Pat recalls happy family outings and picnics in the Soutpansberg and up in the forests just below the huge Hanglip stone outcrop. I attended at least two outings up on Hanglip with the Clarks, which were some of the most unforgettable and enjoyable times I ever had. I would dearly love to reprise just one of those outings.
The Clarks acquired their first pets in Louis Trichardt. The very first was a little black and white cat which was found in the garden of the second house they occupied. There was no indication that the cat had belonged to anyone but she happily adopted them and delighted in playing with the kids. Heather would put her in a little bucket and hoist her into a little tree at the back door. Sadly, almost exactly a year later, she was found dead at the bottom of the garden and almost where she had originally been found.
About a year after moving into the Bank house, they heard about a Siamese cat who had had three kittens, so they went to have a look and ended up taking two of the kittens, which had some Siamese colouring. When they were tiny, they were allowed to play in an enclosed courtyard during the day. When they arrived home from Kid’s Club one Friday afternoon, one of the kittens was missing. There was no way for the kitten to get out of the yard and it never turned up, despite repeated searches. They eventually sadly decided that the poor little mite must have been taken by some large raptor. The remaining kitten, which had started out being called Smokey became Rubbish, a most adorable cat with the most charming personality. He was later joined by another kitten, which had turned up at a friend’s house and was not welcomed by the three resident Siamese there. Chris went across and fetched the little chap and Tuppence came to stay. Both cats went wherever they went and settled happily wherever they found themselves. They even stayed in several catteries and kennels in far away towns when the family went on holiday but always came home and settled in all over again.
Tuppy lived in six towns with them and eventually died at the age of 16, in Brits. Pat was inconsolable about the passing of that cat and mourned him for weeks. Rubbish lived in 7 towns. When Mom visited the Clarks for the last time in Pietersburg and before she finally entered hospital, Rubbish never left her side. He adored Mom and had to be with her all the time while she was visiting. As he too was rather frail, Pat even had to feed him on Mom’s bed and carry him outside when he needed to use the toilet. Just two weeks after Mom passed away Pat & Chris had to make that most awful decision every pet owners faces sooner or later – whether or not to let Rubbish go. His kidneys were failing and he was really very frail and while they did their best to save their little buddy, they had no option but to let him go after having been on this world for 18 years. Chris and Pat cried about his loss for weeks.
Going down to Springfontein, where Chris was to take up his first managerial appointment was completing a circle in Pat’s life, as she had started walking in the local Anglican Rectory. Trompsburg, where she spent eight years, was just a few miles away. The three kids settled into the local Afrikaans medium school without any problems and they were soon well integrated in the small rural farming community. Pat recalls two examples of the strong community spirit which existed in the town. On one occasion, she was in a wheelchair with both her feet in plaster after foot surgery. It was her birthday and she was lying on the lounge couch when she heard cups and saucers rattling. The next minute, her neighbor and a dozen other ladies walked in bearing cups, saucers, plates, cakes, tarts, flowers, gifts and cards. They had come to give her a birthday party right at home. They had brought everything needed – all Pat needed to supply was boiling water. It was a wonderful afternoon and one of the most memorable birthdays she ever had.
On another occasion, they had been on holiday at Nature’s Valley, where Neil had fallen off some rocks and had fractured his skull. He had to be stabilized at George Hospital and they had to rush him through to Bloemfontein for emergency surgery. Neil made an amazing recovery but while he was in hospital, they were inundated with phone calls from local residents, asking after his condition. He actually received more get-well-cards than the usual greetings cards he would normally on his birthday or at Christmas.
In Springfontein they felt they were part of a family rather than just community members and lifelong friendships were made with many people there. Pat predicted that the kids would one day look back fondly to the carefree Springfontein days. They could happily pack some tuck into their backpacks and go off to the nearby koppie and enjoy the day playing there, in complete safety and without a care in the world.
A rather eccentric couple lived in Springfontein at the time. The lady’s name was Joan Brink and she was short and plump. The kids enjoyed playing in the little koppie behind the cemetery and one day they came home and reported that they had seen “Auntie Joan” sitting in the cemetery against a tombstone reading a book. She was wearing a bathing costume and a big straw hat.
Also typical of a small town in that era, the town had its own telephone exchange which was manned by people who knew everything that was going on in the town. For instance, if you tried to phone someone, the exchange would be able to not only tell you if they weren’t home but where exactly they might be found.
Mrs Joan Staples was an elderly neighbor. The Clark’s cats loved her and were equally loved in return and thus they felt completely at liberty to make use of any sunny spots at her house, for their naps. Joan enjoyed pottering around in her pretty garden and Tuppence was her self-appointed assistant and supervisor. She smoked like a veritable chimney and her sons were always at her to give up smoking but she just laughed off the idea and would say something like “who wants to die with healthy lungs?”
On one occasion, there were very heavy floods in the Southern Free State and the radio kept warning that there was more bad weather coming. Their house was pretty much at street level and Pat was afraid that should there be a deluge, water from the street would rush in through the front door and flood the whole house. Pat got hold of a quantity of old canvas coin bags, filled them with sand and packed them along the bottom of the front door. Joan who was passing by in the street, noticed the bags and knocked on the door and sought an explanation. When Pat explained her rationale, Joan laughed and said that she had thought that the Clarks had robbed the bank and were on the point of making a run for it. Needless to say, the dire weather warnings were wildly exaggerated but dear old Joan never let Pat forget that.
The Springfontein farmers were incredibly generous people and the Clarks were regularly plied with gifts of meat. Chris was often invited to go on game shoots but he always turned them down as Chris is basically opposed to harming even a spider. Luckily they still received their share of buck carcasses and the town butcher would make their biltong. When they left Springfontein, they had a chest freezer still full of mutton and lamb.
The Clarks had not been in Springfontein long when Pat discovered that little Heather had head lice. The town had no pharmacy where one could discreetly buy medicated shampoo, meant to destroy head lice so they had only one course of action : The local MD Dr Lotter kept his dispensary quite well stocked with the items one would normally seek in a pharmacy and Pat plucked up the courage and phoned his surgery. Kotie Brand, the receptionist answered the phone and Pat identifying herself as the new bank manager’s wife, asked if they stocked shampoo for head lice. To her chagrin, Kotie burst out laughing heartily and exclaimed, “Ja jong, ons het nog”. Pat was dismayed by her attitude but said she’d send Heather round to the surgery to collect a bottle and put the phone down sharply.
Not long after, the phone rang and it was a highly embarrassed and apologetic Kotie on the line. She explained that she had mistaken Pat for Dr Lotter’s wife, who was a teacher at the local coloured school, who waged an endless war against head lice in her class. “Social welfare” kids which authorities imported from Bloemfontein to boost numbers at the declining school often came back after week-ends at home, re-infested with lice. She was convinced Mrs Lotter had phoned to play a joke but she was dismayed upon discovering her mistake, when little Heather walked in and asked for the bottle of shampoo. The ice broken in a somewhat unconventional and embarrassing way, Pat and Kotie became friends and often laughed about the misunderstanding.
Neil had a friend called Johan Binneman and they did everything together. The Binnemans lived on a plot at the edge of town which gave the boys lots of scope to carry out their adventures. They once decided to dig tunnels for one of their war games and during the dig, struck a water pipe, which sent a fountain of water high into the sky. After getting themselves thoroughly wet, Johan held his hand over the leak, like the Dutch boy with the dyke in the legend, while Neil rushed off to Johan’s Dad to summon help. He was able to plug the leak and calm down the sodden lads, so all was well that ended well.
One day Johan’s dad turned up the Clark’s house to report apologetically that Neil had fallen off the wagon he was taking to his sheep and had a nasty graze on his leg. It was the first time Pat had actually seen and met Mr Binneman and imagine her surprise and amusement when he spoke exactly like the old TV personality, Jan Spies. She very nearly dropped a clanger by laughing out loud because she was sure he was having her on. Luckily she suppressed the laughter in time to save the situation but she learned he was, like Jan Spies, from Namibia and that they really spoke that way where he came from.
Another stunt which the boys got up to was to mix up a concoction of Oxo cubes and vinegar, because they figured it would taste pretty good. It not only tasted awful but made them nauseous as well and they ended up ruining an entire day because of this experiment. Sadly Johan was killed in a motor accident in his twenties.
Another embarrassing day for Pat stemmed from her having sprayed all her indoor plants with a plant food called Seagro. What she hadn’t realized when she bought the product, was that it stank abominably of rotting seaweed and was not appropriate for indoor plants. By the time the odour started making itself obvious in the house, it was too late. A foul smelling fog with a seaweed tang, was now all over the house. As luck would have it, old Mr John Coxwell was going from house to house for the Municipality, to check on property valuations. As John progressed through the house, Pat noticed he was suddenly perspiring profusely and she wasn’t sure whether she should explain the smell and apologise or just keep quiet. When they got to the lounge where the majority of Pat’s plants were, he abruptly turned on his heel and headed hurriedly for the front door. Pat was convinced that he was on the point of losing his last meal so she apologized for the awful smell and explained about the Seagro. He just smiled weakly and said, “I thought you may have a dead rat in your ceiling”. She never used the product again, needless to say.
Pat crossed swords in no uncertain manner with the local school principal. Apart from being headmaster, he also taught mathematics. A number of parents had started noticing that their kids didn’t have any clue about maths and yet he was giving them top marks in tests and exams. Parents had approached him tentatively with their qualms and soon he turned up at the Clark’s house, carrying a little black notebook in which to note down their considered problems. Chris did his best to be civilized and explain what their objections were but the chap just kept arguing the points and saying that they were imagining problems where there were none. Pat was listening to the conversation from the room next door, becoming angrier by the minute and when she had had enough, she stormed into the lounge and said, “Ons het nou genoeg van jou mooi praatjies gehoor. Vat asseblief jou swart boekie en trap uit ons huis uit. Ons gaan nou Departement toe met die problem”. Not long after this scene, parents and the school governing body went to the Education Department with their complaints and he was swiftly relieved of his duties and sent elsewhere.
Talk of his little black book has reminded Pat that she worked in the Springfontein bank branch for several months, while a lady clerk was on maternity leave. It was her first introduction to computers and she kept a little notebook in which she wrote down every step which she had to take while working on the computers. She took to calling it her “Musiekboek”. The strangeness of the new branch environment despite, she enjoyed working in the bank again.
Chris’ Mom always cooked “afval” for Chris when they paid her a visit. The kids used to get stuck into it as well after being told that it was chicken-a-la-king and could not understand why she would not eat it herself. Once when Ouma Broodjie visited them in Springfontein, she went off and bought tripe from the local butcher. She happily set about doing all the unspeakable things to the tripe which made it safe for human consumption. Pat was sure every single fly and “brommer” within a hundred miles picked up the unholy smell and gathered in her kitchen to better appreciate it. When the kids came home from school, the smell reached out to them in the street already and they came in with pinched noses, gasping out, “WHAT on earth is that awful smell”. Gleefully Pat announced that this was Ouma’s chicken-a-la-king, which they had eaten with such relish in the past. The kids were disgusted and swore off ever eating chicken-a-la-king again. They were also leery of ever eating anything that Ouma made in the foodline, without first conducting a proper “inquest” with Pat.
During the Boer War, Springfontein was home to both a Boer Concentration camp and a British Military camp. The family would often go out to where the camps had been situated and root around in the trash heaps and general area, for items such as old bottles, uniform buttons etc Pat had quite a collection of old bottles by the time they left Springfontein. One of the old locals, Miss Mary McClaren had a collection of bound volumes of an early British newspaper – possibly the London Times. She would normally not let them out of her sight but she allowed Chris to borrow two volumes at a time. They spent many hours paging through the old papers and were able to match the names of young soldiers who were buried in the old Military cemetery at Springfontein, with their obituaries, published all those years ago in far away England.
Springfontein was actually a thriving town after the 2nd World War. It was a major railway junction and it sported a number of quite superior shops. Mom once told Pat that they used to do their Christmas shopping in Springfontein, when Trompsburg was our hometown. The town even had a thriving hotel at one time, well supported no doubt, by all the passing railroad traffic. In common with numerous small but thriving towns, the departure of Jewish business owners signaled the end of the towns’ prosperity and their slow slide into oblivion. Today the town is just slightly more than a black, poverty stricken township.
Their first winter in Springfontein was a huge shock after having become acclimatized to the balmy weather, north of the Tropic of Capricorn. Pat woke up one morning to find the world oddly still and all sounds muted. On her way to make coffee and get the kids ready for school, she peeped through the curtains to discover the world outside blanketed in snow. What is more, it was still drifting down gently. She dashed to the kids’ bedrooms and flung back the curtains. They went from whingeing, sleepyheads to fully dressed kids in second flat and by 6.30 they were out in the street having their very first snowball fight. Their neighbours, Piet and Baby Louw later told them that they had lain snugly in their bed, watching the snow frolics - Piet remarked “Jy kan sien die Transvalertjies is niks gewoond nie”. Pat joined the kids in building a “snowlady”, a decision prompted by a lack of suitable attire for a snowman. She was decked out in an apron and a headscarf and became quite a celebrity, once the town began to stir and move about. People stopped and posed for photos of her and with her.
An amusing spinoff was brought about by a noisy group of black and coloured kids from a nearby farm, who always used the nightcart lane of earlier times, behind the house, as a shortcut to their school. Their lively chatter suddenly turned to screams of fright, as they suddenly caught sight of the strange figure standing on the lawn. They ran off down the road at top speeds, as if all the demons in hell were after them and were still very leery after school, giving the Clark’s house a wide berth when they saw the “tokoloshe” still standing ominously quietly on the lawn. For a few days afterwards, they avoided the shortcut altogether.
Eventually the idyllic Springfontein era came to an end and the Clarks were transferred to Rustenburg. The new house was much more modern and luxurious than the houses they had been living in up until then. It even had two bathrooms, a previously unknown luxury. Pat didn’t even mind the ghastly colour scheme of their en suite bathroom. The house had lots of tall windows which created a jawdropping bill for new curtains. Luckily, the kids had no problem settling into their new school.
In Standard 4, Neil decided that he needed to supplement his pocket money and started delivering the Beeld newspapers to houses in our vicinity. He would pack and deliver a big pile of newspapers every morning before school and collect the payments, which he would pay over to his school principal’s wife (who was the area agent), at the end of the month. He was most conscientious and excelled at the job. They had reason to be proud of the level of responsibility which he exhibited.
While they were in Rustenburg, Pat was talked into becoming an Annique agent by another agent who insisted that it was a very useful source of income. Something Pat soon discovered was that she was definitely not a born salesperson. She was too soft to be a hardnosed salesperson and instead of pocketing profits from specials, she would pass them on to her customers. The woman who had recruited her was area manager for Rustenburg and used to get a cut out of everyone’s sales. The final crunch came when this woman asked Pat and Martie, a colleague to help her set up and man an Annique stall at the Rustenburg Show. Pat’s foot was in plaster after recent surgery but she still managed to sit at the stall every day. They did quite well with sales and were supposed to share the profits between the three of them but at the end of it all, the manager announced that only a small profit had been made after deducting “show expenses”. Both Pat and Martie realised right away that she was lying and simply intended pocketing all the profit herself. Pat was furious and resigned on the spot. She made no secret of her reason for resigning to the Annique head office and so ended Pat’s brief career as a salesperson.
Pat decided to sign up with Weigh Less while they were in Rustenburg. She was delighted when it worked very well and she shed plenty of weight but was pretty crestfallen when the weight all came back when she quit the Weigh Less regimen.
They always had their main meal at midday in Rustenburg, because Chris could get home in time, with relative ease. He however, set an unusual kind of record by picking up tickets for speeding at the same spot in the same street two years in a row, on his birthday. One supposes it would have been futile to plead immunity to unfair prosecution on one’s birthday.
Heather joined the Girl Guides in Rustenburg and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. On one occasion, the troop went on a camping week-end to a Nature Reserve on the edge of town. The tents were duly pitched and come bedtime, the girls all crept off to sleep in their sleeping bags, in the tents. She hadn’t been settled for long when she felt a bite and then suddenly, a succession of bites and leapt screaming out of her sleeping bag and tent. They had pitched their tent right on a nest of red ants and the pugnacious little beasts were very eager to dispute the territory. The Guide mistress rushed a thoroughly bitten Heather into the shower but she wasn’t a happy child, to say the least. Remarkably, Heather never swore off camping, despite that experience.
They had most congenial neighbours in Rustenburg, Martiens and Rita, and they had an African grey parrot named Ghandi. While they were at work Pat took to having “conversations” with the parrot, while she was ironing. She had become bored with his endless renditions of “Jan Pierewiet” and started teaching him to whistle the theme from “Wielie Walie”, a kiddies’ TV show of the time. He wouldn’t whistle the tune but Pat persisted and one day she was talking to Rita, his mistress when Ghandi suddenly delivered a garbled but still recognizable version of Wielie Walie. Rita stopped in mid-sentence and said wonderingly, “Het ek reg gehoor? Ghandi kyk te veel TV. Martiens se dit hou hom geselskap as hy alleen is”. About a week later Rita was at home with an attack of sinusitis, of which Pat was unaware. She carried on with her daily routine, which included Ghandhi’s “singing lessons”. Imagine Pat’s surprise when Rita popped her head out of the window and said with a huge grin, “Buurvrou, gaan jy vir ons ‘n rekening stuur vir Ghandhi se sanglesse?”. Martiens’ nickname was Pikkewyn and Pat taught Ghandhi to say “Hello Pikkie Pikkewyn” much to his delight. Ghandhi was a much loved character who died most tragically. Ghandhi’s cage was on the stoep when he gave a terrible screech. Looking up, Rita was just in time to see a large black snake gliding off his cage. They rushed him to a vet but it was too late. Everyone grieved about Ghandhi, the Clarks included.
Their neighbours across the street from them had a big black dachshund named Fritz. Lynn kept inviting Pat over for tea, so one morning she went on over and was met at the gate by Lynn and the dog. On the way into the house, the damn dog quietly bit her leg. Pat didn’t say a word and Lynn had not noticed. Pat did not want to make a scene on the very first visit and figured, because she was wearing long pants, it could not be too bad. She reached down to check the wound and the little swine had a go at her hand as well. Luckily Lynn distracted him so he didn’t make contact. When she got home she had an angry bruise and a lump the size of a tennis ball on her shin. Needless to say, she never went near that house again. It is the only time she has ever been bitten by a dog and she has developed an active dislike of dachshunds as a result.
Another neighbour across the street had three daughters. When their eldest daughter was in Matric, they were miraculously blessed with twin girls. These plump little girls would sit out on the pavement while Pat was working in the garden and continually say, “Hello Tannie Piet”. Heather especially found this very funny and took to calling Pat “Tannie Piet”. To this very day, Jacques and Heather still call her Tannie Piet.
Unhappily for Neil, their next transfer to Lydenburg arrived shortly after he had been chosen as a Grade 7 prefect in the Soutpansberg Laerskool. They were very sad that the transfer would deny Neil his bit of honour but the bank did not take cognizance of any personal factors when arranging transfers.
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