Vrystaat Confessions

Tag: Sheila Swanepoel

Sheila Family History – The de la Rey Connection

Me to Sheila: (2012)

Subject: de Wet

Sheila, tell me again where Generaal de Wet fits in to Ouma’s family.
Apparently he won a battle in the Freestate where the Hysterical Tour is headed right now, so I need to brag about my connections.

When the Brits win the battle Ken Gillings is brainwashing us about, I tell them about Annie and her love of Mrs Queen, but this battle I’m gonna need my Boer connections.

Who else can I claim?

~~oo0oo~~

Sheila: Not de Wet, but de la Rey and Botha

Not de Wet – but de la Rey. Ouma’s ouma (her mother’s mother) was Boer Generaal Koos de la Rey’s sister – she married a Bezuidenhout and produced a daughter who married a Bodenstein and they produced Ouma. So we are directly descended from de la Rey’s father, not Gen Koos de la Rey himself.

Boer Generaal Louis Botha was married to John Bland’s first cousin, Annie Bland Emmett. John FA Bland II was Granny Bland’s husband. He was a lawyer in Harrismith – his own wife called him Mr Bland!

Mr John Bland and Annie Bland Emmett were both grandchildren of Josiah Benjamin Adam Bland – the first Bland who came to SA in 1829. He became mayor of Mossel Bay – the main street is named after him. I have the letter of introduction he had for the Cape and the ship captain’s receipt for his passage on the Nautilus; Hugh Bland has the ring he was wearing. He married a du Plessis and had lots of kids.

There is something about the English Blands from Harrismith going to Ceylon as POWs during the Boer War, but I’m not exactly sure who they were – must have been two of our Granddad Frank’s brothers?

~~oo0oo~~

Me:

Aha! So: General Koos de la Rey had a sister who had a great great great great (4 greats) grandson: Me, Koos.

Anyone who fought for the Brits?

~~oo0oo~~

Sheila:

No, not four greats – just two.

Sister of de la Rey married a Bezuidenhout. Her Daughter married a Bodenstein. Then her Granddaughter (our Ouma) married a Swanepoel. Ouma and Oupa Swanepoel in Maritzburg.

So her Granddaughter was Ouma. Her Great Grandson was our Dad. And her Great Great Grandson was YOU!

I don’t know of any Pom soldiers.

And that’s it, I’m afraid.

~~oo0oo~~

So I’m two greats down from the sister of ‘The Lion of The West,’ and have zero bragging rights in any Freestate battles, zero connection to Die Dapper Generaal De Wet! *sigh* Gonna have to keep my mouth shut on this Hysterical Tour outing.

23 Feb 2025
Old Broads – Harrismith and Abroad

Email from: steve reed – Mon, 28 Nov 2011

to: Pete Swanepoel; Peter Brauer; Dave Rorke; Sheila Swanepoel

Subject: Old timers rock.

A joke shared at work this week reminded me of a classic moment from the past.

Pringle and Maddie were sisters, both spinsters in their early eighties. Pringle lived a good three hour drive away up the west coast at Omapere. She would come down to Auckland about four times a year to see her sister and get her stuff done, among other things an occasional eye test with their tame optometrist, yours truly, who would deliver the glasses to Maddie’s place up the road when necessary. Lately they are both looking a bit older and shakier.

So Pringle comes in (late as usual for her 10am appointment) and when we are getting up close she says to me (no apology mind you): “Look, there may be a whiff of alcohol. Maddie and I like to have a whisky and milk when I arrive from up north. It’s a bit of a nerve wracking drive down, you know.”

“Women after my own heart,” I say to her, cementing our friendship even further, thinking I wouldn’t mind one myself.

~~oo0oo~~

Brauer replied: The old duck was probably too bashful to admit that the wee dram was in preparation for the trying ordeal of decision making required between “number one and number two” when they all look the bloody same – and awful at that!

~~oo0oo~~

Koos wrote: Harrismith had a number of sets of old spinster sisters:

The Hawkins, Flo & Madge & Bill & Blanche
Lived at Watersmeet, where the Kak Spruit flows into the mighty Vulgar River on the northern edge of the metropolis. The new bypass slices through their front garden. One was a headmistress and varsity lecturer and author (I have one of her books, The History of Harrismith – riveting stuff);

The Simpsons, Vera** & Joan
Ran a dairy on townlands on the JHB road just past the Verkykerskop turnoff; Seen in town every day with just a shock of white hair peeping above the steering wheel of their tiny grey Morris Minor bakkie with huge silver milk cans on the back, strapped to the cab – delivering milk to their faithful customers. Supply your own bottles, they’ll decant into them – how green was that! One of them slept on the open verandah of their old farmhouse – I can see her bed in my mind’s eye as clear as yesterday – summer and Harrismith winter for about 100 years. About. Wonder what the price of their milk was? Years later I got a letter in America. 1973. From my sat-next-to-each-other-from-Sunday School-to-Kathy-Putterills-to-Sub-A-to-Matric buddy Fluffy bemoaning the terrible fact (he even said “I don’t know where it will end”) that the price of milk had gone up to 6c a pint and the Scope magazine now cost 20c;

The Jacobs, Marie & Bessie
Lived on Walton farm, a paradise on the upper Vulgar River, huge old sandstone house in a garden filled with massive oak trees; Took over the farming when their father died and slowly earned the respect of all the boere with hairy chins (by out-farming them and not rubbing their noses in it); Had a second farm in the Vrede district and roared between the two in their white bakkies; Beesboere, mainly. They helped rescue me and my Italian mate Claudio when we wrapped a canoe borrowed from the Voortrekkers around a tree stump wedged in a rapid on their farm while tripping from Swinburne to Herriesmif on a swollen Vulgar River back in Std 9. 1971. I see old Claudio, engineer, from time to time and when he introduces me he says “Meet Koos. I slept with him.” We shared a damp sleeping bag – the other one was soaked.

As far as I know, though, none of these spinster sisters “dopped” publicly. Or not much.

**Vera was famous for asking, at a church meeting where they were desperately searching for “elders” to take the collection for the dwindling Anglican church, and Tabs Fyvie’s name was mentioned as a possible sanctimonious candidate – or anyway as a candidate:
“Has his shadow ever darkened the door of this church?”
The nomination was quietly shelved.***

(Mom Mary also thinks this may have been Flo Hawkins)

~~oo0oo~~

Sheila wrote: Loved reading your e-mail – brought back so many memories – am going to forward it to Etienne, Lynn, Redge, Pierre, Ann and Shirley Mason if you don’t mind and cousin Mike in USA – his memories of Harrismith are also priceless – I’m sure he’ll remember some of these old ducks.

Who wrote to you about the price of milk? Was that Fluffy Crawley? (ed: Yep)

Spoke to Mum – the 5th Hawkins sister was Vi – she was tall and rangy; Mab (not Madge) was short and fat; Blanche wrote the book on Harrismith history; Bloody Bill (actually Mary) was a nurse up north in the war. They had one brother, who actually married. His grandchild Jill used to visit and play with Barbara – her mother was Val. Their plot on the edge of town was called Watersmeet, full of tall lush green trees, probly cos one of the Waters that Met was the Kak Spruit.

The Simpsons’ farm was Moyeni – windy. Their step-mother, Dame Simpson, came to live with them for a while. Vera was the bigger of the two and had the square jaw and the wild grey hair – Joan slept on the veranda. They also sold cream. I can see that old grey bakkie so clearly, with that mop of grey hair spilling over the steering wheel.

Mum nursed Norah Miller, who smoked like a chimney – apparently some guy went to Boschetto one day and knocked on the door – as he was telling the story, someone said, “Who opened the door?” “I don’t know, but she had one eye, one leg and a helluva cough!” This was the principal, Norah Miller – she had smoked glass on one lens of her glasses and a very bad leg – Dr Reitz made her some sort of metal caliper which helped enormously with her walking. Dad used to sell ponies to the young lady students – Billy Leslie was one of them. Mum remembers her cousin Leslie (Jessie Bain’s daughter) telling her the story of the “cough” but she can’t remember who the man was. (The feature pic shows Boschetto below the mountain with agricultural gals hard at work).

***Stella was furious about Blanche’s (ed: or Vera’s) comment – Tabs was perfect, didn’t she know that?

The Jacobs – Mum agreed that old Mrs Jacobs didn’t have a name – she was just Mrs Jacobs – Bessie was the wizard in the kitchen and Marie worked with the animals and the crops. Their cousin Robin Jacobs inherited everything when they died. Remember the scuff marks from the British officers’ spurs which could still be seen on the low down window sills in that beautiful old farmhouse? I remember them so clearly. The men used to hop in and out of the windows, instead of using the doors. The house was commandeered by the Poms during the Boere Oorlog. I seem to remember that we were camping on their farm when either the first heart transplant was done – or man walked on the moon – I can see us sitting huddled in the caravan listening to the radio – am I right?

Koos: I don’t remember I’m afraid, my only clear memory of a visit to Walton was this: I veered off from the rest of the people in that beautiful garden to have a pee under one of the impressive oak trees. When I got back to the group, Mom was disapproving! She whispered that she “could see – and everybody could have seen,” how I was weeing because my one leg of my shorts was pulled right up, so it was obvious from behind what I was doing. I remember thinking that was not such a big deal, and though I just kept quiet, I couldn’t imagine that it was a cardinal sin. I was fairly sure me n Jesus were still an item.

Who can add to these memories? And the man who started all this is Steve Reed, whom many of you will remember as Spatchmo, Koos’s great mate from Optom Student days, now resident in NZ. Ex-resident of Clarens – known as Nêrens since he left.

~~oo0oo~~

21 Feb 2025
Guard the Manse

Raise the drawbridge!

Mom tells of the time when The Formidable Terror, Tim Michell, our Methodist dominee’s youngest with a reputation for disturbing the peace, ran into our youngest sibling Sheila.

One fine day Mom and Sheila went to visit Dorianne and Tim at the manse, next door to the old Wesley Hall in Warden Street. As soon as they arrived the Moms, looking forward to a peaceful chat, shoo’d the kids out to play outdoors.

In no time Tim came wailing into the house complaining of something and demanding, Who are these people!? Dorianne said soothingly, ‘Timmy my boy it’s Mary and Sheila and they’ve come to visit.’

Well why did you open the door!?

Apparently he was not impressed as Mary and Dorianne collapsed with laughter.

~~oo0oo~~

In the picture Tim left, Sheila right, Dries Dreyer in the middle

21 Dec 2024
Early Daze

A re-post cos Mom told me some news today (see right at the end):

My first recollections are of life on the plot outside Harrismith, playing with Enoch and Casaya, childhood companions, kids of Lena and Bennett Mazibuko, who looked after us as Mom and Dad worked in town. The plot was in the shadow of Platberg, and was called Birdhaven, as Dad kept big aviaries. I remember Lena as kind and loving – and strict!

I lived there from when I was carried home from the maternity home till when I was about five years old, when we moved into town.

– those pigeon aviaries – and me –

I remember suddenly “knowing” it was lunchtime and looking up at the dirt road above the farmyard that led to town. Sure enough, right about then a cloud of dust would appear and Mom and Dad would arrive for their lunch and siesta, having locked up the Platberg bottle store at 1pm sharp. I could see them coming along the road and then sweeping down the long driveway to park near the rondavel at the back near the kitchen door. They would eat lunch, have a short lie-down and leave in time to re-open at 2pm. I now know the trip was exactly 3km door-to-door, thanks to google maps.

Every day I “just knew” they were coming. I wonder if I actually heard their approach and then “knew”? Or was it an inner clock? Back then they would buzz around in Mom’s Ford Prefect or Dad’s beige Morris Isis. Here’s an old 8mm movie of the old green and black Ford Prefect on the Birdhaven circular driveway – four seconds of action – (most likely older sister Barbara waving out the window):

1. Ruins of our house; 2. Dougie Wright, Gould & Ruth Dominy’s place; 3. Jack Levick’s house; 4. The meandering Kak Spruit. None of those houses on the left were there back then.

Our nearest neighbour was Jack Levick and he had a pet crow that mimic’d a few words. We had a white Sulphur-crested Cockatoo Jacko that didn’t, and an African Grey parrot Cocky who could mimic a bit more. Helmeted Guineafowl would visit by day, and a tame-ish Spotted Eagle Owl would visit at night.

Our next neighbours, nearer to the mountain, were Ruth and Gould Dominy and Ruth’s son Dougie Wright on Glen Khyber. They were about 500m further down the road towards the mountain, across the Kak Spruit over a little bridge. Doug’s cottage was on the left next to the spruit that came down from Khyber Pass and flowed into the bigger spruit; The big house with its sunny glassed-in stoep was a bit further on the right. Ruth and a flock of small dogs would serve Gould his tea in a teacup the size of a big deep soup bowl. I wonder how many sugars he added?

– Me and Jacko the sulphur-crested cockatoo outside the rondavel –

Judas Thabete lived on the property and looked after the garden. I remember him as old, small and bearded. He lived in a hovel of a hut across a donga and a small ploughed field to the west of our house. He had some sort of cart – animal-drawn? self-drawn? Self-drawn, I think.

– Me and Sheila on the front lawn – 1956 –

Other things I remember are driving out and seeing white storks in the dead bluegum trees outside the gate – those and the eagle owl being the first wild birds I ‘spotted’ in my still-ongoing birding life; The storks brought babies we were told – can’t level with kids. Hope parents are more straight-up with their kids these days. I remember the snake outside the kitchen door;

– Scene of the rinkhals leap – this taken thirty years later, in 1990 –

I don’t remember but have been told, that my mate Donald Coleman, two years older, would walk the kilometre from his home on the edge of town to Birdhaven to visit me. Apparently his Mom Jean would phone my Mom Mary on the party line and ask, “Do you have a little person out there?” if she couldn’t find him. He was a discoverer and a wanderer and a thinker, my mate Donald.

– fun on the lawn – and Bruno the Little Switzerland doberman –

Bruno the doberman came from Little Switzerland on Oliviershoek pass down the Drakensberg into Natal. Leo and Heather Hilcovitz owned and ran it – “very well” according to Dad. Leo came into town once with a few pups in the back of his bakkie. Dobermans. Dad said I Want One! and gave Leo a pocket of potatoes in exchange for our Bruno. He lived to good age and died at 95 Stuart Street after we’d moved to town.

– 1990 – Mom & Dad sit on the ruins of the stoep –

~~~oo0oo~~~

rondavel – circular building with a conical roof, often thatched;

spruit – stream; kak spruit: shit stream; maybe it was used as a sewer downstream in town in earlier days?

stoep – veranda

donga – dry, eroded watercourse; gulch, arroyo; scene of much play in our youth;

bakkie – pickup truck

~~~oo0oo~~~

– 1948 Ford Prefect –

A newsflash the year I was born – check the cars.

Our Ford Prefect was somewhere between a 1938 and a 1948 – the ‘sit up and beg’ look, before sedans went flat. They were powered by a 4 cylinder engine displacing 1172cc, producing 30 hp. The engine had no water pump or oil filter. Drive was through a 3-speed gearbox, synchromesh in 2nd and 3rd. Top speed nearly 60mph. Maybe with a bit of Downhill Assist?

~~oo0oo~~

Today – 25 Sept 2021 – Mom (who turned 93 a week ago today) tells me Kathy Schoeman bought the old Ford Prefect from her and one day they drove to work to see it lying on its roof in the main street outside the town hall! Kathy had rolled it in the most prominent place possible!

25 Sep 2021
Barbara’s Letter

. . to old Harrismith Jewish friends

Big sister Barbara Swanepoel Tarr met Rabbi Moshe Silberhaft, the travelling rabbi, who I wrote about some time back. He very kindly gave her a book.

Barbara tells of her voyage of discovery looking up old Jewish friends. This post is snippets from a letter she wrote:

Many of the names and surnames have been mentioned to me in conversations over the years with my parents and some I knew personally and grew up with. We’re still lucky enough to be able to contact our folks, Pieter Swanepoel (98) and Mary Bland Swanepoel (92), who now live in Pietermaritzburg and still have amazingly good memories. They fill in the gaps with names and places and help make our history come alive.

In Harrismith, the Royal Hotel was built by my great grandfather Stewart Bain and was sold to Mr. Sookie Hellman; the Central Hotel was built by his brother James Bain and was sold to Mr. Randolph Stiller.

– the extended Stiller family –

We lived in the Central Hotel for about three months in 1960. Mom and Dad had bought our first house in town – 95 Stuart Street, and were waiting for the tenant’s lease to expire. There we got to know the Stiller family (Isa was a young girl at school, I think) and Becky Kaplan, the receptionist. The Deborah Retief Gardens were our playing fields, under the watchful eye of Ted and Fanny Glick, sitting on their balcony in Van Sandwyk Flats No 1.

Fanny Glick and my grandmother Annie Bain Bland were the best of friends. Sunday afternoons these two characterful old dears would pick up the three Swanepoel kids in Annie’s big cream Chev and tootle down to the Park on the Wilge River. There we were each given a sixpence and left to our own devices at the round kiosk. ‘Glick’ and ‘Anna’ (that’s what they called one another) enjoyed tea and scones in the Chevy, and us three would swing, slide and no doubt fight on all the wonderful ‘things’ in the playground.

– See Anna and Glick, great friends, on a drive – we’re in the back seat –

Around 2015 a bee flew into my bonnet, and I started looking for old Harrismith High School scholars. Finding Ivan and Brenda Katz in Joburg was a gem of a find; I also found another strong Harrismith sister, Adele Cohen.

In 1961 in Std 1, I received my first bicycle for Christmas – a blue Raleigh that kept me going to matric in 1970. I remember going into your Dad Eddie Cohen’s shop for a patch, a new tube, a bell or just to look around. All too soon, the three Swanepoel kids were finished with school and our bikes were no longer needed. Happily they became the property of new owners…the three Cohen kids.

Joy Kadey, your parents’ shop, Jack Kadey’s Jewellers, still stands and is very much alive. Now called Louis’ Jewellers. While the name has changed, very little else has changed in the shop and in the whole building, thanks to Louis Nel and his daughter Erika Nel du Plessis (the owner). She has managed to make time stand still in a little place of long ago. Absolutely worth a visit to this ‘lil ‘ol shoppe’ of our childhood. Erika and husband Pierre du Plessis live in Louis Green’s old home in Warden Street, which they have also restored beautifully. One of Harrismith’s magnificent old homes.

Other Jewish people from old Harrismith are Essie Rosenberg Lunz, John French (great nephew of Fanny Glick, who sent a Facebook link on the Harrismith Jewish Cemetery), David Babbin, son of Isaac and Joey Babbin from the Tickey Bazaar, where you could buy ‘everything.’ How I loved that shop! Walking in through the door took one into an amazing fairyland. Baskets of all sorts on the floor, glass compartments of sweets at mouth-watering eye level, and counters of ‘what you will,’ and everything that could hang was hanging …just ‘as you like it’…..it was all there!

– the occasion: Ivan Katz’s barmitzvah! –

~~oo0oo~~

12 May 2021
The Swansonian Museum

Scottish courts have an office of The Keeper of the Rolls. We don’t have a Rolls to keep, but we do have a vault-keeper.

In every generation there is (hopefully) a vault-keeper, one who guards the links and knows they are precious. author Dani Shapiro, paraphrased.

In our family our Keeper of the Rolls and Vault-Keeper is Sheila in her flat on the Berea in Durban.

– eish – photo albums – what an old-time ‘cloud’ looks like –

Sheila’s busy scanning, saving and tossing to try and get some space back! Her lucky friends are receiving envelopes of pictures with the admonition, ‘Take these and go!’

I catch what I can and add to my blogs, my digital vault. Parked now ‘on the cloud.’ One day – a book? Maybe even an old-fashioned paper one?

~~oo0oo~~

2 May 2021
War Correspondent

While suffering terribly (NOT) during Basic Training in the weermag in a remote outpost outside Potchefstroom (which is itself remote) called Loopsruit, I had a brief respite from the relentless um, tedium, to pen a hurried note to sister Sheila and friend Joey K Nott. They were being paid to drink beer and lead schoolchildren astray in the gin-soaked hills of Empangeni. So briefly, you see, I was a war correspondent.

The lasses had kindly sent me a letter and a parcel and how welcome that was, if you’ve ever sat through a whole posparade where every Tom, Dick and Jannie gets a letter and you sit there like kippie and get fokol, then you know the humiliation of the latter and the unbridled joy of the former. Looking down your nose at the poor poeses whose Ma’s haven’t written to them that week cos they’re working, and anyway there’s no news in their little tuisdorp, and secretly, they don’t actually have a girlfriend even though they’re always talking about a girlfriend, gives one a great sense of superiority and one needs superiority when the whole point of Basic Training is inferiority. Y’unnerstand?

My parcel contained – as I wrote in appreciation – “grub, Scopes, sweets, Time magazines, etc.” Ha! ‘Scopes’ were poesboekies in the days of nipple-censorship. In 1979 gentlemen were expected to go through a marriage ceremony before legitimately seeing their first nipple. Black stars covered the area where a nipple might hide, and if you scratched the black ink off, it just left a hole in the page.

My main news was normal army shit: We’d had 2,5hrs of punishment drill cos we missed a 4.45am deadline to go on a route march. Turned out – this is NOT unusual – the punishment drill for missing the route march was way milder than the actual route march. We were relaxed after 2,5hrs punishment, whereas the ous were fucked after the 5hr route march experience. Don’t look for logic.

According to my letter the only two ‘hard’ days we’d had were a Monday and a Tuesday on which we did ‘leopard crawl’ and ‘rolling down a hill’ in full kit and helmets and ‘carrying our pea-shooters.’ The toughness was relieved by the hilarity of ‘watching the others’ – ‘you just saw helmets, arms, rucksacks, feet and rifles flying.’

And weekend passes had been cancelled, so I would miss Des’ wedding.

‘Lotsa love, Koos’

~~oo0oo~~

image found somewhere on the internets years ago

weermag – weather might; defence force; army

posparade – ceremony of the handing out of the postal delivery

like kippie and get fokol – like a fool and no post for you

poeses – pricks; fools

poesboekies – skin magazines; soft (very soft) porn

tuisdorp – hometown

1 Mar 2021
Up the Creek

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 – the old British officers mess (or the doctor’s residence?) became the maternity home. 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 (more accurately Kakspruit) 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 – 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, halfway between the plot on the banks of the Kakspruit and our new house in town.

Then Charlie Ryder came to town, and one thing led to another . . . also, eventually I got myself a Lekker Canadian Paddle.

~~oo0oo~~

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 humourously suggesting Japanese quality was perhaps dodgy back then. 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 then westward through the golf course on the northern edge of town, then turns south and flows into the mighty Wilge below the old park weir on the right bank; Sensitive Harrismith people refer to it as ‘die spruit met die naam;’ Bah humbug.

die spruit met die naam – ‘the creek with the name’ – that’s a kak description – 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:

windbuks – air rifle; pellet gun.

~~oo0oo~~

18 Sep 2020
Drunken Revelry

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. You could say we were raised on grog.

– 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 found an old familiar brandy-making figure online: the Oude Meester bust. We fondly remember Jan Jan die Oudemeester Man! Jan Robertson, the rep who would visit us to sell his popular product.

..

This is where the big blow-up bottles were displayed, along with the striding statue of Johnny Walker whisky; Dewars White Label whisky’s Scottish soldier ‘drum major;’ Black & White whisky with their black and white Scotty dogs; Beefeater Gin’s ‘beefeater’ in his red uniform, etc. Spot them below. All were shouting a loud Drink More! and in small print; _{um, drink responsibly.}

BrandyAle had people’s best interests at heart when they told you how drinking BrandyAle would “Fight the High Cost of Living.”

Methodists are pretty strongly anti-alcohol, so I believe it is testimony to Mother Mary’s organ-playing skills (and her much-loved status among all who know her) that we could run a bottle store six days a week and still be Methodists on the Sabbath! (Kidding! It was the collection plate. Kidding!).

~~oo0oo~~

13 Sep 2020
Sharp Mary

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!

~~~oo0oo~~~

7 Jun 2020