Читать книгу Time Bomb - Johan Marais - Страница 7

3

FARM LIFE

My earliest memories are of living with my family on a plot in Brakpan on the East Rand where my dad dabbled in mixed farming. Among the animals we kept was a flock of geese. I was always wary of them and fled as soon as they came near me because there was an aggressive gander that seemed to have it in for me. I must have been about three when the creature grabbed me by my willie one day. For some reason I wasn’t wearing pants, and the gander saw his chance and came for me.

I screamed and ran, with the gander in tow, straight into an open drain. My mom, who had been watching the entire spectacle, gingerly fished me out and hosed me down.

Why am I telling this story? It seems that episodes from my childhood always come to mind when I try to determine where things went wrong for me. I don’t, for instance, remember a single occasion when my dad held me close, put me on his lap, kissed me or even just ran his hand through my hair. He showed no interest in my school work, and never attended any of my sporting events – not even when I began to excel at cross-country and marathon running. He was never there to encourage me. I was merely another mouth to feed and another pair of hands to help him work on the plot. It was my mom who comforted me and showed me affection.

Shortly after my run-in with the gander, my dad was forced to sell the plot and we moved in with my grandpa, a dairy farmer at Witpoortjie near Brakpan. My grandpa was strict but fair. He was also a stalwart of the Afrikaner nationalist movement, the Ossewa Brandwag.

Near my grandpa’s farm was a row of shops owned by Indians. At school we had heard that the way to annoy an Indian was to say: “Mohammed ate pork”. We didn’t even know at the time that different religions existed, neither did we have any idea who Mohammed was. On a dare, one of my elder brothers entered one of the shops but came charging out almost immediately. Hot on his heels was an Indian man, wielding a long bush knife. We were scared silly and ran for our lives.

The Indian shopkeeper knew my grandpa and came to complain. We were all given a hiding and a lesson in Indian religion. To crown it all, we had to apologise to all the shopkeepers.

In the evenings after supper the table would be cleared and my mom would bring out the family Bible. My dad would read a passage and we would sing a familiar hymn. Then we children had to answer questions about the night’s reading. If you couldn’t say who had been in the lion’s den with Daniel, you had your ears pulled. Before you got into bed, you had to kneel and say your prayers. And heaven forbid if mom or dad heard you swear or take the Lord’s name in vain.

And then there was grandma who had a harmonium and would sit down at any time of the day, playing hymns and singing along in High Dutch. We thought it sounded like a pack of wild dogs on heat! Of course on Sunday mornings we all had to go to church, followed by Sunday school and yet another church service in the evening. It was very hard for an energetic young boy.

My three brothers and I were indeed restless – at times downright naughty. On my grandpa’s farm there was a disused stone quarry where we used to swim in summer. Bordering the hole was a stand of poplars; it was the ideal place for throwing kleilat (clay pellets). Tired of swimming, we took one another on. When that became boring, we plucked two-metre switches and tried to toss our clay pellets into the road, about a hundred metres ahead.

Some of the older boys found it easy. It was just our luck that a big truck came past one day and we shattered its windscreen. We took fright and ran to our home which was close by, not thinking that this would lead the driver directly there. My grandpa merely shook his head when the driver came knocking on our door but my dad was not so forgiving.

Another favourite pastime was to set traps in the footpaths used by the black boys on the farm. Making a sturdy knot, we would tie together bunches of grass across the path. It was great fun to see them running down the path and falling down in a tangle of arms and legs!

Of course they weren’t stupid and knew it was us. Riding along the path on our bikes, we were caught short one day by a length of galvanised wire slung between two trees. We knew where it had come from. The same went for the day one of us fell into a hole covered with a sheet of corrugated iron and a little soil.

We were wild and often waged war with home-made catapults and stones. We would choose sides and square up in the dirt road before launching our attack. This game ended when one of my brothers was struck on the head and fell down unconscious.

After the catapult battles came cowboys and crooks, during which we fought with stick rifles. That also ended badly when my brother, Jacques[1], fell into his own stick rifle, piercing his stomach. My dad and grandpa had to rush him to hospital.

When I was about six, I saw a dead body for the first time. Our family was on the way to fish in the Bronkhorst River. At a T-junction on the old Delmas road, near Bapsfontein, my dad failed to stop completely and didn’t see a car approaching from the direction of Pretoria. There was a terrible collision. Our car spun round completely, and the other car veered onto its left wheels, careened along for about twenty metres and rolled.

Apart from being severely shaken up, no one in our car was injured. When we came to our senses, we ran to the other car. A piece from the door had struck the neck of the driver, an elderly gentleman, severing the artery. I stood watching as the last of his life blood pumped out and he died.

When I realised what I had seen, I was hysterical and ran blindly into the mealie fields, where my sister later found me.

At the age of eight my dad trusted me with the .22 rifle. I loved going out in the afternoons to shoot guinea fowl or doves. I would roast the birds over the coals – to my mother’s disgust, for I would subsequently refuse to eat supper. My dad was strict, and if I had taken five bullets, I had to return with five doves or explain why I had missed, and account for the rest of the bullets.

On the farm we children – four brothers and a sister – all had our chores. My eldest brother, Ben[2], was in charge of the cattle and the milking, while the second one, Jacques, saw to the pig farming. Len’s chores were divided among the cattle, horses and chickens, and I was the official shepherd. As the older boys left school and started to work, the responsibilities shifted down to the younger ones, and I was the youngest.

We boys slept in a long bedroom, almost like a dormitory. We each had our own wardrobe and an assortment of pets, from snakes to chameleons, bushbabies, frogs … anything imaginable with paws and wings. My mom and the domestic workers often refused to enter the room for fear that a creature might jump from a wardrobe.

Weekends were great fun, as we were all allowed to invite a friend or two to visit. We would ride horses, shoot birds, swim and do every imaginable thing a boy could do on a farm.

About half a kilometre from our house was the source of the Blesbok River, which flowed into a big dam on the farm. When the river flooded, we would cling to floating clumps of reed and race downstream for kilometres.

The refuse dump of the Sappi paper factory was right next to our farm, and every Saturday we boys would train our binoculars on the black youngsters who came to collect copper, bronze and aluminium to sell as scrap metal. We would lie in wait for them and take the scrap from them. On Mondays after school we would ride our bikes to the local scrap dealers and sell our loot. We had more pocket money and more friends than most other children at school.

One day, out of sheer boredom, we took pot shots with our airguns at our neighbour’s donkeys. His herdsman saw us and told his employer. The airguns didn’t have much effect on the donkeys, but the owner called the police anyway. My sister was nineteen and attractive, and the policemen seemed more interested in her. They nevertheless threatened us with death and incarceration if it ever happened again. And dad was waiting in the bathroom, to give us a hiding.

Just before my dad could make his belt do the talking, he got news that my eldest brother, Ben, who hadn’t been part of the escapade, had fallen from his horse and was seriously injured. My dad let us go and rushed my brother to hospital, where he spent about two months. He had to undergo several skin grafts on his legs, where the horse had fallen on top of him.

One weekend our family went camping at the Vaal Dam with friends. I was ten years old. My dad’s friend had a sailing boat and I desperately wanted to go sailing with him. He was keen to take me, but for some reason didn’t want my brothers or anyone else in the boat with us.

Not far from the shore he subtly moved closer to me, placing his hand on my thigh. Something didn’t feel right to me. He told me everything would be fine as long as I kept quiet and didn’t tell anyone, especially not my parents.

When his hand came to rest on my private parts, I got the fright of my life, dived overboard and swam back to our campsite. I told my dad what had happened. When his friend returned, they had a serious altercation, but nothing came of it. Today I realise that the incident caused me enormous emotional damage. I still can’t endure being approached or touched by any man.

By the time I was thirteen, a boyhood routine had emerged. Every Saturday I would get on my bike and ride the twelve kilometres from the farm to the town centre of Springs. In the afternoons a friend and I would slip into the St James snooker club in the local hotel. We would pick a table as far as possible from the gamblers with their thick cigars and tall glasses of booze and play a few games. Later, we would each take a girl to the movies – we started dating at an early age.

I would return to the farm, riding my bike in the dark, along the ghostly plantation tracks and the narrow footpaths that wound between the dams and rivers. It was creepy, but I was used to it.

I shot my first jackal on the farm and sold it to a sangoma in the township for twenty rand. His name was William Skosana and he allowed me to enter the room where he kept his muti and his gruesome collection of dead animals. The place was filled with bottles containing unrecognisable things. He was well known among the local blacks, and they came from far and wide for his advice and medicine. Later he went into politics and became a Cosatu leader. He was a genial man, and I learned a lot from him about the black culture.

In my early teens I also learned to drive a car and a bulldozer. I liked nothing better than to contour and plough the fields with the big bulldozer. The clattering of the tracks and the sense of power were like something out of a fairy tale. My eldest brother got his first car, a blue Mini, and we used it to hunt springhare at night.

But by day my only transport was still my bike. As a young boy, I daily pedalled the eight kilometres or so to the Jan van Riebeeck Primary School in Springs on my old bike. In winter the temperature would sometimes fall to six below zero. Some mornings my fingers were frozen, and ice flakes collected on my eyelids.

The Hugenote High School was even farther than the primary school, so as a teenager I had to do an extra two kilometres every day. Sometimes I would get so tired on my way back that I would get off my bike and sit on a rock or the pavement to rest. I simply didn’t have the strength to pedal any further.

Through my entire school career I kept up an aggregate of sixty per cent for my school work. Today I realise I might have done better if I hadn’t had to pedal all that way, play rugby and take part in numerous other physical activities as well.

A friend of Len’s, who was doing his national service in the army, visited us on the farm one weekend. He brought five F1 hand grenades that he had stolen somewhere. He seemed to have some knowledge of hand grenades, so we decided to test them. We walked down to the farm dam, where seagulls nested on the floating islands. Because they were a nuisance when we shot guinea fowl or pheasants, flying low and chasing off the birds, we decided to throw a grenade among their nests.

We were completely unprepared for the ear-splitting noise, so we headed back home very quickly. That evening my dad mentioned that some factory workers had heard an explosion at the dam and the security department of the factory was investigating. We kept mum.

A week later we took the four remaining grenades to a mine dump some distance from our house. About four hundred metres from the dump there was a railway track. We waited until a goods train came past and threw a grenade at the train from the top of the mine dump. Again there was an enormous explosion. The grenade fell somewhere near the foot of the dump, very far from the train.

For a while we hid on top of the mine dump, before deciding to throw the remaining three grenades over a mound of earth quite near us to see the result of the explosion at closer quarters. We threw all three at the same time and waited, but nothing happened. After a minute or two we cautiously peered over the mound.

The levers lay pointing away from the grenades but they hadn’t exploded. We decided to take the .22 rifle we were carrying and shoot at the grenades. Perhaps that would set them off, we argued.

After a number of shots, the metal on the grenades were already shiny, but nothing had happened. What to do next? My brother’s friend picked up the grenades and noticed that they had no detonators. We took them back home and hid them in a manhole in my dad’s garage. Two weeks later the drain was blocked. The plumber who was called in found the grenades in the sewerage system. Within an hour the Security Police, explosive experts, detectives, fingerprint experts and about three cars belonging to the Uniform Branch were at our house. Everyone was subjected to prolonged questioning. We boys stuck to our story: we didn’t know a thing.

I was the only one of the five siblings who worked in the garden. I had green fingers and made my own vegetable garden, dug over the beds, planted the seedlings, watered them, staked them when necessary and controlled the weeds. My garden was so successful that my dad sold some of my tomatoes, green beans and pumpkins at work.

We had about twenty sheep that I regarded as my personal flock. My saddest moment as a farm boy was when my entire flock disappeared one day. In the late afternoon the flock would start grazing closer to the kraal. Every afternoon I would go out to fetch them. Like a shepherd of old, I would call them by their names – not all of them, of course, but I had hand-reared a number of them with a bottle and teat as lambs. The moment they caught sight of me, they would come up to me for a game of head-butting or a pat on the head. I would lead the way, with the flock following me into the kraal.

Then, one day, the flock was simply gone.

The farm workers came to help, and we followed their tracks to a spot where the entire flock had been herded through a boundary fence. In the bushes we found skins and heads – a number of the sheep had been slaughtered there. It began to grow dark and we returned home. The next morning I accompanied the detectives to the place where the sheep had been loaded onto bakkies. More of my sheep were lying on the railway tracks some distance ahead. They must have ended up in front of a train. It was just before the lambing season, and the tracks lay strewn with unborn lambs, many of them twins.

That was the end of our sheep farming. It had been an enormous financial loss for my dad, and a terrible shock to me. For weeks on end I cried myself to sleep about my sheep. Needless to say, there was no counselling for me.

Next, my dad and I ventured into bee-keeping. At night we transported sixty hives to places where food was plentiful. In winter we put out a solution of sugar and water as a supplement. I was stung so often that I became immune to bee stings. Our enterprise had just begun to flourish when one day, at the request of a farmer, we left our hives on top of a mine dump so that our bees could pollinate his beans. The next day all our hives were missing. They, too, had been stolen overnight. That put an end to our bee-keeping enterprise.

Shortly after this setback, my dad decided to give up farming. The farm with everything on it was to be sold: the horses, cattle, chickens, pigs; even our pets – the dogs, cats, everything – had to go. It all went up for auction, and to me it felt as if part of my life was being sold.

We moved to a big house in town, which was a great adjustment. I found some consolation at the library, which was only a few blocks away. Reading was the new passion in my life. I got through three storybooks per week. Still, I missed my life on the farm badly. I realise today that nothing makes a child independent more quickly than life on a farm, where you have to learn to think for yourself at an early age, and if something goes wrong, find a solution yourself.

Farm children are different. During my career in the police force, especially as an instructor, I could immediately distinguish the farm boys from the city boys in a group of young policemen.

Though life on the farm was in some ways idyllic, it was not always easy. Both my parents had a drinking problem, and they would regularly come to blows. Occasionally one of them would leave, and they would live apart for a while. On top of that I sensed from an early age that I was somehow different from my brothers and sisters, but I didn’t know exactly why.

When I was in standard four, I was taking a bath one evening when I heard my mom screaming on the porch. The screaming grew louder and I didn’t know what to do. My mom and dad had been drinking and fighting all day. I jumped out of the bath and opened the bathroom door a chink. My mom was on the floor and my dad was sitting astride her, with both hands around her throat.

For a moment I stood trembling with fear. What could a child do in a situation like that? I spotted a broom and, without giving a thought to the fact that I was stark naked, I dashed out, grabbed the broom and struck my dad across his back with all my might.

My dad let go of my mom and turned in my direction; I threw down the broom and ran back to the bathroom, locking the door. I got dressed and left through the other door, which led to my sister’s room. She hid me in her wardrobe. I didn’t know what my dad would do to me if he found me.

After a while my sister let me out of the wardrobe; I was crying inconsolably. She tried her best to comfort me and allowed me to spend the night in her bed.

The next morning my mom came to fetch me. She told me not to worry, as my dad had sobered up and wouldn’t do me any harm. For the next few weeks he gave me a wide berth.

We carried on as if nothing had happened, but incidents like that one made it more and more difficult for me at home. After my two older brothers and sister had left school, only Len and I remained. When he decided to leave school during his matric year to join the police force, I couldn’t stand the idea of remaining behind on my own.

Two years later I was back in Springs, but this time as a constable at the Springs police station, and no longer as a boy in my dad’s home.

[1] Fictitious name

[2] Fictitious name