This is a work in progress, a work of introspection
It is published in the knowledge that it is incomplete, as is my life, so they both continue
Think of it as a diary in retrospect. It is open here for anyone who cares to see and I shall continue to add to it as my time allows
Long may it continue!
I have done my best, over time, to square the hole, to fit better into my environment
“Thoughts of an Old Man in a Dry Season”. This phrase has been with me for some time now, inspired by the opening lines of TS Eliot’s poem Gerontion, but not by it's negative tone. As my 8th decade looms, while keeping in mind Clint Eastwood’s “Keep the Old Man out”, I am ever more conscious of wanting to record my memories while they are still alive in my head, mostly for myself and, perhaps, my daughter Clare and Richard, my nephew, and for anyone else who knows me, knows something of my background. It is also somewhat inspired by the memoir my mother left, written in exercise books and sundry pieces of paper, at the urging of my former wife, Pam. That memoir has been of great help to me in writing about the earliest years, as has been the diligent Baby Book in which Ma documented every small detail of my first six or so years, complete with photographs which are a wonderful treasure. So here it begins…
The beginning - 1945-55
My father, after living through the ordeals of World War Two in the North African desert, capture at Tobruk, two incarcerations in POW camps and two escapes came home late in 1944. This postcard, sent from the second camp to my aunt Stella for her birthday in 1943 tells, in a cryptic note, " 'pun my word", which escaped the censors, that he had been moved near to Rome.
When he escaped from it, it was, in fact a lucky escape. This extract from a list of POW camps in Wikipedia, tells why:
P.G. 54 Passo Corese, Fara in Sabina. 35 km (22 mi) from Rome. 4,000 lower-ranked British, South African and Ghurkha prisoners, mostly from the surrender of Tobruk, were held in two compounds of tents, with very poor conditions and food shortages. Many prisoners escaped into the Apennine Mountains when guards deserted as the Italian Armistice was announced on 8 September 1943. It was reorganised by the Germans, became a transit camp and was completely evacuated in January 1944 ahead of the Allied advance. The 1,100 British, South African and American prisoners of war were put on a train to be taken to a camp in Germany. On 28 January 1944, they were crossing the Orvieto Railroad Bridge North in Allerona, Umbria, when the American 320th Bombardment Group arrived to bomb the bridge. Unaware that there were Allied prisoners on the train, they dropped their bombs on their targets. The Germans left the prisoners locked in the boxcars and fled. Approximately half the men were killed by the bombs, or when the cars ultimately tumbled into the river below.
My mother’s work as Matron of the Brenthurst Military Hospital in Johannesburg had ended with the end of our army’s involvement in the War in North Africa and Italy and she had returned to work at the Johannesburg General Hospital, demoted to Staff Nurse because she was married.
Dad was back in the SA Police and was transferred back to Natal, where he had been posted before the War. So she resigned and they settled in Isipingo, a small coastal enclave south of Durban after which I appeared in late November 1945.
I was, apparently a very good baby, but life was to start me on a course of travel and living in various interesting places.
7 weeks old at 4, 4th Avenue, Isipingo Beach with Ma and Granny Duncan
A few months after this life’s journey began, Dad was transferred to Verulam, north of Durban. My parents sold their recently bought house, which my mother loved, and moved into a house in Verulam which Ma described in her memoir as “awful…nothing more than a barrack and had not one redeeming feature”.
Fortunately for her, my father needed to improve his Afrikaans in order to earn the promotion which he should have had before the war erupted. He had gone through the War with the rank of Sergeant. He had been recommended for promotion to Lieutenant in the SA Army (he had been seconded to the Transvaal Horse Artillery from the SAP) and was in training for it when he went down with the flu on a short break at home with his parents. His father neglected to inform the base near Pretoria (my mother believed maliciously) and he was declared AWOL and dismissed from the Officers Course. He applied for transfer to an Afrikaans speaking area and was posted to Reddersburg, a little rural dorp about 60km south of Bloemfontein, early in 1946.
We spent a short time there. My father was studying, learning Afrikaans, academically and by immersion, and Ma staved off the boredom of life in a remote village by learning to cook, immersing herself in knitting countless garments for us all and in buying and (with Dad's woodworking skill) restoring antique furniture. After passing the Afrikaans Taalbond exam, Dad was promoted to Warrant Officer 1st Class and needed to go to Pretoria to attend an Officers’ training course and await a new assignment, so we moved again. This time, my mother was given a nursing assignment, inspecting psychiatric hospitals in all the provinces (her first nursing training was in Psychiatric nursing), but based in Cape Town, so she took me to stay with my Uncle Bill, Aunt Mary and Granny Duncan on their farm, Queensdale, near Queenstown in the Eastern Cape. All this I learned from my mother, both in conversation and from reading her memoir.
My father passed his Officer’s exams and his promotion came through, apparently just before my parents embarked on a long awaited holiday in the Cape, wishing that they could stay there.
They were lucky. He was posted to the then new Bellville district and assigned a house in Parow, which my mother hated, saying that it was ugly and then moved into a Police house in a new housing development, at 10, 7th Avenue, Boston Estate. Today, Bellville is a big Police district, managed by a very senior officer. In 1946, with the rank of Lieutenant, he was in charge of the Police, not just of the new suburb Bellville, but of Goodwood, Parow and also suburbs north of Bellville.
My earliest memories begin there. In those days, when Strand Street really was on the beach and Waterkant Street was the water’s edge, one could stand in Adderley Street and look at ships berthed at the quayside. This was before completion of the Foreshore development and the subsequent construction of overhead motorways along the sea front, which only really happened in the 1960s.
I remember being taken by my father to visit a very large grey ship in the harbour. It must have been the battleship HMS Vanguard which brought the British Royal Family on their 1947 visit to South Africa. They arrived in Cape Town on 17th February 1947 and left on 24th April, so I must have been only about a year and a half old then.
Tom and John, Kirstenbosch 1948
I remember going at night to a big event with marching bands. I also remember sitting in a big red stadium. I believe that that was a parade at the Goodwood showground in honour of the King, Queen and Princesses. Years later, when I heard Händel’s Largo from Xerxes, it seemed familiar; I believe that it was played at that parade. The opening of Parliament that year was performed by the King and my father, a senior officer in the mounted division of the Police, in addition to his other duties, had charge of the mounted Police detachment in the parade at Parliament. He loved horses and began his Police career in the mounted division.
Peter, Tom and John, Blaauwberg, 1947
I also remember that the Boston house had bluegum trees across the street and was built on very sandy ground. My mother told me that I came into the house one day asking for an axe. When asked what I wanted to do with it, I said that I wanted to cut down the trees because they were making too much wind. We were right in the path of the famous Cape South-Easter. My mother was a keen gardener and despaired of making a garden in the Cape Flats sand. She succeeded in the end. My father’s involvement with the mounted division gave her access to all the horse manure from the Police stables and, apparently, truckloads of equine ordure were delivered. I do remember the smell. But it did provide her with fertile ground for her plants.
In May 1848, an election was held and the ruling United Party, led by Jan Smuts, was ousted by the right-wing, ultra-nationalist and ultra racist Herenigde Nasionale Party. I have a letter written by mother to my father in which she tells him how worried she was about their future in a country governed by “these people”, a party which had openly supported the Nazi Party in Germany before and during the Second World War. This change in government would ultimately have a major effect on our family.
My father was a very talented woodworker and made me a garage for my toy cars for my fourth birthday. I still have it; the roof is hinged to allow toys to be put in and taken out. One side, the front of the house, is also hinged. It folds down to reveal the forecourt, which has four petrol bowsers, beautifully carved and painted with the brands of the time, Shell, Pegasus, Atlantic and Caltex and an air pump for the tyres. He painted, by hand, my name over the top of the Forecourt. I was told that, one day, playing with it and my toy cars in the living room, I was told to put the toys away as it was bedtime. I replied, “I can’t, my hands are too small”.
When I was 3½ years old, we were joined by my brother William. He was born at the beginning of July 1949 at the Booth Memorial maternity hospital run by the Salvation Army in Oranjezicht.
L to R Back Row: unknown lady, Neville Fischer (holding Bill), Maureen (Bimbo) Fischer, Tom Ford, Don Hawke
Front Row; David Drewett, Janet, John, Mrs Tomlinson (Mary Drewett's mother), Peter the spaniel
I don’t remember much about him at that time, except that he seemed to be very miserable. He had a bad ear infection which must have been very painful and led to his hearing being affected in one ear for the rest of his life. One memory from that time is of wanting to take him out in his pram. The front door of the house had two or three steps down into the small garden and I didn’t give a thought to my ability to control a pram down the steps. Apparently, it was too heavy for me and dragged me, with Bill in it, to the bottom, somersaulting to the ground. Fortunately, we both survived, although I did sustain a bad cut below my lower lip which left me with a scar which I believe is still there, albeit covered by my beard.
John & William, Bellville, February 1950
An early memory is that Dad often had a beer after he came home and I had my own tiny mug, so that I could join him with my little 20ml portion. My mother encouraged this. Her brother Jimmy was an alcoholic, which resulted in disastrous consequences for his family. His sons were adopted by different families and ended up not seeing each other until they had finished school. Ma wanted us to have a proper appreciation of alcohol and knowledge of how to use it responsibly. If we had wine with a meal, Bill (quite a bit later) and I would also have some, but in a liqueur glass instead of a wine glass. He and I have both grown up with a good appreciation of wine, important as he has built a successful career in the hospitality industry and for me with my work in association with the wine industry.
My mother did not take easily to motherhood and being a housewife after having a very busy nursing career. I was born when she was 36, by which time she had been working for 18 years, and Bill just before her 40th birthday. After years of studying and building a successful career, being at home with two small children, even with her activity in building a garden, was a bit mind-numbing and I benefited. She started teaching me to read, years before I was old enough to go to school and I knew the alphabet at 3½. She saw a creative spark in me and sent me to an art school when I was four. I spent most of my time there drawing cars, ships and planes and still have an AA Milne book with childish drawings of those things inside the front cover, early evidence of a lifelong fascination with vehicles. I had only been at the art school for about six months when it was time to move again.
My father was designated by SA Police headquarters to be liaison officer between the South African Police and the Bechuanaland Protectorate Police and was transferred to Mafeking (now known as Mahikeng). Mafeking was, until 1965, the administrative capital of the Protectorate while being in the Union of South Africa.
Now, I need to insert an explanatory bit of history about Mafeking and Bechuanaland. The whole area of Bechuanaland, the home of the Batswana people, had been placed under British protection in the 1880s, as protection from the encroaching Boers who were still trekking north from the Cape Colony. This was done at the request of the tribal chiefs of the six main tribes of the Batswana, advised by the various Christian missionaries in the territory. After the famous siege of Mafeking in 1899, the territory was split along the line of the Molopo river, with the area to the south becoming known as British Bechuanaland and to the north the Bechuanaland Protectorate. British Bechuanaland was a British colony for a short while before it was incorporated into the Cape Colony. Mafeking, the capital of British Bechuanaland, remained the administrative capital of the BP, as it was known by the white inhabitants. The Tswana people knew it as Mafikeng but the British managed to misspell it in their own way. The name was changed, again, in 2010 by a Xhosa speaking South African government minister to Mahikeng, but the Tswana people still call it Mafikeng.
We travelled to Mafeking by train and, as no house was immediately available, we were booked into the totally misnamed Grand Hotel. Why is it that hotels with that name are seldom any better than totally ordinary? My mother wrote about it, “It may have been grand at the turn of the century, but it had lost any glow that it may have possessed” and “The four of us, and Peter the spaniel, were piled into a horrid little room with the bathroom down a filthy corridor… This nasty place was later demolished after being condemned at my husband’s instigation”. For someone who had spent the war years in an Oppenheimer home, it must have been an horrific comparison.
Daily life in a cramped, nasty room with a dog and two small children while my father was getting his new job organised was obviously very uncomfortable. Some relief came when Dad was sent to Vryburg to take charge of the Police there as a relief commander. Again, we stayed in a hotel, but it appears to have been more comfortable and cleaner, if a bit dull. When that time in Vryburg ended, Ma could not face returning to Mafeking without a house and went to stay for a while in Johannesburg, during which time Dad found a house, with a kitchen and bathroom, although I do remember that the toilet was in its own little "sentry box" at the end of the back garden. I also remember that the property was on a corner and that the garden was quite large with an orchard of fruit trees on one side.
Although it appears that I was quite contented, spending my time with my books and my toy cars, Ma was, it seems, quite bored. She started to make friends, but it was a very small “society”, very old-fashioned with ladies who lunched and gossiped and nothing much else to do. So she packed me off to school, still four years old, at St Joseph’s Convent which was in easy walking distance from us, even for little me. I appear to have enjoyed it, although I do remember harsh discipline with little hands being whacked with a ruler by one of the nuns for minor transgressions. “Spare the rod…” etc. I also remember an episode in the playground when I went to the assistance of a little Jewish boy named Solomon who was being bullied and called names and that a couple of older girls came along and, very kindly, came to the rescue.
My parents did, however make friends in Mafeking, some of them enduring till the ends of their lives. Some of the friendships were among the English speaking community, but those which lasted were in the Protectorate enclave, known as the Imperial Reserve, on the edge of the town. Primary among these friends were the Leeches and the Redmans. The relationship with the Redmans endured and their daughters Carol and, especially, Angela are still my very close friends. Noel and Vera Redman would play a very important part in my life, especially later when I spent three years in England. More about that when I reach appropriate parts of my story.
The Leech family had a terrible tragedy. Their elder son Graham and a friend found an old artillery shell, a Siege leftover, in a fish pond at their house and decided to melt it down to get lead to make sinkers for fishing. They built a fire and placed the shell on top of it. It had never been defused and exploded, killing Graham and the other boy. Their younger son, Peter, was at the periphery of the blast and was only slightly injured. He did, however, sustain minor injuries to his eyes with tiny splinters embedding themselves and, as far as I know, they remained there for his lifetime.
Ma had difficulty trying to cook on an old coal-fired stove and resorted to using a paraffin Primus stove. She used it one day to cook with a new pressure cooker and the pot exploded, coating the ceiling with pea soup.
Among the memories I have of that time is a parade in the centre of the town after King George VI died in 1952. As far as I remember, detachments of both Police forces were in the parade.
One of my friends from that time was Colin Latimer. His father, Robin had a very senior position in the Protectorate government and his mother Betty became a good friend of Ma’s. I remember them as very correct upper middle class English people. I particularly liked Robin’s car, a grey Jaguar Mark V, a very elegant and typically English machine, very different from the American cars which dominated the South African market then. Some people called it "a poor man's Bentley".
Another memory - Childrens' birthday parties. Colin Latimer's party introduced me to something which has always been a total horror, the sort of thing that gave English food a bad name. Betty Latimer gave us an awful concoction called junket - a milk-based dessert with a jelly texture, made with sweetened milk and rennet set in a mould and served cold. Another Latimer memory - Ma said that Betty was the most correct English hostess ever. If a guest ate more slowly than everyone else, Betty would, in Ma's words, "push the last pea around on her plate to ensure that the slow guest would not finish the course last.
Everything appeared to be going well for us in Mafeking when it was time to move again. It seems that Dad was being seen by Police headquarters as being too close to the British people from Bechuanaland and too reluctant to prosecute black people for transgressions of things like the Pass Laws. So he was transferred to Johannesburg and given charge of the Jeppe area, where the Brass could keep an eye on him.
We moved into a flat in Bellville and I was enrolled into the Boys Primary School there. It was not a very happy time for me; I found the atmosphere very strange after the small town life. The school had a very strict Principal and I was called into his office with some of the other boys one day after we had being playing a game like Cops and Robbers or Cowboys and Crooks, which most people would have thought of as quite normal for small boys. We told off for being too noisy and rowdy.
One other thing which was a bit strange to me. The school’s children were about half Gentile and half Jewish and they had weekly religious instruction lessons in which the Jewish boys went to one class. The rest of us, I think, had art lessons in another. That I did enjoy. The rest of the experience I hated.
Granny's friend Mrs Jackson is sitting behind her
But we were only there for three months. My mother told how, one day, there was a knock on the door of the flat and three ladies from Mafeking were there – Betty Latimer, Audrey Langley whose husband was commissioner of Police in Bechuanaland and Lady Beetham whose husband was the Resident Commissioner. They asked her to join them for lunch as Dad was having lunch with their husbands. They were offering him a job.
The commanding officer’s post had become vacant in a village called Serowe in north central Bechuanaland. Serowe was the seat of the Khama family, leaders of the Bamangwato tribe. It was a very difficult time in Serowe. The chief had died some years earlier and his son, Seretse, was too young to take over his father’s position. He was at university in England. He had met and married an Englishwoman, Ruth Williams. Tshekedi Khama, Seretse’s uncle, was unwilling to give up his position as Regent and used Seretse’s marriage to declare that a white woman could not become the chieftainess of the Bamangwato. He led an attempted insurrection and there were riots in which some police had been killed.
Dad was being asked to join the Bechuanaland Police and take over in this difficult arena. As he was not very happy in Johannesburg, he accepted and we would be on the move again. My parents had signed a year’s lease on the flat and had to arrange a sublet. While Dad was making the necessary arrangements, Ma took us to her sister and brother in law, Mary and Bill Clark, on their farm near Queenstown. Of course, there was a complication. Bill and I went down with measles. I remember being isolated in an upstairs room with the heavy curtains drawn. Infecting my three cousins would have been most unwelcome.
I can do no better here than to quote my mother: “William was very chesty and needed constant attention. He needed inhalations and became a wee beastie at each performance. I don’t know who inhaled to the best advantage, he or I. The measles session over, my sister’s children developed whooping cough. Mine had been immunised, so I felt safe where they were concerned".
One evening, I received a phone call from Tom to say that the date of commencement of his assignment had arrived. He was leaving immediately for Serowe and I was to follow with the boys. He wasn’t prepared for the blast. I said, “Not one step without me, I’ll be on the next train out of Queenstown”. I was not going to travel into the wild with two small children on my own. My sister Mary is an efficient lady and, with her assistance, we were bundled onto the first available train. Tom had us for better or worse. We left Johannesburg in the blue 1941 Chevrolet packed to full capacity, including two spaniels.”
The 1941 Chevrolet which Dad had bought for Ma before he went off to war
"We travelled as far as Mafeking on our first day and spent the night with our friends Robin and Betty Latimer. Again I met Vera Hodgkinson, who had recently married Noël Redman. Tom teased Vera and said, “Serowe next for you,” and she protested at the very thought of it. I mention my friends by name as they played an enormous part in my life, and I don’t know how I would have faced the grim days which lay ahead without them.
We travelled on with no sign of Mahalapye. The children literally cried for their supper, and I had become so unused to country travelling that I did not provide a picnic basket. All I had in the way of provisions was a huge round of cheddar cheese (a gift from my sister Mary) and some dry water biscuits. We were so busy pacifying our hungry children that we forgot about our escort entirely, as there were no lights following us and we did not notice when they ceased to be there. Tom suggested we should retrace and see what had happened. My opinion was to press on, find Mahalapye and feed the children.
When we finally reached the village, the children were asleep and so was everyone else. The ‘hotel’ was situated on the railway-station. We roused someone to show us our room, but no food or hot drink was available. I gave the boys hunks of cheese. Tom insisted on returning to find our escort. And he finally returned between 4 and 5 a.m. cold and exhausted. He had found the African Policemen bivouacked for the night, as travelling in the darkness was ‘not for them’."
Next day we drove the short distance to Serowe. It should be remembered that the whole journey from the Bechuana border was on dirt roads. In addition, there was no electricity and no telephone system, so life was a lot more primitive than we'd been accustomed to in South Africa. We were shown to our new home, quite a large H shaped, well-built house with a large garden.
Managing a largish house and property needed help and one of the first things Ma did was to hire three local people – A man to work in the garden, who seemed quite big to me, named Mack, a kitchen maid named Maria and a household help cum nanny named Topsy. Her real name, I discovered later, was Keitwayetse Keitumetse. She was quite thin and Ma said she hired her because she looked half-starved. Topsy became a fixture in our lives and, ultimately, worked for my mother until the late 1970s when she was no longer thin. In the words of Alexander McCall-Smith, she was “of traditional build”. She will come into this story on numerous occasions. She did her best to teach us Setswana and I have retained a fair amount of what she taught me. If I asked for something, her reply would be, “Ora ka Setswana; Ga ke itse Sekgowa”, “Say it in Setswana; I don’t know English”.
We arrived in the middle of a serious drought and the countryside looked very barren. The street side of the property was bordered by a large, tall euphorbia hedge and I was warned that it was poisonous. But it did give us a bit of green to look at. The garden was a bit wild, but Ma began taming it after the drought broke and I remember beds of larkspurs, snapdragons and zinnias and a lawn in front of the breezeway, which had a fine mesh screen facing the lawn to keep the bugs out.
Family photographs in Serowe
In early 1953, my parents decided that the old 1941 Chev needed to be replaced and, probably, that a two door coupé was a bit restrictive with a growing family. They drove it back to Mafeking and traded it in on a new pale grey 1952 model with four doors. Perhaps because Dad was in charge of the Police, it was given the registration BPB 1.
Because of the troubles, a security camp with armed police was established near the Khama graveyard at the edge of the village. It had an officers’ Mess, very much in the style of the old British Raj in India, with all the proper protocols at meal times. While Ma and Dad were away to change the cars, I was assigned my own tent with a batman – a six year old honorary officer. I had my meals with the officers, so had to be on my best behaviour. I had actually received a nasty bump on the head when Dad brought me there. I remember that it was at night. There was always a sentry at the entrance and it seems that he was not in his proper position when we arrived. Dad was driving through when the sentry suddenly stepped out of the darkness into the road and Dad stopped very suddenly. Cars of that era did not have seatbelts and I shot forward and smacked my head on the steel dashboard. The sentry was severely reprimanded!
Tom Ford in back row, 4th from left. Bob Langley front row, 2nd from left
On the way home, they crossed the Bonwapitse river at Mahalapye, just as the drought had broken. What should have been a maiden journey for the new car became a maiden voyage. The roads became rivers, so in the end they had to leave the car at Palla Road and return to Palapye by train. After reaching Palapye they couldn’t get through to Serowe, as not even large trucks could traverse the expanse of water, and the place had the appearance of a large lake. Apparently I was quite happy being with the officers in the Camp and didn’t mind that their return was delayed.
I was sent to Mrs Gwen Blackbeard’s school. She was the elderly wife of a local farmer and ran a small school which had one classroom and catered for boys and girls up to Standard Four so, approximately, six to ten years old. I made friends with a farmer’s son, John Palmer. He had a pretty sister, Monica, who was probably about four years older. I remember visits to the farm with him. They had fields of sorghum which were plagued by pigeons eating the crop. Mr Palmer paid us a shilling (a fortune then) for each pigeon we shot with John’s pellet gun. I don’t think I managed to hit any, but John did and Mrs Palmer made delicious pigeon pie. If Dad had known, he would have been horrified at my being allowed to use any sort of rifle, however small, especially at that age.
As a soldier and policeman, Dad had a huge respect for firearms and I remember when he showed me what they could do. He took an old plywood chair seat and hung it from a branch of a tree in the garden by a piece of wire. He then emptied the magazine of his Browning automatic pistol through one hole in the middle of the wood. He had earned a marksman’s badge in the army. He did not like us having toy guns and to point a cap gun at anyone while playing cowboy games was forbidden. So he was very angry one day when he came home for lunch to find Bill sitting with one of the prisoners who had been delegated to clean up in our garden, holding the guard’s 12 bore shotgun. He blew his top and asked where the guard was. The reply was that he had gone into the bush to relieve himself, but it was OK, they all knew the gun wasn’t loaded.
There were not many "white" people in Serowe. There were three trading stores, owned by the Woodfords, the Watsons and Mrs Page Wood. The Woodfords' daughter and the Watsons' two boys were at the school with me. We became quite friendly with the Watsons and, one day, we were at lunch at their house. A real life experience. One of the servants was told to slaughter a sheep. He did this by cutting its throat with a rather blunt knife, a gruesome and cruel experience as the poor creature struggled and bleated. I think we had mutton for lunch and I don't remember enjoying it. We boys went outside to play after lunch and a game of hide and seek commenced. I was seeking when I was stung by a nasty "bite" on my ankle. George "Saba" Watson had loaded a peppercorn into his pellet gun and shot me with it. He didn't think a peppercorn could do any damage. My father was not amused. He could not bear any sort of cruelty to animals and I remember hearing how he was passing an African village where a cow was being slaughtered by hanging it by its hind legs from a pole while still alive and its throat was being cut with a carpenter's saw. Dad pulled out his service pistol and put it out of its misery. Kindness to animals does not appear to have been part of the culture.
I also made friends with boys who lived in our street. It was an enclave of government people, Paul Titterton, the vet, Drs Doel and van Rooyen, Noël and Vera Redman who had recently moved up from Mafeking and police Lieutenant John King all lived on the opposite side of the street. Our next door neighbour, Gordon Batho was the District Commissioner. The Tittertons moved to Lobatse not long after our arrival and were replaced by an Irishman, Dennis Kelly. His wife, some time after we left, died when a stone was thrown up by a lorry in front of their car. It went through their windscreen and hit her on her head. Bill had already made friends with Alan Titterton and this was resumed a couple of years after, when we moved to Lobatse. The Doels had a son named Norman and a stepson named Michael.
Paul Titterton kept a flock of white Swiss goats. One day, they escaped and invaded Ma’s precious vegetable garden with which she kept us supplied with fresh cabbages, lettuce, beetroot, tomatoes, carrots, brinjals and chillies. I suppose that, as a farmer’s daughter, she was well equipped with the necessary skills. The damage was immense and the crop decimated in a very short time with Ma and Mack trying to herd the goats away before Paul could be contacted and the goats removed. If Ma had had a gun, I am sure she would have shot them. On another day, while Ma was playing bridge in the house, I saw a bright red chilli and thought it would be a good idea to investigate it. It was a very hot one. So, of course, I cried when it burned my mouth. Then I rubbed my eyes and they burned. I suppose that milk was used to alleviate the pain, but I disrupted the game of bridge.Another painful memory is of a bee sting. A colony of bees had set up a hive in our garage. Disobeying an order not to go in there, I went into the garage and a bee flew up my nose. Of course, it stung me; of course, I cried, but then the challenge was to remove the dead bee which was stuck quite far up my very swollen nose. I remember the probing with a pair of tweezers which was almost as bad as the sting.
Paul had to shoot Ma’s precious spaniel Peter. He came home one day with his jaw locked in the open position and with thick grey saliva dripping from it. It was diagnosed as a form of rabies and there was no cure. Contact with him was very dangerous as it is contagious. He was tethered with his lead on the lawn and Paul had to come and administer the coup de grace with his pistol. I was not allowed to watch but clearly remember the sound of the shot. Because there was a chance that any one of us could have come into contact with the virus, we all had to undergo a four week course of daily, painful, injections in our bellies. This was done by a Polish doctor, Dr Schlumpf, at the Serowe hospital.He also removed my tonsils. I had been plagued by sore throats and a post nasal drip and tonsillectomy was prescribed. I had to spend a couple of days in the hospital. My throat was horribly painful and I remember being fed jelly after the operation. Ice cream might have been good for it but, with no suitable refrigeration, this was not possible. Our fridge at home was paraffin powered, with a paraffin tank feeding a wick burner under the fridge.
There was only one row of houses on either side of our street and I would join Norman and Michael on expeditions into the bush behind their house which was completely wild. Occasionally, leopard tracks could be seen in back yards and pet dogs and cats were always kept in a night. We made catapults and one day I managed to shoot a small weaver bird. That Sunday, Ma was roasting a chicken in the wood fired oven and, having cleaned the little bird, I slipped it surreptitiously into the roasting pan. When the chicken came out of the oven, the poor little bird was almost cremated. Ma was horrified.The chickens were kept in a coop in a corner of the garden and, if a hen had stopped laying eggs, Mack the gardener would be told to dispatch it. This was done with an axe with the hen’s neck laid on a log in the wood pile. Bill and I were fascinated by the way the headless chicken would run around for a short while before it collapsed. Every house had its woodpile because we all used wood fires for cooking and heating. The wood was delivered in a creaky wagon drawn by a team of oxen, guided by the crack of a long whip. Just like the Voortrekkers. The wood was long logs, just as they had come from the trees, and had to be cut up by Mack with his trusty axe.
As I have mentioned earlier, Dad was an excellent wood worker. He restored a good number of derelict chairs and tables which Ma had bought on Free State farms and in the African township in Mafeking. He started to teach me at an early age and I remember a visit to Johannesburg when he took me to a hardware shop, owned by one of his friends from the army, Mr Rosenberg. He selected a set of tools for me and stamped them with my initials. I still have, and use, some of them; his large set square and a smaller one he bought for me, a beautiful little pre-war German plane and a hand drill are favourites. Sadly, the large set square’s cast iron handle broke when it dropped onto a cement floor. I repaired it with two pieces of mahogany.
In 1953, the Queen’s Coronation was celebrated with a huge party in the dry Lotsane River bed outside Serowe. We children were given our own picnic at one spot while the adults had a more sophisticated celebration. Of course, we were all given commemorative Coronation mugs. I remember that Dad was not well and at around this time started having nasty headaches. This was the beginning of a period of intense misery.
Ma took him to Johannesburg to see a more sophisticated doctor than we had in Serowe and he was diagnosed as having a brain tumour. I have vivid memories of him lying on his bed and crying out “O God, O God, O God” while he experience intense pain. A Johannesburg friend of his was a homeopath and Dad decided to follow a course of treatment that he prescribed with expected lack of effect. I have not trusted “alternative” medicine since then. He went back to Johannesburg where an unsuccessful operation was carried out. Ma decided that he needed to go to London where there was a better chance of successful treatment. Word was sent to Robin Latimer (later Sir Robert) who was now at the British Embassy in Pretoria. He made sure that all stops were pulled out to make the trip as comfortable as possible Colonial Government flew him with Ma to London. This was still in the days of piston engined aircraft. John King drove them to Bulawayo by car and they had to fly from Bulawayo to Livingstone to wait for the BOAC flight from Johannesburg. The next stop was Khartoum where the aircraft needed a repair and they sat on the runway in the very hot plane while it was fixed. Dad was too ill to move; the other passengers had gone into the airport. The trip from Johannesburg to London took five days with overnight stops. The repair completed, they flew on for a few hours to their scheduled overnight stop in Cairo. Next stop was overnight in Nice and then the last leg to London. At about the time that they were about to go, news came through that Dad had been promoted to Captain. They also received news that he was to be transferred to the Hong Kong Police. This never happened and it is interesting to conjecture how different our lives might have been.
When they landed in London, they found that indeed all arrangements had been made for transport by ambulance, one by BOAC and the other by the Commonwealth Office, with Robin Latimer’s help. A bed had been booked at the Whittington Hospital in Highgate. He was admitted and examined. The tumour was found to be a glioma, still impossible to cure with our more modern medicine. Ma was told that he had no more than three days to live. He died on 9th August 1954. I was eight and Bill was 3½ years old.
While they were away, kind friends took us into their homes. I stayed with Noël and Vera Redman and Bill was next door with John King and his wife. The Redmans had a very new daughter, Angela, who had been born in Mafeking. It seems that I fell in love with her and told Vera that, one day, I wanted to marry her. I never did, but she is still one of my closest friends. Noël had the very unpleasant task of telling me that Dad had died. He was a very gentle man and he did it in a very gentle way. He took me for a night drive in his new blue 1954 Chevrolet and in the darkness in the car, told me what had happened and that they would look after me. I still have a vivid memory of the car’s dashboard lights while he told me. Noël and Vera would be proxy parents to me at various times in my later life, especially in the three years I spent in England as a student.
Cyril Gaylard, Lesley King and Angela Redman with puppy, Serowe
My father’s death affected me in many ways that I did not appreciate until much later, some only after I became a father myself. In my baby book, until the age of six, Ma described me as confident and socially well-adjusted. That observation declined after I turned six and I suspect that some of that came from the feeling of insecurity that came with Dad’s illness and death. That feeling of insecurity and lack of self-confidence was amplified for some years after I went to boarding school at the age of ten, but I’ll tell more about that when we come to that phase of this story.
Vera was very embarrassed one day. I was very worried about money. I didn’t think of Ma as being a capable breadwinner and didn’t know what we would do without Dad’s salary. I picked a selection of vegetables from Ma’s garden, loaded them into a wheelbarrow and pushed it down the street calling at all the houses to try and sell to them. My earliest work as a salesman, if rather unsuccessful.When Ma
came home, she was given a position as a nursing sister at the Serowe hospital.
She worked there for a short while, whilst waiting for a vacant post at the Athlone
Hospital in Lobatse, which had been offered to her by Brenda Murch, the Matron
in Lobatse. As Dad’s successor needed to move into our house, we were given
very kind hospitality by Bruce Rutherford, the new Resident Commissioner and
his wife, Jessie.
In December
1954, we moved from Serowe to Lobatse, down south, near the South African
border. I have a few vague memories of the details, so I shall, again, borrow
from Ma’s memoir, as she described this so well.
“The pantechnicon had to be sent from
Johannesburg for the furniture removal. When the driver eventually got to
Lobatse, his van festooned with branches of trees and covered in sand, he said:
“Mrs Ford, if you ever decide to go back, please don’t ask me to return you to
Serowe, it has been a terrible journey”. I drove down myself this time,
accompanied by an African policeman, John, William and Topsy. The latter would
not leave me to face Lobatse alone. Instead, she left her family to be with us.
I don’t remember much about the trip, except that something caused a fire in
the car engine, which the policeman and I extinguished with sand.
Veld fires were raging
at the time quite close to the road. We stopped for a picnic lunch and William
squeaked his head off, saying “1 don’t want to be burnt whilst you all sit
there eating”. We assured him to the contrary and his inevitable desire for
food silenced his yells. We arrived in Lobatse on a hot sultry evening; we
stayed in the Nurses’ Home, where we encountered great friendliness. I am still
able to recall that evening sitting under the big tree, tired but relaxed,
mentally feeling that I had forged another link in the chain of life.”
Athlone Hospital, Lobatse
We stayed with the nurses for a brief period until a house could become available. When it did it was far from ideal. It was over the rail track from the town and was not in good condition, dirty, with peeling paint. I remember that the kitchen was behind the house in a small outbuilding, connected to the house by a short breezeway. Of the day we moved in, Ma wrote, “After a very busy first day, we couldn’t summon the energy to return to the hospital for supper. I found a tin of pilchards, bread and butter and some canned peaches, and as we were about to partake of this wee picnic, John enquired “Aren’t we having wine for dinner?”. I found some sherry to complete the niceties for John’s idea of the normal.””
With the start of the school year, I was enrolled at the Lobatse School. I remember that the Principal was Welsh, Dai Richards, and that his wife was a teacher at the school and played the piano when we gathered in the playground before being marched in orderly fashion into the classrooms. I also remember that they were both very kind to me. I think that I must have been in Standard three. The school was a single storey L-shaped building in a large open space and catered to children up to, I think, Standard six. I was to be a pupil there for the whole of 1955.
In that time, we made a number of friends, some of whom were to play an important part in our lives. We moved, thankfully into a brand new house. It would not be permitted today. It was what was known as a “prefab”, designed to be assembled in minimal time, and was in a brand new street with about six identical houses along only one side. It was made from a steel frame with two sheets of asbestos cement separated by vermiculite insulation. The doors had a rendency to make a metallic clang when closed. The roof was corrugated asbestos cement.
The hospital nurses’ home was an important social centre for us. We often had supper there with the other nursing sisters and Brenda Murch, an unmarried lady originally from Bideford in Devon. She had a delightful Devon burr in her accent and was most kind to us. This was many years before television reached Southern Africa and evening entertainment was entirely home made. There were bridge evenings and play readings and, frequently, Scottish dancing to shellac 78 RPM records of Jimmy Shand and his band played on a wind-up gramophone.
Ma became a sort of mother figure to a group of young people. Jan Leech, the attractive elder daughter of Jack and Joan Leech whom we had met in Mafikeng, had a bevy of young men around her. Stephen Henn, the new Assistant District Commissioner, a young Cambridge graduate, was the co-ordinator of sporting activities and I remember that he organised tennis parties at weekends. He lived in our new street and Bill “found” him and adopted him into our little family. Robin Miskin was assistant manager at the Standard Bank and, like Steve, was a keen tennis player. Other people in our street were Gordon Taylor, an officer in the Police, and Paul and Sheila Titterton and their son Alan, who became Bill’s friend. I remember that Alan was mad about cricket and motor racing, of both of which I had no experience then. There was also another family in the street who had a daughter. I think that her name was Edna. My only memory of her was being invited to her birthday party, at which she shocked us by lifting her skirt and flashing us, knickerless.
I made friends with Harry Robertson and Peter Leech, whom I mentioned when I wrote about his being in the explosion which killed his brother Graham in Mafeking. Harry’s mother had recently moved to Lobatse from Northern Rhodesia after the death of her husband. I think that the recent loss of our fathers help us to come together.
Harry was a bit of a rebel. He was a couple of years older than me and loved Rock ‘n Roll music. He introduced me to Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. I remember him being very proud of a pair of blue suede shoes. He introduced me to smoking. With Bill in tow, we built a “clubhouse“ in the bush on the hillside above the hospital, where we could go and “camp”. Harry smoked horrible little Rhodesian cigarettes called OK, about the size of the English Woodbines and probably made from sweepings on the factory floor. My mother bought them to give, with sweets, to the many African people who came to our door requesting Christmas boxes. I think it was Bill who nicked them. One memorable afternoon, we built a little stone fireplace in the hut we had made out of branches and leaves. Predictably, the fire we lit was promptly out of control and we had to scamper down the hill after making a vain attempt at putting it out. Brenda Murch had to call out a squad of workers to put it out, not before half the hillside was in flames. We were forgiven, but not before receiving a severe talking to from Brenda and our mothers.
Ma, spaniel Penny, Stephen Henn and his dog Jenny and me
Harry and Peter Leech were both sent to boarding school at Kingswood College in Grahamstown, very much the rival to St Andrews, my future school for the rest of my school life. Nevertheless, we didn’t let that rivalry stop our friendship.
We were happy in the prefab, but were not there for long. I have one memory of a dramatic event that happened there. On a rare rainy afternoon, I was doing my homework and becoming irritated with Bill who was being noisy and a bit obstructive. I went through the kitchen to call Topsy to come and deal with him. The back door opened into a small alcove. I opened it and found myself confronted by a rearing ringhals (spitting cobra), a very venomous snake which was known to spit its venom at antagonists’ eyes with a risk of blindness. I closed the door very quickly and ran to call Topsy through a window. She had a few friends with her – her room was in a separate building behind the house – and they all trooped into the kitchen to see the snake slithering under the fridge. Mayhem ensued as three or four large black people started trying to hit the poor snake with assorted bits of tree when it showed itself. They managed to snap the handle off the fridge door before they killed the snake.
For Christmas in 1955, I received a gift from Ma that, ultimately, would change my life. I was given a Kodak Box Brownie camera.
It was in the prefab house that I started learning to bake. I learned to make scones, quite successfully, and made a cake-sized scone as a birthday cake for Ma. I decorated it with toothpicks in lieu of candles, one for every year (46). I was very proud of myself and showed it off in the neighbourhood. Ma was very embarrassed. Quite early in 1956, we moved again, this time to a much better house, an older brick and mortar one, probably built in the 1930s, became available in 1956. It was in the better part of the government village, on the hillside, with a huge garden, just down the road from the hospital. The bottom part of the garden was an orchard and we were able to pick oranges, grapefruit and peaches. We sometimes did a trade with the agricultural research station across the road, giving them fruit in exchange for raw peanuts, which Ma roasted for us.
Those differences did not affect Bill who was too young to go to school, but with Ma at the hospital and me at school in the day, was largely left to his own devices. He found his way into the abattoir grounds where he met the shunting engine drivers and made friends with them. He spent quite a lot of time riding with them between the abattoir and Lobatse station. He was an adventurous child. I was very angry one day when I came home to find him making a war zone with my Dinky Toy cars and military vehicles. He had, surreptitiously, been scraping the head off matches to make his own fireworks. He used them to make a minefield and was blowing up my cars.
I had been given a bicycle for my birthday before we left Serowe but I also had a tricycle for my fourth birthday. It was a biggish machine with equal-sized wheels. We had moved from the prefab into a larger brick house and it had a huge garden. It was on a hillside with a long drive which lewd down to the road. We had an orchard of fruit trees, oranges, grapefruit and peaches. One day, Harry and I decided that Bill would enjoy rolling down the hill between the trees on the trike. I think he enjoyed it a couple of times, but on, probably, the third run, one of the rear wheels buckled and he came a cropper. Fortunately, there was no permanent damage.
Ma had to do her fair share of night duty at the hospital. This meant that we were left alone in the house all night. In the world we live in now, this would be regarded as a criminal act by many. I believe it helped to give us a good sense of responsibility. We were schooled in survival behaviour. As there was no electricity, light came from paraffin lamps or candles. The paraffin lamps were either the simple kind with a glass bowl, a wick mechanism and a glass chimney or the more elaborate Coleman and Tilley pressure lamps which had a very fragile mantle made from a very fine netting and a small hand pump on the fuel tank. The pressure sent a fine mist of paraffin in to the mantle and a small dose of methylated spirit was used to set it alight. These gave off a very acceptable level of light in the living and dining room. We were taught to be careful with the matches, candles and lamps, not to place them in a draught or in a place where they might easily be knocked over.
There was no cinema in Lobatse, but films were shown on Saturday nights in a hall at the hotel, which was owned by Sid and Doris Milner. The breaks between reels were a good opportunity for a frenetic rush into the bar for replenishments. One night, I waited until Bill was asleep – we shared a bedroom – and crept out of the house and walked down the hill to the hotel. Somehow, I managed to get into the hall without paying and watched the film. The adults probably assumed that Ma was there and no one paid any notice to me. The film was a horror film called Tarantula and was, incidentally, Clint Eastwood’s first starring role. It featured a giant spider which had been injected with a growth hormone by a mad scientist. It escaped and terrorised the community. There was a scene in which a pickup truck carrying a few horses was driving past a ridge of hills on a plain. It was caught and was thrown into the air by the spider – end of Eastwood’s performance – and the horses consumed. The spider was killed, eventually, by a squadron of jet fighters. I walked home at the end of the film. The business centre of the small town was at the bottom of a hill and we lived in the area above and there was a ridge of hills along the left hand side with a space of about a mile before the houses. I was very nervous and imagined the spider coming over the hill all the way home. I crept into bed trying not to have a nightmare and no one was any the wiser.
I was sent one day to take a message to Robin, who had a small flat at the side of the Standard Bank. I rode down on my bike and had great fun speeding down the hill. I even passed a car. I had to make a sharp turn left as I reached the Bank at the bottom of the hill into a side street. The road had recently been tarred and riding our bikes on the tar was great fun after the usual dirt roads. I made the turn… but I had forgotten to turn the left hand pedal up and, as the bike banked in the turn, the pedal caught on the ground and the bike pivoted. I was thrown off and was lucky to escape with a badly grazed elbow. The bike suffered though. The pedal was bent at about 45º. It stayed that way until I sold it for 10 shillings (one Rand) when I left school after writing matric.
A master, Mr Osborne and his wife ran Bowker House. They were strict, but kind and looked after us very well.
Mr Osborne
With my being at boarding school, our worlds separated somewhat. Bill started at Lobatsi school, and entered the world of timetables and homework. He kept his happy-go-lucky ways, and was notorious for taking his shoes off to paddle in a puddle and forgetting to pick them up again, which necessitated a search, usually by Stephen Henn, with Bill trying to remember which puddle.
Bill in the middle of the line, school sports day, Lobatse
He was quite tough physically, and a story which Ma told was of the last time she tried to give him a hiding. She was sitting in a folding canvas chair, smacking away, and all he did was laugh. When she asked him why, he told her that he was watching the stitches in the chair seat parting and waiting for the whole thing to collapse.
For the second term (like some other private schools, St Andrews had three rather than the more common four terms). This was probably because of the number of pupils who lived a long way from Grahamstown, and this reduced the number of journeys we had to undertake each year. In my case, the rail trip from Lobatse to Grahamstown took 3½ days. I had to be put on the train at 4 in the morning, joining a good number of boys coming from Northern and Southern Rhodesia. There was no real platform at Lobatse station, where cargo was much more a prerogative than passengers. So one had to clamber up the small ladder which led to the door of the coach and then reach down to pull up one’s suitcase and hand baggage, which was mostly the provisions for the journey. This usually comprised a cold roast chicken, boiled eggs, bread and cheese and some fruit. So a small crowd of unsupervised boys (and sometimes a few girls in a separate coach) rode the iron horse to the Eastern Cape. It was quite a journey, with a change of trains near the end. The train went directly to Port Elizabeth and Grahamstown was on a branch line. So we had to change trains at a small station called Alicedale and take another local train to Grahamstown.
The map shows the route by road as there is no longer a rail link
On that first journey, there were a few DSG (our sister school) girls on the train. I was standing in the corridor outside our compartment leaning on the edge of the door opening while watching the scenery. There was an older boy named Flack who had brought a girl into the compartment and wanted a bit of privacy. He decided to close the sliding door of the compartment by kicking against the handle. He didn’t know that my thumb was in the way, and I ended up not only breaking the thumb, but losing the nail and all the skin above the knuckle.
When we arrived back at school, Mrs Osborne sent me straight off to see Sister Reed in the sick bay. In the waiting room, I met another boy, John Job, who also had a damaged finger. He had suffered a bad electrical burn from a faulty heater and also needed dressings. From such things lifelong friendships begin and Bill, in his turn, became very friendly with Christopher, John’s younger brother, and our parents formed a very firm friendship as well.
John Job at St Andrews Prep
John with his wife Mavis at their Golden Wedding in May 2019
Another friend in my early days at Prep was Anton “Puppy” de Villiers. His father was Judge President of the Eastern Cape and they lived very close to the school. Puppy was, however, booked into boarding school. He was very much a “laat lammetjie” an afterthought or accident and had two big brothers who were at University. He often invited me and another friend Bruce aka Dish Pringle to Sunday lunch with his parents. This was a traditional big Sunday lunch with roast beef or lamb as the middle of three courses. It gave me my first lesson in spoken Afrikaans. Someone had told that, if my hostess asked me if I had had enough, the polite reply was. “Nee dankie Mevrou, ek is dikgevreet”. There is no real English translation, but the closest is “No thank you Ma’am, I’m stuffed”. So I duly made this response and Mrs de Villiers said very gently that this was not a polite expression was “Nee dankie Mevrou, el is versadig” (No thank you Ma’am. I am satisfied”).
Bruce Pringle with Puppy de Villiers & his Mum
Mrs de Villiers had a little grey Fiat 500 “Topolino. This tiny car was strictly a two seater, but it had a canvas sunroof which could be rolled back leaving enough space behind the seats for three small boys to stand up with our top halves sticking out above the roof. No health and safety rules in those days. Wed thought it was great fun when she took us for drives around Grahamstown with the wind in our faces and hair.
I was placed in Form 4B (Standard Four in other schools) with Mr Paterson as the master. Suddenly, there was a new range of subjects I hadn’t come across before, such as Latin and Biology. I think that it is a great pity that Latin is no longer taught in most schools. It is an essential building block in most European languages and I attribute the poor grammar and vocabulary I read every day to its omission from the curriculum. It is also a huge aid in learning other languages. It made German much easier for me to learn – German grammar is closely related to Latin, the language having been made literate by Catholic monks. My seat was in a coveted spot at the back of the class and I made a sort of history by asking for a seat in the front row. When asked why, I replied that I couldn't read what was on the blackboard.
So the next thing was a visit to the optician, a diagnosis of myopia and a telegram to my mother asking for permission to fit me with a pair of spectacles. I was to wear them every day until I had cataract operations in my sixties which fitted me with new Zeiss lenses in my eyes.
Sport was an essential way to occupy the leisure hours of an often unruly group of boys. We had rugby, cricket, tennis, exercise classes and, unusually, Fives - sort of squash but played with bare hands hitting a hard little ball. There was an open-sided shed for the exercises which were organised in a very military style by Mr Sutherland, an ex-Guardsman. I never managed to do anything useful on the cricket field. Years later, in my late thirties, I was diagnosed as having something called a latent squint. What this means is that I actually see double, my eyes not aligning properly and spectacle lenses with a prismatic correction sorted it out. My brain obviously tried to do this internally, but I have come to the conclusion that I actually didn’t know which ball to hit or catch. So games with small balls were not enterprises promising any chance of success. I was much better on the rugby field. The big oval ball was much easier to manage. Although I was not particularly big, I was put into the scrum, for a long time playing hooker and, ultimately being better as a loose forward. In my twenties, when I played club rugby in London, I found my niche in the back line, playing at inside centre.
Home for the holidays with our pets. John (with glasses), Bill and Harry with Bill’s budgie Chirpy, dogs Jenny and Penny
Mr Paterson’s wife was in charge of the school library. I spent quite a lot of time there as I have always loved reading. She saw a niche for me and for the rest of my time at prep school I was the librarian. This had one benefit. There was a series of wooden panels in the top classroom and boys who had performed with some distinction were allowed to carve their names on it. This was carefully supervised and all the names had to be carved with proper craft knives in measured straight lines. My position as librarian allowed me to carve my name for posterity in my last year at Prep.
In that last year, 1958, Bill came to join me at Prep and was put into the six-bedded dormitory I slept in. Here life took an unfortunate turn. Puppy de Villiers took it upon himself to torment Bill in horrible bullying ways and I am very ashamed to say that I took my friend’s side rather than my brother’s. I have always regretted my behaviour at that time and I stood by while he teased and bullied Bill. My loyalties were divided and I should have been stronger and done more to protect my brother. Fortunately, his strength of character prevailed and he handled himself very well, without much help from me.
In that last year, another big change meant that we were to move again. Jack Penn, with whom Ma had worked at the Brenthurst miliary hospital between 1940 and 1945, was permitted by the Oppenheimers to use the Brenthurst name on a new specialist reconstructive surgery hospital in Johannesburg. The first premises were above Ingram’s Pharmacy in Hillbrow but, in 1956 or 57, he built a completely new hospital at the edge of Parktown next to Clarendon Circle, backing onto Park Lane. Miss Benedict, who was the first matron, was unable to cope with the task of running the new institution and it was running into problems. Jack called to Ma for help, and she took over as Matron in 1958. When she broke the news over supper in the Lobatse Hospital Nurses’ Home, I was most upset. Even though I was spending most of the year in Grahamstown, I loved living in the rural atmosphere of Bechuanaland, where there was no fence behind the house and I could just wander up the hill into the wild bush. Johannesburg held no attractions for me.
So the beginning of my teenage years came with two moves, across a border to a big city and along Cradock road to St Andrews College, where I became a resident of Armstrong House. Actually, in my first year there, I boarded with Mr Anton Murray. There was an overflow of boys from Armstrong and Espin houses, and eight of us were sent to the Murrays, about halfway up the road between Prep and College. One of my fellow boarders there was a tall boy from a German family, who had long floppy blond hair and was a little eccentric. His name is Achim von Arnim, and he became very well-known as an excellent – and quite eccentric – wine grower and we still have a good relationship with him and Hildegarde, his wife.
Ma had a huge job to do, and when the General Manager obstructed her, she fired him. The hospital was broke as a result of massive over-spending on silly things like expensive blue and white Wedgwood crockery with the hospital’s Phoenix logo. Beautiful to look at, but far too fragile for the circumstances and the breakages were horrendous.
The Tertiary Years – 1963-71
Working – Photographer 1971-1978
Marriage – Pam, 1974-99
AGFA 1978 – 2002
Lynne – 1999…
Reference: Janet Ford’s memoir
https://johnduncanford.blogspot.com/2022/06/janet-alice-duncan-fords-memoir.html
