89) Our Holiday

Jonny and I went away on holiday. We had not been away without the boys since our honeymoon so it was rather hard to get used to at first but we did have a good time. First we went to Carltonville to visit Jonny’s niece Bernice. By this time she was married to Vaughan Smith who was a game ranger with the Department of National Parks. Bernice had qualified as a nurse but now she had a little girl called Vanessa of about 16 months old. It was good to see them again and to meet Vanessa. Later they also had a son whom they called Mathew and Vaughan was offered another job in a town on the very northern border of Natal, almost in Mozambique. It was a very small town with a very small European population. Vaughan told Bernice that the European population was four. Poor Bernice was not too sure about this and voiced her concerns. “What if we don’t like those four people?” she asked Vaughan. I just loved his answer “We are those four people”

Me with Vanessa on our visit to Carltonville

After visiting Bernice and Vaughan we moved on to Venter’s Post a small mining town not too far from there. Sonny and Isabel Mathison whom we had known from our Chingola days and had stayed with for a while when we first went to Salisbury were living there. We had not seen them for along time and had a lot of catching up to do. I remember them telling me what a one horse town Venter’s Post was. Most of the week the traffic was not heavy in the little town but on Saturday everyone came to town in their car and the main junction was fairly busy so they would wheel out a portable traffic light and place it at the junction to control the traffic. Then when the shops were all closed and the people had all gone home the traffic cop would reverse the procedure and wheel the traffic light away again. I seem to think that it was kept in the chemist shop while not in use but maybe I am wrong about that.

Alex, Andrew, Wendy, me and Stuart

The next on our visiting list were our friend the Halls; Wendy, Stuart and their four sons Ian, Robin, Alex and Andrew. They were living in King Williams Town, which was then part of the Ciskie a South African Independent Homeland. Stuart was working at the foundry and I remember that there was a considerable amount of worker unrest there at the time. Wendy was working for the education department training new young teachers. Ian was not there as he was at university studying aeronautical engineering. Robin was away working in the reptile department of the museum somewhere. We stayed there a few days and the weather was terrible. There had been a rather bad drought up until then and now it had broken it seemed to be making up for lost time. It was cold and wet the whole time we were there. Wendy was determined to show us the beauty of The Eastern Cape but it was too cold to venture far. One afternoon she rushed home from work and said that she had heard on the radio that the weather in East London was fine and sunny so we had to get ready quickly as she was taking us to see the sea. We got into her car and she drove to East London (which we all laughingly called Slundon). We drove through the vast pineapple fields that the area is famous for. I had never seen pineapples growing commercially before and was impressed to see them in such abundance. The weather started to clear up as we got nearer to the coast and we thought that we were leaving the cloud behind us and we were looking forward to a nice walk on the beach. Unfortunately the clouds were going a bit faster than we were so by the time we got to the beach they had caught up with us and it was cold, windy and raining there. Wendy was very upset that she had not managed to arrange good weather for us.

In search of the sunshine of East London

One evening we went to an Irish Pub evening with Wendy and Stuart and we were joined by a couple called MacDonald, that had been on the cubs fund raising committee with Wendy and I when we were all in Salisbury together. They were also living in King Williams town. We all had a great evening there was a group called The Blarney Brothers and other music too. It was held in a large tent and due to the heavy rain that we had had everything was rather muddy but we had a good sing-a-long and laughed a lot. About two weeks after we got back home we heard that there had been a terrorist attach on King Williams Town and that about eight people had been killed. We were very sad to read in the newspaper that the MacDonald’s were amongst the dead. It was ironic that they had lived in Rhodesia all through the terrorist war and then gone to live in South Africa and had been killed there.

After King Williams Town we headed for the “Wild Coast”. A very beautiful and not surprisingly when you think of its name a very wild part of the coast line. It is part of The Transki, another of South African’s Independent Homelands. Driving through The Transki was an experience in itself. You had to be very careful of all the traffic hazards, poorly maintained road, poorly maintained vehicles, wandering cattle and little black pigs. There seemed to be so many of these little black pigs and their one main object in life seemed to get across the road in front of all the passing traffic. We were sure that in The Transki one did not ask, “Why did the chicken cross the road?” but “Why did the little black pig cross the road?”

We planned to spend a few days in a town called Port St. John. We had read all about it in information catalogues from the tourist board so we knew that there were two or three restaurants there and a number of stores where we could buy groceries. We had booked into a self-catering chalet but did not bother to take any supplies with us as we thought it would be easy to buy things there. When we turned off the main road and headed for Port St. John we were amazed at just how poor a road could be. The Transki was also being blessed with an abundance of welcome rain but it was causing a lot of problems with the roads and it took us a lot longer to reach our destination than we had expected. We arrived at the chalets rather late but as we had eaten at a hotel along the road we were not hungry so were not concerned that the shops were closed by the time we got there and just planned to do some shopping in the morning. We had read in our tourist’s catalogue that there were a number of hotels in the town but we found that one of them had been burnt down so we realised that our catalogue was a little out of date. We did not know how much out of date, but growing in the middle of the burnt shell of the old hotel was a tree that must have been at least 10 foot tall so we thought that it must have been rather a long time since it had been updated.