Tales from the Old Karoo

by Guy Butler

When James got back from the fields I saw him with the weight of the fields and the people and the graves upon him. We went for the same walk, and came right past the Arab stables in the dusk. I paused and said:

  ‘I heard all about Sinquos from the manager’s son, and from Molly.’

  ‘All?’

  ‘Well – up to the rather odd funeral. Is there more?’

  He swallowed.

  ‘Not much. Except that four weeks after the funeral Sipho joined Sinquos.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Jannie Venter says they were collecting goats in the mountains. Some men ahead dislodged a stone, which set up a little avalanche, just a few stones, but enough to kill Sipho.

  ‘I sent for Abraham to tell him, and waited on the stoep with Molly. A black storm was brewing, and a wild wind coming up. The old chap’s coat was jerking this way and that way in the gusts as I told him. Then the white flash as the lightning struck the first toddy palm, and a rending crash, and the house and the whole world shaking. Those burning trees – I told you. Then the first big drops of rain, and the fires steaming in the weeping sky. As the flames started to die down, Abraham said: ‘Sinquos lonely other side. He come to fetch Sipho. They happy now, Qumbu side.”’

  James and I stood there, silent in the deepening dusk, until the first nightjar uttered its uncanny cry. Then we returned to the world of mere event.

  15

  Olive, Johanna and Cron

  Johanna van Dyk, nee Pienaar, is sitting on the stoep of the Old People’s Home in Cradock. She is not an inmate or a patient, but the matron. She knits a little, slowly, to kill time which hangs heavily on her hands – more heavily since the doctor has told her, gently, that she has a malignancy. She looks up vaguely at any person or vehicle that passes in the weak afternoon sun.

  The snow clouds have broken and are drifting off, and the bitter wind has dropped. Sometimes her eyes rest quietly on the roofs of the town, or on the mountains to the south, the Swaershoek, the Bankberg and the Gannahoek, or the pigeons and swallows swimming in the sky round the spire of the Dutch Reformed Church.

  A little coloured boy hands the copy of the local paper, Die Afrikaner, Friday 11 September 1936, through the stoep railings. It is one of her few privileges, this, to read it quickly before taking it through to old Mrs Jordaan, the lady warden. She is about to say, ‘There’s nothing in the paper’, then she sees a Reuters report of the death in Cape Town of Samuel Cronwright, aged seventy-four. She reads it again, and again. She stops reading and looks up at the mountains to the south, beyond the DRC spire, and fixes her gaze on one of them, Buffelskop.

  They say that drowning people see their whole past life unreel before them in a flash. She sees Cronwright-Schreiner as she saw him for the first time, in Hanover, during the Boer War, when she was fourteen years old; he about thirty-eight: handsome, tall, with piercing eyes; a pro-Boer Englishman. She blinks and turns back to the paper.

  ‘Older inhabitants will remember the late Mr Cronwright as a well-known figure in the district. His farm Kransplaas was close to the mountain on which his wife, the novelist, was buried in 1920. Her mortal remains were laid to rest on the top of a high mountain. Later the coffin of her daughter and her dog were also buried there.’

  Why must the paper always get things wrong? Her daughter, nameless, and her dog, Nita, were buried the same day as Olive. That day. Three coffins, there. Her gaze lifted to the distant mountain, and then reverted to the paper.

  ‘The remains of Mr Schreiner will arrive at Cradock tomorrow or Sunday. The funeral, which will also take place on top of the mountain beside his wife, will be held there tomorrow or Sunday.’

  Johanna stood up, her mind giddy with questions. ‘What shall I do? Am I fit enough to climb? It is my weekend on duty. Who would stand in for me? Would they have any understanding of my request? Sit down, Johanna, sit. Think.’

  It was during the Boer War in Hanover that old Miss Viljoen first spoke to her of Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner. Miss Viljoen was an asthmatic who understood asthma. She was about to take in another asthmatic boarder, a Mrs Olive Schreiner, a famous novelist. Was she a widow? No? Where was the novelist’s husband? Who was he?

  ‘A brave man is Mr Cronwright-Schreiner’, said Mrs Viljoen. ‘My brother says he’d rather face bullets than rotten eggs.’

  Where had he faced the rotten eggs? In England. He, an Englishman from South Africa, had toured England in the midst of this war, and made anti-war speeches – speeches defending us, the Boers. Would he be coming to Hanover with his wife? No, he was considered too dangerous to be allowed near the frontier. He’d just made a fiery pro-Boer speech at a meeting at Worcester attended by ten thousand people.

  Mrs Cronwright-Schreiner was short and dumpy and didn’t care how she looked. Apart from the British Army, there were not many English-speaking people in Hanover. They disliked her pro-Boer stand as much as the Army people did. She didn’t make any close friends with the Dutch speakers either. They might approve of her political views, of her rejection of C.J. Rhodes and all his works, but she was suspected of being full of dangerous thoughts. She was a freethinker. People watched to see where she went on Sundays. Nowhere. Or worse, she went for a walk, in her weekday clothes, with her dog, and her string of pet meercats, as far as the town perimeter. There she’d talk to the Tommy on guard, and come back.

  Her other dangerous thoughts were about sex and marriage. From one of the officers Johanna borrowed a copy of The Story of an African Farm. It struck her as very feeble: imagine, a man dressing up as a woman in order to nurse the dying heroine. She simply didn’t believe it, although Mrs Viljoen told her that Englishmen were capable of anything. The power of the book, she said, was in the talk, the ideas, the attitudes. Johanna had skipped these, looking for an elusive love story. All dangerous. It was hard to believe that the lonely little woman in Hanover had written a book that the whole world admired. She was supposed to be writing another, that would take the world by storm a second time.

  Johanna would never have got to know her or her husband but for her brother Boy and his part in trainwrecking at Taaiboschlaagte in the winter of 1902.

  Boy and Boet, her two elder brothers, were learning to farm with their brother-in-law, veldkornet J.D. Cilliers of De Bad, who’d married her beautiful elder sister, Lenie. Lenie had persuaded the veldkornet to employ them out of pity for her parents.

  The Pienaars were very poor. Johanna was the eighth child in a family of fifteen. Her father did odd building jobs, but, as he sadly said, ‘Hanover never experienced any building booms’. The Church helped, particularly the ACVV – who was still helping her now, and would probably assist her passage out of this vale of sorrows. No other family of poor Pienaars – and there were several in Hanover – had been scrubbed and cleaned up for church like they were. Her mother was a proud woman, and knew what was what. She told her children to make the most of the gifts God had given them because their parents had nothing to give. This Lenie had done – without one acre to her name, she’d used her beauty and married a veldkornet with three farms.

  Katrina had no looks at all, but she used what brains she had to such effect that the teacher spoke to the Dominee and the Church paid for her to go down to the Huguenot College in Wellington to train as a teacher.

  Old Mrs Pienaar said God had made things difficult for Johanna, by giving her both beauty and brains. Beauty attracted the young men, but they distrusted a girl whose nose was always in a book. A pretty girl with long red-golden hair was one thing; but any girl always reading must be sick, or too clever to live with.

  There was one young man who didn’t seem to mind Johanna’s liking for books: Petrus Gouws. His father was not quite as poor as old Pienaar. In fact, Petrus would one day inherit one fifth of his father’s farm, Vlakwater.

  ‘Not much of a place’, said Mrs Pienaar.

  There was also Jannie Niewoudt; but the Niewoudts were even poorer than the Pienaars; poor poor white, like the Nienabers. They
all lived in the same long street – landless Afrikaners.

  Hanover is quite close to the southern Free State, but not on the main railway line. Supplies were carted from a siding called Hanover Road.

  Many of the poor people in Hanover got odd jobs as transport riders during the war, sometimes for the British Army. Being in the Cape Colony, the villagers were all British subjects. It was high treason to assist the forces of the Boer Republics in any way, let alone join them.

  There was a big British base at De Aar on the main line to Bloemfontein and Pretoria; and the Boers were always trying to blow up that line – and succeeding quite often. As loyal British subjects the villagers shook their heads, but as Afrikaners born and bred they rejoiced whenever a train was wrecked.

  It was the wrecking of a train that had changed the whole course of Johanna’s life. She was fourteen at the time. She’d asked her mother to let her go to visit sister Lenie and her brothers at De Bad. She replied, ‘Don’t waste too much time on that Petrus Gouws. I think you can do better than one fifth of Vlakwater!’

  She got a lift with the transport riders, the Niewoudts and the Nienabers, who were going to De Bad to deliver cement and pick up the Cilliers’ corn, and some loads of hay for the British cavalry at De Aar. They were a very simple crowd, almost illiterate – and, like nearly all the poor, careful to hide their real feelings from their superiors; and always hoping for a bit of appreciation – a bottle of brandy as a present at the end of a trip, or a stroke of luck, like being overpaid or getting away with a little fiddle; drifting people, ready to use any turn in the current of affairs. The only one Johanna liked was Jannie Niewoudt who was mad about her, and hung around like a hungry dog. But what good could he be to her? The only one she really disliked was Van den Berg, who looked as shifty as he turned out to be.

  There was much war-talk on those wagons drifting across the veld. And laughter at the funny ideas the British had about Hanover. The British believed that the Boers were determined to capture Hanover, so the whole course of the war now depended on the defence of Hanover. Yes, Hanover! So thousands of troops were sent to Hanover; there were cannon on all the Hanover koppies. No lights in Hanover after curfew. The poor Hanoverians found it hilarious that their dorp was suddenly so important.

  At De Bad the transport riders were accommodated for the night in the outhouse and tool room. Johanna was in the big house with her sister. The place was packed. When Petrus Gouws, who was also learning to farm on De Bad, came back from the veld, she slipped away with him towards the koppie beyond the poplar bush. Once out of sight, they stopped, and looked, and looked at each other, swallowing hard, and trying to think of something to say.

  ‘Petrus’, she said at last. He didn’t say ‘Johanna’, he just pulled her towards him. She was too shy to let him kiss her on the mouth, so she dropped her head, and he kissed her just where her hair started on her forehead. That is the only kiss in her life that she cared to remember.

  Then there was a loud wolf whistle, and two Boers with slouch hats and rifles stood up on the top of the koppie, and laughed, and said, ‘Good afternoon!’ Their horses were hidden at the foot of the koppie out of sight. They were scouts for General Wynand Malan, whose commando arrived soon enough – a dashing cavalcade of about fifty men, some with spare horses and spare rifles.

  The General, a slight, fiery, handsome man, told veldkornet Cilliers that he was commandeering all the horses and fodder; and he told Johanna’s sister, Lenie, to get busy and bake for his men. No one on the farm was to move from there until he and his men were gone.

  Then the excited talking started – the commandos mixing with all the men on the farm. The upshot of it was that Johanna’s two brothers, Boy and Boet, had a fight as to which of them should become a rebel and join Malan’s commando. Boy won. And the General issued him with a rifle. He had a horse of his own. The other person to join the General was Petrus Gouws. In vain Cilliers, who was veldkornet, warned them that they’d be guilty of high treason and be shot if caught. But they were determined to go. Johanna was both proud and heartbroken.

  The cavalcade rode off into the twilight towards the next farm. And veldkornet Cilliers rode to Hanover to report the matter.

  That night at De Bad they were sitting round the table trying to put their lives together again when they heard horses. General Malan and three men (and one of them was Boy) dismounted outside, where they went straight into the tool room and wagon shed. They took the wagon chain, a crowbar and a big spanner, and rode off back into the night. One of the Nienabers came to the main house and said: ‘They are going to wreck the train – in the cutting at Taaiboschlaagte.’

  Boet Pienaar added that the entry to the cutting – about half a mile away – could be seen from the top steps of the outside staircase, and from the landing to the loft. They would all be able to see the headlight of the approaching train from there.

  The train was only due at 10.30: but those steps and the landing were soon crowded with people waiting for the headlight to appear; all the Cilliers family, other visitors, and the transport riders – or some of them. It was a very long wait. Johanna’s heart was with her brother Boy and her lover Petrus. What were they up to? Surely the General would not use raw recruits, on their first night of joining, to wreck a train?

  The engine light appeared and the night throbbed with the steam pistons. It disappeared in the cutting. There was a crashing crunch of metal – and then the rattle of rifle fire, but not for very long. Then nothing but the great silence of the veld hanging over them and their ignorance of what had happened. It started to drizzle, and they drifted down the steps and went to bed.

  The next morning the Commando was back, briefly, with a badly wounded man, Nel, carried on a stretcher improvised from rifles and a blanket. In the early light they all looked sad and very wet and cold from the rain. They left Nel at De Bad and rode off into the rain.

  By midday the Tommies were on De Bad with veldkornet Cilliers. The officer was in a fine rage, and seemed to hold the veldkornet responsible, accusing him of having advance knowledge of Malan’s route, and of having gathered sympathisers there. Had not two young men joined Malan? As for the transport riders, they were in the plot too; they had been there with fodder for the Boer horses. They had taken part in the wrecking of the train, not even as members of a regular military force, but as hangers-on, in the hopes of getting some loot. Jackals following lions. They were all taken off to prison.

  One of them – Van den Berg – turned Queen’s evidence.

  Waiting for the trial by court martial in De Aar threw the whole district into gloom. The wives and children of the poor imprisoned Niewoudts and Nienabers had no means of support. The village found it strange that the sick English woman, Olive Schreiner, should worry about them so, writing to friends in Cape Town to send her money for rations. The military did not like her open sympathy with them. She declared that they were innocent, simple men, and scapegoats for the incompetence of the British Army.

  When the news of the verdict came – three of those men to be shot in De Aar – she tried to get permission to visit the General in Command at De Aar, but it was refused. She seemed more upset than the wives of the men. But no one could do anything. Under martial law she could not even get a report of the trial into the papers. The Army told her that War is War, and that war created an emergency which justified the curtailment of normal liberties and the over-refinements of civil justice. ‘Martial law is hell’, Olive exploded to the Town Major, who blushed pink.

  Protesting their innocence, the men were shot.

  If the British shot men who had not even joined the Commando, what chance would there be for Johanna’s brother, Boy, or her lover, Petrus?

  Olive Schreiner got so sick after the shooting of the men that the Doctor feared for her life. Her asthma attacks were terrible to watch. The Doctor told the Town Major that he’d better telegraph permission for her husband to visit his wife. She was calling for Cron all the ti
me. The permission was granted.

  So at last Johanna came to see the man who was so convinced of the Boer cause that he had gone to tell the English, in England, that they were wrong. He had a strong, handsome, rather severe face, and looked like a farmer. And intense eyes.

  He’d given up farming on Kransplaas near Cradock because asthmatic Olive couldn’t breathe there. So they moved first to Kimberley, then Jo’burg, then Cape Town – and in each place he tried to do his articles as a lawyer – but always something interrupted: the outbreak of the war in Jo’burg; and now, Olive’s cry for help from Hanover.

  They were poor, for the royalties from her books were small. She seemed unable to finish her next great novel. She was always rewriting it. He was also trying to make money by writing, out of his farming experience – a book on the Angora goat; but it didn’t sell enough to make any difference. So he set up shop as an insurance agent, auctioneer, and general agent. He worked very hard. They were both restricted to the village by the military.

  They were a really very strange couple. Boers understand people who like animals for pets, and saw nothing wrong in their passion for fox terriers. But there is something odd about a woman who keeps a dozen meercats in addition, isn’t there? As for him, he was mad about spiders – particularly trap-door spiders. He was collecting them for the museum in Cape Town. The Schreiners brought out the funny side of the British Army. Here were these two pro-Boers always writing to the papers here and overseas; unpopular with the small English section in Hanover, and accused of being unpatriotic, and their lives made as uncomfortable as possible by the military. But when a letter came to the Town Major from the museum in Cape Town, he wrote out a pass:

  Permission to pass through the perimeter, dawn to sunset, Mr Schreiner, Mrs Schreiner

  Purpose: to collect spiders.

  Sometimes Olive would go spider hunting with Cron: with her beloved pet dog Nita – how she loved that dog! – and all the tumbling meercats in tow. She would explain with a laugh that a bottle of spiders might not be everybody’s cup of tea, but the more one knew about even the ugliest forms of life, the more understanding and tolerant one became.