Those were the days in Stellies
Many of us have a nostalgic yearning for the platteland because of our earliest childhood memories. Those youthful impressions may often be sentimental, but their sweetness lingers on.
No one would describe Stellenbosch today as being a platteland town. But when I was a small boy growing up there in the 1950s, I remember it as a sleepy dorp far from the city.
We used to go barefoot down to the Eerste River to collect birds’ eggs – small and speckled – none of which ever hatched. We had budgies in a big chicken-wire cage. We shot acorns from our ketties. Sometimes my dad brought us tortoises he had found crossing a farm road. We tickled their backs and fed them cabbage leaves, but they always disappeared after a few days. We climbed the loquat tree to feast on the yellow fruit before the birds got there. We diverted the leiwater in the water furrows to irrigate our granadillas, pomegranates and beetroot.
Sometimes there was a knock on the front door and a bemused motorist would ask if the big dog asleep in the middle of the road was ours. Caesar, a bullmastiff-ridgeback cross, was not going to move. We would bring him inside so that the Pontiacs, Dodges and Studebakers could pass.
Round the corner was Mr February’s cobbler shop. The smell of tanned leather and Dubbin from his belts, riempies, straps, shoes and sandals filled our nostrils and he would let us have the off-cuts to play with.
When my mother baked lemon tarts for the church bazaar, our greatest treat was licking the condensed-milk tin. Auntie Annie Stone from across the road made unbelievable pickled fish, rivalled only by my mother’s smoorsnoek. One day she introduced us to slangetjies – spaghetti. Until then, the only pasta anyone had eaten was macaroni and cheese. We shelled peas and devoured bunches of sweet hanepoot grapes. Pancakes with cinnamon were a rare treat. So was jelly.
Like most men, my dad smoked a pipe in those days. Every few months he would bring home some brown-paper packets sweating from the shredded tobacco leaves they contained. We would tip these onto newspaper spread out on the floor, mix it all up and fill Dad’s tobacco tins. The rich, pungent aromas were quite intoxicating.
In 1959, former Prime Minister DF Malan died. We all stood on the corner of Dorp street as the funeral procession passed from the Moederkerk to the cemetery. I remember my mother saying the hearse was going too fast.
The years slipped by, Stellenbosch changed, and so did we. But we can all still savour those golden platteland moments. Just switch off, sit on a creaky chair outside, light a paraffin lamp, sip a kelkie of muscadel wine, and look out for the new moon.
Louis Rood, DIEP RIVER