Two Bits: Talking about driftwood and missions
Going through some old photographs in the office I kept coming across faces I’ve known over the years and wondered, perhaps not for the first time, what happened to them.
The pounding of heavy surf woke me early Sunday morning, the thump of great breakers shuddering through the house.
I got up to nurse a cup of tea and watch lightning playing across the horizon as a storm raged out at sea.
Not for the first time I thanked my lucky stars for washing us up on these shores, instead of being stuck in (different shudder) Jo’burg. Going through some old photographs in the office I kept coming across faces I’ve known over the years and wondered, perhaps not for the first time, what happened to them.
Some have died, others emigrated, and yet others are I know not where. If this were, say, Vryheid, would there be such a passage of people as we experience here?
Does the beach attract more driftwood than older, inland towns? So many people seem to arrive on our doorstep with dreams of a new life, a fresh start. Many stay and make their mark but others move on and you wonder where they’ve gone to try their luck now.
In the novel ‘No Country For Old Men’ one of the characters tries to explain to a young runaway that nobody can really start over with a completely clean slate. When you arrive in the new place, he says, you’re you, and when you wake up the next day you’re still you, with all your yesterdays sitting on your shoulders.
Talking of novels and changing faces, the Houstons were a lively couple who lived here for a few years, Peter the priest at All Souls Anglican church.
They’re up in Kloof now, rubbing shoulders with the aloof. His wife, Clare, is a dark horse who unbeknownst to all, had been quietly working on a novel. ‘An Unquiet Place’ is a story set around the concentration camps of the Boer War and the effects the camps and the war had on people’s lives. Rose says it is much more than that.
She is devouring it and says it’s brilliant. Turns out it’s not Clare’s first book; she wrote a book for children titled ‘The Magic Bat’ which won the Maskew Miller Longman literature award last year. How about that! I won’t have time for novels for a while.
I’ve been given a pile of histories of the American missionaries, more driftwood, who founded Inanda Seminary, Groutville and Adam’s Mission, the string of missions that played a large role in the history of the area surrounding Durban. And significantly, which produced the founding personalities of the African National Congress – John Dube, Albert Luthuli and others.
On the subject of missions, we are trying to decide whether we can tackle a walking tour of the Trappist monastaries around southern KZN in the new year.
Everyone knows the jewel in the crown, Marianhill, but others like Reichenau, Kevelar, Centecow and Emaus are less well known and in varying states of repair nowadays, but no less interesting for that.
Some years back I enjoyed a novel about the Trappists, ‘For the sake of silence’, which kindled an interest in the work of that Catholic order. But Comrades marathons are long in our past and whether Darby and Joan can manage 20 kms a day for a week or so remains to be seen, crock knees and all that.
Keith Duane jokes that his family has been around these parts for 120 years or so, and he’s still considered a ‘new boy’. But I reckon that after 33 years on this shore, we can be considered part of the furniture as well.
Rose and I are chuffed that last week we could hand over the reins of The North Coast Courier and the holding company, Wordsmiths, to our daughter Lesley as editor and her husband Pieter as MD and publisher.
They are growing the business(es) to new heights in the print, digital and marketing arenas and there’s plenty more in the pipeline. I’ll be around for a while doing this and that – this column and bad jokes, for one – but it’s time to step back.
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Women call me ugly occasionally. But that’s only until they hear how much money I make. Then they say I’m poor and ugly.
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