The Lyndi Tree. JA Ginn Fourie
a single one.
James, David, and Boxer
My brother David is born in Wepener when I am four – he sleeps in my parents’ room, while the rest of us share a bedroom, down a long passage from theirs. The bathroom is on a veranda outside their bedroom. There are no electric lights after everyone goes to bed because the generator is switched off. One night, John says he needs to pee; the bathroom is far and dark, so he asks me to accompany him,
“Are you scared?” I ask.
“No” he replies, “come with me, and you’ll see I’m not scared!”
Although baffled by his seeming logic I go with him anyway – my buddy.
We move again when I am about seven to a place called Mapoteng, also in Lesotho. It is two miles from Maluti Hospital, an Adventist mission which offers great help to the surrounding villages; this means that we are now able to go to Church and Sabbath School at Maluti which is rather dull. Every Saturday morning, we drive over there at about 9 am and after church spend the rest of the day there with our friends.
We learn to ride horses when we are very young. Daddy has horses wherever we live; they are a part of who he is as a polo player, so often after he has closed the trading store, he schools the ponies. Ian goes to a weekly boarding school in the nearest town of Ficksburg and John is homeschooled. John and I spend many hours riding on the bridle paths of the surrounding Maluti Mountains. Sometimes we are in search of our dog; Boxer is a dalmation who is drawn by pheromones, wafting on air currents from nearby villages into his twitching nostrils. The Sotho people we meet along the way are friendly – they generously share their food with us when we are hungry, and they can usually tell us which direction Boxer has taken. John speaks fluent Sotho, so I don’t bother to learn because he is an excellent translator for me, and secretly I enjoy relying on him - my Big brother.
In the summer months on Sundays, Mommy and Daddy take us to Leribe so they can play tennis, it’s about an hour’s drive. I love to play with the other children and take my dollies along, hoping there will be girls. Although at home my brothers play dolls with me, when there are boys at the tennis courts, I learn to leave my dollies in the car.
One hot, sunny day there are only boys at play when we arrive. We join in to play cars in the shade of the surrounding pine trees. Between watching our parents play tennis and our brr-brring on makeshift roads, John says to one of the boys;
“My Daddy plays better tennis than your Daddy!”
“My Daddy’s bigger and older than yours!” comes the retort.
“So, your Daddy will die before mine!” is Johns’ confident reply.
My chest swells with my big brother’s smarts. I don’t remember Ian being with us on this occasion. Sometimes I go to the Sunday school in the Catholic Church near the tennis courts, where the Nuns in their black habits give a sticker for being present and another for learning a scripture. I enjoy the rewards and can’t recall being given awards for anything before. It’s a brand-new feeling; in fact, up till now, my learning has all been over John’s shoulder, as Mommy teaches him. John doesn’t fancy going to the big stone church at all, once a week to Maluti is more than enough for him. On the way home I wonder out loud why it is so important to go to church on Saturdays as we do. Daddy responds,
“Because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh day, on our calendar that is Saturday. God rested that day and set it aside for worship to celebrate creation. At the end of time, it will be a test of faithfulness to the true God, the creator to keep the Sabbath day holy!”
I question, “Oh, so why do other people go to church on Sunday?”
Mommy eagerly supplies the answer,
“Constantine the Great, whomever he was! made a law a long time ago, which changed the Sabbath to Sunday, and now the world is wandering after the Great Beast of Revelation. At the end of time the beast will persecute the remnant people, a small group who are left over, who keep God’s commandments, rather than mans’ and love Jesus. We are the remnant people and need to help others to see the truth.”
I am silent thinking Phew Hell! An expression I have just learned from our new friends. Am I supposed to tell our Nun that she is going to church on the wrong day and following after a ferocious beast which I have seen in pictures, on the Sabbath School Lesson Quarterly, with huge claws and monstrous teeth? Even when she gives me those pretty stamp stickers! I think not.
One time on the way home from Leribe, as the sun is setting, I am asleep in the back window, John on the floor and Ian on the back seat, David must have been on Mommies lap. I awake to the screech of brakes as the Studebaker swerves to a halt. Daddy’s voice sounds tense: “That car is out of control!” Then comes an almighty bang-crash as we land in a tangled mass of metal; leather; and our arms and legs in strange positions. The oncoming car has narrowly managed to cross the one-car culvert but is still going too fast to miss us parked on the side of the road. The vehicles are both damaged too much to drive, and I remember crying with pain in my head and neck, but the fear and sadness for Daddy and Ian seem far worse - they are so proud of the Studebaker. Besides, how will we get home? Some kind soul takes us back and that night before supper we kneel in a circle and Daddy reads from the scriptures about how the angels protect us, and he prays,
“Thank you, our Heavenly Father, for protecting us from injury or being killed today.”
And Mommy says,
“Yes, Lord!”
Daddy buys a brand-new grey Humber Super-Snipe with red leather upholstery, and we are all so proud of the new car! Somehow the sense of status is communicated, although I am no more than eight at the time, I know that we have arrived!
School is not in the picture for me yet. Education seems to be essential for boys though, as Mommy teaches John with a correspondence course. I am keener than he and relentlessly peer over his shoulder, making suggestions, much to his annoyance and my hurt from his rebuffs,
“Why don’t you go play with your silly dolls or cats”; “Push-off you little menace! Stop following me around,” and later, “I wish you were dead!”
But, I have no one else to play with, since I have been warned not to play with the Basotho children. One day Mommy gives me a devil-of-a-hiding when she finds me sharing the servants’ bounty out of their three-legged iron pot.
“Your father has told you time and again that you must not play with the kaffirs, they do not have toilets and baths as we do, and their food is not safe, they have no fridges.”
It is so humiliating to lift my skirt and have my bottom thwacked with a stick.
“Damn, damn, damn,” I mutter under my breath – these new words seem very useful under these circumstances.
The influence of the newly established Apartheid system in 1948 by the Nationalist Government, must have reinforced these ideas about Black culture and inferiority, which then became the norm for us, how sad is that! The laws imposed were oppressive and inhumane, and I will reflect how they affected us all later in the story
John and I steal ‘C to C’ cigarettes from the trading store. We have an elaborate game and the place to play it for hours on end, in the nearby forest. We pretend to be Mr and Mrs so-and-so. We visit the ‘pretend neighbours’ and smoke in their pretend lounge. One day I singe my fringe, and Mommy asks how it happened. I say that I have been playing with matches,
“Show me where they are,” she says.
In the background, John is gesticulating to me to keep quiet and threatening to hit me if I show her, but I show where our matches are stashed, and of course the cigarettes are there too. By this time, John is running away, and Mommy beats me for stealing and fibbing to boot and later John gives