Читать книгу Lansdowne dearest - Bronwyn Davids - Страница 9

THERE WAS NOTHING ordinary about the house and garden great-grandpa Joe had conjured into being and everybody else had added to over time. It wasn’t a grand house – it was an expressionist work of art.

The textures of my childhood home fed the imagination: the wood-framed sash windows, painted wooden shutters on the outside, the rows of African violets and a few cacti in pots with their perlemoen shells as saucers on the windowsills. These served as protection in lieu of burglar bars. Who had burglar bars and security gates then? Some people didn’t even lock their doors.

There was nothing quite like sitting at the open sash window at the small four-seater table in the kitchen, eating lunch or doing homework or listening to Springbok radio with Mavie, and being able to look out over the garden.

I liked our doors: the always-open blue-grey stable door, the painted wooden doors to the rooms with their round brass knobs, the patterns on the sand-blasted glass panes on either side of the seldom-used-front door, and the pane in the door itself which let afternoon light into the passage.

My favourite door was the one between the kitchen and the lounge. The bottom was wooden, while the top had different coloured glass panes in a frame. All mismatched, of course. I’m sure there was solid oak under the layers of paint. The floors were made of suspended tongue-and-groove teak planks.

We seldom used the lounge and dining room, except for parties and sometimes weddings. The old house was a one-stop space for weddings because photos could be taken in the lush garden with all its odd twists of beauty.

On the evenings before functions, I could explore the layers of time when the two sideboards and cupboards were unlocked to reveal what nestled within. Every bowl, tea set, plate, glass, knife, fork, ladle, spoon, cake fork and pudding bakkie had history attached of who it belonged to, either great-grandmothers Sophie and Minnie or Grandma Florie. Great-grandpa Joe’s Bible stood on the ‘newer’, circa 1940s, sideboard.

There were also many gifts from old friends – brass candlesticks, souvenirs from far-away places. And beautiful cranberry glass lamps, with fresh wick and oil in them, stood like sentries on one sideboard, in case of electricity failure in winter.

The drawers held linen tablecloths and napkins and an assortment of lace cloths. There were yellowing Belgian lace cloths made by Grandma Florie, and crocheted cotton doilies, tablecloths and tea-tray cloths made by Ivan’s mom Christina, whom I called Granny Davids.

My favourite things were the old Christmas decorations. There were colourful wooden ornaments, clay angels, Christmas lights from the 1950s and shiny, new baubles. That part of the sideboard smelled of Christmas. The old artificial Christmas tree was the kind with tiny cups at the end in which to stick-thin candles. The candles were for decoration rather than to light.

What should have been the front entrance of the old, ramshackle house was never used. There must have been a gate at one stage, but it disappeared into a cheerful towering hedge of black-eyed Susan, English ivy, bougainvillea and morning glory that tangled into each other’s foliage in the shared space.

On the veranda, the windows were overgrown by the Hoya creeper with its pink bouquets of tiny waxy flowers. All kinds of treasures were kept on the veranda: hurricane lamps, wicker baskets, an assortment of oak furniture that had been Great-grandpa José Antonio’s, cupboards with books, battered trunks with ornaments, old chairs, and a concrete shelf with pot plants.

In those cupboards on the veranda, I found evidence of Grandpa Jack’s household rule that only English should be spoken. And only encyclopaedias, good novels, newspapers, Women’s Own and National Geographic were allowed as reading matter. There was an outright ban on the reading of comics. I was also discouraged from reading comics, but before I could read, Dor would relate to me the adventures of a bird named Robin in a comic strip in the British magazine Women’s Own.

In spite of Grandpa Jack’s ban, Afrikaans was freely used for colour, emphasis and exclamation. Some things were best said in Afrikaans. Like if you needed to tell someone off or skel them, you’d throw in an Afrikaans swear word or two. It had the effect of the hounds of hell being unleashed.

The cupboards were also filled with an assortment of Bibles, catechism books and hymnals. Games – such as rings, cards, dominoes and darts that the uncles and their friends used to play in the kitchen, or the yard – were still there, neat in their boxes. It seems the house was full when the boys were still single, in spite of Grandpa Jack’s no alcohol rule, which everybody respected.

The contents of the cupboards, though decades old, were still intact and had not suffered any water damage. The veranda remained dry and dusty through every winter.

In winter, the zinc roof of the house leaked no matter how many times the gutters and the chimney were cleaned and in spite of all holes being sealed before the rains came. The leaks were always on the eastern part of the house where it had been extended and were probably back-flow from the gutters.

But not even basins all over the floor to catch the dripping water could deter visitors. Always the warmth from the woodstove made up for the inconvenience of stepping around the basins. Everybody came in through the kitchen door and plonked themselves down at one of the two tables. The chairs were an assortment of oak, cane and the latest Formica and metal chairs, and they were all adorned with comfy cushions. Some nights, the aunties’ friends from the neighbourhood came by to do crafts. They embroidered, crocheted, knitted or made raffia bags. Visitors would sometimes draw up a chair to sit beside the stove where cooking and baking fragrances lingered.

Every castle has its crown jewel, something that pulls the whole building together and gives it a reason for existing. Our jewel at Great-grandpa Joe’s castle was an eight-plate, pale-blue wood and coal Jewel stove with a warmer shelf at the top and a water boiler on the side.

The Jewel stood on a plinth, enclosed on three sides by walls. The wall in the corner formed a section where wood was stacked in a Bashew’s cooldrink box. Brooms, mops, long feather dusters, spades, a rake, a pitchfork and other gardening tools stood behind it. There was also a little shelf for wood under the extended boiler section of the stove.

Logs were delivered every week by the wood merchant Mr Dodgen, and these were split smaller by either Ivan or Uncle Joey. I think they just liked splitting logs to vent their frustrations. The fire was started at five o’clock every morning and fed throughout the day and left to die down late. The ash was cleared out of the burner once it had cooled, either the same night or the next morning.

With a collective gravitational pull toward ‘sugar and spice and all things nice’, baking was the food-related activity that everyone in the house excelled at. Platkoeke were often the order of the day, because the oven, which could hold four round cake pans at once, was rather temperamental and didn’t always provide the desired outcome. Being a wood-burning stove, heat distribution was patchy and a jug of water had to be placed in the oven to rectify the problem.

The 22-cm sponge cakes never rose higher than three or four centimetres at the most and always split when removed from the pans. Or they imploded in the middle or they were lopsided. These imperfections were camouflaged by dollops of butter icing. Roped into kitchen duty from an early age, I became an expert butter-icing maker.

Each imperfect cake was welcomed with great enthusiasm and went down well with tea and compliments that it ‘tasted really good’ and ‘yes, I will have another slice, thanks’. Sweet was good, salt was good, fat was good – and you only live once. So there!

Stella’s speciality was coffee cake, made with an essence she guarded with her life. Her chocolate cake was light and fluffy, a genuine chocolatey melting moment. Mavie made fairy cakes, and little tarts with jam or coconut, and her Hertzoggies with a coconut meringue covering the jam. She also made crustless milk tart and tea loaves: banana, raisin, date or ginger.

For a few seasons, she did a roaring trade in rainbow-coloured, two-deck sponge cakes, selling to workers and their families at Strandfontein beach. But that market dried up when Ivan left his job as a beach control officer and became a Divisional Council traffic cop.

Saturday was baking day. We always had lots of visitors on Saturdays, many from Claremont plus the usual neighbourhood friends. People turned up uninvited, bringing prepared but uncooked exotic snacks, like doughnuts, koeksisters and samoosas that they would fry off at our place, or a pot of warm breyani.

Ivan’s speciality was watermelon or fig konfyt, and melon-and-ginger jam which he’d learnt to cook in his youth. Foodwise, he was the king of fry-ups. His version of ouvrou-onder-die-kombers consisted of leftover Sunday roast beef dipped in batter and fried.

He also made all kinds of smoortjies with onions, tomato, garlic polony, smoked snoek or bully beef. Unfortunately, all the frying caught up with him in the end quite suddenly at his desk at the old Regional Services Council building in Wale Street, Cape Town, in 1993. No amount of ballroom dancing and long-distance swimming from Kalk Bay to Muizenberg could offset a diet that bad.

Dor was the head gardener and chief baker. Before she became head flower arranger at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church on Lansdowne Road and was too busy on Saturday afternoons, Dor was usually the one who made the bread, scones and fruit pies, all prepared with careful consideration.

She would pick loquats or guavas and stew them, make the pastry, roll it out, place in Pyrex dishes, add the stewed fruit with whole cinnamon, arrange the pastry lattice on top, brush with egg and entrust it to the oven. The pies were served with a rich golden homemade custard. Fruit from the garden was also often stewed to go with oven-baked sago or tapioca pudding.

Dor also made bread-and-butter pudding and, for special occasions, Queen’s pudding. I’d crumble the white bread slices into a bowl. This she would place in a buttered stainless steel dish. She would scald milk and butter, pour it over the crumbs and let it stand for a few minutes before adding beaten egg yolk, sugar and vanilla essence. The mixture would be baked until set and then covered with jam. She’d beat the egg white until it formed peaks, add a tablespoon of sugar, mixed and spread over the jam. The dish was returned to the oven and baked until the meringue browned slightly. What a queen of a pudding!

In summer she made fruit salad with fruits from the garden plus pawpaw and bananas, which she bought. ‘The pawpaw is what makes the salad taste so great,’ she always said.

Stella made pineapple pudding, which consisted of a tin of Ideal milk, pineapple jelly and a tin of pineapple pieces, blitzed together and left to set in the fridge.

No, we did not have cake and pudding every day. These luxuries were for weekends. For the rest of the week, we had homemade left-over cake and coconut biscuits and store-bought Marie Biscuits and Ouma rusks. They were usually dipped in sweet, milky tea or coffee. The top of the movable, almost two-metre-long kitchen dresser was packed with great numbers of colourful old biscuit tins for the storage of cake and biscuits.

Real, cooked food was incidental in the grand scheme of things. ‘If we could eat pudding first, we would,’ Uncle Joey often quipped with his own brand of irreverence. And sometimes one or the other of them would indeed take a dip into the pudding bakkie first.

Mavie kept her cooking plain but flavourful with mixed herbs or thyme, bay leaves, salt and white pepper, nutmeg, cloves or cinnamon, depending on the dish. Everything had a smoky flavour from the woodstove and this gave the food a unique taste. That stove provided slow cooking at its best, although Mavie was not a fan of its erratic ways. She had great battles with it: slamming lids and letting off a litany of swear words quite often. The cleaning of all the movable parts was a sooty business and was cause for more f and b words.

Mavie’s most used recipes from the Salesians Boys’ School Recipe Book, 1960s.

The sisters were in their 20s and early 30s and they too wanted to be able to cook fast on an electric stove. But the electric cabling in the house was old and because of the uncertainty of the Group Areas removals, which were now in full swing, they did not want to go through the expense of re-cabling to a new electricity box.

Instead, Stella used the gas stove that she had for camping. Her favourite camping spot was Duikersklip before the Hangberg flats were built to the top of the dip, just before the rise of Hout Bay Sentinel. She, Meneer Wilfie and her friends would climb over to the rocky bay on the other side, which was very popular for kreef-diving. We went along for day trips but never stayed over.

Stella would also use the gas stove on countrywide road trips with her friends. She cooked only at weekends, after work on a Saturday. When she came back from her travels, she would cook dishes she had learned about. A peri-peri prawn dish with cashews and rice with saffron, after she’d been to Mozambique and Yorkshire pudding to go with the Sunday roast after she’d been to England.

Her travels also led to us receiving lots of holidaymakers: Indian Hindu and Tamil friends from Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Pinetown, and once some Portuguese people from Lourenco Marques who came to Cape Town to see if they wanted to stay here. They chose Rio de Janeiro instead after Mozambique gained independence in 1975 from Portugal, the colonial power that had governed the territory for five centuries. They got out before the civil war erupted.

Mavie cooked all the traditional meals that everyone was cooking at the time. For breakfast, Jungle Oats or mielie meal porridge – and Weetbix for those can’t-be-bothered days. For supper, she cooked all the bredies (green beans, tomato, cabbage), frikkadels, cabbage-wrapped frikkadels, liver in tomato sauce, sugar beans stew, Irish stew, mince-and-pea curry with white rice, spaghetti bolognaise and bobotie. Lunch was usually leftovers or a sandwich with tea.

For special occasions on weeknights, there was pot roast brisket (cheaper than lamb chops in the 60s and 70s), pot roast beef or pot roast chicken. Chicken was a luxury because it cost more than red meat. All were served with squash, cauliflower with white sauce, roast potatoes and yellow rice. Rustic soups enriched with soup bones full of marrow, vegetables and barley were winter highlights, followed by pumpkin fritters with sugar and cinnamon.

Climbing Table Mountain – Stella, Dor, Ivan and Mavie, 1950s.

One of the Lansdowne Anglican Churches picnics to Churchhaven. L-R: Dor, Mr Smith, Mrs Smith, Meneer Wilfie, me, Stella, Mavie and neighbour, Mrs Ivy, 1964.

At the beach, back row: Stella, Mavie, Uncle Julian. Front L-R: Mrs Ivy, cousins Marlene and Lorna, me and Ivan, 1962.

Mavie on the rocks at Mouille Point, 1950s.

Sometimes there was corned beef or homemade steak ’n kidney pie with boiled potatoes or mash, salad made with tomato, onion and lettuce and squash with mustard as the accompanying condiment. Macaroni cheese or savoury rice with a tomato-onion-lettuce salad was always paired with breakfast sausage or minute steaks. Lamb chops or fish fillets or kuite (fish roe or fish eggs that look like sausages) came with potato chips and a tomato and onion smoor.

I didn’t eat the kuite or rollmops. I also drew the line at giblets stew, homemade brawn, tripe and trotter curry. But I did eat kaiings though, made from the excess fat cut from the meat, chopped into tiny bits and cooked in a pot until crispy. So lekker. ‘Lekker’, by the way, was without a doubt the most-used Afrikaans word in our family.

My favourite was when Mavie made bredies. Just after the meat and onions had browned (or burnt and she had done a quick rescue mission), before the veg was added, she would call me in from playing outside for brood-in-die-pot and tea. A slice of bread was put into the pot to cook a few minutes and it absorbed the browned fat and onion juices. It was very lekker.

All the lard was stored in containers in the fridge and used for cooking. Even the excess fat from Sunday roast was saved and used again for the bredies. Uncle Joey would visit most days and head straight for the bread bin for a slice or two of bread, spread with fat and topped off with whatever leftover meats or spreads and jams were around. (He wasn’t supposed to eat those. Doctor’s orders. He had diabetes.)

Then there was the Christian ritual of Good Friday pickled fish from a recipe that was invented and shared by Cape Malay slaves4. Hot cross buns were always bought – I don’t think my family had a recipe for them. We ate the same menu for Easter Sunday as we did for Christmas, except without the Christmas doekpoeding. We had one of the usual winter puddings, usually with custard.

Easter weekend was more about church than food, although I got the impression that chocolate may just have sneaked into first place ahead of piousness for some. The Easter holy week began on Palm Sunday with the handing out of palm crosses that symbolised Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, riding on the back of a donkey over a street that had been covered with cloaks and beside which people stood waving palm fronds.

The weekend began on Thursday with the blessing of the anointing oils, holy water, wine, wafers, paschal candles and incense, all of which were to be used throughout the archdiocese for the rest of the year. Thursday evening there’d be a special service during which the priest washed the feet of fellow clergy, deacons and lay ministers. In recent years, some churches have introduced a paschal meal after the service, as an attempt to reimagine what Jesus did the night before he was crucified.

Good Friday was sombre with the re-enactment of the Fourteen Stations of the Cross held in the field behind the church. I found this frightening and sad. It was as if one was right there in Jerusalem all those thousands of years ago, especially if the weather was overcast and gloomy.

The re-enactment required the congregation follow, according to European processional traditions, a narrator reading passages from the Gospels. This was a shorter service than the three-hour focus on gospel readings, solemnity and prayer for adults in the afternoon. Between these two church services, there was much munching on pickled fish and buns in homes across the city.

The midnight mass, called a wake mass, was held on the eve of Easter Sunday. For me, it was the most beautiful event on the church calendar. It was dramatic from the moment one entered the darkened church where the only light came from candles flickering on the altar.

The priests and altar servers would enter in silent procession without the characteristic pipe-organ music and hymn. An altar server walked ahead carrying the incense burner. There would be opening prayers after which we filed out to hear another prayer while standing around an enormous fire. Then the paschal candle, studded with religious symbols, would be lit.

Back in the church, we would all receive light from this paschal candle to light our little white candles in cardboard holders. The paschal candle would stay lit until Pentecost. There’d be a benediction with incense, and prayers would be sung as was the tradition of the Solemn or High Mass. Only then would the lights be switched on for the continuation of the mass with hymns sung to the accompaniment of the pipe organ.

These were all symbolic of Jesus Christ’s resurrection from the grave – rising out of darkness on the third day. The tradition goes back centuries to the days when Christians could not read the Gospels for themselves and the stories were told through images, symbolism and re-enactment. Going to this mass felt like touching the ancient past.

All Holy days, events and foods went according to the seasons, except at Christmas, when we ate a traditional British meal, as was the custom at the Cape since colonial times. Girls were taught all these dishes by their mothers and in Domestic Science classes at high school, out of a 1948 textbook called Housecraft for Primary Schools by R Fouche and WM Currey. Often new recipes were swopped or cut out of newspapers and British magazines.

The Christmas meal was oven-roasted leg of lamb with potatoes flavoured with a sectioned onion. The meat (always carved by Dor) was served with cauliflower and white sauce, gem squash and yellow rice, gravy and Dor’s mint leave salad, with chopped onion, salt, pepper and a dash of vinegar.

The flagship of the meal was always the doekpoeding made days before. Making it was a long process that began with freshening up the calico cloth in which the pudding was boiled. The batter consisted of breadcrumbs, fruit mix and nuts (bought at Wellington’s Fruit Growers in Darling Street in the city centre), flour, eggs, yellow sugar, a little milk, measures of mixed spice, all-spice and cinnamon. The calico would be spread over a colander and the mixture spooned in, before being tied with string and lowered into a big pot of boiling water at the bottom of which was a plate to hold the pudding’s shape and to prevent it from sticking to the pot. There it would steam for five hours.

The Christmas pudding was served with custard and it would last for days. Mavie did not add coins or brandy, as was the tradition. She would not be caught dead buying brandy, and she feared that coins would lead to choking.

On Christmas day, the usual visitors would drop by after the morning service before they went off to their own family lunch. They’d be served Bashew’s, the cooldrinks delivered to the door in wooden crates on Friday nights, or tea, and tarts or fruit cake.

On Christmas Eve we always went to the magical midnight mass at Our Lady Help of Christians. Carols were sung before the High Mass and were followed by a benediction. When I was still a child, Mavie would take me to the morning service.

A big part of the rituals of Christmas and Easter was to go to Klip Cemetery in Grassy Park to put flowers on the McBain family grave, after which we walked over to the grave of Great-grandpa José Antonio and Great-grandma Minnie, near the World War II soldiers’ graves. Dor’s flower arrangements were of such a high standard they could have easily been used as centrepieces at a bride’s table or on a cathedral side altar. Her work was showcased far and wide, including at the flower festival at St Mary’s Cathedral. In the 1980s she received, during Pope John Paul II’s reign, two papal medals for her work in the church.

We also made a point of going to greet Uncle Joey and his family.

After 1970 – when Ivan learnt to drive and acquired a car and I was nine – we would attend Christmas tea in Claremont with his family. His brothers, who all played musical instruments, usually had an impromptu jam session, belting out jazz standards. Aunty Doreen and Granny Davids served apple tart and cream, Granny’s fruit cake (which did have brandy in it) and her homemade ginger beer, and an assortment of savouries.

The big, all-out party was on January 1, the first day of the new year and also Mavie’s birthday. That party lasted all day and evening and visitors just pitched, no invites.

The day before, a feast would be prepared. Tarts and sponge cakes were baked. Vegetables were grated and bagged to make bowls of salad the next morning. Corned meats were cooked. A day or two earlier smoked turkeys and cold meats were collected from Ken Higgins, the butcher. Savouries were made just before the guests arrived.

It was always a big surprise to see who would turn up. Some guests only saw each other on that day every year, but they fell into conversation with ease, picking up where they’d left off the previous year.

In spite of the forced removals happening all over Cape Town, community spirit prevailed in the older, more established areas. As apartheid’s grip tightened, this community spirit seemed to obtain greater significance, perhaps a matter of the star burning brightest before it faded.

Mavie outside the nurses’ residence at Somerset Hospital, Green Point, 1950s.

Mavie did her duty to help the sick and elderly in her family and those she knew in the community. This included changing wound dressings, bathing an elderly cancer-ridden woman, and giving daily injections to a teacher friend who had tuberculosis in the fallopian tubes. Sometimes, Mavie’s duties extended to laying out of the dead, just after the doctor and priest had been there, and before the undertakers turned up.

It was a way to use the nursing skills she learnt at Somerset Hospital. She often said she would have preferred to still be a nurse, but once she took a breather from nursing (after a crippling bout of anxiety during her final oral exams) there was always something that kept her rooted to the house in Lansdowne.

I think she missed those years living at the nurses’ residence in Green Point, and she always spoke in glowing terms of her colleagues. She related many tales of that time: what it was like to work on the wards, going to see off nurses who were leaving for England, taking a Union Castle Line boat from A-berth in the harbour, and being let off Christmas Eve night shift duty to attend midnight mass at Sacred Heart in Green Point. It seems to me one always remembers those first tentative steps toward independence from family. If that time is coupled with achievement, the passing of that period leads to a lifetime of nostalgia and reminiscences.

On many afternoons, neighbours would drop by unexpectedly to talk through their problems with Mavie. And there were endless problems: teenage pregnancies, cheating husbands and fights with the in-laws.

Mostly, however, the talk revolved around the forced removals and being visited by Community Development officials. The men in white Volksies with GG number plates were the foot soldiers implementing the Group Areas Act in the suburbs. And everybody had the same worries: ‘What now? Where are we going to move to?’

Some evenings at supper, if the food was too salty or had a slightly burnt flavour that Mavie’s rescue missions could not hide, Ivan would say after the first forkful, ‘Mrs Dennis was here,’ or ‘How’s Alida doing?’ He said he could taste in the food that they’d been.