6 1938 – 1940: Life On The Farm
1938 – 1940: Life On The Farm
‘Success’ was the original name of my grandparents’ farm and the name was retained for the half that Mum inherited. My uncle Bonnie named his half “Eureka”. The Umvoti River formed the boundary between Uncle Bonnie’s farm and ours. His farm was on the mountainside beyond the river while ours was in the valley below.
As nearly as I can work it out, we moved to the farm from Winterskloof in Pietermaritzburg probably at the end of 1937 in time for Mace to commence his Class 2 year at Seven Oaks Junior School at the beginning of 1938. He would have been six-and-a-half then and I would have just turned five.
The farm was mainly run by Mom. Dad helped and, as I gather from my sister, also poured much of his retirement capital into the enterprise which didn’t turn out to be much of a success (despite the name). The farm had worked well enough when my grandfather owned and ran it, and also under my grandmother’s hand after my grandfather died, but they were life-long farmers. My mother and father had no experience of farming at all, my father having been a carpenter and later a shopkeeper.
The commercial farming activity consisted mainly of wattle plantations, some maize production and a herd of milking cows. For our own table Mum ran a vegetable garden which supplied everything we needed, and numerous fruit trees. In those days, wattle was grown extensively – primarily for the bark used in leather tanning and, secondarily, for the wood as firewood.
Success is about 10 miles (16 kilometres) from the nearest railway station at Seven Oaks and is about the same distance over the river and up the hill to the Rietvlei Railway Siding. The difficulty for us — or rather for Mum and Dad because my brother Mace and I just enjoyed the carefree life on the farm — was that we didn’t own a lorry and so we used an ox wagon for transport to the railhead and a sledge drawn by two oxen for moving the bark out of the felled plantations. I can’t remember in which direction the loaded wagon set of with either bark to be railed to the tanning extract factory somewhere in the direction of Pietermaritzburg, or with logs to be delivered to a sawmill to be sawn into firewood and then railed to the city. I think the wagon probably went across the river and up the hill through Uncle Bonnie’s farm to the Rietvlei Railway Siding. The road was the public road from Seven Oaks to Rietvlei which served all the farms on the route, passing through our farm and near our house so we often went to the road to watch other farmer’s lorries trundling past with bark or logs.
The wattle bark was bundled and sold either as green bark or it was laid out in the stripped plantation and left to dry before being bundled and shipped. Dried bark fetched more money than green and was a lighter load on the ox wagon. Ours was usually dried.
Uncle Harry lived with us on the farm. He wasn’t really our uncle but all older men friends of the family were ‘Uncle’ to us children, and women friends were likewise ‘Auntie’. Uncle Harry was a widower with two grown-up sons — Lawrence and Eric — who were farming or working elsewhere (I think Lawrence may have been in the Army).
Soon after we arrived on the farm, Uncle Bonnie (my real uncle) also joined the army and went ‘up north’ with the Eighth Army serving in the North African desert. He was later taken prisoner and sent to Italy as a prisoner of war.
I started school at Seven Oaks Junior School (there never was a Senior School!) in January of 1940. Our farm was too far for Mace and me to be taken and fetched daily so we were boarded with ‘Uncle Ben’ and ‘Aunt Lillie’ Braithwaite (also not really our aunt and uncle), whose farm was about halfway between us and Seven Oaks. Leslie and Ian Mortimer, from a farm halfway between ours and Uncle Ben’s, also boarded there and Uncle Ben took us all to school daily from there. I don’t know why Uncle Ben was prepared to do the ten-mile return trip twice daily to take us to school. It could have been to deliver milk or other produce to the Station to be railed by passenger train to Greytown.
Our ‘school bus’ was Uncle Ben’s old Dodge car. I think it was a 1928 or ’29 model with a canvas top and a crank-handle to set the motor going. Other farmers had newer cars but that was Uncle Ben’s transport and he and his family seemed to be quite content with it. Uncle Ben was a very gentle and likeable man, a blacksmith who came out from England (with Aunt Lillie) and carried on the trade on the farm. I spent many a happy hour in the smithy watching Uncle Ben hammering away at red-hot sections of iron as he shaped them into rims for wagon wheels or implements required by farmers in the area. I used to have a go at moving the long wooden shaft up and down to pump the bellows for the fire. As I remember it I would have to hang my full weight on the shaft to pull it down. The task of working the bellows was actually done by a farm worker who made it look very easy! Uncle Ben had two nicknames for me — ‘Peaches’ (in Zulu, maPechiesi), and ‘Pumpkin Fritter’. The first because on an occasion Aunt Lillie bought a paraffin box-full of peaches from a woman who came around selling them and I ate too many at once ending up with an upset stomach, and the second because I so loved the pumpkin fritters that Aunt Lillie made. Uncle Ben thought it all a bit of a joke.
Uncle Ben and Aunt Lillie’s house was built of wattle and clay, actual clay and not mud or daub as is more usual, with dung floors as in the traditional Zulu hut. The dung coating, formed of fresh cow droppings mixed with water to a thin paste and smeared on with the palm of a hand by the house-help, was re-done every month or so, as I remember, and no one was allowed inside until it was quite dry. It was pleasant to walk on with bare feet (we children always went barefoot on the farms) being cool in summer and warm in winter. It provided another facility for enjoyment! Felix, Uncle Ben’s and Aunt Lillie’s youngest son had a die-caste toy truck (lorry) and a handful of flat nails he used as the load on the truck. He used the nails also to build a bridge over a slight hollow in the dung floor, being extremely careful not to damage the floor. He used to bring the set out occasionally and play at carting loads to the station. We were allowed to watch but were completely forbidden (by Felix) to touch either the truck or the nails! I suppose it sticks in my mind because I was so envious of him and his toy truck!
Talking of trucks, on one memorable occasion a truck provided us with another diversion while boarding at Uncle Ben’s. This time it was a real large three- or five-tonner belonging to a timber farm in the area used for carting wattle poles and bark to the station at Seven Oaks. Uncle Ben’s house was on a hill and the road, winding past the foot of the hill in the valley below, took a sharp turn to cross over the stream. On this day the driver missed the turn and the lorry, with a full load of wattle poles, went nose-first down the narrow storm water gulley from the road to the stream where it stuck fast. All attempts to pull the lorry out with a tractor failed, even when the poles were unloaded. There is a saying in Afrikaans, ” ‘n boer maak ‘n plan ” (a farmer makes a plan) and this farmer did. He erected a galley of stout poles over the front-end of the truck from which to suspend a pulley and then winched the nose up out of the narrow ditch after which the tractor was able to pull it back onto the road. The process took a couple of days and we watched every move in the afternoons when we arrived back from school.
Mum fetched us to take us home for the weekend on Friday afternoons, but sometimes Mr Mortimer would take us together with Lesley and Ian as far as their farm which was about halfway between ours and the Braithwaites’. Our mother would pick us up from there.
Something happened on just such a Friday that produced one of my most vivid memories from the time on Success. We had a 1937 or ’38 Ford at the time which, like most cars of that era, had steel bumpers at the front and back with an upright over-rider at each side. Mom had picked us up and we were on the way back to Success when we met Dad on his bicycle. He had ridden out to meet the car especially to alert Mum that the sledge drawn by the two oxen was on the road ahead and that she should take it easy in case she came across it as she rounded a corner. When Dad met us, Mace decided that he would ride the bicycle home while Dad rode in the car with Mum and me. Then I decided that I would also get out of the car and somehow get home alongside of Mace on the bicycle! But as soon as the car pulled off I jumped onto its back bumper to catch a ride. As the car gathered speed, for some reason I decided to jump off again but my blazer was buttoned and caught on the over-rider. I was dragged along the rough road, very rough because in that section it was scraped into a bed of shale with ridges where the scraper had ‘bounced’ as it was dragged along. To add to my misery, there was cow dung which had been recently dropped by the oxen pulling the sledge. I was slung about from side to side with my knees being grazed by the rough surface. I must have been screaming, and Mace was definitely yelling as he pedalled as fast as he could to catch up with the car. Mum and Dad didn’t hear the commotion but fortunately, as the car approached a sharp corner, Mum slowed down in case the sledge was just beyond it. I can’t remember exactly, but I think that Mace caught up at that stage and Mum heard him shouting and stopped to find out what he wanted. I was saved from too serious injury but arrived home in the car with blood and cow dung caked all over my legs. The mystery is why the button did not pull off the blazer, or the cloth rip, and release me.
There are some happy memories from this period of my life on the farm, memories which exist mainly as little snapshots or cameos in my mind.
There are flashes of Uncle Harry picking an apple off the old tree, peeling it with his pocket knife and handing it to Mace or me. Or he would knock a prickly pear off the plant, spear it with a sharpened stick, cut the two ends off, slit it down the side, roll off the thorny peel and hand it to one of us. I can’t adequately describe how delicious a prickly pear tastes fresh off the plant on a hot day. Then there was the feel of the soft, cool earth on our bare feet as we followed behind the ox-drawn plough making furrows in the mealie field, and the sight and sound of hadedas making their way in formation to their roosting place in the late afternoon, and memories of paddling in the Umvoti River with our playmates, the farm-workers’ children, or trying to catch scalies with a line and bent pin on a hot summer’s afternoon.
Another picture that stays with me was the erection of a wireless (radio) aerial in the form of a wire stretched between two very tall gum poles to enable reception of the news reports. Radio was rare among the farming communities in those days, I imagine not so much because of the cost — the more successful farmers could afford such luxuries — but because of the difficulty of reception in the remoter rural areas. The war had just started and everywhere people were wanting news. I think it was Uncle Bonnie who bought the aerial and set it up at our place because he was going to enlist and would be away from his farm.
Thinking about communication, high up on the hill next to Uncle Bonnie’s farm was the farm of Willy Hooper, brother or cousin to Uncle Harry. He and Uncle Harry used to communicate by shouting to each other across the valley, a really great distance, and the echoes would fly up and down the valley. The one occasion that sticks in my mind was when Uncle Harry spotted a buck on the hill on Willy’s farm and wanted to alert Willy to the opportunity of getting it for the pot.
There was excitement once for Mace, me and the farm-workers’ children when two strangers arrived on the farm. They were sawyers from distant Cape Town who made a living by cutting down large trees and sawing the logs into planks. There was a large, very tall fir tree that Mum and Dad for one reason or another wanted cut down. It may have been for the planks. I remember the ‘competition’ between Dad and Uncle Harry over who could predict exactly where the tip of the tree would land on the ground, with each stepping back and squinting up at the tree and then planting their stick in the ground to mark the spot. The sawyers knew how to make the tree fall precisely where it was needed by chopping a wedge first on one side and then the second main wedge higher up on the other side. It took them a while to fell the tree with axes (I don’t think chain-saws had even been thought of in those days). When it fell to the ground, Uncle Harry had won! He went in and triumphantly pulled his stick out from near the very tip of the tree. The next part of the job took several days. The two sawyers first cut the tree into the needed lengths with the large two-handed crosscut-saw they had brought with them. Then the lengths in turn were rolled into position on two logs placed across a pit in the ground. Then with one of the men down in the pit under the log and the other standing on top, the long task of sawing the log into planks with an even longer two-handled ripsaw began. It took several days of hard work before the log was gone and the planks were lying out to season. I can’t remember the pit being dug so it may have been there already; it would have been common practise not many years before that for planks to be cut on the farms for use in repairing wagon beds.
And talking of logs, a wonderful feature of the old farmhouse was the huge tree trunk propping up the gable wall at the one of the roof! Judging by its condition, the log had been there for many years.
Then, of course, I remember going into the grassland above the house to look for kowe mushrooms after a thunderstorm. I suppose this experience gave me the ‘expertise’ to think I could recognise the species with dire consequences later.
A personal history must be candid so I will try not to withhold anything just because I am ashamed of it. This memory fits into that category: One of my playmates was a farm-worker’s son called Gcina (it means ‘The Last One’, or ‘End it!”). Gcina was epileptic. It would have meant nothing to me even if I had known what epilepsy is. Gcina and I were both only about five or six at the time of this incident. Just below his family’s home was a marsh or wetland fed by a mountain spring. One morning Gcina and I were walking in the wetland, stepping from tuft to tuft, when Gcina suddenly fell face-down in the marsh and just lay there. I panicked and ran away, up toward the footpath leading from his hut to our house. Fortunately, I met his mother on the path and told her what had happened. She set off down the hill while I ran all the way home. His mother got to him in time to lift him out of the marsh and Gcina was alright, but the memory stays with me. Only when I was much older did I understand that Gcina had had an epileptic seizure. Not knowing what to do in an emergency is something which has cropped up on me again in my life. Not knowing what to do is a predicament which sometimes leads to spontaneously rash but brave action in threatening situations, and at other times to cowardly action as in the case of Gcina who could have drowned because of my utter helplessness. The memory of Gcina face-down in the marsh doesn’t go away so I incorporated it into a short story where the hero (me, of course, as I should have been for Gcina) saves a child from drowning. I have included it as the next chapter.
