New Heavens (6 page)

In the early 1930s, my parents began traveling by air, and we used to go early in the morning to Germiston Airport to bid them farewell. The first leg of the journey was in an Imperial Airways de Havilland Rapide twin-engine biplane
with seven passengers and two pilots. My father, dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and a pith helmet, looked like an African explorer. As each passenger boarded the aircraft it tilted a little to one side. We stood close by on the grass as the pilot ran up the engines, and the airplane and its passengers inside shook and shivered. When the pilot taxied to the beginning of the grass field and took off over our heads, we tearfully waved good-bye.

The various legs of the flights of Imperial Airways were about three hours long and after each they landed for refueling. At the end of the day, they would retire to a nice hotel at their destination for a rest and a quiet evening. If the pilot saw some interesting wild game on the way, he would draw the attention of the passengers and circle the herd of elephants or giraffe or whatever. A few years later they would, after two days' flying, be transferred to a large four-engine Sunderland flying boat at Port Mozambique, with twelve passengers and a crew of five. The flying boat eventually landed in Palestine either on Lake Tiberias or on the Dead Sea. The flight took the better part of two weeks, and no one seemed to be in too much of a hurry. I have a clipping from a South African weekly that gives an idea of air travel in that period, with a heading on one page about my parents paying “a lightning visit to Palestine, there and back in one month.” Now who had it better, the early travelers or us nowadays in the sleek jets?

The Sterkfontein caves, renowned for the traces of early prehistoric civilization they contain, are forty kilometers
north of Johannesburg. Though we lived in Johannesburg, much of my youth was spent at Doornbosfontein, a farm we owned near the Sterkfontein. It is a large farm, and its name comes from a big Doornbos thornbush tree that stands in splendid isolation in a broad treeless landscape. From my early childhood, we called it “the lonely tree.”

After establishing himself in South Africa, my father bought the farm for his sister and two brothers and their families as a home to live in when he brought them from Lithuania. It is huge—7,000 acres. The three immigrant families hailed from the small village in the distant Baltic country having had no experience in agriculture. They took to their new environment and occupation without difficulty, as has been the wont of Jews who so often have had to migrate from country to country. The district was populated by Afrikaans farmers, who looked on incredulously as the inexperienced Lithuanian immigrants, in their outlandish Russian dress with pale complexions, began to plant corn and reap crops with surprisingly good yields.

Despite knowing little English and not a word of Afrikaans, they were welcomed and were well treated by the God-fearing Afrikaner farmers who considered the Jews to be “the people of the Book.” Probably the sympathetic attitude of the Afrikaans farmers to the Jews had its roots in the history of their Huguenot ancestors' flight from religious persecution in Europe in the seventeenth century.

The farmers had been accustomed to visits from time to time by a kind of Jewish immigrant called “smouses” in Afrikaans. They were traveling merchants who went from one isolated farm to another with a bag or two of articles for sale. The farmers were isolated from contact with their
farmer compatriots because of the lack of facilities for communicating. They tended to rely on the traveling smouses to bring them news from other farmers. The peddlers were often put up for the night by the kind Afrikaners, but they had not expected to see them working beside them as farmers. My father always spoke well of them and of the Afrikaners and their welcoming attitude to newcomers.

Most of the road from Johannesburg to Doornbosfontein is tarred, but the last ten kilometers consists of dirt roads winding through low hills covered in dry brown grass and fields of corn, the staple food of most black South Africans. As these roads pass through farms, there are gates every few kilometers, and if one throws a coin to the Picannins who are nearby, they open and close the gate with a winning smile. After leaving the tarred road, four farms are passed in this way, the last belonging to the family of Dolf de la Rey, descendant of the famed Afrikaner general of the Boer War.

Our homestead at Doornbosfontein was near the farm entrance and consisted of one large ancient farmhouse and another smaller building composed of what is known as
rondavels
. These are unique to South Africa and are circular structures with roofs made of thatch, the interior construction exposed and consisting of long poles of poplar wood, which support the thatch. The poles end in a conical top, the whole making a pleasant appearance with the bundles of thatch forming attractive ceilings especially in the soft light of paraffin lamps. The thick walls are made of bricks and plaster painted white inside and out, and inside there is always the peculiar but pleasant smell of thatch. Apart from
some danger of fire, there can be no better form of roof, cool in summer and warm in winter.

The atmosphere of the veld pervades everything. At Doornbosfontein, we always felt close to nature. It is usually bone dry, but in the summer after a rain shower, the air is suffused with the wonderful pungent odor of dry earth wet by rain. The rain comes in the early afternoon, preceded by vast buildups of towering cumulus storm clouds, which invariably give birth to wild storms. When we sought shelter in our
rondavels
, the rain could not even be heard through the thick thatch, and we felt cozy and safe. Outside, the veld stretched as far as the eye could see, the parched earth drinking in the life-giving fluid from the heavens, the dry cracks in the earth healing as the rain smoothed the ravages of the burning sun.

A dam at the end of a stream supplied water of good quality. There was no telephone or electricity at Doornbosfontein, and the nearest telephone and post office were at Orient rail station, seven kilometers away. Part of the farm is in a mountain range. It was a magnet for us children because of its streams, steep valleys, and populations of buck, porcupines, monkeys, and other wild life. The mountains were reached by the whole family in a large ox-wagon drawn by sixteen slow-moving oxen, led by the black
voorloper
pacing along slowly at their head. On arrival at the “kloof” as we called it, the
voorloper
would tighten brakes made of large blocks of wood pressed against the rear wheels. We would start down the incline, and I remember the fear I felt during the steep descent behind the bellowing oxen. It is hard to believe that in the eighteenth century the mass movement of
the Afrikaners from the Cape to the far north a thousand miles away was made in the same kind of wagon.

The farm was basic, without electricity. We made do with Primus stoves for cooking, and the kerosene lamps at night lent a cozy atmosphere to the rondavel. Meals were simple. A profusion of salads, vegetables, and white cheese made by my mother by hanging cloth bags of sour cream on a tree, from which we could see the whey dripping. My mother loved the simplicity of life at the farm and refused to introduce modern gadgets. Even our water was drawn from the dam nearby and carried to the
rondavels
.

Our relatives eventually decided that life on a farm in South Africa was not for them and left Doornbosfontein for the city. My father arranged with various tenant farmers to live in and run the farm. They lived in the big house with their families while we kept the rondavels for weekends and vacations. The farmers were mostly Afrikaans, many down on their luck from drinking, and were a continual source of trouble. The black workers were more-permanent residents at the farm and lived in a village they had built at one end of the farm. They were entirely independent, provided they gave us one-third of whatever crops they grew on the land near the village. They had their own hierarchy, and their church nearby was on our land, its exterior walls gaily decorated in African fashion. I remember the great respect tinged with some fear we children accorded their old headman Oom Paul with his one blind eye.

In the early 1930s, my father, always a keen Zionist, offered Doornbosfontein as a training farm for prospective migrants to Palestine, and there were groups of young men
living there studying agriculture as part of the Hechalutz movement. It was doubtless strange for the Afrikaner farmers in the area to visit the large central rondavel, which had been turned into a dining room and lecture hall, to see the slogans about the Promised Land posted on the walls in Hebrew. Not a few of the kibbutzniks in Israel today must remember their months of training in farming at Doornbosfontein. Years later, to all our regret, the farm was sold and has since become a large cattle ranch.

When I was twelve years old, I was sent to Hilton College, a boarding school 700 kilometers from Johannesburg. The train journey took a night and half a day with carriages for girls going to schools in the same area. We were all homesick and excited, and after nightfall we visited the girls' carriages. In time, the school authorities understood what was going on during the overnight journey, and they locked the corridor leading to the girls' carriages. That did not stop us, for we climbed out of our windows and made our way by crawling along outside the carriages to enter the girls' side. The train was all the while hurtling through the night at high speed.

In the morning the train continued to speed through the flat Transvaal landscape halting momentarily at dry “dorps,” where barefoot black youths, mucous dribbling from their noses, stood in the cold near the tracks with their hands stretched out begging. When the train pulled into the station at Hilton Road after lunch the following day, we
traveled by car through the forests and had our first sight of the beautiful school, situated in its own estate of thousands of acres of forest and mountains with wide rivers coursing through it. The buildings were in the Cape Dutch style, snow-white with black roofs and gables at the ends of the buildings surrounded by well-tended lawns.

Each dormitory had twenty beds, not one of which had even a shelf or night cupboard for one's own personal belongings next to it, creating a feeling of impersonality for us. The dormitories with their iron bedsteads looked like soldiers' barracks. Showers were communal, first thing in the morning and in the afternoon after sport. No hot water was available in the showers probably because of belief that cold showers reduce libido. It was strange to be in the shower room early on a winter morning, freezing and crowded with boys who ran one by one into the shower, gasping loudly and rubbing themselves furiously as the cold water streamed onto their sleepy bodies. Hot baths were allowed for ten minutes twice a week, strictly according to a timetable listing names and times of bathing.

Daily routine meant rising at 0630, and after a compulsory ice-cold shower, standing in line to get a mug of cocoa and one slice of bread and jam before chapel for the morning service. As it is an Anglican school, Jews and Roman Catholics were exempted from chapel and went to the library to await the end of the service.

On that first day, still wearing my Hilton tie, I removed my jacket and took a walk around the school. As I passed in front of the main building, a teacher beckoned me over to him and said coldly, “I think it might be preferable if you
were not to walk around the school without your jacket.” That was my first encounter with the school establishment. All the hopes and expectations of the great adventure of becoming a schoolboy at Hilton gave way in an instant to a sense of feeling an outcast in a stiff and hostile environment. In general, the atmosphere at the school was suffused with a certain coldness, which probably came from the rigid English public-school rules and customs. In the first few days of my stay at Hilton, I was very homesick and had a desolate feeling when something reminded me of my home and its warmth and coziness.

Discipline at Hilton was strict in all respects, and punishment was meted out for all transgressions. More serious overstepping of the rules meant corporal punishment. The prefects enjoyed various privileges and were allowed to cane any boy who overstepped rules. In short, discipline at the school was harsh, but there were rewards for those boys who obeyed the draconian rules.

One of the features of Hilton was the practice of being referred to only by your surname. First names were used by one's closest friends only. If there was more than one boy with the same name, you were given a title, which would be for example Smith Major, Minor, or Tertius. This practice is followed at English public schools, and it created for me an atmosphere of coldness and impersonality. Another rigorously followed custom of the English public school at Hilton was fagging. Any boy who had been at the school for two years became an “old poop,” which entitled him to employ any of the “new poops” to fetch and carry for him, to brush his blazer and polish his shoes.

Morning chapel was followed by study in the classrooms, after which we had breakfast in the large dining hall. The walls were covered in wooden panels, each dedicated to the various generations of families. I noted that many of the panels contained names ranging from grandfather to father and then to son, with the dates of attendance at Hilton, in some cases extending for nearly a hundred years. Apart from the two teachers of Afrikaans, the masters were all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, and the influence of the British Empire, at that time the paramount power in the world, pervaded the school environment. In addition to the regular syllabus, there was an emphasis on classical subjects such as Latin, which I studied for five years, and classical Greek.

Some minor anti-Semitism existed among the boys, but it never amounted to more than a remark. The teachers never showed a hint of it. Whether by chance or by intent, there were only a handful of Jewish boys at Hilton.