Visiting the neighbours

Visiting the neighbours was always hard for me, as I had great difficulty in speaking their language.  I would stand at a distance and watch my father, who I might add was fluent in four languages, chat away merrily with Mrs. P from next door.  She had three great big strapping sons, the eldest of which it was rumoured, had single-handedly loaded his truck with forty, one hundred pound bags of mealies before breakfast.  When the workers arrived, the task had already been completed.  I found Mrs. P quite intriguing, for the simple reason that she had a really bad set of dentures.  When she laughed, she would quickly bring her hand up to her mouth, to hide the fact that lunch was still lurking around the corners.

One of the farm workers arrived one morning with a new set of teeth.  My father interested in knowing where he had managed to get them, and so quickly too, was told that at the local police station, there were any number of sets of teeth. One just had to go and try them all out to see which ones fitted the best.  It was no coincidence that right next door to the police station, stood the mortuary!

Occasionally I went with my father to visit old Mr. and Mrs. De Wet, who lived on a farm about fifteen kilometres away.  They seemed firmly stuck in the previous century, still riding to town in their horse and cart.  My gaze seldom left the top of Mr. De Wet's head, which seemed to be covered in greenish lichen.  Mrs. De Wet was always decked out in an assortment of clothing spanning about fifty years, offset by a large floppy bonnet.  Apparently she became ill once and took to her bed for ten days without removing her shoes!  On entering their very humble abode, my father and I disturbed a broody hen, who was sitting on a clutch of eggs in the sideboard.  With much squawking and clucking, she quickly jumped down and sprinted out of the front door.

The only English speaking neighbours we had were Mr. and Mrs. B and their spinster daughter Violet, who had a strange turn of phrase, quite unique to herself.  When she did speak, which wasn't very often, she talked about off-legged turkeys, off-handled cups and lah-de-dah pigsty's.  My mother recalled her commenting once about the "comical" weather we were having!  I always felt a bit sorry for her, as I sensed that life hadn't turned out quite as she might have wanted it to.  Living an isolated life with a domineering mother and laconic father was not an ideal situation.  Both Mr. and Mrs. B would eventually lie in state in the rondavel next to our old house, before joining my relatives in the family plot.  Whatever happened to "comical" old Vi after that was any ones guess.  She probably just slipped back into the woodwork, from whence she had come!

Heavenly haystacks

Once in while our neighbours Mr. and Mrs. B would invite two of their grandsons from Johannesburg to visit them.  Mr. B, a rather large, morose looking man rode a big horse, but Billy and Neil their grandchildren, would ride over to our farm on lowly donkeys.  Kleintjie (little one) and Lemonade.  Donkeys at the best of times are extremely stubborn beasts, but these two were exceedingly difficult.  Many a time I've watched as the boys approached us, pushing their donkeys from behind. 

These two young boys were a bit of light relief for us, as friends were few and far between.  They too had lots of interesting games to play from leap-frogging onto the backs of the donkeys, to tunnelling into haystacks.  We always had loads of haystacks for the Winter period when the grass had all but disappeared, and the cattle feed needed to be supplemented.

The cutting of the grass was one of those heady times of the year.  The sweet scent of the swaying, shimmering grass never ceased to cause me to catch my breath in sheer delight.  To lie on my back in the middle of a field of grass listening to the humming of the bees, and the various insect calls was heaven.  At the height of Summer when the sun beat down relentlessly, I was rewarded with not only the steamy smell of crushed grass, but also the different aromas of the crushed wild flowers.  On those occasions, while thoughtfully chewing the end of a newly plucked stalk of grass, I felt I could conquer the world.

My father always allowed us to sit on top of the hay once it had been loaded by pitch fork on to the trailer, and we would have this amazing ride bumping along the rutted roads, and hanging on for dear life to the steel frame at the front end of the trailer.

The best game of all was tunneling into the centre of a haystack.  It took all day to hollow out the inside and turn it into a sort of cave.   Once we had neatened it nicely and pulled out any stray bits of grass from the "ceiling", we would sit down with a tin a condensed milk, and using old teaspoons, contentedly work our way through the sticky, sweet mess.  After that, there didn't seem to be too much else to do, so by the light of a torch we would crawl back out into the world again, and with a great sense of achievement, make our weary way home.