As I've already said, it takes a special kind of person to live on a plot. We came to the life totally unprepared. It has been a long and exciting learning curve!
We ended up here in this valley because my father was a Romantic. He’d been told tireless tales about his father's older brother, who at thirteen had watched in helpless rage as his farm near Brits was burnt to the ground and his mother and younger siblings were taken by the British to rot in Kitchener’s infamous camps. Alone in the dark, this young boy had waited for the soldiers to leave and then searched for his father in the Kommandos and joined them, running beside his father’s horse until one was found for him. He had fought with them until the end, and survived.
As if this story was not enough, his imagination had been further inflamed by fireside tales his mother told her eager children of far-off lands and deeds of derring-do and knights in shining armour.
So it is not really surprising that at seventeen he ran off to fight in WW2 - much to the disgust of his father, who, as a survivor of the camps, felt he was on the wrong side. It wasn’t so much that my grandfather was pro-German as just bitterly anti-British. But my father wanted the glory of battle, and he wanted to fly a plane, and he was terrified that the war would end before he got a chance to be in it.
He survived that war as his grandfather and father had survived theirs before him, and his father (grateful to have his his eldest son back in one piece) forgave him, but that was not enough for him. Exposure to foreign countries and ancient civilisations just whetted his appetite and made him yearn for more adventure. He cast about for a ticket to adventure and finally hit on an unlikely source: the Civil Service. So he became a Civil Servant, packed up my mother and me in 1954, and travelled the world.
When we returned in 1972, he surveyed his office in Pretoria with distaste. He didn’t like being given orders, and he didn’t much care for the petty bureaucracy of Head Office. He much preferred dealing with them from several thousand kilometres away. He had certainly had a lot of adventure; he had lived in London, Hamburg and Buenos Aires, and travelled the length and breadth of Europe and South America. But now he yearned for a closer relationship with the land of his birth, specifically the farming life of our Afrikaner forebears. He wanted to stare out at vastness, emptiness, and to feel the hot African earth between his toes.
So he sold our beautiful, shady old house in Irene, and acquired a small shoe-box on 22 acres of treeless, windswept savannah in this sunlit valley, along with one extremely bad-tempered Jersey cow, and a huge shiny Shangaan of indeterminate age with muscles like ships’ hawsers. This giant’s name was Samson Baloyi. Well, we didn’t actually buy Samson, of course. Samson just stayed, along with his family.
Samson didn’t think much of people in general, and especially not white people; and as far as white people went, he particularly did not like English speaking white people. True, my father was Afrikaans, but as a city slicker, he didn’t count. Real Afrikaners worked the land and sweated and slaved along with their workers. Samson had no time for lazy soft-bellied fools who sat on their flabby white bottoms at desks doing nothing all day and getting paid handsomely for it. Any idiot could do a job like that, even a woman (the lowest form of life in Samson's opinion). If you couldn’t go out and kill your own dinner with your bare hands and pee standing up, you were worthless in Samson’s eyes. And he was not shy about letting you know it.
In fact, the only reason he tolerated my parents was their beautiful cars. My father had an enormous metallic gold Caprice and my mother drove a nifty little Volkswagen-Porsche 914. They had been bought purely for their overseas resale value, the only money-making perk of an overseas posting, but we had not completed the two years of our second tour of duty in Argentina, so they could not be sold. Samson adored these cars, and kept them showroom-shiny. But nothing else about us impressed him.
We were keenly aware of our ignorance on everything to do with farming and relied heavily on Samson for guidance. One evening we arrived home to find our cow, Prudence, mooooooing plaintively and wandering around restlessly. She didn’t want her evening treat and was off her feed. No-one slept that night. Prudence made sure of that. She mooed without rest. We were worried.
The next morning the three of us gathered gloomily outside her paddock. She was still mooing disconsolately and pawing the ground every now and again as she paced her paddock restlessly.
“Merciful heavens! Just listen to her!” exclaimed my mother irritably. “Hennie, DO something! We can NOT go on like this! I haven’t slept a wink!”
“She’s certainly not happy”, observed my father, sucking deeply on his pipe.
“Well whatever is wrong, please fix it” snapped my mother, who regarded sleep as sacred. “D’you think the Vet is awake at this ungodly hour? If he is, he doesn’t deserve to be. After all, he is only 10 kms away. He must have heard her. It is quite bad enough living in the middle of nowhere without having to spend the entire night listening to a cow carrying on like a dying diva in an amateur Opera. She sounds as if she’s wailing for every cow that’s ever lived!!”
“Or died”, I suggested.
“She does rather,” conceded my father, sighing deeply.
I was standing well back. I was terrified of cows, especially this one.
At that moment, Samson ambled up.
“Samson!” my mother brightened, sensing relief at last. “What is the matter with Prudence? An ideas? Anything at all..?”
Samson gazed pityingly at the three of us.
“Sy soek die Pil” he said. (Translation:She wants the pill)
“Pill? She wants a Pill? Good heavens, man, what sort of pill does she want? Hennie, find out at once! We must get this pill!”
Now of course, one must remember that pills were BIG in the sixties. Everyone lived on the knife-edge knowledge that they could be blown to smithereens at any moment that the Presidents of either Russia or the USA absent-mindedly tapped a bony finger on The Button and launched us all into Atomic oblivion. Global neurosis was at an unprecedented level and wealthy psychiatrists, psychologists, and of course, the big chemical companies, bloomed as prolifically as bright red poppies had on the battle-bloodied fields of the great wars.
By the seventies, there was a pill for every occasion. Your fate was in your (and your Doctor’s) hands. You could control whether you speeded up, speeded down, fell asleep, stayed awake, got fat, got thin, got happy, got pregnant, got Septicaemia, Dyspepsia, Acne, Arthritis or Tuberculosis. There were even pills to make you tell the truth.. (though of course, those were never really available in pill form - too many marriages would have been ruined) Rock and Pop groups extolled their virtues in song. The Rolling Stones sang about them: “Mother’s Little Helper” foreshadowed the hordes of grey-haired pill-popping prescription-addict grannies of the eighties and nineties - and even movies were dedicated to them. If the world could be blown up in an instant, at least we could all go calmly. Even Prudence, with any luck.
Clearly my mother was also hoping for some such calmative effect for Prudence – and failing that, for us. She had embraced the pill-popping culture with the devotion of an early Christian for a piece of the True Cross.
Samson cleared his throat.
“Nee, Mies – nie daardie soort pil nie. Sy soek die BILL.” (No Ma'am - not that sort of pill - the Bill)
“She wants Bill? Bill who?”
Samson rolled his eyes.
“Hennie!” demanded my mother impatiently, “We must find out who this Bill is and get him here at once! Ask, him, Hennie, ask him!” she pleaded.
Before my father could get a word in, Samson interrupted. With an air of martyred pain, he gazed heavenward. One sensed that he was asking the Almighty what he had done to deserve such suffering.
“Dis nie die mens wat sy soek, Mies. Dis die BUL” he said carefully – as one does to not very bright children - “die man-koei”…(It is not a person she seeks. It is the man cow)
What my mother said next doesn’t bear repeating. My father and I were laughing too much to remember much of it anyway.
No comments:
Post a Comment