Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 3 - final)

(Continued from Part 2)

On Sunday morning we had breakfast with Theo Ngubane and his brother Owen, and Owen told us something of his history. He had kept a shop for a while and then gone overseas to England, where he drove buses in London, based at Ealing, but he had been there after me, when it was Transport for London, not London Transport.

Owen & Theo Ngubane, Steve Hayes

So we had something in common, but with a time lapse, so we compared notes. Owen said the buses he drove were fully automatic and could almost drive themselves. I drove RT buses with preselector gearboxes -- you selected the next gear you thought you were going to need, but it wouldn't actually change until you pressed the gear pedal with your left foot. A little later we got Routemaster buses, which had automatic gearboxes, but not very good ones, because they only changed at certain speeds. so late at night one would have to travel long distances slowly in a fuel-wasting low gear. because to change to a higher gear one would have to travel faster and so get ahead of schedule.

The London we lived in was also very different. If anyone is interested in my reminiscences of the Swinging London of the 1960s, you can find them here.

Deacon John Aitchison reading the Gospel, St John's

After breakfast we went to Durban to St John's Church in Clark Road. John Aitchison was serving as deacon, and they had 3 New Testament readings, one of which was St Peter's vision of clean and unclean foods, and John preached on that. They sung hymns to a piano accompaniment, and John read the Gospel from the middle of the church, surrounded by servers swinging incense.

Afterwards John told me something about the arrangement of the stained-glass windows, how they surrounded people with saints, the disciples of Jesus, his friends, and others. We asked the Rector, Themba Vundla, if we would use the chapel to sing the Hours and Obednitsa, and we read our own Gospel of the Samaritan Woman. There are not many Sundays after Pascha left when we can sing the Paschal hymns. so we did not want to miss this one.

Gammage Family, Pinetown 19 May 2025

On Monday 19 May we went up to Farningham Ridge to see Val's cousin Arthur Gammage, who was celebrating his 74th birthday. Arthur's younger brother Douglas and his wife Margie and their son Ken was also there, so it was a fair-sized family gathering, with Arthur's wife Jenny and their son Keith.

They talked about their children and foster children and adopted children. Both families had adopted or fostered children with various disabilities, and Hilda, who had been adopted by Arthur and Jenny was now in a home, where she could be cared for. 

Arthur Gammage, 74th Birthday

Doug and Margie had adopted Hilda's brother Richard, who had even more problems than Hilda, and they said his behaviour would worsen at the time of the full moon. Nowadays many people seem to think that is a silly superstition, I had noticed that much the same thing had happened with someone I had worked and shared a house with 50 years ago. He could be very pleasant and affable sometimes, but then he would start getting fits of the sulks, and would do all kinds of petty spiteful things. I sometimes wondered if I was just imagining things, or perhaps was going mad -- more recently I discovered that this kind of behaviour is called "gaslighting" After a few months I noticed that his sulky phases seemed to coincide with the full moon. I don't know if Richard's behaviour was similar, but it did seem to be affected by the moon.

After the birthday party we went to Durban North and again went to the Spur Steak Ranch for their pensioners' special. That particular branch of the Spur franchise was in the grounds of a sports club, and we parked next to an abandoned bowling green.

Blacksmith plover at Durban North

There we saw a blacksmith plover, like the ones we have in our garden at home. This one had a sore foot, and, perhaps because it was more difficult for it to run away, stood still and let me take a photo of it. It seems that several species of birds that used to be quite wild and rarely seen, and then only out in the country, are becoming urbanised and even domesticated. Hadedas became urbanised about 1990, and plovers and dik kops a few years later. At first it was crowned plovers we saw in our garden, but now the blacksmith plovers seem more common. The are called that because their cry sounds like a hammer hitting an anvil. There were also a couple of babies, and the one with the sore foot appeared to have a mate on the other side of the bowling green.

We sat by the window overlooking a hockey field with astroturf, and some schoolkids were practising on it. Four schoolboys came in, aged about 11-13; two Indian, one coloured, one white, They sat at a table nearby, and we wondered how they had enough money to buy lunch at such a place. Maybe they were here after school to practise some sport, and their parents might have arranged for them to have lunch first.

Nora Saneka, Noreen Ramsden, Val Hayes

We went on to see Nora Saneka, now living in Roseglen with her widowed mother Noreen Ramsden. We had known the Ramsden family in Durban North in the 1970s, and it was good to see two of them again

They were having their fibre telephone cable repaired, as the municipality had cut the grass and cut the cable as well. Nora showed us photos of their family -- her husband Mike Saneka, who had died a couple of years ago after an operation for a cancer resulting from smoking too much. Her daughters Rebecca and Pascal, Pascal was a doctor, and specialised in trauma, and had gained a great deal of experience through the disasters that had struck Durban in recent years -- the Zuma riots, bringing in gunshot wounds; the floods, with drownings and so on. She said her brother Richard was in Sydney, Australia, where he was a kind of consultant, and he was the one member of the family that never seemed to be mentioned in our communications with them on Facebook.

Mexican Sunflower?

Her mother Noreen came in in a wheelchair, now in her 90s and suffering from Parkinson's disease, which made it difficult for her to talk. Her father, Bill Ramsden had died a few months ago, and had been disappointed that he would not last long enough to get a letter from King Charles on his 100th birthday, as he never made it that far, but tried to pretend he was older than he actually was. There was, however, a commendation from Queen Elizabeth hanging on the wall.

Nora said she belonged to St Mary's Anglican parish in Greyville where she seemed to be quite active. She said the rectory had been sold to become a pizza parlour, and the adjacent shops were used by a group of businessmen who wanted to take over the church hall as well, but the parish had started a nursery school, which the businessmen seemed anxious to close. Nora was worried that the Archdeacon of Durban seemed to support the businessmen, as he thought the sale of the hall would bring in some money for the church. Nora argued that the church should use its buildings for the benefit of the community rather than just selling them off to raise funds.

Val Hayes & Peter Gunning, Ballito Beach

On Tuesday 20th May we had breakfast with Theo and Owen Ngubane, and left Nagina at 9:15 am, to head up the North Coast and stopped nearby to take some photos of the ubiquitous yellow roadside flowers. They only seem to grow along roads with heavy traffic, so it's difficult to take photos of them. Carl Brook told us they were Mexican sunflowers and were an invasive alien species, but we thought they looked rather pretty and looked them up on the Web, and found that they are useful for fertilising the soil.

We drove down to Umngeni and along Riverside Drive and up the old North Coast Road. We turned off at Casuarina Beach, where there had once been an old house we liked as we passed it when we lived in Melmoth and travelled to Durban back in the 1970s, but it had long been demolished, and modern ugly blocks of flats were being built in its place, and most of the Casuarina trees had vanished and we saw only a few palms.

Melvain Donyes at iHlozi Lodge

I went to a toilet there, but only the shell remained. It was full of rubbish, and all the fittings had been nicked. As we were leaving a bloke in a car stopped, and said it wasn't safe there; old people had been attacked, and we should rather go on to Westbrook Beach, which was further on.

We went on to Ballito, where we called on Peter Gunning, who took us to coffee at a beachside kiosk. We sat on a bench overlooking Ballito Beach and Pete spoke of Bible study groups he had participated in, some of which had old St Martin's people in them, including Alison Bastable, whom he said had wanted to see me, but we did not have her contact info. He talked about the millennialists in Bible study groups who waited for the end of the world, and were fans of Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth. I wasn't aware that there were people who were still interested in that, and Pete said that they had changed the ending to put forward things that Hal Lindsey had predicted would happen, but hadn't happened as predicted, so they moved them further into the future.

IHlozi Lodge. Kuleni Estate, near Hluhluwe, KZN

We went on our way up the coast, using the R102, and avoiding the N2 toll road, partly because of a conscientious objection to toll roads. In the past all roads had been paid for out of the Road Fund, which was replenished by the tax on petrol, which seemed a pretty fair "user pays" way of doing things, but the then National Party government wanted to rob the Road Fund for its attempted conquest of Angola, and so toll roads were introduced. Another reason for avoiding the toll roads was that they are full of big 26-wheeler trucks, which make driving unpleasant.

Along the R102 at every settlement or village there were speed bumps in the road, often not well marked. But though the road makings had faded, you could often tell where they were because of the sugar cane that had bounced out of trucks as they went over them. The road was otherwise in good condition.

Melvain Donyes

We crossed the Tugela (uThukela) River on the old N2 bridge, which had been washed away in floods some years ago, so we had had to take a detour via Mandini when we travelled this way before, but the bridge had now been replaced. looking much as it had before, and from there to Empangeni the road was much as it had been 40 years ago when we lived in Melmoth and travelled down to Durban. Here it was the new toll road that was nearer to the coast.

We filled up with petrol for the third time on our trip at Mtubatuba. We drove on to Hluhluwe and reached Kuleni Estate at sundown. We went on to iHlozi Lodge, where our friends Melvain and Lynette Donyes welcomed us and we had supper with them and chatted. Melvain and Lynette had bought iHlozi Lodge out of their retirement savings and run it as a guest house to support them and their ministry as evangelist/teachers in the Pentecostal tradition. Melvain was one of the pioneers of online communications in South Africa, having set up one of the first BBSs and importing some Christian networks. One of the forums we started back then is still functioning, now as an email mailing list. It's called Offtopic, because it's a relaxed sort of place where you can discuss things that might be considered "off topic" in more specialised online forums. If you know us and would like to stay in touch, feel free to join us there -- you can find out more about it here. And if you're looking for a place to stay in northern Zululand near the coast, click here to find out more about iHlozi Lodge.And for more places to stay run by our family or friends, see here.

Melvain Donyes, Val Hayes, Lynette Donyes

On Wednesday 21 May we spent the day with Mel and Lynette, driving into the small town of Hluhluwe to have lunch at a small cafe there, and chatting about old times and old friends sitting around the fire in the evening.

On Thursday 22 May we said goodbye to Mel and Lynette and headed for home, and again had problems with poor road signage. Perhaps the roads authorities think that road signs are not needed because nowadays everyone listens to the plastic auntie giving directions on GPS, but we found that doesn't work too well, at least not on our cell phones. It shows you approaching a turnoff, but by the time is shows you have reached it, you've already passed it, so the signs would be useful. So we drove up the N2 for about 5 kilometres looking for the R69 to Vryheid, and had to turn back. It turned out to be a rough gravel road, but soon climbed into the hills with some spectacular views over the Pongola Dam.

View from Magudu, KZN

Then the map showed we had to join the R66 and travel 3 km south towards Nongoma before continuing along the R69. This time there was a sign, but it was actually a "short cut" and we should have carried on along the unmarked road. Eventually we saw a sign to a place that was on the map, the small village of Magudu, perched high on a hill, with splendid views in every direction -- well worth a visit.

And from there it was a zig-zag run (to avoid potholes) to Vryheid via Louwsburg (off the road and unseen) and Hlobane, a rather unromantic coal-mining town. Stopped for lunch at a Wimpy in Vryheid, and then on to Utrecht, where we had lived in 1976/77. 

St Michael's Anglican Church, Utrecht, KZN

The small church of St Michael & All Angels, built by British soldiers during the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902, looked much the same as ever, but there was nothing to indicate what denomination it belonged to or the times of services. When we had been there there was an amazing carbon-filament light bulb in the entrance, which had probably lasted the 77 years since the church was built. Perhaps, after another 48 years, it is still working.

 We had a quick look around the town, which seemed little changed from nearly 50 years ago, before heading on home via Volksrust, Standerton and Leandra -- 710km in 13 hours, tired from avoiding potholes, for which Steve blames Maggie Thatcher, who started the mania for deregulation of road transport which has led to the deterioration of both the road and rail infrastructure. But hey, it was an enjoyable trip, and we saw a lot of old friends and met a few new ones.

Travels in the Free State and KZN, May 2025 (Part 2)

 (Continued from Part 1)

Val Hayes & Cath Stempowski

On Wednesday 14 May we had tea with Huberto and Cath Stempowski at Cowies Hill. We had met them at Clarens, where they had also gone for the memorial to Peter Walters. 

Cath is an artist, and worked in various media, and showed us some of her pictures. She said she would be interested in playing with a possible illustration for the cover of the second edition of my children's book Of Wheels and Witches, which is being prepared for publication by Shack Simple Press in Texas, and she suggested some styles that could be used.

The story is about four children who have adventures in the Southern Drakensberg back in the time of apartheid, and spend some time riding around on horses, so the illustrations could show them on horseback or on foot, at any point in the story. Cath had one picture of a horse that suggested one possible style that could be used.

We drove down from Cowies Hill into Pinetown, and there found Sandy's Supermarket, which had been there forever. In the same shopping centre was a Spur Steak Restarant, so we had lunch there. We had their old folks special -- coffee; 124g steak with salad and chips, and ice cream, for R129.00, which was less than half the cost of the single course we had had at Granny Mouse's Country House the previous day.

Revd Theophilus Ngubane

Back to Theo Ngubane's place for supper, and more talking afterwards about old times together in the Anglican Diocese of Zululand in the 1970s and 1980s. Theo was amazed that Steve remembered the names of many people that he had forgotten, and said that most of those we had known had died. The only one left was Hamilton Mbatha, who had been Rector of KwaMagwaza Parish and rural dean of the Mthonjaneni Deanery when we had been there. Hamilton, Theo said, was still active in his retirement, and was often asked to preach in various places. Remembering names was easy because it was a close-knit community, and people often gathered at the diocesan conference centre at KwaMagaza. It was a place where we had many friends, and felt closer to people than in the big city. Once the burglar alarm went off at our neighbour's house in Kilner Park, in the Great City of Tshwane, and we phoned the neighbour to let him know, and he said he had moved away two years previously. Big cities are very anonymous places.

Perhaps one thing that has made it easier to remember people's names is that we had taken photos of many of them, and looked at the photos occasionally to remind ourselves of them.

Nagina, near Pinetown, with yellow roadside flowers

On Wednesday Theo asked us to lead morning prayers, so we read the Hours of Pascha, with its repetitions of "Christ is Risen". After breakfast Theo took us in his son's car, a Yaris that was newer than ours, up to Maritzburg, up a back road from Nagina near Pinetown, where Theo lives, , the M61 West via Shongweni Dam, where we could see all the houses built on what until quite recently were bare hillsides. The hills were very steep, and there were lots of yellow flowers at the sides of the road, a bit like the orange zinnia-like ones in Gauteng, except that these were a bit more like daisies.

At one place Theo pointed out sewage pipes coming out of houses and emptying into the gutter of the road, and said that people bribed the municipal inspectors for such things. Up at the top,just before joining the N3, there was a new shopping mall, Westown, a huge affair out in the veld, with access roads being built to it from Hillcrest and other places.

Macrina Walker, Val Hayes, Carl Brook, Theo & Steve

From there we drove along the N3 to Hilton, and much of it being worked on, so it was reduced to 2 lanes, with the left lane being mostly occupied by 26-wheeler trucks. We went to Sweetwaters to see Carl Brook and his wife Elma. He is now head of ESSA (the Evangelical Seminary of South Africa). after having worked in Swaziland for a while. We had last seen them in 2008 when they were living down the South Coast. I had first met Carl online back in the 1990s and he was researching monastic and other intentional communities in southern Africa, and we had later met face-to-face a few times.

Val Hayes & Macrina Walker at Macrina's new cottage

After a while Macrina Walker, who lives just down the road, joined us, and we took her to lunch at a place called "The Upper Millstone" where they served sandwiches and coffee which for the four of us cost little more than lunch for one at Granny Mouse's Country House.

 Macrina took my book of St John Chrysostom's Liturgy and said she would rebind it for me. She was looking for an apprentice  of sorts to do that kind of work, as she is now mainly binding new books that she sells overseas, through her bookbinding service Annesi Bindings.

 Macrina is another person we had first met online, when she was a Roman Catholic nun in the Netherlands, and thinking of becoming Orthodox.

Theo Ngubane, Linelle Irvine, Val Hayes

We went across to Hayfields to see Linelle Irvine, who had been at varsity with Steve back in the 1960s, and hadn't seen each other for nearly 60 years.  She was living at the Lutheran Gardens Retirement Home, opposite the Lutheran Church. She had spent most of her working life as an English teacher.

We were very much having a "seeing people" holiday, visiting old friends and family that we hadn't seen for a long time, as many as said they would like to see us.

Darryl & Anne Honey, Val Hayes. Sarnia, 15 May 2025

On Thursday 15 May we visited another old friend, Darryl Honey. He had been a neighbour of Steve at Culemborg Flats in Sandringham, Johannesburg, and later in Cheltondale. And we reminisced about old times and people we had known. We had found him on Facebook -- he was one of the people Facebook said we might know, as we had a mutual friend Tony MacGregor. Darryl said he had actually been friends with Tony's brother Chris MacGregor, through his interest in jazz, and said he had had a jazz guitar when he was younger, but when his bike was stolen his father had refused to get him a new one, and he had swapped his guitar for a bike. That is one of the main uses of social media web sites like Facebook -- they help you to re-establish contact with people you had lost touch with.

Val Hayes, Tim & Celia Sparks

In that afternoon we had tea with more old friends, Celia Sparks and her son Tim. Steve had first met Celia when a mutual friend, Martin Goulding, had commandeered her garage to repair Steve's old car, a 1961 Peugeot 403 station wagon, which needed new main bearings, not a job which could be done out in the street. 

Tim had been interested in Orthodoxy, and had visited a monastery near Pretoria. He is now a poet, and we talked mostly about books of Charles Williams. 

On the Saturday we left Theo’s home in Nagina and went to the other side of Pinetown to visit Val's sister Elaine and her family.

Val Hayes, Elaine Machin, Wyatt Anderson

They have an interesting family arrangement as Val's niece Lesley and her husband Jay have a house with a small second house on the premises and their mothers live together there. This gives security to the ladies and also provides for baby-sitting for their mutual grandchild Wyatt, who certainly does not suffer from the lack of love and attention from two grannies.

Elaine has not been well for the past few months, and also had a very bad fall which left her face bruised and cut . I had been very concerned for her, but was happy to see that she is well and recovering. She is very artistic and I encouraged her to pick up her paints again and spend time doing something she really enjoys.

They spoiled us with lovely tea/lunch and it was great to catch up on so many years since we were last together (13 years). Wyatt is a beautiful, active, enquiring little boy.

Wyatt and his other granny, Averil Anderson

 

(continued in Part 3)