Phoned Mom yesterday and she started talking of her old friends.
Joey de Beer (Onderstall), Dossie Farquhar (de Villiers) and Ursula Schultz were big and close friends at school in Harrismith.
The picture was taken at their 45th matric reunion.
Ursula used to get comics, or comic books and I would visit her and her Mom and we’d read them. I felt sorry for Ursula and her mother as their husband and Dad was locked up for World War 2 as a possible German sympathiser.
Sometimes us kids would play cards while the ladies played bridge. Mrs Woodcock, Mrs Schultz and maybe Mrs Rosing would play. Maybe Fanny Glick too. Not my Mom Annie, she was at work, running her Caltex garage.
Joey’s sister was Marie de Beer, who became Marie Lotter of Havengas bookstore.
~~~oo0oo~~~
The conversation wandered on to the lovely stewed fruit Sheila makes for Mom.
Yes, I share it with my tablemate in the diningroom. I call her my ‘stablemate.’
Yay! Science! I just found out what the very first flower I ever drew was/is: A Canary Bird Bush Crotalaria agatiflora.
I suppose for a school project? I collected a few in our garden and drew the flower and the leaf. I was fascinated by the shape of the flower: like a yellow bird, butterfly or ship.
I saw this on iNaturalist.org thanks to prolific iNatter @troos (Troos vdMerwe) and there’s a lovely twist: He photographed it in the favourite gardens of a favourite schoolfriend of my Mother Mary’s!
Joey de Beer became Jo Onderstall and became a founder member of the Lowveld Botanic Society and the Lowveld Botanic Gardens in Nelspruit, now Mbombela. She wrote the book on Lowveld flowering plants.
– Jo Onderstall’s 1984 book –
A lovely full-circle kind of story.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Joey matriculated with Mary in Harrismith in 1945. When she heard Mary was going nursing she expostulated: What A Waste Of A Good Brain! She was right, but Mom decided she needed to do something that earned her a salary and cost her widowed Mom Annie nothing. Typical Mom. Joey went on to study phys ed teaching in Bloem, then married ‘doctor/farmer’ Bill Onderstall. They moved to Nelspruit in 1950. Bill gave Jo a camera for a wedding present and so she herself took a lot of the pictures in the articles and books she wrote. I didn’t know her mother Bessie de Beer had been chair of the Drakensberg and Eastern Free State branch of the Botanical Society, so Jo followed in Bessie’s footsteps. Must tell Mom that. Jo herself seems as self-effacing as Mom. She writes in the introduction that her name on the book ‘is but the visible tip of an iceberg’ and the fact that she took most of the photos is mentioned nowhere. All other photographers are acknowledged, but even the fact that she took the front and back cover pictures is added in the ‘errata’ – like an afterthought! I’m guessing some of her friends insisted.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Yellow bird! Who remembers Johan Pheiffer who came from the city to Harrismith to visit his cousins the du Plessis in the dorp, whipped out his guitar and sang Yellow Bird?
~~~oo0oo~~~
Later: Mom said ‘Thanks for this.’ Sheila read it to her. She didn’t know Bessie had also been involved in things botanical. She did know that Bessie used to take people for the drivers test. ‘You would drive her round the block and she’d say OK, you have your licence. None of this parking into a garage stuff.’ So says Ma.
Her good friends Joey de Beer and Dossie Farquhar said Mom must take science. She found it hard, but enjoyed it. She didn’t like the science teacher, Swart Piet du Toit, though. There was also a teacher called Wit Piet du Toit, who later was called Whitey. Wit Piet married one of the girls he had taught in Std 6. Beautiful girl. Later he married Doris. Old memories flooding back, Ma?
Vrystaat Confessions 