18 September 1928 plus ninety three years gets you to today. So if you were born then you’ve had around 33 968 sleeps.
Quite something, Mom! Happy birthday, we feel very lucky to have you with us and be able to listen to your stories, and hear your memories and your piano playing. Love you lots!
I listen to the Chopin and Mozart etc you used to play and I say to the expert pianists playing: Huh! You shoulda heard my Mom!
She recently said she thinks the best piece she played was the duet with Una Elphick in the town hall of Beethoven’s 5th symphony
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.’
Mom Mary told me about the concert in the Harrismith town hall again and there was more detail, which I add here.
Griet Geyser, who played the violin, suggested a tribute concert to her tutor Professor Bloch. Fellow violinist Helmut Brunzlaff and everyone else thought it was a good idea, especially when they added the piano tutors. So it became a tribute to Professor Bloch, Miss Underwood and Miss Thorburn.
Una Elphick and I decided we were going to play a duet on the grand piano – you know they had a grand piano in their flat? It filled the lounge. Well, we chose a challenging piece: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, you know: da da da dum!
We started practicing separately and then we got together and we just couldn’t synchronise – we just weren’t in time. Una put on her metronome ‘tick tock’ but that didn’t help. The only thing that got us going was Una counting out loud. That worked and we got better and better and played it beautifully if I say so myself.
More of the music they and other Harrismith virtuosos played here. Although, that may have been a different concert as that one was in the kerksaal – church hall.
I posted this on the day – 14 July – over on bewilderbeast.org, but it also belongs here, so here it is:
On the 14th July 1951 the biggest hugest massivest humungousest stroke of luck to befall him in all his life befell Pieter Gerhardus Swanepoel. By far. By a very long long way the biggest.
And he didn’t realise it, still doesn’t.
This morning Mary will wake thinking, I wonder how Pieter is, I hope he’s alright.
Hey JP – I saw Mother Mary Methodist on Sunday (it’s her 91st today) and she told me this: Verster de Witt was the captain of the rugby team and he was her boyfriend! First time I heard that.
She has lots of memory lapses – yesterday things – and then lots of clear flashbacks of olden daze things. Sien vir jou – Koos
..
Jean-Prieur du Plessis replied from Texas:
Aaaawh! Happy Birthday Aunty Mary. I bet Mona will be able to second/confirm that! I remember she was really good at who dated who in the past in Harrismith. I asked her once: Ma, hoekom hou jy nie van Tannie Havenga nie (I forgot her first name…from the bookstore**). She answered: Want sy was jou pa se girlfriend in matriek! 😀
Thanks for always keeping in touch! Lekker bly. Cheers
** Marie Lotter – was Marie de Beer
– in the right picture: Dickie ___; Pat Bland; Mary Bland; Polly du Plessis – chilling at the ‘baths’ –
Top pic: May and Polly ca.1945 – their matric year
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maybe add this to the ‘Harrismith’s automotive designer’ post
The Harrismith Chronicle started publishing in 1903. Annie was ten years old, still living in the cottage behind the Royal Hotel. Eighty years later the paper celebrated. That milestone edition included our dear old Annie’s obituary. She’d reached ninety. Lovingly cared for from when Frank in died in 1943 right to the end forty years later, by her daughter Mary, our loving Mom.
Now in 2020 comes more sad news. After 117 years, the old Chronic has folded. Maybe it won’t be the end? Maybe someone can revive it in digital form, online? Sure hope so.
~~~oo0oo~~~
On the 23 March 2021 came a glimmer of hope:
Dandre Kleyn commented on my post Chronic. Terminal?
Interesting post and very nice to read. So, good news, the Harrismith Chronicle is being revived! The 1st new issue is hitting the shelves 25 March 2021. New ownership and a new newspaper coming to you.
I was born up Shit Creek without a paddle. Quite literally. OK, my actual birth, per se, was in Duggie Dugmore’s maternity home, less than half a kilometer away on Kings Hill (see pic above), but mere days after I was born – as soon as I could be wrapped in swaddling clothes – I was taken home to my manger on a plot on the banks of Shit Creek in the shadow of Platberg mountain. And it was twelve years or so before I owned my first paddle. So this is a true story.
– ruins of our house on the plot – trees in in the middle ground are on the banks of Shit Creek – – inset: me on the lawn thinking, ‘where’s me paddle?’ –
I paddled my own canoe about twelve years later after we lost the plot. OK, sold the plot, moved into town and bought a red and blue canoe with paddle. The first place we paddled it was in a little inlet off the Wilge river above the Sunnymede weir, some distance upstream of town. Right here:
– younger sis Sheila operates the paddle I was born without –– same little inlet off the Wilge – Mother Mary and Sheila on land, me airborne, Barbara sitting on water –
Before this, I had paddled a home-made canoe made of a folded corrugated zinc roofing sheet, the ends nailed onto a four-by-four and sealed with pitch. Made by good school friend Gerie Hansen and his younger boet Nikolai – or maybe his older boet Hein; or by their carpenter father Jes? We paddled it, wobbling unsteadily, on their tiny little pond in the deep shade of wattle trees above their house up against the northern cliff of Kings Hill.
School friend Piet Steyl wrote of the wonderful days he also spent in the company of Gerie Hansen – who died tragically early, adding to the feeling that the good die young. Piet told of fun days spent paddling that zinc canoe, gooi’ing kleilat, shooting the windbuks and smoking tea leaves next to that same little pond. We both remembered Gerie winning a caption contest in Scope magazine and getting reprimanded for suggesting Japanese quality wasn’t good. Irony was, the Hansens actually owned one of the first Japanese bakkies seen in town – a little HINO.
Gerie used to say ‘He No Go So Good’, and Piet says when it finally gave up the ghost he said, ‘He No Go No More’!!
~~oo0oo~~
Shit Creek – actually the Kak Spruit; a tributary of the Wilge River which originates on Platberg mountain, flows down, past our old plot and westward through the golf course on the northern edge of town, then turns south and flows into the Wilge below the old park weir; Sensitive Harrismith people refer to it as ‘die spruit met die naam;’
die spruit met die naam – ‘the creek with the name’ – too coy! It’s Kakspruit – one word; always will be; Shit Creek.
gooi’ing kleilat – lethal weapon; a lump of clay on the end of a whippy stick or lath; spoken about way more than practiced, in my experience; and about 10% accuracy when you do get it going; Here’s a kid loading one:
OK, not really; more a reverie on drink – a nostalgic lookback on a bottle store. Platberg Bottle Store / Drankwinkel in Harrismith, the Vrystaat. The Swanepoel family business. We all worked here at times.
– the dark side –
– the pale side –
We were talking about the trinkets, decor and marketing stuff. Like those big blow-up bottles hanging from the ceiling. Turns out big sister Barbara kept some of them from way back when:
Younger sister Sheila has some whisky jugs; and I had found an old familiar brandy-making figure online:
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This is where they were displayed, along with the statues of Johnny Walker whisky, Dewars White Label whisky’s Scottish soldier ‘drum major’, Black & White whisky with their two Scotty dogs, Beefeater Gin’s ‘beefeater’, etc. Spot them below:
Sheila has a lovely Mary Methodist anecdote from around 2012. Mary was about 84yrs old back then:
Her granddaughter Linda was telling her a story about a friend who had all his precious work stored on his laptop computer – ledgers, spreadsheets, emails, the lot. His work and his ‘whole life.’
Like so many people, he had no backup – none, anywhere.
Aware of the potential dangers, he was very conscious about the possibility of having it stolen, so when he had to go out one day, sans laptop, he hid it in the oven.
Well, you guessed it, his poor very embarrassed partner – unknowingly – had done the humdrum – pre-heat the oven to 220ºC – and the unthinkable. The precious laptop was melted, warped, done to a crisp.
– “Oh no!” interjects Mary ”He had cooked the books!” –
~~~oo0oo~~~
June 2020 Sheila reports: Today Mum has so many jerseys on that Sister Rose asked if she was going to the North Pole.
For her crossword Mom asked what Mexico’s biggest volcano was. I looked it up while we were chatting – Popocatepetl. I’ve never heard of it – but Mum knew / remembered it! She had asked a friend who was going to her cottage to look it up on her computer – but now, when this friend comes back with the answer – Mum will know it already – she liked that!
Mom Mary Swanepoel made costumes for a fancy dress event in the Harrismith town hall ca.1959. We were living on a plot Birdhaven in the shadow of Platberg just a kilometre east of the edge of town on the forestry road.
Some thirty years later, big sister Barbara in the middle on the left, made costumes for her kids Linda and Robbie in a re-enactment ca.1986. They were living on a farm Shukela Estates outside Greytown.
– three of us kids ca.1959 and then Barbara’s two kids ca.1986 –
At the time our Oupa was visiting us from Pietermaritzburg. Paul Fouche Swanepoel, grandpa of Peter Frank – me.
– early 20th century ballroom trousers on the old PF – shorts on the new PF –
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Now we await Linda’s move – I’ll bet she’ll repeat the re-enactment with her two, Mary-Kate and Dawie VII – they’ll be third generation ‘gypsies.’
Vrystaat Confessions 