Tour of my old home town an illuminating one

FOR much of my life I considered my home town of Noupoort, in the eastern Karoo, to be rather a miserable little place. It was where I was taken, at the end of every school holiday, to catch the train back to boarding school. Mention Noupoort to me and I immediately have visions of standing forlornly on the windy (always windy) station platform with my parents and my suitcase, waiting for the train to arrive.

My mother tried desperately to make cheerful chat, knowing I was sick to my very soul at the thought of leaving the freedom of farm life for another endless school term.

It was only this week that I learnt a little of the history of Noupoort, when a childhood friend, Peter Barnes-Webb, who farms nearby, took me on a guided tour of the town.

Today, there is only one store, a pharmacy, police station and the magistrate’s office where goats clamber along the wall and graze on the weeds poking up through the pavement.

The site where the Imperial Hotel stood is just a patch of rubble and where there was a street of corrugated iron railway houses there is now only tall grass.

Noupoort was once a vital link on the route from Port Elizabeth to Kimberly and Joburg.

Records show that more than 100 ox wagons stopped there every day to load supplies for the north. When the railway lines were built, it was the junction of vital rail routes, and there was a huge marshalling yard where trains were assembled, and busy workshops where steam locomotives could be serviced as well as repaired.

Of course, such a vital communications link needed special protection during the Boer War, as it connected the Cape Colony to the Free State Republic.

A vast tented army camp grew up, with the biggest army hospital in the country, where up to 800 patients (from both sides of the conflict) could be treated.

British soldiers built two beautiful stone churches there and old records say that it was “a great pity the war ended before the one could be completed”.

Then the days of steam locomotives ended and diesel trains took over the lines, destroying the town within a few short years.

Trains could be driven by a single person. There was no longer need for the many stokers, coal loaders and water tank operators needed to drive the great steam locos. The workshops closed and the population halved. But if you visit the quiet military cemetery outside the town today, you can feel some of that history still.

The graves of Canadian and British soldiers and those of doctors and nurses who worked so many thousands of miles away from home all stand crumbling in the Karoo heat, reminding us just how sad and pointless war – every war – is.

Last Laugh

In Sun City they say love is a gamble, just like a game of poker. It starts with a pair, then she gets a flush, he shows his diamonds and they end up with a full house.