The Story of a Southern Overberg Farm: Escape From the Country

After reading the latest VISI magazine (Winter 2013) which is all about Escape to the Country, I had to laugh at the idealized and romantic view of country life. I love the magazine but sometimes I wish they would not feature such contrived views no matter how designer or beautiful. We have had a farm for nineteen years outside Baardskeerdersbos in the Western Cape and as my poor hard working husband and our trusty farm hands will tell you it is nonstop toil, with one disaster management task after another and money quicker spent on a compost heap! It is far from gingham covered jars of jelly and jam, slick designer furniture and family gatherings around a big table. But more like getting used to the blood and gore of birthing and dying animals, farm roads that wear your vehicles to the bone, weather with storms worse than the West coast of Scotland (in winter), boots sloughed with chicken pooh and cow manure, dirt you never get out of your nails, stained linen due to the lovely healthy tannin colored water, exhaustion that prevents you from ever getting round to entertaining, water pipes bursting, animals breaking fences and straying onto the roads, and floods from under water springs which appear overnight and keep the house flooded for days and damp for most of the year! The list is exhaustible and I challenge any of those well heeled city slickers to actually move to the proper country, not a tarmacked dorp like Stanford, but to a real country farm in the middle of no-where! Swop the tarmac, concrete and steel and neat paved little pathways for pastures, mud bricks and wood with bare earth and ceaseless dirt. ! And that is not taking into account the power failures, the peculiar people (very few humans actually), the distances, the lack of social and cultural life, and the porcupine, baboon and guinea fowl that frustrate every attempt to have the dream of home grown vegies, while goshawks, jackal buzzards and caracal are intent on wiping out all your carefully nurtured poultry. No, real country life is altogether a different kettle of fish than that described in magazines.

But then I have to also remind myself Baardskeerdersbos is quite backward and very barbaric, extremely isolated and it may be tougher here than other country places. As I have written about in my previous Post

'In which we get our first two donkeys, Pablo and Luna.'

The original farmers here are a tough cruel bunch who it seems have no understanding that animals are sentient beings. They lack a normal education on most levels, but the treatment of animals is most decidedly the worst. The neighbor on Concordia allows his cats to run wild and when kittens are born they are left to lie in the bare soil in the freezing winter rain, their crying meews breaking ones heart as the starving mother can find no shelter and in the words of the farmer, she is a bad mother she will eat them. I begged him in tears to let me rescue the kittens and mother to which he and his wife became so aggressive they chased me off their farm. This same farmer had a pack of starving dogs that went on the rampage and massacred another neighbors rabbits which led all the dogs to be shot execution style.

A recent incident will further illustrate the attitude here perfectly. There was a man who lived down the road from us on a farm, where he had spent his whole life, his name was Barend Fourie. Barend Bogel was his bynaam (nick-name in Afrikaans) because he was a hunch back. He lived in a little mud brick, traditional Overberg vernacular cottage on the hill with his horses which he loved dearly and which multiplied year by year, but he had enough ground and kept them well. Barend was uneducated and illiterate and lived like a hermit tending to his land. He was written up many times as 'a curiosity' in South African magazines such as Huisgenoot and one of the last articles upset a lot of people as it was entitled 'The Dirtiest Man in South Africa'. Yes it was questionable how often he bathed or washed, he had very long hair and a beard, wore the same funny old jacket and shorts year in and year out. He was always bare foot and at the Baardskeerdersbos Kerk Bazaar (Church Bazaar) he would find himself a pair of Coke tins which he would step on to form shoes and trap around like this for the day. He cycled or walked down to the local shop, Marnie's Winkel, for his provisions and occasionally he would be seen on Snoekie Groenewald's horse cart getting lifts here and there.

Well, Barend died recently and left his land, house and horses to Snoekie Groenewald's son Hennie, who was his nephew ( Hennie's mother Buela, wife of Snoekie, was Barend's sister). Within weeks of Barend being dead, a couple of weeks ago in fact -before Barend's Will has even been cleared by the Master of the Supreme Court- Hennie the trusted nephew, set Barend's house alight and then bulldozed it to the ground. While he was at it he decided to cut every tree down on the property, lovely old poplars, oaks and fruit trees. These trees and Barend's house appear on an Overberg Heritage document but this was of no concern to Hennie. Then to make it more appalling he shot all of Barend's horses and with a digger loader dug a great big hole and tipped them into it.

Regarding the illegal destruction of the Barend's house, we hear he did this because he feared two cousins of Barend's who had been living there with Barend before he died, might try to take over house, so rather than let this happen he razed it to the ground. Hennie lives in the village itself and not on Barend's land where he so wantonly shed blood, sap and stone. Both cousins are still there, in old caravans. One caravan is perched precariously at an angle on the empty hill, now stripped bare of house and trees with nothing else in sight, nor animal or branch. The other is parked over the old Fourie graveyard, because, according to local sources, it is neutral territory and the cousin says Hennie cant touch him there. As for the horses, as horrible as it sounds they are far better off in their place in the ground than being left to the clutches of these crazy people.

Two paintings of Barend's land, at peace, painted when we first came to the area. The first one shows his little house on the hill.

Well then, you say to my moaning, why live in the country, when the reality is so exasperating? It is rather like the approach- avoid dilemma, approach it for all its good qualities while cursing and trying to avoid all the pit falls. For me the solitude, peace and quiet, closeness with nature, being surrounded by animals, both domestic, farm and the predatory which prey on the former, the lack of man made noises (unless they are building a new national road!), the bird calls, the space and distance as far as the eye can see, all this brings joy to the soul , even with all the stresses it brings in basic survival techniques. All the new souls who have settled in the area love animals ( well most) and love the natural surroundings and do not share the barbarism of the old locals who are as far away from Visi idealized fantasy as you could ever imagine. We are still hoping to tame the porcupines and keep our chickens in safety. And now it is raining and pouring and I am so happy I have a huge mess of a trench in my back yard which I hope this time keeps the water out of my house! Any magazine journalist, stylist or photographer would be advised to rather Escape from the Country!

Here are some pictures nice and bad taken in autumn and in the last few weeks of a very wet trying winter!

Geese and chickies on my doorstep. My poor garden which in spite of their interest in eating the plants and scratching the ground up, has continued to grow.

Most beautiful Leghorn Cockerel

The warm and cosy house before the August floods

Power failures by candle light

One of my many prized Staffordshire figures, Dandy with Cat

My painting, Interior Conversation

A delicious winter tomato tart

Geese at the back door, cats at the hearth

Marmaduke, Allegra and Lilith

Allegra

A warm cup of tea

Staffordshire dogs on the window sill

Lilith with her baby Burmese

Waiting for the fire to be lit

A snatch of winter sun on a white stink wood table

My desk before it got cluttered with papers

Dolly the one of many sheep, and dog creatures at Kali's farm, she loves animals!

Kali's birthday lunch on a gorgeous winter day

My portrait of Kali

Mum with her dog Sally on a long empty beautiful beach

The Burmese Isadora and Marmaduke

Cats at the hearth, while the floods keep coming into the house due to underground springs bubbling up under my country mud brick cottage

The bathroom swimming pool

We go out for a little Sunday drive after the big rains of Thursday and we get grounded thanks to the rain and the road works (the new national road being built between Elim and Gansbaai) and trucks that have DESTROYED our farm road! It took Duncan, Thomas and friend Henri , plus Charl and I two hours to dig, shunt, heave, push and shove to get us out.

Our Road to Dakar, with trucks struggling to get through, while cows watch on munching grass and wishing the noise would end

The back yard is dug up and trenches made to try to stop the water flooding my house, it still looks like this...

A warm hazy morning in between the rains when everyone comes into the sun to dry off!

Views of the lush green pastures and animals all loving the sun..

Rupert the donkey with a blaze

The moos and momps

The moos favorite restaurant, Hay Bales, which can be found in front of the Stables Studio and Gallery, note the very pleasing latte fencing.

Paloma Donkey

The designer country furniture.... bath in fashionable moo and momp style, fittings in rusted wire and orange plastic, filled with luscious natural mountain water. Spider gum latte cow proof fence and knocked together, rough planed gate and rusted latch chain .

Cattle feeding trough in rough natural wood and distressed corrugated zinc, doubles as chicken rain shelter

Chicken cages awaiting the spring clutches of chicks, painted in chic French grey and covered with rustic chicken wire and constructed out of natural wood latte poles.

Architect designed chicken coop

The fowls on their preferred type of furniture, perches of Eucalyptus tree branches, upholstered with subtle covering of green lichen, natural sun lit lighting

The goose pond under the trees in dark grey cement finish, surrounded by natural weeds. The geese were vacationing for the day in the bursting furrow and river when this picture was taken.