However, there she was, a housewife, in the wilds of a foreign country, with three dirty children, and piles of laundry which couldn’t be washed in that filthy water. It was unbearable. She had never had to live like this before and it was yet one more reason for her unhappiness.
Even as a child, I knew that this couldn’t be normal, could it? This was the 20th century, after all. How were we supposed to manage? I know all too well that it took countless sessions of boiling the kettle, plus endless pots and pans boiling on the stove, to get enough water for us all.
We knew, although I don’t know how, that the lack of water affected only a specific area of Darwendale, namely our three houses. Most of the village itself had clean running water, and it just wasn’t fair to any of us that no-one else was prepared to do anything about this major problem. It really was a case of “I’m all right, Jack!”
My parents were not about to accept this situation. These two newly emigrated, largely despised Brits, or “rooineks” (red necks, as the Afrikaners sometimes called us, referring to our pale British skin’s tendency to sunburn so easily), these two foreigners who knew nothing about living in the bush, were prepared to do something to improve our circumstances.
I remember my parents’ making this decision and discussing how to tackle the problem, knowing full well that it meant dealing with bureaucrats in Salisbury probably unwilling to pay for changes to the infrastructure in a village forty-odd miles away. However, we had all had enough of the status quo. Every day, my father would take empty containers to the railway station. There he would fill them up with water and bring them home in the car. If we ran out, there was no means of replacing the water till the following day. It was hardly ideal, but it was still better than not having any water at all.
Within no time at all, my parents launched a petition, which they asked neighbours to sign, and then sent to the City of Salisbury, requesting an investigation, with a view to solving the problem. It was a sustained and time-consuming campaign on my parents’ parts. Over the next many weeks, I would often hear my father dictating to my mother, whose handwriting he rightly claimed was far neater than his own illegible scrawl, the words she was to write in letters addressed to various officials. Maybe, my parents contacted the Railways Headquarters, in Salisbury, too.
I don’t know whom my parents contacted, but I do know that they wrote endless letters, and, if I remember correctly, my father even went at least once to a meeting in Salisbury, driving for an hour each way along rutted strip roads, and all to put forward his case. It was a hopeless cause, as far as our immediate neighbours were concerned.
Eventually, though, as we suffered, intermittently, through days and days without water, my parents were paid a visit by some experts from Salisbury, though I don’t know who they were, in fact. I remember that my mother told me these people had come up from the city to see our property and to decide upon a possible solution for the lack of water.
