Tent Travels: A special lunch in a dusty little town

TWO must-see Nieu Bethesda tourist attractions serve as memorials for the little Eastern Cape town’s most famous children.

The Owl House, once the home of eccentric and troubled artist Helen Martin, is now a museum that showcases her work and tells the fascinating story of her life. It is this attraction that has put the town so firmly on the tourist map but the lesser known Kitching Fossil Museum is well worth seeing, too. It houses an informative display that tells the 200-million-year-old fossil story of the Karoo.

It also commemorates the work of Professor James Kitching, the former head of the Bernard Price Institute for Palaeontology Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, who grew up in Nieu Bethesda. After his death in 2003 his colleagues said he was “one of the scribes of the story as told by the rocks of the Karoo”.

We’d spent time at both these places on previous visits and had found them fascinating. However, even without them we would have liked Nieu Bethesda, a little town of dusty streets, whitewashed houses, gossipy stoeps, sheltered fruit-tree filled back-yards, irrigation canals, windmills and empty spaces. The gravel road leading into the town is just corrugated enough to deter anyone but the genuinely interested and Nieu Bethesda remains unspoilt and unpretentious.

A visit to this charming littleKaroo village wasn’t on our original ‘Filling in the Gaps’ road trip itinerary but while staying at the Camdeboo National Park near Graaff-Reinet we celebrated our wedding anniversary and decided to mark the occasion with a short visit to Nieu Bethesda to have lunch at the brewery, deli and restaurant on the edge of town.

We worked up an appetite by taking a pleasant little stroll around the dusty Nieu Bethesda streets. Although we didn’t have time to visit the Owl House or fossil museum, we waved at the nest of owls on the Owl House verandah. Then we took a quick look at the cement owls and other typical Nieu Bethesda crafts that are sold at informal stalls behind the Owl House. I wanted to buy an owl as a birthday present for a friend.

The craftsmen’s work reflects the artistic legacy left by Helen Martins that is safeguarded for future generations within the Owl House museum. Born in 1897, Miss Helen, as she was known, was raised in Nieu Bethesda and trained as a teacher at nearby Graaff-Reinet.

Her younger years are something of a mystery – there was a short-lived marriage along the way – but she returned to her home town to nurse her ailing parents in the 1930s. Her mother died in 1941 and her father, a difficult man known as The Lion, in 1945.

In 1952, Miss Helen married again, but her second marriage only lasted three months. It was a spell of illness that changed her life. Lying in bed, the moonlight drifting through her windows, she realised her life had become drab and colourless. And so began her obsession with colour and light and the way they are reflected.

The interior walls of the Owl House are brightly painted and covered with glass which Miss Helen ground with a coffee mill in her back yard. She also replaced the clear window panes with coloured glass. Every surface in every room is a magpie’s nest of cheap ornaments, coloured lamps, mirrors and virtually anything glittery and bright that Miss Helen could acquire.

Outside is the fantastic Camel Yard, crowded with the fabulous sculptures wrought by Miss Helen and her assistant, Koos Malgas, out of cement, wire, old bottles and fragments of shattered glass. It is an amazingly whimsical place, filled with statues of peacocks, strange, cat-like creatures, acrobats, mermaids and Miss Helen’ signature bottle-eyed owls.

Sphinxes, Buddhas, references to the poetry of Omar Kayyam and William Blake and her circular glass bottle edifices she called her Meccas mingle with symbols of Christianity and refer to myriad mystical sources and the artist’s delvings into different belief systems.

In one corner, life-sized camels, wise men, shepherds and a host of mythical concrete figures follow suspended tin stars to Miss Helen’s imagined east. Their outstretched arms seem to speak of Miss Helen’s yearning for some unattainable light.

Over the years, Miss Helen became more and more reclusive; the townsfolk must have viewed with suspicion this eccentric artist in their midst. Then her health deteriorated. Her eyesight began to fail, perhaps from all those years of working with ground glass. One cold, winter morning in 1976, the 78-year-old artist took her life by drinking caustic soda.

Miss Helen’s story is a sad one and yet the camel yard is such an exuberant, passion-filled place that, in a way, it dominates the town. Even walking past it, clutching my newly acquired Nieu Bethesda owl, I felt my spirits rising. The discovery of yet another marvellous little Karoo bookshop, a literary treasure trove of new and pre-loved books called ‘Dustcovers’, lifted my spirits even further. We did some treasure hunting amongst the crowded book shelves and added a few more purchases to the bag containing our Nieu Bethesda owl.

Then we were more than ready to enjoy a delicious anniversary lunch. After 38 years of happy married life Bill, my fellow life traveller, and I felt we deserved to celebrate. And what better setting for a celebration than this intriguing rather mystical little village at the end of a gravel road.