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.
