Luky and grandparents on Holy Communion Day
CHAPTER FOUR
BYE HOLLAND! HI SOUTH AFRICA!
My parents, sisters, brother and I might
never have come to South
Africa but for the kind offices of a Dutch
Reformed dominee and his wife, Aneke.
Both of
them died several decades ago as did many of the people in the earlier chapters
of these dappled reminiscences. The last I saw of the dominee was when, now
an old man, he was on television, speaking about his work which was to provide
bibles for the masses.
He allowed his wife to assist us
in our plans to emigrate to South
Africa.
He was studying in Amsterdam
at the time for his doctorate in divinity or theology and he and his lovely wife
stayed in digs close to our shop in the Scheldestraat.
Aneke was a lonely girl, newly married
and hyper-slim with long glorious blonde hair.
She wore the most wonderful clothes which she made herself with great
skill.
It didn’t take her long to clean up the few
rooms they rented, and as her husband was mostly either at Amsterdam university or studying at home, she
had to learn to be quiet and content with her own company, creeping around like
a child on her stockinged feet.
She was bitterly homesick for her mother,
for the vast Fauresmith farm where she had grown up and for the sheltering
beams of the South African sun.
Shyly, she’d come into our shop for her
half loaf of bread, a couple of rolls, a pie or some biscuits, but my mother
lost her heart to her and loved the way she tried to speak Dutch in her
Afrikaans way. Come to think of it, she
had some of the graceful appeal and dignity of my Hogenhout aunts and this too
may have drawn my mother to her.
They began by having short conversations and
soon my mother was telling her how much my father longed to emigrate to South Africa. I was too young to grasp all the details, but
I think for us all to come to South
Africa together my father had to have a job
and a house awaiting him.
“Don’t you worry,” Aneke said. “I’ll get my mother on the job. She’s a formidable organiser.” Aneke’s mother made our family her mission. Within a few months my father had his South
African job, his work permit and a house promised to go with it. He and my mother sold the business which had
brought them out of the red and made a tidy profit, enabling them to buy
tickets for the six of us without State aid and to crate all our furniture,
linen and crockery in a huge wooden container, in addition to ensuring our financial survival until it was
time for the six of us to leave.
The dominee on
his return to South Africa
from Amsterdam
became a chaplain. In
the meantime in Amsterdam,
my mother and Aneke continued meeting.
In the month October of the year 1952 a
taxi drove through the centre of Amsterdam en
route to the harbour where the emigration ship Zuiderkruis (Southern Cross) awaited the most recent crop of
emigrants to South Africa who were about to embark and leave the Netherlands
for South Africa later that day. My
father sat beside the taxi driver, Miekie on his lap, while Jos, Elly and I were pressed up close to my mother in the back seat.
I was the only one who shed a tear. Among the rest of the family a euphoric sense
of anticipation reigned. My paternal grandfather had supported us enthusiastically.
He was very cross with the government for making him pay a great deal of
money in income tax for social services.
Having always been self-employed, he frowned on the idea of state
pensions for everyone and he had no intention of paying the pension of others,
particularly when this would affect his own frugal savings for the future after
a lifetime of self-employment and the employment of others. When he could no longer pay the massive taxes
required from him, he posted the key of his smithy in a registered envelope to
the Receiver of Revenue.
“They know now what I think of them and of their
whole regime, Kunegonde,” he told me proudly.
Frankly I didn’t know what he meant by that. He always over-estimated me.
Although I was a child, however, I realized
that beyond a possible shrug very little attention would be paid to
Opa’s bold gesture in the Revenue office.
When my father spoke to him about hoping to emigrate, Opa yelled:
“Long live liberty!”
“I leave this cold country without shedding
a tear,” my mother was saying to my dad. “I’m just sad about my mom and dad and feel
sorry for you about your mother.” My maternal grandfather was already dead by that time. Tante Talitha’s
husband had taken her to Indonesia. For a long time when she returned she sat all
day beside Oma’s fire, white to the gills, shaking with cold and yearning for
the blazing sun.
My mother enjoyed serving rice, for she thought
rice was where it was at. Trying to find our feet financially the
first two years in South
Africa we would practically subsist on rice
and bananas, a cheap, if fattening, diet.
On our way to the harbour, we passed the
Dam and the Kalverstraat. On Sundays my
father had often taken us along to a church in the Kalverstraat, hidden among
the shops that were frequented by tourists.
They called the church De Papegaai
(The Parrot). During the war when
petrol was unobtainable we went there once in a cart with horses. I had never forgotten that.
As the taxi irrevocably left the beautiful,
familiar old parts of Amsterdam,
I started asking myself how I could bear to leave this city of my heart. When the taxi entered a hitherto unknown
section I sobbed sorrowfully. We were a
down-to-earth family. When you cried at
home you were told to wipe away those crocodile tears.
“For if you’ve got time to waste you can come
and wash the dishes.”
But this time my mother stroked my hair and
my father made soothing sounds from the front seat.
“Don’t cry honey, you’ll see that you’ll
find South Africa
beautiful,” my mother said. “They sell
pineapples there for a sixpence. That’s
only a kwartje in our money. And you know how you love pineapple.”
I stopped sniffling. “With whipped cream?” I asked hopefully, Aneke having introduced us to this splendid dessert.
“Well I can’t be sure about that. Only the future will tell.”
I was in the seventh grade at school. Our school year had started in September and
it was now the end of October. Since there
was no place for Elly and me in the digs my parents, Jos and Miekie occupied
when the house and the shop had been taken over by the new shop-owners, we had
been sent to a girls’ home run by nuns for the couple of months
since I had finished grade six. We felt
somewhat cramped in those surroundings after running around
unfettered in Amsterdam
for so long but we soon came to heel.
Elly went back for a few weeks to school but later stayed on with the
sisters who were teaching her sewing the way the nuns had taught my
mother twenty-five years earlier.
My academic good fortune had held and there
had been talk of letting me skip the rest of grade seven and promoting me to
grade eight. This intention came to
naught when suddenly our papers for South Africa arrived and we were
told to pack our cases and take a very early train back to Amsterdam on the morning of our proposed trip
to South Africa.
In our compartment on the way from Amersfoort to Amsterdam were two ladies
speaking together. With our knowledge of Dutch diction, Elly and I both realised that the one hailed from Amsterdam. The ladies in the compartment were being complimentary and one told the other she came from the Hague.
“And you, where do you come from?” she
asked the other.
“Where would you say?” the other asked.
“I couldn’t possibly guess.”
“From Amsterdam,” the other replied.
The Amsterdammer and the The Haguer
beamed benevolently while Elly and I smiled at one another. With a flash of insight I realized at that moment
that one day I would be writing about this and here I am, sixty-one years
later.
My parents were waiting at Centraal Station
with Jos and Miekie and after our excited hugs and greetings my father had
hailed the taxi. It was now turning into
the quay of Amsterdam harbour and my father paid off the driver who bade us all
a bon voyage. With the back of my sleeve I wiped off my
last tears.
“Out you get,” my father told us enthusiastically. He had little idea that this was the last
time he would ever see the beloved city of his birth and how desperately homesick
for Amsterdam he would be during the seventeen years of life that remained to
him.
Absently I watched groups of emigrants,
some busy and nervous, others sorrowful and weeping, taking leave of their
families. My parents had said goodbye to
their families at a party at my grandparents the previous evening and asked
that nobody come to say goodbye. Then
another taxi drove up along the quay and Aneke stepped out.
There she stood, with her long blonde hair waving
in the winter breeze, wearing her amusing short green jacket with felt
figures all over it She carried two coats over her arm. One my mother shrugged into and the other
went to Elly.
“When you give these to my mother and my
aunt in Jagersfontein, please give them my love,” Aneke requested. “Only three more months till we go home. Tell my mother I can’t wait to see her and
the family!”
“Look over there!” my father called.
A massive wooden chest was being hoisted
upwards to the deck of the Zuiderkruis.
It bore the legend: G J Nooij, Jagersfontein, South Africa.
“I wonder whom that belongs to,” a lady,
standing near us, said. “They must have
taken everything but the kitchen sink.”
And that was the truth, and a good thing it was too, because my father
and mother were never again to become wealthy.
And yet in the Scheldestraat so briefly they had come so close to
attaining material wealth. I can think
of no better application of the expression “Man proposes, God disposes.” They went to make money and they ended up
losing it. How ironic was that.
”We’re really on the way now,” my father said. A BBC radio man approached us and asked my
mother in English why she wanted to emigrate to South Africa.
“To give my children a better future,” she
said, although there had been nothing wrong with our future in Amsterdam. But perhaps our good fortune had arrived just
a little too late.
Our
hand luggage was collected and we followed in its wake into the boat. Aneke stood in the bracing wind, waving and
coughing. She had difficulty in handling
the weather. She looked extremely
sad to see us go. Nobody could have been more hospitable to Aneke in Holland than my
mother was.
“Child,
go home, you’ll catch your death,” my mother called and Aneke nodded
dutifully. One last wave and she was
gone. Slightly overawed, we let go of the
boat rails and went downstairs to find our cabins, impressed by the relative
air of luxury exuded by the good ship Zuiderkruis.
For
my mother, the ship journey to South Africa would be a seventeen-day-long
nightmare during most of which she was sea sick and survived on salty biscuits,
black tea and an occasional apple. My
father and Jos slept in a massive men’s dormitory and my mother and we girls
shared a cabin with a lady and her two-year-old daughter. Though the lady was perfectly polite as was
my mother, they were reserved. Beyond a
courteous greeting from both sides each morning, the lady and my mother never
shared a single conversation. Although
we could not understand one another’s languages, I made friends with a little
Danish girl whose mother was a reporter for a Danish newspaper and she and I took
part in all the shipboard games.
Miekie
turned seven on board ship and the captain sent her a huge cake in
celebration. When we spent an afternoon
on the island of Las Palmas, my parents bought her a huge doll, almost as tall
as herself (she was very little), that could walk.
We
were up before daybreak the day we reached Cape Town and I have not seen as beautiful a
one since. All the colours of the
rainbow from pink and blue to gold lit up the sky as the sun rose. I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
Some
Salvation Army ladies with whom my mother had made friends on board gave us a card
with the address of their Cape Town headquarters and after spending a fortune
on morning tea we decided to swallow our pride and made it to the headquarters
where we met a lot of our shipboard friends.
My father started playing some songs at the piano and we ate the most
divine cakes and sandwiches. We had been
spoiled by the copious meals on board and for a while after we were forever
hungry until normal life set in once again.
A
Dutch Salvation Army lady, clad in mufti, took us to the station that evening
and bought each of us children an ice cream on the platform. When she waved and left us, we looked as
night fell on Cape Town and the city turned into a massive Christmas tree, full
of twinkling lights.
We
were three days and nights on that train, with some lengthy waits between. Most of the time we survived on bananas which
were sold at every station. Ever since,
I have needed to be pretty hungry to eat another banana. My mother kept us ready in case we arrived but at times we thought it would never
happen.
One
night in a place called Springbok (or Springfontein – I’m not sure) we waited
for hours for a connecting train. We
children lay down on the wooden benches as my parents were waving towels around
us to discourage the droves of mosquitoes.
My father said to my mother:
“I
have always wondered how St Joseph felt when he accompanied Our Lady into
Bethlehem. Now I know. Can you forgive me for bringing you here?”
But
by now truly the die was cast.
On
the third day we arrived at our destination at last. The only taxi on the Jagersfontein station took us off in a cloud of dust to the little town which
owed its existence to diamond mining. A
greater contrast than that between Amsterdam and Jagersfontein it would be hard
to imagine and we were homesick from that day. And yet I realise today that there must have
been a strong link between that tiny dusty mining town and Amsterdam’s vast
diamond industry.
We
entered to the butchery of Mr Nel, my father’s new employer, who also ran a
bakery and my parents went into his office.
I looked at the butchery’s interior, so vastly different from the cheery shop in Amsterdam
with its bunch of flowers on the counter.
Peering through the window outside onto the dirt road, I
sighed.
Mr
and Mrs Nel took us to their house where we eventually sat down to a typical South
African dinner. Then a massive American
car stopped outside, driven by Aneke’s mother. She had brought an almost equally stately
sister or sister-in-law along and they took delivery of the
two coats my mom and Elly regretfully surrendered.
There
was a good outcome, however, at least for Jos. Aneke’s brother Jan came to visit us from the farm he had inherited
from their father. He brought his wife Maria who was a beautiful young woman. Jan took us to his
farm, telling us how green his lands were but they looked pretty brown to me compared
to Dutch meadows. But by now I was
beginning to learn to keep my mouth shut.
I wasn’t at home any more.
For
many years afterwards Jos spent his holidays with Jan and Maria and their
children. He became fluent in Afrikaans
and ended up getting an honours degree
in Afrikaans-Nederlands at Witwatersrand University.
Jan taught Jos horseriding and gave him a horse and some lambs which he took care
of with his own flock. One lamb Jos
liked particularly and he brought it home where it grazed on the huge space
around our house. At first Jos fed it
with a bottle and later we took it around Jagersfontein on a leash.
My
parents were unsure where the Catholic Church was. One day they saw a little church and went
knocking at the presbytery door. It was
opened by a Belgian priest who called his Belgian confrère. We became friendly with them .
My
mother got a lift from the priest who took her to the Belgian Father in
Bloemfontein. He took them to the Sister who was the secondary school principal.
When my mother returned to Jagersfontein that evening, carrying bags of
school uniforms – there had never been anything like that in Holland – she said
that Elly had been enrolled for grade nine and I for grade seven. In South Africa it takes twelve years of
school before a scholar can write matric.
“I said they must do better than that,” my mother commented, “so they decided
that Elly should go to grade ten and Luky to grade eight. That gives Elly three and Luky five years to
go until matric. ”
And
so when the new South African school year started in January 1953, Elly and I
presented ourselves in our green uniform dresses with their white collars and
cuffs, our striped blazers and our white panama hats with the hatband in school
colours with the badge in front.
One
week after we had started school and having been given a number of class tests,
Elly and I were called in by our teachers, who had decided to promote Elly to
grade eleven and me to grade nine. That
meant she had two more years until matric and I four.
I
am proud to report that less than two years later Elly distinguished herself by
passing her matric with English as her medium. She must have picked up a great
deal of education in the university of life in Amsterdam. My parents had by then moved to Springs on
the Eastern Witwatersrand and Elly got an excellent job as a typist-clerk, while I stayed on for a further two years until I too
matriculated.
Back
in Jagersfontein, Miekie and Jos grew very close to one another and my
parents. My mother was very homesick for
us and one day she managed to get a lift with three businessmen and came to
visit us.
But
first something happened that my mother told me about years later and makes me
chuckle every time I recall it. The
three businessmen put up in a hotel and my mother also got a room there. She said:
“After
supper at about seven I excused myself and went to my room. A little while later, a knock came to my door
from the three gentlemen. They told me
through the door that they had come to have a drink with me. I said I was sorry but that I was in bed
already. One said: “But we brought you a
bottle of gin.” “Oh well, in that case
…” I said. I opened the door a few
inches, put my foot against the door and held my hand out, took delivery of the
gin and locked the door again. I had
quite a few drinks from that bottle that night before going to sleep.”
Those
were the days when I learned that it is possible for a person to feel lonely in
a crowd. The Pro-Cathedral of the Sacred Heart
was next to our school and between study sessions we would be given time off
for recreation. I took to praying in the
chapel and I built up a very strong relationship with God. There were Catholic Truth pamphlets on a wooden stand which I read from
cover to cover and I learned a great deal about my religion. I soon found that God is never outdone in
generosity, The more time I spent with
him, the closer I felt to God.
I
quickly learned to speak English as I had a brilliant English teacher, who made us learn reams of Shakespeare and other poetry off by heart
and we also had to know our Scripture direct speech texts word perfect. I could always learn parrot fashion.
She
had the gift of making her lessons amusing and interesting at the same
time. She
started a question box for the seniors at our school and a popular event it
became. You put your question – unsigned
– into the box and she gave her answers.
Teenage
girls being what they are, this gave rise to a lot of fun, but it was
impossible to put her to the blush. On
the contrary.
“Is
it all right to kiss a boy when you’ve only been out with him once?” she read
out on one occasion. Benignly she looked
up, her eye unerringly pinpointing the anonymous author of this daring request.
“Perfectly
all right, Anne,” she acquiesced, “provided you don’t make a meal of it.”
After
that, Mother Superior wasted no time in putting the lid back on our question
box and our questions remained unanswered.
I
used to labour over my English comprehensions in order to impress her, for I greatly valued her advice with regard to my writing.
“And
here we have Lookie’s little attempt at an essay,” she said once, holding my
beloved composition book between a forefinger and thumb. “For her I predict a golden future … as
reporter to the Sacred Heart Messenger.”
Who knows, it might have been this
remark which eventually led me into sending my first attempts at writing to the
Catholic newspaper The Southern Cross and her teaching which made them
receptive to it. She actually wrote me a
letter thirty years later to tell me how much she enjoyed my essays in the
paper, saying she never missed them.
I
had red hair and the Amsterdam
streetboys used to come after me, chanting: “Rooie,
ga naar huis toe, d’r komt ‘n stier an.”
(Red one, go home, a bull is on its way). My father had told me that English people
loved red hair and my English teacher was no exception.
“Look
at Lookie’s hair in the sun,” she told my classmates, “it looks like ripe
wheat.”
“Not
veet,” I said. ‘stroh!’
I
would probably have made more friends if I had only been better at games but
all my life I was a zero at gymnastics and sport. But the academic side of life was not an
insurmountable problem to me. They never
let me take maths, only arithmetic, but I easily managed the English, Latin,
Afrikaans, History and Religious Instruction, though I couldn’t handle Biology.
I
tried to be polite to everyone in the hope of making friends and I was so homesick for Holland and my parents that my life
seemed to be one long misery. One day in
my first year during evening study I asked to be allowed to go to the
cloakroom. It was exam time and I just
couldn’t understand the biology.
Standing,
washing my hands at the basin, I heard someone crying loudly. I looked around me but I was the only one in there. It took a while before I realised I was the
one weeping. It’s the strangest
feeling. I went back to the study room
and the study Sister packed me off to the dormitory. Nobody ever mentioned my weeping to me
again.
My
parents were having a dreadful battle financially. My father had worked in Jagersfontein, Bloemfontein, Pretoria and finally got a
job in Springs when Elly was in matric.
Unfortunately, he had paid the deposit on a house in Pretoria, so my mother, Jos and Miekie had
remained back there until the house could be sold and they never did get their
money back, but were lucky to get the house sold to other people. My mother was working as an alteration hand
in a dress shop in town. My dad visited
the family every second weekend by train from Springs.
One
weekend when he was not there and Elly and I were home on holiday, we were
sitting around the kitchen table, waiting for our supper. There was no money in the house and my mother
only had oats and sugar in the kitchen cupboard. She was hoping to get her monthly salary a
couple of days later.
Annie
was always at her best in an emergency and we were laughing and chatting as if
we were attending a banquet.
“I
think I’ll put the sugar into the porridge immediately,” my mother said,
“because then I can get away with using less.”
She added the action to the word.
We prayed and as we brought our spoons to our mouths we put them down
more quickly than we had picked them up.
To our horror, the white stuff she had believed to be sugar, turned out
to be salt.
“Now
what do we eat?” my mother asked, perplexed.
I had spent a lot of lonely afternoons and weekends becoming ever closer
to Our Lord and I knew his power.
“Leave
it with me,” I said and left the house.
I walked to the café and spoke to the owner. I had prayed Hail Marys all along the
way. I knew he gave no credit.
“My
mother will be paid on Monday but there is no money in our house at present,” I
said to the man. He gave me a serious
but sweet look.
“Buy
what you need,” he said. “I know your
mother. She always gets her food here.”
Fifteen
minutes later I arrived home with tea, coffee, sugar, milk, Oros, bread, butter, jam, cheese, apples, chocolates
and biscuits and we had a feast. People who say that when poverty enters the
door, love leaves out of the window, get it wrong. The time I loved my family most was that Saturday.
At
the end of that year Elly passed her matric and joined the family now living in
Springs. They were staying in a rented
house next to the bakery where my father worked.
My mother worked her magic in that house. She got a married couple in to help her. The lady scrubbed and polished the floor while her husband painted the walls.
My mother sewed curtains and bought some flowers. In the tiny front yard we
planted canna lilies and I was happier in that house during the holidays than in any
of the other places in which I had lived. And at the last count, I have stayed
in twenty different houses – most of them far more beautiful than that house. That is the place where my
Dutch mother taught me that a house which may look shabby outside may be
beautiful and cosy within.
The
library was less than ten minutes walk away and town and the cinema were just
around the corner. We had a very happy
time there but Annie and my dad were able to put a deposit on an economy house, so we moved.
Finally the day came when my school years came to a close. I went to the Pro-Cathedral and thanked God for the peace and joy I had always found there. That
night I got on the Bloemfontein train and I knew somewhere deep inside that – provided I had passed biology which
was always a doubtful prospect – I was on my way to a new future.
I was only sixteen and I would probably soon be holding a matric certificate from
one of the most highly respected schools in the country which would open many
doors to me in the future. It had all
been worth it, I decided. All that was
left to me to do was to find a good job in Springs.
