A STRANGE TALE OF A NEW FRIEND AND A LITTLE WOODEN BOX

I lived in Langebaan village on the lagoon that lies just off Saldanha Bay on the West Coast of South Africa. My daughter Susan and I were producing a little monthly magazine called Out & About on the West Coast.

The magazine diarized current events, horse racing news, stories, recipes and information about the surrounding areas. It was very popular with residents waiting eagerly to read it every month. Susan did the layout and I was journalist and editor and coffee maker, you name it.

One day as I was at my computer writing an article a knock on the door disturbed me. I opened it to greet a strange young woman with blond hair who was not beautiful but very attractive. She held a back copy of Out & About in her hand and asked if she could come in.

Over coffee she introduced herself as Debbie. Debbie had always had a dream of writing and up to now her life and not allowed this. She asked if I needed a hand and could she do an article for the magazine each month. Well I knew how difficult it was to get published and I asked her to bring me an article. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her pocket and handed it over. I told her I would read it and come back to her.

Now just recently geologist David Roberts was picnicking  on the beach at Kraal Bay in the West Coast National Park. David knew that fossil prints of a large carnivore had been found on the dunes here and he began to scramble among the cliffs searching for more animal prints. He found three paw prints of a large carnivore on a rock slab.

David returned to the area a few months later as a scientist with the council for Geoscience to begin research on the geological history of the western coastal platform. He noticed a piece of quartz shaped by a stone age person protruding from the sandstone. Holding the artifact up his gaze was attracted to the low cliffs a few hundred yards away. Eureka! There he spied human footprints!

He splashed across the flats to reach the cliffs and began a systematic search that resulted in him arriving at a pinnacle known as the Pulpit Rock. He hauled himself up to a large block of sandstone and bent to examine it more closely. He brushed away the loose sand and had a heart stopping discovery for here lay two beautifully preserved human prints and so the existence of Eve as she was subsequently named, was discovered who lived and walked along these shores some 117 million years ago!

Debbie had written about this find and her writing was so vivid that I could see the real Eve walking upon the dunes thinking and dreaming much as I had done on many an occasion. I was overwhelmed at my discovery of an exceptional writing talent!

Debbie became my right hand man and little by little I learnt her story. She was married and had three children. Her husband abused her so badly that she ran away from their home in Maun, Botswana. She showed me the scars on her hands where he had forcibly held them against a hot plate on the stove. In desperation she had fled, leaving her children behind feeling sure that he would not abuse them.

She settled in Langebaan and met someone she could love and moved in with him. Some months went by and I was planning to travel to Robertson where Susan stayed on a thoroughbred stud farm with her husband and children. We had a lot of work to do together and Debbie was happy to hold the fort while I was away. However she needed to go away too and it was agreed that I would return on the day she was leaving. She would leave everything ready for me and get going early with her boyfriend.

I took a short cut back that led me to Mooreesburg on a lesser road that ended on the main artery running South to North on the West Coast. I needed to cross over, go through the town and on to Veldrif and so home. At the junction there was a huge accident with fire engines and ambulances and I crossed without seeing it in detail.

A week later Debbie had not appeared and was not answering her phone. We did not have cell phones then. I was not unduly worried but it was unusual for her not to have let me know if she was going to return late. Then my phone rang and a strange woman asked if she was indeed speaking to me. I confirmed that it was indeed I and she told me that she was Debbie’s mother. Debbie and been in that terrible accident that I had passed and had died. Her boyfriend was badly injured and was doomed to a wheel chair for the rest of his life.

I was very upset but was occupied packing up to go to Botswana for more research on the guide book Susan and I were working on,  Discovering Botswana. My friend Joy who lived outside of Gaborone was expecting me. Tidying up I picked up a little inlaid wooden box that had sat on the bookshelf since I moved into the house and what made me lift the lid I don’t know. Inside was a folded A 4 typing paper.

I opened the folds and saw that the letter for that was what it was, was addressed to me. I glanced at the end and there was Debbie’s signature. I knew her handwriting well. I sat down with a glass of wine and read the letter. Tears dripped down my cheeks as her words told me just what it had meant to her to be able to write for Out & About and my friendship. I was touched to the core.

Debbie must have written it before leaving for her trip with her boyfriend and planned to give it to me on her return. I returned it to the little box that had been on the shelf when I moved in, probably left by the previous owners of the house.

The drive to Gaborone went without incident in the bitter cold of a Kalahari winter and that evening Joy and I went to bed early, both in her bedroom. Our beds were opposite and we were both keen readers. Joy had a whisky beside her and I had a glass of red wine, each with a book. We were good companions with no need to chat.

Something made me look up and there was Debbie sitting on the end of my bed. She was pale grey white but unmistakable. She spoke to me, her words quite clear. “Don’t worry Mols, I’ll show you how!” Then she was gone. I was shaking as I lifted my glass to my lips and Joy dropped her book and asked me what was wrong. I told her and being Joy she accepted what I said unconditionally.

Now I had had a few episodes of seeing things having had a grandmother who was Cornish and another who was Irish. The family believed I was what they used to call ‘fey’.

Throughout my trip I pondered on Debbie’s words thinking that I was probably going to die too. However here I am in my eightieth year still very much alive. Looking at the little box I reflect that she really meant that she would guide me through the rest of my life for I have indeed ended in quiet waters with a life rich in friends and family and am still writing and painting. I will never forget Debbie and her words.

 

OF WIGGLE TOYS AND MORE

I was very privileged to meet one Angel at the Irish Club in this my Jozie. (Johannesburg) Angel changes her hair colour with regularity and rules the flotsam and jetsam of the members and staff with a flexible rod. All revere her. Rumour has it she was once a beauty and had many lovers but nobody has confirmed this. However the power of her personality filters into all our lives.

She certainly changed mine. She introduced me to an incorrigible fellow author with a puckish sense of humour who very kindly helped me to publish my novel, July Fever, on Amazon. She persuaded us all to help a member who had fallen on hard times, with car washing and other chores until he found more work.

She next instituted an occasional home cooked meal from her friend Doug who is I must admit a very good cook. Doug brings his slow cooked food to the Irish pub where we gather drinking beer or wine, chatting up a storm, in an insulated bag such as our grandmothers used to use. Good food and wine, friends, and what more could you wish for? I have long used this method when in the bush using the cast iron pots beloved of rural people I would construct the stew, bring it to the boil then bury it in a hole with a few coals below and some on the lid. When we returned from our game drive the stew was ready and succulent!

Christmases past and present see me do the same for my lovely gammon. Boiled up with cider, dark brown sugar and water to cover for thirty minutes then removed and the pot wrapped in newspaper and blankets until the next morning to be revealed in all its perfection. Peel off the ski, score the fat in a diamond pattern and glaze it with brown sugar, sherry and mustard. When glazing done decorate with cherries or whatever. In Tofo in Mozambique I use fresh pineapple pieces.

I have a Dutch oven that has served us well over the years at our place in Tofo beneath a cashew nut tree. Years gone by we were there one very wet Christmas sitting beneath a canvas canopy as the half done roof was leaking badly. A screaming interrupted our early morning coffee and we jumped up to see Nic, our Greek neighbour, killing a pig for his lodge, Turtle Cove’s Christmas dinner beneath our cashew nut tree. He cooked a haunch of the pig in my oven and it was delicious!

That Christmas brings back memory of a dear friend of ours who was with us that Christmas. A young man with everything to look forward to. All of twenty-six years, Glen left Maun in Botswana where he was working in the Delta to be with his dying grandfather. He had a job in a plant to diesel factory in a village near Gaborone and was sadly electrocuted as their electricity had not been earthed. We loved him dearly. His body lies next to his grandfather beneath an acacia tree.

Back to the Irish pub.  There is a car boot sale every Sunday. Jack and I wander there, talking to the vendors, sampling wares and looking for earrings for me. I bumped into Angel happy to see her as I had not been to the pub for some time. “Oh I have a present for you!” I looked at her, puzzled. “It’s from Bob. He bought us all one but you have to open it in the sun!”

I smiled. What could it be? Jack, my trusty companion with four legs and a long body and I took it home. We opened the gay package and revealed a plastic globe within which was captured a plastic ladybird. Sure enough in the sun she began to fly in one place, always doomed to be imprisoned in her plastic globe.

When Jack and I sit in my large arm chair, just fitting together, I hear the click click of her wings and look up to see her in the sunlight through the open door. My heart goes out to all those animals doomed to look at bars throughout their life. How precious those times in the wild where they roam free. The plastic shines in the sun and I am reminded of the plastic littering this great city of Joburg and the rivers so polluted that our very life is threatened. A vision of that deep hole in the Pacific where all the plastic of the world collects disturbs my thoughts.  Hope is on the horizon for our new Mayor has declared every last Saturday of the month clean up day and the public will get stuck in and collect rubbish in parks, neighbourhoods and the city centre.

How many creatures lose their lives swallowing plastic, get caught in gill nets. Early days in Botswana the lodges would display long lines of wire traps found in the bush. Ironically, I feel that ladybird is part of the family now and I find her click click passive flying part of Jack’s and my life.

I am reminded of Wordsworth’s poem, The Daffodils. Will my Wiggle ladybird appear when I am in pensive mood and will I wonder if she is at the bottom of the hole in the bottom Pacific?  Where will I be somewhere along my declining years? It is sure to be in Africa. children know that my ashes need lie beneath a tree in one of my favourite game reserves where an elephant might take shade or a lion sleep.  Of course I will send ladybird to the great plastic recycling graveyard.

I have often been in great pain and the thing that flashes on my inward eye is a pale lioness in the great Etosha Pan game reserve in Namibia. Susan and I and her children came across her hunting. The dying sun gave lustre to her ivory coat and I was captured by her absolute concentration on her quarry.

I was in the Okavango Delta one year when the flood that comes down from Angola was especially heavy and the male lions’ territory was shrinking. They roared their supremacy all night but could not stop the encroaching water and in the morning could be seen lying exhausted and wounded from defending a diminishing territory, licking their wounds.

Are we not looking at a diminishing territory in our world? More and more people are filling the cities and having to make do with limited space. Think of going to Mars – we would take all our inter personal animosities and ingrained opinions that would eventually come to the surface despite exhaustive counseling. Eons later we would also have to abandon Mars.

Great thoughts; with a glass of good Robertson red wine whilst a thunderstorm finally brings rain. I nibble at the most delicious chocolate almond wafers that my neighbour brought me in a delightful little packet together with other goodies. A few sticks of biltong that the Americans would call jerky, dried game meat with spice beloved of South Africans and a breakfast bar. All I had done to deserve this generosity was give her a lift to the optometrist. Here I think is the essence of our existence. Caring for others.  In Africa we call it Ubuntu – I am, therefore you are.