MEMORIES OF MY LATE FATHER

My previous post refers. Although it is a personal experience, anybody can share her or his memories about a loving and caring father. However, when reading Robert Bly's work IRON JOHN, one can link various interpretations to the reletionship between a man and his father. Without discussing all the detail and personifications, I also shared the natural instincts of my father. The "wild man" as well as the "cautious" man. To be alert as well as to be daring. My father was a steam locomotive train driver. He was known to make up lost time. Speeding with an unimaginable lot of steel on a railway track in the grass flats of the Free State province with fire, white steam and smoke should have pumped some adrenaline. Also living next to the railway lines, it was always exiting to watch steam trains. As railway children, steam locomotive drivers were representing the cream of the crop. They were the heroes in the neigbourhood ! There were altogether four drivers with the name De Beer in Bloemfontein. Not related, but were very good colleagues. Two of them attended my fathers funeral service and shared some intersting experiences with me. Especially that my father was a special grade driver, which meant that he was qualified to drive passenger trains. The "flag ships" such as the Orange Express and fast express passenger and goods trains.

Yes, he was also the absent father as Robert Bly describes fathers like my dad. He had to sleep and rest before he went on another round trip to Kimberley or Burgersdorp. However, he also had to sleep over at Naauwpoort in the Eastern Cape. We missed his real presence as the traditional father that went to work in the morning and return in the afternoon. Especially during school holidays when everybody else could go fishing or to observe their father's hobbies. Train drivers also had theirs, but always in a hurry. Wathing the time when to rest and when to book on and off...My father was a perfectionist in his work. As children we accepted it as normal. Looking back, my father got caught up in time schedules, rosters and clock watching untill his death. Unfotunately a very sad remembrance. He could not relax. Eventually his health collapsed and was borded. After a few months of rest, he was appointed as a clerk in the high suppreme court and started living again. He played some money on the horses and shared his winnings with the rest of the family with barbeques or watermellon picnics under the palm tree at my parent's home. He mowed his own lawn, cut the fence and weeded the garden. Only then, when I was already a grown up with children of my own, I could chat at great lenght with my father about his personal as well as the De Beer family history. Or sometimes to go into serious debates about the Apartheid politics of those days...

My dad did not make a scientific study of the De Beer's. He only shared his personal experiences how he grew up during the great depression of the thirties. How fortunate his father, Oupa Karel, was to have a job as a labourer (Bieter slaan in Afrikaans) on the railways and the sink house they rented next to a siding near Petrusburg. He was the eldest son of four brothers. He also had two elder sisters. In a way he was loved and cared in a special way by his mother and sisters. He was also fortunate to get part time garden jobs in the town nearby and milked cows for extra money (made up of pennies, tickeys, six penses and sjillings or some times a half a crown). He pumped the organ in the church and also got an income (one tickey) for that pastoral service. He also told me about the hardships of other people during the depression years. It was a worldwide phenomenon that peaople were always on trek and on the move, looking for better pastures, work and opportunities that were not to be found. My dad saw people with no food, no shelter, no medcines, no proper clothes and shared the sad experiences of struck down people. He told us how his mother took care of mothers who gave birth and handed out home made bread because they had food to share. This characteristic was part and parcel of his whole life to lend out money or to help our other less fortunate relatives. However, only on merit. His experience of life was to earn your own income. Even if it was not much; but at least try to do something...We were always amazed how he could stretch money. Bying cases and bundels of fruit and vegatables on the fresh market and divided it for sub-selling to the neighbours and friends. My brother, Pieter, use to go to the market with him and also inherited that gift how to stretch money.

My father liked to dress up smartly. Mostly wearnig white or light faun clothes. Still weared cuff links, ties and suits in fashion to church services. Even when he and my mother went on holidays, he took along smart dress. When we were still kids he initiated motoring trips for the family along with his colleagues to Durban via the Transkei, East London, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town. We visited most of the museums and site seeing corners of South Africa on various occasions. My love for history and museums were stimulated to keep this interest untill this very day and date. We camped in tents, slept in hotels, guest houses and relatives in Johannesburg, Pretoria and in first class passenger trains when traveling in that fashion. I can still remeber the English breakfasts on the stations and the delicious dinners in the dining carts of those days. The South African Railways (SAR) was known to be world class ! Really, we grew up smartly.

Our elder in the Nether Dutch Reformed Church in Noordhoek, Bloemfontein, Uncle Piet Greeff, was one of my father's line managers at the loco. He visited us before the holy communions, read a verse in the Holy Bible, knelt down and prayed to our loving Father in Heaven. My father organised the Christmas Trees for the locomotive drivers' children and always invited uncle Piet to open it with prayer and Christmas songs. My father always discussed the serious and the unexlplainable and mistic parts of the Holy Bible with Uncle Greeff. He was always searching for the truth. At the end of his life, he rested with the idea that one cannot explain God. His works are far too big for mankind to understand it to the full. Allthough he was baptised in the church, a regular church goer on Sundays (when the time allowed him), for a little while served as an elder, staunch supporter of church events and prayed loyally for the food on the table, he was always very carefull to discuss religious affairs. He always quoted the saying: "If God permits...we will do this or that..."