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.
Home, sugary home
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
