8 1940 – 1946: The Old Hotel in Seven Oaks — (Part 2)

[At the end of the last PAGE, I said I would publish the short story 'Celeste'.  That was in the full book prepared for publication as a book. I omit those stories and essays on this blog for brevity's sake. I may later blog all the stories, essays and poems as a separate blog].

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1940 – 1946: The Old Hotel in Seven Oaks — (Part 2)

Many adventures, happenings and mishaps make up my memories of those years but the actual time-sequence of events is vague so I give them to you in somewhat random order. In this chapter I tell of adventures with the sun, the Butcher Shop Murder, skinny-dipping in the Umvoti, ‘bioscope’ comes to the village, and other things.

The long, lazy days of summer stick in the mind more than the winters but we had fun at any time. I can still see myself sitting on the ground with my back to a wall in the blazing sun nursing, of all things, a bad dose of sunstroke! Mum eventually got me dosed with a Grandpa Headache powder and lying in the darkened bedroom. I don’t remember how long it took to pass, but I know that it wasn’t the only time I had sunstroke — that and severe sunburn where my back peeled all over. These occasions usually resulted from a day spent swimming nude in the swamp or sometimes in the Umvoti River where the Pietermaritzburg-Greytown main road crossed over it. Mace and I rode the six miles (about 10 kilometres) to the river on our bicycles, which was downhill all the way there and uphill all the way back! The sunburn happened at the river and the sunstroke during the long walk riding/pushing the bike back up the hill, squinting into the afternoon sun. To add to the fun, the road was not tarred in those days but was surfaced with a mixture of sand and white pebble stones which formed into corrugations under the wheels of the cars and lorries. The corrugations were best taken at speed but even then it was a bone-jarring, teeth-rattling experience!

Another experience with the sun was one of the most foolish things I have ever done — I stared into the full sun to see how long I could do so without blinking! I had no means of timing it, but I was far and away the champion at it. My competitors would only steal a glance upward at it and immediately turn away. Fortunately that didn’t seem to do as much damage as it could have done but is probably the reason why I can’t even today look at the point of a sewing needle without screwing my eyes up and holding my forehead with one hand. That makes it very difficult for me to thread and use a sewing needle, something which presented me with quite a problem before  Dorothy-Anne came into my life and relieved me of all sewing duties. I also can’t move around within a display of glassware without having the same discomforting sensation in my eyes and forehead. When  Dorothy-Anne and I are out shopping together, I usually wait outside while she looks around at glarey glassware displays.

But let me tell you something more about swimming in the Umvoti. We normally arrived at the river without any swimming trunks so we paddled and swam in the nude, leaving our clothes on the bank. It didn’t matter because there was no pedestrian traffic there and when a motor vehicle passed over the bridge we simply stayed in the water or just stood in the shallow section under the bridge where we could not be seen. But we did get caught out one day. We were in the pool above the bridge when a car pulled over and parked under some trees which provided shade for a picnic area. A man and a woman got out and walked right down to the bank where our clothes were bundled and stood there looking at us in the water! We just had to wait submerged like that until they left! It was one of those episodes that I later turned into a short story.

The other vivid memories of summer at Seven Oaks involved eating plums and loquats from the trees that grew in our garden. We had two varieties of plum that were nicely ready when school broke up for the long Christmas holidays, a greengage tree and what we called simply, a Christmas-plum tree. The plum trees were easy to climb and sit in while eating plums but the loquat trees were more of a problem. There were two of them in the centre of the mealie field, old and large with branches spreading widely, and the fruit was always at the ends of the branches. It was deliciously scary crawling along a swaying branch, reaching for a bunch of loquats and dropping them to the ground. Somehow none of us ever fell out of a tree so there were no broken bones.

Eddie Bird, the butcher, and Koos Kemp, the assistant butcher, both boarded at the hotel. At some stage after Mace died, I shared a room with Eddie. Being then about 11 years old and big enough to see over the counter, I spent many a Saturday with Eddie and Koos in the butcher shop, sometimes being allowed to serve African customers through the window provided for them. (These were not yet the years of grand apartheid but the ‘Whites Only’ rule still applied in all areas of public life.) One of the three African assistants in the shop was Bhegindlela (‘Watches the path’) with whom I spent much time skinning slaughtered cattle at the ‘abattoir’ about a hundred yards below the shop. I would watch Eddie kill the animal with the humane-killer — a gun which propelled a retractable bolt into the forehead — and then I would lend a hand with the rest of the process. At the time, seeing birds and animals killed for the pot meant nothing to me, it was just part of the process of life and living, but in more recent years just seeing sheep and cattle in crowded trucks on the way to be slaughtered at the abattoir in Cape Town was enough to put me off eating meat of any kind for several years. I have since started sneaking in the odd rasher of bacon and the occasional piece of fish into my diet, something I can manage provided I don’t visualise those tragic animals crowded into two-decker trucks on the road to the abattoir.  Dorothy-Anne, who became a vegetarian at the same time as I did, still maintains a completely lacto-vegetarian (not vegan) diet. Three of our children actually led the way becoming vegetarians some years before us.

However, the story I really need to tell involving the butcher shop is about Bhegindlela. One day when I was in the shop, there were sounds of shouting and running feet coming from the direction of the slaughter poles and ending with Bhegindlela rushing up the steps onto the back verandah of the shop with his sharp flensing knife in his hand. Eddie was at the door first with me not far behind. I just caught a glimpse of someone lying on the ground between the shop and the slaughter poles when Eddie stopped me from going further. The man on the ground was dead, stabbed in the heart with Bhegindlela’s knife. The story came out that some men had confronted Bhegindlela while he was skinning a beast and had threatened to set upon him over some quarrel they had. Bhegindlela, who was by no means a coward, took off running up to the shop with the attackers close on his heels. Bhegindlela, without looking over his shoulder, lunged backwards with the knife catching the man right in the heart. The man died instantly. Bhegindlela’s favourite flensing knife had been sharpened so often that it was reduced to a narrow blade from the handle to the point.The detective was called from Greytown and arrived in due course on his Harley Davidson with his African assistant in the sidecar. Statements were taken from witnesses and Bhegindlela was carted away to Greytown, riding, as I remember it, in the sidecar with the detective’s assistant now sitting on the pillion. I don’t remember what happened to the body: it was probably taken away for burial by family and relatives. Justice moved swiftly in those days and in no time at all Bhegindlela arrived back at the butcher shop having been tried and found not guilty. It was a talking point in Seven Oaks for a couple of weeks and then life continued as normal.

We had some excitement once a year when Pagel’s Circus came to the village and set up the tent immediately in front of the hotel. The elephants spent the days tethered to one of the oak trees in our grounds and there were a couple of animals in their cages-on-wheels which formed part of the caravan. Mace and I and all the African children from the village spent hours just watching the large tent going up, and being pulled down and stowed again at the end of the stay. A sign pf the presence of the circus that remained long after they left was a violet stain on an oak tree where a big cat had marked out its territory!

Pagel’s Circus was later absorbed by Boswell’s Circus and no longer stopped for performances at Seven Oaks on its way to Greytown. One of the major tragedies in the area involved a Boswell’s 10-ton truck on its way back from Greytown carrying African staff and family members sitting on top of a full load of equipment. The truck went out of control on the very long New Hanover Hill, missed the corner where the road enters New Hanover and crashed into trees, throwing the people over the front. Ten people died in that accident and many were seriously injured. Crashes of that magnitude, which are so commonplace today, were a national news story in those days.

Then there was the time that the ‘bioscope’ came to Seven Oaks! We had no idea what a bioscope was so we watched with great interest as a white sheet was slung between two posts supporting the verandah of the Indian Store. Then in the evening, as soon as it was dark enough, everyone in the village and from the farms nearby took up position in the road facing the screen, a generator on a truck parked behind us started up and the moving images flashed onto the screen. White people in the audience had some idea of what to expect, but the main audience of African people, for whom the film was really intended, was completely stunned by the miracle. The thing was all an advertising gimmick by Mazawati Tea with a message — “Always drink tea. Tea is good for you!” — as opposed, that is, to getting drunk and into trouble.

It was while we lived at Seven Oaks that Mum came back from the trading store one day bearing a bottle of Ellis Brown Coffee Essence. It was a first for South Africa as far as I know. There were not yet any of the powdered Instant Coffees we know. This was a liquid. The taste was good — but Mum didn’t dish it out regularly or easily to me and Mace, or to the guests and borders at the hotel. It was an expensive luxury.

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