Towing the party line

Living on a farm can be quite an isolated life, and the telephone was an important link to the outside world.  If you wanted to get hold of the exchange at the post office, you had to turn the handle at the side of the phone about seven times in quick succession and then give the number to a disinterested lady on the other end.  Some things never change!  Once connected, she would interupt you at three minute intervals, this being the standard charge time.

Our large, wooden phone was mounted firstly on the wall in our sun porch and next to the bathroom door in our old house.  It got struck by lightning one year just as I was taking a bath, and a ball of fire the size of a soccer ball flew straight through the door and passed right in front of me.  Scary stuff!!  In our new house, it was situated on the wall near the left hand corner of the hallway.  A large highly lacquered rectangular box with a handset on the one side and a handle and earpiece on the other.  It also had two round bells at the top which rang when you received a call.  The earpiece was designed so that others could listen into the conversation taking place.  Unfortunately my sisters and I fought over it so much that my mother had a hard time hearing anything at all, so a lot of the time she banished us from the hallway.

We belonged to a party line, which interconnected the adjoining farms.  We each had a special "ring tone", ours being a short and three longs,  so it was tring, triiiinnnggg, triiinnnggg, triiinnnggg.  My uncle's next door was four shorts, so his was tring, tring, tring, tring, and so on.  All the farms on the party line could all call each other up at no cost.

One night my father and I had to take a small child and his mother to the nearest hospital.  He had accidentally poured a pot of boiling water over himself and required immediate treatment.  The hospital was just over and hour away, but by the time we had repaired the punctured tyre and replaced the snapped fan belt, it was well into the night before we arrived at the hospital.  My father gave my mother a call to tell her that the child had been admitted and we were now on our way back home.

Shortly after that, my mother received a call from our next door neighbour Mr. P, who asked with great concern how each of us was.  Hearing that everyone was fine, his curiosity got the better of him and throwing caution to the wind, he blurted out that he had just been listening in to their conversation, and couldn't understand what was going on, so he got his wife to listen in.  She too could make neither head nor tail of it, so he thought the only thing left then, was to call us directly and get the whole mystery cleared up.

I think there is a certain amount of caring in the farming community, coupled with a equal amount of inquisitiveness, or the feeling that perhaps others lives were a bit more colourful than their own.  Whatever the reason, my mother thought it was hugely funny and never failed to recount that conversation with great hilarity.   As for the little boy, he fortunetely recovered, and was well enough to come back home, after having spent a month in hospital.

The man with no name.

I loved playing in the family plot.  My middle sister and I had some great games sliding down the sloping moss-encrusted tombstone of my great-grandfather and fitting together the broken pieces of my great-grandmothers cross.  Sitting astride my grandfathers headstone, I remember gleefully saying to my sister   "I'm riding on his head".  We were quite an irreverent bunch of children.

There happened to be one grave where there was no inscription at all, just a small crumbling cement rectangle to demarcate the area. The story went that one day, a very sick wanderer landed up at the farm, and having succumbed to his illness, was buried there.  No one was any the wiser as to who he was, where he had come from or what his story had been.  It was a sad little grave and always caused me to feel a pang of regret on his behalf.

Both my great-grandparents John and Isabella, as well as my grandfather and great uncle and in time to come Mr. and Mrs. B from next door were buried there, and of course the man with no name.  Not a very big plot, but quite significant.  The farm derived it's name "Belladale" from my great-grandmother, who had come out from Scotland some years before.

My grandfather had beautiful little white stones all over his grave and my sister and I would collect them and take them home to use in whatever we happened to be constructing at the time.  Usually we used them to decorate our little mud and stick houses, and to make pretty flowerbeds and pathways around them.  In time, my grandfathers grave got to be rather bald and moth eaten.  He was such a lovely old man though, that had he been alive, he probably wouldn't have minded in the least.  In the same way that he used to take out his brown paper packet of sweets to give each of us one, so I could imagine him having a brown packet of little white stones and doling them out to us instead.

The sweet memories of those steamy hot Summer days spent messing around in the family cemetery with its Cyprus tree sentinels, remains with me still.

My mother's cats

My father was quite a strange man and very complex.  Kind, loving and playful one minute and stern, and seemingly lacking in compassion the next.  I never really knew where I stood with him a lot of the time.  One of my earliest memories set the tone of our relationship from that day onwards.

I remember it being one afternoon, when my father came to me and said  "Come, we're going to shoot cats".  These happened to be three of my mothers favourite cats, one being a huge, fluffy, Persian type cat with grey and white colouring and wearing voluminous plus fours.  The other two were more ordinary looking.

I can still hear the noise of the shotgun and see the bits of fur twirling through the air and the limp bodies of the cats, lying draped across the big stones underneath the gnarled apple trees near the pig sty.  Although it happened so many years ago, the memory of those trusting cats rubbing themselves against my fathers legs before being executed, still stands out in stark relief, deeply etched into my mind for all time.

My perception of my father at that tender age of four was changed forever.  I remember asking him "Why are we killing cats?"  The memory of his answer eludes me, perhaps there was none.  In retrospect, I think my father was very much a law unto himself and rather sadistic to boot.  I never heard what my mother thought of it all, but my witnessing the ghastly demise of our wonderful fluffy cats must have blocked out  a lot of what happened that day.  I can't even remember where my father buried them.  I do remember though, that after shouldering his gun, we solemnly made our way back past the pig sty, past the cattle kraals and the stables, down the rutted road and back to the old house.  Just one more puzzling riddle stored up at the back of my mind.

Because I love you so

Our local town was a tiny dorp with half a dozen gravel roads running through it.  At one end, as in almost all Free State towns, was a gigantic Dutch Reformed church, which made a huge statement as one approached the town.

The co-operative store or c0-0p as it was known, together with the hotel, were the main meeting places for the local farmers.  There were also one or two general dealers, a cafe and a small pharmacy, where the same Christmas cards were sold year after year.  Unfortunately, two cards out of each pack had to be discarded, as the verse inside ended with the words "because I love you so"  My mother accidentally sent one to our Doctor, much to her embarrassment.  I think she kind of fancied him, but not quite to that extent!

The Benders owned a haberdashery store, which sold materials, wools and other related items.  Mr. and Mrs. Bender were what is known as "Blourokkies"  All the women wore blue dresses and black stockings, and had their hair scraped back into tight buns.  The other thing which singled them out as being different, was the fact that they didn't believe in doctors.  Mr. Bender developed cancer of the lip, which quickly spread.  Eventually he began to wear a scarf around his mouth to cover up the disfigurement.  As a child, I would gaze intently at him in the hope that the scarf would fall down, so I could see what his face looked like underneath it.  I enjoyed the macabre.  Mrs. Bender seemed to do all the work, while Mr. Bender just sat there reading his bible.  I often wondered how he endured the pain and whether his belief system stayed in tact.

The Post Office was another place of great interest.  We rented post box number 6, which meant that we were one of the first farmers in the district to own a post box.  The Post Mistress, a Miss Wilde, was a rather masculine woman with a short back and sides hairstyle.  She was one of the few English speaking people in town, and so grabbed every opportunity to engage my mother in long conversations.  Apart from her work, her secondary occupation seemed to be collecting and pasting into a scrapbook, pictures of the Royal family, interspersed with pictures of all the local murders, of which there were quite a few I can tell you.  So poor old Queen Elizabeth had to share a page with Jack the Ripper, or the equivalent thereof.  Her favourite non-royal family story was the one where the new bank manager, after having been stabbed in the femoral artery, bled to death on the front steps of Standard Bank.  She proudly showed us pictures from every angle of the blood stained steps.

We all thought that Miss. Wilde was a bit suspect until one day she announced her impending marriage.  Apparently, she had been attending the funeral of one of the towns folk, when the grieving widower spied her through his tear-stained fingers.  He later told her that the reason he fell in love with her, was the fact that she had lovely clean white shoes.  The moral of the story being, never judge a book by it's hairstyle.

My aunt dies

Some very sad news came to my sisters and I while we were at boarding school.  My aunt, who lived on the farm next door to us, had died.  Life was never going to be the same again.  My mother had lost her friend and confidant and we had lost the free and easy way we had of popping into their house at a moments notice. 

The day she was buried was one of the saddest days I was yet to experience in my short eleven year life span.  It was cold and rainy, which seemed to echo the damp and depressed feelings we all had as a family. 

Her body had been placed in the rondavel next to their house, and it was from here that the procession to the grave site commenced.  None of my three cousins came to the funeral, and quite frankly, I didn't blame them.  I would have found it equally as difficult if the roles had been reversed.

We walked silently along the narrow footpath, the long wet grass brushing against our legs and clothing.  Gusts of wind blew the fine rain into our faces.  The ground was muddy and waterlogged.  After a short service of committal, the pall-bearers slipping and sliding on the mound of sodden black earth, lowered the coffin into the grave.  I had this hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, as I watched it disappear into the ground.  This was the very first close family funeral I had attended, and the realisation that my aunt would no longer be around in an earthly sense, had a very sobering effect on me.

Many people from the surrounding farms and the local dorp came to the funeral to pay their last respects, and as I observed all the faces later at tea, it occurred to me how few I was familiar with.  I knew old Mr. and Mrs. de Wet, but then everyone knew old Mr. and Mrs. de Wet.  I was particularly fasinated with the mouldy green fungi which grew all over the top of Mr. de Wet's head and down the sides of his temples, and I could only in retrospect imagine that Mrs. de Wet acquired her wardrobe by raiding the dress-up box at some nursery school.  I have seldom seen such an interesting combination of different period styles in a long time.  Other than that and one or two more people, I knew no one.

A lot of my inability to relate to people was aquired from my mother who was a bit of a recluse, and kept very much to herself.  Consequently we didn't get to visit too many of our neighbours in the farming community.  I think that having my aunt die, was very hard on my mother, as now there really was no one else for her to commuicate with, which caused to intensify her isolation.

Milk out of a stone

We once had a pet cow named Miranda.  She was the most docile of all cows and we could do almost anything to her and she would take it all in her stride.  We climbed up onto her broad back and attempted to ride her, and we even placed my fathers old raincoat over her and tried to climb up using the pockets as footholds.  She was the gentlest of creatures and would allow us to lie underneath her and squirt the milk from her teats straight into our mouths.  Deliciously warm and wonderfully frothy.

My father suffered greatly from ulcers, and spent a good deal of his life in bed.  It was during one of these periods of illness that early one morning my mother sent me down to the cowshed to bring back some milk for breakfast. 

It happened to be one of the coldest days of the year and the temperature was well below freezing point when I set off for the shed.  I'm not sure whether it was me an inexperienced milker, or whether it was the freezing temperature, but the cows just would not oblige.  Eventually I was crying with frustration.  The regular milkers were very sympathitic and offered to help me, but I declined their offer, feeling that my mother would be cross with me if I let someone else do the milking instead of myself.

After about an hour of squeezing this and pulling that and feeling throughly humiliated in front of all the milkers, I finally went home with a quarter of a bucket of dirty looking milk.  To add insult to injury, my mother was really angry that I had taken so long to get back and had so little to show for it.  Her insensitivity to what I had gone through to get the small amount I had, crushed me.  For heavens sake, I was only nine!