MY DAPPLED LIFE - A QUILT OF MEMORIES. CHAPTER 4. BYE HOLLAND! HI SOUTH AFRICA!

 

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.