Pat was happy in the bank but was lured away to the SA Police by a job with better salary and benefits. She started off as typist for the Border Stock Theft Squad, which operated on the border with Lesotho but had its headquarters in Ladybrand. She was tasked with typing out the reports which young constables with a rather tenuous grasp of English, would write out by hand. She recalls the report about a border farmer’s mare which was in foal, which had been stolen. The young cop described it as “One brown merry hors in foam are missing from farm stable”. (I can’t stop myself seeing a somewhat demented looking, jaunty young horse, happily awash in some kind of foam, when I try and picture this.)
Another young constable had neglected to fill in his personal pocket book record and his superior officer had written a sarcastic remark in his book. Rather foolishly the constable loftily wrote “Sarkasme is die toppunt van bobbejaanisme” in his book, apparently forgetting that Captain Heunis would see it next time round. Boy, was he in trouble when that came to light.
She was eventually moved to “Stores” where she worked with Sgt Ferreira, who used to call her “Irishman”. He was a thin man who really felt the cold during winter. During a first cold spell, he would walk into the office and exclaim, “Dis nou blerrie koud Irishman. Tyd om my balletbroeke uit te pak”. (Referring to his long, winter underwear) He was a keen gardener and often used to go into the police station gardens where convicts would keep things spick and span. One day he noticed the convicts seemed to be spending more time than usual in a patch of dahlias so he went over and had a look. Neatly hidden among the flowers were a couple of well tended dagga plants. During a break while the convicts were sitting having their meal, he slowly walked over to the flower beds and casually uprooted the dagga plants, much to the dismay and chagrin of the convicts.
She worked for the police for about two years and then she decided she needed a complete change of scene. Mom’s sister, Doreen found work for her with Everite in Marble Hall. It was not an exciting job but was a living. Everite worked at designing irrigation systems and manufacturing asbestos-cement products like flower pots and ceiling-boards etc. Considering the worldwide ban on asbestos because of its toxicity which currently exists, it’s quite sobering how casually she used to work in the proximity of the stuff. Pat stayed on the Bayford’s farm for a while but eventually moved into a flat in Marble Hall. She met Chris, who was a teller at Barclays Bank in this time and was married to him on 25th November 1972 by Rev Dudley Goodenough in the Pietersburg Methodist Church.
Next town, in what was to be the first of thirteen moves, was Naboomspruit. Michael was just a few weeks old at that stage and they spent three years in this town. They lived in a large flat above the bank. Chris still played rugby and joined the local rugby club, where he was treasurer. On an occasion, the team toured in Rhodesia and played against a number of local clubs.
Pat remembers a memorable occasion when she had decided to make her own ginger beer. She stored the resulting brew in 9 one liter Coke bottles on a shelf in their small pantry. Chris was at the hotel after a match on a Saturday night, when those bottles decided to erupt like volcanoes. Bits of glass flew everywhere with the violence of the explosions but luckily Pat and Michael were well away from the scene of the disaster. Sticky ginger beer cascaded off everything. Pat, needless to say, had the fright of her life and frantically phoned Chris at the nearby hotel. He came across in such a rush that he was still holding his glass of beer in one hand. The tedious job of cleaning up the mess took hours, the incredible spread of shards of glass making the job extremely hazardous as well. Luckily there was a little storage space in the pantry floor into which they were able to sweep all the glass. Subsequent occupants of the flat must have wondered where all the glass had come from but were blissfully unaware of Pat’s inadvertent “Bank Job”.
Another memorable occurrence happened when Pat had mown the patch of lawn in their small garden and to quench her thirst, had poured herself a tall glass of beer. She left it next to her chair in the lounge while fetching Michael’s lunch. She returned to find him sitting in her chair with the empty glass between his legs. Discovering that the chair was dry, she realized that he had polished off the whole glass without spilling a drop. He was indisputably drunk and staggered around, giggling uncontrollably. Pat could not do a thing with him and he eventually staggered off to his room and collapsed on his bed, where he slept so soundly, he did not even wake when Pat changed his nappy and tucked him in. He slept through until morning.
Heather was born while they were in Naboomspruit. While Pat was in Nylstroom maternity home for her birth, Michael would use the phone to “contact” his daddy by turning the handle and asking the exchange “wa Cwis?” (Michael was a slow talker and had a language all his own) The people at the exchange knew what was going on and would phone Chris at the bank and say “jou seuntjie soek jou - hy probeer jou bel”. Chris at one stage saw her doctor and asked him how long she would still be in hospital. Dr Frank asked “Verlang jy na jou vrou ?” His reply was “Ja, maar die brood, polony en Oros is ook amper klaar”. Chris was not at all domesticated at that stage of our marriage.
I visited the Clarks at Naboomspruit on a couple of occasions and one I remember particularly was when I had had a rush of blood to my head and had bought Chris a gas driven soda siphon. I forget why I thought it was a good idea – perhaps Chris had taken to whiskey and soda. Chris was at work and Pat & I were in the flat with Michael and I decided to see if the thing worked. I loaded it up and as Michael was standing watching me from some distance away with large inquisitive eyes, I thought to dampen him with just a little spurt of soda water. But that thing was designed for something other than quietly filling a whiskey glass because an awesome, laser-sharp stream of water suddenly erupted from it and zapped poor little Michael right between the eyes. That stream of water would have killed sparrows at fifty yards it was so powerful. To say that Michael was startled would be a huge understatement. He took off like a bullet, screaming his wet head off and running off to goodness knows where. Pat came running and caught him in mid flight and I was equally torn between laughing uproariously and making conciliatory noises at the terrified kid. To this very day I have a sneaking suspicion that this experience somehow impacted on Michael’s development and I’m sorry if it did, but heaven help me, it was damn funny too.
Chris was next sent to Nylstroom, where they stayed for only 18 months. A dear old lady, Tannie Malherbe, lived across the road from them and she was very fond of making and selling children’s clothing, to benefit her church. She would call Pat across every morning at 10 for tea and biscuits and after just a hour of “kuiering” would inform her that teatime was over and that both of them had work which was waiting for their attention. Pat bought lots of Heather’s little dresses from this old Tannie.
Mom came up to Nylstroom to assist in running the household, when Pat had given birth to Neil. One afternoon, Mom had put the kids down for an after lunch snooze but discovered that Michael had disappeared. She and the domestic searched high and low but just could not find him. She eventually phoned Chris at work to confess that she had “lost” Michael. After further serious searching, they discovered that Michael had risen, managed to unlock the back door, climbed through the fence and was happily playing with the grandson of the people who lived next door. On another occasion, while Granny was sleeping, Michael sneaked into the pantry and discovered a tin of sweets. When she got up she found his bed and room littered with toffee papers and the sweet tin empty. He had guzzled the lot.
Pat recalls a farmer who had harvested his tomato crop, inviting them out to the farm to pick whatever tomatoes were left. Chris by then, had bought an old Toyota bakkie (which they named Frisco due to its colour similarity to the Frisco coffee tin,) from his previous boss so he went out and duly loaded up as many tomatoes as he could find space for. Pat spent days frantically bottling tomato chutney, green tomato chutney, tomato jam and half a deep freeze full of fried tomato and onion. It took her some time to rediscover her liking for tomatoes.
Reference to my growing up years in Trompsburg will reveal my story about how the Afrikaans words “gat” and “hol” got both myself and Gielie into trouble for swearing. History was repeated when Michael, exclaimed to the maid while watching a woodpecker making his nesting hole, “Anna, kyk hoe klim die voeltjie in sy hol”. At least the consequences for Michael were not as painful as they had been for Gielie and myself.
Michael often sat next to the garden wall between their yard and the house next door, and chatted happily with the invisible fellow on the other side. They had never actually met yet were great cobbers via their chats through the wall. When Michael was asked what the other fellow’s name was, he revealed that he was “Outjie Outjie”. Extrapolating a bit, they figured that Michael’s name to the other chap was “Outjie”. Worked for them it seems.
During their time at Nylstroom, the notorious “Tunnel Robbery” occurred at the bank in Krugersdorp. The police had put out an identikit photo of one of the robbers. Chris and the family were on holiday at the time and Chris had grown a moustache and a beard. When he returned to the branch, everyone exclaimed how much Chris looked like the robber in the identikit. (This was quite ironic because a previous accountant of the bank in Nylstroom, turned rogue later on in his career and became a really notorious bank robber.)
Next, Chris was sent to Sibasa in Venda to train the staff there but as there was no accommodation at Sibasa, they had to find a house in Louis Trichardt. Mom was staying with them at the time and they spent their first night in the hotel in Louis Trichardt. The house they found was quite horrific and Pat became so dispirited that she refused to get out of her bed the next morning. It was Chris’ birthday as well and Mom refused to accept Pat’s miserable behavior, reading her the riot act to get her out of the bed and working. The owner of the house had a peculiar shaped head which resulted in him being called Bennie Boekwurm. There was a large pile of rubbish and junk in the yard and Pat phoned the Municipality to take it all away. Amongst the junk were a number of rusty scaffolding stands – “bokke” in Afrikaans. The Municipality duly came along and cleared the yard of junk and rubbish, leaving the yard more child friendly. About a month later Bennie Boekwurm turned up at the house, while Pat was at the shops and Mom was home alone with Baby Neil and asked if she had noticed “bokke” in the backyard. She immediately knew what he meant but putting on her most broken Emglish accent said, “Nee, hier is nie bokke nie. Ek het net my hondjie”. After checking the yard, he left without further comment and one assumes he did not want an uphill conversation with the Engelse Tannie.
Luckily they were not in that house very long before the owner decided that he wished to use the house himself. There was a severe housing shortage in Louis Trichardt at the time so they had to grab whatever came along. The bank incurred Pat’s wrath in no uncertain manner as they had no interest in or sympathy for their housing difficulties. The house they found had no dining room so some of their furniture was stored upstairs in the branch. It had bare polished cement floors and such bad cracks in some of the walls, that daylight could be seen through some of the cracks. It also had an enormous garden which had to be maintained but it also had a borehole, which provided water intermittently, depending on whether other water users further up the road, were pumping from the same underground vein or not. Despite the inconveniences and detracting aspects of the house, they lived there happily for three years.I
I arrived some months later to conduct an audit at Louis Trichardt branch and while I stayed at Clouds End, a hotel some distance outside of town, I spent most of my spare time with the Clarks. During this audit, I bought a decent camera from a local Indian shop and some of the first pictures I took with it were taken at this house. Pat recalls me pushing the kids around the garden on the base of an old lawn mower and here is a snap of my little “train”.
Those few weeks were some of the happiest I ever spent in my long years on the road. I didn’t realize just how much I missed proper family life until I went there. Leaving there to go to my next branch at Orkney was astonishingly difficult and for at least a week at Orkney, I suffered the pangs of proper homesickness, such as I had not had since my first days in the army.
Eventually Chris was appointed accountant at Louis Trichardt branch and at last the job came with a decent bank house and yet another huge garden. Pat worked in the branch herself before they were transferred to Springfontein. She worked on the switchboard and telex machines. She once had to phone a new client to ascertain his postal and residential addresses. Bedeviled by a spoonerism, she asked, “het u dalk ‘n pisbos?”. With a chuckle he replied, “Nee wat ek gebruik maar die badkamer”. Need I add that her face went bright red ?
During their time at that branch, there was a young teller who forged a Bank Cheque, brought a brand new car with the proceeds and gleefully took off across the country, writing dud cheques as far as he went. Pat became suspicious when she took messages from three car dealers, who advised that Mr Smal could be informed that his new car had arrived. Chris, after being told Pat’s suspicions, tried to contact Smal at home, as he had not turned up for work but Smal had already left in one of the new cars which he had ordered from three different dealers and was haring off to goodness knows where. A month later the police caught up with him at a holiday resort near Naboomspruit and he was duly sent to jail.
Just before they left Louis Trichardt, another young staff member was involved in robbing a train. He was aware that that branch had dispatched a quantity of surplus cash to Pretoria, via the Post Office, which was the normal means by which cash was moved in the days. The train on which the postal bags were being carried, was robbed and the cash removed. It would not have taken a genius to work out that inside information was involved and before long, the foolish fellow was arrested. He was married with two kiddies while a third arrived mere days after he was taken into custody. One can understand, if not approve of, the desperation which stemmed from trying to bring up three kids on a bank clerk’s salary.
The Clarks spent a total of 7 years in Louis Trichardt. All three kids started school there under their first teacher, Mrs Beryl Watson. Pat has rated Beryl an amazing human being and the best teacher she has ever known. Pat spent many nights helping her paint huge backdrops for school concerts and she remembers those times of fun and laughter with much affection. In one of her concerts, Heather was cast as Lady Di while Neil was called upon to be the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
When they moved into their third house in the town, they found a huge garden. This was a bank owned property. In the garden was a large avocado tree which bore plenty of fruit, much of which was out of reach due to the size of the tree. In order to reach some of the ripe fruit high up, Chris took off his shirt in the heat and started climbing up the tree. Unknown to him there was a red hornets’ nest up the tree and the fiendish stingers, which took immediate umbrage at Chris disturbing them, came at him in droves, stinging him soundly. Pat just heard his agonized scream and next thing he dropped out of the tree like a ripe avo. He had been stung on his back and shoulders and was in considerable pain.
Pat ran a Kids Club on Friday afternoons at the Methodist Church which they attended, which was like a Sunday School but was aimed especially at the farm kids who did not get to church on a Sunday. It also helped to keep the kids busy, while the farm mums did their shopping on a Friday afternoon. She would go around town and to the English hostel, in their Peugeot station wagon, picking up the children. She would sometimes have 15 kids singing their heads off as they made their way to the church. She and her dear friend, Pauline Eyssel ran the Club for 5 years.
She remembers giving the kids a verse to memorise every week but there was one little Afrikaans boy who never volunteered to recite the verse. One Friday Bertie surprised them all by being quick off the mark, wanting to recite the verse, “The Lord loves a cheerful giver” but giving it a new slant by declaring in a loud voice, “The Lord is a cheerful lover”. It could not have been easy to keep a straight face. On another occasion, Pauline was about to give her lesson about King David and to break the ice, said “Today I’m going to tell you about a very important king in the Bible. Can anyone guess what his name was?” Up popped a little chap who said, “I know Auntie Pauline – it’s King Nebuchadnezzar”. Pauline was flabbergasted and after the class wanted to know if there was a bloke with that name in the Bible.
Comments