LIFE IN A TIGHT SHIP OR ANGE CRACKING THE WHIP IN SOUTH AFRICA

Home life in South Africa was always active and full of fun. With Desyi cracking the whip and pushing my butt out the door each day, to work on the funding for our next adventure, the girls providing the comic relief, the dogs guarding the property, Salena (the maid) keeping things tidy and Johannes dispensing his brand of African wisdom, there were very few dull moments. In this post, I am going to let my mind ramble around a bit.

If you hear any sort of grinding sounds, that would be the old clutch still slipping and my mind trying to self destruct. I try to remember everything and every occurrence. However, the things that remain in my mind are only glimpses into our life. Those that had some significance, and that for one reason or another stuck fast in my memory. Again, everything that I write is the full truth as I remember it. I try not to cover up, shade, embellish or otherwise distort the truth as I see it. Today’s article contains snippets of daily life and our time in Sandown, Sandton, Johannesburg, South Africa in 1989.

First let me say, Ange was now rolling off “one liners” fairly often and was hilarious with some of her innocent contributions to life “as she saw it”. One evening we were having a family dinner in the formal dining room, fully engaged in family chatter. As often the case, Ron (Ange’s tutor, mentor and sensei) was “cutting up” and getting herself in some kind of trouble with her mom. She had developed a habit of teasing someone constantly. I am not quite sure where this came from, but this particular evening she was on her mother’s case. And when she got going, she could really, really hit you where it hurt.

This teasing had been going on long enough and after being told, admonished, scolded and threatened, she was still performing, when ol’ Ange jumps down from the table, and without a word goes stomping down the hallway towards the bedrooms. Now Deysi has two situations to handle, one trying to get Ange to return to the table and two trying to get Ron to stop. Me, I’m staying out of this! I am in a no win situation, if I chime in, I’m very likely to attract the ire of all three and find myself the target of joint abuse. Not wanting to sacrifice myself for their unification, I sit back to monitor the proceedings.

In a couple of minutes here comes Ange. She has a very stern look on her face and is dragging one of my belts behind her. It was about 5 feet of leather dragging behind her 3 foot frame. She walks into the dining room and her mother says “Ange what are you doing?!” Ol’ Ange looks up and with the angriest expression she could muster, announces “I’m gonna belt that girl”. Once again, I was at risk of peeing the old diaper. It came out so innocent and so serious that you couldn’t help but know she was committed. It stopped Ron in her tracks. We were all now howling! Where she got the idea of a good belting from, is beyond me. That sort of punishment for a crime did not exist in our family, except maybe once or twice when Deysi wanted to belt me (story later, Not).

Johannes, our gardener and subject of a previous post, had by now been with us for a good few months and was a presence that we were now getting used to. He had formed a very special bond with our guard dogs. They were now a little bigger than puppies and had their guard skills finally tuned, by their trainers Ange and Ron. Yup break into our yard and you were liable to get attacked by two big old wagging tongues trying to lick you into submission. The exception was Johannes, they “hated” him and he in return equally “hated” those dogs. How this happened, I am not sure, but it appeared that, instinctively, those dogs had a dislike for him.

His room was in the back where the dogs lived, so they were in close proximity to each other daily. What took place between them was 100% mutual. Johannes’ room was in a corner of the back yard where the dogs also had free range. In the evening when it was time to call it quits for the day ol’ Johannes used to peer over the gate, wait until the dogs went to the farthest corner of the yard, and then make a break (hotfoot you might say) for his door. He would have his key out and pointed towards the lock. You could then hear those dogs yelp and start coming across the yard. He had just enough lead on those dogs so that he could get to his room, open it, slam it shut and then bam, bam those dogs would hit that metal door. You always knew when Johannes had returned to his room, by the sound of the double gong as the dogs bounced off his door. This scene was repeated every day, early in the morning when he left and in the evening when he returned, and stayed like this as long as we were there, and as the dogs got bigger and bigger.

As I mentioned earlier, Selena, our maid, fit right into the mix. She had a very good business relationship with Deysi. For me, her biggest asset was that she could cook, and cook she did. Each and every evening I returned home from work, to a dining room resplendent with the product of her days cooking. My god were the meals special. I might get two different meats, potatoes, rice, two or three veggies, and dessert. Let me tell you, the Blue train had nothing on our meals, for splendour. It seemed that every meal was a special occasion and that she had cooked everything that we had in the house. Come to find out that this was very close to the truth.

Deysi figured it out very early in the game. You see the agreement they had was that Selena would cook enough so that she had enough left for her own evening meal. So you see, she kept the leftovers. The more she cooked, the more leftovers there were. We were four and most evenings she cooked enough for 8-10 people. I would have never worked it out. I would have just sighed and thought I must be special to get served food like this every day! Soon Deysi participated in the menu and portions returned to normal. But I always remember, this lady could cook! She got even better as Deysi started to give her tricks and tips and recipes. It was like eating in a restaurant every day.

I will leave you today, with one last Johannes post. Before leaving for Mauritius and the Seychelles, I took Johannes into the back yard to show him some work that I wanted done while we were away. Our back yard had about 15 Apricot trees growing in it. They were beautiful trees, but had grown about 10 feet in the months since our arrival. They now stood about 20 feet high. So I’m standing there with Johannes and with hand gestures, and words, instruct him to trim the fruit trees in a nice dome like shape, and reaching my arm up I show him a rounded off shape pointing up into the trees. He looks at the job and says “ok, I will do it”.

I ask, if there is anything that he doesn’t understand, does he have sufficient tools, and anything else I can think of so this job does not go “sideways”. He tells me everything is good. We finish with an understanding and I am very happy with my communication abilities. I tell Desyi, that Johannes was going to trim the fruit trees while we were gone. She doesn’t say anything but I can see that “are you mad” look in her glance at me. What could go wrong? Well on our return, I had forgotten all about my instructions to Johannes, but a few days later I was out in the back for something and noticed about 15, five foot tall stumps, sticking out of the ground where the fruit trees once resided!

I lose my breath, as if someone had punched me right in the old bread basket. I stagger inside and yell for Desyi. “What” she says, “what happened to our fruit trees”, I wheeze out? “Didn’t you tell Johannes to trim them”. My heart sank, my knees turn to jelly and I realize, that I had forgot to mention the ladder. I just assumed that my dome shape pointed up into the upper branches was sufficient too convey my meaning. NOT! Johannes had got out the saw and at about as comfortably high as he could reach “trimmed” the trees. This comfortable height for him was at the 5 foot level. One thing I did notice though, was at the top of each stump, he had sawn them off in a sweet little dome shape, about 6 inches across. Shame on me!