We were camping in the Estcourt caravan park on the banks of the Bushman’s River when we heard there had recently been a beauty pageant in the dorp. The crown had been awarded. A Miss Estcourt had been chosen, and she was in town.
But where!? Our source of this local knowledge was Doug the Thief, who had heard it from a local.
This was her lucky weekend! She could choose from four handsome, willing and able bachelor paddlers. Well, willing, anyway:
She could choose from Bernie & The Jets’ yellow helmet, Swanie’s white helmet or Lang Dawid’s blue helmet. A quick shower in the communal ablution block and we were ready to hit the dorp.
Doug the Thief had disappeared, nowhere to be found. Oh, well. His helmet’s loss.
Like this, just white
We focused on preparation for the search, gaining bottled IQ points and suave wit before setting out in the Jet’s white Ford Escort which we thought the best vehicle with which to impress Miss Estcourt Sausages. Look! Miss Estcourt Sausages, we’d say. We came courting you in an Escort! HaHaHa! She’d collapse laughing.
We eventually tracked down her flat on the top floor of Estcourt’s only highrise building. It was also the third floor. And knocked on her door, calling out seductively and probably irresistibly for Miss Estcourt Sausages – expecting at any moment for her to open the door in a negligee and say Hello Boys!
Instead the door opened to reveal a horrible sight: Doug the Thief, who hissed FUCK OFF! at us and closed the door! The Swine.
Disconsolately we had to schlep back to the caravan park and more beer. We consoled ourselves by braaing a few of these till they were overdone.
In 1980 the army relieved me of my post as adjutant for the Natal Medical Corps and sent me to work for the provincial ophthalmology department in Durban run by the Nelson R Mandela school of medicine based at King Edward Hospital. This meant I worked at the three racially-segregated hospitals.
King Edward VIII in Umbilo (for the healthily pigmented):
RK Khan Hospital in Chatsworth (medium pigmentally blessed):
Addington on the beachfront (pale, pigmentally deficient):
At KE VIII we had our own building, at RK Khan and Addington we shared. Addington OPDB (Out Patients Department B) was for legs and eyes. My mate Bob Ilsley in orthopaedics would say “I’ll get them to walk straight, you get them to see straight”.
Resident ophthalmologist Pat Bean was a character. Surfer dude at heart. And heart of gold. “You got cat tracks, mummy”, he’d say at RK Khan. “Cat tracks. Terrible things those cat tracks. Must give you ‘PRATION. Not sore ‘pration. Over one time, you go home next day no pain see nicely” he would reassure.
(‘cataracts’ – ‘operation’)
=========ooo000ooo=========
The nurse in charge of the clinic most days at KE VIII was Staff Nurse Anita Lekalakala, another character of note. One day she picked up a card for me, glanced at the name, grinned and called out loudly to the packed waiting room:
Miss Grace Kelly! Calling Princess Grace Kelly!
And in shuffled old Mrs Grace Cele, leaning on her walking stick.
=========ooo000ooo=========
(36yrs later Anita still comes to me for her glasses)
Actually it was hours, not years, but that would have made a kak-lame heading, and you might not have rushed over to read about it. So clickbait.
Kai Reitz once made the mistake – no, bold decision – to put the Lloyd cousin in charge of The Bend while he went off to murder sundry buffaloes and bambis in the Zimbabwean bushveld near Mana Pools.
I joined Lloyd on The Bend one weekend. As an adviser.
Things did not go exactly according to a Reitz-like plan. Nor did things run like a well-oiled machine. It was more like a military operation.
Lloyd had managed to get the Chev pickup stuck between two gears. So when I got there it was parked in the lands. Immobile. I don’t remember how I got there, but it wasn’t with my own transport.
Some parts of the farm did run flawlessly, it must be said: Balekile did sterling work in the kitchen, making great big piles of delicious veggies. Lloyd had run out of meat and I had not brought any, only liquid refreshment, and as we were now stranded for transport it was a healthy vegetarian diet for us.
Then Lloyd found Kai’s old .22 rifle and we went hunting for the pot, bravely. If Kai could do it, so could we. We strode out boldly, fearlessly, onto the front lawn. The Zunckel walking with that action he got from Mad magazine’s Don Martin, taking exaggerated stalking strides with his toes hanging downwards. Great sense of the ridiculous had Lloyd. He was playing great white hunter in Africa. I was his gun-bearer, just not bearing his gun.
After a careful and skilful stalk we heard something. We were already some metres from the house. High up in a pine tree a poor little dove was romantically asking “How’s father? How’s father?” or telling us to “Work Harder. Work Harder,” and Lloyd drilled him, SHPLORT! If you weren’t a Mad Magazine fan, that was a Don Martin-type sound of a Cape Turtle Dove hitting the ground, morsdood.
The next meal Balekile cooked had all the veggies, PLUS – a big meat dish covered with a silver lid. We opened the lid with a flourish, then peered closely before we spotted it – it looked like a plucked mossie had crash-landed onto its back in the middle of an empty swimming pool.
Next mishap: The big truck was accidentally reversed over a stack of irrigation pipes. Thank goodness by Kai’s licenced driver doing the reversing. This was not good. I saw big $$ signs, but when Kai got back he sommer just set about fixing them himself, cutting off the flattened sections, hammering thin pipes through them, then thicker ones until he had restored them to size, then welding them together again! They looked like they had cellulite, but they worked.
I’m sure we didn’t run out of beer though, so we weren’t completely disorganised.
Mandy’s reply on the 21st post reminded me of The Bend – that sacred pilgrimage site we would repair to as part of growing up and learning wisdom and wonder. Also drinking, puking and dancing. Especially drinking. It was like Mecca.
We searched the whole of Joburg all term long for girls and women and couldn’t find any, but on The Bend there was always a goodly gang of inebriated bright young future leaders and fine examples to our youth, dancing, hosing themselves and matching us drink-for-drink.
Some of the drinking was very formal, with strict protocol, enforced by some kop-toe okes who had already been to the weermag and wanted to show us lightweight long-hairs what DUSSIPLIN was all about. Louis was very disciplined under General Field Marshall Reitz as was I under Brigadier Field Marshall Stanley-Clarke:
Late at night important stuff would happen. This time it was inventory control. It became vitally urgent that we help Kai clean out old Dr Reitz’s expired medicines. Mainly by swallowing them. The muscle relaxants caused great hilarity as we pondered what effect they might have on our sphincters. Yussis you’d think with a resident pharmacist we’d be told the possible side-effects, but all we were told – or all we listened to – was “Fire it, Mole!” and down they went, chased by alcohol to enhance the effects. Highly irre-me-sponsible, but all done for research purposes.
Dr Prof Stephen Charles dispenses –
The research was inconclusive. We fell asleep before any fireworks happened.
In those days we all shared one cellphone, which you didn’t have to carry in your pocket. It was already there when you got there, nailed to the wall so it couldn’t get lost and so everyone could overhear what you were saying. There it is:
I forget what this was, but it was important and Stephen Charles was giving it his rapt attention –
Sometimes farming interfered with the serious part of the weekend and then we would be of great help to Kai. We’re taking his mielies to market here. Don’t know what he would have done without us. Airbags and seatbelts were not highly essential in those daze, as we were usually well internally fortified, and as our driver had his foot flat we knew we’d get there quickly. So it was alright.
Taking mielies to the koperasie silo. No airbags –
Back: Me; Kevin Stanley-Clarke (now a Kiwi); Glen Barker (now an Oz). Front: Pierre du Plessis; Steve Reed (a Kiwi in Oz); Lettuce Wood-Marshall (a Chinese or an Oz?); Dave Simpson;
glossary:
kop-toe okes – taking themselves seriously; which made them more hilarious
weermag – ‘again might’, as in ‘we might have to go there again’; involuntarily
mielies – maize, corn; sometimes schlongs
schlong – your mielie
koperasie – co-operative: socialist gathering of capitalist farmers
In JHB, a mate swears he heard me giving directions to the farm. I’m sure he’s mistaken, but Trevor John says: Swannie, I will never forget your directions to a farm in Harrysmith – 2 quarts of beer to the right turnoff; one pint to the next turnoff; and a small shot for the next left to the gate .
95 Stuart Street was home from 1961 to 1973. To learn more about Stuart Street as a street, go to deoudehuizeyard! where Sandra has done a great job using old and new images of the long east-west street we grew up in.
– Mom with Barbara. Koos in rugby kit – probably 1967 –– the country mansion and stonehenge –
Some stiff poses in the garden in 1970 with Jock the Staffie:
Inside, in the dining room and the lounge:
Twelve years at 95 Stuart Street. Funny how that felt like forever! Ah youth!
~~~oo0oo~~~
Married, we stayed in our first home for around fifteen years, 7 River Drive Westville. From early-1989 to Dec-2003. That time appeared to go much faster!
. . and have now been in our second home, 10 Elston Place Westville, the longest of all – since late 2005:
She actually did. My sister Barbara’s granma lived at 131 Boom Street Pietermaritzburg.
Born in the bedroom on the left on 15 December 1922
Right across the road was this school. Going to the Afrikaans school would have meant a bus ride, and Oupa was frugal.
And so started the ver-engels-ing of Dad. The rooinek-erisation. Pieter Gerhardus became ‘Peter’.
~~oo0oo~~
*ver-engels – Anglicisation
*rooinek – Boer word for Poms – anyone from ‘England’ – any of those islands left of France. Literally ‘red necks’ – but not American rednecks. NB: This excluded those Irishmen who fought for the Boers against the plundering, wicked, invading, looting Poms. Even though Irishmen can have very red necks.
~~oo0oo~~
From here (the way I understand it) they all went to Havelock Road Primary; Yanie the oldest went on to matriculate at Girls High; Lizzie the second child went on to Russell High School adjacent to the little school across the road, leaving in Std 8 to go and work; Boet finished Std 6 at Havelock Road and got his first job at Edel’s Shoe Factory, his second in Howick at Dunlop. On the way back one day he crashed his motorbike and injured himself badly. Lizzie arranged a bursary for Dad the youngest to go to Maritzburg College where he left in April in his matric year to join the post office as an apprentice electrician.
– a pre-school, a primary school and three high schools – click to enlarge –
In 1971 I decided I wanted to do the Dusi. Charlie Ryder (who gave me his boat, a fibreglass Limfy K1 with nylon deck and his left-feather paddle) told me it was tough, I’d better train.
So I did. Every morning a few of us (Louis Wessels, Tuffy, Leon Crawley, who else?) got up at 5am, cycled a mile to the boys hostel and then ran the X-country course. About 3km up a hill past the jail, across, down through a donga/stream bed and back. Probably a 20 minute run. After school I would cycle to the mighty Vulgar River and paddle Charles’ boat (which I left “hidden” under a willow tree) for about a km or two. The cycle back home was uphill.
I’m not even sure I told anyone I was I was aiming to paddle the Dusi! I must have, surely? They knew about the boat anyway.
I have never been as fit in my life, before or since. Running I felt like I could fly. I would run hard, then even harder and still think “I could just carry on like this!”
Today I re-read Graeme Pope-Ellis’ book. The part about his training in 1971.
He ran at 4.30 am for two to two-and-a-half hours; He ran hard. In the afternoon he paddled for two to two-and-a-half hours; He paddled hard. Plus he did half an hour of hard, targeted gym work.
My total training was an hour a day and only parts of the running was done hard. The cycling and paddling were leisurely. To this day, I chant, No pain; No pain!
I didn’t have a clue what “train hard” meant! Talk about chalk and cheese! Quite an eye-opener.
I didn’t do that race in 1972. My boat was stolen shortly before – around New Year. I hitch-hiked to the race and followed it down through the Dusi and Umgeni valleys (with friend Jean Roux), sleeping in the open and bumming rides with paddlers’ seconds. Graeme won the race. His first win. He went on to win it 15 times.
Later I got to know Graeme and many of the guys who dedicated their lives to winning the Dusi. They trained like demons. Some of them did beat Graeme. Occasionally. But usually Graeme did the winning.
Me, I became a tripper! One of the trips was with Graeme and other fast paddlers who geared down and bumbled down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon in leisurely fashion. My style!
~~~oo0oo~~~
In my first Dusi in 1983 I politely waited for the okes in a hurry to move on over the flat water in Alexander Park and when I go to the weir I paused to tie a shoelace. Jerome Truran (world-class whitewater paddler) was spectating that year. He spotted me and said “Hey Swanie, you do realise this is a race, right?”
After NTC Rag Ball in 976, we left Pietermaritzburg’s notorious Hotel Insomnia and drove home in Tabs’ red Datsun fastback, famed for having being called a Ferrari by one of the automotively-challenged TC girls, and a Datsun Triple Ess Ess Ess by Geoff Leslie. We had spent a few short hours in the Hotel Insomnia after the ball was over. I seem to recall about a dozen people in a double bed.
Braithwaite was behind the wheel. He had held back slightly as he still had to drive on from Harrismith to Nelspruit where he was needed to dry-clean some Lowvelders’ underpants. Tabs was in the passenger seat, me on the back seat.
me & Liz Howe, Sheila & Hilton – Tabs in full voice with John Venning –
Under the flat raking solar panel-like back window of that red fastback was most of a case of beer, baking in the sun. After a short hung-over silence Tabs turned to me and asked “How hot are those beers?”
I said “Shall we share one and see?”
He said “Let’s open two and share them and see.”
We happened to finish the case before we got to HY. Thank goodness for Hilton’s driving! It’s a lot easier to divide by two than by three after a few ales.
Tabs & Jilly Shipman sing – Dave Simpson, Lettuce and me sit -all at a very clever stage of these academic proceedings –
I canoed the Vrystaat Vlaktes thanks to Charles Ryder, who arrived with Jenny in Harrismith – about 1968 or ’69 I’d guess – to start his electrical business, a rooinek from Natal. He roared into town in a light green Volvo 122S with a long white fibreglass thing on top of it like this:
I asked:
What’s that? It’s a canoe
What’s a canoe? You do the Dusi in it
What’s the Dusi?
Well, Charles now knew he was deep behind the boerewors curtain! He patiently made me wiser and got me going and I got really excited the more I learned. I decided I just HAD TO do the Dusi. What could be more exciting than paddling your own canoe 120km over three days from Pietermaritzburg to the sparkling blue Indian Ocean at the Blue Lagoon in Durban? Charles made it sound like the best, most adventurous thing you could possibly think of. He showed me how to paddle and was so generous with his time. Both in paddling and with Harrismith’s first Boy Scouts troop, which he helped establish.
I started running in the early mornings before school with a gang of friends. Tuffy Joubert, Louis Wessels, Fluffy Crawley, who else? We called ourselves the mossies as we got up at sparrow’s fart. Then I would cycle about two miles to the park in the afternoons and paddle on the flat water of the mighty Vulgar River in Charles’ Limfjorden, or Limfy, canoe, which he had kindly lent me/given to me. That was in 1971 and it was the fittest I’ve ever been, before or since.
Overnight I would leave it on the bank tethered to a weeping willow down there. One day around Christmas time with only a couple of weeks to go before Dusi I got there and it was missing. I searched high and low, to no avail. So I missed doing the Dusi. Not that I had done anything but train for it – I hadn’t entered, didn’t know where to, didn’t belong to a club, didn’t have a lift to the race, no seconds, nothing! Still enthused, though, I persuaded my mate Jean Roux to join me in hitch-hiking to the race.
1972 Dusi: We got to Pietermaritzburg and the next morning to the start in Alexander Par PMB. Milling around among the competitors and their helpers, we watched the start and as the last boats paddled off downstream Alexandra Park started emptying, everyone seemed in a big hurry to leave. We asked Wassup? and someone said, We’re Following Our Paddler! so we bummed a lift with some paddler’s seconds to the overnight stop at Dusi Bridge. We slept under the stars and cadged supper from all those friendly people. They let us continue with them the next day to the second overnight stop at Dip Tank and on the third and last day to the sea, the estuary at Blue Lagoon, following the race along the way.
Back in Harriesvlei I continued the search for my missing kayak and found a bottle floating in the Kak Spruit, a little tributary that flows down from Platberg and enters the river downstream of the weir. It had a string attached to it. I pulled that up and slowly raised the boat – now painted black and blue, but clearly identifiable as I had completely rebuilt it after breaking it in half in a rapid in the valley between Swinburne and Harrismith. Come to remember, that’s why Charles gave it to me! I knew every inch of that boat: the kink in the repaired hull, the repaired cockpit, the wooden gunwales, brass screws, shaped wooden cross members, long wooden stringer, shaped wooden uprights from the cross members vertically up to the stringer, the white nylon deck, genkem glue to stick the deck onto the hull before screwing on the gunwales, the brass carrying handles, aluminium rudder and mechanism, steel cables, the lot. In great detail.
1976 Duzi – In 1976 I entered the race and convinced a friend at College Louis van Reenen to join me. He had asked ‘What’s that?’ when he saw my Limfy on my grey and grey 1965 Opel Concorde in Doornfontein, and ‘What’s that?’ when I said ‘The Dusi,’ so he was ripe for convincing. Later in the holidays he bought a red Hai white-water boat with a closed cockpit from Neville Truran and paddled it once or twice on Emmerentia Dam. In those days that sort-of qualified you for Dusi! Then he loaded it up on his light blue VW Beetle and drove down from Jo’burg to meet me in Harrismith. Only one of us could paddle, the other had to drive as the ‘second’ taking food and kit to the overnight stops. So we tossed a coin. I lost, and so we headed for Alexandra Park in PMB with the red Hai on the roofrack. A great pity for me, as I had done a lot of canoeing, also in flood-level rivers, and had broken two boats in half and repaired one, getting it going again in time for the 1972 Dusi as related above. But – a coin toss is a coin toss. For Louis, the coin toss won him first-ever trip down a river. And what a river!
In that 1976 flood-level high water Louis swam his first Dusi!
He swam and he swam and he drank half the water, lowering the level somewhat, but not enough, as it continued raining and filled up faster than he could drink it down. Evenings he had to hang his bum out the tent door, wracked with ‘Dusi Guts’, but he rinsed and repeated the performance three days in a row and finished the marathon. He was a tough character, Louis!
I drove that pale blue VW in the thick mud of the Valley of a Thousand Hills. Us seconds took turns getting stuck and helping each other out. In places there was a queue of dozens of cars, but one-by-one we’d give each car a shove and we all got through.
Here’s Louis at Blue Lagoon finishing that epic Duzi!
Here’s my orange pup tent and Louis’ red Hai and blue VW at Blue Lagoon after the race, wind howling:
Waiting for Louis van Reenen, probably floating in the swollen Umgeni next to his Hai!
1983 Duzi – It was only in 1982 that I eventually got round to paddling again – and then in 1983 I finally did my first Dusi. On a low river:
first overnight stopstart last day
1983 Umko:
1983 Berg:
Berg RiverBerg River Canoe Marathon 1983
1983 Fish:
a more recent ‘Fish’
and the Lowveld Croc:
– a more recent ‘Croc’ –
All in quick succession, and all at my not-furious pace, staring at the scenery, which was good practice for kayaking the Colorado through the Grand Canyon in 1984.
– Colorado River 1984; Crystal rapid –
When I got back from America I thought I must get hold of Charles and tell him what his enthusiasm had led to.
But I didn’t do it then – procrastination – and then I was too late. His heart had attacked him, he was no more. Thank you Charlie Ryder. You changed my life. Enhanced it. Wish I had told you.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Years later good friend Harry Pikkie Loots forwarded this post to Charlie’s son Bradley. I hope Jenny also got to see it.
Way back in high school we spent a night in an old sparsely furnished Drakensberg farmhouse with no ceilings and a tin roof.
We accompanied Klein Kerneels Retief to his Dad’s winter grazing farm Sungubala below Oliviershoek Pass and were left on our own overnight. Adventure! The skies were overcast and soon there were deep rumblings and flashes of lightning. A heavy rain started falling followed by hailstones. The Drakensberg storm built up until it was a roar and we couldn’t hear each other at all – not even shouting into your ear from an inch away was audible above the tinroof fandango. We jumped a foot high when a massive crack of thunder clapped half an inch above the roof. The loudest heavenly bang I’d ever heard in my larf!.
The next day we explored the soaked veld and ouhout thickets above the house and came across a well-endowed woman lying naked on a huge stone in the woods! Stunning! She sported huge shapely boobs and was a wonder for the eyes of lustful teenagers. She was gorgeous! OK, she was made of stone, but hey, what else did we have?
I have often thought of her over the years and started thinking I may have imagined her but then I read of the stone carvings of the Drakensberg and determined to go and find her.
I took the kids and we stayed at The Cavern, lovely old-style ‘Berg hotel. They loved it.
Beautiful things in the grounds – also flowers
Asking around, one of their guides said he knew where my statue was and he’d take me there. I packed a rucksack, he packed lunch and off we went for the day, leaving the kids behind. They could not WAIT for me to GO, DAD! as they had discovered an amazing secret: If you gave any hotel employee your room number he or she would give you anything you wanted under the sun. They had discovered the key to endless riches.
Tom’s signed slip for a ‘free’ movieKids with free drinks!
When my guide and I got to the little valley in the foothills where he said the statue was it didn’t look right. It didn’t feel like the place I remembered from – uh, 40yrs ago. But there she was: A maiden with luscious boobs carved in stone.
But this lady was standing up, not lying down on a rock in a seductive pose. There is another statue, I told him. This is not the statue I saw. Its beautiful, and thank you, but she is not the lady of my vivid mammaries and my dreams. Ah! He knew where the other one was. He had seen it once. But it was on private property and he couldn’t take me there. Back at the hotel I asked around and they showed me a picture.
And there she was, exactly as I remembered her. I had not been hallucinating. Here was proof of my excellent memory, my sanity and my dodgy taste.
Well, almost exactly. Um, I must confess I did NOT notice that she had wings back then, nor that she had clothing. I was remembering naked bunnytail more than dressed wings. Hey, Teenage Testosterone! Vrystaat! 1970! No internet! Very few Playboy magazines! Cut me some slack here! It was a lekker and enhanced memory.
~~oo0oo~~
The Story of the Stone Ladies – a tale was told of a reclusive sculptor who fell in love with a trader’s daughter and sculpted these rocks in homage to her. She was a Coventry. We had Coventry twins Glenda & Glynis in Harrismith who came from a Drakensberg trading family. And I think I see a resemblance . . .
~~oo0oo~~
Later I found this in a book by Rowan Philp, Rediscovering South Africa: A Wayward Guide. “There are two boulders hidden deep in a Drakensberg forest which tell a near-Shakespearean tale of obsession, genius, and revenge. Completely unsign-posted, they feature magnificent, life-size sculptures of the same nude, full-breasted woman, painstakingly carved by her lover fifty years ago. The story begins when Willie Chalmers, a wandering artist with a wildly unkempt beard, came to the area from the Kalahari in the 1930’s to learn more about Bushman paintings from a farmer’s daughter, Doreen Coventry. He fell in love with her and spent fourteen months carving her likeness into a flat sandstone rock on her farm, adding a halo and the face of a child alongside. He called it Spirit of the Woods.
But some of his younger in-laws saw him as a con man and a parasite at the family homestead, and at the height of the row, Coventry’s nephew hiked up to the sculpture in a rage and smashed off the nose. So, some say, Chalmers began a second Spirit of the Woods, this time in a secret location almost completely enclosed by other boulders, sometimes working for weeks without a break.”
~~~oo0oo~~~
ouhout – Leucosidea sericea; mountain shrub and tree
Vrystaat Confessions 