Now that the fire had ruined our tourist business on Arrojela, we soon realised that we had no alternative but to leave Portugal and to look elsewhere for work. Despite our efforts, every door we tried was closed. Eventually, we decided that the only thing to do would be to rent Arrojela out for a nominal rent, considering the dreadful state it was in, and try our luck in South Africa, where I had been born and where what remained of my small family was still living.
It was a sad decision to make but I consoled myself that it wouldn’t be for long, maybe just for a year or two. It was also sad saying goodbye to the friends we had made in the Algarve, especially as I knew that some of them like our dear old Dutch friend Jan wouldn’t be alive when we came back. Jan had emphysema from all the cigarettes he’d smoked all his life and died in 1992, not long after I left.
When we had a last farewell supper with our friends Rev and Merryl who owned the beautiful Casa Meranka Guest House in Figueira, near Villa do Bishpo, Rev tried his best to cheer us up with jokes and riddles.
“Do you know how to make a small fortune in Portugal, O’D?” Rev asked, while he filled our glasses with the rough Algarvean wine he liked to drink and which always stained our tongues a virulent deep purple. Rev was tough and lean and had once been a British paratrooper.
No,” O’D said glumly. “If I knew how, I would have done it.”
“But you DO know how,” Rev said with his loud, cackling laugh, “because you’ve just done it!”
“What are you talking about?” O’D asked.
Rev gulped down some wine and gave another cackling laugh. “How do you make a small fortune in Portugal? You bring a big one with you when you come here!”
“I don’t think that’s funny at all, Rev,” I said.
CHAPTER TWO
AFRICA!
I left the Algarve for South Africa a few months later, in November. O’D stayed behind to find homes for our two dogs, Genghis and Attila, and to look for someone to rent Arrojela. I was still numb and in something of a state of shock from being so unexpectedly uprooted from the home I loved. I had planned to grow old at Arrojela and now here I was, on a plane heading towards Africa! I was someone who liked to know what I was doing and now I didn’t have a clue where I was going to end up and I had no ideas at all for the future.
At Jan Smuts Airport (later called Johannesburg International and later still, renamed O.R. Tambo Airport) a sunburnt, blonde Immigration Officer stamped my British passport (courtesy of being married to O’D) and gave me a cheery grin. “Aaah … born in Port Elizabeth,” he said. “Welcome back to South Africa!”
“Thank you,” I said gloomily.
I went off to find my luggage, which fortunately had arrived at the same destination as I had, and made my way over to the Domestic Terminal. Although I was now in South Africa, my journey still wasn’t over. I had to catch a flight to George, the small town in the Cape, where my sister Jennifer and her husband Paul would be waiting at the tiny airport to drive me off to their house, not far from Mossel Bay.
On the plane, I sat surrounded by chattering, camera laden and bespectacled Asian tourists and it appeared that, except for the flight attendants and the pilot, I was the only Caucasian passenger.
Where were these talkative travellers from the Far East going? To the lagoons of Knysna or the Tsitsikamma forest? I looked out of my window. We were flying over jagged ranges of mountains and harsh scenery that was completely unfamiliar to me. Not a good place to crash, I thought and wondered how on earth the Voortrekkers had ever managed to get over this terrain with their heavy, creaking wagons and their oxen.
With a sigh, I looked away from the window. I was back in the land of my birth, back in Africa, a turbulent continent that had never brought anything but turmoil to my ancestors’ lives ever since they had first set foot on its soil.
As the sunburnt Immigration Officer had noticed from my passport, I’d been born in Port Elizabeth, in the Cape. My first ancestors who had come to Africa had been Huguenots, making their escape from France in the 18th century and when I’d been very young, my grandmother had given me an extremely colourful version of this escape.
Until I was five, my mother, father and I had lived with my grandparents (my father’s parents) in their big old house overlooking a leafy park. We had lived downstairs, while Gran and Gramps had lived upstairs.
Here, the best part of the day for me always came first thing in the morning. When I woke up, I would creep up the stairs and tap on my grandparents’ bedroom door to be let in. They would still be in bed and while they drank coffee and ate sweet biscuits, Gran, who was something of a socialite and very fashionable, would give me the tremendous treat of allowing me to try on her huge and gorgeous collection of hats.
Oh, what a thrill it was to open hat box after hat box and to feast my eyes on wonderful confections of organza, velvet and straw, felt and fur; feathers dyed the colour of jewels and flowers and fruit fashioned out of delicate silken fabrics and wax.
While I occupied myself with my favourite morning occupation, sitting in front of the mirror and admiring myself in a variety of delectable hats, Gran occupied herself with her favourite occupation … which was talking.
Usually, this involved real life stories about our ancestors and the way Gran told them, they were certainly much more exciting than the bedtime fairy stories my mother read to me in the evenings.
“My family, the Duvinage, was originally from France, you know, Valry,” my grandmother would begin. She always called me Valry, much to my mother’s annoyance. She even spelled my name that way on letters and birthday and Christmas cards. “We were called Huguenots and we had to flee for our lives from France because the Roman Catholic Church was after us. We escaped in wine barrels … sailing off across the ocean all the way from France until we landed at the Cape of Good Hope.”
Unaware that my grandmother had omitted a vital piece of information, which was something she often did, the bygone antics of these remarkable ancestors of mine filled me with admiration. How daring they had all been! Imagine … sailing away across the ocean in BARRELS!
Picturing the scene quite clearly, my childish mind imagined dozens of men and women, hair in ringlets and clad in silk and velvet, bobbing along bravely in their big wine barrels over the sparkling, white-tipped blue waves of the sea and unerringly making their way straight to the shores of South Africa.
It was only later when I learnt to read that I discovered what my grandmother had forgotten to tell me. Disappointingly, my Huguenot ancestors had not barrelled their way to Africa. To avoid detection while boarding ship in France, they had merely hidden themselves inside some empty barrels, pretending to be part of a consignment of wine being loaded for South Africa.
After their arrival in the Cape, it had been downhill all the way for my ancestors. Except for short periods of peace, which allowed them to prosper temporarily and which gave them a false sense of optimism that everything was going to turn out alright, they seemed to have spent most of their time involved in some life and death struggle or other. They battled with the inhospitable bush, they fought malaria and black water fever and rinderpest; they ran away from the British during the Great Trek and somehow found themselves on the losing side of every war, except for World War One and Two.
Over a period of more than three centuries in Africa, we moved around in a great and slow circle from the Cape to Johannesburg and then, before the apartheid era came into being, we left Johannesburg for South West Africa. From South West Africa we went to Rhodesia, where another war caught up with us and when this was over, most of us who were young decided to leave Africa for good. Enough was enough!
And now here I was - back in Africa and in the Cape again, thanks to a fire! Hopefully, it wouldn’t be for long.
At this time, my family were living a short fifteen-minute drive away from Mossel Bay in a deadly boring place called Kleinbrak, where the monotony of life was only broken by the weekly arrival of the garb
age men to collect the rubbish. Their house was situated in a peaceful rural spot, very close to the river and although it was quite an old house, it was comfortable and spacious with the biggest kitchen I’ve ever seen. In the garden at the back of the house, there were two small cottages and I rented one of them.
After living in Arrojela, it was a bit difficult adjusting to life in a tiny cottage. It was even more difficult adjusting to life in a small, mainly Afrikaans coastal town. Although I enjoyed being with my family after so many years of separation, I found the atmosphere in South Africa rather off-putting and inhibiting, stifling even, especially where safety was concerned. In Europe, I’d grown used to living amongst people who were fairly law-abiding. Now, back in a country where mugging, car-hijacking and handbag snatching were national pastimes, I would have to re-learn the old safety habits I’d been so glad to discard when I’d gone to live in England.
With nothing to do except wait for O’D, I gratefully accepted Paul’s offer of a temporary Girl-Friday job at his boatworks in Mossel Bay. It made the time pass more quickly and gave me some pocket money.
My brother-in-law, who was tall and lean and who sported an enormously wild and bristly beard on his face, was passionate about boat engines. They appeared to be his first love, even supplanting my blonde and blue-eyed sister, and he often talked about them to me for hours on end. Chained to my chair out of politeness, I would listen to Paul explaining how he had gone about repairing his latest engine and describing the size, shape and number of every nut, bolt and screw he had used, even down to the spanners and screwdrivers. On and on he would talk, in his slow and drawling voice, while I listened until my eyes glazed over … like a Zombie’s … from having to endure this most dreadful mental torture a man could ever inflict on a woman.
Despite this downside to Paul’s character, he did have other more interesting things to talk about, and these were often to do with his own personal experiences with the Afrikaners in Apartheid South Africa.
One of his anecdotes that I found particularly hilarious was about the time when Paul had been living in a lighthouse.
The weather, Paul told me, had been exceptionally wet, miserable and stormy even for the Cape and this had kept him cooped up in his lighthouse for several days and nights. One Sunday afternoon, unable to take it anymore, he had decided to clear the cobwebs out of his head with some fresh air by going for a ride on his motorbike. As temperatures had plummeted and the day was freezing, he had thought that the best way to combat the excessive cold was to wear his form-fitting black wetsuit for the ride, and putting on his black safety-helmet, black gloves and black boots, he had sped off down the road.
After a few miles of exhilarating speed, he had heard the unwelcome sound of howling sirens and had been overtaken by some police cars with flashing lights. “Now what do these Turkeys want?” he had asked himself. Slowing down to a halt behind them, he had watched several beefy and very grim Afrikaans policemen climb out of their vehicles and begin to walk towards him. From the looks on their large, square faces and the way their stubby fingers had twitched over the triggers of the revolvers in their holsters, it had seemed to Paul that his misdemeanor, whatever it had been, was an extremely serious one!
“Howzit! What’s the problem?” he had drawled a greeting, and removed his helmet.
At this point in his story, Paul always snickered with enjoyment into his big beard when he remembered how the Afrikaner policemen’s beefy jaws had dropped when he had revealed his face to them and they had seen the colour of it.
“Magtig, man!” one of the Afrikaans policeman had cried. “What a terrrrible shock you’ve jist given us! When you flashed past us at high speed in that black wetsuit, we jist couldn’t believe our eyes. We thought we was seeing a NAKED AFRICAN riding a motorbike! A NAKED AFRICAN!”
This seemingly outrageous contempt for all social conventions by an AFRICAN in SOUTH AFRICA had rendered the policemen almost speechless for several long minutes before they had managed to pull themselves together. Then they had scrambled for their cars, to hit the road in hot pursuit after the perverted black biker.
Another of Paul’s loves was Pluto, his African grey parrot. Pluto had been born in captivity and had been given to Paul as a present. She adored him with all her little parrot heart, jealously treating Jenny and their two daughters, Danielle and Andrea, as rivals for his affection and flying at them to furiously peck at their feet to warn them off. When Paul fell asleep on the sofa in the sitting room, as he sometimes did on a Sunday afternoon, she would hop onto his chest, snuggle up into the curve of his neck and also go to sleep in the nest-like comfort of his great and bushy beard.
The little town of Mossel Bay was a trifle livelier than Kleinbrak. It was pretty and immaculately clean and had banks and shops and traffic in its streets. The sandy coves and beaches looked inviting but lost their allure for me one morning on a drive along the coastal road to the town with Paul.
“This part of the coast, you know,” Paul told me, “is the breeding ground of the Great White. The sea teems with sharks.” He removed a hand from the steering wheel and pointed a finger at the sparkling blue waves of the Indian Ocean. “There’s an island called Dyer Island further along the coast. It’s like a shark supermarket. The water around it is full of Great Whites because about 50 to 60 thousand seals live on the island and the Great Whites feed on the seal pups.”
The Great White!
“Wow,” I said.
“If you’re interested,” Paul, who was a man of the wild African outdoors and the wilder the better, went on, “I can contact one of the shark tour companies and arrange for you to spend some time underwater, in a cage, watching the sharks up close while they circle around the cage.”
A menacing and well-known film theme tune came into my mind … dada dada dada dada … and the picture of a girl struggling and screaming in a moonlit sea while her boyfriend slept, snoring and oblivious, on top of a sand dune … JAWS …
Another picture came into my mind, this time of myself in a cage while a Great White swam towards me with its blank cold eyes and its enormous cavern of a mouth gaping open wide, to crunch the cage …
I gave Paul a look. “Thanks, but I’ll give it a miss.”
Later on, when my sister Jennifer told me about my father’s recent stay in the tiny Mossel Bay hospital, I realised that danger wasn’t only confined to the sea in this somnolent little spot on the South African map. It lurked above ground as well, and in places you certainly wouldn’t expect to find it.
My father, who had been suffering from a heart problem for many years, had fallen ill and had had to spend some time in hospital. He’d been put in a room by himself until, one night, another patient, an African man, had been brought into the room and put into the empty bed next to his.
Dad had talked to the man for a while and had asked him what was wrong with him. The man had replied that he had been at a beer drink with some of his friends and that during the evening he had drunk down a bottle of DIESEL by mistake!
After a few more minutes of conversation, my father and the man had gone to sleep. Then, at about two o’clock in the morning, they had both been rudely awakened when some extremely drunk men had noisily burst into their room. Brandishing knives, the intruders had for some inexplicable reason rushed over to my father’s bed and grabbed hold of him, shouting that they were going to kill him!
Fortunately for my father, the drunks had turned out to be the diesel- drinking man’s companions and he’d been able to calm the men down by telling them that my father was his friend and persuading them not to harm him. In the end, the drunks had staggered out of the room, calm had returned and my father had eventually fallen asleep again.
However, as if being attacked in his hospital bed hadn’t been bad enough, there had been still more to follow.
In the morning, when my father had woken up, he had greeted his companion in the next bed but had received no reply. On closer scrutiny of the still f
orm lying under its hospital blanket, he had noticed that the man’s open eyes staring fixedly up at the ceiling had been sightless and that there had been no up and down movement of his chest. Sometime during the night, the poison had done its work and without even a sound, the diesel-drinking man had breathed his last breath and died.
My father had informed the hospital staff of his companion’s demise but they had made no effort to remove the dead body out of the room. As the day had progressed, the hospital staff had served Dad his breakfast of milky tea and soggy scrambled eggs on soggy toast and at lunchtime had given him another meal, behaving as if it was quite normal for a man to eat in the presence of a corpse mouldering away in the bed next to his. With this kind of attitude, who knows how long the dead man might have been left in that bed.
Luckily, my sister had paid a visit to my father at three o’clock that afternoon. She’d been shocked by the hospital staff’s lack of respect toward the dead as well as their insensitivity towards the sick. She’d also been aghast at the sight of the long trail of ants soldiering down the wall, marching across the floor, climbing up onto the dead man’s bed and walking all over his face, into his eyes, into his nostrils and into his mouth.
Jenny hadn’t minced her words with the hospital staff and within a few seconds of her arrival, they had come with a trolley and had taken the dead man away.
While I was getting to grips with some of the grim realities of life in Africa, O’D was still busy sorting everything out at Arrojela. It took him four months to pack our possessions into boxes and to store them in his mother, Marion’s, attic in her house in Montes da Cima and to find a home for Genghis and Atilla. He also rented Arrojela to a German who appeared out of the blue and offered to pay 198 pounds a month to live there with his family while we were away.
Monkeys in My Garden Page 5