When we bought our farm in the Southern Overberg thirteen or so...ish years ago, the village of Baardskeerdersbos was unheard of. It was a tiny hamlet with a handful of families who had lived and worked the land as small subsistence farmers and inter-married for over 100 years. The village family names included the Groenewalds, Fouries, de Kocks and Mathees . On the outer-lying farms adjacent to the village were to be found the families, de Wet, Uys and Swart. Inside the village no outsider could purchase land or property as all the smallholdings were combined in a family trust which prevented outside ownership. When all this was considered we felt very lucky to have stumbled upon our little farm tucked in a valley 6 km outside the village, in an area called Tierfontein....
How we found our farm.
In 1995 we decided to start looking for a small piece of land that Charl could grow cut flowers on. We were living in Cape Town at the time and one Sunday as we looked through the property pages of the news paper we spotted a small advertisement for a farm near Pearly Beach. The ad read that the farm had a small cottage on it and a dam and consisted of 68 hectares of land, of which 10 were arable and the rest were fynbos and mountain. Although Pearly Beach seemed miles away we phoned the estate agent and got brief directions which included a lot of gravel roads, dams and red roofed houses as landmarks. We knew we had to take the turn off on the dirt road opposite Pearly Beach, and to look for a new large dam and a red roofed house. So off we set that same Sunday. Needless to say we got very lost, and after numerous wrong turns down overgrown sand roads and an encounter with a very large puff adder we finally realised that what was meant by the 'new dam' was the farm called Nieuwedam Farm opposite the Tierfontein road and the 'rooi dak huisie' was in fact the small cottage of our farm. It was it seemed the only house with a red roof and was clearly seen nestling in a large meadow surrounded by bright green kikuyu grass, with a huge dead gum tree standing over it as sentinel. We thought it looked wonderful, like a combination of Wales meets Tuscany, only a bit shabbier.
The 'Rooi Dak Huisie'
On the outside the small rustic red roofed cottage had cement coloured walls made from stipple plaster work and a deep pitched red painted corrugated iron roof. The roof was almost more in volume than the house itself.As we approached we saw there were a lot of dogs hanging around. We knew that Arnold the farm labourer lived there, and they were all his dogs, border collie crosses and other mongrel breeds, some tied to trees with rope, others just sitting around. There was the sound of plaintive yelping coming from inside the cottage which sounded like a puppy crying and crying. We knocked on the door, but it appeared no one was at home. I was desperate to get to the crying dog, so in we removed the makeshift cardboard cover over a panel of the front door and entered into a very dark interior front room. In a long tall cardboard box was a small black and white puppy scrambling up against the box sides and yelping as though its heart would break. I picked it up and found a bowl of some mashed potatoes on a table next to the box and started to feed it. It ate hungrily and I held it a bit, but realised this was some one else's animal and it looked in good condition and it was just lonely and the owners were probably out at church and would be returning soon. We looked around at the tiny black interior of the cottage which had a small kitchen with walls blackened by wood smoke and soot. There was an old Dover stove in a bakoond but it had no flue so whoever lived there just made a fire in the stove and all the smoke came out and filled the whole interior covering the walls and ceilings. The ceilings we noticed between the black soot consisted of heavy wood beams with reeds between them. The voorkamer were we had entered into through the front door was crammed full of vinyl covered furniture against the walls which were covered in a discoloured beige enamel paint. There were bright red and black bold patterned carpets on the floor. The one bedroom which led off the voorkamer had a mixture of old floral wall paper and beige paint and pictures cut out of women's magazines plastered on the walls. There was a horrible damp smell and the floor looked like bare earth. There were two single beds in the room piled high with clothes and a double bed separated by a curtain. Off the voorkamer leading to the back was a small room which stank of rat urine and a small turquoise coloured dirty bathroom. There was another door leading further on, but it was bricked up. This led to a large room at the back of the cottage which had caved in and all that was left were a few mud brick walls. What was so appealing about the whole cottage despite its dismal interior were the very thick walls, obviously made from mud brick, the old sash windows of oregon pine with their wide interior window sills, the yellow wood beam and reed ceilings and low oregon pine doors, and besides all the dinginess I just knew it was filled with potential, even though it looked like Charl would take some convincing. The house was obviously very old and full of cracks and creaks, but with a lot of love and a few licks of paint I knew we could turn it into something wonderful. And besides we had a whole 68 hectares to look at, with a fynbos mountain, and a dam...as far as we were concerned the house was a bonus! So we took a break under an old fig tree near by while we considered which way to explore next.
The hundred year old Fig tree
Painting of the fig tree
Our little cottage in a sea of grass, as it originally looked when we bought the farm in 1995A short walk....
After we had settled the puppy and carefully closed up the cottage we walked past a very old Willow tree with a child's swing attached to it, uphill towards the mountain and the dam which was situated about 500 metres above the cottage on a slope. We saw first a very large dam with a big hole in it and not much water, and upwards of this was a smaller dam which we assumed must be the small dam which came with the property. Above and behind the dam was a fence separating the 10 hectares of arable land from the mountain. The estate agent had told us that two years before there had been a big fire which had swept across the mountain and burnt much of the fynbos and a small pine tree forest in its wake. The mountain was still scarred but showed signs of new life with beautiful little fynbos flowers all over it. We sat under a few remaining tall Pine trees and looked back towards the red roof of the cottage beyond where it was nestled in a field of Kikuyu grass with cows grazing around it. We saw the still dark water of the dam and the bright blue sky reflected in it, heard the sounds of birds and we looked at the uninterrupted views beyond of gentle green fields and sloping hills. It was very lovely and we were so excited, we knew we just had to buy it. We had no idea how far the property stretched up the mountain, but we knew it must be quite far if the remaining 58 hectares were all mountain. We also did not have anyone to explain the boundaries as the estate agent had not come with us. We just knew we had found a piece of heaven with no noise or city life and we rushed back in the car to Cape Town to phone the agent to say we had to have it.
The farm becomes ours...
When we returned to Cape Town and we had negotiated a price for the farm, we started to make the necessary adjustments to our lives which included Charl selling his share as a partner in the Cape Town based landscape business LM Garden Design (Laubscher Moore Garden Design) and him moving from Devils Peak to Observatory. We kept our two respective houses in Cape Town as a base as we knew it would be a few years before we could move to the farm permanently. When the sale went through in January 1995 Charl set off to the farm to take a long hard look at the rooi dak huisie and what was needed to make it habitable. I was a bit cowardly at this point and what with all the spiders, webs, rats and snakes that abounded I thought this was decidedly a mans job! He took a further man called Simon with him and later when they returned and Charl told me how Simon slept the whole night with his candle burning to keep the rats away from his feet, I knew I had made the right decision! He and Simon cleaned and scrubbed and dusted years of blackened soot and dust from the yellow wood ceiling beams and from the spaans reit (Spanish reed) ceiling. The ceilings and corners of the rooms had spider webs as thick as mist from all the daddy-long-legs and the walls were as black as pitch. Arnold, the farm labourer who had previously lived there for nine years with his wife and small family, had never been given a pot of paint to paint the interior walls and the traditional Dover stove in the kitchen on which they cooked had no flue to take the smoke up the chimney, so it filled the tiny house and coated all the surfaces every time they made a fire. The following weekend I accompanied Charl and we took a plasterer who was aptly named General to tackle all the cracks in the walls and the non existent floors which consisted of earth covered over with linoleum. On our first night Charl and I decided to assemble two old World War II camp beds for ourselves in the bedroom filled with the cut out lady pictures and smelling of damp and fresh earth from the floor. General slept in the voorkamer. We had paraffin lanterns and candles and we had cooked our supper earlier on a fire under the stars . We collected water from the dam to wash the dishes and for our own ablutions and we marvelled at how quiet and tranquil it was in the country.
Noises in the kitchen...
We put out our candles and paraffin lamps and snuggled into our ancient and wobbly camper beds while listening to the outside sounds of frogs and insects as a wildlife night orchestra took over. Calls of owls and night jars added to the bliss. About half an hour after our lights went out I heard this rustling of many small feet on the ceiling above us and the tiny squeaking of little furry creatures. In the kitchen, which was a doorway and the small voorkamer away from our bedroom, I heard a gentle plop, plop as one by one as the furry creatures with the rustling feet lowered themselves from the brand solder attic, through the burnt ceiling reeds in the corner and down the the wall onto a corner shelf. Charl had worked hard the whole day and was dead tired, in addition to being blessed with that enviable male attribute of falling asleep the moment his head hits the pillow. I lay awake quite undecided as what to do, as well as being terrified at the thought of having furry rodents running over me during the night. Plucking up the courage I picked up the torch and crept into the kitchen. There I saw our plastic shopping packets which we had put on the one and only corner shelf on the wall, spilling open with trails of bread and biscuits and fruit distributed over the floor. Of the culprits there was no sign. I quickly learnt that they had a maddening habit of being able to vanish into thin air the moment they sensed a human was moving in their direction. All I could do was carefully close the kitchen door on its rickety hinges, leaving the rodents to their midnight feast, in the hopes that none would make their way through to us and that there would be some bread left over for our morning meal.
