Part two

Before I carry on with mum’s story, I just want to draw your attention, gentle reader, to this opening sentence: “My parents met on a Union Castle ship sailing from Durban to Cape Town”. It takes a maximum of four days to sail between those two cities, that’s all the time they had to meet, fall in love and agree to at least the possibility of marriage. The next time they saw each other I’m fairly certain was in London the next year as they prepared for their wedding. Talk about lucky to be here.

On with the story:

“My parents had now moved to Lake Pleasant Hotel which they leased. This was on the shores of a lake halfway between Knysna and George. My bedroom window opened onto the flat roof of the dining room & lounge and I used to climb out there to read. We had six rowing boats and a small pier onto the lake and I soon learnt to row and used to love rowing to the middle of the lake, dropping anchor (a rock on a rope) & dive in. Once however I had to climb back in quickly as there was a snake in the water. I killed it by bashing it against the anchor with an oar & when I showed someone my trophy they said I was very lucky as it was deadly. I also swam across the lake (about 1/4 mile) un accompanied. Health & safety didn’t exist then, although I think my dad was watching from the shore.

The hotel was also about 3/4 mile from a lovely private beach, but I only went there when I could scrounge a lift from one of the guests as it was a very hot dry walk over the hills. We had the same guest come back year after year – the Dickens family with four boys & the two Anderson boys were particular favourites and hanging out with them encouraged me to be a real tom-boy. My mother preferred to dress me in pretty frocks but I lived in shorts and after a major rebellion got her to buy me a pair of jeans & the frock stayed in the cupboard.

At one stage I was a favourite with some of the old ladies who stayed in the winter, and played gin rummy with them. When my mother discovered I was winning small amounts of money most days, she put a stop to it!! I also used to sneak round at Christmas & New Year taking sips from all the glasses – again till my mother noticed. I learnt to like oysters from one guest, Jane ( a widow from Cape Town who I spent weekends with when I went to college in Cape Town) and rollmops from a Dutch family who I also visited in Cape Town.

I enjoyed my school work and was particularly good at maths and English. I shared the prize for maths in my final year but should have won it outright as we had had an old lady supply teacher for two terms of my final year. She couldn’t cope with the syllabus & I used to teach her to teach the class!

When it came to post school education, the same argument arose between my mother and my teachers. They wanted me to go to Cape Town University & study advanced maths & calculus and she wanted me to do domestic subjects. She sort of won & I landed up at Cape Town Technical College taking bookkeeping, typing, shorthand, dressmaking and cooking.

While we lived at Lake Pleasant I used to travel to and from school by train – a whole host of school girls & boys let loose for, in my case 18 hours, with no supervision!! We were very repressed by today’s standards; no drinking, sex etc, but thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It was about the only time we had to get to know boys from our brother school & work on finding partners for the annual 6th form dance. We did sit opposite the boys contingent in church but the staff were very vigilant but sometimes missed the odd note being passed. I was told I had a ‘very sweet and friendly smile’ – not that it got me a prtner for the dance.

Cape Town

I thoroughly enjoyed being at college – we lived in a hostel on the lower slopes of Table Mountain and had a long walk every morning to the college in town. We passed the still fabulous Mount Nelson Hotel, through the park known as the Gardens & past the legislative house of SA parliament at the top of Adderley Street. The first girl I shared a room with was a very heavy smoker and I tried desperately to join in but couldn’t cope with it or the smell, so asked to change rooms and landed up with an Afrikaans girl from the veldt who used cheap perfume to cover up rampant B.O. I don’t know which was worse.

I joined the hockey team and we used to travel all round Cape Town & its suburbs on our thumbs. We travelled ingroups of three with our sticks at the ready in case of trouble & I was usually made to sit in front to chat to the driver. Once we got in with a very drunk man & I was steering while he kept trying to chat up the blond in the back. We were very glad when we got to our destination. Some of us when the summer came round used to hitch over the gap in the mountain to a beach called Camps Bay. We once went to a guy’s flat and had a lovely lunch & quickly departed leaving his hopes unrealised.

During my time in Cape Town my parents left Lake Pleasant, having lost quite a bit of the little money they gad, as trade was very seasonal& mainly school holidays. They first stayed in a B&B in Port Elizabeth then had three months in a grotty hotel in a grotty strip village called Swartkops. It really had nothing to recommend it. There was a railway station, a road, a hotel, a power station (more later) and a few houses. When I left college I travelled back to PE by boat. It was a three day trip and we had a terrific time. I joined my parents in the B&B and then they moved to Swartkops. My mother, again without consulting me, arranged a job for me as an office junior in her solicitor’s office – Joubert, Galpin & Searle. I don’t think Joubert existed then, Galpin was her solicitor – a grey sort of man, and Searle was a larger than life character who drove an enormous pale blue cadillac. His son also worked in the firm. I used to walk to the bank each morning with a lot of money in a canvas bag. Unknown to me at the time I started on the first floor, Colin worked for a firm of quantity surveyors on the 8th (top) floor. I discovered in 1979, twenty three years later, that I had been offered an Articled Clerkship in a firm of auditors and my mother had turned it down as “women didn’t need careers”. She was at least consistent over the years, but I often wondered what life would have been like if she had been more in tune with my talents.

When I moved back to PE I rekindled a friendship with one of the local girls from my school days – Colleen Foster. Her parents Ken & Ivy always welcomed me to their home. They were staunch methodists & Ivy was determined to both get me involved with the church, and to give me a better social life than I had in Swartkops. She organised for me to go to an Easter camp run by all the methodist churches in the area. This was held on a farm in the countryside near Grahamstown. The coach/transport was due to pick me up in Swartskops but never materialised. It turned out Ivy had given me the wrong time so between her and my dad it was arranged for him to drive me there. This at lunchtime I made a grand entrance and was put into the group headed by Colin. Ivy forever after claimed responsibility for our marriage! I had great fun at the camp and until we moved back from Swartkops to PE (about 5 miles) I used to spend weekends at the Fosters so I could join the group. Once they arranged a trip to the aforementioned power station where I failed to understand how they could wash air! Collin remembers me arguing with the technician.

My parents then found a better job running an ex-servicemen’s club called the M.O.T.H. Club (MOTH being Member of the Order of Tin Hats). We had a lovely flat above the club premises but ass ladies weren’t allowed to be members, my mother and I had to be seen (occasionally) but not heard! These years between college and marriage (3¹/₂ years) were the only ones I actually lived with my dad full time because of the war & boarding school, but I always got on with him better than my mother. After a few months Colin broke up with his then girlfriend, (Katy Aspinall) who was in close cahoots with his mother, and asked me out. There was a direct bus route from near our flat to the top of his road (and to the Methodist church where we went to guild meetings) and that was very handy. Colin would take me home and then sprint for the last bus. If he missed it it was a long walk home.

After a year in the solicitor’s office I was head-hunted to join the staff at a new building society opening across the road and I became a b. society cashier. I loved this work dealing with figures, money, and the public and stayed there for three years. My boss (the head-hunter) was then transferred to our Durban office. Colin and I got married and moved into an annexe in Doncaster Road, Port Elizabeth. Colin’s mother & I never got on, and this made visiting his house quite an ordeal, but his dad was lovely & Wanda [sister] also welcomed me.

Before I married my mother and I used to watch all the cricket test matches played in PE. After 4pm it was 1/- to enter and I would go straight from work and meet her there. We watched all the great cricketers of the day. While I was in Cape Town some of us had gone to a rugby match – the Springboks against the touring British Lions – and queued up outside the dressing rooms for autographs – one of the girls cheekily asked if we could have a lift back into Cape Town as we didn’t want to hitch in the dark, so we rode home in style in the Lions’ coach.

At the end of 1959 Colin’s articles were ending and with no promise of work at his firm, he found another job in Durban where he could also complete his university course. I contacted my old boss, Mr Kilpin, and he arranged a job for me at the Natal Building Society in Durban and we moved into a small flat in Springfield Crescent. We also got our first car, and ancient Hillman. Durban is a sub-tropical city and we found it very hot in the city and after six months moved out to a coastal area where we had a lovely first floor flat & got our first dachshund puppy, Mitzi. I was promoted at work and became a cashier which was the sought after job, but there was a problem. A week before we married I had been hit on my right leg by a hockey ball. This was an inter-guild mixed sex match and one of the guys got the direct hit. I had an enormous lump on my shin (luckily skirts were long enough to cover it), then when we moved to Durban, I was standing on a bollard in the harbour when it was switched on and I slid down the side bumping the same shin again and again. Thus when I got the cashiers job and had to stand all day, I got awful pains in that leg. The doctor thought I had bone cancer & we were very relieved that it was varicose veins. He gave me the advice to never stand when I could sit & to always sit with my feet up when I could. Following this advice, I’ve never had any real problems with v. veins, but thought it would end my chances as cashier. However, the building society bosses decided that rather than lose me they would provide all six cashiers with stools. At first this didn’t go down well with the others who were all a lot older than me, but after a week it was impossible to get them off the stools!

In February 1961 South Africa converted to decimal currency. In those days it was done by hand & on adding machines. Converting each account to the new currency and then checking through miles of adding machine print-outs in case of mistakes, we worked through to 1 or 2am & luckily one off the staff lived down the road from me & gave me a lift home.

Time for another pause before a move to Johannesburg and my own entrance to the story…

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