70) Disappointment

Jonny, the boys and I loved Zimbabwe very much and were sad that circumstances were such that we felt that it was wise for us to leave. We had hoped to live out our lives there but it was not to be. Australia seemed very far away and very different to Africa but having made up our minds to move there we looked at the good things about the country we intended to make home and were looking forward to our move. So we were very disappointed when we received a letter from the Australian Immigration Department saying that because of the economic and employment situation in Australia they had not approved our application for immigration. In retrospect we now realise that what we should have done is just reapply and keep on reapplying until we were accepted but in those days we did not realise that the powers that be could change their minds. We discussed all the different possibilities open to us. One was to send the boys to live in South Africa to get their training there. We did have family there. Jonny’s father, his brother, his half brother and both his sisters were living in South Africa by then and I am sure that one of them would have had the boys stay with them while they did their training. Although we talked it over we never really wanted to split up the family. What was the point of living in a country where our children could not be with us so we decided that we would all go together and started making plans to go south?

Jonny decided to go down first, he thought that if he could get a job and be a little settled by the time we came down it would be easier. Jonathan was in his final year of school, doing his “O” level exams and we wanted him to stay and finish them. Jonny would need a vehicle to get him to South Africa and I would also need one, so he bought a pretty elderly Land Rover and left me with the VW. Unfortunately for him he had problems with the Land Rover and he had to get in touch with his brother Don to come and help him to finish the journey to Pretoria. Jonny stayed with Don and Sandra for a while and then he went to Witbank to visit his sister Cecilia, arriving in an old Datsun van that Don lent him. I think he left the Land Rover with Don.

Cecilia was living in the coal-mining town of Witbank that was about 90 km east of Johannesburg. Cecilia and Derrick had bought a house on a small plot on the outskirts of Witbank. It had not been much of a house when they bought it but Derrick had done a lot of work on it and it was now a very lovely house. Derrick had also built out buildings for Cecilia to rear young cattle, chickens or rabbits. All of which she had done at different times. I don’t know if she would ever made a good farmer though, she loved her animals too much and it hurt her when they had to go to market. Derrick loved to tell everyone the story of the day she took delivery of her first batch of calves. The idea was that she should buy these young calves from the farmers who had dairy herds. The farmers would sell the milk to the dairy while Cecilia would hand rear the calves with powdered milk until they were old enough to send to the auctioneer for sale either to butchers as veal or to other farmers with the facilities to fatten them further and they would later be sold for their meat. The day they arrived it was raining and rather cold and Cecilia took one look at these animals that were only a few days old, cold, wet and obviously missing the comfort of their mothers and her soft heart went out to them. She brought all twelve of them into the laundry room at the back of her house and got out her bath towels to dry them down and make them feel more comfortable. I can just imagine how Derrick must have reacted when he came home and found all those animals in his house, he explained to Cecilia that they were outdoor animals and they were supposed to live outside no matter what the weather was like. Of course Cecilia knew that but she just felt so sorry for them. She did learn to be a little harder but she always was very upset when any of her “Babies” had to be sold. She also had a couple of mature cows that were milked to help with the feeding of the calves. She had one called “Sandra” another called “Cec” and a bull called “Jonathan”. When one of the cows had a calf it was, in due time, like all the others that she bought, sold at the auction. While Jonny was staying with her he offered to take a calf to the “vandisie” (the auction) for her. The young calf was loaded on to the back of the van and its mother followed the van, running along the fence as far as possible. When Jonny came back the mother cow saw the van coming from a long way off and she made her way to the gate to greet her “baby” home again, only to find that there was no baby on the back of the van. She seemed very upset and made a lot of noise. Jonny made the mistake of telling Cecilia that the cow had been looking for her calf and poor soft hearted Cecilia was just about put off farming for life.

Cec and some of her “Babies”

Her plot was not big, about 10 hectares I think and it was not very fertile soil so she mostly stuck to hand rearing animals. She was very successful with her chickens for a while and she also raised rabbits, until that market slumped. Cec was always thinking of ways to make money out of her land and when one year the price of garlic was very high she decided that the next year she would grow garlic. I don’t know how much land she cultivated but the following year she had a wonderful crop of garlic for the market. She bought string sacks to package it and thinking of the priced that she had paid the previous year was sure that she had a winner. But unfortunately many of the farmers in the area had thought along those same lines and there was a flood of garlic on the market. She was offered was less that she had paid for the string sacks that she had packed the crop in. She refused to sell it for that price and just took it home instead. There is not a lot a family of two can do with sacks and sacks of garlic, so she just fed it to her cows. I did not think that cows would eat garlic but they ate it all right, she told me the only problem was that it turned their milk a pale shade of green and gave it a gently garlic flavour. She said she had to throw it down the drain and buy in milk for herself and the few people that she had been supplying at the time.
After looking around Witbank Jonny decided that he would be better off looking for work down in Natal. Our friends Pat and Ken had offered to put him up so he moved down to Durban. I remember that he phone us just after he arrived there, to let us know that he had arrived safely and it was a very poor telephone line. I asked him “How did you manage without your navigator?” (That was always my job when we travelled anywhere) and he did not understand what I had said. He thought I had said, “How did you manage without your alligator?” and wanted to know what on earth he needed an alligator for. The boys thought that was hilarious and so navigators were always alligators in our house after that.