rifle and many armfuls of cartridges to try to destroy the nest of vipers that were breeding unconstrained under the rocks alongside the reservoir. My mother stood at a distance, shouting words of warning.
“Bruce! Be careful!”
“There’s another one behind you.”
And there was.
And another.
One puff adder after the other, writhing and undulating as they intertwined.
It was Charlie, with his stick, who taught us to listen for their puff, to always look down as we walked and to recognise their cryptic colouration as they lounged lazily, carefully camouflaged in their natural habitat. It was also Charlie who came rushing to the back door one afternoon, ashen in pallor, shouting for my mother.
“Miessies!”
My mother opened the door, eyes wide.
“Daar’s ’n slang! ’n Groot slang!”
Eyes wider still.
“Ek kannie die kop of’ie stert sien nie!” he yelled, his stick hanging useless at his side.
I never did see the snake that stretched from the one side of the road to the other, obscuring both its head and tail at the same time. But I knew it as the python that lived in the hollow beneath the marula tree, the one that guarded the bottom gate, and from then on we were no longer allowed to wait under the tree for my father to come home from work.
We checked our beds at night to make sure that no cobra had tucked itself in. We kept our eyes open for mambas, by far the most deadly, and lost a bit of ourselves when our dog, Spekkie, died of one’s poison. We watched out for rinkhals that played dead. We observed the boomslangs as they warmed themselves out in the sun or became one with the branch, still and unmoving.
But the most spectacular was the snake that would one day make its way down our slate passage. It was school holidays and it was just my brother, David, and I at home when it made its magnificent entrance. My brother was in the passage when it sashayed toward him, its head swaying from side to side. I was in the kitchen frying our favourite slap chips when David ran in screaming. I couldn’t make out his words. I thought he’d been stung by a bee. He was very allergic.
“It’s okay,” I said, “Calm down.”
“No. It’s a python!” he screamed.
A python?
“Johanna!” I shouted. “Daars ’n slang – kom gou!”
Johanna tossed her iron aside and came running.
“Dis onner die couch, Johanna!”
“Nee, nonnie, hy’sie daarie,” she said peering into the under-couch darkness.
And then, as she dropped the couch back into place, it slithered out from under it, shifty eyes darting, tongue flicking. It was the biggest snake I had ever seen. Easily three metres long and as wide as my hand. So big that we couldn’t kill it. We managed, though, to close it in the TV room.
Then I leapt up onto the dining table, not wanting my feet touching discarded scales, and called my father.
The snake park sent one of its handlers. It turned out not to be a python after all. It was a banded Egyptian cobra. And that was how our very own cobra was given its own glass cage next to the prized king cobra at the park. Our snake then became the second biggest snake I’d ever seen and we were given complimentary entrance to the snake park for as long as everyone remembered.
As scorpions and spiders also blended seamlessly into our environment, my mother decided it was time to introduce animals that we might prefer. So my father and Charlie set to constructing cages and pens and hutches and soon we had chickens, ducks and rabbits. We got stuck in – feeding, collecting eggs and counting bunnies. But the most anticipated event of the year was the spring arrival of three fluffy white lambs, one for each of us to hand rear. We eagerly took ownership of our little lambs and gave them meaningful names like Fluffy, Snow and Diane. We held them tight as they greedily drank the milk that foamed from teats attached to Coke bottles. We wrestled with them, spent hours training them to follow us and generally loved them until they became big, robust sheep with woolly, matted coats. It was heartrending when they mysteriously disappeared, one by one. My father said it was the jackals.
Charlie fashioned out a vegetable patch and soon we were growing our own vegetables too, leafy lettuces, spinach, carrots and cabbages. Aside from the bird coop, the vegetable patch and the cleared rock garden, the veld around us was an impenetrable expanse. It was dense with waist-high shrubs, thorn trees, aloes and proteas, a vast wildness that became our playground.
We had no immediate neighbours – or at least none that we could see from the house – and, having moved from Port Elizabeth, it was a surprise to realise that people could live so far apart. The Bothas owned the smallholding to our right and we only saw them when we passed each other occasionally on the dust road. It was a road that needed to be graded annually after the rains, an initiative spearheaded by Mr Botha himself as he preferred a smoother surface for his Mercedes-Benz. Mr Botha was a distinguished man, active in the local municipality and involved in the church. Mrs Botha was equally refined. To our distant left Johann, the hairdresser, and his boyfriend lived discreetly. Almost two kilometres away, toward the national road, were the Bezuidenhouts, whom we would only befriend once we started catching the school bus. Then on the other side, even further away, were the Van der Merwes and the Du Toits. It would take years for the Goings to integrate.
But if there was one thing that brought the entire community of Ana Landbouhoewes together quickly, it was a veld fire. And we were particularly vulnerable in our wooden tinderbox. It wasn’t just the time my brother set a match to the grass; the blazing sun had a habit of taking its vengeance out on the parched ground, and its blistering heat was enough for the grass to self-ignite and start a wave of destruction that could quickly escalate out of control. There was one particular night when it seemed that Vulcan himself had released his fury in the form of an almighty blaze that almost took us with him.
We awoke to find our bedroom lit up bright orange. I remember screaming for my mother, but she wasn’t there. All human effort was needed to battle that fire and the calming of three distraught children was not a priority. We huddled together as we listened to the echoes of panic.
“Oppas!”
“Gaan daardie kant!”
“Kry nog water!”
“Gou! Die wind het gedraai.”
The flames were raging tall, higher than our house, plundering everything in their path. We could hear the fire rushing towards us, its noise deafening as it pitched and peaked. As the God of Fire and Forge fiercely continued its rampage and the air around us closed in with a blazing heat, my brother, my sister and I held each other tight. We listened to the sound of wet branches being battered into the ground, melding into the thud of sodden hessian bags as neighbours from all around tried to beat back the raging furnace. By the time the fire engines arrived from town, the smell of burning acacias had long since filled our lungs. But the fight was far from over – it took the rest of the night before the fire was contained and days more before the smouldering embers had burnt themselves out.
The veld around us reclaimed its structure slowly as weakened roots strengthened and small creatures returned. It was a tentative process of healing and a daily reminder that life was fragile and that all dangers needed to be contained.
Five
Brits was built on the back of the motor-manufacturing industry, sweating miners, subsidised farmers and staunch Afrikaner politics. It was in fact just outside Brits, at the nearby De Wildt railway station, that the heart of the National Party first beat following a speech by General Barry Hertzog in 1912. It was a town proud of its heritage and, as cultural purity reigned, it comfortably gave prominence to those more radical in their views.
Dries Alberts lived near the Hartbeespoort Dam, where when the sluices opened the