|
By
William Paterson - 10 May 2005
My
childhood memories of Durban are rather like a coastal weather
report --- "hazy, but with bright sunny spells; fog-patches
may occur".
Towards
the end of the second Great Depression (1929 to 1932) my parents
and sister moved from my father's Zululand sugar farm to Durban.
They first settled in Dooneside and I have a picture of them
in bathing costumes from that time.
I was
told that my father had to catch the steam train from Dooneside
to Durban and back again every evening. He had started to
work at the South African Cane Growers Association in Parry
Road. Being born in 1932, I must have caused them many sleepless
Dooneside nights.
The family
subsequently moved to a genteel boarding house called Portcullis
on Durban's Berea. Dooneside and Portcullis, however, will
remain forever shrouded in deep memory-fog.
Chelmsford
The first
burst of cerebral sunlight occurs on the day we moved to Chelmsford,
while I was running excitedly through the long grass of one
of the back lawns. The lawns - and all other vegetation -
had remained untended for many years. At the age of three,
the grass was taller than me and hurt my face.
Chelmsford,
named after Lord Chelmsford, was to be our home from 1935
to 1947. It nestled atop Umgeni Heights, on the northern side
of the river, in five acres of grounds - some left as virgin
Durban bush. There was some talk about Chelmsford commandeering
all the horses from the homestead, but this seems unlikely
as it would have made him exceedingly unpopular
I could
write a lot about Chelmsford, among its creaking big trees,
but I won't here. My parents loved it because it reminded
them of their Zululand farm and my sister and I grew to love
it because it was home.
Briefly,
though, it was an old colonial house with verandahs on three
sides, the wooden balcony on the front resembling the ones
you can still see in Florida Road (near Gordon Road).
There
were bell pushes throughout the house and a rack of room numbers
in the old kitchen - no longer working. When they had worked,
the numbers were actuated by silk-thread insulated electromagnets.
The wire gave me hours of pleasure unravelling
To this
day, the sound of rain on a tin roof takes me back to the
roar of rain on Chelmsford's corrugated iron roofs. The electric
light bulbs were distinctly 1930-ish, there were cavernous
underground wells to hold rainwater, supplemented by above-ground
corrugated circular water tanks, but there was no water-borne
sewerage for some years.
Ramsamy-Naidoo was the night-soil man who used to clatter
down the long drive from Mount Argus Road, in a loin cloth
and turban, to change the deep-drop cans in the lavatory behind
the old stables. I once came accross a puffadder in the lane
leading there, being mesmerised by our cat, her galvanised
hair standing on end like a bottlebrush
Neddy
the mule arrived to keep the many lawns under control. He
left after throwing my sister from the saddle to the ground
and stamping on her foot. He was replaced by a wild-eyed gardener
who, high on dagga and skokiaan, ran across the lawns all
day with the lawn mower. After waving a panga and shouting
gibberish, he left too and the family settled for a donkey
instead, also named Neddy.
Donkey
lived in one of the stables. When he was untethered at dusk
he cantered round and round the paths surrounding the homestead,
trailing his rope, until he was coaxed into his shed. Once,
he ate my sister's bedroom curtains.
Part of
that rope was used to tether a canopy roof outside my bedroom
that threatened to fly away during a hurricane; my parents
waking up in the night to tie it down.
Shadows
of war
The front
verandah looked down the Umgeni valley to the sea. Sometimes
the valley was filled with mist, our hilltop floating above
it. Occasional early morning mists stole into the garden and
it was then that the dappled bushbuck appeared, like ghosts.
It was
from this verandah that I was to see other ghosts appearing
in the dawn light. Convoys of grey ships standing out to sea,
not long after war was declared. The front verandah was always
an important gathering and viewing point.
Often
the house was full of farmer friends from Zululand, who arrived
in mud-spattered cars (some with tyres still in chains) to
stay for a few days. The verandah was the place for
drinks, tea, cigarette-smoking and discussion.
When the
war came, farmer-visitors were supplemented with British Tommies,
Fleet Air Arm pilots and submariners - the latter bringing
white bread made in the submarine galley. (White bread was
impossible to get in Durban. We ate rye bread instead. My
mother tried to introduce us to whale meat at that time, but
this was not a success)
My grandmother
and mother used to work at the Victoria League in Smith Street,
preparing and serving sandwiches and tea for the troops that
thronged the centre of town. Often they invited a few home
for dinner. My father also did. So did my sister once, much
to my parents concern, (She was now at Durban Girls College)
Blackout
Father
was too old for active service, having traipsed - with the
rest of the BSAP - after Colonel von Lettow-Vorbeck and his
Schutztruppe in East Africa during the First World War. In
WW2, he used to drive the army visitors back to the ship,
even during the blackout.
At that
time, car headlights were concealed behind black metal masks,
with only a glimmer of light being permitted through a hooded
hole in the middle of each lamp. These night journeys first
required him to negotiate unlit Buttery Road, which only joined
the comparative safety of Riverside Road after passing between
quarry cliffs on either side of the steep roadway.
He then
had to drive across the unlit Queens Bridge, turn left into
the start of Umgeni Road, drive all the way into town into
unlit Soldiers Way leading to Gardiner Street, turn left at
the Embankment and proceed to the docks checkpoint. He returned
along the same dark, hazardous route. My mother stayed awake
until he arrived back
[Cars
were still being imported from the United States as late as
1940 and both he and his friend, Jim Nelson, bought 1940 Chevrolet
sedans. Other friends of my parents, the Brabys, bought a
brace of green Armstrong-Siddeleys, but these must have been
the last cars manufactured in Britain before the war.]
Chelmsford's
wooden sash windows were very wide and deep. For the blackout,
my father made wooden frames covered by a kind of patterned
bison-board, with ventilation slots. On humid summer nights,
blackout, with the window covers in place, turned the interior
of the house into a Turkish bath. To escape from the heat
in the evening, we used to sit in the dark on the front verandah,
listening to the croaking of the frogs and crickets, the squeaking
of the bats and watching the fireflies.
The mosquitoes
stung so often on such nights that we all built up a kind
of immunity to their bites. Chelmsford mosquitoes had horizontally-striped
black and white legs and sounded like Stukas. Some, I swear,
were twin-engined.
We often
moved to the lounge on the other side of the house to listen
to the Pilot wireless. This was a large brown box, fluted
rather like a midget art deco cinema, concealing a wizard-of-oz
assembly of radio valves which glowed in the dark. The speaker
was behind a fretwork grill and the dial was a small curved
window of celluloid above a large tuning knob.
'Ici
Londre'
The radio
service transmitted from Britain to the French underground
was very clear - the call sign being the Morse V sounded on
a drum, the dash at a higher pitch than three dots. After
a silence came the words "Ici Londre". Radio Zeesen,
one of the German propaganda stations was the most powerful.
My parents
were great friends of a Zululand sugar-farming family. As
the farmer's brother was one of the BBC's wartime announcers,
we used to listen to his news broadcasts most intently. I
never sensed any feeling of apprehension in my parents - no
matter how bad the news was. ITMA with Tommy Handley, replaced
in time by Much Binding in the Marsh, were also programmes
listened to by the whole family.
Being
shortwave, reception deteriorated into crackles as a storm
approached. When it broke, my father and I used to go out
onto the verandah to watch the lightning and listen to the
thunder crashing over the house. I think it was his way of
allaying childhood fears.
Aeroplanes
and flying boats
It was
again from this verandah we used to watch the world's noisiest
amphibious plane, the pusher-engined Walrus inspecting its
flock of ships. Patrolling Sunderland flying boats were a
source of particular excitement, as they often flew over the
house with a haunted crooning sound.
Picture
courtesy Reg Sweet |
This
splendid picture of the anchorage outside Durban was
taken sometime in 1942 and clearly one of the Walrus
aircraft (referred to above) on patrol.
<=
Click image to view wallpaper-sized enlargement (1024x768px)
|
Stamford
Hill aerodrome, down Umgeni Road, was to the best of my knowledge,
purely military. When the Harvard trainers took off they gave
a distinctive high-pitched buzzing while climbing, which gradually
turned to a lower contented purr as altitude was approached.
Part of
the training required recovery from stall and the noise of
a racing engine and prop was unique to the Harvard. (Harvards
are still being flown by members of a Gauteng flying club
and I can instantly recognise their engine-noise even now)
Mr
& Mrs Morse's General Store
In those
days the Umgeni tram terminus - really just the end of the
line - was at Mr & Mrs Morse's General Store on the town
side of the Bridge. Mr Morse was rotund, wore a vaguely clean
apron and smoked a smelly curved pipe with a perforated tin
lid covering the bowl, attached by a chain.
Their
store was sweet-smelling and deep, with sacks of sugar, mielie-corn
and potatoes. Round blackball sweets, charm sweets and toffees
in wrappers were in covered glass jars on the wide wooden
counters.
Steam
and the Zululand Train
Morse's
faced the railway line which was protected by a level crossing.
Alternating red lights flashed and a bell rang a warning as
the booms blocking the road to Queen's Bridge were being lowered
- operated by the man in the signal box on the northwest of
the Umgeni train station
Tedder's
Chemist was on the other side of the road bridge, at the foot
of Mount Argus Road. Mr Tedder, in his small pharmacy smelling
of ether and chloroform, was a true old school pharmacist
and was always there to attend to sudden health emergencies.
I recall a young Indian girl was brought into the chemist's
by a frightened mother and father.
Mr Tedder
cut the leg on the snake bite with a disinfected razor and
squeezed out as much of the venom as possible then summoned
an ambulance. I believe it was a serious bite but the girl
lived
If you
visit the bird sanctuary at Riverside and look up at the top
of the quarried cliff you will be looking at the edge of our
old property. A very large, flat brown rock marked the cliff
edge and inevitably, was called Lovers' Leap by the family.
A few steps back from the cliff edge was the summer house
which, by that time, had lost all its thatch.
This was
the viewpoint to watch the Zululand train whistle and clatter
over the
steel Umgeni train bridge. I was sent on this train sometimes
to holiday in Zululand.
Steam-power
came into its own during the war on the roads, with Coronation
Brick & Tile utilising steam-driven trucks. These used
to race over the Queen's Bridge, past the Roadhouse, a pre-blackout
drinking-hole for troops, and curve away to the brick factory
at Redhill.
Trams
and other forms of motive power
Horses
also got a reprieve: Bakers Bread (formerly Bauman's) made
its deliveries with vans drawn by giant dray horses. The horses
sensed when they were going home at the end
of the day, increasing the pace of their trotting.
Some kind
of coal gas, carried in a large black bag on the roof of cars
was also used by motorists to get around petrol-rationing.
There was the inevitable scandal when a motorist was discovered
cheating - he was using petrol and the black bag was just
a front.
To get
to school, my sister and I had to clamber down a very rough,
untarred and steep Mount Argus Road, mostly bordered by bush,
and walk across Queen's Bridge to catch the tram (replete
with advertisements portraying a man in striped pajamas astride
a Bovril bottle below the slogan "Bovril prevents that
sinking feeling"; rather crass in the light of convoy
sinkings)
Schools
and air-raid precautions
The tram
took us to Adrian Road (incorrectly spelt 'Adrain Road"
on the kerb where we alighted), thence to Gordon Road. My
sister peeled off to Gordon Road Girls School in earlier days
and I to the Prep, just up the road.
I don't
think the schools expected to survive a direct hit, but they
at least went through the motions of building air raid shelters
near the playing fields and burying them in earth mounds.
War time precautions required us to wear dog-tags with our
name and details around our necks and carry a large eraser
to grip between our teeth during an air raid. All school windows
were coated with muslin to limit flying shards of glass. Thankfully,
the raids never came.
School
was a great place to swop souvenirs. I had an empty aluminium
Italian hand-grenade, shrapnel and expired dum-dum bullets.
There was also a lively trade in models of Spitfires, Hurricanes
and Sunderland flying boats. (My father built me a plywood
hanger for my flying boats, complete with camouflaged slipway).
However,
Cops & Robbers remained the group game of choice, with
the two sides bashing into each other to get to the other
side of the playing field. Arthur Tayfield and Hugh Tayfield
were the school's cricket heroes and Sheldon was the distinguished
swimmer
Barbed-wire
beach
For my
father to take us for an ocean swim on Sundays in wartime,
we had to pick our way through barbed wire at the Country
Club Beach. There was a zigzag path through the entanglements
that could be closed quickly.
All
change
Gone is
the Indian who, with a small carnation in the palm of his
hands, prayed at each corner of the General Post Office. Gone
are the flower sellers outside the old railway station. No
longer are the pavements of West Street marked with arrows,
'Keep Left' and "Moenie Spoeg Nie" signs.
Greenacres
disappeared too, long ago. It was a source of child wonder
to watch the brass cash payment canisters being sent from
all corners of the store on overhead wires, to a central accounting
office. Here the cash was collected, change dispensed and
the canister returned along the same route.
The canisters
were propelled along the wires by a counter-hand pulling a
lever. This parted vertically twin conveyer wires, causing
the canister to 'run downhill' across the store. The system
may have been replaced later with a pneumatic tube system,
which Cuthbert's shoe shop was already using.
The street
photographers have faded away too. They used to snap appropriate
pedestrians and present them with a numbered card. Photographs
could be redeemed by presenting the card at a central point
(with money of course)
After
Standard Six I was sent to boarding school in the same year
that the war in Europe came to an end. When I came home after
four years, the old Durban had gone.
ends
Resources
Page
|
