Views From the Southern Cross

By Bruce W Finnemore

Adventures and misadventures make for great stories. Drawing on over seven decades of life experience spanning three continents, Views from the Southern Cross chronicles Bruce Finnemore's life growing up in the farming community of Theunissen in the Free State where long drops were blown up, bread was baked in anthills and budgies were captured by convicts, to wreaking havoc on a ship bound for the United Kingdom in the 1950s, to the hilarities of medical school where he trained to become a dentist in the 1970s, to journeying halfway across the world to trace his family tree back hundreds of years in an effort that gained him international recognition.

Borne from a love of history, guns and the South African bushveld, and interspersed with wickedly funny pranks that began during Bruce's childhood and extended—often backfiring—throughout his adult life, this book, painted with the vibrant hues of a true South African adventurer, storyteller and family man, will have you chuckling and shaking your head in disbelief while being propelled along dusty roads and through towering grass, into sangoma's caves and out into the cool shade of the thorn trees and Lala palms, where horned beasts rest as they attempt to escape the shimmering heat of the South African savannah, lazily flicking flies away with their tails, snorting at intruders, and looking down their noses at you as if you owed them money.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bruce W Finnemore
• Release date: Dec 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781386938569

Book preview

One

THE BEACON, REVISITED

This story has been written some sixty-five years after the

events described actually happened. While I have tried to be

factually accurate, the passage of time has sometimes dulled the detail.

I therefore ask for acceptance of a certain amount of poetic licence,

which hopefully enhances the account and makes it as enjoyable

to read as I have found it enjoyable to write.

The directions to my grandparent’s farm were most explicit: Take the dirt-road out of the little Free State town of Theunissen and wind your way toward Winburg. After five or so miles, having passed the last house and the railway station, the road will fork. Take the right-hand side of the fork and drive until you see a trigonometry beacon on the slight rise in front of you.

This beacon signalled the start of the road that led to the farm. Logically enough, the farm became known as The Beacon; the dry patch of Free State real estate that Arthur and Bertie Finnemore acquired following their relocation from Kroonstad—the town where my dad, Ronnie, and his siblings, Dudley and Ellen, were born.

Africans—or natives, as they were then known at the time—have a delightful way of unconsciously corrupting the English language. This is to be expected and, if the truth be known, we inadvertently corrupt their language too. Such was the corruption of The Beacon which became known as Tea-bee-con. When sounded out, the corrupt term was understandable, and members of my family would often use this version of the name when in conversation with the natives.

My earliest and fondest memories of rural country living were incubated and rooted at The Beacon—in fact, I can recall no earlier days than those on the farm. I must have been about two years old at the time. I knew little of the economics of the farm, its profitability or its management—for me, it was simply a place of fun, exploration and childhood growth. As a child, The Beacon was always there. It was The Farm where Grandma and Grandpa lived. It was the holiday refuge that swallowed me up in its divergent mysteries.

The farmstead was a rough economical construction, built from available rock and a weak mixture of cement, mud, cow dung and grass. The exterior was waterproofed with multiple layers of whitewash made from agricultural lime. Paint was a distant luxury. Although the whitewash worked well, it had to be reapplied annually before the rains. The house was an L-shape, with the long arm of the L housing three bedrooms—all of which were interleading. Grandma and Grandpa had the end room because it was the most private. My parents occupied the middle room, and David and I were in the nearside room—the one with the most through traffic. Each room had a door that exited onto the wide veranda that ran the length of this sleeping wing.

Each bedroom was equipped with two iron frame beds, grey blankets, one pillow apiece, with an eiderdown being a welcome addition in the winter. Between the beds was a small table on which stood a paraffin lamp. Grandma’s table had a copy of the Bible, Grandpa’s shiny, silver Eveready torch, and two mugs—one for each of their sets of false teeth. These false teeth were a source of constant fascination to me, my grandparents being the only two people in my circle who had such wondrous oral adornments. My later years as a dentist changed my perception from childhood fascination to horror at the thought of such a remedy for disfigurement.

In the corner of each bedroom stood a washstand—a great favourite of mine. The stand was made of two metal hoops supported on three metal legs. The top hoop held the deep metal basin, and in it stood a chipped cream-coloured enamel water jug. The water was for face and body washing, the brushing of teeth, and the occasional water fight with David. Over the bottom hoop hung two towels and a facecloth—sometimes two. A piece of home-made farm soap rested in a small porcelain container.

Each room also contained a chamber pot, something that few children and young adults of today have ever heard of. I always hated the pot. As a small child, I would call one of my parents when I needed to wee. Mom was gentle, but Dad would stand me on the bed and wedge its icy cold metal receptacle firmly up against me—the mere act of which had the effect of instantly drying up the urge to do anything. It became a time-consuming battle to convince myself to perform, with Dad’s sighing making the opening of the sluice gate even more of an effort. In that twilight zone—being half asleep and half awake—the exercise often ended in failure. Anything more serious than a wee into the chamber pot was to be avoided—unless the urge was extreme—as the pot would remain in the bedroom with its aromatic contents confounding the bedroom air all through the night. The pot always came with a small, linen serviette-type cloth that, if used, would cover the pot and its unwelcome contents, indicating to the maid in the morning that it needed to be emptied, cleaned and replaced for a subsequent night’s use. I remember being clearly embarrassed—even at that early age—that this emptying routine was delegated to the maid, although I would never have volunteered to do the job myself. I also remember it being my childhood horror that the covering cloth and the table napkins in the dining room would become confused and get mixed up in their application.

Walking out of the children’s room led directly into the dining room, which doubled as a lounge. The dining room had two old, wide, floral upholstered couches along the one wall. I remember sinking deeply into them when I sat on either of them, the springs having long-since lost their effectiveness. The large dining room table with its eight or more riempie chairs designated the space we would occupy for the main meal of the day, which was always at lunchtime.

Behind the (usually) open dining room door stood Grandpa’s fowling-piece: his much-prized shotgun. It was in June 1900, during the Second Anglo-Boer War, when Grandpa and his two brothers arrived in South Africa from England on the troopship, Kinfauns Castle, having enlisted as bootmakers in the auxiliary services for the British Army. Coming into a war zone, they were not permitted to bring rifles or sidearms—only a shotgun. Grandpa’s parents complied, and the three boys each arrived with a shotgun. Grandpa’s was a 12 bore Damascus steel, double barrel weapon made by the gunmaker, Robert Hughes, of Birmingham. Its manufacture date was stamped 1898. This gun stood behind the dining room door with a sock pulled over the mouth of its barrel to prevent mud wasps from using it as a refuge in which to build a home. We were never allowed to touch it, and, to my surprise, and my credit, I can never remember breaking that rule—although many other rules were indeed shattered.

Through the dining room, and along a short passage, one found the bathroom on the right and a pantry on the left. The passage then lead into the kitchen. I remember the bathroom with so much affection. Grandma would have the kitchen maids prepare hot water on the stove which would then be bucketed into the deep cast iron bath until an acceptable depth of hot water was reached. We always wanted more water, utterly oblivious of the effort required to produce it—which meant that we were usually disappointed.

A paraffin heater was placed in the room well in advance of our arrival, warming the room beautifully and making our sojourn there quite enjoyable. When we were unsupervised, we would throw our towels over the heater to warm them up for later. This was a risky manoeuvre—besides the obvious fire hazard, which we never seemed to grasp—with a sharp slap on a naked bum being the usual reinforcement from whichever adult was in attendance. The punishment, if it came, was a small price to pay.

Farm soap was the order of the day. It was large, white and homemade. After killing one or two pigs, the skin and the fat would be separated from the edible meat and sliced into manageable pieces. These pieces would be dumped into an enormous open top, three-legged pot, suitably placed over an outside fire. With the addition of caustic soda, and other ingredients, I imagine, this cauldron would bubble away till the chef decided that the time was right to remove it from the flames. The pot would be left overnight to cool, and, in the morning, a thick layer of white soap would have set on the surface. This layer was removed and cut into manageable size blocks. The soap was used in the dairy, the kitchen and the bathroom. It was also used to wash clothes, and the dog—although I have no recollection of dogs on the farm, which, in retrospect, is strange.

The kitchen was the engine room of the rambling farmhouse—a long room with a floor made of cow dung and mud. Many floors of the time were fortified with the addition of peach pips which had the effect of limiting the wear and tear of the mud, however, I don’t think that ours did. Peaches as a farm product don’t feature in my memory—pumpkins, squash, and mealies, yes, but not peaches.

The kitchen always seemed to be full of maids. It was a happy, bustling place, with an abundance of jam flowing from its production line. The kitchen had a door in from the passageway and a door out to the back of the house. In the centre of the one end of this rectangular room was the old coal stove—a constant source of welcome heat. I cannot recall whether it was fuelled by wood or by coal, but, knowing that Grandpa was governed by economics, it was likely powered by logs from the black wattle trees that the early farmers grew specifically, and prolifically, for this purpose. Using coal would have dug into the meagre purse that I perceive there to have been.

I can still see the picture today of me standing on the wide window ledge of one of the two narrow slit windows that flanked this source of welcome heat. The window ledge was as wide as the thick mud-brick wall into which it was set, and the opening just tall enough for me to stand upright inside. It was in this opening that I would stand while my nanny fed me the mealie-meal porridge that was the staple breakfast for everyone who lived at The Beacon—white or black—except we got more milk and sugar than the natives. Such was the division of breakfast wealth, and nobody ever questioned it.

If breakfast was not consumed in the kitchen window, it was eaten in the veld after the morning escape where we ate mostly what we wanted. The meagre variety on offer meant that there was little choice or variety, but it was, in all likelihood, nutritious. We seldom rejected the food as our exertions always kept us hungry. When it came to supper time, the children were fed the monotonous home-made bread and jam on offer. There was always the bottomless glass of fresh, sometimes still warm milk from the dairy.

The windows of the house were small—not much bigger than my morning breakfast perch next to the stove. The front porch was an essential part of the architecture, with that part of the Free State being particularly dry, dusty and extremely hot. The porch and the small windows meant that the house was rather dark but comfortably cool on even the hottest of summer days.

Several large pepper trees were planted outside the kitchen back door. The milk cooler—our rudimentary but efficient fridge—could be found under these trees outside the kitchen door. Its entrance was covered with a wire net surrounded by a wooden-framed door. It was simple, and it worked. It needed no power source, and never required regassing. Its structure, five feet high and three feet square inside, was a double wall of porous brick, with the gap between the two layers filled with coke; stones that resembled volcanic rock. There was a depression on the outside of the cement roof into which water slowly dripped. When the water overflowed, it ran down into the gap between the walls and down onto the chunks of coke, keeping them constantly wet. The movement of air through the hollow walls and over the wet coke caused an evaporative cooling effect. Standing on the cement floor inside was our milk in five-gallon milk cans and our cream in smaller one-gallon cans. It was also the place where our butter stayed remarkably fresh for days on end. Meat was also sometimes kept inside, although I think the moisture would have been detrimental. ¹

It was only in recent years after an informative walking tour of Kimberley that I learned that pepper trees were always planted outside the kitchen—their primary benefit being to control the flies that gather around areas of food preparation. These same trees were extensively planted around the Kimberley hospital to ward off flies and disease-transmitting insects. Ever since gleaning this piece of old-time knowledge, I regularly notice pepper trees in almost all suitable locations in which their use was beneficial.

The house’s red corrugated iron roof enclosed a loft which was accessed from the outside. One would walk up a series of wide, white stone stairs which ended at a small wooden door that hung from a partially broken hinge, making it difficult to open. Inside was a veritable treasure trove for small boys. There in the dark, hot recesses, I uncovered a variety of discarded items, such as an old torn saddle, a bag of long, dried, withered pumpkins, several wooden planks, the hopper for a threshing machine and a myriad of other valuable delights.

The loft was out of bounds. The loft’s wooden floorboards formed the ceiling boards of the bedrooms beneath. As we walked, or crawled, around its confines, the accumulated dust and grime of years would fall through the joins between the planks into the rooms below, meaning that our adventures in the loft never went unnoticed. Our subsequent punishment was, however, well worth it when compared to the knowledge and experience we gained.

A rose bed could be found nestled in the elbow of the L-shaped architecture of the house. It always seemed to me to be a rather scruffy part of the garden and the blooms never of any consequence, but it was, however, of great significance to my grandparents. In the middle of the bushes was a small plaque on a two-foot pole that read Ellen’s Garden. This plaque was in the memory of Grandma’s only daughter, Ellen—sister to Dad and Uncle Dudley. Auntie Ellen, whom I never knew, was a nurse. She contracted an illness from a patient during the Second World War and succumbed in July 1942 at the age of twenty-six. I am, at times, ashamed that this garden of remembrance or the loss of Auntie Ellen meant so little to me. I never grasped the massive significance of the passing of a child and the sorrow and pain that the parents endure. It was only when Margie and I suffered the loss of our son Mark in such painful and dire circumstances, that I was able to fully appreciate the depth of sorrow that accompanied the passing of all who knew Auntie Ellen.

The path from the veranda that led down the slope and over the driveway to the outside toilet—or long drop—was well worn. The distance was about fifty yards—no distance at all in the day, but a formidable trek after dark if activity into the chamber pot was to be avoided.

En route to this long drop, outhouse, klein-huisie—or whatever it was affectionately known as—the path passed a turning circle in the driveway that was used by cars and wagons. Within this white-stone demarcated circle was a short pole on top of which was attached Grandpa’s rain gauge—a galvanised cylinder about the size of a large canned fruit bottle. It had a lid which emptied down a funnel into a glass measuring vessel. The top of the vessel was broken, but it still fulfilled its measuring role. It had markings to indicate fractions of an inch of rainfall.

As rain was scarce in this part of the country, any shower or downpour would immediately be measured from the water collected in the rain gauge, and, if significant, the neighbours would be called on the party line through the simple telephone exchange, and the information eagerly shared.

As a child, I found it a source of enduring amusement to fill the rain gauge with water from a bottle or a watering can, and, after the downpour, watch Grandpa’s face in disbelief as inch after inch was recorded. Realisation would eventually dawn that, once again, this irritating child had ruined any chance of accuracy.

The path that ran past the white-stone circle towards the long drop terminated in a gate in the fence. This gate always squeaked, announcing to the world that the next occupant was about to find relief. The long drop was just that—a long drop. There was always a smell, and, although it was never overpowering, the buzzing flies unnerved me as I peered into its depths to confirm that there was no lurking reptile or fallen chicken waiting to bite my rear end as it attempted to escape its dingy confines. Despite all of this, the long drop was a peaceful place and, once settled in, the experience was not an unpleasant one.

Grandpa’s weekly routine—and in an attempt to sterilise the hole—was to pour a pint bottle of petrol down the hole every Saturday, give it a moment or so to evaporate, and then toss in a match. There would be a poof, followed by a puff of blue flame, and all insects and other occupants of this sacred abode would be instantly incinerated. The story goes—and I cannot vouch for its accuracy—that an adjacent farmer, all dressed up for a wedding in the town, poured an unusually large amount of petrol into the hole, and without waiting the requisite time for it to vaporise, tossed in the match. The resultant ka-poof propelled some of its contents upwards and out of the hole in the seat, covering our aspirant wedding goer in the unspeakable.

If you continued down the path past the long drop, you would end up at the farm dam—a scrape in the earth at the lowest point of the slope. In the middle of the dam stood a windmill, its only purpose being to pump water from the depths of the Earth and release it into the dam for the relief of the cows and oxen that passed that way on their daily trek to feed in the veld. It still confuses me how a windmill can pump water around itself when standing in water, without that water finding its way back down the hole from whence it came.

I wish that I could remember the name of my nanny—she was such a large part of my early life. I was carried around and cared for by this wonderful woman, yet I cannot recall her name. All the farm children were cared for by nannies, and I scarcely remember any daytime contact with my family at all. I was entrusted to her and strapped onto her back with a blanket. She crooned and sang to me, as black people do, and the song that I will always remember from those early days is the anthem of the now New South Africa— Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika. It was ingrained in my mind from an early age and was the first, and only, African song that I ever learned. It puzzles me to this day that the song is rooted in Xhosa culture (or so we are told), and yet my nanny was a Sotho woman. Perhaps it is not Xhosa after all—but that would be a research project for another day. Irrespective, I learned the song by default, and am proud that today I know more of the words than many of my white compatriots do.

The activities of those balmy childhood days seemed to blend into a continuous stream of happiness with me graduating from my nanny’s back to my small black childminder. My brother David and I each had our own. Mine was known as Salman—which I presume to be the African corruption of Solomon. Salman and I were inseparable, except in the evening when I was called into the welcoming warmth of the old farmhouse and Salman went to his hut, wherever that was. As a child, these details weren’t important—we accepted the divisions of the social structure and were quite comfortable with them. Salman was two or three years older than me. He was tall for his age—thin, with a broad forehead and large ears. African children develop a sense of responsibility much earlier than their paler charges, which is probably why they are considered capable of this kind of entrustment. My parents must have deemed him responsible enough to take care of me because there were no restrictions on where we could go, or what we could not do. Perhaps it was simply that the farm in the early 1950s was safe. At any rate, those happy, carefree days are long past.

Salman and I had adventures in the veld that could not be duplicated today. An exciting excursion was to go off into the veld after a downpour wearing our gumboots. Mine were intact, whilst Salman’s had holes—the front of one of his boots gaped like a hungry goose. This didn’t seem to worry either of us, besides the minor inconvenience of only one of Salman’s boots being suitable to hold the water and the tadpoles that we collected on these outings. Although the alternate use of our gumboots would get us into trouble upon our return, this hardly curbed our enthusiasm for tadpoles—and frogs, if we could find such a prize.

Another adventure that we never seemed to tire of was baking veld-bread. For the uninitiated—and I am yet to find another person who has experienced this culinary pleasure—it is to bake a rudimentary dough in a hollowed-out anthill. Anthills were plentiful on The Beacon, as was evidenced by the decimation that these insects caused to the grazing areas. Grandpa must have reconciled himself to living with his unwelcome tenants because I cannot remember any attempt being made to eradicate them—their abundance would have likely made a mockery of any such attempt. The only benefit that I remember the ants had to life on the farm was the supply of veld-ovens for Salman and me. I also remember that Mr Seiler—from the town—occasionally came for a supply of anthills, crushing them and using them to resurface the one tennis court of which the sports centre of the town boasted, and of which he was the custodian.

There was a nest of three galvanised bins in the kitchen; one for flour, one for sugar and one for the daily supply of mealie meal. Salman and I would take a quantity of flour, a bottle of water and a box of matches, and set off on our culinary expedition. I have no idea how we were entrusted with matches at such an early age—perhaps we never asked, or perhaps we just presumed, and took? At any rate, well stocked with the essentials, we set off to bake. Our sights were set on finding an anthill with a smallish hole at the bottom of one of the sides— the excavation probably caused by some veld-creature whose diet included ants. Having found an appropriate mound, we would scour the veld for dry grass, small sticks and anything else that we could use for kindling. With the fire set and alight, we would add slightly bigger sticks and the odd dry cow dung pat—something that made excellent fuel, despite the acrid, annoying smoke that it produced.

While the fire warmed our oven, we would mix together the appropriate amounts of flour and water, and a little salt if we remembered to bring some along—although it never seemed to be essential to the final taste. Sometimes we would make a small hole through the top of the anthill for a chimney, but often the thickness of the ceiling caused us to abandon this exercise. We loved to inhale the cow dung smoke and cough with exaggeration, each one attempting to outdo the other with our staged phlegm-filled spit—such were the laughs we enjoyed. The fire normally burned well and, as it heated the mound, we would make up a quantity of mud and dry grass sufficient to seal the doorway at the appropriate time. When the time was right, we would push the glowing red sticks to the rear—much in the same way as we do with pizza ovens today—and thrust our precious ball of dough into the hole, supported on a base of bark, or wood, or even dung if neither of the former two were to hand. With the opening sealed with the mud, our dough would be left to the mercy of the fire.

The cooking time was usually about twenty minutes, but since neither Salman nor I had any means of timekeeping, we would wander off and return when the time was right—or simply when we remembered. There were so many variables to this exercise, many of which would confound even Jamie Oliver—including whether the dough was too dry or too wet, or whether the hole had been sufficiently sealed—but to these culinary experts, the result was, without fail, always the finest blue-ribbon loaf available, and we would devour it with gulps and exclamations of delight. Such was my grounding in the affairs of the kitchen, which, even today, stands me in excellent stead.

Salman and I were inseparable—each evening was a sombre parting, and each morning a happy reunion. We never planned the day; it just evolved. The only time that Salman was not available to me was during ploughing season. This is because he was a voorleier—the small child tasked with holding the riem that was attached to the horn boss of each of the two lead oxen in the span. Salman’s job was to guide them on their monotonous and repetitive pathway, turning the soil in preparation for planting.

If memory serves me correctly, a ploughing span of oxen numbered eight. Each ox had an enormous set of horns. It used to intrigue me that their expansive horns did not damage the face of the other beast in the pair when they were so closely tethered to each other. They were Afrikaner oxen, a breed of cattle that seems to have disappeared today but which, at the time, were the norm. Being castrated, they were as docile as can be and were quite happy to be lead up and down over and over again from morning until late in the afternoon by this small voorleier. The closest analogy I could find to the patient nature of these enormous beasts was when Margie and I visited Vietnam in 2011—the year of our fortieth wedding anniversary—where we witnessed the bond of trust that existed between the water buffalo and the small Vietnamese children at work in the paddy fields.

One of my most vivid memories of interaction with the ploughing span was the sheer delight of being lifted to sit on the expansive rump of one of the rear pair of animals, my legs splayed for balance and my little packet of sandwiches opened and placed on the hairy table-cloth. Facing backwards, I would converse with the driver of the ploughing span, Ou Raas, as best as I could in my rudimentary Afrikaans. It was a strange name that he had—when translated, it meant old noise—yet at the time, there was no cause to question it. Ou Raas was old—old in the eyes of this young child, but probably no more than forty. He would incessantly call and whistle words or sounds of encouragement to his team while deftly wielding his long whip with an ear-splitting crack only inches above any animal who was shirking his duty in the task. Seldom did the whip find flesh as it was encouragement, and not punishment, that was his Ou Raas’ duty. Each animal had a name, and they responded to Ou Raas’ voice with amazing obedience while Salman guided them up front as they carved each successive furrow.

The earliest gift that I ever remember receiving in my life was an Afrikaner bull calf. Grandpa called me one morning and, with an apparently well-rehearsed family in tow, I was taken by the hand to the stone cattle kraal. There, suckling from its wide-eyed and agitated mother stood my newly-born gift, the first animal in my now-established herd. I was told that although this calf was mine, it would be sold when it was about two years old and the money transferred to a savings account in my name. Imagine my disappointment, having just been given this perfect animal as a gift, only to be told that it would be taken away and sold? I remember bursting into tears, to the amazement of the adults present. I also remember the stern lecture I received later that night extolling the sins of my ingratitude.

Afrikaners are not a docile breed of cattle, unless they are castrated. Their size, their wide and rolling eyes, their horns and the way they toss their heads, all add to their intimidation factor, particularly when you are only four or five years old. It was therefore from a safe perch atop a huge rock which stood next to the stone wall of the cattle kraal that I usually observed the goings-on of these beasts.

The sorting of the herd occurred inside the cattle kraal. Here the bawling youngsters were separated from their protesting mothers and branded—something that I found fascinating to watch from the safety of my rocky perch. The young animal, now isolated and in a smaller kraal leading off from the big one, would be lassoed and thrown to the ground, and his forelegs and hind legs lashed together. In a cloud of agitation and dust, with the shouts of the men and the bellowing of the now-excluded mother, the hot iron, bearing the insignia of the farm, would be applied to the young animal’s rump, resulting in a cloud of hissing smoke as the hot letters burned their way into the skin of the much-traumatised calf. Hot branding is no longer used and has been replaced by freeze-branding which is seen to be more humane and less damaging to the eventual pelt, rendering the skin and leather quality more valuable.

I have a vivid recollection of a narrow escape from the horns of one of these beasts as a young boy. I had been viewing, with interest and childhood fascination, the goings-on in the kraal, when a frightened cow managed to scramble over a lower section of the stone wall. To say that our eyes met would be a romantic exaggeration, but the enraged animal saw me and, deciding that I was fair game, hurtled toward my tenuous perch. My reaction, borne of the instinct for survival, was my small legs propelling me off the massive rock on which I stood and upwards onto the wall, just as the sharp horns and head contacted the now-vacated site. With a shudder and a bellow, the animal looked at her escaped quarry with angry eyes and turned and rushed off as far and as fast as her adrenalin-charged legs could run. I never quite grasped how lucky my escape was at the time, nor did I understand the tears that welled in my mother’s eyes when I later related the account to her with the matter-of-fact calmness of an innocent child.

Sometime later, Mom was to have her own experience with a runaway animal. Having washed her hair, she was sitting on a chair in the sun outside the kitchen door—the sun being the only accessory to drying one’s hair in those electricity-free days. Two maids were bustling nearby and hanging up the daily washing when another escapee animal, wide-eyed and bellowing, came hurtling towards them. Again, viewing them as fair-game and quarry, it made a beeline for the trio. With screams that can only be ascribed to women, the three made for the safety offered by the doorway, only to all reach it at the same time. There was no possible way that Mom and the two servants could enter at once and the scene can only be described as a cartoonist’s dream. Thankfully, the screaming trio burst their way to safety through the wooden frame. The wide horns of the ox ensured that he was unable to follow them through the door, and he collided against the building, bringing his massive body to a shuddering halt. He turned and vented his anger on the sheets and clothes that were pegged to the washing line, and, as Mom later related, careered into the veld with a pair of Grandpa’s trousers attached to, and flapping from, his enormous horns.

Although Grandpa kept Afrikaner cattle as trek animals for ploughing and for pulling the produce-laden wagon to town and back, he also had Friesland stud animals for the dairy. My recollection of the Friesland animals is, however, scant, as my interaction was more with the huge russet-coloured large horned Afrikaners. The Friesland animals were used both for milk, and to grow the number of stud animals that Grandpa owned. I think that his love for bovines was cultivated during his boyhood years at the home farm, The Yews, in Seighford village in the county of Stafford, England. Grandpa built up an impressive herd of Friesland stud animals, and the stud was eventually registered with Studbook in Bloemfontein—the organisation charged with the retention of all animal details. The name Beaconmore Stud was registered—Beacon being from the name of the farm, and the suffix from the family surname, Finnemore. As the reputation of the stud grew, so Beaconmore became a proud name in the family.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Margie and I were on a beach holiday at a holiday cottage owned and rented to us by our friend Reverend Jack Scholtz. It was late afternoon, the boys were probably asleep, and I don’t recall the start of the conversation, but the culmination was that we would name our newly-built farm in Nooitgedacht after Grandpa’s Friesland stud. And so, Beaconmore Farm came into existence and has been a unique and proud name ever since.

At some point in those early years on the farm, it was decided that the time had come for me to be taught to swim—properly, and by Grandma’s standards. If ever there was a time in my life that I pegged as a black period, it was the time of the execution of those swimming lessons. The scene has to be set: An apprehensive child in underpants, a determined grandmother, and other observers. The concrete dam stood about five feet out of the ground and was about thirty