A young lady growing up on a farm in rural South Africa in the 70’s and early 80’s.
Our big draftee farmhouse on Kia Ora, in KwaZulu Natal, was my castle. The busy farmyard always filled with people and animals, the constant action, the veld that we looked out onto and explored during our walking expeditions, the dams that were built over time by the family and in the distance, the beautiful constantly changing but all ways present, majestic, and picturesque Drakensberg mountains with Bergville nestled beneath them. This was my kingdom and I loved it. Our family had farmed this land for over 100 years and I felt my very deep tap root into the South African soil.
Driving through to town with the contours of deep pink cosmos during the Easter season and how they would sprout on the side on the road, is how I would like to liken myself. Resilient and offer such beauty (in my case a bit of light heartedness) in harsh conditions…. A ray of light on a cloudy day…. Blue heaven on a rainy day…a pretty weed coming up in the paving stones … a little green park bench under a giant tree… pointing their faces to the sun and getting things done. Bergville, our local town, has seen many changes over time and is attached to a highly active and productive farming community. To me, the farming community was always the heartbeat and the rest just a supporting “attachment”. But the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” certainly was true of Bergville. Our tennis coach was a friend of Moms, our Sunday School teacher (on a Wednesday afternoon!) was my aunt…. our teacher was the fiancé of my folk’s bachelor friend…. love was all around like amniotic fluid (I guess some might have found it a bit claustrophobic but not me …).
Having said all this about the harsh African climate and how I fitted into it – I do see myself as a bit of an “English Rose”. Love a bit of Woollies in the fridge…. My en-suite bathroom …. And my percale sheets … my high heels …. My (very seldom experienced due to my high self esteem …. Love you Mom and Dad) inadequacies do surface when faced with a real “boer vrou” who can do a dinner party for 20 off the land and with no trip to town, who makes her own butter (every day!) and whose garden rivals Babylanstoren!
The change of seasons on the farm were distinct, so when we went to school and learnt about the sun moving around the earth, cloud formations etc. this all made sense. The seasons showed us our position in the calendar and what big celebration we could start looking forward to. Rainstorms in the afternoon bringing thunder, lightning and wind – meant summer, sitting like rock rabbits in the sun coming through the windows in the sun room and reading a book – meant that it was the long July holidays and the destructive hail storms meant that it was around Christmas / New Year. Exploring the farm after big rainstorms was always exciting. We would see the water rushing in streams into the dams, across the roads and through the veld, making new gully’s or roaring through old ones but inevitably we would pile out of the truck and start doing some earth works and end up having fun in all the mud. The fun of youth! One of these adventures had a purpose, however. Dad had built a canal to transfer water from a smaller stock watering dam into the big irrigation dam and we wanted to see this stream in action. Of course, it worked perfectly!
Coming home from school and joining dad at the firebreak told us it was the beginning of winter and that dad was securing the farm against run away fires. We would all get involved in stepping the small flames out and doing it in your school uniform with your school shoes and white school socks was much more fun. The eastern boundary of the farm runs along the great Tugela River, and over the years this natural fire break has saved Kia Ora from fire disasters on many occasions. But with the wind howling, smoke blowing and dust in every nook and cranny, a run-away fire is a very scary thing. Making you feel exceedingly small and insignificant, that at a whim you could spontaneously combust and join the dust swirling outside.
Our farmhouse had solid wooden floors throughout and these had been scrubbed clean and washed over the years until they resembled a dehydrated state. It had high ceilings and big rooms. These were all connected with a wide passage that linked the house with the land line telephone at the centre of the house right outside the bathroom door in the centre of the house. This would cause anxious moments when I got any calls from boys, they always phoned (which was certainly not very often) at night. The house was quiet, all had gone to bed, you could hear a pin drop! The bathroom was the only one in the house and housed the bath and the toilet. This was the way it was done in “the olden days” as the plumbing went to the kitchen and so to add a bathroom to a house was easier if the bathroom was next to the kitchen. Old farmers were nothing if not practical. The bathroom was a big room and housed the toilet, bath, and basin. We had a big towel stand in the corner that we could hang all our towels on and down the one wall mom eventually got her first and only set of built-in cupboards with a built-in laundry shoot – very smart. In the later years, it was big enough to house the washing machine. Even with all the fittings in the room it was big enough for me to do some jumping exercise and star-jumps before bath! The energy of youth but also the need to warm up! The window-sills throughout the house were large sash type that were left wide open on the hot summer evenings to try and capture any breath of wind, but was also an open invitation to any mosquito in the district to pull in, and there were lots of them. The house had a wraparound veranda around two sides, one of which was closed in to form the sun-room. The big front veranda was the place where the family would meet twice a day for tea. The farm representatives would make their appointments to coincide with these times and join us for tea and business would be discussed while walking to the veranda, but never while we were all together.
The outlook of our home was over a flat lawn (called, ostentatiously, the tennis court) and then through an orchard ending with a clear view of the farmyard and all the farm activities and inner working. We could see my dad coming home at any time of the day. We would run to meet dad and walk the short walk home together chatting all the way home.
The orchard was very productive with a variety of fruit trees dripping with their bounty. Our best-loved, especially during silkworm season, was the mulberry tree. Mulberry leaves were a favourite food of the lowly silkworm. Boxes of silkworms would be carted to school to show friends, swop, and compare. There was always something to munch in the orchard on the way to visit dad at the sheds.
A result of this “open-plan” farm layout was a huge rolling lawn that went right down to the sheds and through the orchard. Mowing the lawn, before the ride on mower of today, was a 3-day affair. No sooner had that all been done, and mom fixed all the patches on the extension cord that had been run over and cut, then it was time to start again. No ride on mower back in “the old days”.
The physical layout of the farmyard was instrumental to our upbringing. The farm was all encompassing, it was a part of everything we did and everything we thought of doing.
Pink Farm Chick 