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. Grandpa Jack, Grandma Florie, Aunties Stella and Dor (my appointed godmother), Uncle Joey and even the always-cross Meneer Wilfie all doted on Bronnie. They all had a new toy to play with and I had lots of visitors.
‘What the hell!’ Ivan was said to have exclaimed just after my birth. ‘She has a bladdie crown of thorns on her head. Look how it stands up. And look at the button nose. Have you ever seen anything like it?’
It was to be my first inkling about how important appearance and looks were to the community I had been born into. Coloureds were weird that way: they’d roll an imaginary dice and take bets on what a pregnancy would deliver. Would it come out dark to the fair, or fair and blue-eyed to the dark? Everybody maliciously waited for dark children to be visited on fair relatives, especially those who had opted to be reclassified white.
And then the offspring all go through a lifetime of the vicious game of trek die siel uit? which entailed drawing out the child’s ‘spirit’ to ascertain temperament. They would tease and mock and provoke, a disruptive and unnecessary thing to do. After which the poor kid would be boxed in by the often-repeated line of ‘you take after so and so’.
Labelling is very limiting, and it was unpleasant to be subjected to trek die siel uit? by grownups in the extended family. It was a nuisance, especially when you had better things to do, like playing outside, colouring-in and drawing.
My own family did not taunt and tease as much as outsiders, probably because they were too busy with all kinds of chores. My older cousins popped out fair, dark, in-between, dark, blonde and blue-eyed (times two), medium, medium, medium, fair, blond and blue-eyed, and so it would alternate until there was me and four more after me who were all similarly varied. The blond and blue-eyed cousins were unpretentious coloureds who lived in Bridgetown.
My looks attracted much comment, some quite nasty, mostly from females in great-grandma Sophie’s family. They thought I may have Down syndrome or cerebral palsy. I was always sickly. On top of which I didn’t resemble anyone in either my mother or my father’s families.
Seeing that they had so much to say, they might have urged Mavie to ask Dr Cliffie Louw to check me out for autism. It might have satisfied their need to label me. We certainly travelled the distance to Athlone often enough for a snotty nose, tonsillitis and all other childhood diseases. I stoically endured the stick stuck on the tongue and the ‘Say ahh’ or the occasional injection of antibiotics. My consolation was to admire the front garden at the surgery with its fountain and fishpond. When Dr Louw emigrated to Canada, we went to Drs Sakinofsky and Osrin’s surgery where Dor worked. And still no further tests for whatever was ‘wrong’ with me.
Make no mistake, appearances always came first in the community I grew up in. People contradicted themselves when they quoted the English proverb, ‘Do not judge a book by its cover’. I suppose this applied only to some and not others.
Ivan’s suspicions about my oddity were confirmed when I grew into toddlerhood and started talking. I acquired an imaginary friend named Dali. I received dark looks of censure and he’d snap at me to stop.