Growing up in East London at 10 Oliver Road in Amalinda, a new suburb in East London in the 1960’s
My earliest memories are from this house, we were the last house on the street, which was a dirt road, occasionally graded by a big yellow grader.
After our house, the road changed into a narrow track, which continued down the hill to a distant road, in that distance were Blue Gum trees, how these Australian trees ended up in South Africa would be interesting to find out, but they lined many roads in East London.
Opposite the front of the house was open veld but the one side had “droogie” bushes, the fruit was a little black berry that made your mouth feel dry when you ate them but they had a nice taste.
Near them was a raspberry bush which was the best of the lot; you just had to avoid the thorny branches, often unsuccessfully. In our back yard we also had guava trees and a louquat tree. I got severely constipated after swallowing numerous loquat fruits, with their large pips, I was just too greedy. The guavas had white and pink fruit, all which had to be closely examined as they could have worms inside.
The van Schoor family lived next door
They were a very “very Afrikaans” family, they used to breed pigs in the back yard which seem to consist of just sand and corrugated pens, Mr van Schoor cut their throats then the poor animals ran around squealing terribly as they died.
Some of their sons were named Louis, Thysie and Andre. They were the most of polite children and Thysie and I were friends as our ages were fairly similar. The one time Andre showed me a picture of the Voortrekker monument that was hanging in the entrance by the front door and I was solemnly advised that if black people saw that picture when breaking in to steal, they would run away in fear.
Thysie was the eldest but died as a teenager. My first memories of his older brother Louis, were when he got a shiny black bicycle as a present, all the kids in the neighbourhood looked on in awe as he bounced his front wheel off the ground.
When Louis grew up, he eventually had his own security company and in 1992 he went to jail for shooting 101 black and colored vagrants, even murdering 39 of them, in a three-year period.
He used to lure them into his van, take them to some premises he was guarding and then shoot to kill them. The irony is that his daughter Sabrina used to sleep with black men and had a child of mixed race.
When her dad was still in jail in 2002, she hired a black man to slit her mother’s throat because she claimed her mother was a racist bully, and she went to jail for murder,
to the same jail, Fort Glamorgan, where her father was incarcerated.
So in East London you have some white people who sympathize with Louis and some black people to view his daughter as a martyr, both individuals from the same family, this could only happen in South Africa.
When Nelson Mandela came to power, a general amnesty for many people involved in racial killings were released, Louis was one of them. Since then he shaved off his beard and lively unnoticed in the outlying communities of East London.
The next house which was on the corner, was occupied by the Kruger family, another Afrikaans family who seemed quite posh to me, their one son Michael was also a neighbourhood friend.
They had a dog that was a fox terrier (named Spot) that used to run next to our car barking at us.
The one time when our family was going to church, my Dad shouted so loudly at Spot that his false teeth flew out into the uncut sidewalk grass.
We all had to get out the car and we searched for ages to find his teeth.
The van Schoors had a Cape Vervet monkey as a pet which escaped into the domestic servant’s toilet, all the kids were older than me and they persuaded me to throw an orange into the toilet and then close the door, trapping the monkey. The monkey was too quick for me and when I attempted to close the door, it bit me on the left hand between the thumb and the forefinger quite severely. I howled the neighborhood down while the older kids hastily tried to quieten me down before an adult came to investigate.
There was another family on the other side of the block, an English speaking family with the name of Els, they had a son Mickey who was disapproved of by my mother as she saw him show a “zap sign”, a rude hand sign, to another kid, he seemed quite tough to me.
My Dad also had a large enclosure where he had chickens enclosed in chicken mesh not only around the sides but on top, this I remember because East London had many earthworms and we children used to throw them into the chicken “hok” (large cage in Afrikaans) where the earthworms dangled off the wire. The big chickens waited anxiously below as the poor worms slipped down to their doom.
Every now and then one of the chickens would pay the ultimate price.
My task was to hold the chicken while my Dad chopped its head off with a small axe, I was too squeamish and the headless bird used to run around the yard much to my horror and I hurtled off in the opposite direction.
Stella was our maid, who I loved and who loved me, when my mother wanted to give me a hiding, Stella would pick me up and run away.
She used to make “marog” which consisted of two ingredients, mealie meal the staple diet of black people, and with some weed that tasted far better than spinach.
When our first Prime Minister, Doctor Hendrik Verwoed, was assassinated in September 1966, Michael and I would play burying each other with the sea sand in our sand pit in the backyard. I thought we could be in trouble with the police if caught,
interesting thoughts for a six-year-old just before his birthday.
