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 always provide the desired outcome. Being a wood-burning stove, heat distribution was patchy and a jug of water had to be placed in the oven to rectify the problem.
The 22-cm sponge cakes never rose higher than three or four centimetres at the most and always split when removed from the pans. Or they imploded in the middle or they were lopsided. These imperfections were camouflaged by dollops of butter icing. Roped into kitchen duty from an early age, I became an expert butter-icing maker.
Each imperfect cake was welcomed with great enthusiasm and went down well with tea and compliments that it ‘tasted really good’ and ‘yes, I will have another slice, thanks’. Sweet was good, salt was good, fat was good – and you only live once. So there!
Stella’s speciality was coffee cake, made with an essence she guarded with her life. Her chocolate cake was light and fluffy, a genuine chocolatey melting moment. Mavie made fairy cakes, and little tarts with jam or coconut, and her Hertzoggies with a coconut meringue covering the jam. She also made crustless milk tart and tea loaves: banana, raisin, date or ginger.
For a few seasons, she did a roaring trade in rainbow-coloured, two-deck sponge cakes, selling to workers and their families at Strandfontein beach. But that market dried up when Ivan left his job as a beach control officer and became a Divisional Council traffic cop.
Saturday was baking day. We always had lots of visitors on Saturdays, many from Claremont plus the usual neighbourhood friends. People turned up uninvited, bringing prepared but uncooked exotic snacks, like doughnuts, koeksisters and samoosas that they would fry off at our place, or a pot of warm breyani.
Ivan’s speciality was watermelon or fig konfyt, and melon-and-ginger jam which he’d learnt to cook in his youth. Foodwise, he was the king of fry-ups. His version of ouvrou-onder-die-kombers consisted of leftover Sunday roast beef dipped in batter and fried.
He also made all kinds of smoortjies with onions, tomato, garlic polony, smoked snoek or bully beef. Unfortunately, all the frying caught up with him in the end quite suddenly at his desk at the old Regional Services Council building in Wale Street, Cape Town, in 1993. No amount of ballroom dancing and long-distance swimming from Kalk Bay to Muizenberg could offset a diet that bad.
Dor was the head gardener and chief baker. Before she became head flower arranger at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church on Lansdowne Road and was too busy on Saturday afternoons, Dor was usually the one who made the bread, scones and fruit pies, all prepared with careful consideration.
She would pick loquats or guavas and stew them, make the pastry, roll it out, place in Pyrex dishes, add the stewed fruit with whole cinnamon, arrange the pastry lattice on top, brush with egg and entrust it to the oven. The pies were served with a rich golden homemade custard. Fruit from the garden was also often stewed to go with oven-baked sago or tapioca pudding.
Dor also made bread-and-butter pudding and, for special occasions, Queen’s pudding. I’d crumble the white bread slices into a bowl. This she would place in a buttered stainless steel dish. She would scald milk and butter, pour it over the crumbs and let it stand for a few minutes before adding beaten egg yolk, sugar and vanilla essence. The mixture would be baked until set and then covered with jam. She’d beat the egg white until it formed peaks, add a tablespoon of sugar, mixed and spread over the jam. The dish was returned to the oven and baked until the meringue browned slightly. What a queen of a pudding!
In summer she made fruit salad with fruits from the garden plus pawpaw and bananas, which she bought. ‘The pawpaw is what makes the salad taste so great,’ she always said.
Stella made pineapple pudding, which consisted of a tin of Ideal milk, pineapple jelly and a tin of pineapple pieces, blitzed together and left to set in the fridge.
No, we did not have cake and pudding every day. These luxuries were for weekends. For the rest of the week, we had homemade left-over cake and coconut biscuits and store-bought Marie Biscuits and Ouma rusks. They were usually dipped in sweet, milky tea or coffee. The top of the movable, almost two-metre-long kitchen dresser was packed with great numbers of colourful