Animals & Farmers

 

Jerseys and turkeys....

We had not had the farm for very long before we started to have visits from strange semi-conked out blue bakkies (pick-ups) with farmers asking us if we had any grazing for their cows. It was easy to see what attracted them as we had ten hectares of wonderful rich thick grass which had not had any animals on it for at least five months. Bearing in mind we had no fencing we were a bit cautious about letting the land out for cattle grazing. Eventually we agreed to let one of the locals have his emaciated Jersey cows graze as we felt so sorry for their thin state. We were unaware we could charge for the grazing and the crafty farmer had not told these ignorant newcomers about this possibility. We soon realised that cattle had the added benefit of picking up the millions of ticks that clung to the long grass blades and seed heads. We felt like a real farm now with some farm animals! The only other animals besides the abundance of wild life were a flock of white turkeys that some how hung around and roosted in the old fig tree at night. We were never quite sure who they belonged to, but their gobble-gobble sounds and decorative white plumage were a pleasure to watch in the rich green landscape. After a few months had passed we noticed their numbers got fewer and fewer and we wondered whether someone was eating them, in particular the noisy bunch of labourers who lived on the farm to the left of us. One weekend we came to the farm and there were no turkeys left. We decided it was probably a Caracal or Genet, rather than the farm workers that had been polishing them off, although we never did discover the true culprit. In the future we thought we would like to replace them, as they were so beautiful, like sheets of white paper on the fragile Fig branches. When we later were to keep poultry we learnt there was a good reason for them to be locked up at night.

New neighbours...

One summer morning we awoke to a loud knocking on the front door. Bleary eyed I went to open it and there in the bright sunshine was a woman with a mass of curly brown hair and a younger flaxen haired girl of about 12 years old, dressed up in smart riding jodhpurs and riding boots. The older woman introduced themselves as Ros and her daughter Candice, the new tenants of one farm away. Ros invited us to breakfast and insisted we come right away to discuss the labourer, Arnold who had been on our farm before we bought it. She said he was staying on the farm where she was and was posing all sorts of problems. Candice her daughter was also very insistent we come as soon as we were dressed. They were both very open and chatty, not at all what we had so far experienced from the reserved and suspicious locals. We hurriedly dressed and still in a very sleepy state drove over to their farm which has the Assegaai Bosch Kloof waterfall on it that serves the Tierfontein water furrow. Ros was already frying eggs and bacon when we arrived and the delicious smells of cooking filled the cool interior of the house, which was crammed full with saddles, horse tack and candles of every shape and description. At once we could tell these were serious horse people, but how the candle wax fitted in was uncertain. It turned out that their farm had also just been sold by the same Groenewald who sold us our farm, to an artist and his wife who did not live on it, so they had hired Ros to manage it. She and Candice had fled the horrors of a crime ridden Johannesburg, with all their nineteen horses and come to the Cape. En route their horse carrier had been in a terrible accident in the pouring rain and some of the horses had been killed. It was a gruesome and disturbing story and not a promising introduction to their new life. But we were soon to learn that Ros was a tough and tenacious independent woman with a great sense of humour and an unparalleled love of horses. She and Candice had come to help the owners clean up the farm which was as derelict as ours, and supervise the building of a new house. Arnold the labourer had moved onto her farm from ours and was supposed to be working there but instead had started to steal the sprinkler heads and sell them off one by one, as well as helping himself to other items around the property. Ros had been driving him to church in Elim on Sundays and he had got more and more demanding, expecting her to lift and carry him and his family at all hours. Eventually she told him enough was enough and he was asked to leave the farm. She further feared for her and her daughter's safety after the SPCA had been called anonymously to rescue all his dogs. It turned out he and his wife were only too pleased to be leaving rough rural living in favour of a life outside the nearby fishing town of Gansbaai, where he had got a job at the Municipality working in the water department.

Barking in the night....

On a wet cold July winter evening at about 9. 30 pm I saw through the front window what I thought was Ros' little VW Beetle travelling along the Tierfontein Road in front of our farm. The sharp whining and baying of dogs could also be heard coming from the fields next to our house. At first I thought they were Ros' dogs and she was driving after them, but every so often her car would stop and she would switch off her car headlights and then start up again and drive as though she was looking for something. I thought she might be in trouble, maybe she was looking for a lost dog, or her car was cutting out due to mechanical problems. Meanwhile the incessant yapping and barking of many dogs continued coming out of the darkness across the cold wet landscape. Ros drove up and down and the barking got louder and louder. Then I heard a loud whistle just as Ros drove up our long driveway to our front door. Charl was in bed and although I was in my pyjamas I was standing at the front door of our dimly lit little house holding a candle and trying to make out what the problem was. I grabbed my slippers and a jersey and said to Charl, 'Ros is in trouble'. When she arrived at the door she said 'They are hunting dogs and they have got something! Are you coming?' Without another thought I grabbed a small torch and rushed off into the pitch dark behind Ros as she headed over the fields towards the barking. 'Have you got a good torch ?' she asked, 'Mine is pathetic'. Well mine was even worse so we were both in the dark. As we got closer we could hear the pack salivating hideously and braying as they cornered their prey Whatever it was the dogs had caught was wedged up against the dam and the small wooden pump house. I was terrified and Ros kept repeating, 'These are hunting dogs and I heard men's voices with them earlier'. I asked her if they wouldn't set the dogs on us, which we could tell were very large and numbered about six or seven, or would they not even shoot at us if they were hunters? I was completely terrified as we stumbled in the rain and mud, over the uneven grass field, bumping into barbed wire, and fence poles as we struggled through the fence to get close to the dogs. ' Don't worry' she replied, 'I have got a little something'. Finally we got close to the dogs and in the dim torch light we could see them in a frenzy pawing and biting at each other to kill their prey. The next second there was an almighty bang, as a gun was fired right next to me and I thought we had been shot. I fell to the ground screaming 'Oh my God, oh my God!' I was sure I would find I was dripping in blood. Ros said 'Sorry I should have warned you, I fired the shot!' Her ' little something' had been her 38 calibre pistol which she had fired into the dam wall next to the dogs to frighten them off. Well the dogs vanished, not a sound could be heard, no murmur, no running away, not a whimper, the night was totally and absolutely pitch black and silent. I was sitting in a puddle of mud in complete shock at the fact that I had been so close to Ros with her gun shot, the deafening sound of which had now made me temporarily deaf. Where were the men, were they going to come after us? We were perfect targets standing in the dark with our little light in the field. All I wanted to do was get back inside the house as fast as I could and put some proper clothes on instead of the skimpy pyjamas and slippers I had on which by now were sopping wet from the rain. So back we walked, once more fumbling and tripping over barbed wire and unfinished fences. At the house I put on some long pants and a jacket, handed Ros a pair of gum boots although she said she was soaked already, climbed into my boots and back we set to see what the dogs had caught. Meanwhile, Charl slept dead to the world through all the commotion, he had not even heard the gun shot. When we reached the dam and the pump house we shone our torch and saw a large porcupine lying on its side. At first I thought it was dead, but Ros said, no, the dogs seldom kill, it is the men who come and do the vicious killing by using a pole to smash the only vulnerable part of the poor animal, its nose, which is not protected by quills. Suddenly it moved slightly and managed to raise its head and opened one eye and peered at us. Ros talked to it gently and it slowly shook itself, rustled its quills before righting itself. Then it unsteadily turned around and gaining balance got up and trundled away first to the other side of the pump house and then it trotted into the night. Before we left the field, we checked the hunters were not lurking inside the pump house and as we walked back to the house we heard the porcupine utter a grunt, as sort of thanks. Ros at this point left to go and check up on her daughter who she had left alone in the car, while I went back to find Charl still asleep. I woke him to tell him about my shock at the gun and what had happened and the absolute fury I felt over this hunting and how whoever it was had had the cheek to walk right over our property in their blood thirsty killing of wildlife. I could not believe how brave Ros had been valiantly getting into her little Beetle the moment she heard the dogs and her determination to stop the hunters in their tracks. Most people would have looked at the rain and just felt it was too much bother to go out, let alone take on a pack of dogs and their unknown owners in the middle of the night.

We begin to understand the importance of good fences....and Charl wonders what he has bought

On our first visit to the farm, once we had officially taken transfer, we wandered up towards the small dam we knew we owned, at least according to the agent's advertisement. There we saw two men, a farm worker and a man who glowered at us through steely blue eyes under a peaked cap. They were very busy doing fencing and working with rolls of barbed wire. As we approached the men, the one in the cap turned towards us and without a greeting said he was the neighbour and that he was correcting the boundaries. He said that the fence line was wrong and he was moving the fence. He said Groenewald, from whom we had both bought, ran the two farms together and we did not own any of the dams as they were positioned on our respective boundary. The boundary line ran through both the top and bottom dams, he said and ours was a tiny portion of water. When we asked him what he was basing his new fence line on, he replied vaguely that his wife had the farm diagram with the correct boundaries on it. We asked if we could please see it at some time and he said she was away and he did not know where it was. We tried to be friendly but were met with the cold response, 'I don't know where you think you are going to get your water from.' Much taken aback by this country welcome we retreated to our cottage and as we had to leave the following day to go back to Cape Town we resolved on our return to meet the neighbour's wife and look at the diagram. When we next returned to the farm, we walked up to the dam and were horrified to find a barrier of barbed wire strung right through the water. Not only that but the fence line all along our boundary had been hastily moved in by one metre, stretching right up the mountain, where the boundary stone piles had been moved. A one metre distance divided the new stone piles and the remains of the old rusted fence line that had burnt in the mountain fire. Arnold , who was still around came and showed us the old fence line and verified all the new stone piles were incorrectly positioned, giving the neighbours one more metre width to their land. As our farm was a long thin piece of land it made it look all the more obvious and ridiculous. There and then we decided to pay a visit to our neighbour to try and sort out this matter. First we removed the barbed wire in the dam for fear of water birds being trapped or harmed by it. We never did get to see the famous correct diagram, despite trying to visit our neighbours on a couple of occasions and in the end we decided to press on with our home renovations and tackle the boundary issue at a later stage. We would eventually go to the authorities in Bredasdorp who told us we had every right to move the fence back to its original position, which we did about five years later.

Over the next few months we went to the farm every second weekend and in the holidays while concentrating on getting some sort of plumbing installed and the interior more livable. The house had no running water or bathroom. We found a local bricklayer in Baardskeerdersbos, a coloured man named Jims who came and worked on and off, as his alcohol intake dictated. We were very dependant on him and slowly with hard work from Charl, managed to put in a small bathroom which had a small old ball-and-claw bath we retrieved from one of our fields. Arnold, who had lived in our house and had moved to a farm higher up the Tierfontein road, had without asking us intended to take the bath with him, hence us finding it in a field. We also put in a shower with a mosaic pebble floor made of pebbles found at nearby Pearly Beach and a gas geyser which could operate on low water pressure. Establishing our water source for our house was to become one of those learning curves that no-one in the city ever experiences. The topic of water is one that would be returned to again and again! For the moment the house had dam water, but the water pressure from gravity flow was not strong enough to push through the geyser and as we had no electricity to run a pump, we were reliant on gravity. There was a pool of clean water higher up above the two dams where the furrow fed into our property at the base of the mountain, but it fell just on the other side of the neighbours fence. Arnold told us that was where he got water from for nine years and there was a small 20ml pipe in the furrow already so we used this to bring water down to our house. In our kitchen we installed a square porcelain sink which we bought at a builders yard in Salt River and we built stone surrounds to resemble a rustic Greek style sink. Wanting to keep all the fittings in character with the old house we also bought an old enamel basin and recycled taps for the bathroom, something we later learnt was not a good idea, as they could not easily be maintained. From time to time Charl would get overwhelmed and frustrated teaching himself plumbing and trying to figure out how to get enough water volume to the house, as we bought endless filtering devices and black pipe from the farmers co-op. We also spent ages figuring out how to stop frogs and grit from blocking the pipe. Home made shade-cloth netting over the pipe inlets seemed to work the best.

The pitch black Kitchen - before

...and after a coat of paint and the new sink is installed

Inspired by Tricia Guild's bright colours, I busied myself painting the three rooms of the house, choosing an orange ochre for the voorkamer with lime green and dark turquoise wood work, while the bedroom was painted lilac blue and lime green. We laid a cement floor in the bedroom and in the voorkamer, all the old linoleum was lifted off the weak, crumbling cement base. We painted the floors to resemble flag stones in a pale yellow ochre-sandstone colour which was very successful. The kitchen was painted white to rid it of the dreadful burnt brown walls, and I painted the bits of furniture we picked up in second-hand shops in Ultramarine blue. In the attic of the house we found some old broken three-quarter beds which we repaired and an old rickety passage table we affectionately call to this day 'the Tricia Guild table'. All the wood work in the house we distressed with lots of bright colours and this little table we found in a ready made distressed state just like Tricia Guild would have painted. In the process of painting the walls we learnt a lot about what people tried to do in the old days to conquer the problem of damp! The moment enamel paint was invented it must have seemed like a cure all, as all the walls had copious coats of it, and in the bedroom there were layers of different wall papers all peeling and damp under another layer of enamel. Vinyl or linoleum must have seemed just as much a godsend as enamel and it was laid right over floors of bare earth with roots coming through it. One could have done an archaeological survey with all the different linoleum patterns used. We used PVA paint on the walls, but eventually this too peeled off and in the end the best solution has been to use lime wherever possible, sealing the surface between the enamel and lime with a bonding liquid solution. We learnt to live with damp marks as long as the walls were not wet and over the years with enough ventilation and proper trenching around the outside to keep the water away from the house, the walls are all dry. Our house was not built with any cement foundations and has koffieklip rock foundations above the ground on which thick walls of sun dried mud bricks were packed. We even found the wooden mould that was used to make the bricks, lying in a pit at the back of the house. Between the voorkamer and the bathroom was a small passage way room we referred to as the rat piss room. It was named thus because it smelt so terrible that we could not get the smell of rats out of it no matter how many coats of paint we applied over the pale existing turquoise walls. The smell of rat piss had penetrated far into the floor and only after we had put a thin cement screed on it and painted it did the smell go, but the name stayed! This room was painted a pale red ochre and the bathroom leading off it was painted in mid-blue and white stripes with a little yellow window, to try and give the tiniest room in the house some character.

The Voorkamer before painting

...and afterwards

There were only three small Georgian sash windows in the entire cottage, one in the kitchen, which had a few panes cemented over where they had been broken, one in the voorkamer and one in the bedroom. The rooms were badly in need of some more light, so in time we put two more matching small pane windows in the bedroom and kitchen. We had the bedroom window custom made to bring in as much of the outside view as possible. This involved having a large horizontal window made with two opening sections, but no middle section to the frame, so that when both sides opened there was nothing to bisect the view. It still had small panes so even though it was a big window, it would not look out of place with the other windows. Charl and Jims planned to spend one weekend putting it in. What we thought would be a quick job turned into a week long exhausting episode as it turned out that unbeknown to us the wall had been rebuilt at some point in the house's history using firebricks laid in English bond. This meant that not only was the wall as hard as rock because of the hard fired bricks, but because of the English bond, which has bricks in double depths set at different angles, it took a very long time to just make even the smallest hole. After a few broken hammers, many sore muscles, sweat and copious amounts of red brick dust, the hole which needed to span virtually the entire length of the wall was complete and the window was set into the wall. The kitchen window would only come a while later and in anticipation I painted an imitation window and view through it, on the wall, which reminded us of what we could look forward to. The hard effort of the bedroom window paid off and we had a beautiful wide view of the landscape which we could view from our bed. I painted it an acid lime green which worked fantastically with the pale violet blue of the walls.

Dreaming of a new kitchen window

Charl began to create a garden for us starting with windbreaks. We had wind belting at us from all angles, and we had to plant tall trees and shrubs if any sort of garden was to be established. What was very difficult was deciding which views to sacrifice. We argued a bit about it as I was in favour of views and Charl was in favour of windbreaks. In the end he convinced me by saying you can't have everything and we could have views in between the wind breaks which would act as frames for the pastures and mountain. We planted an indigenous small tree called Tarchonanthus camphoratus to start with, to block out the winter North Westerly winds. For the South Easter summer wind we planted Cupressus arizonica with a view to clipping it into a curved hedge. We still had no fences around the house or anywhere except on the boundary of the farm and we were really enjoying the openness of it all. Grass still grew right up to the back door, but slowly Charl created flower beds starting at the front door and extending along the walls of the house and then outwards. There was an old sick Peach tree at the front door which occasionally gave a few peaches and we left it there for a while. Mostly the baboons got the peaches first, or the worms. It finally grew so old and full of dead wood that we cut it down and planted a Turkish oak, Quercus serris. We designed the garden together with Charl doing most of the spade work. We gravelled paths and left the front garden to develop into a mixture of cottage and meadow garden. Because of the dry hot windy summers we had to plant hardy Mediterranean plants many of which have grey foliage and flowers in shades of purple, lavender and blue. We could only water whenever we came to the farm and Charl put a basic dripper irrigation system in which worked very well when it was not blocked by all the silt in the water. Old fashioned roses and English roses did suprisingly well in the front garden and gave the most spectacular spring show once they had grown into mature plants.