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
