The last of the whites.

The last of the whites

‘My name? Abir, my name is Abir. My ouma was also Abir, she’s long gone now of course. I well remember her flowers, her kitchen always smelt of flowers. Spices too, and baking. Fragrance, Abir means fragrant. I was very young then and scared of her big black iron oven. It always seemed to throb with heat. Wood, it burnt mountain logs, denneboom mostly, also gum. I loved the smell of pine. I also remember a house in Claremont near the mosque, the Claremont Main Road Mosque. The Mosque is still there of course, but not our house, not any of the other tiny row houses. There are shops there now, shops for the larnies – well, I hear it’s no longer just whites, but I’ve never been there. I won’t. Ouma lived alone in a stone cottage close by the Kerk. I don’t remember Oupa. He died in a sawmill accident. The water mill up at Paradise. We would walk to her from Claremont. Aisha holding my hand. She’s gone too. Just two rooms, the kitchen and a bedroom. I don’t remember a bathroom, maybe there was one, maybe there wasn’t. There was water in the kitchen, cold water, a big shiny brass tap, a huge stone sink. The water piped straight from the mountain. I remember the taste of that mountain water. Maybe the sink wasn’t inside. It was on the stoep, under the lean-to. I also remember acorns, collecting fairy cups.’

Here, below the main entrance to Kirstenbosch Gardens and behind the old stone church, (the Church of the Good Shepherd), the Liesbeek River rises from the confluence of the Windows and the Protea streams (the Protea itself rises in the Gardens where the Nursery, Skeleton and Vaalkat streams meet). Liesbeek - reed stream - named by our country’s original settler, Jan Van Riebeeck, he perhaps named it for the Palmiet that sometimes clog the fast running winter waters, or perhaps he named it after the small river of the same name near to his birth town in the Netherlands. Either way it was the first river in our land to be given a written name. But surely the original people knew it by a very different name, a name passed down through the ages by oral tradition, a name full of consonant clicks, long forgotten now, back then discarded by Europeans, unpronounceable.     

Surrounded by oaks a spring rises here, long since made into a square pool framed with blocks of Table Mountain granite, blocks worn smooth from generations of mothers and girl children rubbing and beating their laundry. Mothers of families who lived here. Families of freed slaves brought to the Colony from “Coromandel” on the east coast of India or from Indonesia or cheaply bought from kings of Madagascar. Families of woodcutters, gardeners, flower sellers, and roadbuilders. A spring of clear cold water and memories. For a few months a goldfish, a white one, was at home here.

‘The flowers. I remember the flowers. Ouma’s neighbour would cut flowers and sell them from steel buckets.’

The Group Areas Act came, and by force, (force of the law, force of the batons and sjamboks), all those families were removed and discarded throughout the desolate windswept sands of the Cape Flats. They were not white enough to be allowed to live here.

Since then this place has been unused and nature has made it beautiful. A lovely place reserved for people officially classified as white. Slegs Blankes. When democracy eventually arrived all such signs, notices and laws were removed and discarded. There’s little trace of them now.  

Soon after the winter solstice, and for three months more, the open meadow and the far meadow are a carpet, made white by a succession of spring flowers. Different species yet all of them white. Slegs Blankes. It’s winter yet and the first to promise spring are the small bells of childhood – snowdrops as I remember them. But not quite snowdrops, these are of a different genus. A different classification, taxonomically. These too grow from bulbs but have a tiny olive-green dot on each petal. “Spring Snowflakes” – Leucojum vernum (from the Greek Leuco – white, and vernum – spring). Around and between the three shaded ponds the Snowflakes have found a little late winter warmth clustered at the north facing base of the old tall bare oaks. These ponds are fed by the spring, and so remind me of fishing at the pike ponds of my early teens and bring memories of Colin who taught me how to whip rings onto a cane rod and to wire a barbed hook onto a glittering silver spinning spoon. A memory too of taking home a jack pike that died in a bath of shallow tap water. The result of a forced removal.

‘We were all born in Mowbray maternity home. Aisha, me, Nadia. My Oom, my mother’s brother, took me by train from Bonteheuwel. We were living there then. In the flats. He took me to meet my new baby sister. That one was Nadia. She’s gone too. I’m the only one left. I did so want children but could never have them. I would have been a good mother.’   

A few weeks later, as the Snowflakes are finishing, it’s the turn of the “Paperwhites” to cover both open ground and the damp loamy soil under tree canopies. Narcissus tazzeta. Tiny these, a cluster, an umbel, on a single stem. A wonderful fragrance. A scent that I can smell even now, six months after the last one left us. Here so many that I felt no guilt in taking a small bunch, six or eight stems, to scent the house.

Alongside and amongst the Paperwhites, Arum Lillies are in flower. Spectacular, bold white flowers, home to ladybugs, black with white dots, one to each flower. A tiny orange footed frog makes a home inside the flower. I’ve yet to find one. These arums are harvested (illegally) at night as a micro enterprise to be sold from plastic buckets at the traffic lights on Paradise Road.

People, probably the gardeners who once lived here, lined the rough central path with Camellia bushes that must now be well over sixty years old, maybe even decades older than that. These too are in white flower (two or three bushes are blush or rose pink – but that merely accents my story).   

Three weeks more and wild garlic flowers (the white ones – not the mauve) appear in spots of marshy ground. These are Tulbaghia fragrans “Alba” named after Ryk Tulbagh, a governor of the Cape Colony who sent plants from the Cape to Carl Linnaeus for him to classify. My children would bruise their leaves to release the garlic scent and rural Zulu people plant them around their beehive huts to discourage snakes. In the open, the ground is covered with Harlequin flowers - six pointed stars. But these Harlequins belie their name. They are pure white save for a golden centre. Opportunistic plants. They waste no energy in growing stems any longer than is necessary to make their flowers known to pollinators. Where the wild grasses are short, the stems are just ten centimetres tall and where the grasses grow longer or more dense the Harlequins can grow to sixty centimetres.

‘I hated living in Bonteheuwel. We had to walk up three floors of open stairs and in winter the rains soaked me to the skin. In springtime the winds tried to knock me off and the blown sand hurt my face. The place was noisy, always shouting, loud arguments. Streets packed with people, lounging, talking, drinking, smoking. The big boys called me vulgar names and tried to drag me behind the sheds.’   

Sunday birdsong at the end of September, the spring equinox has come and gone, the order of morning prayer at the stone church is completed and the full moon has forgotten its own order and time: hanging low, a smudge over Castle Rock – the castellated buttress between Nursery Ravine and Skeleton Gorge. Clustered around the bases of the larger trees, in deeper shade, are the Dietes iridioides, the beautiful Forest Lily - a white iris flower with a yolk coloured stripe on just two of its petals – pollen guides.

‘After we moved out to Mitchell’s Plain life was better. We had a proper house. Still a row house, two up, two down. There I was a school teacher before we moved back to the City, to Retreat. I loved teaching.’ 

By mid-October the grasses will be tall, the rains a memory and early summer heat will have finished off the last of the whites. But their legacy will live on, cool underground, as corms, bulbs, tubers and fleshy white rhizomes. Dormant, hibernating all through the hot summer and the cold wet winter until the ground warms a degree or two, a harbinger of the next spring, and with it they return.

‘Over the last years I have been contacted by the people organising the return to Kirstenbosch. I am on the list. I have seen the plans, they look lovely. But it’s too late for me. I’m too old, I shan’t move again except in a shroud of pure white cloth, my Kafan. Nadia’s son, my nephew, he is very keen, he wants to move there, he’s on the committee for the new houses.’