In my childhood years we possessed only two farms, the one in the Roggeveld and our winter quarters in the Karoo, but an effort was already under way to extend our boundaries, and I know there was constant conflict with neighbours about disputed land ownership or beacons that had reputedly been moved, and one of my earliest memories is how Jan Baster was chased from his dwelling-place near the boundary of our land. I never learned the details of this either, but I can remember an elderly coloured man at our door, hat in hand, trembling and stammering with dismay at the injustice he had come to complain to Father about; I must have been young still, for I know I had become upset too without realising why. Father stood on the threshhold, silently, with Mother close behind him, and I remember her giving him a little nudge in the back; “Tell the Hotnot to go away!” she hissed. How well I remember it, Mother’s black dress and her words and that small, impatient gesture with which she urged him on. At some time or other it was discovered or decided that the land on which Jan Baster lived was part of our farm and he was told to leave, while, from his point of view, he maintained the land had belonged to him and his people for many years and his father had lived there at the fountain before him; and then Jakob and Gert rode over one evening, or they were sent, and they burned down the few small buildings at the fountain. Jakob and Gert were enemies, but in the isolation that was our shared lifestyle, none of us could afford to surrender to our feelings of animosity or affection: Jakob and Gert struggling together to bring the ox under the yoke or to pry the rock loose with the crowbar where they were stacking the kraal wall, their heads close together; Jakob and Gert riding over to Bastersfontein together to set fire to the dry thatch of the hartbeeshuisies.
How did I know this? It was probably mentioned at the dinner-table or it was eagerly discussed in the kitchen. Yes, and one evening, much later, old Dulsie snarled at Gert: “Jan Baster’s curse on you, both you and Jakob!” and Gert’s face clouded with anger in the dim firelight. “Old woman, just say another word …” His voice trails off in my ears, his face vanishes in the wavering shadow of the firelight, and I do not remember any more. But Jan Baster left, for what resistance could he offer after all, and where could he turn for help? And he and his family crossed the Groot River to Griqualand, I later heard the servants tell. Can I really remember it, that small procession with the rickety cart struggling down the road in the distance, drifting and bobbing over the waving shrubs of the veld with us watching them from the farm, and a voice telling me, “There go Jan Baster and his people”? After that our flocks were often sent to graze at Bastersfontein and our herdsmen erected their own dwellings there, and no one gave Jan Baster another thought, trembling with outrage before our door in his shabby suit of dressed skins. Who still knows today how the fountain got its name except me, lying awake here and suddenly remembering him? I never had an opinion or passed judgement, neither did the word injustice ever occur to me. There was just an old man in a suit made of skins, and a fountain where our flocks were sent to graze all the ensuing years.
This must have been the way our land ownership expanded initially and our claim to it was secured, by disputes with the neighbours and threats or acts of violence against those who were weaker than us. Bastersfontein was the first acquisition I can remember and, after that, Kliprug; later there were the purchases and later still, when Maans was a young man, the inheritances, but it started off modestly, yet persistently, and when I reflect on it now, I realise that my early childhood was actually filled with the ongoing blurred arguments about the boundary fences and beacons of Kliprug, where Oom Barend Swanepoel’s herdsmen were reputedly trespassing on our land and had to be driven off forcefully by Jakob and Gert. And once more there is such a sudden, unpleasant recollection of violence, old Oom Swanepoel with his reddish beard, slamming down his fist on the big table in the voorhuis, Mother in her black dress, leaning across the table towards him, both hands resting on the tabletop, shouting at him shrilly, the way she shouted at the farm-hands in the kitchen, and Father sitting between them, helpless or powerless, not trying to intervene in their heated argument while Mother drove the old man from the house with her words as if she were wielding a sjambok. “I won’t be driven away from here like Jan Baster!” the old man shouted over his shoulder in parting, neither could they do it, for he was a white man and they could not simply burn down his house and evict his family, yet in the end he was forced to leave, how, I do not know. “Your grandfather drove to Worcester to get that piece of land,” old Oom Kasper Vlok told Maans at the wedding at Gunsfontein years later, “and I don’t suppose you’re sorry today, are you?” They were discussing Maans’s sheep that were grazing on the land that had been part of Kliprug in the old days, though nobody remembers the name today, and how good the grazing was there; I sat across the table from them and heard the old man’s words, and then I remembered the name Kliprug and suddenly old Oom Swanepoel appeared before me again. I know they conferred by candlelight, Father, Mother and Jakob, and that there were documents on the table that Meester had to come and read to them, so it must have been before Jakob’s wedding, when Meester was still with us. Perhaps they consulted an attorney or the magistrate, or Father might even have had his horse saddled and ridden all the way to Worcester as Oom Kasper had said, for the Vloks lived just beyond Kliprug in those days and he would probably have known. But however it may have been, the Swanepoels likewise disappeared, soundlessly and without repercussion they disappeared, and Kliprug was added to our land as if the disputed boundary fence had never existed.
Mother in her black dress — at the time I did not think about what I had seen or heard, but as I watched her become prouder and more headstrong over the years, I realised how important land and property were to her, and what a high price she was prepared to pay for what she desired, acre by acre, morgen by morgen, and farm by farm. What fired this acquisitiveness that was daunted by nothing and no one, and saw all methods as legitimate? Perhaps that old insecurity and poverty, the bitter youth, the shabby wagon, the worn skin-blankets, the small handful of tin knives and spoons? Could it be that land meant more to her than merely a specific ridge or piece of shrubland or so many fountains, and grazing for so many sheep, and did she see it as a means to everything that had once seemed unattainably distant to her, the power and the status which she finally did achieve, the town house where she hosted visiting ministers, and the seat in the front row at church? I can only try to determine and recognise the pattern; with no hope of understanding it any more.
Thus, since the beginning there must have been a goal, no matter how vague it may have been at first, and a plan, though initially it was carried out rather blindly. At the time I am actually talking about — my childhood years, when I began to take notice of what was happening around me and could remember — it gradually began to take shape, however, around Jakob as the eldest son at first, and later around Maans, his heir; but a goal there had always been, and we children were employed to help achieve it too.
Father could sign his name and read to us from the Bible painstakingly but not much more than that; at the time I can remember, it was mostly Meester who read to us from a Dutch book of sermons on Sundays, and later the task fell to one of the boys, for Meester said the letters hurt his eyes. I never saw Mother with a pen in her hand, neither do I recall her signature anywhere, nor that I ever saw her read, or write even a note. In those years and in those parts there were no schools, and there were few educated people among us; Father and Mother’s contemporaries probably achieved little more than they, and the same went for their children. We had to be educated, however, and when Jakob and Pieter were still young, every effort was made to find schoolmasters for them. Where did Father find these people and how did he retain their services? There was a succession of these tutors, none of whom remained long, and in fits and starts the boys received some kind of education over the years, so that both of them could read and write and do arithmetic; Jakob did not like studying, but Pieter actually had a few old books in which I sometimes saw him read. As I remember, it was always Jakob who was summoned to consult with Father and Mother, yet when a letter had to be written, it was Pieter who had to come, while they sat watching him, dictating what they wanted him to write.