Somewhere along De Waal Drive, at the foot of Table Mountain, is a
stopping point which allows you to walk up the lower slope of the mountain.
Julia Schweitzer (not her real name) and I had walked this road up onto
the grassy slopes of the lower part of the Table a number of times but, one
day, on a whim, I led her up a track to the right where we had never been
and found a house which couldn’t, can’t, be seen from the road, completely
shielded as it is by the close screen of pine trees filling the property.
We came to a gate which was open, and in front of us lay the house,
nestled with its back against the side of the mountain and facing out
over the vast Cape Flats which lead all the way to Stellenbosch. The
house appeared to have been dropped among the trees, so close to the
walls did they stand. The house itself looked quite unlike anything
favoured by the original Dutch settlers of the Cape, or the Mediterranean
style preferred by the English colonialists who followed them which is
best exemplified in the predominance of the Mediterranean architecture of
he University of Cape Town, further around the foot of the mountain on the
same De Waal Drive.
The house was essentially Cubist in style with its walls filled with windows,
many running floor to ceiling. The house had been clearly built in an earlier
era, before the advent of large panel float glass introduced by Pilkington
and others in the nineteen sixties. So the windows were sectioned into foot
by foot panels, supported by angle iron. The house was very slab sided and,
to the best of my recollection, had a flat roof. It was large, not to say,
extensive. Cubist in shape it may have been, but its colouring was drab.
The exterior palette had been chosen to match the greens and browns of the
surrounds. The effect was to blend in to the point of almost invisibility.
A rather aged woman in house clothes, with greying silver hair, glistening
in the dappled late afternoon sun, streaking low through the surrounding
trees, pulled back tight to her head, was gardening in front of the house.
The garden was more a kitchen garden than showpiece, it too blending in
with the surrounding scrub so characteristic of the area.
We, Julia and I, stood in the open gateway spellbound by our discovery,
silent. The woman, sensing our presence, bent up from her work.
Straightening her back with one hand, and pushing a stray grey hair from
above her ear with her wrist, her hands being covered in kitchen gloves,
she turned to look in our direction.
“Come in.” Her voice hailed us in a warm, welcoming
manner across the silence of the trees and the thirty or
forty feet that separated us. A distinct yet undefinable
accent layered through the English. Not South African.
Julia and I scrunched along the stone chip driveway
up to her. And we introduced ourselves, we to her, she to us.
“Let’s go in and have a drink,” she said. “Then I can show
you round the house. You’d like that wouldn’t you?”
We beamed warmly back at her, and followed her round the side of the
house to the kitchen door. Inside, she poured the each of three of us a glass
of wine on a butcher’s block table situated in the centre of the tall ceilinged
kitchen. Then she took us on a tour of the house. As she did so, she told us
the story of how she and husband had come to come to South Africa.
The house had not aged well. Its builders were clearly unfamiliar with the
suitability of the materials being called for by the proud specifying couple
to the climate of the Cape and of its salt laden South Easters. The metal
frames on the windows were flowering, bulging profusely with rust.
Everywhere, fittings and hangings, once pristine, were now prematurely
aged and showing every signs of despairing decay. The atmosphere seemed
more mausoleum than lively household, more archeology than architecture.
A sad remnant of once obvious pride.
Only the artist’s studio, with its abundance of windows, floor to ceiling,
seemed to hold anything like present life. Huge canvases stacked in every
direction hid their faces from us, their subject matter, style, colour,
composition unknown, unknowable; a series of frames and stretchers,
like some newly arrived exhibition, ready for hanging. None that I could
see were hung on the walls and the lady, despite her obvious kindness,
did not offer to display them.
“We came here in 1937,” she told us. “And built this house.”
He was an artist of established reputation in Europe. They foresaw the
terror and horror that the Nazis were about to wreak across the entire face
of Europe and decided to relocate to South Africa. And here they had
remained.
Malcolm D B Munro
Saturday 2 June, 2012
Filed under: poetry
