When I got back to Harrismith in December 1973, we were moving house. The ole man had sold the old house . .
. . and built a new one in Piet Uys street uptown.
I filled the blue kombi with stuff – small furniture, paintings and odds – and drove it the kilometre or so down Stuart Street to Piet Uys street; then back, again and again. Load after load. I loved it, I had driven very little in the USA.
We had LOTS of stuff to go. Including Jock, the brindle staffie terrier.
Finally when I’d moved all the stuff I went for my drivers licence. Overdue. I had turned eighteen eight months prior. I drove myself there. After a short drive the traffic cop turned to me and said “You’ve driven before”. I said Um, Ja and he told me to turn round, go back and he signed on the dotted line.
As I was leaving he asked “Who drove you here?” Um, Me I said. He just grinned.
Miss Underwood taught Mom Mary to play the piano and taught her very well; she then also taught big sister Barbara to play and taught her quite well, too; in my imagination this set off the following family discussion:
Let’s send little Kosie to her as well! He’s such a delicate little chap. If he also does well Sheila will want to follow and then we’ll have four musicians and we can start a band, maybe name it after some insects and become RICH!
Don’t laugh. This was ca.1959 and John, Paul and George were still The Quarrymen. Ringo hadn’t even joined them. There was a gap in the market.
I was dispatched to her house in Stuart street and suffered some torture of the ‘put this finger here and that one there’ kind; and then worse: ‘Take this home and practice it.’ One lesson, in my rugby kit, then I escaped and ran home, never to return.
When the next lesson time came around Barbara called me to the black bakelite phone in the long passage at 95 Stuart street. “It’s Miss Underwood!”
Yes Miss Underwood; Yes Miss Underwood; Yes Miss Underwood
Today Mother Mary took a break from playing the piano. She suddenly remembered a time Mona du Plessis came to her some time after a ‘do’ at the town hall. These fifty year old memories come and go, so she must tell them as she thinks of them.
Mona said to me – says Mary – “Jinne Mary, while we were at the town hall, Kosie took the kombi, loaded up the de Villiers kids and drove to Joan and Jannie’s where our kids were. Then they all got in – Mignon, Jean-Prieur, Sheila, everybody, and they drove up and down Hector Street!”
Of course, I remember doing stuff like this – I loved “borrowing” the kombi – but I don’t really recall that specific escapade. The expedition accomplices would have included these, so here’s a possible montage of what a ‘stolen’ kombi in Hector Street might have looked like:
Mona would actually have been quite pleased at the ‘naughtiness’ of the kinders, I bet. Mary would have been worried about our safety. Joan would have shaken her head. Bonner too. We would all have said much the same: ‘Ag don’t worry, Ma!’
Back in 1963 we joined the du Plessis on a one-week beach and fishing holiday on the Natal north coast – Chaka’s Rock! They were beach regulars, this was one of our two beach holidays that I can remember. (flash: there were three!). Louis Brocket wrote in to remind us that, as Lynn’s boyfriend, he was also there for his first “vakansie-by-die-see“.
Sheila writes: “Found a postcard which Mary Methodist sent to her Mom Annie Bland (1½ cent stamp – remember the brown Afrikaner bull?). Mary wrote ‘We’re enjoying the swimming immensely. Coughs no worse in spite of it. We’re sleeping well and eating very well. The coast is beautiful. This is a picture of the pool where we swim.’ I think the three little Swanies all had whooping cough. Must have been fun for the du Plessis family who shared our holiday!”
It was amazing! The cottage on a hill above the beach, the rocks and seaside cliffs, narrow walkways along the cliffs that the waves would drench at high tide; magic swimming pools set in the rocks. The men were there to fish:
We baljaar’d on the beach and sometimes even ventured into the shallows – just up to safe vrystaat depth. A swimmer I was not, and I still vividly remember a near-death experience I had in the rock pool: a near-metre-high wave knocked me out of Mom’s arms and I was washed away out of her safe grasp! I must have been torn away by up to half a metre from her outstretched hands; little asthmatic me on my own in the vast Indian Ocean for what must have been a long one and a half seconds, four long metres away from dry land! Traumatised. To this day I am wary of the big-dam-that-you-can’t-see-the-other-side-of, and when I have to navigate across any stretches of salty water I use a minimum of a Boeing 707, but preferably a 747.
Well, after all! This was the most threatening Free State water I was used to braving before I met the Indian Ocean: Oh, and also the horse trough.
– and even then I’d lift my broek just in case –
The view from the cottage looking down the asthmatic flight of stairs:
In this next 8mm cine footage, you can see the violent waves inside the rock pools that threatened my frail existence:
vakansie by die see – beach or seaside holiday for naive inland creatures
baljaar – frolic
safe vrystaat depth – about ankle deep; not adult ankle. My ankle
postscript: I tried to keep up the luxury cottage theme but Barbara talked about the big spiders on the walls and yesterday even Dad, who was talking about Joe Geyser, mentioned ‘that ramshackle cottage we stayed in at Chaka’s Rock.’
Dad was saying Joe hardly ever caught a fish. He would be so busy with his pipe, relighting it, refilling it, winding the reel with one hand while fiddling with his pipe with the other. My theory is the fish could smell the tobacco and turned their nose up at his bait. Dad reckons tobacco was never a health hazard to old Joe. Although he was never without his pipe, it was mainly preparation and cleaning, and the amount of actual puffing he did was minimal.
Once he caught a wahoo and brought it back to Harrismith. Griet took one look at it as he walked into her kitchen and bade him sally forth. Some wives had agency. So Joe brought it to Dad and they cut it up and cooked it in our kitchen.
~~oo0oo~~
I went back in 2016 and the beach and rocks and the pools still look familiar.
But don’t look back! The green hillslopes have been concreted. When we humans see beautiful sub-tropical coastal forest we say, ‘Stunning! Let’s pour concrete on it!’
Before we learnt to drink beer on the banks of the mighty Tugela, we drank oros and water while observing our elders drinking beer on those same rocks on the same bend in the river that gives the farm its name. Here’s an 8mm ‘cine’ movie taken back in the early 1960’s – before we followed suit in the seventies.
These were the days when Thankful and Grateful – as that incorrigible axis of mirth Sheila-Bess-Georgie-Lettuce called Frank and Gretel Reitz – would have large soirees on the farm with the Swanies, the Kemps and others gathering ‘in their numbers.’
In the movie Gretel, Joyce, Mary and Isabel walk along that stunning driveway lined with (amIright here?) Grecian (Roman?) columns to the old double-rondawel thatched homestead. Then the drinking party moves down to the river where Gee and Kai pilot the motorboat and Barbara and Bess paddle in the shallows. Check out Doc Reitz’s old Chev OHS 71.
My Mom Mary Bland learnt to play the piano on her Granny Mary Bland’s upright Otto Bach at 13 Stuart Street. Mom’s sister Pat Cowie didn’t play, but when Granny Bland died the piano had to go to the older granddaughter. But how to get it there?
Jack Shannon had a bakkie and he volunteered to schlep it to Blyvooruitzicht, or as the Cowies called it, ‘Blayfore’. It got dropped at some stage in the loading or offloading and had to be repaired when it got there. All was well.
Years later Pat died and Bill decided it should go to Barbara as she played, and his daughters Frankie and Gemma did not. So another farmer with a bakkie was roped in to schlep it back from Blayfore – this time Barbara’s long-suffering husband Jeff Tarr carted it to PMB or Howick or Greytown (must ask Barbara). Barbara still has the piano in her home on their farm Umvoti Villa on the Mispah road outside Greytown. It’s now her daughter Linda’s home and Linda does play – hockey, jolling, all else – just not the piano. Maybe her daughter Mary-Kate will keep up the tradition of ‘Marys that play that piano’?
– the Otto Bach – now at Umvoti Villa –
Meantime Mom had bought another: an upright Bentley. Marie Bain had bought her daughter, Mom’s cousin, Lynn the Bentley hoping she’d learn to play ‘like Mary.’ Well, Lynn never took to playing, so Mom bought it from Marie for the same £100 she had paid for it years before. This was the piano we were so privileged to grow up with at 95 Stuart Street, listening to Mom playing her Methodist Hymns, and her Classical and Popular music. Who could forget the late night drinking songs when the Goor Koor gang would gather round her and bellow out their alcohol fumes, cigarette ash and varying levels of talent with gay abandon.
Mom still has the Bentley in PMB and still plays it beautifully. They’re upright pianos, not ‘grand’ pianos, but they certainly have been a grand part of our lives from about 1920-something – Mom Mary was born in 1928 – to 2019. And hopefully many more to come.
Here Mary at 90 plays someone else’s piano. Her classical pieces she always played with the music score in front of her. She can no longer see well enough to read it, so mainly plays her popular pieces by memory now.
We grew up to these sounds in the background. How lucky can you get!? These next few classical pieces are ones she played. Played here by some wonderful pianists who are almost as good as Mom in her prime!
also this:
I remember a few times getting so overcome by the music – melancholy or something? – I’d run down the passage and ask Mom to stop playing! weird.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Which are the ‘good’ pianos?
In the last 200yrs about 12 500 brands of pianos have been sold – and many more models – 12 500 actual brand names! The branding of pianos is a minefield of bulldust. Here Martha Beth writes amusingly about her forthright opinion on the quality of the pianos she is asked about:
Hilariously, the more authentically German the name sounds, the more it may have been made in Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, South Africa, America or anywhere else! Once a piano did get a good name, a host of others suddenly had that or a very similar name! Steinway success spawned Steinbergs, Steinburgs, Steinerman, Steiner, Steingraber, Steinbach, Steinhoven, Steinmeyer, you get the picture. Each of them would claim to be THE famous Stein-what-you-call!
English piano makers Whelpdale Maxwell & Codd made – or ‘controlled’ – these brands, among others: Bentley, Broadwood, Knight, Welmar. They’re now out of business.
Otto Bach: See Dietman and Zimmerman for manufacture details. Otto Bach piano are possibly the most popular intermediate pianos in South Africa; the brand is certainly the most well known in South Africa. There are a wide range of Otto Bach pianos assembled in South Africa and some that were manufactured in the Zimmerman Factory in Germany.
“Otto Bach” ~~~~ seems originally to have been a name for pianos exported by Zimmermann, Leipzig for their export range. It appears that they took on the “Otto Bach, Leipzig” name by the twenties. It then seems that Dietmann, South Africa, purchased the “Otto Bach” brand in the 1950s and out it onto pianos they made, apparently not mentioning Leipzig. Alastair Laurence tells me that Knights supplied the piano parts to Dietmann for these, so they were virtually Knight pianos. There are still thousands of these Otto Bach pianos around; besides famous brands such as Steinway or Bösendorfer, it is probably the best-known piano brand in South African homes. By 1971, there were also “Otto Bach” pianos made entirely by Knight in Essex, and identical to their others except for the name on the front. Because of the varying origins of the name, it is not possible to date the pianos by their numbers.
Corrie Roodt was the Barclays bank manager and Mom say he and his wife Lettie were great friends to her and Dad. But ‘Boy, could she talk! She could talk up a storm!’
Mom had a real good laugh as she remembered the story: Lettie was apparently famous for her lo-ong stories.
Once they went overseas and when they got back Theunis van Wyk said to Mom:
“Mary, I just hope I don’t bump into her until she’s over it.”
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landradig – long-winded; tedious; um, can you get to the point already?
Overflowing ashtrays. That’s one of my clearest memories of the old Moth Hall down near the railroad track, and I was pleased when Etienne Joubert also mentioned them; proving once again that some of my memories are real. Even if some feel surreal! Ja, the smell of old ashtrays and stale beer in the morning… Us kids roped in to clear up the mess after the oldies night of revelry. We loved it. We looked. We learned.
We always called it The Moth Hall, and for a while it was where Dad was probably drinking. But it was more correctly called Platberg Shellhole of the M.O.T.Hs – The Memorable Order of Tin Hats. And there was an older shellhole before that one – an older ‘Moth Hall’. It was down near the railway line; down near the Royal Hotel.
This was where old servicemen would lie to each other and themselves in song:
“Old Soldiers Never Die;
Never Die, Never Die;
Old Soldiers Never Die;
They Just Fade Away.”
Back then they were all survivors of WW1 and WW2. Only later did they take in ever-more members from ever-more wars. And there’s an endless supply of those; the armaments industry sees to that.
The things I remember about the old shellhole was playing in the dark next to and behind the building – big adventure; And seeing 16mm movies, with big reels whirring in the dark; some were sponsored by Caltex and other companies; I remember Hatari! about yanks in darkest Africa, catching animals for zoos; It starred John Wayne, but who was he to us, back then?
. . and Northern Safari, about a 4X4 safari in the Australian outback with a very annoying theme song “We’re Going NORTH on a Northern Safari! We’re Going NORTH on a Northern Safari! We’re Going NORTH on a Northern Safari!” ad nauseum. We loved it!
What the folks would remember, if the truth be told, would be booze and sing-alongs and booze and skits and booze and plays; these were the order of the day. * click on the pic * if you want to read some names.
Seated on the left next to Mary Swanepoel and Trudi Else in full voice, is Harold Taylor, veteran of WW1. Under those voluminous trousers is one wooden leg. The other is buried at Delville Wood. He would take his turn standing next to the piano singing:
Mary & Trudy
Etienne Joubert remembers:
The old MOTH hall was not opposite the Royal Hotel but in the vicinity. In fact it was next to Llewellyn & Eugene Georgiou’s home. It was near the railway line below the G’s house.
I remember Ray Taylor who had some shrapnel in his head, not Harold with a wooden leg; also Uncle Jack Hunt; Arthur Gray & of course your folks. I also remember playing in the dark outside. I remember my first sip of beer which I did not like; but I overcame this in years to come to absolutely love it!
I remember the song A Long Way To Tipperary; The piano was very rickety, as was the wooden floor, which squeaked with the slightest step. On the walls were very big portraits of Winston Churchill & Jan Smuts; Dan Pienaar was also there, but smaller; and a pin-up of Jayne Mansfield. This pin up made it to the “new” Moth Hall.
One thing I did not like was helping my Old Man clean the Shellhole on a Saturday morning; the smell of stale beer & cigarette smoke remains very vivid in my memory.
– royalty-free pic dreamstime –
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Still nostalgic?
and here’s Vera Lynn, 101 yrs old and still going (Nov 2018). In 2009, at the age of 92, Lynn became the oldest living artist to make it to number 1 in the British album chart.
The ole man acting Paganini:
The real Niccolo Paganini – and probly why the ole man wanted to be him:
When he was eighteen the young virtuoso escaped his father’s control, following his elder brother to the Tuscan city of Lucca. “Freed from parental control, Paganini embarked on a life of famous excess. As he later put it, ‘When at last I was my own master I drew in the pleasures of life in deep draughts.’ He would spend the next twenty-seven years in Italy, filling his life with music, love affairs, and gambling, interrupted by long periods of utter exhaustion.”
The Bain brothers Stewart and James Bain of the villages Sarclet and Wick in Scotland, who came to South Africa around 1880 and built railway bridges from Ladysmith in the British colony of Natal to Harrismith in the independent Oranje Vrystaat had seven and nine children respectively. Despite their valiant efforts the Bain line dwindled to one single strand: Chadd Bain, the last Bain from that lineage! Luckily, Kate gave Chadd three sons before he passed away at a young age in a tragic motorbike accident; so now there are four: The three boys and their grandad Peter. If I have it right it went this way: Stewart begat Ginger, who begat Dudley, who begat Peter who begat Chadd who by gad had three boys.
In the year 2000, after two years of adventure in the UK, Chadd Bain returned to Mevamhlope in Kwa Zulu Natal. In 2001 he became involved with an orphanage called ‘Nkosinathi’, building, providing beds and blankets, organising food donations, and teaching the residents to grow vegetables.
In late 2002 Chadd met Kate, and they married in September 2004. They grew the charity along with Chadd’s Mum Shelley and the first Orphan Christmas party was held in 2002 for 80 kids. The next year they had 150 children. The next year they decided to do more and started with educating 17 of the kids.
In 2009 Chadd was tragically killed in a motorbike accident in the sugarcane fields. He was only __ years old.
Kate and Shelley and their team have carried on and continued to grow Izulu Orphan Project (IOP) ever since. Do go and have a look at the sterling work they’re doing.
Read a bit about Chadd’s grandad Dudley here and about his first-to-SA ancestors here and about his Scottish roots here
It’s pinch-of-salt history, but its a bit of fun for family (and I record the little I know in the hope that someone WILL pick up the threads and do it properly!).
Vrystaat Confessions 