Perhaps there was some intelligence and restraint left in that anger-twisted head, or perhaps he valued his own life over mine, but after a few seconds of deep contemplation Christo Snr stopped shaking me and slowly lowered me to the ground. As my feet touched the floor I broke away and dashed to safety behind Violet’s ample frame. I still remember thinking that I must have done wrong and was going to get a serious pasting from my dad when he got home, if this brute didn’t get me first.
Knowing instinctively that he was living on borrowed time if he remained at our kitchen door, Christo Snr shuffled away towards his big-winged American car.
‘Get your father to phone me, you fokken krimineel!’ he spat.
Later that evening, when my dad got home from work, as he came in the front door he asked Violet, as was his daily bantering habit, ‘What stories are we hearing today, Mrs Mokmac?’ (his nickname for her). Every day, Violet would reply with her customary ‘No people speaking today, sir’. But today was different, and she said ominously, ‘Beeeeeeeg, beeeeeeeeg trouble, sir’ before spilling the beans on the events of the afternoon.
From my secret hiding place behind the rhubarb plants near the kitchen door I sat quivering like an autumn leaf as I heard Violet tell Dad her version of what had transpired. I fully expected to hear the thunderous summons ‘Stephen, come here!’ at any moment. But it didn’t come, and I waited and waited and waited for what seemed an eternity.
Then the rhubarb leaves parted and Dad sat down on the ground right next to me. Tears immediately streamed down my petrified cheeks and I mumbled, ‘I’m sorry Dad, I’m so sorry Dad.’
I remember like it was yesterday, the utterly incredulous look that came over his face as he stood up, then bent over at the waist and lifted me into his arms like a little baby, telling me over and over again that I’d done nothing wrong while he carried me into the house and laid me on the couch with a little blanket over me because I was suddenly so cold.
We waited for my mom.
She arrived home a few minutes later, and a short time after that my dad went out, ‘to pay a visit to someone’, Mom said.
I didn’t ask any questions but Christo Snr never did lay criminal charges.
Our house in Viking Road was close to the short final approach of Runway 01 at AFB Swartkop. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swartkop was a particularly busy airfield, and housed Sabres, Harvards, Vampires, helicopters and transport aircraft, mainly DC-3 Dakotas and DC-4 Skymasters. Aircraft movements went on throughout the day and night. Although we as a family soon became oblivious to the noise they made, many an overnight visitor to our house complained of being unable to sleep a wink.
Over the next few years my dad established himself in a business career and was finally able to take up his lifelong dream of flying, which resulted in his qualifying for his private pilot’s licence in 1970. I flew with him at every available opportunity and was consequently affected by his passion for flying. A number of my parents’ friends were SAAF personnel, and while at school I was fortunate to get regular trips in a range of SAAF aircraft, including the C-130 Hercules, DC-3 Dakota and DC-4 Skymaster, which further fuelled my desire to become a pilot.
Our next-door neighbour, Major Peter Webb, a navigator on 24 Squadron Buccaneers, was killed in a low-level night sortie along the Natal coast in the early 1970s. This of course led my mom to question my oft-expressed dream of taking up flying as a career. I think that she would have preferred me to have taken a different career direction, but, being the woman she was, she never once told me this.
Jim Serobe was a tall and stately Shangaan warrior who’d worked for my grandparents on the family farm near Wonderboom Airport for more years than anyone could remember. As a young man, Jim had earned his warrior status by killing a lion with only a spear. He was justifiably proud of this.
From the time of our arrival from Northern Rhodesia in December 1963, one of my favourite pastimes on the farm was to sit on my haunches with Jim around his cooking fire, dipping bantam-egg-sized balls of stiff maize porridge into beef, chicken or goat stew while listening to him recount the stories of his life and absorbing his lessons on all manner of subjects. Jim could live entirely off the land, even in the peri-urban environment of the Wonderboom farm.
When asked how old he was, Jim would always reply ‘One ninety ouhty one’, which we came to accept as being his expression of the year of his birth, 1901 (although it could also easily have been 1891). We never quite knew for sure. He related that he had lived through the era of ‘Oxpicky baggies’ (Oxford bags trousers of the 1920s) and ragtime.
Jim Serobe was my other grandfather. He called me Maloui (pronounced Ma-loo-wee), which I understood to mean ‘restless’ or ‘energetic’ in Shangaan.
At one stage Jim had had seven wives and countless children, all of whom stayed at his kraal in Mozambique near the Lebombo/Ressano Garcia border post. Jim would often tell me that he preferred that the family stayed there. He was proud of his peacemaking ability when he would return home annually over the festive season, and bring a semblance of order to what he described as the chaotic situation that prevailed whenever he was away even for a short period. ‘Chaotic’ often meant that he would feel duty bound to kick out an errant wife or acquire a new one, or accept paternity for progeny sired by any number of locally resident contenders for their absent headman’s throne. As the years went by and his prowess as a warrior chief waned, Jim gradually shed more wives than he gained.
Each time he went on leave, I looked forward to his return, as he would regale me with stories about what had happened at his traditional home and how many wives were still left, as well as matches, hatches and dispatches and all manner of interesting titbits. I came to feel that I knew each member of his family, even though I’d never really met any of them.
In 1973, he came to live with us in Valhalla, because, at the age of 72-ish, the job on the Wonderboom farm had become too much for him. But he wasn’t yet ready to accept a pension and retire.
‘I am still young, Maloui, my third wife just had another son,’ he told me.
Dad felt it best that he was closer to us.
He didn’t actually live at 58 Viking Road but rather across the road in digs on Laureston Farm, which was owned by the Billett family. There he earned his keep by turning Mrs Billett’s kitchen garden into a paradise of herbs and fresh vegetables.
Jim was a man of relatively few words, but those he used were very descriptive. Shortly after being awarded stewardship of the vegetable garden, Mrs Billett called Jim and asked his opinion of the tomato bushes that she’d painstakingly nurtured and of which she was immensely proud. After years of dedicated work, the tomato patch had finally produced its first tomato, which, if the truth be told, was a rather shrivelled specimen.
‘My tomatoes are producing very nicely now, don’t you think, Jim?’ suggested Mrs Billett.
‘Dis tamaties (tomatoes) is fucked!’ Jim retorted.
One day when Mark, Jim, my dad and I were busy building a swimming pool on our property, Dad broke wind loudly. Without interrupting the rhythm of what he was doing Jim looked up and said, sagely, ‘It will rain… I can hear the thunder.’
Each Saturday, as soon as he was paid, Jim would take a walk down to the general dealer’s shop located at the little Wierda Bridge Shopping Centre nearby. Afterwards, he would invariably go to a shebeen in the bush behind the shopping centre for a pint or two of a wicked, home-brewed traditional liquor called skokiaan. Skokiaan was rumoured to contain such exotic items as rotting roadkill, insects and birds, and was fortified with battery acid. Drinking it required a very strong constitution indeed.