Exploring a rarity

Marie-Lais Emond

Each week Marie-Lais scouts another urban reach, tasting, testing alternative aspects to pique our curiosity about places and people we might have had no idea about. This week she’s Fook isolated.

Before this became an island, it was already isolated. Pawel and I are before a kind of history wall of the main house originally designed by Norman Eaton, examining prints of his 1939 construction that is surrounded by sepia veld.

The adjacent side of the room features a wall-Battiss, in the style of bushman rock art. Walter Battiss was taken with this early art form in his own early painting days and he came by this Eaton house in those days. In the intervening years, someone has attempted a clean-up because a kudu and some smaller antelope have been almost wiped off the face of the wall by Handy Andy or something.

The Battiss Fook Island concept was born later, possibly in the fifties, while he was rebelling against what he saw at London exhibitions, but being impressed by Picasso. He set off to visit real islands then.

I reach the upstairs bedroom, once the studio of Battiss, now occupied by a daughter of the owner’s family, giant teddy bears, pink tulle and another wall-Battiss, this one a decade later. It is surrounded by a burglar alarm cable, assuredly the originator’s own work.

Even further work, part of his Fook Island period, is the big King Ferd-the-Third seal set into the wooden bathroom floor.

The Fook Island concept occupied him and Norman Catherine through many exhibitions of the seventies. Battiss had populated his concept with animals such as a twin-headed dodo and the doggy zyptozook, plants and people. King Ferd III ruled, though Battiss said anyone could be king or queen of Fook Island.

In the courtyard surrounded by lofty palms, the guesthouse owner says he is surprised Battiss had them, because “he was not fond of palms”. Maybe, but Fook Island palms were famously supposed to be so short that people could pluck the coconuts. Perhaps these outgrew Fook rules.

Battiss Guesthouse is now a section of the Fook Island property, other cottages sold off individually. King Ferd keeps cropping up here in engravings, carvings and stained glass, looking not unlike the Walter Battiss I used to see at my mother’s Pretoria house, in his studiedly mismatched shoes. The little tuft of hair above the chin is a confirmer. Fook Island stands out from the rest of Menlo Park.