Cracock - We weren’t planning all this. We thought we were in Cape Town forever, or at least until we got that bug again and decided to while away a year or two in Italy, or in Ireland, spending days writing and nights lingering in local pubs.
This would preferably be a characterful old place with some green-eyed minstrel fingering a fiddle and some dejected poet weeping into his Guinness (if in Ireland) or some Caruso caressing the sweetest notes of O Sole Mio (if in some forgotten village in Calabria). But never the Karoo, and never a restaurant, because we’d done that, ticked those boxes, got it out of our system.
But life has a way of creeping up on you when you least expect it, plonking you down somewhere you hadn’t planned to live. Somewhere you knew, and loved, but had never for a second thought of living. For us, thanks to a delta of serendipity as broad as the Fish River mouth, this has turned out to be Cradock.
Cradock, for us, has for more than two decades been the place that brought me to Olive Schreiner, that led me to research her life and writings and to think about her beliefs and what she felt mattered, and which led to my writing plays about her, the time she lived in and the issues of her day and how they affect ours a century later.
Cradock gave me a lot, but now the town has claimed me. I came to Cradock by chance more than two decades ago. We had carved an alternative route between Durban and Cape Town. We skirted the Drakensberg and Lesotho, visiting towns such as Bergville, Winterton, Clarens, Ficksburg, Aliwal North and, one fateful hour at the end of a long day’s driving, Cradock.
I had booked us, sight unseen, at the Tuishuise, all those years ago. These turned out to be six or so old Karoo houses in Market Street, just off the town square, filled with antiques, awash with character, and I fell in love with them. Much of the “alternative route” story I wrote dealt with this delightful stopover, it was published, the magazine paid me, and I forgot all about it. For 17 years.
Then, one day, after a few years of living in England and a couple more in Sutherland, where we ran a restaurant, and having returned to Cape Town, we decided to retrace that old route. I booked us into the Tuishuise once more, and at the end of a day on the road we trundled into town and into Market Street. They put us in the Lion House, right across from the Victoria Manor Hotel, which by now had become a part of the business, and after freshening up we trotted across the road into the red-painted dining room for their Karoo buffet.
Just before dessert was served, a woman in a big red coat who had been going from table to table arrived at ours, beamed at me, and said, ‘You are Tony Jackman! You are the reason for my success!” Then, after a pause, “And I have been waiting for 17 years to give you a sheep.”
Puzzled, and a little perplexed at the thought that we might have a sheep in the car for company for the rest of the drive back to Cape Town, I half-smiled and half-frowned, muttering “surely not…”. But Sandra Antrobus was insistent, and remains so to this day.
She was to become my angel. She has been there all along the way, as if the fates sent her to me and me to her. That first visit had been about visiting the Schreiner Museum for the first time, which had been her first restoration project. This had given her the bug, and she had gone on to buy up most of the houses on both sides of Market Street and do them up. In the intervening years my fascination with Schreiner had grown, and I had written a play about her, The Knocking (previously titled Bloody England).
On that second visit five years ago, the woman in the red coat spent an evening having a glass or two of wine with us (that’s when I took the picture published here) and told us it was a pity I had not arrived just one week later, when the first annual Schreiner Karoo Writers’ Festival was to be held. One week – after those 17 long years.
Di Cassere, my wife, told her that I had written a play about the feud between Schreiner and Rhodes. Upon which Antrobus said, “Well then, you need to come back next week. We’ll put you on the programme.”
So I did, and I was, to talk about my Schreiner play. And I was asked if I would bring the play to the following year’s festival. Which I did: a staged reading of it with professional actors – Lynita Crofford, Francis Chouler, John Caviggia and my friend Michael Bosazza – presented to an audience that included Professor Paul Walters, who chairs the festival, and such literary luminaries as Etienne van Heerden and Stephen Gray. It was wonderfully received, I was gobsmacked, and my somewhat belated career as a playwright was on its way.
On the Sunday morning at the end of the festival, Sandra sat me down and said, “Right, what are you bringing us next year?” As it happened, I had wanted to “put Emily Hobhouse” on the stage for years, I told her, so the following March I was back in Cradock, writing An Audience With Miss Hobhouse, my first play to go into a professional production.
There are many more points of serendipity for me, Schreiner, and the wonderful woman in the big red coat. Most recently, when certain wheels were coming off in our then work situation in national newspapers, Sandra happened to phone me up and say, “I don’t suppose you might be interested in this, but the lease has suddenly come up at the Schreiner Tea Room after 11 years. Would you and Di be interested in it?”
And so that long road has brought us here. As I write, I have been in the old house at 36 Market Street for a week, and Di has been it it only for three hours. There is thunder clapping in the sky. It could be that the clouds will dampen my plans for a braai tonight and that we may have to trot over to the hotel for the Karoo buffet. And if we do go over the road, the woman in the big red coat will most likely be there.
At Schreiner’s the blackboard is up on a wall of the main dining room, waiting for my scrawled menus. There’s a barrel of kalamata olives in the kitchen waiting to become my signature starter (Olive’s Olives, get it?) and the local farmers are awaiting my call to inquire about their prime lamb, beef and game. We plan to open the doors of Schreiner’s for business within two to three weeks.
That sheep never did happen, by the way. But I have a suspicion it might turn up in my restaurant kitchen any day now. I just hope they slaughter it first.
Weekend Argus