Even for the local people who were accustomed to living on their own large properties in our little town, a visit out to our family home at Matamba was considered to be something special. The reason was not only because they knew they would be made to feel very welcome, but because our rural property had such great appeal. From the day Dad’s team of well sinkers struck a sufficient supply of life-giving water rich in natural ingredients on our patch of virgin land, he began planting fruit trees of every variety that one could get to grow in the hot and dry Gatooma climate. The expansive vegetable garden reflected the same: even in the dry months it had rows of all the vegetables we could ever use, including different leaf vegetables like rape (chamollier, as they called it) that our black employees preferred to our Western favourites. We always had an abundance of vegetables to give away and very few visitors ever left without a basket of soil-fresh fruit and vegetables.
Then there were the varieties of most recent animal and bird orphans brought to us by local farmers and others who happily handed them over for nurturing back to health and eventual release back into the wild (if their release ultimately proved possible.) Duiker antelopes were the most common orphans because their mothers were easy prey for poachers using snares. For a while we actually had nine of them to care for, nursed to adulthood by bottle feeding. And us kids seldom didn’t have pookies to keep in our bedrooms as cuddly pets (also known as night apes; lesser bushbabies; nagaapies; pukunyoni, or more scientifically correct, as a Galago) and we always had mischievous (actually, destructive little buggers) vervet monkeys running free. Free to come and go as they liked, but the abundance of food at home usually kept them as permanent residents on our property. Wild as they were, all these wild friends often came into our home when they wanted some human company, a scratch, or a favourite titbit. For us kids, to be able to entertain friends was never a problem. Kids were always told to go and play outside, and we always found plenty to do even if it was only to employ the art of finding scorpion holes and dig up the reluctant inhabitants to amuse ourselves.
But then there were the other species. Humans. Some truly beautiful ones. Exquisite, in fact. Take Robyn for example. When this stunningly attractive teenage girl walked through our front door behind her parents, my senses rushed clean out of my head and immediately into my bloodstream where they set about blinding me! To say that I was staring at her agape and wide eyed must be the understatement of the decade. Robyn was simply beautiful from her shiny black hair all the way down to her painted toenails peeping out of her shoes. She looked as if she had just stepped away from an international models’ photo shoot, still wearing a famous designer’s clothing brand. Men are never born so perfect. Only women. Even so, not all of them are.
After a typically warm, Rhodesian-style family welcoming of our in-transit visitors, a chat, a drink and something to nibble on, I took Robyn on a tour of the Matamba menagerie. She was quickly drawn to our monkeys and for a change the vervets seemed to be in a good mood, allowing her to pet them, just as long as she didn’t try and pick one of them up for a cuddle. I crouched close by, keeping watch over Robyn and still very much mindful of an unfortunate social visit the previous weekend when I was showing another young lady around when one of the duiker antelope males took an instant dislike to her and charging up suddenly in the fading twilight it butted her hard, puncturing her one thigh with its spiky horns. I had never known any of our buck to behave that way, and I felt terrible, embarrassed and sorry about the inexplicable incident. It might have been a jealous duiker who had picked up on her hormonal condition. Who knows?
When Robyn saw uncle Dudley’s home-built sports car parked under the flamboyant trees behind my huge aviary, all her interest in our fauna and flora evaporated and she rushed ahead of me with her hair bouncing on her shoulders as she ran towards the austere performance vehicle. In appearance it was not much more than a very low-slung two-seater sports car he and a sports car enthusiast friend had constructed on a 1950’s-something Volkswagen Beetle chassis and powered by a modified VW engine with a supercharger to make it run extremely fast and accelerate like a rocket. As my father said the first time that I took him for a ride in it, one felt “…as if one was having one’s bum wiped by the tarmac!” Being seated so close to the road, one experienced the distinct illusion that the car’s performance was far in excess of reality, but nevertheless, it was very fast!
They say that petrol and alcohol don’t mix on the roads, but sure as rainbows have colours, nor do petrol and hormones: when Robyn asked me to take her for a drive I probably croaked something like “Yes, lets…” but meanwhile all the standard vehicle checks I would routinely have carried out before driving onto the main road were taken as ‘done.’ Being a Saturday afternoon, there were very few other vehicles on the road, probably only one or two other cars passing every half hour at the most. The exhilarating feeling of the power of the vehicle as we tore down our long driveway and then onto the strip road towards Gatooma could only be matched – in part – by what it was like to have such a thrilling companion squashed into the small seat we shared. She whooped with delight as we raced along some two hundred yards of driveway and watching her expressions made my chest swell with pride. If only my pals could have seen the two of us having so much fun as we came over the brow of the Cam Hill and then down, speeding like a demented whirlwind.
Its hard to try and describe the vast contrast of emotion I felt when the engine died on me. Without any hint of a warning it shut down at the bottom of the hill and immediately it happened I remembered that I hadn’t stuck my finger into the filler cap to check the fuel level in the small tank when we first decided to go on our joyride. I was singularly responsible for my stupidity. Before the vehicle came to a complete stop I managed to pull over on the shoulder of the road while my mind raced. What about Robyn? How was I going to be able to get her to safety while I sorted out the petrol problem? How could I leave her alone in the bush, miles from anywhere? Where should I go for help? Which was the best alternative – trying to get home, or trying to get to town? The questions flooded my mind and one of the biggest threats I had to face was how to explain my irresponsibility to Robyn’s parents, and mine too. My father had absolute zero tolerance of anyone who ran out of petrol on any road, always asking “…Do you honestly think you save fuel when you drive your car on an empty tank…?” How true.
Still preoccupied by horrible mental images of what might happen in the forthcoming hours, I was distracted by a deep, rich voice coming from behind me where a black man was greeting me as he dismounted from his bicycle. I cannot remember what I said to Robyn to reassure her, but within a few minutes there I was, a young adult, sitting side-saddled on the carrier on the back of the stranger’s bicycle and off we rode to town! There he kindly dropped me off at Dad’s “Duly & Co” Ford outlet and I persuaded the petrol attendant “Foyer” to let me borrow a one gallon can filled with petrol for the urgent rescue of my uncle’s quicksilver, but functional, vehicle. That was the easy part. How to return to Robyn, the vehicle, and my own reasonably sane state of mind was another challenge altogether! It seemed that there was just not another soul in town that evening.
My guardian angel must have arranged it, but after a relatively short wait during which I had made up my mind to walk across to the Model Bakery in the main street and ask Mr. and Mrs. Wood if I could phone home, call for help and face the wrath of my father, when Isaak Niehaus arrived driving his brand new and thumping-big Ford Starliner which everyone thought was the most beautiful new car in town, and imported specially from the USA. Isaak had ordered his dream car from dad and had proudly taken delivery of it only a few days before. Can you imagine my embarrassment when I had to ask Isaak to do me a special favour and take me, and my can of petrol, back to where I hoped to find Robyn unharmed? I could imagine him thinking how stupid I was, especially since he knew I was the son of the manager of Duly’s who surely knew enough about cars, with cars pulsing in his veins, to avoid anything like this event ever happening to him.
I’m sure my whole head glowed bright red all the way back to the spot at the bottom of the Cam Hill. When we arrived, Robyn looked distraught to say the least, but she was safe and unharmed, thank goodness. As Isaak drove away the burble of his Star liner’s huge V8 engine echoed off the dense hillside vegetation almost in rhythm with my pounding heart. But this time it wasn’t because of Robyn’s effect on my hormones that it was happening. It was aftershock!
davidgoelst 