NO MINUTE HAND TO MY CLOCK
By Dan Rademeyer
CHAPTER 1
The thick lenses of the doctor’s spectacles reminded me of the solid bottoms of two milk bottles as he began to polish them on a piece of chamois. Everything in the room, even the man himself, breathed solidity. He was well into his sixties, a few years older than I was, but he was as ageless as a man of thirty, even though he had a slight inclination to corpulence. He was healthy of colour, a man who had harnessed life to his own bidding. And I was a wreck of a man who had ruined my life with alcohol.
He was a famous specialist on neurosis. My nerves were in shreds. He was the judge and I was waiting for the sentence. I gripped the edges of my chair and a shudder went through me.
He had touched every nerve in my body with a long examination. He had put me through medical tests to which I had responded with the faith of a toddler learning to walk.
There was a solidity even in his sympathies as he made me confess to a life of debauchery.
I was a big man physically but felt like a rag of a man in that solid room with the heavy Persian carpet, the leather bound volumes, the few rare expensive prints in costly frames. And I felt small as he pushed the bronze ashtray towards me and offered me a heavy blend of cigarette from a gold monogrammed case.
* * *
During the examination my mind flitted back to the time a month before when I had been discharged from a hospital with the sentence which a little woman doctor had given me: a sentence that I would be a cripple until the day of my death. She was a charming young thing, with the figure of a Cinderella and big, brown eyes. She had taken a personal interest in my complicated case of alcoholism and her sympathy had warmed my heart.
I had come to her on a long trail through many doctors and two sessions at a sanatorium. Then came the day when I sensed doom in the apologetic smile in her candid brown eyes. “I’m sorry, but I’ve bad news for you, Mr Bossau,” she said.
I stood my stick against the wall and slumped into a chair. I tried to put on a brave smile and said: “Fire away, doctor.”
“You’ll never be able to walk again,” she said bluntly, and every word knocked at my heart like a stone.
“Why? Why?” the cry was torn out of me. “Are you throwing in the towel?”
“Yes, in your case.”
“But do you mean, doctor that I’ll never work again? Never tackle a job?”
“Never,” she replied, “but you could play chess.”
“Chess?” I wanted to laugh but there was a knot in my throat.
“Buy yourself a chessboard, Mr Bossau. It’s the most interesting game I know of.”
“Chess?” I spluttered. I got to my feet and my hand trembled as I took my stick. “Thank you, doctor,” I said, “but I’m telling you that your diagnosis is wide off the mark.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You know it wasn’t easy for me to tell you.”
“I know.” Squaring my shoulders I hobbled away, praying that I wouldn’t topple over as I had been doing so often in recent months.
* * *
Almost a year before that I had given up alcohol and in that period neuritis had become prevalent in my flesh. Without warning violent shooting pins would sear my legs. Under Cinderella’s treatment the pains had gradually decreased, but at the cost of a parallel decline in my powers of walking, until I could only hobble a few paces with the aid of a stick without collapsing. The neuritis was the reaction to alcoholism and the reaction was fiendish.
I had been so determined to conquer the disease that had crucified me through the long years that I had tried to cure myself by voluntarily going to a sanatorium. I had summoned to my aid a tremendous amount of will power, but dear God, the reaction seemed to be crueler than the disease. Drug addicts at the sanatorium had the same type of reaction. It was frightening to see. It was almost beyond human endurance to suffer it.
I was like a punch-drunk prize fighter. I carried the ravages of the blows in the ring, marked by the ravages of alcoholism. Like a prize fighter, I was determined to make a desperate comeback.
The reaction was more malevolent, crueller and more devastating than ten thousand of the worst hangovers and before this Cinderella from hell. I had thrown away the bottle for ever and empty bottle was having its revenge.
I had made up my mind that come hell or high water I would never drink again. Perhaps that was my error. Perhaps I should have weaned myself gradually. Perhaps a thousand reasons and excuses, but when I conquered alcoholism, the cramps and sweats began to conquer me. My system cried out for the painkiller of alcohol, but I rejected the demand and gritted my teeth while my muscles danced with spasms and I became so restless that I could scarcely sit down. The banging of a door or even footsteps on an uncarpeted floor was like a whirring saw on my nerves which made me fly into a temper. Bouts of nausea sometimes made me retch blood. I became a frightened man, frightened for my children and for my loving wife Nina; my family who was my only sheet anchor in the bitter storm that looked as if it would never end. I had been blessed with a family whose love had been a shining light, and for their sakes as much as for my own I wanted to win the last, vital battle.
I had conquered one disease only to be crippled by a worse one and I saw the pain in their hearts as they watched me, tended me, ready to sacrifice everything to ease my pain. I had become a child in their hands.
I had terrible convulsions when I lay down. A needle of morphia put me to sleep. The lights went out. And then I saw a lion or a tiger on the wardrobe or green mambas and brown cobras spitting venom at me. I saw tall buildings toppling towards me and I would wake up screaming. Day after day and night after night the torture went on interrupted only by fitful periods of sleep.
In the hot, Rand1 summer while everybody went round in light clothes, I was freezing and could not endure the whiff of a breeze. My feet and legs had become so sensitive to a touch that I could not bear the bed sheets against my skin. As the demon of neuritis coiled within me, my hands and my fingers, my legs and my toes became cold and bloodless. They felt like flannel. I began to have difficulty shaving and using a knife and fork. It became a burden to stand before the shaving mirror on rubber legs trying to shave with lame hands. Time and again I collapsed on the floor.
As suddenly as the neuritis had struck, another frightening development hit my system. I became a slave to constipation. My whole digestive apparatus was thrown out of gear. I was ordered from one doctor to another who suspected piles or cancer. At last I reached the sanctum of a radiologist who was a psychologist to boot. He had a face like a horse and a heart like a prison warder’s. I told him and his two young and flat-breasted women assistants the story of my alcoholism. I went though a painful and repulsive examination and had already decided that I would rather be hanged than undergo another enema in stark nakedness. I collapsed on a couch and shivered with cold.
The poker face would tell me nothing. The charge was fifteen guineas and in time the report came back marked “negative”. No cancer. No piles. No abscess.
* * *
We had to cross though the heart of the city to get to the outer suburbs. The traffic snarled at me: “Chess, chess.” The wheels of our car picked up the refrain: “Chess, chess.”
My days were numbered, but I knew as much about chess as my dear old mother, long since in her grave, had known about an aeroplane. The only sedentary game I had ever played was snakes and ladders and that with my grandson, but only after he had taught me the game. I had never played a game of cards.
I had grown to maturity in games of hide and seek with roan antelope or stalking a koodoo. With a double bore and pointer, I had winged pheasant, partridge and guinea fowl. I had shot at Bisley2 tournaments. I had broken in fiery two-year old Irish hunters3. I had jumped the hurdles with a song in my heart, my steed gleaming with sweat.
There were times when I took to passive roles with rod and line under a willow on the banks of the brown Vaal4, with the jewelled notes of birds and the murmur of bees drowsing my mind. I had used my talent in sketching interesting faces and in writing. I had found gold in the hills, plucked music from piano keys and found happiness in times when it seemed that I had fought and won the battle against drink.
Now I had decided that I must first tell Nina the doctor’s verdict. All the children would be waiting at Charles’s house. How considerate those three children of ours had been even during the most excessive of my fits of debauchery. And since I had not touched liquor for nearly a year, their love for me was more lavish than ever before. They offered themselves as crutches for my walking.
I did not have a heart to tell them, Nina would; Nina my mainstay who had mothered me as well as being my loving wife through all the darkness. I would tell her of the greater darkness on our doorstep.
I was like a tortoise that hides its tears as it withdraws its head under its shell as I told her in our room. I was aware of her beauty even though she was well into her fifties – the black hair without a speck of grey, the oval face and the wide-apart dark eyes. Her skin was as smooth as our daughter’s.
She had been as calm as I had seen her a thousand times, but she could not hide from me the thread of pain which ran across her face. She tried to hide her heartache and said: “It can’t be true. It mustn’t be true. You haven’t come all this way to lose now.” Later she said: “We mustn’t let the children despair.”
We joined them in front of the fire. I was early autumn, but Charles had built a big, log fire to keep my feet warm. Nina told them what the doctor had said. I saw Magdalena, our daughter, hold back her tears. Charles’s wife, little black-eyed Mary, looked for a moment as if somebody had told her that I had died but she took a grip on herself. “We mustn’t believe that doctor,” she said.
“She should never have said such a thing to Pa,” said Nina.
“She’s only a house doctor,” said Fred, our youngest son and always the optimist of the family. That’s why we nicknamed him Micawber1. “Tell you what. Let Pa have a year of open-air life and her theory will be blasted.”
“We’ve got to do something,” said Charles. He was always the practical one. “We’re taking Pa to the best nerve specialist in the country.”
I caught a look which flashed between him and his mother. They must have come to that decision before the doctor had sentenced me to a living death.
Another lifebuoy had been thrown out for me to clutch at. What if it turned out to be the last straw? But after all there was still hope, tenuous though it might be. When a man was sentenced in a lower court, there was still the court of appeal.
• • •
Now I was facing the ultimate judge. And my doom was ominous in his first words.
“I’m going to tell you the straight truth,” he said. He gave a vigorous polish to his spectacles. “The truth is sometimes unpleasant, but I consider your case, Mr. Bossau, as one which can’t be brushed up by any wishful thinking or false hopes.”
He replaced his spectacles and shot out his cuffs. He lit the cigarette he had given me, then lit his own and blew out the match. He spoke through a puff of smoke.
“There’s no active life left for you,” he said. “Your heart’s very good. Your blood pressure is like that of a youngster of eighteen, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t live for many years. But your liver,” he blew out a cloud of smoke. “Your liver is damaged and can’t supply your extremities with blood. That’s why your feet and legs, your arms and hands will always be lame.”
“I’ll die of stagnation if I have to be inactive,” I blurted as I rose from my chair.
We shook hands. “Take up chess,” he said.
“Be damned to chess, doctor,” I said.
I did not have the courage then to tell him that he was wrong. I felt hopeless as a mouse in a tray even though I told myself that I would never sit on my brains like a chess player. But the terror of becoming a fossil gripped me.
I had always thought that suicide was cowardly, but I began to understand then how a man’s difficulties could drive him to such a desperate act. I began to understand, too, why so many people I had known had drunk themselves to death.
I sat in the sun, brooding. I rifled the pockets of my memory and so many of the coins were shining gold. I saw across the years the brave face of Nina. Deliberately, I had to begin a new fight, the greatest fight of my life and I knew that it would never have begun had I bought a chessboard.
CHAPTER 2
I was born of a good family and of Huguenot1 descent. I was the youngest of ten children and lost my father at the age of five. We were all reared on the farm under Mother’s apron in an atmosphere where the playing cards were hidden when the parson called.
I have only a shadowy memory of my father when he went off to war for old President Kruger against the might of England and her Empire. I saw him ride away on a beautiful brown horse named Rooibok, from our farm, Mooimeisiefontein (Pretty Maid’s Fountain), at Perdefontein (Horse Fountain). Everywhere in the land where the old Voortrekkers2 had found fountains, they used them for place names. The local town was well-named Perdefontein, because it was the centre of a flourishing horse breeding district.
Later I conjured pictures of my father, from tales my sister Molly told me long after the cruel war was over. For he rode in the days when Miss Paddon (another shadowy figure in my mind) was the governess of the children – in a Victoria, the Rolls Royce of carriages drawn by a pair of Arabian dapple greys. Miss Paddon called it the “royal carriage”. My father insisted on having the best of English governesses and apparently Miss Paddon was the star of them all.
A petite woman she was, with a long oval face and violet eyes. Her long feet were shod in boots, and somehow I remembered those boots – they were black with elastic sides. Her dresses were of heavy tweed with a small red knitted shawl round her shoulders.
I remember laughing when I saw how she made my sisters walk up and down with soup plates on their heads to give them poise and deportment. The ladylike influence of Miss Paddon was something the family talked of for years after she had vanished, and I grew to be grateful to her, because she had made Molly into a fine pianist and it was Molly who gave me my first lessons. Miss Paddon went out of our lives with the outbreak of the war.
My father never came back. He died on the battlefield and the Bossaus were all sent to a concentration camp. Two of my little sisters died in the camp and the sorrow bit deep into my heart. As a boy, I must have nourished (subconsciously!) great spurts of hate against the English. When the war was over, we returned to our farm to find the home reduced to ashes. It had gone up in smoke following the edict of Kitchener3 that the Boer farms had to be destroyed. The labour of years in ashes and the master of the house dead.
But the Boer women were among the greatest in the world, and my mother was one of them. My father and mother built up ten farms from wool off the backs of sheep at six pence per pound. One day one of the farms would be mine. Mother took her children under her apron, rebuilt the homestead and restocked the lands. No stranger came or went without sitting at Mother’s table and there was a bed for him and stabling for his horses.
Our house was big and it was always a refuge for children and grandchildren and even for remote relations and casual acquaintances. It seemed to have fallen on Mother to shelter the indigent and black sheep of our family, even to such remote relationships as third cousins.
All through my childhood our home was filled with people temporarily or permanently embarrassed. Remote relatives and acquaintances came for alms or refuge when they were penniless or homeless. During periods of setbacks whole families descended upon us, sometimes accompanied by their cattle and servants. Yet the larder was always stacked, the mangers full of grain and everyone had enough to eat and our servants at their beck and call. Should sleeping rooms become crowded the huge dining room with its two Victorian period sofas or the outbuildings would provide temporary accommodation. No one, however poor or ragged, was ever turned away. Mother seemed to have had the knack for smoothing out adversities. People, sometimes complete strangers, used to descend on her from near and far with their troubles and misfortunes and always departed either assisted, consoled or pacified in one way or another.
Looming large in my life before and after the Anglo-Boer War was an ancient burgher, Martiens Lood, which is the Afrikaans term for “lead”, and how appropriate his name was, because he was equally as malleable as he was tough. He had lost a leg in one of the Kaffir wars and he slumped about on his wooden leg. He reminds me now of Stevenson’s Long John Silver1. He was agile, too, and he could throw a two-year-old horse in a flash. He had a long grey beard which he combed with the fingers of his left hand to the rhythm of his talk. Coachman, milker and general factotum, he was a Jack of all trades on the farm and master of them all. He was a teller of blood-curdling tales of massacres by the blacks. Always he chewed a plug of tobacco.
I could ride almost as soon as I could walk and I was soon handling a gun. This old warhorse taught me to ride, swim, to shoot and fish, to snare birds and hares, to shoe a horse and it was he who taught me to read.
My mother could not afford to employ governesses after the war, because the properties of most of the children were in the hands of the Master of the Supreme Court and she had to battle to bring us up out of her share of the estate.
I had the veld for my world, and Lood. Among the relics of his fighting past was an ancient muzzleloader. It was a tall gun, but not as antiquated as the flintlock. It was fired by means of a percussion cap instead of the flint. He was proud of the weapon as he was of his beard and it was as clean and polished as the shine of his billiard-ball bald head.
With Lood’s gun I blazed away at finches and pigeons and I was frequently bowled over by the recoil of the formidable weapon, which had the report of a small canon and the kick of a colt when overcharging with too heavy a load of black powder. Smokeless powder was unknown in those days.
Sometimes when we ran out of powder, Lood, who was the most resourceful man I ever knew, simply manufactured his own. I used to steal saltpetre, used for curing hams, from Mother’s pantry for the process, until I was found out. But sulphur also did the trick. A large quantity of sulphur, which was always there for the taking, was kept for making sheep dip and for dosing the children for irregularities. (Treacle and sulphur was a popular home remedy – I think Mother must have read about Dickens’s Mr. Squeers2.) Sulphur was a necessity in Lood’s powder making and I gladly procured it for him.
We used to burn the charcoal from dry willow stumps. Lood would use no charcoal other than willow. He once proved his case to me by using other wood with disappointing results.
He also proved that the willow attracted lightning more than any other tree. On our farm we had a long line of the lovely weeping willows running down to the vlei (pronounced ‘flay’, meaning marsh) and in the spring they looked like long green hair combed by the wind. Year after year they were struck by lightning during the highveld thunderstorms, which are among the most vicious in the world. After years of battling they became gnarled and cloven skeletons.
Every spring they fought back and clothed their twisted skeletons anew. Lood pointed out to me that taller avenues of trees in the vicinity were unscathed by lighting. And another thing: when a gum or poplar was struck, which was seldom, it was usually destroyed outright. Lood’s theory was that a small quantity of the lightning in the form of willow charcoal went into every charge of the muzzleloader.
Old Lood was as superstitious as an Irishman. One night, I was caught up in a dream of the First Boer War of Independence. The vivid pictures had been fed into my mind by spectacular tales which Lood had told me. I could see the soldiers in their red coats, white helmets and black trousers drawn in battle formation, complete with the little drummer – and he was only a boy – sounding rat-rat-rat on the drum. But the rat-rat-rat was the sound of Lood’s peg on the wooden floor. He was shaking me awake and I saw him with a guttering tallow candle1 in his hand.
“Get up, jong,” he bellowed. “There is a sign of war in the sky.”
“I’ve seen them,” I murmured. “The red coats at Majuba where we knocked hell out of them.”
He laughed, twisting the plug of tobacco from one cheek to the other. “You’re dreaming, youngster. There’s no more red coats. Joubert taught Victoria a lesson at Majuba. That’s why she changed her Tommies into khaki for the last war, to camouflage them like the pheasant, the partridge, the hare and the brown veld. Come see the sign in the sky.”
I followed him out, rubbing my eyes. Then I was quickly awake. The eastern sky was almost as bright as day with a long tailed comet. I could see the little ribbon of the stream and the overflow of a fountain reflected in the bright light.
We were watching Halley’s Comet!2
“War,” said Lood. “I told you we were going to have another war.”
But Lood was wrong by a few years and life in the sun went on pleasantly. The land was drowned with the fragrance of newly mown hay. Lood was the sole coachman of the smart Victoria which mother had acquired. Dressed in starch and alpaca with a silk hat, he drove us one night to Fillis’s Circus which was put up at Perdefontein twice a year. Frank Fillis was one of the world’s cleverest horsemen and the following day he visited our farm to buy some horses.
All the two-year-olds were running wild in the veld and had never been in a corral. Lood and I, on our stable horses, rode out across the dew-drenched veld early in the morning, and what a strenuous round-up it was, for the two year olds were as shy as antelopes. We had to change horses several times before we managed to kraal the wild ones. They milled like a merry-go-round.
Mother needed money then for she had darned and patched our clothes and cobbled our boots for the Nagmaal (Holy Communion) which would come round in a few weeks. It looked as if Fillis was not going to buy when he told us to let the horses out. They were out in a flash, jumping with the joy of freedom. Fillis suddenly clapped his hands, twice in quick succession, and they sounded like pistol shots. A dapple grey and a bay with a star and white fetlocks suddenly came to a dead stop, turned at right angles and with their ears pricked, stared back at us.
“I’ll take those two, Mrs Bossau,” said Fillis. “I’ll pay you £50 each for them.”
“And why those two?” she asked, and her eyes were merry, for a few minutes before I had seen that she had felt that Fillis was not going to buy.
“Curiosity,” he said. “They’ll be easier to teach than any of the others.”
Often afterwards I tried that Fillis trick with mobs of horses and men and women. It always worked. The animals that responded to it always timed out the best.
Lood, in spite of his wooden leg, was a good horseman. It was he who taught me the finer points of a steed. He taught me to plait snares from horsehair. Once, from the tail of a horse which had died, he plaited a half-inch lasso which we used to lasso colts and steers. This rope which had the spring of steel and the suppleness of a willow was used on the farm for years.
And my, Lood the old Trojan was a master of clay modelling – his specialty was horses and dogs. The fire of my first love of the fine arts was kindled by him. But how could I know then that one day one of my sketches would be hung at the South African Academy? And how could I have known, with all the world beckoning to me, that I would come to within an ace of ruining my life?
Lood would sit under the willows by the spring, while the red and yellow finches made love in the trees, modelling the true-to-life heads of our favourite horses, dogs and old servants. The old man’s enormous fingers would turn out a remarkable model. Those same fingers which could grip a two year old steer between the nostrils and throw it as easily as a bag of mealies – I marvelled to see him play lovingly with lumps of clay.
The Bible was the only book Lood could read, all in high Dutch in those days, for Afrikaans was still in its swaddling clothes. He taught me the ABC. With him I spelled out my first words in Genesis. By the light of a tallow candle and before a roaring fire of fried mealie cobs, I became a parrot to Lood. He always had his spittoon around, a three-cornered wooden box filled with sand, and I was amazed at the way he spat and always found the spittoon. Time and again I saw him hit a fly on the edge of the box and drown it with nicotine.
The childless Lood loved me as a son, but I only knew what he meant to me long after. With a slate and pencil he taught me to draw weird pothooks and grotesque figures with my threes always about face and my fours upside down, until the day, which seemed like a birthday, when I went to school in Perdefontein for the first time.
Those were the days when Lord Milner had flooded the country with his kindergarten1 in the form of teachers, policemen and magistrates. I was dubbed ‘Dutchman’ on the first day by some of my classmates and had a couple of fights behind the church, the rendezvous for fighters. There would have been three had not Sergeant Major Macewan stopped the second fight. We fighting boys were given four of the best with a Malacca cane and the two boys I had scrapped with became my closest friends. Macewan (God bless his soul; he died in the Gallipoli fiasco2 fighting for his convictions) was our drill instructor, boxing coach and trained us in target practice. The Malacca cane instead of psychology was much in evidence. Macewan was a great man. One of the greatest.
We stole fruit and the dominee’s (parson’s) fruit always seemed to taste better than any other. We swam nude in the Vaal. They were days of laughter and tears.
When it came for my entrance to the high school, Mother, much to the consternation of some of our neighbours and our church friends, entered me for English medium education. We had discussed it and I had agreed.
“Henri,” she said, and how wise that mother of mine was, “our home language is Afrikaans, but this is a bilingual country. You’ll have to fight for your place in the sun against strong competition from the English. And you must not be inefficient in English.”
She was called disloyal, unpatriotic. Her attitude was even described as treasonable. She was out, they said, to make a rooinek3 of her son. I only came to value her bold decision when I entered the old Transvaal University. All the lectures were in English.
She made another decision on my behalf. “I know you love the soil and you will be a farmer,” she said, “but I would also like you to have a trade. Life can be awkward and too often your plans go wrong. It is good to have a few arrows to your bow, Henri.” I was no great bookman then and I consented to being apprenticed to a Johannesburg electrical firm. It was as if Mother could see into the future.
As an apprentice I was kept on the run by three journeymen. I even had to fetch their beer, make their tea, carry their loads of tools and stand the lash of their tongues and the crack of their fists should they blunder in their jobs.
Johannesburg with its dusty streets was still a sprawling mining camp. I had no great liking for the place, because it seemed to me that the tragedy of the Anglo-Boer War would never have occurred had it not been for the gold of Johannesburg and the consequent greed it engendered.
Once a month I got a letter from Lood, sometimes complaining of the guinea fowl overrunning the land, of the increase of quail, or of the two-year-old horse he was breaking in. Nostalgia swamped me. My heart cried for the open country and the meadows, for the cool shade of the willow avenue, for the chorus of the yellow finches playing a hundred guitars.
His letters stopped suddenly, and Mother wrote that Lood had dropped dead. I cried for days.
Time leaked away and I acquired a diploma in electrical engineering. I never thought I would need it, for back on the farm I began to build and to plan. When I was 21 the farm would be mine. How well Mother managed it – a farmer in her own right.
I was a gay cavalier and there was a round of dances and balls, of agricultural shows, of lavish entertainments. It was at one of these parties that I first saw three sisters, and the young bloods talked of them. They said that the dark-eyed one was the one to be avoided. Lithe like a sapling she was…and she was Nina.
“She’s high-spirited,” the young bloods said.
“There’s something untameable about her,” said the young women.
“I’ll tame her,” I said.
I rode far into the nights to her people’s farm north of Pretoria and in the wonderland of the koppies (hillocks) and the shade of the Mimosa, I courted her. There was a great deal of coming and going between her parents and my mother, but we knew that they could never change the decision we had made. It was the custom of the time to palaver, but we were glad when the elders decided that there was to be no marriage contracts as they considered such a custom to be a fraud and only entered into by deceivers and lawbreakers.
What was mine was Nina’s and what was hers was mine. The only perfect arrangement. My farm was prosperous and the future glowed. Nina was 17 and I was 19 when we married. And from the beginning Nina was a Ruth to the Naomi who was my mother.
I was wild and impulsive but they calmed me. I was reckless and they toned me down. There was money in wool, maize and dairy products. Food was so abundant that it was a pleasure to give some of it away.
Nina and Mother planned a two-acre garden. There were a thousand roses. And often Mother told me: “Henri, if you ever doubt God, look into the heart of a rose and you’ll find him there.”
Fountains laughed in our garden and streams jabbled. The big house rang with music and dancing. I rode my wild horse, which I always preferred over the seven-seater car we had. All life was jewelled and even more so when our first-born, Charles, came – a nine-pounder – after our first year of married life.
And my Nina was so often the belle of every ball. Shrewd, loving – my mother was behind her.
Liquor flowed at every entertainment, at every dance in the big house. I was a social drinker and I could hold my liquor better than any husky Boer, better than any of the heavy drinkers in town.
I never had a hangover.
CHAPTER 3
Life was brimful of all good things in that halcyon period following the years after the First World War and the world seemed remote from all madness. The seasons came and went and there was fulfilment in the years. And how blessed were my days; how my life stretched before me glowing with promises. A new era of prosperity in South Africa.
At shows, gymkhana balls, at parties, I would say to my neighbours: “Life is good.”
“Ja, Henri,” they would say, “life is very good.”
“Ja Henri,” my young neighbour, Tony Dingwell would say, “life is beautiful and our ‘show’ animals are in the pink of condition”.
Tony was an Apollo of a man, a tall, blond type and as strong as a horse, but he was a shy, rustic man. He had inherited a rich farm and my mother and Nina used to tease him about getting a wife to grace his house. But he was as shy of women as my two-year-olds were of hurdle.
Tony became very interested in the Irish type of hunters I was breeding from an imported sire of seventeen hands and local mares. The offspring were as dynamic as the Irish people themselves. Often, Tony would come across to my farm and give me a hand in training them for steeplechasing. We had the hunters to jump over improvised hurdles. Tony and I, after some gruelling rounds with the horses, would be seated comfortably under the trees in wicker chairs with a siphon and a bottle of whisky between us, while we watched the stark-naked black picaninnies, minus saddles, perched on the backs of the fiery horses taking the hurdles. A picaninny got a sixpence for every hurdle taken and not thrown. Time and again the little fellows ploughed the veld with their noses. There was nothing cruel about the sport, because they enjoyed every minute of it and there was always another eager to take the place of one who had tumbled. One day we had a particularly stubborn horse which refused to take the hurdles.
Laughing, I said: “That horse, Tony, reminds me of you and your attitude to women.”
“Henri,” he said, and blushed like a girl, “I’m scared of women.”
“Finest things God ever made,” I said. “And the two masterpieces he made to my mind were Mother and Nina. Reckon the good God broke the mould after he made them.”
“They’re the only two women who don’t frighten me almost to death,” said Tony. He poured himself another stiff drink and swallowed the whisky without a blink.
I nodded towards the decanter. “Tony, it would be better for you to hug a woman now and again than hugging whisky.”
“I find solace in it,” he said.
I reminded him that at the last dance in Perdefontein he had, at Nina’s insistence, filled his card with names of dancing partners, but after suffering the tortures of the damned in two dances he had escaped to the bar – there was a bar at every dance in those days.
“I can’t help it,” he said.
“Tony,” I said, “Nina has so often told me that the girls are not after your money, but they think you’re the best looking man in the land.” I looked at his fine frame and his blond head. “And they would be blind if they didn’t admit it.”
“Let’s have another drink,” he said.
“Trouble with you, Tony, is that the magnetism of Bacchus is stronger than that of Venus. If I had to choose between them I’d go for Venus every time.”
His father was a lawyer in Johannesburg. His mother had died at his birth. One day I was surprised by a telegram from Johannesburg where Tony had been visiting his old man: “Remove all bottles. Old man coming down.”
I rode over to Tony’s farm where I saw his old coloured nurse whom I called Peggotty1, for at the outset she had reminded me of Copperfield’s nurse. She was a small, wrinkled old mummy with a brown face like a dried-up calabash.
But her heart was of pure gold. She had spoiled Tony and worshipped the very ground he walked on. It was no uncommon thing to find devotion among the old Cape Coloureds for their masters, but with her the devotion was a religion. She had nursed Tony from the cradle.
As I rode through Tony’s lands I pulled up to admire his pure-bred cattle and thoroughbred horses, and as I came up to the homestead, I thought again how much better it would be for my friend if he had a wife and children round him.
Old Peg cackled a greeting when she saw me. “Hello Master,” she said, “when you come for my curry again?”
“I was here last week,” I said. “Ja, you make the best Bombay curry in the world.”
“Bombay?” she snorted through the toothless gap of her mouth. “Mine curry is Cape curry. An ole Malay girl learned me how to do it.” She had told me so a thousand times. “Master Tony, he’s gone to the ole Joburg,” she said. “That ole Sodom and Gomorrah of a place, that Joburg.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “I got a telegram from him.”
A shudder shook the skeleton of her body. “Wha’s matter?”
“Nothing,” I said. “The old man is coming down and I must bury some bottles.”
Her first fright was drowned in a new cackle. “Master Tony likes his sopie (sip of liquor),” she said.
But when I saw the ‘dead marines’2 I gasped. There were bottles and bottles and jars and jars, enough to fill the yard of a bottle store.
“Good God,” I said. “We’ll need a wagon. Did Master Tony drink all the stuff in these bottles?”
She squinted up at me: “No, his friends drink the most.”
I sent her off and I heard her screaming for the boys who presently came with the wagon drawn by oxen. We filled that wagon and we buried the bottles in a donga. And I could see that old Peg was mightily relieved.
“The ole master,” she said, “he won’t know nothing.”
And that was the way of it. Tony’s father, nicely pot-bellied and ivory-skinned like most city men, came for a week and seemed to be quite happy about Tony’s farming.
Many a night Tony came round to our place “to get away from the devil,” as he put it. I had thought, until I found the litter of empty bottles, that his devil was loneliness. I had often wondered why, after supper, he always seemed to be fidgety and restless. And always when he was on the point of leaving for home I made a habit of suggesting a “stirrup cup”. It was a social formality in the days when the good old horse was the fashion. And long after the women were in bed one stirrup cup followed another while we smoked our pipes and talked of crops and stock. And more often than not about horses and cattle, because we were both set on breeding the best horses and cattle in the country.
The stirrup cup was out again one night. Tony’s secret had made me uneasy and I wanted to clear the air. I challenged him: “You know, Tony, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I found those bottles.”
There was a sudden fight in his deep blue eyes. “You did me a good turn and I’m grateful. Please don’t read me a lecture, Henri.”
“Lecture, be damned,” I said. “You’ve got me worried.” I hit him squarely. “You’re a secret drinker then.”
“I drink,” he said.
“A wagon load of empties, man.”
“That was over a long period.”
“Long or short, it was a wagon load.”
His great shoulders sagged. “I went to a doctor about it in Johannesburg. He said that the cause of my drinking is frustration.”
“Frustration? You have a wonderful farm and a body like a Greek God. There are women who would be glad to tie your shoelaces. Get yourself a woman, Tony, and that’ll be the end of your frustration.”
“We’ve been through all this before, Henri.”
“The women at the dances even go to the bar to entice you out.” I went on. “One or two dance and you slink back to the bar. I’d understand this frustration of yours if no women would look at you.”
He poured himself another drink. “You know, the doctor said that it might also have something to do with the fact that my mother died at my birth…the loss of motherly love. There must be a guilt complex that it was my birth that killed my mother. She was a beautiful woman.”
I said limply, “That guilt complex of yours is rather ridiculous, Tony. You can’t be responsible. It’s the way of life.”
“Another thing,” he countered. “He has never said it, but deep down in his heart I know that my father doesn’t care tuppence for me. He never married a second time.”
“He’s been generous to you with the way he has poured money into your farm.”
“Money?” Tony almost spat the word out. “There are things that all the money in the world can’t buy.”
I took him to his horse and the harvest moon, that night, was in full bloom. I stood in my garden and listened to the clop of his horse’s hooves dying on the heart of the radiant night. Tony, tall and straight, taking the hurdles like a man born to the saddle. A ‘lucky young man’ they called him in Perdefontein. And so many women, at that very moment, must have been stirring in their sleep thinking of him. He would reach home a little bemused with drink and old Peg, like a honey-clawed witch, would be sitting in the corner of the wide stoep (porch), waiting for him. And as he let his horse free she would chitter and chatter around him, with her dim old eyes all lit up, because he was home safe again. Would he sit the night out with his bottles? Would he go on staring at his mother’s portrait?
Many a time our neighbours invited us to go to surprise parties, but I never allowed those parties to interfere with the milking of my cows, with my lambing season or hurdle jumping. I looked across my lands and saw the sentinel trees. I heard the chuckle of my stream and I sensed the deep roots of my house. I had swum on with the years of farming expansion. Stock and produce were fetching high prices, for the time was in boom. I ploughed back all the profits into the farm. For the asking, I could have big loans to improve my stock and build stables to house them. I had built silos, fenced my lands, and the song of the windmills was all over Mooimeisiefontein. There was water in all my padlocks for my herds. Banks, and even moneylenders, were glad to lend money to any farmer of substance, and I was one of them.
The tight times which I knew in my schooldays were no more. In those days my mother had to starch and iron our shirts and collars by a cow-dung fire. She had to have household water carted from a fountain some distance away. In winter she had to heat our water over the same dung fire, for there was no money to buy coal. She made tallow candles and soap from the fat of the sheep and pigs that were slaughtered on the farm. But that old world had vanished with the smoke of the dung fires. Now, we had a bathroom with hot and cold water and the big dairy also had hot and cold water taps, a spring fountain near the house, a huge kitchen range, electric lights and a telephone.
We had a car which Mother and Nina used when they went shopping, instead of the carriage and pair. Nina was at the wheel. But I still preferred to ride a horse instead of being choked by the dust from the car wheels. All through my life I would prefer a horse to a car.
Soon there were two other young Bossaus in the house. The boy was Fred and the girl was called Magdalena after Mother whose cup of happiness was near full. By getting married young, we grew up with our children.
There was no loneliness in my life, like in Tony’s. No frustrations that I could put my finger on, and had there been then, I said to myself, that I would ride them as I rode a horse over the hurdles. In that lovely moonlight, which must have been like the first moonlit night after the dawning of the world, I felt bedevilled by Tony’s story. I knew in my heart then that a woman like my Nina could save him.
Poor Tony. That’s how I thought of him as I turned into the house at last with the note of a night bird dropping into my happy mind. But I was to learn that even in the case of Tony it would take a long time for drink to ravage as fine a specimen of manhood as he was. I was, years later, to learn myself that in the battle with the bottle a man can take a lot of punishment, that like a boxer he can come back again and again for more.
So the years slipped by. The children were growing. The house was full of their laughter, and it looked as if nothing could ever come to ruin the glory of the golden years. The pastoral world was all to my liking and I fitted into it like a hand into a well-made glove.
CHAPTER 4
The seasons came and went. Harvests were reaped and eaten. Nature went on in her sweet, constant way and the long wait in Europe dragged to a close and the countries began to count the terrible harvest of the death of their young men. Our land was rich in bounties. The war1 had not touched most of us and the eternal promise of the land was with us.
The song of labour and the joy of our children filled our world. Any excuse was enough for a surprise party. I liked the companionship of these surprise parties, the spirit of good fellowship glowed like the golden glow in brandy or like the soft peat-water flavour whisky.
It was queer, I thought, how drink took different people. It made some of them maudlin and some of them bellicose. It loosened tongues, and invariably, a man in his cups would tell his secret thoughts. In vino veritas, the old Latin tag was so right.
Alex Venter, a dark complexioned athlete, was a constant member of these surprise parties. His full name was Alexander Dumas Venter, certainly an odd name for an Afrikaner, but at the time he was born, Alexander Dumas’s books, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo among them, were the rage in reading circles2. And Alex’s mother was among the French author’s ardent fans. She was a romantic and therefore christened her son Alexander Dumas. He became a romantic too, a scholar and adept in sport and alas, eventually, in dissipation. At his university, he had taken honours in Latin and Greek for his Master’s degree. He also had a degree in music and had concentrated on the piano and organ. Because of his many gifts he caused quite a stir, when at the age of 28, he swooped down on Perdefontein as principal of the high school. His salary in the early twenties, for the job, was quite fantastic: £1,000 a year. He had a staff of twenty under him, many of them his seniors in age. In addition to his school principalship, he was appointed organist to our Dutch Reformed Church at £150 a year with an extra £50 a year as scriba (secretary-treasurer).
He was singles tennis champion of our town and rugby coach to all the schools. He was a fine rugby player too. He had everything in him to make a d’Artagnan3, but in one way he followed Dumas himself. Money went through his fingers like water. And as the great novelist made and squandered a million and died a pauper, so Alex Venter would have spent a million if he could ever have laid his hands on it. He would have made a boon companion for his namesake. His mother fortunately died before Alex began the downward trail. She had lived long enough to glory in his attainments.
Romantic Alex. His wife was a beautiful woman – some men said that she was the prettiest woman in the district. And pretty she was, with the complexion of a ripening peach. She was a genuine blonde and she never wore make-up. I promptly nicknamed her Rosebud. The name stuck.
But she had one weakness: dress. That can usually be applied to any woman, but with her it was a passion. And she dressed with seductiveness. Not that she had any need to, because that Juno of a woman could have seduced a parson. She seemed to be always bathing in lavender for that was the perfume that she always left in her wake.
Rosebud dressed for men to admire her; and to mortify women. The fashion of the time was the gay twenties and her gowns always gave me the peeps. She knew her beauty was to men like a lamp is to a moth, and what a woman she would have been had she been less haughty and proud.
Naturally the women didn’t like her, but Alex worshipped her, provided to her every whim, to all her extravagances. She was the Delilah to his Samson. At the balls and surprise parties I heard the women talk about her, mostly of what it must cost to clothe her.
I listened to them and smiled. I remembered Mother saying: “You thank your lucky stars Henri, that you haven’t got Alex Venter’s wife to clothe.”
Alex often came over to the farm, because in common we had love for horses and literature. Literature was a subject which always tugged at my mind and I had become an external student of the University of South Africa and had begun to read for my bachelor’s degree. Alex was a master of the English and Dutch poets. I arranged to pay him a guinea for one lecture a week.
We had long talks afterwards as we drank and compared and argued over the great masters, sometime into the small hours.
“You mind, Alex,” I asked, “that your brilliant mind doesn’t get sodden.”
“I’ve got so many worries, Henri.”
“With your salary?”
“I’m always hard up.”
We were close enough that we could discuss anything quite openly.
I said: “You’ve got to persuade Rosebud to do with a less extravagant wardrobe.”
His eyes lit up. “She’s a picture. Henri, I doubt if Helen of Troy was more beautiful.”
“But she ruined a kingdom,” I parried significantly.
Slowly, insidiously, even without my grasping the full weight of the transformation, Alex and I drifted into becoming boon drinking companions, drinking pals. I liked his mind. He liked my insatiable curiosity for literature. We shared books. We talked of the glories and the sorrows of painters, musicians and poets. Perhaps at heart we were both poets and we caught the symphonies of the stars. I could see that Rosebud was his frustration.
I, conversely, had none that I could see. I was the king of my land. I was happy in my home life. But it did occur to me now and again that I would prefer to ponder over the mystery of life with the poets than counting the fleeces on my running flocks.
Too often Alex and I began to call at the Springbok Arms for a “quick one”. There was always somebody drinking in the bar, and with talk about rugby and sheep and horses and politics we got caught in the web. Alex was very popular and I was a pretty good raconteur of stories. When I got home after sessions that lasted too long at the inn, Mother was critical, and so was Nina, but in a much gentler way. But I was never so drunk that I couldn’t stand square on my two feet. I told them that I would always be able to master drink.
But Alex and I got round to having a “quick one” even while the church service was going on. Was there some schoolboy mischief still in the hearts of the schoolmaster and the literary pupil? Mother was a strict observer of her Nagmaal (Holy Communion) which she never missed. I seldom partook in “the bread of life” …sinner that I was. I know so many Communion takers who might have drunk a cup of water from the Vaal for all the good it did them. But when Mother went to Communion I had to go with her.
Alex played the huge organ in the gallery and he had a mirror in front of him to watch the movements of the minister and the congregation. Alex could also watch me through his mirror. Directly, when the predikant (priest) invited the congregation to take their places at the communion table, Alex would signal to me and make for the steps which led out of the church to the gallery. The shifting of the congregation to take their places at the table and to join in prayer took some time.
By the time Alex reached my car the engine would be running. It was two blocks to the hotel and we had things so well arranged that the little bar would be open for us on a Sunday. We would down a couple of “quick ones”, jump into the car, race back to church and I would be back in my pew and Alex taking his seat at the organ just as the minister announced the number and verse of the next Psalm.
We did that time and again and we were never caught out. Alex had a running wager with the hotelkeeper that we would get away with it. Alex was always laying bets on incidents close to the wind. He loved horses and he was an inveterate race punter. Even at a travelling circus or carnival show he would become so absorbed in the silly gambling boards that he had to be dragged away. He never understood, in spite of his amazing intelligence, that in gambling the dice were always loaded against him. Alex was a plunger and he would empty his pockets at the spin of a coin. The only thing I ever saw him win was a horse and trap at a charity bazaar raffle. Alex fell for the horse and he had a desperate desire to get it.
“I’m going to win that horse and trap,” he told me.