Cherished memories of youthful blooms

MORNING-GLORY vines twined the mesh- wired and wooden fences which bordered many of the houses on the streets of the Maitland Garden Village of my youth.

These deep-purple flowers were distinctive features of my ouma’s house at 26 Beatty Avenue: they rambled through and over the redberried, evergreen hedge of the semi- detached cottage where the Verwey family had lived since the 1930s.

Pink and blue dappled Christmas flowers (hydrangeas) grew on the side of the house along the short road linking Beatty Avenue to Discovery Avenue.

It was here that my grandfather, Jacobus Verwey, aka “Derra”, suspicious about the wilting state of his usually flourishing, prize-winning dahlias, on a whim did an early morning patrol of his garden. He chanced upon a fellow City Council worker taking a leak on his cherished flowers.

My ouma often related this incident and in later years my mother continued what has become part of the family’s archival memory. The details of the narrative, such as the type of flowers that benefitted from this salty benediction, would change. But the constant feature of this possibly allegorical tale was Derra’s heroic vigilance and, more importantly, that he was a wonderful gardener.

I don’t recall ever being told how the matter was resolved.

Maybe the story was just the story and I had to elicit some teaching determined by my intellectual stamina and moral sense at any given time in my life. But the Weeder/Verwey hermeneutic continues as my children now too are the custodians of the tale about the flowers and the urinating saboteur.

Our memories are the means by which we can enter into sensemaking conversations with ourselves and others.

A positive aspect of social media is its capacity to enable us to remember our private histories as part of a body of ideas of others who shared aspects of our communal story.

A conversation this week with a lady who works at Wordsworth Books at the Gardens Centre, nudged me across a bridge into my past. I learnt not only was she an exVillager but had lived in Discovery Avenue across from the Andersons. This family was famous, to me at least, for owning a refrigerator and so we could buy iced-lollies from a kind and cheerful Mrs Anderson.

I then posted on my Facebook wall a poem based on an incident from those distant days. We walked, my four year old brother and I, the short, after Sunday lunch amble to Mrs Anderson on Discovery around the corner and down from Beatty Avenue. On our way back, relishing the icedsuckers bounty of our visit; without thought, I guided Mark to the other side of the narrow road lined by a morning-glory hedge. The overhead, electric wire fell, writhing down, angry, where we’d just been a lick and a smack-of-lips away. Then, my mother’s running scream of fear and loss. Her crushing embrace. The antiphon of her “Dankie-tog, Jesus,” the whirr of ascending, angel wings.

Sandra van der Rheede, who had lived on Alexander Avenue, was one of the first respondents: “I have such fond memories of Garden Village Primary school, where I started Sub A. Waiting every week for the mobile library. Picking up pine nuts in Pinelands. My mother, Meisie Hoffman, used to speak often of Dollar Brand as they were friends.”

It seemed as if every youngster who ever had any association with the Village would’ve descended on Pinelands to gather pine nuts. My memory of this was roasting them on my granny’s Dover Stove on our return from the shaded streets on the other side of the Cape Flats line.

The pine trees lining the road from the railway station to Central Square were lofty and most regal to my young eyes. There were morning-glories there too but ours were definitely more lovely. Even our dahlias and the village Christmas flowers.