Dad was officially discharged from the Army in September 1946. He and Mom presumably moved to Winburg sometime in 1946 where he returned to his civilian job of Road Inspector. Mom’s mother, Ruby von Schlicht, moved to Winburg with them and she stayed with the family until her demise in 1968.
In 1947 the Royal Family visited South Africa and one of their stops was at a small game reserve near Winburg. Dad could have gone to the reception but chose to stay outside in the car with Mom and baby me. It’s a pity they didn’t go in because I would have been the only baby there and would have been sure to catch the eye of one of the female Royals.
In October 1948 my sister Patricia May was born in Winburg. I recall sitting in the car, outside the house which was apparently used as a nursing home, waiting while Dad went to visit Mom. Pat came home soon after but I have no Winburg memories of her. The house where she was born is still standing as she has confirmed.
I obviously don’t remember much about Winburg. Dad told about the former South African President, C.R. Swart who although a barrister, owned a farm, De Aap, in the district. Dad had much respect for the man, despite the fact that he was opposed to the political party Swart belonged to. He cited examples of his wife Tannie Nellie, leaving baked goods or fresh meat in the padmakers’ camp caravans, whenever they were working on roads on his farm. They were kind and down to earth people who had much sympathy for the poorer elements of society.
Dad must have been transferred to Trompsburg in 1949. I recall us all travelling down in our car behind a Road’s Department tipper truck which was conveying some of our trek. I vividly recall a chicken coop full of windblown fowls, right at the top of the pile on the truck, with Robbie, our old boerboel, sitting up there proudly minding his own business.
Trompsburg was a small, sleepy little town through which the main road to the Cape and Eastern Cape passed. The bypass road which is there today, was still a couple of decades in the future. In holiday times, the coast bound traffic passed through the town and one had to be ultra careful when crossing that main road on foot. Dad drove a Chevrolet, successor to a Ford which Dad had in Winburg, before its wiring caught fire. I know that Dad was given a new Chev in 1953 because I went to Bloemfontein with him to collect it and like all his cars up to that point, it was a Government vehicle which had only limited private use. It had to be used within the boundaries of his district only. All those cars had PAO number plates and Dad averred that it stood for “Paaie Altyd Onrybaar”.
In 1950 (I think) the family took the first and only away holiday we ever had. We climbed on a passenger train at Trompsburg station – everybody, including Granny – and left for Pretoria where at the main station we were picked up by Roy Bayford, Mom’s sister’s husband and taken to their farm at Marble Hall by car. There was an extra house on the farm, which we occupied for the time we spent there. We spent Christmas there and I for one really enjoyed the farm life. It was still relatively wild, untamed country around there, the farm getting water from The Loskop Dam which was built in 1939. Homecoming soldiers were offered small irrigation farms on favourable terms and the Bayford’s bought one of these. I was warned repeatedly to take care not to run into snakes, Dad then having an Irishman’s dread of serpents in no uncertain degree. I never saw one but I’m sure I picked up my own fear of snakes from Dad during that holiday. The trip back on the train was just as memorable as the up journey and I recall an acute feeling of deflation when we arrived back in Trompsburg.
That holiday seemed to harden Dad’s attitude to holidays because he never again so much as suggested that we go away. Pat was lucky in that she was invited by our friends in Ladybrand, to go down to Durban on holiday with them, so she saw the sea a good few years before I did. (I saw the sea for the first time in 1966, just before I turned 21.) As she grew up, I know Pat resented not being able to have proper holidays but I accepted the status quo and quite happily spent my holidays at home. Even today, I view the lemming-like annual stampedes to the coast during holidays, as a form of madness I’ll never understand and I’m sure I simply rationalized Dad’s apathy towards holidays and left it like that.
In the late 40’s and well into the 50’s, all the men wore hats and Dad always had his on his head when out in the car. Another common male habit was smoking! While Dad had a rack of old pipes on his oak desk at one time, I don’t recall seeing him light one up. Pipe tobacco, especially Springbok and Horseshoe brands, came in little tubby fabric bags. Empty bags made handy coin or marble holders for us small boys. Dad always had a box of Springbok 50 plain cigarettes on him. They were much shorter than today’s cigarettes and a bit thicker as well. Mom also smoked at the time and she smoked Rembrandt cork-tipped cigarettes. As I discovered when I foolishly picked up the vile habit myself, Springboks made one cough less than the Rembrandts so it was from Dad’s stock that my early cigarettes were purloined.
Dad’s job entailed him being in charge of gangs of workers, who saw to the maintenance of secondary and farm roads in the area. Only the main road which passed through the town was tarred then so there was plenty of grading to be done. Before the introduction of motor driven Galion and Caterpillar graders, mule drawn graders were employed but I think these had been phased out by the time we reached Trompsburg. I couldn’t have been much more than 3 or 4 when Dad sometimes used to take me along with him on his trips into the district. My job became the opening of the numerous farm gates which existed, before the coming of the grids or motorgates. Dad would pay a farthing (A quarter of a penny, a penny = 1 cent) for each gate that I opened so it was a job I relished.
On one of these trips, on a remote farm road at the farthest limit of his area, Dad, Piet Mandla (My minder) and I were going along a road which had been damaged during heavy rain the previous day. Dad took a chance crossing a drift over a still running stream and was nearly across when the car hit a muddy hole and got well and truly bogged down. I can just imagine Dad’s dismay at being stranded on a little used road, miles from anywhere. No handy cell phones to let Mom know we were just temporarily stuck.
Dad knew that a maintenance crew was camped some miles ahead, so he sent Piet to go for help. Of course, when Piet got there, only the camp boy was there and he had to wait for the rest of the crew to return from where they were working. It was quite late in the day when we spotted a line of burly black men coming over the hill towards us – they knew a short cut. It took mere seconds for those chaps to lift the heavy Chev out of its muddy hole. Piling the whole bunch into the car, we drove on to their camp. It was starting to turn dark by the time we got there and well and truly dark when we finally got to a frantic Mom back home.
We weren’t in any danger there – the stream water was quite clear and drinkable and while not an ideal diet for a wee lad, Wilson’s 3-X mints, dampened down the hunger pangs a little.
Dad always had a few rolls of those sweets in the car. (Dad also suffered endlessly from dyspepsia and he had bottles of Macleans Stomach Powder at home and in the car, at all times. In later years, Macleans went off the market and Dad switched to De Witts stomach powder in the familiar blue tin. He must have taken thousands of doses of the stuff over his lifetime. While talking product usage, Dad believed in Gibb’s Dentifrice. It was a pink paste in a flat tin across which one would draw your toothbrush. It was horridly unsanitary because we all used the same tin and it’s a miracle we didn’t all develop gingivitis and worse.) That was probably the last time I ventured out into the district with Dad, much to my dismay. Mom wasn’t keen on chancing me being marooned somewhere in the wilds of the Southern Free State again.
It must have been quite early during Dad’s term of office that our Landlord, Dr Graham, died. His will stipulated that he should be buried on a “spitskoppie” on the farm. His family had gone all out to comply with his wishes and a grave was dug up on the hill, but a large granite boulder in the hole, could not be moved and dynamite was needed to break it up. The family approached Dad for a couple of sticks of dynamite and Dad risked losing his job by helping them to blast the rock to shreds. How Dad accounted for the missing, strictly controlled dynamite which was for road-making purposes, we’ll never know.
Dad was usually a quietly spoken, peaceful man who didn’t even yell much at me but I saw another side of him one Saturday morning. The street which ran behind our garden linked up with the dirt road to Smithfield. A small bridge crossed the spruit which runs past Trompsburg and once it was crossed from the Smithfield end, one would be on town land. Graders ran as far as the bridge and no further but on this Saturday morning, the idiot operator (One Sarel Marais) decided to come right over the bridge and grade right up to the centre of town. Thinking back, I suppose he was drunk but he sobered up pretty quickly when the wrath of JB Lyle descended on him. Dad with me in tow, jumped into his car and shot round to where the bloke was industriously grading the street. Stopping right next to the grader, Dad leaped out of the car and would have bodily ripped Marais off the grader, had he not climbed down unsteadily instead. What followed was a tirade in broken Afrikaans, Dad bellowing at the top of his voice. Jeez, I had never seen him so cross and I just shrank into the car seat in case he spotted me too! Marais just stood there with his head hanging down saying, “Ja meneer” or “Nee meneer” whenever Dad paused for breath.
On another occasion, I was with Dad when he went down to one of his camps in the Edenburg area and stock had to be taken of the plant in use by the unit. Picks and shovels and suchlike had to be laid out on the ground to be counted by Dad and missing or damaged items accounted for. The ganger in charge of the camp did or said something which enraged Dad and he clouted the man’s pipe clean out of his teeth, all the while telling him his fortune at the top of his voice. Shaken and chastened, that chap had his stuff laid out in tip-top order in next to no time. You simply did not mess “met die Engelsman” because he’d cut you down to size, no matter who you were.
There wasn’t much good to be said about Trompsburg but Dad was pleased about one aspect: The gravel which they used to construct the dirt roads was of a type he used to call “sugar ballast”. It was basically crumbly, rotted stone which packed down and created a beautiful surface when graded and watered. The granite geology of the Southern Free State was ideal for the creation of the gravel and it was easy to spot the pressure ridges where gravel occurred. Much as he loved Ladybrand when he eventually was transferred there, it, being a sandstone rich area, did not have the sugar ballast Dad so loved.
One of the highlights (For us kids) of Dad’s job was when he was called up to his Head Office in Bloemfontein for Conferences and briefings. One such took place very early in the 50’s and we all spent a night in the Capital Hotel in Maitland Street. It was a small, nondescript place and I recall us standing on a balcony above Maitland Street, looking down the street at all the neon lights. Chief among these was a huge neon Coca Cola sign which showed a glass being filled with Coke. It was to a little guy, something too marvelous to comprehend.
Generally speaking, Mom and Dad went to Bloem alone, leaving us in the care of Granny. We really didn’t mind because they ALWAYS brought back interesting presents for us. I remember them bringing home a Tinker Toy for me once. I would still welcome one of those with which to fiddle. On the occasions when we went along, we’d park with Mom’s Aunt Olive and Alan Godfrey and we’d all go shopping at shops like Sonop, Fichardts and John Orr’s. Dad hated to drive in Bloem, which he said had the worst drivers on the African continent. He said that drivers in chaotic Cairo were better behaved than Bloem drivers. For me, one of the big treats when going to Bloem was to go up Naval Hill and view the city from all angles.
The property that we occupied was actually a part of a complex which included D.J. NEL’s clothing shop which was semi detached with our house, a garden on which stood a functioning windmill and storage cement dam and fenced off securely from our property, a large orchard with a variety of fruit trees and grapes, to which we had no access. Dad decided to use the bit of garden which we had the use of to plant vegetables. He laid on a water furrow from the dam to the beds he was cultivating and siphoned water from the dam which he lead to the garden. A friend Gielie Venter and I were also given beds and some pea seeds to cultivate. To my dismay, Gielie’s grew beautifully while I had a complete crop failure! I never tried gardening again.
I don’t recall whether Dad kept up his gardening for more than a single season which is strange because he never failed to start gardens wherever he stayed after that. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary because once a week a wooden crate with vegetables arrived on the Railway Station from H. Hall & Son from Mataffin. Our back gate also opened onto the market square and on Friday afternoons, a produce market was held and a variety of vegetables and fruits put up for auction. Mom sometimes attended. Then there were also the Visagies, who had quite a large piece of ground and a windmill and dam, at the bottom end of town. Visagie worked with Dad but he also grew and sold vegetables on his bit of ground. I used to be sent down with an empty basket or two to buy beautiful fresh veges from Mrs Visagie. Half a crown (25 cent) usually bought lots of veges and I would battle home with those heavy baskets.
Dad always had chickens or rather fowls, as we termed them back in those days. My earliest memories were of black fowls, Australorps, which laid eggs like crazy. We never had a shortage of eggs in our house and we ate them with gusto, every single day. In later years he also had white Leghorns. Whenever a hen started showing signs of being broody, Dad would select a clutch of 13 eggs from the stock and close the hen up inside half an oil drum, to sit on the eggs and hatch them. Those were times I personally loved because baby chickens are some of the most charming creatures of all. Dad almost always had full hatchings of chicks – lucky 13 or industrious roosters?
There was an occasion when a clutch of chicks had to be brought into the kitchen at night, to be thawed out in the old range’s warming drawer, because a cold snap or unusually heavy rain had knocked the little guys over. It must have been lovely in that drawer because all recovered and went on to keep the eggs coming. Once an old hen somehow overloaded her crop with crushed mealies and it burst open. It didn’t seem to hurt much because she carried on pecking but whatever she picked up went down into her crop and out again. No trouble to Dad – he sterilized an ordinary sewing needle and stitched up the old hen’s crop with black sewing cotton. She recovered soon enough and probably lived to a ripe old age, as all our laying hens did. (The strutting cockerels had somewhat briefer lives and usually forfeited their heads on special occasions but they enjoyed all the benefits of a healthy diet and lots of feminine company in the time they were allotted.)
While I’m on the subject of food, Dad was always an early riser and all through the years he’d make early morning tea for the rest of us. Also his task was making the porridge. Most of the time we had maize meal but sometimes he’d switch to Maltabella, a sorghum based porridge, for a while. His porridge always went down well except on a couple of occasions when he forgot to add salt to the mix. Unsalted porridge tastes awful if you’re used to it being salted and the odd thing is, trying to add salt afterwards makes an even bigger mess. Dad always put his porridge out early and left it to go cold on the table. When he finally came to eat it, he’d add milk and a Frisbee-like piece of pap would float on the milk and Dad would scoop cold chunks out of the disk – kinda like eating scoops out of a melon. Something else Dad liked was burnt toast – the blacker it was, the more he liked it. No toasters in those days; slices of bread were just dumped on the coal stove top and left to smoke and burn.
There was a strongman and health expert in Dad’s younger days named Tromp van Diggelen, who offered a postal course on how to build a healthy body. Dad had tried the course and I recall he said he was called upon to eat a small quantity of sand, as well as charcoal at times. Perhaps Dad developed his appetite for blackened toast during Tromp’s course.
The little dam in our garden, which was supplied by the windmill, gave me my first experience of immersion in cold water. It was a hot summer and Dad decided he’d like to have a swim in the dam. Wearing his knitted woolen swimming trunks (Which I still have somewhere) and me in a similar miniature pair, he got into that icy cold water with me. I remember the occasion vividly – how I hated having all my breath sucked out of me by that cold water. He splashed around merrily while I just wanted to get out. I hate immersing myself in cold water to this very day.
Dad’s office and stores were situated on the edge of town, on the way to the railway station. There was a remarkably pretty garden opposite his office which was a delight in which to play. I think Willie, the store night watchman, was responsible for keeping the plants watered and tidy and he made a jolly good job of this. Visiting the store after hours required a short-long-short blast of the car to get Willie to come running out in order to open the gate. The whole yard was scrupulously neat and tidy and the old mule-drawn graders were a delight for a kid to play on. In Standard Two the teacher arranged with my Dad for the class to visit the store and be shown how everything worked. I remember a workshop with welding and suchlike workshop tasks but the highlight of the trip was a demonstration of grading by a large new Galion grader. I can’t describe how proud I was that day to be able to show my classmates what fantastic work my Dad was in charge of!
Late one Sunday afternoon, a violent thunderstorm blew into town and as it started subsiding, someone arrived at our front door with the news that part of the roof had been blown off the store. Calamity! Dad with us in the car, rushed up and I can still see that great big black, rafter-filled hole left when the roof sheets took flight. He quickly arranged for heavy buck sails to be drawn temporarily over the hole and within days, the roof was repaired.
Dad was well thought of in the farming community. I confirmed this fact many years later when I returned to Trompsburg in my role as Internal Auditor for FNB and met several of the old farmers who remembered Dad. Even as far away as Springfontein old farmers remembered him. He was universally described as a gentlemanly, humble man who listened attentively to farmers’ road problems and dealt with them speedily. Nothing was ever too much trouble for him. He was also well liked and respected by his subordinates, the “Padmakers”. When he was transferred, that bunch of men clubbed together and bought him a silver (EPNS) tea and coffee service, which, considering their abject wages, could not have been easy. I still display the set in my lounge and also personally see to keeping tarnish at bay with my trusty can of Silvo.
Dad obviously had some knowledge of carpentry because he once made a carry-case out of simple box wood, for my little Meccano collection. Needless to say he painted it a lurid green and I was very proud of it. I had two Meccano sets – a basic beginner’s set and a more advanced no 2 set. The case could lock and was my pride and joy but alas, Meccano did not attract my attention and I never even built the most basic models. I had no use for Meccano but I sure would like to still have that box. I wonder why Dad didn’t do more woodwork but admittedly, he had only the most basic of tools.
When it came to hobbies, Dad seemed to be too wrapped up in his work for traditional hobbies but he listened to the radio a lot, especially Springbok Radio when it came on the air in 1950. He took great delight in entering the numerous competitions the sponsors of the radio programmes put on, usually entering for himself, Mom, Pat and me. He even used different handwriting on each of the entries. The result was an extraordinary run of wins throughout the 50’s and 60’s. He never won anything major like a sweepstake but the list of items he won was substantial. It included sponsor hampers, (Potter & Moore toiletries, IXL, Koo, Silver Leaf, Pepsodent Toothpaste, Ransom Cigarettes, Cadburys chocolates, Lyons Tea etc etc) cash prizes, all the records on the week’s Hit Parade, a book-of-the-month for a year, garden chairs, even a magnificent tabletop radio which unhappily ran off a car battery. He loved crosswords and entered them as well, often winning cash. There was a phone-in programme on Springbok Radio , the Eyegene Jackpot, where, if your entry was drawn, they would phone the number you had provided and put questions to you, to win a jackpot. As we had no phone in those days, Dad always gave his work number and on at least two occasions, he and Mom had to go and sit in the unlit office and wait for the Eyegene Jackpot to call them. On both occasions, money was won and we were able to listen to it all on the old Traveler.
Dad never had any drinking problems and both he and Mom drank a small amount of brandy back then but most intermittently. They usually brought out the bottle on a summer week-end and drank from handsome tumbler glasses. I doubt whether they ever had more than two “spots”, as they termed their drinks. A more regular alcoholic beverage was Lion Lager, which we often had at table on Sundays. Dad shared the bottle around, everyone else having shandies, while he put the remainder away by himself. I loved beer even then and still do but I sampled the dregs of some brandy glasses once and recoiled at the utterly horrid flavour of the stuff!
Dad attended church and mass while we were in Trompsburg. While he was Christened in a Presbyterian Church in Bloemfontein, he was confirmed in the Church of St John, Belgravia by a Bishop Arthur of the Anglican Church. I have no explanation for the switch in his faith but I would think Granny Lyle, his mother had a lot to do with that, as the Seabrooks were Anglicans. Early on, we attended services in the Anglican Church in Springfontein and visited Rev Chatfield and his wife at the Rectory. Pat started walking at their house on one of these occasions. Services were also held in the little Masonic Hall in Trompsburg and I recall a reasonable turnout at these services. As time went by, the services came to be held in our lounge, the number of attendees having dwindled drastically. The Chatfields were transferred to Ladybrand and were replaced by the Webbs.
Mom and Dad were fond of walking. On a summer week-end afternoon, we’d all walk down to the town commonage and off into the veld. It was huge fun I thought – Robbie and Lassie the dogs tramped along and if there was enough water in the spruit pools, they’d swim as well. There were always meerkat villages out there, although we didn’t get to see much of the shy critters close up. We even saw a woodpecker once, hard at work on his tree home. Dad spotted a trapdoor spider trap once and with a twig lifted its lid to show us the wicked looking spider lurking beneath.
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