Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
A week ago John Tromp was buried in Ravensmead. He was an educator, a former head of Department at the then-Peninsula Technikon, and a well-loved man whose memorial was attended by former Pentech rectors Brian Figaji and Franklin Sonn. His son formerly a
BEAUREGARD TROMP,
THE BOY stood in front of the mirror and practised his recitation he’d learnt at school that day. He sang the songs, too, watching himself as he performed the actions to suit the words, to live out the story. When he was ready he would put on his show for the adults elsewhere in the corrugated iron shack they called home.
Later, when he’d finished carrying the water and chopping the wood, the little boy would play outside lining up six stones, imparting his newfound knowledge to his charges. Inattentive learners were dealt with by his cane. Yes, he told Oom Petrus Marsh, he knew what he wanted to be. A meester.
The boy and his family had already travelled a great distance from his birthplace on Spes Bona farm, about 50km outside of Ceres at the entrance to the Karoo. Seasonal workers at first, Jan and Martha Tromp met on this farm and stayed. In 1943, their third child, John was born, named after his grandfather, Johannes.
By the time the family left in 1948, there were five children in the truck that would take them to the farm of Ren Sergeant (today Devon Valley), a horse and strawberry farm in Stellenbosch. As always, times were tough but the family took pride in the little they had, the children always neatly dressed. After school the children would race out to the strawberry fields to help pick the fruit. For John it was a competition, to see if he could beat his older and more adept siblings at the number of strawberries he could pick.
At the end of the week when pay packets were given even to the littlest worker, the closed envelope was handed directly to their mother. It was a time when even teenagers would lie awake on a December night, hoping for a glimpse of Father Christmas, when a doek or a little car under their pillow the next morning would be a treasure to savour for years.
But farm workers’ lives are dependent on the whims and wiles of the farmer. So when Ren Sergeant and his wife split, the Tromps once again packed up and headed further south. They would settle at Die Akkers, old Johannes Tromp having secured a smallholding for them along the N1 in what is now known as Vasco.
The Marshes, family friends, had arrived some months before and little John was soon spending so much time at their house that he moved in. Jan found work as a blockman with a butcher and Martha worked as a maid while the children went to school at Agulhas se Skool in Hugo Street, Parow.
Despite the lack of roads, sewerage or running water, some remember this as a happy time for the family. John had ingratiated himself with the Marshes and had become an adopted son to them, helping with the chores around the house. For them, he would put on a show, drawn from his schooling day.
When the Tromp family once again upped and left in the mid-1950s, none of the children asked questions. The new address was 63 Grove Street Parow. Much later, they would discover their father was paid a pittance and forced to move.
John was hardly a feature in the scrum of children playing in the streets. It’s like he had a plan, they say. He chopped wood for change, worked as a “boy”, scrubbing floors, making salads, doing chores and working for the miesies, Mrs Redelinghuys. Mr Brittow across the road employed him to make up hampers. Tickey by tickey he was plotting his future, his ambition.
In Parow, friendships were made, neighbours shared what they had, and the man on the corner shouted for the hotnots to get off his sidewalk. It was a time to pin your colours to the mast, and halfbreeds, despite their mattraskoppe, became play-whites. Long before the world would hear of District Six, the bulldozers and removal trucks of the apartheid regime would roll into Parow.
By the turn of the decade it was time to move again. Tiervlei (today’s Ravensmead) would mean a return to the impermanent corrugated iron shack, carrying water, endless buses and now, a new threat – skollies. The river would be the dividing line between coloured and white.
Jan and his troop of young men started again, building a house for the family. With four stands in Kingston Street, John had the unenviable, backbreaking task of preparing the land for vegetables. He took to the task without complaint. His willingness to bend his back without a second thought made him his disciplinarian father’s blue-eyed boy. All the wood chopping and back bending paid off and helped shape an impressive physical physique, the kind made for rugby.
John turned out for Blue Birds Rugby Club in Tiervlei – but his foray into rugby was short-lived after he injured his neck. John again showed his tenacity, writing his university exams with his neck in traction in a hospital bed.
During holidays the boys were sent to visit their grandfather in the Bokkeveld. It was a glimpse of another time. John was rarely sent on these trips, work always taking precedence.
A young man now, he started spreading his wings, travelling often to visit friends. He even made it as far as the thenLourenco Marques (today Maputo in Mozambique), where he had his hair done in a foreign country with not a tickey’s worth of Portuguese. What emerged was a bouffant Tony Curtis hairstyle which, of course, put paid to his plans to swim for the rest of the trip.
Through his youthful participation, he made friends with the likes of the Bams, who would become life-long friends, conspirators and confidantes. It was they who would introduce John to another family of his, the Oliviers and later the Dentlingers of Rehoboth. On many of these adventures he had his stertjie, Dougies, his younger brother, who followed him without question.
Throughout, he stayed committed to his education, already squirrelling away the money he would need for university. Armed with a teaching degree from the University of the Western Cape, John started his career at Elsies River High School, an institution would which forever remain dear to his heart, as much for the dedication to the profession he so admired and loved as for the lasting friendships. Perhaps even more than this, it was the fact that for the first time in his life the farm boy could trade in his cane and stone-pupils for real, flesh and blood children whom he could help shape, discipline and inspire.
Like most young men, he chased the girls. There was the one he took camping, in different tents and with his mother in tow as chaperone, of course. She was part of the geleerde set, families who had principals in their ranks and camped at the relatively exclusive “Die Dam”.
The Tromp way is to do