Читать книгу The Lyndi Tree - JA Ginn Fourie - Страница 10

Daddy says that the writing is on the wall for South Africa – Apartheid is not the way to treat people and expect their submission indefinitely. They sell all of the furniture and vehicles before leaving Beginsel, keeping only a few treasures like books and saddlery, to be sent to Rhodesia by rail with his three best horses. One of them is Landau, a horse that Daddy’s friend Johnny Higgs has given to me. I feel so special to have been gifted Landau and that Daddy honours my horse as one of the chosen, although without asking me.

After final exams, I board the train to Ficksburg one last time before the move. We spend a couple of weeks staying at 16 Kloof Street before it is taken over by new owners. Kendrew is still living at home, on Laerplaas, and we meet a couple of times. Then to my surprise, en route to Rhodesia, while we are spending a week in Johannesburg with cousin Claudies’s parents, Kendrew and a friend turn up. We go out water-skiing, and Kendrew asks if I will marry him. I am corresponding with Rob, and I also want to go to University, so I decline with sadness, confusion and pain. I realise that Kendrew needs to marry and settle down on the family farm. I am tempted to accept his proposal because he has meant more than a big brother to me; I have been very envious of Sylvia for all these years. At the same time my mind mulls Granny’s advice,

“If you want a home where the shadows are never lifted; marry one with whom you are unequally yoked together.” I know we have different beliefs about the Sabbath and Sunday worship - is that unequal yoking?

Is that why Granny had forbidden Kendrew to visit me?

John had joined Daddy at Beginsel for a year before the move, and now the six of us set off in Johns’ Fiat to travel two thousand miles north. Daddy says that he has transferred all his funds to Rhodesia because of a reasonable exchange rate. I feel very uncertain, but my parents have always coped before, so I tell myself that we will be OK, even if I must sit with some luggage on my lap. James is the smallest, so he often sits in front, three up for the sake of peace, but more often four up in the back, enduring David’s jibes,

“Mommy, David’s teasing me again!” pierces my small inch of tranquillity - persistent as the breath we breathe on the long, exhausting journey to Salisbury.

“David, stop that!” Daddy says. “Or you will walk for a couple of miles.”

I don’t recall that happening. At last we get to Salisbury, and instead of heading north to Sinoia as I expected, Daddy buys a blue Mercedes Benz. We set off east to Inyazura where Ian has been with Irma and her family arranging their wedding for New Years’ Day of 1963. They had graduated together and then announced their engagement.

John is the best man with Irma’s brother Athol - groomsman, and I am a bridesmaid with Diantha, Irma’s sister. The preacher has a catchphrase, which is all I remember of the sermon,

“The couple who prays together stays together.”

Everything goes without a hitch until the bridal couple has boarded the train for their honeymoon and then on to a mission station called Bugema College in Uganda. We wave good-bye with tears in our eyes, not knowing when we will meet again. We are each caught in a private web of anticlimax when John feels in his pocket for his car keys - Ian was the last to drive it. The train departed twenty minutes ago. Immediately John hops into the Mercedes and chases off until he manages to catch up with the train, at a station. What a relief, I find myself weeping with the combined pain of saying good-bye to my big boet - brother and new sister, plus the stress from the ‘key’ saga.

Inunwa Ranch entrance with our cheetah and puppy

Daddy sells the tobacco farm near Sinoia before we move there and buys Inunwa Ranch, fifty-four miles north-west of Bulawayo . I spend that year on the ranch deciding my career direction. I have set my heart on Physiotherapy, but Cape Town seems a long way away. I enjoy being Daddy’s ‘farm manager’ … he teases that I am his farm damager.

I pass my drivers’ license the second time around! So that I can assist him and learn how to care for the mombies - cattle. John accepts at Gwebi Agricultural College in Natal, and David and James attend Anderson School near Gwelo. For the first time in my life, I am alone with my parents and enjoying their full attention.

Mommy is a lot more fun than previously, and to celebrate my adulthood, I start calling them Mum and Dad. We drive to Bulawayo once a week, to buy supplies on the tarred strip roads. Dad usually takes us to Meikles for lunch as a treat. We meet with our neighbours and the elderly couple who run the post office at Lonely Mine, which is only four miles from our Ranch homestead. Abandoned long ago, the mine is apart from the post office and adjacent house. The only evidence that there was a mine is the twenty-odd crumbling foundations interspersed with ant-heaps. Lonely indeed; wistful with Mopani trees and grass growing out of what was once a thriving community in the surrounding bushveld. Dad has bought the breed-herd with the Ranch and soon starts upgrading the largely Afrikaner cows by crossing with Brahmans to create his hybrids. There is a luscious field of lucerne, which is game-fenced to keep the kudu out - they prefer it to even the Mopani leaves in the dry season from August to November. October is known as suicide month in drought years because of the heat and dust storms before the guti - heavy mist and rain arrive to save us all.

We discover that there is an Adventist Church and Conference Office in Bulawayo, which means instant connections and friends, but it is too far to go to church very often. So, we still study the Sabbath School lesson every Sabbath. Now I enjoy bringing my insights and arguments to the table, and we have lively and heated debates. By mid-year, I start feeling lonely and a bit bored, so I apply to the School of Radiography in Bulawayo. The two-year course begins in July, and I attend an interview. After a pleasant exchange, the Head of the School informs me that commencing with the new intake, lectures will be conducted on Saturdays. The implications for me are study and work on Sabbaths. Why is this happening to me? In disappointment and sadness, I turn the offer down. Mum suggests that it is providential and there will be something better that is meant just for me.

A fire breaks out on our northern border. Dad is the first to detect the smoke. He calls the farmworkers to load the bakkie with a water tank, while he drags hessian sacks towards us,

“Drive as fast as you can!” he shouts to me as he jumps on the back,

“I’ll direct which roads to take”. Soon the flames are visible, and I feel the panic in myself and the others. We reach the fire which has penetrated Inunwa’s far camp, the mombies are restless and running. Dust combined with the smoke; the intensity of heat and poor visibility brings a madness of its own. The men unload the water tank and start beating at the flames with the wet sacks. It seems hopeless with the wind ripping. Dad and Paulus grab pliers from the tool kit and start to run. Dad yells that I must move the bakkie away from the fire and they disappear in the direction of the next fence to cut the barbed wire, so that the cattle are not trapped. I drive away and am now uncertain of how to proceed. I have no experience with fires and pray desperately,

“God, please, please help us. Change the direction of the wind - you did it on the sea of Galilee, I think it was, you stilled the wind and the waves. This time it’s the wind and the flames. It would be a good idea to change the direction of the wind, so it burns itself out; for your honour and glory”. I add the addendum,

“Please save Dad, the cattle and the people.” Time is up because I am suffocating, and I can’t see where the flames are. I call and walk for what seems like hours, then when it looks safe I climb back into the bakkie and retrace my treads, the burnt grass and trees are sickeningly black and eerie in the murky foglike smoke,

“Daddy! Paulus! Where are you?” I’m getting hoarse from shouting, and there is no reply. The sun is setting. I feel so panicky and exhausted that I am about to return home, when a bent and blackened figure comes staggering out of the bush. It’s Dad and then Paulus and the others. I run and embrace Dad and congratulate the weary warriors,

“The cattle got through OK!” says Dad. “But the veld is burned badly, and we are finished! Please drive home after we have had a drink.”

We pass the nearest cattle trough en route home, and everyone gulps down handfuls of water from the inlet pipe. We are all relieved but too dirty and weary to celebrate or even feel grateful until dinner time with Mum.

Towards the end of the year, I’m delighted that the only University to which I have applied for Physiotherapy accepts me, the University of Cape Town. By the way Mum and Dad congratulate me, I know that they are thrilled too. I work hard at preparing for the adventure; making new clothes and reading up about Cape Town University.

During the Christmas holiday, Rob travels up by train from East London to Bulawayo. I am so excited to see him again. We meet at the station and dally a while before joining Mum and Dad in the car. Rob has already met my parents on a previous occasion, but he has not stayed in our home. Mum, knowing that Rob has excellent carpentry skills, puts him to work making doors for the built-in cupboards for our huge kitchen. She says it is not suitable for us to have too much free time! She seems to be nervous that my career will be interrupted before it begins, but she doesn’t say so.

One evening Dad invites my brothers and their friends to a hunt; near a dip tank in one of the distant camps, a leopard was sighted by one of the workers. Dad puts the shotgun and a rifle onto the back of the bakkie and gets into the driver’s seat. The others clamber onto the back with shouts of,

“Goodbye. See you at suppertime!”

I am glad to be excluded; I have no stomach for shooting any animal, let alone a beautiful shiny leopard. When they return at sunset, Rob is shaking as he tells me about his very narrow escape,

“Shit. I nearly shot your father! We saw the leopard a couple of times. Each time someone would grab the rifle and aim, but by then it was out of sight. As the sun was setting your Dad was standing by the driver’s side, and he said, ‘We’ll have to pack it in for tonight guys!’ So I reached for the rifle to put it in its holder… Pow! There was a loud report. As I felt the kick I nearly dropped it. Your Dad was looking ashen, pale; the bullet had whistled right past his ear.”

Oh, shit, indeed! As he speaks I feel my tummy lurch, I think of what might have happened that night and how different our lives would be if Dad had died. At the same time I am relieved that the leopard lives. The event is never spoken of again, but I notice that when Dad prays, at worship that night, there is real meaning in his gratitude for life and health and strength. He seems to treat Rob more like a son after that experience and one to follow soon after.

“Quickly get the trochar, and canular,” Dad shouts as he runs down the hill to the Lucerne land. I detect his desperation and run to collect them in his office. The mombies have been in the lucerne land too long and are bloating. There are fifteen of them - prize steers ready for sale. We chase them into the crush, they are bellowing and soon start frothing at the mouth and gasping for breath. I feel so helpless as Dad punctures their bloating abdomens – gas hissing. One trochar is too slow, and with panic, fear and sadness, we witness four sink to their knees and slump rasping in death. Rob is very disturbed by this, and we cry together over the colossal loss.

Before Rob leaves, we stand in the kitchen after everyone else had gone to bed, our arms around each other. He asks about a private engagement. He is doing a Bachelor of Commerce by correspondence and at the same time is helping his father in the family business; a stone quarry near East London. I have three years ahead of me at Cape Town University. A private engagement he reasons will give us time and commitment to think about our future together. I am happy to know that he wants a permanent relationship. And although we are tempted to have a sexual relationship, he says that he values our friendship too much to spoil it before marriage - the picking of the rose! He leaves by train at the end of the holiday, amid tears and promises to write often, to which we stick like glue.

The train ride to Cape Town is a long three days, which will be repeated twice a year for the next three and a half years. The University is dauntingly new. It is the height of summer and every day I walk up the long hill past the Old Dutch Mill, over DeWaal Drive and a further slog up to the Physics or Chemistry Building on Upper Campus. I have lodgings at the Adventist Nurses Home, on the mountainside of the Mowbray Train Station. Twelve of us live in the double-storey house. Mrs Agnes Marais is a meticulous ‘house mother’ and provides our comfortable stay. The food is vegetarian and well presented and our linen laundered weekly. Mrs Marais takes worship straight after supper for those who are not on duty. I am the only resident not doing nurses training, which means I am not earning a salary as they are.

My parents send my monthly pocket money with the board and lodging fees. No need to worry about payment of the University fees, it happens seamlessly by considerate parents. I am so preoccupied with lectures, studying, tennis and finding new friends that I seldom think about my privilege. It seems like a right to be at University. Occasionally the members of NUSAS (National Union of Students Association) march in protest that Black students cannot attend the University of Cape Town, and Coloured students must obtain special permission. They are permitted only if the requested course is not offered at the University of the Western Cape; established for Coloured People in 1960.

Initially, I joined in the marches, more for the fun of it, than as a serious activist. Although I become uncomfortable with the Black oppression during apartheid, I now have no Black friends, and the farmworkers at the ranch in Rhodesia seem to be happy and satisfied. Mum is frustrated because she cannot depend on them to always do as requested. Edward, who is Cook and Houseboy disappears unannounced for months at a time. Then he reappears expecting to take over his job again, as though he has not been away. Edward says that he only intended to go home for the weekend but finds big family matters to attend to and crops to plant, but now he is back and all smiles. He is an excellent cook and a pleasant man, so each time Mum relents and arranges for whoever has taken his place to work in the garden or on the ranch. What angers Mum is that during the years of living at Inunwa, Edward is never able to tell her in advance when he will be leaving, and it is never at a specific time of the year, so the pattern continues.

When I phone home from Cape Town, Edward sometimes answers,

“Hello Edward, please call the Madame.”

I hear a chuckle, as he says,

“Ah! The Madame, she is not here at this time!”

“Where is she?” as if it matters anyway I ask.

“Sometime she is in the office, sometime she is in the garden, and sometime I am not very sure.”

So that is how our conversation ends,

“Please tell her I phoned.”

On the train, returning to Rhodesia one winter holiday, a group of us read ‘Uhuru’ by Robert Ruark; banned in South Africa for inciting unrest and violence. So, it is with intrigue that we divide it into three pieces and pass it around. Tucked up in our bedding rolls to ward off the cold, we read frantically to finish before the journey ends. Other novels which I remember on those train journeys are: Wilbur Smiths’ ‘When the Lion Feeds’; and ‘Lady Chatterley's Lover’ by D H Lawrence. Both also banned at the time.

It is 1964. I start to feel a less secure side to life after reading about the Mau-Mau, but it is too uncomfortable to dwell on that when in all other respects, life is comfortable enough, even with the stresses of maintaining friendships - trying to ‘make it’ socially and educationally. However, in the stillness of the Rhodesian night, thoughts of the Mau-Mau and Kenya haunt me. When it’s time to return to Cape Town, I panic about my parents being alone so far away from help should the Mau-Mau, the Black fever, strike in Rhodesia; yet Mum and Dad seem so unafraid and absorbed in their challenges with making ends meet, with the economy and politics, that we never discuss it. They don’t urge me to do better at University when I fail physiology and have to repeat it by doing an extra six months. They don’t ask what is happening in my life, but they are just always so happy to have me home. We garden together or take a flask of tea out on the ranch checking the mombies, the watering points and fences, or go to Bulawayo shopping and occasionally to church.

I have been making all my clothes since I was thirteen and that takes up creative time in the holidays. I either ride horseback or use the bakkie to fetch the post at Lonely Mine. Rob’s beautiful letters arrive faithfully, connecting me with his world and struggles. Being the eldest son and living at home, working for his somewhat authoritarian father, and studying by correspondence, is proving to be more difficult than he had imagined. Between the lines I hear him gritting his teeth and pushing to become independent, he concentrates on staying fit by jogging and pushing iron.

Kudo cow

One day Mum and I are in the vegetable garden, a kudu cow comes loping up the long concrete driveway between the gardens and the homesteads; perched on top of the koppie - hillock. Our two dogs are chasing and biting at her swollen udder. My heart beats faster, as I realise that she has a calf somewhere and is probably bent on distracting the dogs. Knowing that she has a short running span, I give chase as fast as I can, following her up the hill. As I get to the top of the koppie panting hard, Freddie, who is chopping wood at the pile, raises his axe and aims for her throat. I scream in anticipation but see her stumble, and Freddie slits her throat. Fury burns in my breast and explodes in my mind,

“Freddie give me that axe. I will kill you now; she came for protection, and you killed her.” I yell, sobbing and trying to disarm him,

“Ah. Ah. Ah. Miss Gin,.” he mutters, dropping the axe and holding my wrists which render me powerless and even more enraged. With a herculean shove, I manage to free myself and run to my bedroom, where I lie on my bed, pounding my pillow…. eventually my sobs subside, and I toss around until I fall asleep.

“Ginny, did you have a good nap?” Mother prompts at supper time,

“Tell us how Freddie managed to supply our meat rations for the month.”

How can I respond? My mind slows down; this is a double bind. Dad sometimes shoots a kudu bull for rations, but only when there is little else for us and the farmworkers, and only an older kudu bull. Now Freddie has saved him the chore.

“What about the fact that she must have a calf? And that she came to us for protection?” I hear my voice, sharp and critical.

“Ginny…” Dad says patiently, “…life is different for Freddie, he is grateful for fresh meat and especially enough to last all of us for a month. The cow didn’t suffer, and she was about to give birth!”

“I don’t care about Freddie – I could have killed him this afternoon if I only had the strength. He doesn’t care for anything but his stomach.”

In that instant, a flash of insight penetrates my soul - I have the potential to kill, and I feel a rush of guilt - mea culpa! Suddenly I know, that provided with the right circumstances, I am capable of the evil of which I am accusing Freddie, but it is brief and transitory. I force it out of my consciousness like a searing rod of blame and shame.

“It’s no good getting angry with Freddie, nothing can be reversed now; as you know the commandments say,‘Thou shalt not kill’.”

Dad concludes the discussion with the authority of the scriptures.

“Is that only humans that you may not kill?” I sense my confusion and the unfairness that what I am feeling is so unimportant as to be summarily dismissed.

Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be.

No wonder the Mau-Mau in Kenya could hamstring beautiful cows in the pastures, they must be savages after all!

In my second year at UCT Rob writes saying that our paths are leading in different directions and in all honesty, he wants to go his way. We have discussed the religion of our parents; he pictures a harsh, arbitrary, punitive God who waits to judge, condemn and punish with no second chances – that is not for him. I feel the same powerlessness in the pit of my stomach. I have no defences against that reasoning from the Old Testament, although I intuitively know it cannot be that way. The creativity of the God who hung dying on a tree must have a way of dealing with my humanity; is it the ‘grace alone’ that Uncle Cyril insisted on years ago? My language at the time seems inadequate for letters, where there is no eye contact and closeness. So, with tears and a sense of rejection, I have to let Rob go. Sadly, we have no further contact until his sister provides me with his telephone number to request permission to include him in this book.

Rob says he trusts me implicitly and doesn’t need to vet what I have written.

I am on a bus to the University one day in September 1966, when the news headlines read: Verwoerd – A Nation Mourns. He escaped assassination in 1961 at the Rand Easter Show but this time Dimitrios Tsafendas, a parliamentary messenger, has stabbed him at his desk in the House of Assembly. It is with shock and disbelief that I realise how tenuous life can be and although the press lauds him, there is a rumble of discontent about the architect of apartheid. While he was Minister of Native Affairs, he wrote of the intention,

“To limit black academic curriculum to basic literacy and numeracy because Africans were meant to be ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water.”

He was also responsible for the restrictive laws on courtship and marriage across racial lines, where to live, where to play, where even to go to the toilet. What would the future hold now?

Soon after I graduate with a diploma in Physiotherapy, Christian Barnard rockets to fame for the ‘first in the world’ human heart transplant at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town. I have done ward rounds with him as a student in my faded Ricketts blue uniform and have witnessed his impatience and arrogance with staff and students. Yet it is with great pride, that I acknowledge I am a graduate of the same university hospital and have brushed shoulders with the famous man.

My first appointment as a qualified therapist is at the Bulawayo General Hospital. One of the young patients, on hearing about the heart transplant asks me,

“So, will Dr Washkansky love the people that Miss Darvell loved?” … her heart had been donated, after a fatal motor accident. I try to answer his question with all my tortured memory of physiology,

“No, I think that love is a series of electro-chemical connections through pathways in the brain and has very little to do with the heart, which is just a pump to circulate the blood.”

He seems satisfied, but I am not. There must surely be a better explanation for a force so powerful; as clear and consistent as love, equal in strength to magnetism and gravity. No rational description seems enough.

Fifty years on, and we have much greater insight into heart function; As we experience anger, frustration, anxiety and insecurity, our heart rhythms become more erratic. These erratic patterns, directed to the emotional centres in the brain, are recognised as negative or stressful feelings. These signals create the actual feelings we experience in the heart area and the body. The erratic heart rhythms also block our ability to think clearly. Added to this is the risk of developing heart disease, which increases significantly for people who often experience these emotions.

Conversely, Heart-Math’s Insititute research shows that when we experience heart-felt emotions like love, care, appreciation and compassion, the heart produces a very different rhythm; a horizontal sinusoidal pattern that looks like gently rolling hills. Harmonious heart rhythms, which reflect positive emotions, are considered to be indicators of cardiovascular efficiency and nervous system balance.

The heart it seems is the seat of emotions as the ancients believed, after all. Perhaps Dr Washkansky did love Miss Darvell’s friends? And even enjoy the same foods as Miss Darvell.³

While I am finding my way in the world, there is a lot happening in Africa, confirming my apprehensions about the Mau-Mau in Kenya making their way south.

I am ignorant of the detail and particularly that of a baby born to his family in the northern reach of South Africa. Here begins his story, taken from his book ‘Child of this Soil – The Journey of a Freedom Fighter’, with permission.