Krissie was the first-born. Married Hunter, around 1910-1920. There was one child also called Hunter. I think the first husband died. She then married Lew by whom she had two children, Olga and Brenda. These three were our only first cousins from Rolf's side of the family.
I remember Krissie as a fairly tall, kindly, middle-aged lady who would kiss me warmly and give me cakes and toasted buns to eat. She exuded warmth and didn't criticise, something I could not say about her sister Sylvia who was forever finding fault and trying to improve us and make up for perceived defects in our upbringing.
We always went to the Cape for our summer holidays and stayed for a month or so. Our Dad's leave was less than that so he would either
follow us down later or go back to Jo'burg earlier. It was 1000 miles by train. Quite an adventure. But we didn't go every year. Mostly we were based at my mother's parents' home in Claremont where that family picture was taken. In 1943 or '44 I spent a magical week or two at Krissie's seaside home in Seaforth, Simonstown. I remember in particular spending a whole morning
exploring rock pools with my father.
(Both these maps come to you courtesy of Mapquest. If you click this logo you could make yourself just such a map.)
Simonstown was a British naval base and there was a war on, so getting into the area was quite a performance. You had to have permits which were checked by men in white helmets before you were allowed out of the railway station. It was all very exciting.
Even better, from Krissie's you could see all kinds of warships entering and leaving the harbour, including submarines.
Best of all they trained anti-aircraft (AA) gunners there. These fired ack-ack guns at a target towed behind a light aircraft. From the ground the target looked like a door. The guns went "ack-ack-ack-ack-ack", again and again. Recent enquiries reveal that they must have been 40mm Bofors guns which could fire bursts of five shells since this was the size of their ammunition clips. I'm also told that there were bigger guns but they fired single rounds which were breech-loaded. (If anybody knows better, let me know).
I never saw one hit the target but you could sometimes glimpse them missing it. My Uncle Lew told me that once a round had cut the towing cable and the target had fallen into the sea. I would have given anything to have seen that. That's the only actual conversation I can remember having with Uncle Lew.
I've only just discovered that ack-ack guns were so-called, not because of the sound they made but that it was an army way of saying "AA" to avoid confusion on crackly field telephone or radio links. As in "ack-emma" for a.m. and "pip-emma" for p.m.
I don't know much about Krissie's first husband, Hunter. Considering that I saw a fair bit of the second, Lew, I find him very unmemorable and recall only one conversation with him, mentioned above. I know that our Dad, Rolf, thought him a miserable bastard. I remember Rolf saying Lew had offered him a "medicinal dose" of brandy, soon after Rolf's lung operation. Rolf saw this as stinginess with the brandy rather than concern for his health. Rolf had said, "Fill it up. Fill it up." The reason I don't remember Lew well is probably because he was a miserable bastard.
Our three cousins, Krissie's kids, were much older than us and when I was little they were always referred to as Uncle Hunter, Auntie Olga and Auntie Brenda. I have a vague recollection of Brenda as a very pleasant young woman; maybe I saw her once. Hunter is memorable mainly because of his name. You have to be impressed by someone called Hunter.
I don't remember ever clapping eyes on Hunter, but think I met his wife, having been sent there by Aunt Sylvia. I was accompanied by my cousin Graeme. We were about thirteen. She seemed to be Afrikaans and assumed I would speak Afrikaans since I came from the Transvaal. (In those days, older English-speaking Capetonians were notoriously ignorant of Afrikaans.) The only thing I remember clearly is her daughter, a rather pretty blonde girl of about eleven who took a precocious interest in her anticipated pubescence, and talked about "when my things get big", meaning her breasts. Graeme and I were greatly excited by such talk.
I remember only two other things about Hunter. First, Sylvia saying a few years later that his main problem was his liking for Cape brandy. Later, from my mother, that he had become a leading light in Alcoholics Anonymous, somewhere in the Eastern Cape. Now brother Alan informs me that in the town of George in the Eastern Cape there is a pub called 'Hunter's Rest'. Assuming that this name really is commemorative, this raises the question: Did he establish his reputation before his AA phase, or was his AA phase short-lived?
Olga I know a lot more about since she lived in the Johannesburg area with her husband, "Uncle Jack", and we saw them from time to time. A very Nordic-looking blonde. She had a daughter Winifred, later called Ingrid (I think), several years younger than me, and an even younger son called George. I remember them both as whiney, grizzly kids who cried a lot. (Alan says Ingrid was last heard of in Zimbabwe.) Uncle Jack had a kidney operation. I remember him sunbathing on a Cape beach and having great livid scars over his kidneys. That's how I know where kidneys are. He died soon after that. I might be missing a bit of the history here and perhaps someone can fill it in by clicking here to send me a message. Some time later Olga married someone called André.
Our mother couldn't stand him. She was rather shy, strait-laced, religious and easily embarrassed. She once described how she had been spotted by an old Capetown acquaintance on a Jo'burg tram. He had come lurching down the aisle towards her, breathing brandy fumes, and saying loudly "Jesus Christ! Muriel!", to her acute embarrassment. This André was just such a guy.
He once pitched up at our house in the 1950s full or brandy. I was writing an essay or something when he stumbled into my room to tell me about a marvellous new job he had just landed, and saying that he now had his "bum in the butter". My mother offered him some tea. He declined. Coffee? The same. He explained that he had a peculiar medical condition - "the opposite of an ulcer" - that precluded his drinking such things. Muriel knew damn well that he wanted another brandy, so she offered him milk.
Muriel later encountered him again at Krissie's at their house off some steps on the mountain at St. James, where they had moved. The mountain there was teeming with feral cats - domestic pets or their offspring that had gone wild. I don't know whether they lived lone lives like leopards, or in prides like lions. But if you threw some tasty left-overs into the yard they would descend in their dozens to eat them.
André must have squeezed some brandy out of Lew. He announced that such cats were not difficult to domesticate if you knew how to handle them and stepped out into the yard and picked one of them up. It promply bit him right through the hand before fleeing back up the mountain. He had to have rabies injections. Muriel was delighted.
About the same time André and Olga moved to the South Coast of Natal to run a cafe or hamburger joint. Much later, in 1979, I heard that he had divorced her. I don't know whether either of them is still alive, but Alan thinks Olga was killed in a car crash. (So it goes.)
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