Ouma Annie had
a gentle nature and very blue eyes. She was a daughter of Genl P.J. de
Villiers. During the Boer War, the family saw little of him because he
was away on Commando. They were constantly worried that he would be
captured. Being a citizen of the Cape Colony, a British possession, he
was officially a rebel and could be shot out of hand.
Ouma married
Oupa Neels du Plooy in 1898, when she was 18 years old. On the marriage
certificate his trade is given as "wagon maker", but on his
daughter Nellie's marriage certificate, his trade is
"blacksmith". In the early 20th century, the motor car
was starting to take over from the wagon as a means of transport and
Oupa had to find another way to make a living.
He later went
into the building trade: there are still farmhouses in the Kimberley
district that were designed and built by him. A gable at the front of
the house was his trademark, and no two were alike. They are all dated,
and bear his initials in an unobtrusive spot.
Gables became
fashionable among the local gentry and Oupa's designs were the in thing.
He was in great demand by the local landowners, or more likely their
wives, who wanted something a bit swish.
Ouma had
several miscarriages, but raised six children,
three boys and three
girls.
(Click here for a handy diagram)
They lived in Hopetown, then in Douglas and later in Kimberley, first in a
rented house in Adam Street, and then in Tapscott
Street.
In October
1918, when the Spanish 'Flu swept the world like a twentieth-century
Black Death, Kimberley did not escape. Between the middle of 1918 and
the middle of 1919, the worldwide pandemic killed at least 21 million
human beings -- well over twice the number of combat deaths in the whole
of World War I.
The whole town
was stricken. The streets were deserted. 15-year old Nellie was the only
one in the family who didn't succumb. She hardly slept, spent her days
and nights nursing her parents and her five siblings and washing the
bedclothes which were constantly sodden because of the high fever of the
patients.
They all pulled
through. When they were a bit better, she queued every day at the soup
kitchen in the Town Hall with a milk can, which she lugged back home
full of soup to feed them. Then she herself got sick, not with the 'flu,
but "a fever" … today we would call it stress and
exhaustion.
Shortly afterwards, they moved
to 16 Tapscott Street, where Ouma and Oupa lived until 1953 when they
moved to a house at 28 Synagogue Street.
Return to top of
page
Shopping
with Ouma
by a
Granddaughter
Ouma Annie was
a notable cook, like her sister Auntie Nellie. But unlike Auntie Nellie
who had the produce of a farm at her disposal, Ouma had to shop.
I liked going
to the shops with Ouma. She would put her hat on, skewering it to her
hair, which she wore on top of her head, with a hatpin. On our way to
the shops, I got to carry the basket. Ouma carried it back, when it was
full.
We went to the
local butcher, or sometimes to Suzman's the fishmonger. They both knew
Ouma and told her what was good that day.
Then we went on
to the grocer, called Ho Bew and Co. It was owned by a Chinese couple,
known to their customers as Joe and Mrs Joe. Why people couldn't just
have called them Mr and Mrs Ho, which was no doubt their name, I don't
know. Ouma asked for half a pound of tea and a shilling's sugar or
whatever, and it was weighed out and put in brown paper bags. Ouma would
get me a ha'penny stick of barley sugar to suck. Barley sugar is made
from glucose and is good for you, she said, as long as you brush your
teeth afterwards.
What I really
wanted was a niggerball, (shock, horror! ... but fifty-odd years ago
we knew nothing of political correctness) a round black confection
nearly the size of a ping-pong ball: you had to yawn to get it into your
mouth. As you sucked it, the layers of colour
changed from black to white, pink, green, yellow, and so on. Every now
and then you could slip it out of your mouth to check the current
colour, or if you had a friend with you, you could clench it between
your front teeth, draw your lips back and ask "Wha' cull ishhi'
nah?"
Ouma would
never buy me a niggerball (four for a penny), on the grounds that I
would get my fingers sticky taking it out, or it would slip down my
throat and choke me, or both. My mother, to my disgust, also subscribed
to this theory. Such is the irony of life that in due course I, too,
avoided letting my small daughter have what was by then more acceptably
referred to as bull's eyes, (two cents each) in case she
should choke or get her fingers sticky.
We did not have
to shop for vegetables or milk - they were delivered. Ouma left a metal
milk can out on a little table on the front stoep. It was scoured until
it shone like a mirror. The milkman brought the milk in 2-pint glass
bottles sealed with cardboard disks that fitted into a slot running
round the edge. He had a metal skewer which he thrust through the
cardboard, flipped the disks out and poured the milk into Ouma's milk
can. Ouma took 4 pints of milk every day. The can was kept in the back
yard cooler and the milk decanted into a milk jug covered by a crocheted
doiley edged with blue glass beads, as needed.
Out in the back
yard, under a tree, Ouma had the "cooler". It was a cabinet on
four sturdy legs, with double walls of chicken wire, which were filled
with coke. Not the sort you drink or sniff, this was black like pieces
of coal. Air could flow freely between the pieces of coke.
The chicken
wire was covered on both sides with hessian. On top of the cooler was a
shallow metal tray, always kept topped up with water. The tray had small
holes round the edges, so water dripped down and kept the hessian wet.
The whole thing worked with evaporation and was very effective. Even in
Kimberley’s very hot summers, it kept the butter firm and the milk
from curdling.
The vegetables
were brought twice a week by the Indian greengrocer, in a horse-drawn
wagon with sides that flipped down like a counter. There were scales
with weights, and a whole lot of small wicker baskets hanging on hooks
at the top. The housewives came out to make their choice, which was
placed in the baskets and carried into the house by the assistant. The
baskets were suspended from a pole across his shoulders.
Most
greengrocers were Indian and all were known as "Sammy". The
name eventually became a generic term for greengrocer: Long after
the Sammys with their wagons were no more, people would still refer to
the local greengrocer in the shopping centre as "the Sammy."
We had a
skipping rhyme:
Sammy, Sammy, what you got?
Missy, Missy, penny apricot.
Return to top of
page
Ouma's
Garden
Ouma liked to
garden: she was often to be found on her knees, weeding the flowerbeds
in front of the house or the veggie garden at the back. She had a
potting bench at the side in Oupa's shed in the back yard.
Twice a year,
when she needed a lot of digging and cleaning out to be done, she would
get "the convicts". You could arrange with the local jail to
send you half a dozen convicts for the day. They didn't send the serial
killers; what you got were the ones who had copped thirty days for drunk
and disorderly. They came trotting up the street on the appointed day,
singing, with their warder.
The convicts
wore red-striped shirts and khaki shorts and the warder wore a khaki
uniform. They were all sorts, but the warder was always a Zulu. He
carried a knopkierie and assegai (knobbed stick and short
stabbing spear) but it was all just for show, they obviously enjoyed the
outing and worked away diligently. Ouma gave them bread and jam and
coffee for elevenses and at lunchtime they had a pot of stew and more
bread and coffee. They brought their own tin plates, spoons and mugs
which they rinsed under the garden tap afterwards.
Back to the top
Oupa's
twilight
Ouma died suddenly of a heart attack
in 1958 and Oupa lived with Auntie Susie, his eldest daughter, until her
death. After Auntie Sue died, Oupa went to live with his second
daughter, Nellie, who was my mother.
Oupa came to live with my parents in
the early sixties. I was away at University so I didn't see much of him.
He was already in his nineties then, but still physically in good shape.
He had cataracts and couldn't see very well, but he was used to the
house and found his way around easily. He needed no help with his
ablutions or dressing.
He had lost the
plot a bit and always addressed my mother as Katie. He had a cousin Kate
who kept a boarding house in Kimberley when he was young, and in his
mind he was boarding there again.
He liked to sit
on the stoep and listen to the birds: he could tell each kind of bird by
its call. When I was home for the holidays, I would sit with him on the
stoep drinking coffee and he told me very interesting stories about his
world travels. Not that he had ever travelled very far, but all his life
he was a keen reader of travel books, and now he believed that he had
been to all those places. His descriptions were so good, you would think
he really had been there in person.
He had no clue
who my father was, just accepted him as a fellow-boarder. Every day when
my dad came home from work, he would introduce himself to Oupa:
"Van Tonder", he would say, or: "Papenfuss", and
Oupa would say :"Du Plooy", and shake hands. This procedure
offended my mother bitterly and gave my father endless amusement.
Oupa was 93
when he got a "cold on the chest". The next day he had pneumonia and two
days later he died.
Return to top of
page
