The houses were all identical, painted cream, with red roofs. Each house had a living-dining room at the front, from which, on one side, a single glass door led to a veranda or “stoep”. At the opposite end of the house were the three bedrooms. A separate toilet, a bathroom with a bath and a washbasin (no shower) were in the middle of the house, and a kitchen could be found at the rear, with a half-and-half stable door, keeping out snakes and leading to the back garden and yard.
Here our family lived for two years, trying our best to adapt to a completely different way of life from the one we had left behind in London, England. There were numerous challenges, one of the biggest being the erratic supply of water. Here we were, in the middle of nowhere, a family of five, including us three children, Susan (me), John and Peter, aged 10, 8 and 4, and we didn’t have any water at all for days on end.
We certainly needed water, too!
For a start, John, Peter, and I played endlessly in our back yard in the red dirt, making complete cities out of mud and water, complicated layouts for the use of our Dinky cars. Once we built a three-sided hut, whose walls and roof were made from sticks and dried grasses. Our hut was completely open at the front, but it had an extended awning, also made of dried grasses. We were so proud of ourselves and of our ingenuity. We could seat three of us inside that tiny space. We invited the platelayer’s son from next door to come over and join us, and once we invited our mother to come to tea. She duly arrived with drinks of some kind and with some jam sandwiches, too, which we all ate, seated on the ground, beneath our straw roof.
We children were never bored, but, somehow, we managed to get ourselves filthy by the end of each day, though that was never our intention. There was no way we could go to bed, without having a full body wash or a bath, first. The red soil stained our clothes, so they had to be washed, too, before such marks could become permanent. We didn’t have a washing machine, so all the laundry was done by soaking it in the bathtub.
Not having any water was an enormous challenge for us all. Such was the case, sometimes for a week or more at a time. Even if we did have water, it would spurt, erratically, in reddish brown bursts, from the tap, and be unfit to drink. My mother would boil it for at least five minutes, before any of us were allowed to use it. We had to be patient allowing it to cool, if need be. It must have been awful for my poor mother, who had always kept a clean and tidy house, and continued to do so till her dying day.
