Growing up in South Africa in the 50s and 60s was an experience I will always cherish. My father's work entailed a great deal of moving around, so I learned from an early age to adapt to changes in place.

I was born in the middle of a severe thunderstorm in what is today known as Mpumalanga, but then was called the Transvaal Lowveld. My father, who was managing a banana plantation near Sabie at the time, was offered the owner's 1948 Citroën   Traction Avant to rush my mother to hospital in Pilgrim's Rest on Christmas Day 1950, as the dirt roads were too bad for my father's vehicle at the time.

Shortly after I turned one, we moved to Ladismith in the then Cape Province, when my father managed a farm. Here my brother Daneel was born and died soon after, aged just under six months old. His funeral is my earliest memory.

The oldest photo I have of me.
Taken in Laingsburg in 1953.

When I was about four years old we moved to Cape Town. Here my father took on the position of superintendent of the Zeekoevlei Yacht Club in the city's south. We lived in a large house less than a stone's throw from the waterside and I have vivid memories of watching boats being repaired and varnished or painted prior to being relaunched into the lake.

Aged four, Cape Town.


From Zeekoevlei we moved to Green Point, just outside the CBD, where we lived for a while in a flat in a block called Toronga Mansions (the building is still there) and then in a rented house closer to Sea Point. I was approaching six at the time (1955).

Taronga Mansions today.

From Green Point we moved to the Cape Midlands, to a small place called Jansenville. This was the start of my father's long association with the Cape Provincial Administration's Roads Department, which he served as clerk of works, liaising between the Department and private civil engineering contractors. Here I turned six.

Later that same year we moved to Steytlerville, about 80 km away (via Klipplaat). Here the main street was being surfaced. It is still much the same, very wide and with plenty of kerbside parking. Both towns are today mere ghosts of their former selves because of the movement of people from rural areas to the larger metropolitan areas.

Taken outside Jansenville.

From Steytlerville we moved to East London, a busy harbour city on the Eastern Cape coast. Here I started my school career in the Border Primary School. This was 1958 and I was seven. My brother Pierre was born here.

My first school photo.

My first school.

Work on the streets of what was to become a large Black township was soon completed, and before the year was out we were on the move again.

Douglas in the Northern Cape, near the confluence of the two mighty rivers, the Orange and the Vaal, was to be my home for the rest of the year. Here I finished my Sub. A (Grade 1) schooling and started Sub. B. Before  the end of the year construction of the main streets of the town was completed, so we set off to Tulbagh in the Western Cape, where the water supply network was being upgraded.

While we were in Tulbagh my mother, who was then expecting my sister, went to live with her mother in Grabouw, some 140 km away. My father and I lived in a flat in Tulbagh for the duration of our time there.

From here we  moved to Klawer in the Cape's north-western region at the beginning of 1960, where I started Std 1 (Grade 3), and then to Orkney in the then Transvaal, where the construction work was soon finished, and we headed back to the Cape Province, to Graaff-Reinet.

Spandau Hill as seen across the town.

Graaff-Reinet is a lovely town and we lived there until the end of the next year (1961) when I completed Grade 4 (Std 2). I suspect my parents were concerned about the effect of three schools in two very different provincial school systems might have had on me, because they promised me my first bicycle if I obtained an average of 90% at the end of my Std 1 year. I recall mentioning it to my class teacher, a wonderful older lady called Jacobs, and I still have a shrewd suspicion that she helped matters along a bit, because I ended the year with an average of 92% -- and a brand new Triumph Sports bicycle! Here my friend Johan van Schoor and I climbed the tall hill called Spandau Hill and had all kinds of other fun, including a tense few days when there were fears that the cloudburst nearby was going to fill the dam above the town to a dangerous level.

The start of 1962 saw us moving to Petrusville, back in the Northern Cape and near the site of the large Vanderkloof Dam, which was being built at the time, and near the border with the Orange Free State. My year here was a very happy one (mind you, my school years were all happy, but Petrusville was a bit more so) with me spending long hours in the veld, alone or with friends. This is also when I travelled alone by train to spend the winter holiday with my mother's eldest sister and her detective husband in Port Elizabeth. That was a super adventure! Travelling the almost 600 km each way by train on my own was such a lark!

Next stop was Willowmore. I was now twelve and in Std 4 (Grade 6). This was a short stay; we moved again at the end of the first term at the end of March 1963. I had a very good friend here. Stuart was my age, but a year ahead of me at school, since I started a year later than my peers.

Alicedale in the Eastern Cape was our next stop. What a delightful little town! We lived in an annexe of the hotel, a mere hundred metres or so from the railway line and close to the station. I had already been in love with steam trains, but my time in Alicedale strengthened that love immensely. I spent the last term of that year boarding with my headmaster and his wife next to the school. They treated me like their elder son (their own son was just a toddler still). My parents moved to Oudtshoorn where my father started a different career – designing houses as the in-house designing draughtsman for a large company selling building materials. I joined them at the end of that year.

The school building in Alicedale, as seen from the 
street outside the principal's house.

Oudtshoorn has a very special place in my heart. There is something about the town that absolutely captivated me. Summers were blazingly hot, but we still went everywhere barefoot. My last year of primary school here was also a very happy one, and I had another very good friend in Manus Kemp, who was a budding artist of great skill. I was to return to Oudtshoorn a few years later to do an instructors course at the Infantry School, but that's another story for another time. My first wife and I visited the town a few times, since my sister and her family lived there then, and my current wife Elle and I spent a wonderful but all to short a time there in 2014, too.

My high school career started in Oudsthoorn High. It was the year the former Boys' High School amalgamated with the Girls' High School. The beautiful old sandstone building nowadays houses the CP Nel Museum.

But 1965 also heralded our move to Vredendal in the northwest of the Cape Province. I spent almost three years there, leaving at the end of my Std 8 (Grade 10) year. Again a place of which I have nothing but extremely fond memories and where I had amazing friends like Mossie Visser,Leon Uys,  Bertie "Bok" Strauss and Nelis Avenant (whose father was my English teacher. I'm privileged to still be friends with my Science teacher at Vredendal High, Willie van Zyl, a wonderful teacher and mentor who I will always admire.

My last year in Vredendal saw me boarding with our former neighbours and friends of my parents, as my father had taken up a position similar to the ones in Oudtshoorn and Vredendal, but this time in Worcester, much closer to Cape Town. The Coetzees were like family to me. The only reason I changed my boarding home was to go and live with my friend Leon Uys and his family. His father managed one of the hotels in town, and we lived in a house next door to the hotel. Leon and I were inseparable, so it was only natural that we'd live under the same roof.

Vredendal days. Camping beside the Olifants River. 

My father in the white shirt.

1968 was my penultimate year at school, and saw me starting the year in my twelfth school. De Villiers Graaff High School was my favourite school in my twelve year school career. I loved Villiersdorp, nestled in a narrow valley between the mountains, I had some amazing teachers, especially those I had for German, English, Afrikaans, History and General Science. I ended up at DVG High because of the (for me) lucky fluke that the high schools in Worcester did not offer German as a subject, and it was my favourite choice subject.  My German teacher for 1969, Herr Horn, retired at the end of the year and took a teaching post with the School for the Deaf in Worcester. He and his wife asked my parents if I could stay with his wife for my final year, as he would only be home on weekends. I jumped at the opportunity, because the people I was boarding with were extremely old-fashioned and stingy and did not approve of my reading until late at night, nor of the fact that I did not attend church.

De Villiers Graaff High School. The building at the rear

was added well after my time.

The school's cadet officers. I'm the tallest one at the rear.

Far left in the front row is Kelly du Toit (Afrikaans). Fourth

from the left is Mr Jamneck, my history teacher, and to the

 right of him sits Johan van Vuuren, my German teacher in 1969.
Tom Engela, the principal, is centre front. A man I admired 

tremendously.

And thus my twelve school years came to an end at the end of 1969. Villiersdorp is where I met the first great love of my life and where I found myself encouraged to join the debating society, which I chaired in my last year, as well as being fortunate enough to win the senior debating trophy. Kelly du Toit, my Afrikaans teacher, encouraged me to take up lyrical writing and always had time to read and evaluate my attempts at poetry. Johan van Vuuren, my young German teacher for my last year, encouraged me to read the classic German authors and also strengthened my love for the language. I will always have a special fondness for Lerina du Rand, the music teacher, who was always there to encourage my writing, even though I wasn't a pupil of hers.

I consider myself extremely blessed and fortunate to have lived the life I did up to the end of my school years. I was fortunate to have lived in so many places I loved, to have made the dear friends I did and to have the opportunities to grow up close to nature.