'PARADISE' AND THE BARNARDS
From Newlands we rode, one glorious afternoon, up a small, conical
hill at the back of Fernwood, or the old homestead 'Boshof.' There are
several ways of arriving, but we, full of enthusiasm, chose to take a
stony path hedged by scented wild-geraniums and ripening blackberry
hedges, along which more than a hundred years ago a big wagon had
rolled, dragging up the hill, as far as the ravines and rocks would
allow, two occupants--Mr. Barnard, His Excellency's secretary, and
Lady Anne, his wife.
There has been a great 'Barnard' cult of late, and the people who have
wondered at the romantic and witty correspondence of Lady Anne and the
Secretary of State for War, Lord Melville, have perhaps gained some
geographical knowledge of the Cape Peninsula one hundred years ago. I
adore Anne for her sense of humour; Marinus adores her for her
faithfulness to Barnard, whom for various reasons I have depicted to
him as a dullish and obliging man.
[Illustration: THE SOUTHERN PART OF THE FALSE BAY, WITH CAPE HANGCLIP]
Behind this overgrown hill at the top of the Newlands Avenue lies
'Paradise,' where Anne Barnard lived during the summer, and which she
called her Trianon!
So Mecca-wards we rode, with the gigantic grey wall of Table Mountain
towering before us.
We turned our horses round to face the Flats! We saw the great plains
before us, once so bare that you could have seen a Hottentot crawling
among the sandhills miles away; the Bosheuvel Hill, or 'Hen and
Chickens,' standing out to the right, with its crown of silver-trees
shivering and shining in the sun. To the east lay False Bay--thousands
and thousands of emeralds set in cream; to the left, the dull, low,
crouching Tygerberg Hills, full of propriety, sleek and smooth. Below
us lay the Bishopscourt woods--the old Company's 'Forest lands' hiding
the river and the squirrels and the black babies of Little Paradise,
or Protea, with the branches of their enormous oak-trees--_chapeauz
bas_ to Wilhelm Adrian Van der Stel.
Anne Barnard wrote other letters than those to Lord Melville; she
wrote in long charming letters to her sisters at home a description of
the pretty little place called 'Paradise,' halfway up the hill, which
Lord Macartney wished her to have; 'how she could not drive up the
hill, but had to alight,' and walk, and thought the way to Paradise
the proverbial path, hard and steep, and thought less and less of His
Excellency's offer the steeper the path became. She writes--all out of
breath:
'On turning round, a sequestered low road appeared, over
which oaks met in cordial embrace--the path which, suddenly
turning, presented to us an old farmhouse, charming in no
point of architecture, but charming from the mountain which
reared itself three thousand feet perpendicular above its
head, with such a variety of spiral and gothic forms,
wooded and picturesque, as to be a complete contrast to the
hill which we had ascended or the plains over which we
gazed. Before the house, _which was raised a few steps from
the court_, there was a row of orange-trees. A garden, well
stocked with fruit-trees, was behind the house, through
which ran a hasty stream of water descending from the
mountain; on the left a grove of fir-trees, whose long
stems, agitated by the slightest breeze of wind, knocked
their heads together like angry bullocks in a most
ludicrous manner.'
'Anne! What do you say to this?'
Mr. Barnard speaks in much admiration. Anne, still breathless, feeling
happier, but her skirts are torn by the blackberries and low bushes:
'Why, that I like it, I am vexed to say, beyond all things.'
His Excellency's Secretary, becoming more elated (Anne having bright
pink in her flushed cheeks): 'And if you do, my dear Anne, why should
we not have it?' (This with all acknowledgment of the lamentable
fact, which I impress upon Marinus, that Anne's approval is the only
thing which will matter; Marinus always argues that in the other scale
are 'Robin Gray' and that packet of letters which Lord Melville tied
up with blue ribbon.)
Anne answers the adoring Barnard, not too decisively: 'Because the
World's end is not so distant as this spot from the haunts of men.'
Barnard's last effort is worthy of a diplomatist; he sighed: 'It's
very charming, however.'
They visited a number of other places, but Barnard's sigh won the day;
and a new road was made to 'Paradise' by the slaves--a road we were
presently to see, still showing the hard brick foundation, winding and
hugging the mountain from the present Groote Schuur Road.
There is a delicious description of a day at 'Paradise' in the
wonderful 'Lives of the Lindsays'--the mad, witty Lindsays! and Anne
was one of them--and she wrote as amusingly and wittily to her sisters
as she wrote to Melville, and she tied up the beautiful Cape wild
flowers in gauze bags to send to 'my dearest Margaret.'
I sometimes think that the letters, which are known to be in a famous
collection kept from the world, must be less philosophical, less
cynical, less amusing, and more in accord with the mood in which Anne
wrote 'Old Robin Gray.'
That in 1797.
This in 1909--Marinus and I asking our way of an old black woodcutter,
with feathery green 'Newlands Creeper' twisted round his hat--that
heirloom of the old slave descendant--a broad, passive grin crinkling
over his face: 'Jaa, Missis; Missis want ole slavy-house--want get by
ole "Paradise"? Yaa, vat I know ole Paradise; working by dese woods
tirty years--fader, grandfader, all working by "Paradise."' So we
followed him, our guide, our ponies scrambling up the slippery,
moss-covered pathway, the trees growing low and thick, obscuring the
sunlight, the dark figure of the woodman always running before us.
Deeper and deeper we plunged into the low woods, when turning suddenly
to the right and going slightly downhill, quite behind the fir-covered
koppie, we came into 'Paradise.' Found! and in ruins! And I picked
ferns from the walls of Anne Barnard's dining-room!
Here was the courtyard with the chief buildings facing north; on the
right, the long stoep showing remains of the curved, rounded steps. On
the left are the walls of lower buildings--probably the kitchens which
the Barnards built.
We left our ponies with the black man and pushed our way in silence
through the overgrown garden, all the terraces still banked up by
small stone walls, now moss-covered, past little garden paths running
along the mountain-stream, and fig-trees long since overgrown and
forgetful of bearing fruit; and higher up towards the mountain we
found two graves and four or five chestnut-trees--'the finest
chestnuts I ever saw by many, many degrees,' says Anne.
But wherever we went the thin, twisted, fantastic oaks, like deformed
gnomes reared in the dark, barred the way of 'Paradise' to intruders,
and with the rustling breeze the frightened squirrels and the ghosts
of this Trianon rushed away before us into the gloom.
Once, when sitting alone, only breathing a little Greek poem of praise
to Pan, I thought I saw a ghost of this dead 'Paradise,' forming
etheresque, vague and elusive, between the green hanging strands of
creepers.... It was only the web of a wood-spider caught in a shaft of
sunlight which had shot through the heavy roof of leaves. The garden
which should have grown the most sensitive plants now grows weeds;
only in a deserted corner we found a quaint, aromatic pink flower with
a scent which suggested the East.
The light was fading; Anne in her letters remarks upon this: 'The sun
sets here in "Paradise" two hours sooner than on the other side of the
hill, which I am told marks its height, but with lamps and candles it
makes no difference. We have nothing here to annoy us--except
mosquitoes and the baboons who come down in packs to pillage our
garden of the fruit with which the trees are laden.'
So we recovered our ponies from the woodcutter, who told us he had cut
wood round 'Paradise' for over thirty years, and followed the
red-brick slave-road which brought us to the middle of the Newlands
Avenue. 'Paradise,' with its shy ghosts, its decay, its charm, and its
memories of Anne, we placed at the back of our minds like little
sacred hidden temples, and the essence of it all burnt like incense in
their shrines.