The three Du Plooy sisters were very close. My mother, Nellie, was the middle one. Sue was only a year older than my mother: she was born in 1901. When they were little girls, they shared a bed. Sue was afraid of the dark and she used to go to sleep clutching a matchbox in her hand, two matches protruding so that she could easily strike one to light the bedside candle.

When I was three years old, my father was transferred to Kimberley, and we went to live with Ouma and Oupa du Plooy at 16 Tapscott Street until I was five, when my sister was born and we moved to a house of our own.

Ouma and Oupa had the extended family living in their house: besides us, there was my Auntie Sue, who was (whisper it!) divorced and had come back to her parents' house with my cousin Ian.

When Auntie Ann came on holidays from Pretoria, where she worked as a typist, the three of them would gather in the kitchen or in one of their bedrooms and chatter for hours. They laughed a lot. I liked to hang around and listen, and I soon learnt not to draw attention to myself, or they would send me out to go and play. Under the kitchen table was a good place.

During the War cosmetics were scarce: they would scrape out the stubs of their lipsticks with a hairpin and melt the bits together in a spoon over a candle flame. There would be enough to pour into a tube and make a new lipstick. Auntie Ann usually got the lipstick, because she donated four of five stubs to my mother and Auntie Sue's one each.

Auntie Ann was six years younger: she was a city girl and had lots of different colour lipsticks. Mum and Auntie Sue wore quiet pink lipsticks.

The matter of Auntie Sue's divorce was not mentioned, except in hushed tones among adults. Divorce was a bit of a disgrace in those days, no matter who was the "innocent party". Auntie Susie was once bitten, twice shy ... I never knew her to have a boy friend. She went everywhere with her friend Madge Bennie, who was a teacher. Madge wore suede shoes and smoked through a cigarette holder. Those were two new and fascinating things to me.

Auntie Susie was also a teacher and she was the headmistress of the Newton Primary School. The nail of her middle finger grew down like a parrot’s beak. She had slammed the finger in a door when she was young. She was a keen knitter and a keen reader - always doing intricate patterns, while reading from a book propped up on a cushion in her lap.

I, too, was a keen reader. I can't remember a time when I couldn't read.

The sex maniac episode

The little table beside Auntie Susie's chair was a good source of reading material. She kept her little stack of library books there for the reading-cum-knitting sessions of an evening.

One day I had one of Auntie Sue’s library books and I was reading it with great interest, until I asked my mother at breakfast: "What's a sex maniac?" (I pronounced it man-eye-ack)

"It is a kind of murderer", said my mother, "Why do you ask?"

I said there was mention of one in Auntie Susie’s library book, and my mother was right, he had indeed murdered someone. When I wanted to go back and finish the book, I couldn’t find it anywhere. My mother and Ouma and Aunt Sue all helped me look, but the book was gone, never to be seen again. One of life's little mysteries.

I didn't like to attract too much attention and did a lot of my reading behind the sofa. (From there I also heard a lot of interesting if often mystifying grown-up talk.) I don't think they realised I could read, or at least how well I could read, so nobody cared what I had hold of. They mostly thought, if they thought about it at all, that I was looking at the pictures. It was only after the sex maniac episode that I found gaps in the bookshelves and Auntie Sue started to keep her library books in her room.

Auntie Sue also had a dog called Rex whom she dearly loved. Everybody else disliked him because his hobbies were jumping up against you and/or sticking his nose in your crotch. Ouma complained that Auntie Sue always had dogs but she, Ouma, had to feed and look after them. This was a lesson to my mother and we were never allowed a dog until I had already gone to boarding school and my sister Marie got her dachshund Cleo. But that is another story.

The school visit fiasco

The tradition in primary schools was that on the last day of term, you were allowed to bring your little pre-school brother or sister. I was very keen to go to school and one end-of-term, when I was five, Auntie Sue took me with her for the day. I was so excited I couldn't eat my breakfast.

It turned out to be a disaster. Auntie Sue taught the eight-year-olds. The classroom had two-seater desks. Everybody wanted me to sit next to them. Auntie Sue got me to sit next to a little boy in the front row and introduced him as Heinie Bigalke. Consternation! I promptly burst into tears, and wouldn't say why.

 The truth was, I was terrified of Heinie Bigalke because I had heard Auntie Sue on many occasions telling my mother about him and how naughty he was. One of his exploits was to tie a string of fire crackers to the school cat's tail. The cat ran franctically and the next day the gardener found it under a bush with a burnt tail. It was still terrified and the vet had to sedate it. 

The day I overheard that story, I couldn't sleep and threw up all night, as was my wont if something had frightened me during the day. I felt so sorry for the cat. My mother thought I had a weak stomach: I never let on about my fears.

When order was restored and I was sitting between two girls, a safe distance from the dreaded Heinie Bigalke, lessons started. At first I enjoyed myself: I called Auntie Sue "Miss" like the other children and I was pretending to be a real schoolgirl. We had Scripture first, Miss read a Bible story and we said Our Father (who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name).

Then we went to a bigger classroom and we had singing, together with another class. We sang "My Grandfather's Clock" and "Hansie Slim". Then the bell rang for "playtime" and we went outside. I basked in the attention of the "big girls": we shared our sandwiches and somebody had a skipping rope ... they let me swing one end while we chanted "salt, mustard, vinegar … pepper!"

After that, we went back to our classroom for sums. I could count, but "sums" was new to me. I sat quietly and admiringly between my two desk-mates, who enjoyed being "big girls" and impressing me. "Tables!" they said. "You'll find out about tables when you go to school!" I could hardly wait to go to school and find out about tables.

Then disaster struck again: after sums came spelling. Auntie Sue, a.k.a. "Miss", read out the ten words the class had had to learn for homework. My mentors smiled kindly at me and gave me a pencil and a bit of paper so I could also pretend to write the words.

Well, I knew nothing about sums, but to a reader of books about sex maniacs, spelling words like "pretty" and "elephant" was a piece of cake. I was the only one in the class who got all the words right. Suddenly I was invisible. Nobody spoke to me. I learnt something about discretion that day. Nobody likes a smartass.

Auntie Sue didn't take me to school again.

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 Ann
remembered by her niece

My mother's younger sister, my Auntie Ann, didn't live in Ouma's house, but she often came for holidays. She was a typist in the Landbank in Pretoria.

I thought her very glamorous because she painted her fingernails and her toenails red; she wore eyeshadow, and mascara which she put on with a miniature black toothbrush. She spat on the little tablet of mascara, rubbed the toothbrush vigourously over it and applied it to her lashes. How I coveted that little toothbrush for my doll! She smoked; she had perfume called Evening in Paris, in a little blue and silver bottle; she wore slacks and shorts and sometimes she sat on a deck chair in the garden wearing a set of lounging pyjamas in green and black stripes, that tied in front and left her midriff bare. My mother and my Aunt Sue did none of these things.

Funny about that … my niece Belinda told me, years later, that when she was a little girl in Rhodesia, she thought Downsouth was a placename, because people always called South Africa "Down South".

In Pretoria, Auntie Ann lived in Eaton Hall. I didn't know that this meant she had a flat in a building called Eaton Hall. The only hall I knew, was the Kimberley City Hall, a very grand edifice with an imposing flight of steps leading up to a portico with corinthian pillars. I thought it only proper that a glamorous person like Auntie Ann should live in such a building.

I gleaned from my mother and aunts' talk that she worked in a place called The Typing Pool with a lot of other ladies whom she referred to as the girls. The head typist was Miss Itsy van Zweeten, who had been overseas several times and had a coat and skirt that she got in Belgium. I imagined them doing their typing at little tables round the pool, wearing swimming costumes. (I had seen Esther Williams movies.) All except Miss van Zweeten, who was in the Belgian coat and skirt.

During the war, there were RAF and WAAF people stationed at the SA Air Force base outside Pretoria. What with Uncle Wiener being Army, Auntie Ann didn't think much of the Air Force. She spoke slightingly of the Raffs and the Waffs who spent their time swanning round town dancing and drinking cocktails while Uncle Wiener had to get on with the fighting in The Desertupnorth.

I had great admiration for the legendary Uncle Wiener who was single-handedly holding the enemy at bay. Every night when I said my prayers, I added "…. and please take care of Uncle Wiener in The Desertupnorth."

If I had met a Raff or a Waff swanning round our neighbourhood, cocktail in hand, I would have given them a piece of my mind.
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The Boys:  Koos, Piet and Neels

He married Dorothy Louise ("Bebe") BEBINGTON on 19 Apr 1930 in Cape Town. She was born 23 Sep 1905 and died 1965 in Cape Town. During the War she served in the SA Corps of Signals HQ in Potgieter Street Pretoria with the rank of Staff sergeant.

During WWII Piet was not allowed to be released for active service from his duties for the Dept of Postal Services. However, he was in the "citizens' force" as a sergeant.
He became Post Master at Durban.

They had two sons,  Dennis and  David. Dennis married Ruth Williamson and they had four daughters and six granddaughters; David married Sandra Bebington and they had three children.

He had two sons, Neels and Donnie. His wife's name was Bessie and she wrote novels.

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