20 1959 – 1960: Blair Atholl Heights (Westville North)

20 <> 1959 – 1960: Blair Atholl Heights (Westville North)

I can’t think how it happened but it was not long after Graham and Carole moved to Westville North that our friend Johnny Fosteras, who was the Company Secretary at a well known Property Agency, asked if we would like to rent a house on very reasonable terms at a new development at Westville North/Blair Atholl Heights. It was a ‘house’ built as the sales office for the plots stretching down the hill below the office. To make it more attractive he negotiated a couple of months’ free rental for us, so we took it. Graham and Carole’s house lay to the left of the road leading from Westville through Westville North/Atholl Heights to New Germany and Pinetown, our place was a bit further along on the right of the road. The ‘house’ consisted of a single row of rooms leading off an enclosed verandah, with internal steps to the roof from which the whole development area could be viewed.

It was in that house, ‘The Top House’ at No. 10 Pitlochry Road, that we had our first of several adventures with snakes in the area. We bought a Siamese kitten which we named Syngman Rhee after a newsworthy character of the time, the president of South Korea who was forced to resign and leave the country in 1960 (which nicely dates our move to Atholl Heights!). Syngman Rhee (our kitten) took sick one Sunday morning. We rushed him to the Vet in Pinetown and to our disgust the Vet would not see us until he had finished his lunch! When he got to us, it was too late to save Syngman Rhee who died from a snake bite, probably a puff-adder, one of many varieties of snake in the area. After Syngman Rhee died, we bought another Siamese cat which we called Chu-Chu.

Across the road from us were three houses, which, with ours and two lonely old houses down in the valley below, formed the entire occupied ‘suburb’ of Athol Heights at the time. One of the houses across the road belonged to a family with missionary connections with whom we became on visiting terms, particularly with the ‘grandmother’ in the house, Mrs. Barry. Somewhere I came across a second-hand book (still on my bookshelf) called ‘Springbok Rampant’ written by author Francis Gérard who had built and lived in that house before them. In the book Francis Gérard has a chapter about snakes, including an adventure with one especially large black mamba, and I quote a couple of paragraphs:

“When we moved in to our place at Atholl Heights, Mr. Le Grange who lived at the little estate office building about a hundred yards away [that's our place!], warned me about a black mamba of his acquaintance. He’d shot at it twice but it had got away. This snake lived in the valley at the foot of my land and, before our coming there, had used my property as a right-of-way to cross the hill-top to the valley beyond where he hunted. Sometimes in the morning we would see his track in the dust of the road at the top of my land and it was evident that he was a big snake. Le Grange, who had seen him, estimated that he must be between ten and a dozen feet in length.”

Then a few paragraphs later in the book:

“One evening, it was about dusk, I was standing on the edge of my land admiring the last of a wonderful sunset. . . . . . . . Suddenly I heard a swishing sound from up the hillside. I glanced up the slope and then stood rigid. Coming apparently straight for me was a big black snake. He was moving rapidly over the ground with his head held rigidly about a foot in the air so that he could see over the top of the bush-grass. I guessed who he was all right. He was the Old Man Mamba returning home to his place in the valley after a hunting expedition. He was Mr Le Grange’s acquaintance, the ten to twelve footer. And I was standing on his right of way ! . . . . . He never so much as turned his head. He went past me, not three feet from where I stood, this kingly snake, without a glance. He ignored me completely.”

I quote these paragraphs here because of what comes later in our own story.

We and the Smales frequently got together on a Saturday to wine and dine over a demijohn of White Angelica wine, alternating between their place and ours.  DorothyAnne or Carole cooked us dinner — or sometimes at their place we had a braai — and we whiled away the evening listening to classical records (when at their place) and drinking the wine. On other occasions the four of us would go to a hotel or other venue — I remember a place in Pinetown called Zia Maria which had recently opened, and also the Chantecler Hotel at Botha’s Hill — where we could have a meal and dance. Those events created pleasant shared memories which come back whenever we see Graham and Carole (which we still do these days when they come to Cape Town to visit their daughter).

The man, who I will refer to as Mr. M, from whom Graham and Carole had bought their house in Westville North had a vacant stand on the road (a dirt road) leading to their house. It was a lovely plot overlooking a valley. Mr. M offered to sell it to us. We had no money for a deposit. He drew up a document inferring that we had made a deposit — “It’s okay; everybody does it” — the idea being that we could then get a loan from a Building Society and build our house. We signed the purchase agreement and began making the monthly payments to him but soon became uneasy about the whole deal because it so obviously couldn’t be “all right”. Mr. M refused to cancel the document and threatened to take us to court should we stop paying. Not long after that the whole thing fell through anyway when Mr. M and his wife left South Africa suddenly for foreign parts leaving a whole lot of unsettled business behind, including our plot for which they still owed money themselves. We stopped payments not having anyone to make the payments to. The land was repossessed by the original seller without, I think, our deal with Mr. M even being known. The purchase agreement was probably not recorded anywhere other than in his own office.

We had another friend, Colin, who came from the Greytown area and whom I had met up with at University. He married Anne and the two of them visited us frequently, and through us they met Graham and Carole and the four of them also became friends. (In time Graham and Carole sold their house and, together with Colin and Anne, rented a house in Pinetown. Whether before that or after it, I had became interested in hydroponics and had dreams of having a small holding in Kloof and growing vegetables for the Durban market. I think it was my enthusiasm that planted the idea in their minds to buy small holdings in Kloof, which they did eventually on adjacent sites.)

While we were in the Top House, the first house in our road changed hands and we watched to see who the new owners would be. Then one day several cars, jeeps, pickups (bakkies) and other vehicles pulled into the yard. More arrived over the next few days until the grounds of the house looked like a downtown parking lot. It turned out that the new owners had fled from the revolution in the then Belgian Congo bringing with them the fleet of vehicles which had served their transport business in the Congo. The combination of the unusual house which was our home and the arrival of the fleet from the Congo gave rise to the first of the Don Corbett ‘Fringes Of War’ stories that I wrote many years later. I will include that story as a separate chapter.

Later in 1960, at the expiration of our twelve-months’ lease of the Top House,  DorothyAnne and I rented a more conventional house at No. 38 Chearsley Road lower down in the valley (one of the two previously mentioned old houses). That was the ‘Bottom House’ where we had further encounters with snakes.

One day  DorothyAnne was cleaning the house when she came across another snake, a green mamba, under the dining room table. She fetched the garden hoe and chased that one around the table legs with Chu-Chu jumping in to get a piece of the action.  DorothyAnne killed the snake and put it in the bath and left the bathroom with the window and door closed in case it wasn’t quite dead and would escape. But it was dead all right and when I got home we disposed of it. That was pretty calm for a women recently arrived from England.

One night we had just got into bed and put the light out when we heard a ‘thump, thump, thump’ on the floor. We assumed it was Puddles scratching herself and told her to stop it. We couldn’t fall asleep because of the thumping, and after a while I got out of bed to go to the toilet. When I turned on the light at the switch near the door, we saw that the noise was a snake thumping on the floor while Chu-Chu had it by the tail. I had stepped out of bed in the dark right next to it! I got the broom and helped Chu-Chu finish it off much to her disgust. That was a black snake, a black mamba.

From Atholl Heights I travelled daily to work in Durban in the Ford Popular, giving a lift to Mrs. Smith, the wife of the estate agent who lived in a new house built lower down the road from the Top House. The daily use wasn’t very kind to the Popular and in time it needed new rings. There was no question of taking it to a garage so I tackled the job over a weekend with help from  DorothyAnne. That involved stripping the engine down to get the pistons out, replacing the rings and putting the whole thing together once more. All went well until we attempted to start the engine again, which had to be done by cranking the engine with a crank-handle. I primed the engine, turned the handle and the engine roared into life and then cut out again. After several more attempts with the engine roaring into life and then cutting out straight away,  DorothyAnne suddenly said “What is this thing on the ground?” She had spotted it lying there — a small part like a bolt but not a bolt. I looked at it a bit puzzled at first and then realised it was a part that screwed into the inlet manifold, previously the connection point for the vacuum pipe leading to the windscreen wiper which I had had to seal off when replacing the vacuum wiper system with an electric motor. I screwed the thing into place and the engine started and purred perfectly.

The house was in an isolated area and should have been a lonely place for  DorothyAnne during the day when I was at work, but she says she didn’t mind being out there. She was on visiting terms with our nearest neighbour above us where she would call in on the way back from the Whybrows’ grocer’s shop on the main road. She was also always welcomed by Mrs. Barry whenever she popped in there, and she also became involved in the Women’s Institute in the area.

But things needed to change.

We had at that stage been married for over three years and had not managed to have a child so we had put our names down with the Durban Child Welfare Society to adopt a baby. Expecting that to happen at any time,  DorothyAnne painted the second bedroom in the house — after filling in a couple of hundred nail-holes (or so it seemed) made by the landlady’s husband for a wall of pictures and left by him in that state much to  DorothyAnne’s disgust! — and prepared it as a nursery with a pram and a crib. But we then thought it would be a good time to move back to Town so as to be closer to the Welfare Society offices when the call came, and Atholl Heights would, in any case, not have been a convenient place for  DorothyAnne to care for the expected baby, so when our lease on the Bottom House expired at the end of November 1961 we moved back to Durban to a flat in Moore Road.