Lansdowne dearest. Bronwyn Davids

resurrection from the grave – rising out of darkness on the third day. The tradition goes back centuries to the days when Christians could not read the Gospels for themselves and the stories were told through images, symbolism and re-enactment. Going to this mass felt like touching the ancient past.

      All Holy days, events and foods went according to the seasons, except at Christmas, when we ate a traditional British meal, as was the custom at the Cape since colonial times. Girls were taught all these dishes by their mothers and in Domestic Science classes at high school, out of a 1948 textbook called Housecraft for Primary Schools by R Fouche and WM Currey. Often new recipes were swopped or cut out of newspapers and British magazines.

      The Christmas meal was oven-roasted leg of lamb with potatoes flavoured with a sectioned onion. The meat (always carved by Dor) was served with cauliflower and white sauce, gem squash and yellow rice, gravy and Dor’s mint leave salad, with chopped onion, salt, pepper and a dash of vinegar.

      The flagship of the meal was always the doekpoeding made days before. Making it was a long process that began with freshening up the calico cloth in which the pudding was boiled. The batter consisted of breadcrumbs, fruit mix and nuts (bought at Wellington’s Fruit Growers in Darling Street in the city centre), flour, eggs, yellow sugar, a little milk, measures of mixed spice, all-spice and cinnamon. The calico would be spread over a colander and the mixture spooned in, before being tied with string and lowered into a big pot of boiling water at the bottom of which was a plate to hold the pudding’s shape and to prevent it from sticking to the pot. There it would steam for five hours.

      The Christmas pudding was served with custard and it would last for days. Mavie did not add coins or brandy, as was the tradition. She would not be caught dead buying brandy, and she feared that coins would lead to choking.

      On Christmas day, the usual visitors would drop by after the morning service before they went off to their own family lunch. They’d be served Bashew’s, the cooldrinks delivered to the door in wooden crates on Friday nights, or tea, and tarts or fruit cake.

      On Christmas Eve we always went to the magical midnight mass at Our Lady Help of Christians. Carols were sung before the High Mass and were followed by a benediction. When I was still a child, Mavie would take me to the morning service.

      A big part of the rituals of Christmas and Easter was to go to Klip Cemetery in Grassy Park to put flowers on the McBain family grave, after which we walked over to the grave of Great-grandpa José Antonio and Great-grandma Minnie, near the World War II soldiers’ graves. Dor’s flower arrangements were of such a high standard they could have easily been used as centrepieces at a bride’s table or on a cathedral side altar. Her work was showcased far and wide, including at the flower festival at St Mary’s Cathedral. In the 1980s she received, during Pope John Paul II’s reign, two papal medals for her work in the church.

      We also made a point of going to greet Uncle Joey and his family.

      After 1970 – when Ivan learnt to drive and acquired a car and I was nine – we would attend Christmas tea in Claremont with his family. His brothers, who all played musical instruments, usually had an impromptu jam session, belting out jazz standards. Aunty Doreen and Granny Davids served apple tart and cream, Granny’s fruit cake (which did have brandy in it) and her homemade ginger beer, and an assortment of savouries.

      The big, all-out party was on January 1, the first day of the new year and also Mavie’s birthday. That party lasted all day and evening and visitors just pitched, no invites.

      The day before, a feast would be prepared. Tarts and sponge cakes were baked. Vegetables were grated and bagged to make bowls of salad the next morning. Corned meats were cooked. A day or two earlier smoked turkeys and cold meats were collected from Ken Higgins, the butcher. Savouries were made just before the guests arrived.

      It was always a big surprise to see who would turn up. Some guests only saw each other on that day every year, but they fell into conversation with ease, picking up where they’d left off the previous year.

      In spite of the forced removals happening all over Cape Town, community spirit prevailed in the older, more established areas. As apartheid’s grip tightened, this community spirit seemed to obtain greater significance, perhaps a matter of the star burning brightest before it faded.

      Mavie outside the nurses’ residence at Somerset Hospital, Green Point, 1950s.

      Mavie did her duty to help the sick and elderly in her family and those she knew in the community. This included changing wound dressings, bathing an elderly cancer-ridden woman, and giving daily injections to a teacher friend who had tuberculosis in the fallopian tubes. Sometimes, Mavie’s duties extended to laying out of the dead, just after the doctor and priest had been there, and before the undertakers turned up.

      It was a way to use the nursing skills she learnt at Somerset Hospital. She often said she would have preferred to still be a nurse, but once she took a breather from nursing (after a crippling bout of anxiety during her final oral exams) there was always something that kept her rooted to the house in Lansdowne.

      I think she missed those years living at the nurses’ residence in Green Point, and she always spoke in glowing terms of her colleagues. She related many tales of that time: what it was like to work on the wards, going to see off nurses who were leaving for England, taking a Union Castle Line boat from A-berth in the harbour, and being let off Christmas Eve night shift duty to attend midnight mass at Sacred Heart in Green Point. It seems to me one always remembers those first tentative steps toward independence from family. If that time is coupled with achievement, the passing of that period leads to a lifetime of nostalgia and reminiscences.

      On many afternoons, neighbours would drop by unexpectedly to talk through their problems with Mavie. And there were endless problems: teenage pregnancies, cheating husbands and fights with the in-laws.

      Mostly, however, the talk revolved around the forced removals and being visited by Community Development officials. The men in white Volksies with GG number plates were the foot soldiers implementing the Group Areas Act in the suburbs. And everybody had the same worries: ‘What now? Where are we going to move to?’

      Some evenings at supper, if the food was too salty or had a slightly burnt flavour that Mavie’s rescue missions could not hide, Ivan would say after the first forkful, ‘Mrs Dennis was here,’ or ‘How’s Alida doing?’ He said he could taste in the food that they’d been.