Tales from the Old Karoo Page 2

  All through the long, hot hours of waiting for something to happen the old lady dithered in a terrible quandary. When a wool buyer with a big wagon came along and offered to take them into town she was reluctant to leave the place – there might still be two or three gold pieces in the sand. On the other hand she didn’t want to ask him outright to count how many gold pieces were in the tin: not only would this advertise the fact that she couldn’t count, but it might tempt the wool buyer to murder her for her money. But what could she do but take a chance? She smiled her sweetest smile and played the damsel in distress. She described the accident, and the spilling of the money. This, she said, had so upset her nerves that she came to a different total every time she counted. Would he mind counting it for her?

  Well, it was 100. The bank manager got it; they got the farm and Arrie got the sack, for breaking the cart.

  But Oom Goggie’s most terrible story was about another tree; not an imported tree from the Mediterranean, but a tree known as a witstamboom; a tree as old as Africa itself, growing by the roadside where the valley widens out. Its pale white stem is now split, and one half lies on the red soil like a twisting silkworm on brown paper, and the other stands erect, if skew, too massive for the ragged head of leaves that it supports. Both halves have many curious craters or pock marks in their white bark.

  The old Dutch East India Company tried to police the East Cape Frontier with pandoers – Malays and half-castes from the Cape mixed with Hottentots whose clans had been smashed by the combined impact of Boer Commandos, brandy and smallpox – all men with broken origins, rootless, surviving as mercenaries in the pay of the powers that had taken their land and way of life from them. When the British captured the Cape they inherited this corps. The only thing that they changed was the officers – and instead of mostly Germans, they got mostly Scotsmen.

  The pandoers were crack shots and good horsemen, and great elephant hunters, but as elephants were royal game – all ivory belonging to the Chief – this was a point of friction with the Xhosa. Also, like most soldiers since the beginnings of time, the pandoers easily became brutal and licentious when not properly controlled. The Xhosa hated them, and envied their possession of horses and, above all, their guns, lead and powder.

  Well, the Scots sergeant and his troop of four pandoers had run six cattle thieves to exhaustion and had captured them and the twelve stolen beasts. The twelve recaptured cattle were being driven back at an even pace by the captured six Xhosa, and the six Xhosa were herded by the four pandoers; and the four pandoers were watched by the beady eyes of the one Scotsman. He had a pack horse all to himself, laden mainly with whisky. This he needed for company. All the others had company. A man in charge is always lonely.

  So lonely, in fact, that he decided to go and visit the Van Vuurens, who’d also been robbed of some cattle. They also had a beautiful daughter. They lived deep into the mountains on the left. He was given a warm welcome by the Van Vuuren parents, and by the daughter. Towards sunset, clouds rolled up with thunder, followed by cold wind and rain. Against his better judgement, he allowed himself to be persuaded to stay on. In the middle of the bitter night the daughter brought him a warming pan full of coals to keep him warm. She said she was feeling a little cold herself. What could he do but invite her to join him in bed? She left him well before dawn.

  It continued raining, heavily. He needed little persuasion to stay on for another night. He then tore himself away.

  It was still overcast and gloomy as he came down the mountain. All the streams were rumbling and tumbling with brown water; but he soon realised that the rain had not been general. While he’d been a happy mountain prisoner of the late snow clouds, the plains had been as dry as ever. Near the bottom of the pass he heard a shot, then another. He cursed his men – they were hunting, something he had forbidden. He had warned them not to let their attention stray from the Xhosas and the cattle for a moment. With each shot his anxiety increased. The stream was full, and he could not cross it. His men might be on the other side.

  He moved downstream towards the firing. Then, from an eminence, at a little distance, he saw the cattle grazing unattended with the horses.

  Two Xhosas were at a twisted tree with a white stem, from which they were untying the limp body of a pandoer. They dragged it to one side and dumped it next to two other bodies. Another two Xhosa dragged the last pandoer to the tree, and tied him there.

  At about sixty yards’ distance the two remaining Xhosa were loading the captured muskets – slowly, inexpertly. Then the live target practice resumed on the last of his pandoers.

  The Xhosa were very bad marksmen indeed. It took twenty-three shots before the figure on the tree finally stopped moving.

  They left him tied up there. Without any haste, they made off back into Xhosa land, with the cattle, the horses, the guns, the powder, the lead.

  How did it happen?

  ‘Well’, said Oom Goggie, who has a feeling for words and phrases: ‘The pandoers stole the sergeant’s Scotch Whisky; this had filled them with Dutch Courage, which had made them so reckless that they fell victim to Xhosa Cunning.’

  For years afterwards, frugal Boers used to dig leaden slugs out of the bark of that tree, melt them down and re-use them.

  ‘What happened to the Sergeant?’ I asked.

  ‘He galloped thirty miles and reported the matter. He had to do some fast talking to explain how he became separated from his men. But as the only survivor of an action in which four gallant pandoers lost their lives, he got promotion.’

  Oom Goggie looked at me sideways. Then he said: ‘Others say that he turned round slowly and went back into the mountains. He left the army forever, and took on the name of Van Vuuren.’

  I won’t go on with Oom Goggie’s stories about that one little corner of the Karoo. I tell these in the hopes that you might sympathise with my eventual decision to abandon Olive and the SATV programme.

  Of course I have not told his stories exactly as I heard them. For that, there is the tape recorder. I have added and subtracted as always happens when a story is retold.

  As we came down the mountain, Christopher Heywood and I stopped repeatedly, photographing what we thought might be Die Jood se krans or the witstamboom, or the Drift of the Hundred Golden Sovereigns, but I was no longer really interested in actual geography and history. I was turning to an internal landscape large enough to cope with stories I’d heard from the other Oom Goggies of my sixty years; so that when I got back home that night I found that I’d lost my camera somewhere up that valley.

  But the Coetzers phoned the next day to say the camera had been spotted by one of the labourers and brought to the homestead.

  It was delivered per opportunity, with a couple of sticks of excellent biltong.

  And what were we able to give in return for their kindness and hospitality? I had only one little fragment about Olive herself and her stay on Leliekloof.

  When Olive came to Leliekloof in August 1879 – five hours by Cape cart from Cradock – in her baggage were the manuscripts of at least three incomplete novels, including The Story of an African Farm, (then called Lyndall). She had started The Story in March 1875 while with the Fouches on Klein Gannahoek. After about a year there, she’d gone to Ratelhoek to the Martins for three years, one of her longest spells in one spot. She then left there, to return to the Fouches, who were now farming at Leliekloof.

  It was from this spot that she sent off the manuscript of The Story of an African Farm to Dr and Mrs Brown in Burnley, England. It reached them in mid-winter – ‘very indifferently written, many blots, many erasions were on almost every page, and here and there a grease mark as though the tallow candle by which she probably wrote, had dropped a tear.’

  The Browns sent the untidy draft to friends in the publishing business. They were not particularly encouraging. It was returned to Olive at Leliekloof for re-writing, with a letter by one of the readers dated 30 May 1880: ‘while it shows a good deal of talent, it i
s too long, and would require to be cut down’; but there was ‘no reason to lose hope of ultimately succeeding’. Olive’s diary does not show us how she reacted to this rejection slip. Struggling authors will sympathise with her. There was no one to consult or help with the revision. On 12 December 1880 she confides in her diary, ‘Have begun to revise Lyndall. Must leave out much, feel a little heartsore.’ She completed the revision but not the fair copy. When she left Leliekloof in February 1881, she wrote: ‘I had hoped to get my book written out, but I can’t as I am very sick today – I shall have to finish it at Fred’s, if ever I do.’

  So she leaves Leliekloof in near despair over her writing. But according to Cronwright, her genius ‘was never better than at the latter part of her stay at Ratelhoek and at Leliekloof … At Leliekloof, free from asthma and all other bodily ailments, she re-wrote The Story of an African Farm, even twice it would seem.’

  Well, she did manage to complete the fair copy at Fred’s. The book appeared two years later, early in 1883. Of all the eloquent reactions to The Story of an African Farm, my vote goes to Mrs Brown’s, when she first unwrapped the untidy manuscript. Born and bred in Cape Town, (one of the famous Solomon clan), she was homesick in the damp, smoky industrial North of England.

  No Scotsman ever longed for his heather hills … more than I did for my native land. The bulky parcel was sewn up in a piece of coarse cotton cloth, to keep its pages together, and then in brown paper. When I opened it, in those wintry surroundings – with the noise and stir of a manufacturing town about me – a flood of emotion came over me, for I was met with the strange pungent smell of the smoke of wood fires, familiar to those I had known on a karoo farm. I folded that bit of cotton cloth almost reverently, and I have it still. Do not think that I was either sentimental or foolish, but I felt as if the story belonged to me, because there, in that town, with its thousands of people, there was only one besides myself who had seen the great African moon, or knew how it glinted on the corrugated iron roofs, or threw the shadow of the milkbush on the dry earth. With the description of these the story opens.

  When I got back to Grahamstown I resumed work on the TV series. The phone rang.

  ‘Professor Butler’, said the voice. ‘You don’t know me from a bar of soap, but I’m ‘phoning to offer you a treat.’

  Elwyn Bowker was about to go up-country into the Karoo to visit an uncle of whom he was particularly fond. The old gentleman wished to go over a hundred mile stretch of road along which he had driven a flock of sheep in 1921, a bad drought year. He’d not lost a single sheep. Uncle and nephew were planning to find all the old milestones, which appear at ten mile intervals, and photograph them – a task complicated by the relaying of the roads. Would I like to come with them?

  Why was he inviting me? Well, his son had come back from school and said: ‘Dad, you’ve just got to read this.’ It was a short story, in free verse, which I had written ten years ago about a nephew and his uncle driving into town for a church fete. ‘I found “Sweet Water” a real treat, and wish to show my appreciation.’ I accepted the invitation.

  During that delightful expedition with nephew and uncle, vague ideas of writing a book of short stories began to harden into a resolution: short stories with a particular focus: stories which were attempts to recover and record the rapidly disappearing memories of my part of the world.

  About halfway we had to leave the tarred main road and follow a dirt track in order to get back on to the old wagon route, now overgrown, to an abandoned outspan where one of the missing milestones stood. The owner of the farm, another Bowker, and the uncle got talking. They’d last seen each other at a cricket match in the thirties. The talk swung this way and that way, until it settled on the ruins of a cottage on the long-abandoned outspan. Mr Bowker had a story to tell about them.

  A ghost story, from his father’s days, when there could be anything up to sixty ox wagons at a time on the outspan, taking goods and people to and from -Kimberley ‘before the railways spoilt everything’. He told it in a matter-of-fact manner, no different from the way he’d discussed the nesting habits of blue cranes: about a policeman stationed on the outspan, who played the piano. A musical policeman. Dead a hundred years. Whose piano can still be heard on moonlit nights.

  The story, wouldn’t let me go. I thought I owed it to all concerned, not least the policeman, to leave some sort of record. If I didn’t, who would? Suddenly Giochi Coetzer’s and Uncle Norman’s and other peoples’ stories came flooding back to me. Some were no more than anecdotes; others were tips of icebergs, drifting in mysterious seas; some comic, some tragic, mostly ironic, half-serious. I’d heard them in my childhood, as a student, during and after the war, in pubs, at dinner parties. They were folklore, and nearly all from the Eastern Cape Karoo. I jotted down the bare bones in the back of my diary. There are forty-eight of them.

  This resulted in a crisis of writer’s conscience. Time becomes very precious after sixty-five. Was I going to use the next three years trying to turn the Schreiner siblings and friends into an historical soap opera? Did I really want to dance a polka with Olive through South African history from the Great Trek to her death in 1920? It was something which anyone with a feeling for people and the past could do; but who but I could release the stories locked in my head?

  I abandoned the Schreiner task, but could not exorcise her entirely. I have a feeling of affectionate responsibility towards her. After all, I spent my formative years in Cradock, under her inspiring if moody shadow. Also, I’d got to like her much-maligned husband, Cron, and some of the lesser characters, like Johanna Pienaar, into whose lives Olive and Cron kept entering like hot iron. ‘Johanna, Cron and Olive’ differs from most of the other stories in this book in its heavy reliance on surviving written records, although the oral tradition is also laid under tribute.

  What do I mean by the Old Karoo? I mean a time before the triumph of the internal combustion engine over horses and oxen; when the trains were pulled by steam engines when only a few roads were tarred; when most cooking was done on wood-burning ranges; when fridges and radios were unknown, and land barons as rare as pondhase. When Karoo towns were racially easy-going places without buffer strips and barbed wire fences patrolled by conscript-filled caspirs.

  I wish to thank the following people who told me stories or gave me ideas which have contributed to this book: John and Marie Biggs, Elwyn Bowker, Isaac Bowker, Alice Butler, Joan Butler, Sister Carmel, Giochi Coetzer, Godfrey Collett, Norman Collett, Charles Eglington, Professor John Gouws, Professor Christopher Heywood, The Honourable Nico Malan, Errol Moorcroft, Rex Moys, Dr Dooley Muller, Brig. R.J. Palmer, Dr Jack Skead, Ferdinand van Gas and Lindy Wilson.

  Lionel Abrahams, Ida Bell, Jean Butler, Ad. Donker, Joan Gillmer, Reg Griffiths and Don Maclennan made valuable suggestions for improving some of them.

  Of the fifteen tales in this book, three have appeared before:

  1.‘Lambs, Aasvogels, Zebras, and the Day of Judgement’ in Karoo Morning. David Philip, Cape Town, 1977.

  2.‘The Rebel with a Price on his Head’ in Contrast 63, July 1987.

  3.‘Concertina Gate’ in Sesame II, Summer 88/89.

  Guy Butler

  Grahamstown

  March 1989

  1

  Concertina Gate

  Opening a gate is not a routine matter; it calls for experience and skill, and, in some cases, circumspection, even a degree of humility. I’ve known grown-up clever men from big cities reduced to tears of impotent rage by a gate – for example, that woolbroker from Port Elizabeth who couldn’t undo that double catch which old Hans van Heerden had devised. The two of them had words about it at the stock fair pens.

  ‘What do you need such a complicated thing on your gate for?’ ‘To keep animals in, or out, as the case may be.’

  ‘I’m not an animal. It wouldn’t let me in.’

  ‘Until I put that double catch on, a clever old mare I’ve got always opened it.’

  ‘Are
you calling me less clever than an old mare because I can’t open your gate?’

  ‘Use your brains, man. The thing is simple; you can do it with the fingers of one hand. If the mare’s tongue had been just a little bit thinner, even she’d have been able to lick it open.’

  Seeing the dangerous possibilities – Hans telling the broker to try his tongue next time – I said ‘Reminds me of the case of the Concertina Gate.’ They both looked at me, and changed the subject.

  That case had gone to the Supreme Court, and cost both parties a fortune, and made them look ridiculous too.

  The litigants were a new young doctor from Cape Town who’d never gone beyond the Hex River Mountains before, and one of his outlying patients, old Horrelpoot Harmse. The young city slicker was totally ignorant of and showed no respect for a common-or-garden concertina gate. He lost the sympathy of a thousand farmers when he persuaded his advocate to argue that concertina gates were a public danger, and that those who erected them were liable for any damage or injury they might cause.

  The damage that most concerned the young Doctor was injury to a thing called his dignitas. Some ignorant people thought dignitas was a polite scientific word for unmentionables, not a high-sounding circumlocution for conceit.

  This kind of gate bears the charming name concertina, not because it makes music, but because it folds upon itself and stretches out like a concertina, and has no spine. A conventional gate is a short bit of fence on a moveable metal or wood frame, with one end hinged and the other free to swing shut and open. A concertina gate is also merely a bit of fence, but without any frame. It is held erect entirely by tension. One end is fixed to one gatepost, and the other end held to the other gatepost by a most ingenious catch. When the catch is loosened, the gate, unless handled well, will collapse with a nasty twang into a low wire entanglement. In the Ghoup they call these catches on concertina gates bek-slaners, or mouth clouters.