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.
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