Return to Corriebush

by Lynn Bedford Hall

  5 ml (1 tsp) mild curry powder

  2 ml (1⁄2 tsp) turmeric

  2 ml (1⁄2 tsp) ground cinnamon

  1 medium knob fresh root ginger, peeled and grated – about 10 ml (2 tsp)

  750 ml (3 cups) chicken or vegetable stock

  a little sea salt

  2 bay leaves

  125–200 ml (1⁄2–4⁄5 cup) milk

  fresh lemon juice

  fresh coriander leaves to garnish

  Heat the oil and butter in a large saucepan, add the onion and, when soft and golden, add the pumpkin, potato, apples and spices and toss together over low heat for about 2 minutes, until coated and aromatic. Add the stock, salt and bay leaves, bring to the boil, then cover and simmer over very low heat until the vegetables are soft – about 25 minutes. Cool to lukewarm, remove the bay leaves and purée in a blender, in batches, until absolutely smooth. Reheat, adding just enough milk to achieve a medium-thick consistency – the soup should be velvety and creamy even though there’s no cream in it. Check the seasoning, and if the flavour needs sharpening add a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. Ladle into soup bowls and top each serving with a few coriander leaves. Serves 6.

  Smoked Salmon & Green Bean Salad

  Because smoked salmon is expensive, it’s a good idea to pad it out with other ingredients to make it go further. If you choose these ingredients carefully the result will be creative, rather than mean. In the following starter salad the addition of anchovies and slim-as-a-bridge-pencil green beans do the trick, and the result is an unusual combination, topped with just a flutter of salmon and served with lightly buttered rye bread. Nevertheless, it is a special-occasion and not a budget salad.

  400 g very slim green beans, trimmed and halved diagonally

  or 300 g green beans and 200 g button mushrooms, wiped and thinly sliced

  1 large onion, sliced into thin rings

  2 ml (1⁄2 tsp) dried dill

  1 large red or yellow pepper, seeded, ribs removed, and julienned

  120–160 g smoked salmon, rolled and thinly shredded

  sour cream, milled black pepper and lemon slices to garnish

  DRESSING

  100 ml (2⁄5 cup) oil

  1 × 50 g can anchovy fillets, drained and briefly soaked in milk, then drained again

  a few tufts of parsley

  30 ml (2 Tbsp) fresh lemon juice

  a pinch of sugar

  Cook the beans, mushrooms (if using), onion and dill in a little unsalted water in a large frying pan until the beans are tender and still bright green – don’t cover the pan completely, keep the lid tilted. While this is happening, make the dressing by placing the oil, half the anchovies and the rest of the ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. When the beans are ready, drain (but do not refresh), place in a bowl, pour the dressing over, fork in the red or yellow pepper, cool, then cover and chill for 3–4 hours. Just before serving, toss in the remaining anchovies, chopped, and arrange on individual small plates. Top with the salmon, a dollop of sour cream, and a dusting of pepper, and place a slice of lemon on the side. Serve with rye bread. Makes 6 small servings.

  Salad with Rosemary Pears & Blue Cheese Dressing

  A salad always gets a meal off to a good start, but, to qualify as a starter, it has to be different from the usual tossed green salad. This one is. A combination of leafy greens with roasted peppers, walnuts and subtly perfumed pears, it looks lovely piled onto a large platter*, allowing diners to help themselves. Easy to prepare in advance, and the quantities for leafy ingredients are adaptable, depending on the number of diners; the pears will slot into a salad for four to six, so double up for a jumbo salad; the dressing, served separately, will do for about 10 servings.

  BASE SALAD

  A mixture of baby spinach, rocket, watercress and lettuce leaves.

  PEPPERS

  2 large red peppers, halved, seeds and ribs removed, opened out flat and grilled until blistered and blackened. Cover with a damp towel, remove skin and slice into strips.

  PEARS

  Peel and halve 3 large, not-quite-ripe pears, e.g. Packham’s. Place in a wide pan, rounded sides up, sprinkle each half with a pinch of sugar and 5 ml (1 tsp) lemon juice, add 250 ml (1 cup) water and 2 × 10 cm sprigs rosemary, bring to the boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, until just tender – test by pricking with a skewer. Leave to cool uncovered (the perfume is a knock-out), then remove the pears with a slotted spoon and refrigerate. Before serving, remove pips and cores and slice into segments.

  TOPPING

  Coarsely chopped walnuts or pecan nuts.

  DRESSING

  250 ml (1 cup) oil (half olive, half canola or sunflower)

  90 ml (6 Tbsp) fresh lemon juice

  60 g blue cheese, crumbled (or more to taste)

  5 ml (1 tsp) Worcestershire sauce

  1 small clove garlic, chopped

  a few tufts of parsley

  2 spring onions, chopped

  a little trickle of honey

  Place in a blender and blend until creamy. Pour into a jug or jar, refrigerate, and shake or whisk just before serving. Optional: for a milder, creamier dressing, stir in up to 125 ml (1⁄2 cup) thick plain yoghurt.

  ACCOMPANIMENT

  Baguette slices, brushed with olive oil, lightly toasted and rubbed with a cut clove of garlic.

  * Use a large, shallow platter in order to show off the different ingredients and colours before they all get mixed up.

  Flora

  Corriebush was a neat little town.

  ‘Shipshape is how we describe it,’ the women would inform visitors when taking them round to show off the sights.

  And they certainly had reason to feel proud, for the houses were regularly whitewashed, or painted in pastel shades; hedges always clipped as straight as arrows; and every garden meticulously designed – with flowers blooming in circular beds, and birdbaths or jolly gnomes planted neatly in the centres. Each front gate displayed a street number in shiny, polished brass, and many had name-plaques: Ons Huisie, ‘Rest-Awhile,’ or a combination of the owners’ first names – like Charlie and Nellie, who called their house ‘Charnel.’

  The council regularly trimmed all the trees lining the pavements, except for the jacarandas, because everyone loved the purple blooms that floated down and carpeted the streets. There were no litter bins, because nobody littered. It was a neat town.

  There was only one house in the whole of Corriebush that was totally neglected. The women were discussing it over tea on Lily’s stoep.

  ‘A dreadful sore eye.’

  ‘Eye-sore, Sophia.’

  ‘Eye-sore. It gives the town a bad name.’

  ‘Lowers the tone of the place.’

  ‘I can’t understand why somebody doesn’t buy it. There’s lots of potential there, they could do it up very nicely.’

  ‘I wonder who built it in the first place?’

  ‘Servaas says it was a convict who escaped from England on a ship, but then he died, and now it’s haunted.’

  ‘Ag, Servaas and his nonsense.’

  Certainly the house did look spooky, standing lonely and scarred in the middle of a forest of weeds and twisted trees. The shutters hung limply, whipped loose by years of shrill winter winds, while a century of sun had raked the plaster from the bleached, pitted walls. The windows stared blindly, all shattered and empty, with only a jagged pane here and there reflecting glints of blue sky. It was a dead house.

  And then one day, a lorry rumbled down the main street, a huge lorry loaded with bricks, bags of cement and wooden beams. With a loud grinding of gears and a great deal of hooting and bumping, it climbed the pavement before turning sharply into Marigold Avenue, where it grumbled to a stop outside the old house.

  No sooner had the driver pulled up the brake when Lily was there. Amelia was not far behind, untying her apron as she rounded the corner, followed by Anna and Sophia and Nellie and Maria. But Daleen – Corriebush’s estate agent – had beaten
them to it, and was standing, notebook in hand, looking important.

  ‘What’s going on here Daleen? Have you sold it at last? You didn’t tell us anything!’

  Daleen took some time to answer, first chatting to the driver, then directing him, waving her arm this way and that. ‘Swing this way! No, no, sharp left. That’s it. Now reverse. Slowly, slowly, that’s right, try revving a little bit now. There you go! Brilliant!’

  ‘DALEEN?’

  ‘Just a minute Lily. I’ll tell you everything later, when I’ve supervised the delivery. It’s a tricky job, you know, and I’m in charge. Cash client. A V.I.P.’

  The lorry finally made it into the pot-holed driveway, coming to rest in a fog of dust and engine fumes. When everything had been dumped, Daleen sat down on a broken log.

  ‘It’s a rich lady from the coast. She made enquiries, top secret you know, and I posted her all the details and she sent an architect to draw up plans for renovation. Then she bought it on the spot – no, I’m a professional and I cannot disclose the sum. That wouldn’t be ethical, and if I’m anything, I’m ethical. The lady said she was buying it on behalf of a good friend, and she thought it would suit her perfectly.’

  ‘Well, that’s very nice,’ said Sophia, swatting the air with her hands. ‘But if that driver doesn’t get himself fitted with a new exhaust pipe I’m not coming again.’

  Nevertheless, she joined the others as they eagerly watched the house mushroom into life: sash windows, two gables, a teak front door and a verandah all the way round with a view over the town and straight onto the mountain. The garden was cleared and planted with calendulas and nasturtiums, which surrounded a fishpond with a mermaid in the middle. After three months the job was complete. And then the furniture arrived.

  ‘Antique stuff,’ Amelia told Daniel, who knew about furniture.

  ‘A yellowwood dining table, two Paul Kruger chairs, a stinkwood riempie bench for the verandah, a four-poster bed, a French armoire and a linnekas and …’

  ‘Enough. There’s a story there. Suddenly a woman no-one has ever heard of, a total stranger with a lot of money, buys a dilapidated house in Corriebush, fixes it up, then dispatches a friend to come and live in it. Strange. Very strange. Tell Lily to go and find out more.’

  Flora Lategan arrived on Wednesday of the following week, and the women knew immediately because they had been keeping a daily watch. On the Tuesday the house was, as Nellie said, up and running but as quiet as a mouse, and then on the Wednesday evening – right out of the blue – there was a woman sitting on the stinkwood bench on the front verandah.

  ‘We must call on her,’ Lily told them, when they had gathered in her kitchen after supper. ‘Tomorrow. With a few eats and maybe one of those fancy cards. “Wishing You Bunches of Happiness In Your New Home”. Something like that.’

  ‘I’ll bake scones,’ said Nellie.

  ‘I’ll take the jam,’ said Amelia.

  ‘Pumpkin fritters for me,’ said Sophia.

  And so they arrived all together the next morning, lifting the new brass knocker on the front door, quite breathless with the joy of it all, for welcoming strangers to Corriebush was such a pleasure.

  The woman who answered their knock was, they saw immediately, one of their own. Middle-aged and smiling. Kind, gentle face. Hair in a bun. ‘Goodness gracious me!’ she exclaimed, clapping her hands. ‘Isn’t this a surprise! Come in, come in!’ And she put out her hand. ‘Flora Lategan from up the coast, near Plet. But just call me Florrie. Everyone does. Sometimes even Floribunda. I don’t mind.’

  One by one they shook her hand and introduced themselves.

  ‘Well now, do sit down. Where shall we go? The dining room is a bit dusty still, so maybe the kitchen is the place, if you ladies don’t mind?’ They were delighted, other people’s kitchens were always of great interest to them. Surprisingly, it turned out to be an old-fashioned sort of kitchen. Large deal table, an Aga stove, open wooden dresser hung with china cups. ‘I wanted a kitchen just like Martha’s,’ said Flora. ‘To remind me of her always.’

  ‘Quite so,’ they nodded, not understanding any of it.

  ‘Such a lovely lady,’ Flora went on. ‘All this that you see here is thanks to Martha.’

  ‘How very kind,’ they agreed.

  ‘It’s not every day that somebody gives one a house.’

  ‘With furniture and everything.’

  ‘Is Martha your rich aunt, then?’

  ‘Ag, I’m so stupid. Of course you don’t know Martha. But let me first pour the tea and butter these delicious scones you brought, and then we can ‘chew the fat’ as they say.’

  Sophia couldn’t wait. ‘Never mind the fat, Florrie. We’ve all got enough of that. We’re just longing to know who you are. I mean, we like you very much and all that, but we don’t know anything about anything. And so on,’ she finished, losing her thread completely.

  Anna came to the rescue.

  ‘What is your trade, Florrie?’

  ‘She means profession,’ Lily quickly corrected her.

  ‘I’m a district nurse,’ Florrie answered. ‘You know, I go round with my medical kit and visit sick people in their homes.’

  ‘And then?’ Sophia was back again, wanting to know.

  ‘Well, I try to help them, and sometimes my patients become my friends. It goes like that with district nurses.’

  ‘And then?’

  Flora realised there was no stopping Sophia. She would simply have to begin at the beginning. ‘Fill your cups,’ she told them. So they poured quickly, and then sat back eagerly, waiting.

  ‘It all started in Plettenberg Bay. My agency sent me there, and one of my patients was a lady called Martha Foster. She lived alone, in a big house overlooking the bay. She kept to herself, seldom leaving the house, spending most of her time sitting on a bench in her garden looking out to sea.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘Before my first visit I asked the people in the village about her. It always helps if you have a little background about your patients before you start. And they told me her story.’

  Immediately the women fell silent. This was what they loved best, and the very air in the kitchen rippled with anticipation. Their tea grew cold, the scones lay crumbled, half-eaten.

  ‘Martha Foster was a lovely girl. Tall and slender with gypsy-dark eyes and long, wavy black hair. Sometimes she drew it back and tied it with a red ribbon, but usually it swung free and shining, the colour of midnight, and when she walked in the wind it wrapped round her like a cloak. She and Edward Bellamy made a striking pair and the villagers always turned to look as they passed, for he was as fair as she was dark, and they were young and in love.

  ‘Ag siestog,’ said Sophia.

  ‘The wedding was set to coincide with Martha’s eighteenth birthday and, once the engagement had been announced, the small community hummed with excitement. This, everyone knew, was to be a memorable wedding because Martha Foster was no ordinary village girl. She had been only four years old when her parents had been drowned in a shipwreck. Sailing to England, the Crusader had run aground in a storm near Algoa Bay, and Martha’s guardian had brought her to live with her great-aunt Dora.’

  The women were leaning forward now, elbows on the table, eyes fixed on Flora. Romantic stories were their favourites.

  ‘Dora Foster was an artist, a spinster who had settled in a small cottage in the village, because painting seascapes was her speciality. Finding that she was suddenly in charge of a four-year-old child came as a big shock. She wasn’t at all sure how to handle the little girl, so she simply sent her off each morning to spend her days with the other village children. And so Martha grew up barefoot and free, a child of the wind and the water just like the rest of them.

  ‘Until the day Aunt Dora told her about the money.’

  ‘The money?’

  ‘Now there’s a thing.’

  ‘I knew there was a twist coming.’

  Florrie ignored the interruption
s.

  ‘It was the morning of Martha’s tenth birthday. Aunt Dora called her to come to her studio – a small, dusty room, slanted with sunlight and splashed with easels and paint. Stepping back from the canvas on which she was working, she cocked her head to one side and said, ‘You should know, child, that on your eighteenth birthday you will inherit the Foster fortune.’ That was all. The old lady dipped her brush into the purple paint-water and, head, still on one side, returned to her easel.

  ‘The villagers said a few of them had been listening at the open window while Dora was speaking, and that Martha had stood quite still in a pool of sunlight. The child was probably having a wonderful vision of bags and bags full of gold coins. Then she skipped out of the room and down the sandy track to tell her friends. The children told their parents, and the news rippled through the village. The child was an heiress. She would be a very rich lady. ‘But whom,’ they asked, ‘will the poor little thing marry?’

  ‘Ag shame.’ Sophia could not help herself.

  ‘Not one of their sons, they decided sadly. Not a mere fisherman’s son. No, her groom would have to be a man from the city, or even a foreign country, not a poor fisherman’s son. And from that day Martha was set apart. Not unkindly; the children still played with her as they had always done, but she gradually became aware that she was no longer one of them. The fact of the matter was that she was an heiress with a destiny far beyond that of the average village child.’

  ‘Florrie does use big words,’ whispered Nellie.

  ‘Shhh. She’s not a district nurse for nothing.’

  ‘They watched as Martha grew from a sunburnt, leggy waif to a slender beauty. They watched while the other girls of her age were pairing off with boys, and Martha was never approached. The local lads were friendly enough, helped carry her school books and so on – but they never kissed her round corners the way they kissed the other girls. They knew her story. She was too grand for them. And Martha began to feel really lonely and bewildered. Until the day – the memorable day – that Edward Bellamy arrived in the village.

  ‘It was a crisp, clear morning in the middle of winter, when the sand squeaked cold underfoot, and the waves – navy blue, winter waves – splintered on the beach like ice on stone. The men were out in their boats on the bay, their wives busy mending their nets, spread out like giant cobwebs on the silky sand. Striding along the water’s edge came a barefoot and bronzed young man, kitbag in hand, long blonde hair down to his shoulders. Edward was a sailor. No-one knew where he had come from, but he turned up that winter’s day and before the sun had set in the evening all the women were clucking with excitement. Here was a stranger, a romantic and handsome stranger, and there was Martha, as ripe and ready to be picked as the juicy pomegranates that grew in every garden – perhaps, perhaps at last …