The Uloliwe

Miss Van Rooyen. She taught the children in grades A and B and standard one, while Mr. Jacobs taught those in standards two to five.

Marie was a sweet and supportive sister, but she had a thing about Miss Van Rooyen. She told me that the woman was a dangerous bitch. It transpired that Solly Scheepers, a small-time farmer who lived near Kleinfontein, and who was later to become my brother-in-law, had also been calling on Miss Van Rooyen, which fact no doubt influenced my sister in a negative way.

The problem about going to school at Kleinfontein was the transport. My father shared my views about horses. He had spent a large part of the Anglo-Boer War on a horse’s back and was one of the first people to buy a motor car in our family. He was quoted as saying that he’d swop the farm and his wife for a car, just as long as it enabled him to stay away from horses. I was his name-sake, a nine-year old chubby and spoilt little brat. No ways was he going to let me ride a horse to school and back every day. So it was arranged that I would board with the Spies family who lived only a few hundred yards from the school.

Before setting out for school that first day Marie told me not to stand any nonsense from Miss Van Rooyen. “But for heaven’s sake Pietie, don’t let on that you are my brother. And when the headmaster asks you what standard you are entering, you tell him: one.” That was how it came about that I never went through the grades A and B. Attending school and boarding with the Spies family posed no problems, but those seven miles from and to the school were terrible. Our cousin, Coenie, whose parents farmed very far from the school, boarded with us. He and Gert were the same age, so on Mondays and Fridays I sat squashed in between them in that gig. Our schoolbags and my pyjamas were stacked on my lap. The road was corrugated all the way and the horse took a fiendish delight in trotting as fast as it could, delivering us bruised and shaken at the end of the journey. It was too terrible to bear and I complained incessantly.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays Gert and Coenie rode donkeys to school and on Wednesdays they used their bicycles. They took great delight in telling me how much pleasanter these trips were compared to the Monday and Friday torture drives. Fortunately neighbours who ran the store at Calverts, a mere three miles away from our farm, but in the opposite direction from Kleinfontein, informed my parents that they had engaged a governess from January 1938 to teach their two children and two of their nearest neighbours’ children. They said I could board there during the week, but of course that still left the Mondays and Fridays to be arranged 36