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In one case a fisherman saved for years in order to build his house on the mountainside above

Quarter Deck road. His daughters remember how the family saved coins, earned by the father
at sea, in a tin to finance the construction, and how an uncle helped build the house when

eventually enough was saved. They also recall the challenge posed by having to transport the
building material up the slope, and how the stones pulled out of the mountain were used to

build a stone wall in front of the house. Decades later, when the fisherman died, the CDB
informed his widow that it was illegal for her to stay on the premises, and made her sign an

affidavit saying that she would sell to a qualified person within a year. The widow died

before she could do this, leaving behind four daughters. The daughters applied for a permit to
remain in the house. When this was refused, they moved to Steenberg.

Beside the social and emotional trauma of being involuntarily uprooted, there were often
financial losses involved in the forced sales. In one case where a widow was left in a house

that she was forced to sell, the CDB in 1972 evaluated the property at R5 900. One year later,
it was sold for R11 500, an amount nearly double the evaluated price. Since a portion of the

difference between the estimated value and the actual price was paid to the CDB, it is likely
that the widow was the loser, although there are no records of what exactly happened in this

case.

Die Dam and Die Middedorp

Most of the property-owning families who moved under the GAA lived in the area known as

Die Dam, named after the area where the old wash house stood on what is now the park
above Lever Street. (Fig 5.4.) Before the demolition of the wash house in the 1950s, the

fishermen’s wives used the spot to do washing and ironing on a commercial basis for the

nearby hotels and boarding houses, as well as for Kalk Bay residents. As such, Die Dam
became a symbolically important area, serving as an interface between the fishing and the

non-fishing communities. Many of the contacts that people established in connection with the

laundry commerce continued for many years after the women who were involved in the
industry were forced to leave Kalk Bay because of the GAA.

Despite having been demolished nearly fifty years ago, Die Dam is still today very much

alive in popular memory, and often even newcomers to Kalk Bay are aware of its history.
This is partly due to the lack of new development on the spot where the wash house used to

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