Around 1965 or thereabouts, I got an early morning phone call filled with excitement and urgency: “Koos! Come quickly! Come see! There’s a snake in the hoona hock!”
Well, I was thrilled! This I had to see. You can live in a dorp and hike in the veld often and very seldom see snakes, so I hopped onto my dikwiel fiets and pedaled furiously. It was about a mile to the Joubert’s house. Down Hector Street, west along Stuart Street past Scotty’s house, past the MOTH Hall, then downhill in Piet Uys Street to their house on the spruit that ran between them and the meisieskoshuis.
As I pulled up the whole family was there to meet me, Aunty Joyce, Uncle Cappy, Etienne, Tuffy and Deon, laughing and shouting “Happy Birthday!”
There was no snake. I’d not realised it was the 1st of April.
Lloyd sadly passed away in the early hours of August 3 2016 from a brain bleed –
huge shock to us all and especially his partner who could not wake him for his tea.
John and I held a memorial service for Lloyd in our garden and we were
overwhelmed by the 150-plus friends who came to bid him farewell.
I wrote:
Hi Filly
Dammitall I am so sorry to hear of Lloyd’s passing! So so sad.
He and I had a helluva good time together in Herriesmif. We clicked and just shared a similar outlook on life, the universe and kop-toe dutchmen.
It wasn’t long, but it was a great friendship while it lasted.
Thinking of you
Love
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What a lovely guy from the bestest, funnest, hilariousest, lekkerest part of my youth. Lloyd Zunckel arrived in Harrismith from the metropolis of Bethlehem and switched the lights on. A breath of fresh air. He was kind, genuine, modest, charming, and a barrel of laughs. He just couldn’t do maths. Or English or science or any of that shit. But man, could he do life! LIFE! He loved life; and he loved people. I was very good at math. And English and science and that unimportant shit. But Lloyd taught me how to do life and I will forever be grateful to my friend Lloyd for that. Lloyd switched the lights on for me.
Things I remember with Lloyd:
What a tennis player!
A bit of golf. I would ride my dikwiel fiets to the hostel, pick up Lloyd and a golf bag and with him on the cross-bar, cycle to the country club where we’d while away the hours “playing golf”. Sort of. On the bike we would sing – him way out of key, me melodiously:
“Let the spidnight mecial.
“Line a shite on me
“Let the spidnight me-ecial
Line a helluva lotta shite on me . . “
Me and my mate Lloyd! There was this (where we almost escaped a para-military fate worse than death) and this (where we acted very speronsibly) and this (where we were instrumental in setting Kai up for his great success in farming).
What we didn’t know was this – from his amazing sister Filly:
I don’t know if any of you or his other mates were aware but Lloyd was hugely dyslexic – not really recognized way back then. Lloyd hid it under his happy-go-lucky facade and was told throughout his schooling he was stupid and lazy and all sorts. Lloyd in actual fact did not matriculate and eventually left school in 1973 being 19 without getting higher than Std 8. He went off to the army in 1974 for 18 months.
He married in 1979. Things went pear-shaped on our farm in Bethlehem with them partying and spending everything they had. My dad Fred bought him a Bayer agency and they moved to Pongola in Natal. Then to White River where his business was thriving and they were very successful but for some unknown reason his wife was very keen to move to the Cape – George and Wellington – and after a few years they were living way above their means. The marriage fell apart and Lloyd owed hundreds of thousands of Rands. He moved alone, with nothing but a bakkie my dad bought him, to somewhere near Pongola and we lost touch.
I eventually tracked him down, no car – written it off when he was two sheets to the wind. He was living on a verandah with a woman who was also homeless. A great friend of ours Dave Kahts drove me down to find Lloyd. It was his 50th birthday – and he looked awful.
My wonderful husband John told me to settle all his debts and bring him to Zim to live with us. Problem – he had no passport, so we sorted that and brought him here where John gave him a job in Mozambique. Sadly the farm invasions had started in Zim a few years earlier and we were hanging on to ours with every muscle in our bodies, but eventually lost it.
Things fell apart for all the farmers who moved to Moz, so Lloyd came back to live with us until he met Shana. He moved in with her – they were together for eight years, a rocky relationship, but they did love one another and she had a home and Lloyd did the cooking and oversaw the gardening – he was happy there 😀 .
And that’s that 😘
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Another song (reminded by his big mate Steve Reed);
Steve expostulated: Lloyd having no musical talent? That’s rubbish Fil. Lloyd did a pitch-perfect rendition of:
“The doctor came in, stinking of gin”
And sometimes he even added the next line:
“and pro-ceeded to lie on the table”
Admittedly that was his full repertoire.
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Actually, there was a third he would warble off-key:
Tuffy has hit the bright lights. School friend and class mate Mariette van Wyk edits a lovely magazine Atlantic Gull down in the Dryest Fairest Wettest Cape.
She got the fascinating life story (well actually, snippets of it!) of Irené John Joubert out of him recently.
Fascinating thing is, Tuffy DID this stuff, Chuck Norris acts it out. Here’s an eyewitness account of his famous plummet from a chopper.
Here he is in those far-off days when you could see more chin and not so much forehead:
Tuffy’s older brother Etienne remembers him getting his nickname like this: In the very English environment of the Harrismith Methodist church some soutie made the mistake of calling the French masculine name Irené the English feminine name Irene in Sunday school and promptly got dondered right then and there by said Irené. And hence the nickname Tuffy was born.
I see Tuffy says he has no trouble in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Congo as “with my honest face, people just love me.” What I want to know is: How do they see his face?
Well, now that his cover is bust, his anonymity lost, learn more about Tuffy being a domkrag and then tackling an unsuspecting ox here.
~~oo0oo~~ soutie – engelsman, pom, english ou; the story was English-speaking South Africans had one foot in England and one foot in SA; this left their willies hanging in the brine, giving them salty cocks, therefore ‘soutpiel’
~~oo0oo~~
This is the last in a series of famous friends I have known. And ja, also the first . .
We had a few gatherings in the long, wide and high Gailian lounge / dining room / bar with the smooth parquet floor. For a while this lounge was shenanigan-central for the Harrismith Jet Set. While the Stella cats were away the lightly inebriated mice came out to play.
Luckily Hec & Stella Fyvie would regularly gallivant off to Kruger Park and other places in their yellow and white kombi. ‘Don’t worry,’ Tabs would say, ‘We’ll look after the place;Enjoy yourselves.’
I would nod.
One such evening* is engraved in the memory bank. ‘Twas a dark and starlit night after we had sat all afternoon seeing to it that the sun set properly, and fine-chooning ourselves to a well-honed pitch, like a master-crafted musical instrument. A lute, perhaps. A flute, perhaps. By carefully choosing our poison by percentage alcohol multiplied by millilitres consumed we had manipulated our PE Factor** to a wonderfully advanced state where we were erudite, witty, charming, sparkling company – and wonderful dancers.
Especially wonderful dancers.
The theme for the evening was high-speed langarm, and we whizzed around the lounge to loud classical waltzes at ever-increasing speeds on that slick polished parquet wooden floor till centrifugal force spun us out onto the veranda, onto the lawn and across it to the swimming hole in the dark, thutty metres away; back over the lawn and round the dance floor again. To tremendous applause. I personally did a few laps with Lettuce Leaf which were wondrous in nature. Strauss would have been proud of his waltz that night. Jet-fuelled ballroom dancing par excellence.
– an actual daguerrotype taken that evening – me and lettuce leaf are second from left –
Some people didn’t get the langarm memo though, and arrived in punk outfits. No names, no packdrill, but Des had a safety pin through his earlobe and Timothy Leary one through his foreskin and these two pins were joined in holy matrimony by a chain. Never before have two ballroom dancers been so synchronised, Des leading and Tim not daring not to follow. After that performance they even named a band N Sync.
Before the sun rose there was snoring and long after the sun rose there was still snoring and that is how Aunt Stella found us when she returned unexpectedly to find Des and other bodies in her double bed. On seeing his Aunt Stell, Des spun onto his tummy, burying his face into the pillow. Des has always believed if you hide your head in the sand maybe the problem will go away.
But this time he shouldn’t have: Written in bright red lipstick on his back was “FUCK! PUNK! PUNK!!”
~~~oo0oo~~~
*This tale might be an amalgam of a few blurry evenings, skilfully blended and spiked;
**PE Factor – Personality Enhancement Factor; Found to various degrees in all bottles of hooch;
langarm – two or more perpetrators remain attached by various body parts and run around more or less in time to music they normally would not listen to, while pumping the outermost arms up and down; unlikely to work sober.
~~~oo0oo~~~
This critical observer might have been watching us at Gailian that night, although he was actually talking about the 1815 season in Brussels:
Whenever they get together the severest etiquette is present. The women on entering always salute on each side of the cheek; they then set down as stiff as waxworks. They begin a ball with a perfect froideur, then they go on with their dangerous ‘waltz’ (in which all the Englishwomen join!) and finish with the gallopade, * a completely indecent and violent romp. – Rev. George Griffin Stonestreet
Gallopade: A lively French country dance of the nineteenth century, a forerunner of the polka, combining a glissade with a chassé on alternate feet, usually in a fast 2/4 time. Sounds about right, huh? I think that’s what we were doing. Indecent and violent romps bedondered.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Recently Des went viral – no, no, in a good way. Thanks to great backing from sister Val, he put what he learnt at Gailian to good use. Roomerazzit he got extra points for his broek and his dancing shoes:
But to do it I needed a henchman. You can hike alone, but I’d really rather not, so I persuaded Stefaans Reed, The Big Weed, resident son of hizzonner the Worshipful Lord Mayor of Nêrens (aka Clarens) and fellow optometry student in Jo’burg to nogschlep.
We sallied forth, rucksacks on our backs, boerewors and coffee and billy can and sleeping bags inside, up the slopes of Platberg, from Piet Uys Street, up past the Botanic Gardens, von During and Hawkins Dams, into the ‘Government forest.’ The pine plantation. ‘Die dennebos.’ We could discern two types of pines. The type we liked had the long soft needles and made a good bed. We walked next to the concrete furrow that led water down the mountain into town from Gibson Dam up on top. Often broken and dry but sometimes full of clear water, it made finding the way easy.
– the furrow on top –
Halfway up we made camp, clearing a big area of the soft pine needles down to bare earth so we could safely light a fire.
Learning from our primate cousins we piled all those leaves and more into a thick gorilla mattress and lay down on it to gaze at the stars through the treetops. This was 1974, we were eerstejaar studente in the big smog of Doornfontein, Jo’burg. We had learnt to drink more beer, sing bawdy songs, throw a mean dart in a smoke-filled pub, hang out of friends car windows as they drove home thinking ‘Whoa! better get these hooligans home!’ and generally honed our urban skills. Steve had found a few wimmin and I almost had. Now we were honing our rural skills. Wilderness ‘n all.
As we lay in our sleeping bags, burping boerewors and gazing through the pine fronds at the stars, we heard a loud, startling, beautiful sound.
I was wide-eyed wide-awake! WHAT on EARTH was that!? I knew it had to be a night bird, but what? Which one?
In the dark I scribbled down a picture of the sound. This is what it sounded like to me and I wanted to be sure I didn’t forget it:
I didn’t know I was drawing a ‘sonogram’ – I’d never heard of that.
When I got back home I looked through my ‘Birds of South Africa – Austin Roberts’ by G.R. McLachlan and R. Liversidge, 1970 – and found there was a nightjar that said “Good Lord Deliver Us” and I knew that was it. The Fiery-Necked Nightjar – some call it the Litany Bird. I loved it, I love it, I’ll never forget it and it’s still a favourite bird fifty years later.
– they look similar but they sound very different –
– stunning nocturnal aerial insect catcher –
Next morning we hiked on, past the beautiful eastern tip of Platberg – some call it ‘Bobbejaankop’ – and down round Queen’s Hill through some very dense thicket, across the N3 highway, back home and a cold beer. See more pics of Platberg.
– that dense thicket in foreground –
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– here’s a real sonogram of the Good Lord Deliver Us bird – top one looks like mine if you squint –
Thanks xeno-canto.org for sharing birdsounds from around the world.
Those pine trees may be Pinus patula – soft leaves, not spiky. Comfy. Still an invasive pest, though.
A ‘litany’ is a tedious recital or repetitive series; ‘a litany of complaints’; ‘a series of invocations and supplications‘;
The Catholics can really rev it up – Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, have mercy on us. Lord, have mercy on us. Christ, hear us. Christ, graciously hear us. God the Father of Heaven, Have mercy on us. God the Son, Redeemer of the world, Have mercy on us. – and this is one-twelfth of the Catholic Litany, there’s eleven-twelfths more! Holy shit!!
If I was God I’d do some smiting.
~~oo0oo~~
Nêrens – nowhere, or Clarens in the Free State, named after Clarens, Switzerland to which that coward Paul Kruger fled cowardly after accusing my brave great-great Oom of cowardice. Ha! Who actually stayed and fought the war, huh?
nogschlep – kom saam; accompany
kom saam – nogschlep
boerewors – raw beef wurst; just add fire
dennebos – pine plantation; plantations are not forests!
What a lovely surprise! A story about ‘Scotty’ of 71 Stuart Street Harrismith on Harrismith’s best blog, deoudehuizeyard.wordpress.com.
We grew up at 95 Stuart Street. 1961 to 1973. About a kilometre west of us was Scotty’s sandstone cottage, set forward, almost on the pavement. Miss Helen M Scott she was. I seem to remember she gave extra lessons in her cottage. English.
She and Mom were very fond of each other and we all loved Scotty as she was always friendly and kind – and she baked her famous butterfly cupcakes and was generous with them! Like these, just better, of course! We called her ‘Scotty’ – like we called our gran ‘Annie’. Just Scotty. Just Annie. Lovely people.
She retired from teaching but went back for one year in 1966 when she taught sister Barbara English at the Hoer Skool.
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Do go and have a look at what Sandra and Hennie of deoudehuizeyard are doing for Harrismith tourism and heritage.
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.
The pinnacle of my tennis career came when I beat a Springbok Grand Slam winner in a doubles tournament at the Wanderers in Jo’burg.
Of course, it helped that my playing partner was Free State junior champ Alick Ross, a brilliant left-hander who carried me all the way.
Also, it helped that the ‘Springbok tennis player’ was actually our opponent’s DAUGHTER, not he himself. So the truth is Alick and I beat Ilana Kloss’ FATHER in an early round of a doubles tournament back in 1974.
Here’s Ilana, left, who we didn’t beat. She was lucky enough never to be drawn against us in her career.
Oh, well, it sounded good for a while there . . .
Unlike me, Ilana went on to greater heights, winning two Grand Slam titles two years later, the US Open doubles with Linky Boshoff and the French Open mixed doubles with Aussie Kim Warwick. Her Dad had probably passed on a few things he learnt from me.
I emigrated from Hillbrow and Parktown to Welkom, Free State. The joke goes, “I spent a year in Welkom one weekend.”
In about April 1978 Kurt E, optometrist in the city centre near the famous horseshoe – the dead-centre of town – asked me to work for him. Yes, please, I said. In Highpoint Hillbrow Graham B, the known world’s finest optometrist, had said he didn’t have enough work for me – he had “let me go” – so I drove off in my grey-and-grey 1965 Opel Rekord breaker in a south-westerly direction, crossed the Vile river and arrived in Welkom, city of sin and laughter. Where Kurt gave me a warm friendly welcome. introduced me to his friends and ducked off on leave more often than he’d been able to when on his own. A handy trick I would copy enthusiastically decades later.
Got myself a big ole empty flat in a big building in town – my first very own apartment! The Thornes of Barbour & Thorne, estate agents, arranged it all. Father and sons estate agents – who became firm friends. Andy & Evyn, and Dad Wally. They also helped me buy a double bed, a couch and a fridge, you don’t need anything else. I had left behind the lovely communal house at 4 Hillside Road in Parktown and a lovely lady, the delightful Triple-Ess. I was all swoon and sigh, but the Pru in her soon sorted me out and made me realise life moves on! I guess I was “let go” twice that month!
I loved the work – I was much busier than I had been in Hillbrow, doing a far wider range of challenging cases. One of my first patients was a keratoconus patient I fitted with her first rigid contact lenses and she saw beautifully as she hadn’t in years! Another early patient put on his minus fours and said he couldn’t see fokol. I tested him again and he was minus two. I said he should see his doc and he went off pop in a spittle-flecked fury, ranting that I was just trying to rob him and was obviously in cahoots with the GP or ophthalmologist. He knew our types! Dink jy ek is fokkedom?! Luckily when he finally went after passing out at home, his GP instructed him to come and thank me for saving his life – he was a sky-high undiagnosed diabetic one Fanta Grape away from death or losing a toe. Once his sugar levels had stabilised he actually did come in and thank me and say jammer asseblief. Halcyon days.
Being the Vrystaat and late eighteenth century, the practice had a back door and a tiny separate test room for Nie Blankes, can you believe it!? Frontline ladies would firmly instruct darker people to walk down the alley next to the shop to find the back door.
Kurt was a character, Swiss squash champion. He had two mates who were also Swiss champions in various disciplines besides drinking and carousing – cross-country running and skiing, I believe. They would meet annually and be suave, drink and carouse. He had an old Mercedes sedan in mint condition and a beautiful Beechcraft Bonanza India Mike Alpha. He kept a little car at the airport in JHB so when he flew there he had transport.
– similar -this is not IMA –
Winter solstice in 1978 we had a boys night in Kurt’s sauna with Kurt and Johnny H, lawyer and mensch; We sat drinking beer in the heat of the sauna till it became unbearable, then plunged into the freezing open air pool. Then back into the sauna . . It’s good for you, they say . . To this day I believe in the beer part of that prescription.
Kurt once asked me to drive his Merc and a young lady pilot with instrument rating to Joburg while he flew there. She was probably going to fly the Bonanza back at night? The Merc got tired in the metropolis of Parys and we had to spend the night there while the local mechanics got it back on its feet. A few months earlier the Barclays bank manager in Hillbrow had been a ‘barclaycard pusher.’ He’d pressed a credit card on me over my protestations that I didn’t need it. Well, that night I did – I paid for both hotel rooms and the car repair. So where some might have had their first Campari in Benoni, I had my first credit card transaction in Parys. Milestones.
Memories of people: Kurt’s receptionists, Elsabe and La Weez; Yoyoyo lots of make-up; Ralph G, the other optom; Kurt’s lovely wife Barbara; The shapely Maria; The shapely pharmacist Frick; matric classmate Elsie C’s shapely blonde Vrystaat varsity friend; McM the shapely Rhodes University student; The mafia tenderpreneur builder / truck transport brothers who wore matching thick, dark Safilo plastic frames and bought matching yellow Lamborghinis to prove a point. Not shapely. Built like squat double-door refrigerators, but lots of money.
Swanning around in my grey-and-grey 4-door, three-on-the-column 1965 Opel Rekord Concorde, the Welkom ladies must have swooned. Surely. Those days men were men and, like the Lambos, my Opel had a good hard steel dashboard, not soft and airbaggy, and a bakelite steering wheel. A front bench seat. And all the ladies agreed that it trumped the Lamborghinis when they saw my back bench seat!
I was due in the army for national service in July but Kurt spoke to the local Nationalist MP and swung it so I only started in January the next year. Strings. Who said corruption is a new invention? It’s always who you know. ~~oo0oo~~
Around 1967 – long before my time there – the Welkom manne decided that the Welkom / Johannesburg road was too dangerous to travel on, and learnt to fly. Together with his great friends Wally T and Heinie H, Kurt bought a Cessna 182 Skylane, ZS – DRL and operated the plane in an association they christened “HET – Air” – their initials. I got this info off Barbour & Thorne’s website. ~~oo0oo~~ fokol – not much; less than twenty/two hundred; less than six/sixty; Frank Duro would have raised his (were they bushy? were they non-existent?) eyebrows
Dink jy ek is fokkedom?! – think I’m schoopit?
jammer asseblief – my bad
Nie Blankes – Non Whites; Human beings deemed not to be ‘white.’ By highly scientific tests of course
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’)
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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.
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(36yrs later Anita still comes to me for her glasses)
Vrystaat Confessions 