the fair, or fair and blue-eyed to the dark? Everybody maliciously waited for dark children to be visited on fair relatives, especially those who had opted to be reclassified white.

And then the offspring all go through a lifetime of the vicious game of trek die siel uit? which entailed drawing out the child’s ‘spirit’ to ascertain temperament. They would tease and mock and provoke, a disruptive and unnecessary thing to do. After which the poor kid would be boxed in by the often-repeated line of ‘you take after so and so’.

Labelling is very limiting, and it was unpleasant to be subjected to trek die siel uit? by grownups in the extended family. It was a nuisance, especially when you had better things to do, like playing outside, colouring-in and drawing.

My own family did not taunt and tease as much as outsiders, probably because they were too busy with all kinds of chores. My older cousins popped out fair, dark, in-between, dark, blonde and blue-eyed (times two), medium, medium, medium, fair, blond and blue-eyed, and so it would alternate until there was me and four more after me who were all similarly varied. The blond and blue-eyed cousins were unpretentious coloureds who lived in Bridgetown.

My looks attracted much comment, some quite nasty, mostly from females in great-grandma Sophie’s family. They thought I may have Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. I was always sickly. On top of which I didn’t resemble anyone in either my mother or my father’s families.

Seeing that they had so much to say, they might have urged Mavie to ask Dr Cliffie Louw to check me out for autism. It might have satisfied their need to label me. We certainly travelled the distance to Athlone often enough for a snotty nose, tonsillitis and all other childhood diseases. I stoically endured the stick stuck on the tongue and the ‘Say ahh’ or the occasional injection of antibiotics. My consolation was to admire the front garden at the surgery with its fountain and fishpond. When Dr Louw emigrated to Canada, we went to Drs Sakinofsky and Osrin’s surgery where Dor worked. And still no further tests for whatever was ‘wrong’ with me.

Make no mistake, appearances always came first in the community I grew up in. People contradicted themselves when they quoted the English proverb, ‘Do not judge a book by its cover’. I suppose this applied only to some and not others.

Ivan’s suspicions about my oddity were confirmed when I grew into toddlerhood and started talking. I acquired an imaginary friend named Dali. I received dark looks of censure and he’d snap at me to stop.

I had only two years with Grandma Florie before her life of broken-heartedness consumed her. She died at Groote Schuur Hospital while in a diabetic coma. I wanted her back. I devised all kinds of plans to get her back out of that place in the sky I’d been told she’d gone to. These included the use of the very tall extension ladder which had to be placed on Grandpa Jack’s crock VW Kombi.

Grandma Florie and me with my crown of thorns, 1961.

The day she died in April 1963, her departing spirit endured its final humiliation at the hands of Grandpa Jack and Miss Lizzie. The mistress had never met Grandma Florie, who had decided never to play into their hands by acting out the role of the confrontational scorned wife. Mavie and Stella heard from a reliable source that on the day Grandpa Jack told Miss Lizzie that his wife had died, the two of them laughed until the tears rolled down their faces, and streaks ran down Miss Lizzie’s carefully powdered and rouged face.

About six months after Grand­ma Florie’s death Ivan, who was a badge designer at Mr Barlow’s embroidery factory in Steenberg, quit his job. He signed up for a six-month season working on the Dutch whaling vessel, the Willem Barends. At the age of 32, he worked as a deckhand, aiding in the hunting and killing of whales in the South Atlantic. The meat was destined for the European and Asian markets.

Ivan must have hated being at sea because he never went back when the season ended but resumed his job at Barlow’s. His stories were filled with the horrors of the Roaring Forties (the strong westerly winds of the Southern Hemisphere between latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees), fear of imminent death, of vomit overboard, horrible shipmates who had murderous intent to push him overboard, their foul language, and the gore and blood every­where on deck, which was his responsibility to clean up.

Grandpa Jack was still living in two places: at Miss Lizzie’s all day, sleeping at Heatherley Road at night. After 33 years of defiant togetherness, he and Miss Lizzie only married in the mid-1960s, about three years after Grandma Florie’s death, at St Paul’s. Finally, he moved to her rented house in Belgravia Estate in Athlone.

Uncle Kenny, not long before he died, 1996

Miss Lizzie’s family had lived in Black River, but it was declared a white area and they’d been forced to leave their home in the 1950s and move to the Cape Flats.

Dor and me in the lounge, 1963.

Dor, Stella and Mavie only met Miss Lizzie, who had been a dark shadow in their lives for so long, the day Kenny married Olive from Simonstown. The wedding tea was held at the house in Heatherley Road. Dor and Stella were polite, but Mavie – who’d been cruelly rejected by her father to pacify his mistress – refused to be diplomatic and ignored her.

By 1966, only five people lived in great-grandpa Joe’s house: my mother Mavie, her husband Ivan, and me, and Mavie’s two older sisters Dor and Stella. But there was always an assortment of visitors in for short stays. The four grownups contributed to a pool which covered upkeep of the property, rates, electricity, water and food.

Each one saved the rest of their meagre wages and used it to buy what was perceived as uplifting things. They surely needed it as a way to help them deal with apartheid. By now, its laws had become the bane of their existence.

Ivan, Mavie and me at my first birthday party, 1962.

Mavie and me in mourning for Grandma Florie, standing in the straggly vegetable patch, 1963.

My first birthday party, friend Jean Engelbrecht, Grandma Florie, Mavie and me, Dor, friend Mrs Maggie Smith, Stella. Standing: Ivan, cousins Flo-Anne and Gregory, and Mr Peter Smith, 1962.

At cousin Esme’s home, where Cavendish Square is today, for her daughter Denise’s first birthday party, 1963.

Me on the purloined, old rusty bicycle in the yard. The old part of the garage can be seen in the background, 1964.

Me at my second birthday party; having breakfast on the road to Goedverwacht; and all dressed up for the double wedding in Goedverwacht.

View of the Heatherley house from Dale Street, 1976.

Mavie’s room at 62 Ajax Way, Woodlands, 1993.