Chapter 8. Welcome guests and Christmas gifts

Friends and relations with Bokkie and his best friend Klippie

Visitors were always welcome at Bulklip. Because we lived twenty kilometres from the nearest town, and five kilometres away from our nearest neighbours, they were not something that we were over-burdened with, and so when they appeared, either by accident or by intent, they were usually very welcome. Of course there were those odd occasions when the prospect of a long Sunday afternoon siesta was regretfully turned into a slightly bleary-eyed presentation of tea and scones while all the time trying to give an impression of huge interest in the gossip of the day. We usually had a five minute warning of an imminent invasion. Mr Dumpy the Weimeraner, who was the largest and who looked the fiercest of the three dogs, was usually the last to bark, and on several occasions, was the first to flee into his kennel lest the arrivals were impervious to his best efforts to scare them off.

However, with his sleek grey coat and yellow eyes and not inconsiderable height, he could present a fairly scary sight if he was feeling brave and giving of his best. Farm labourers who came with their employer for whatever reason, made certain that they didn't leave a careless digit or a gum-booted foot hanging over the side of the truck for him to latch on to. He reacted to fear of any sort with joyous barking and leaping about, but if anyone looked him squarely in the eye and told him to shove off, he would take it in good heart and go and lie on the veranda and wait for the next bit of entertainment to start.

It was usually little Muffy who started up the barking . I always thought that the Maltese Poodle must be the national Free State dog as just about everyone had one. Tucked up incongruously inside the leather jacket of some hefty Afrikaaner farmer or peeping out of a basket hung over the arm of some well upholstered housewife, they really were a dime a dozen. You could be certain that if Muffy sat bolt upright on the front lawn with her head cocked to one side, within a minute you would see the dust of a vehicle coming over the distant hill. Klip the sheepdog would then swing into action and would race down to the front gate to give his welcome speech, more often than not accompanied by Bokkie and Noodle the sheep running along at his side.

‘Wow, guard sheep, you could make a fortune’ chuckled one visiting farmer. He wasn’t chuckling quite so loudly when Noodle mounted him in the cattle crush and proceeded to show him just who was the man around town.

Visitors came in all shapes and sizes and at all times of the day, but seldom during the night. A vehicle on the move at night was as suspect as the telephone ringing after 9.30. It usually meant that something untoward was taking place and could give rise to a few nervous palpitations until the matter was resolved. If the party line rang late at night, we could be certain that, even if it hadn't rung for us, that there would be news of some problem by the next morning. Family dramas, illness and fires were the most usual reasons, but with the increase in attacks on farmers, a late night ring was a most unwelcome sound.

On one occasions, our most welcome night-time visitors came in the shape of two dear friends who lived down in Zastron. Normally they would pay us a visit on a sunny Sunday lunchtime, when we would round up the gang, get the barbeque fired up and the croquet hoops set out. However, on this occasion they had heard that a series of ferocious veldt fires were sweeping through the area and from where they lived in town, it looked as though one was headed straight for us. Unable to reach us by telephone, they had nobly driven out to the farm to warn us. The four of us sat on the veranda, each nursing a glass of wine which we drank with one hand cupped over the top to keep the ash from flying in, and we watched and waited as the fire swung this way and that across the neighbouring farm. At one stage, the road to the farm was closed off with flames leaping across it, and the departure of our friends was delayed. I began to wonder if I'd have enough clean sheets to make up the guest beds, but eventually the moonlight began to filter through the billowing clouds of smoke, and the line of fire bent away from our farm and turned its malevolent attention to the slopes of the nearby mountain range. That was a night when a problem shared was a problem halved. It is all too easy to become so terrified and confused that the wrong decisions are made which can result in far greater harm, and to have them with us that evening gave us strength and sanity.

It was these same stalwart friends who agreed to come and spend Christmas Day on the farm one year on the understanding that Christmas lunch be served anywhere but within sight of the farm buildings. They had nothing against the farmhouse and gardens, but they just felt that it would stretch our imagination a little if we were to think up a different venue.

For a hot day in the middle of December, there was no better place than down in the Milagro. Alongside the field where we had made our early attempts at bean growing there stood an elegant driveway of trees. Presumably in years gone by, this avenue had been the original access road to the farm, but all that was left was a rather overgrown but still clearly demarcated double row of oak trees that formed a shady archway. The grass that grew underneath these trees was always kept trimmed and neat by the sheep that occasionally grazed there, and the effect was that of a delightfully cool sylvan setting.

‘You must come dressed from the turn of the Century, and we mean the last one’ we told them

and played the ball neatly back into their court.

Loading up our farmhouse kitchen table and the two long benches, we carted them down to Milagro and set them up. The table was rather low due to the fact that it had come from the canteen belonging to the French company which John had previously worked with in Lesotho. The Site leader was somewhat vertically challenged but suffered from Napoleonic tendencies, so in order to appear to stand tall and be in control of the situation when he and his cohorts gathered around for meetings, he had the legs shortened on the table. The fact that the rest of the team were resting their collective chins on the surface didn’t seem to faze him one iota, and we counteracted the problem by keeping it on four bricks.

Into the picnic basket went my favourite lunchtime specialty of a de-boned chicken which had been stuffed with a delicious mixture of fresh breadcrumbs, onions, garlic, French herbs and olives, then roasted, cooled and carved into slices before being put back together again to appear whole. Alongside that went our home grown salad, cocktail tomatoes still warm from the sun, chilled slices of cucumber sprinkled with olive oil and parsley and our freshly dug baby potatoes dotted with butter. A large tin of home made mince pies and a jug of farm cream collected from the neighbour when we dropped off their parcels that morning, plus the efficient cool box which kept the variety of white and rosé wines chilled to perfection made up the cargo, and portable Christmas lunch was ready.

Everyone had made a great effort and outfits were splendid. John had found an ancient pair of dungarees and chopping the legs off mid-calf, he had left his farmers suntan to do the job of an undershirt, Tying a colourful bandana around his neck and adding a battered straw hat, he looked the perfect French peasant from the turn of the century. This pastoral image was completed by an ancient sheep crook and his companion. Noodle the orphan lamb had been sent a length of Scottish tartan ribbon by my mother in England. All the dogs had been given new collars for Christmas and she felt that Noodle shouldn't be left out. With a bow under his chin, he looked like something straight off a shortbread tin and he was thrilled to be included in the festivities. Thankfully he couldn't understand the rather pointed remarks made by some about his proximity to the barbeque, and he romped with the children and had a great time.

Kathy had turned up in her wedding dress which had been first worn ten years before, prior to the birth of her five children. With a big picture hat atop her blonde hair and her tanned shoulders well and truly exposed by the dipping cut of the dress, she looked for all the world like something out of a French impressionist painting, that was until she hiked up her skirts to play cricket with her sons out in the field and exposed a pair of trainers and some Bart Simpson socks. Mike had arrived looking like a refugee from an English beach holiday with his trousers rolled up to half mast, his tie threaded through his belt loops and a handkerchief tied in four knots around his head. All he needed was a copy of the Daily Express and four pen’orth of chips wrapped in newspaper and you could have lost him at Skegness. I had opted for a long loose cotton skirt with a peasant top and a big straw hat and had to demure when it was pointed out that a haystack was the only thing missing for the requisite roll in the hay!

What a successful Christmas lunch. No ceremony, no Queen's speech, no telephone calls and no uninvited visitors. The children chased around playing hide and seek and collecting feathers, stones and wild flowers, and while the upper middle-aged folks collapsed on blankets under the trees, the lower middle aged gang sat around the shortened table filling and re-filling our glasses and telling tales of the best and the worst Christmases that we had known.
Mike had spent one in the Antarctic and had put his huge beard to good use by doing duty as Father Christmas complete with snow and sled. I had spent one Christmas day under a stranded Landcruiser trying to stay out of the baking sun while dining off tins of corned beef and drinking hot beer but it was still a marvellous day. John had been groaningly overfed in the South of France, in Liberia and in Nigeria. It seemed that wherever the French congregated, the smoked oysters and marron glacé that went to make up the Christmas feast couldn't be far behind. Lesley had managed to sort out warring Cornish factions, got them all back from church and settled down for lunch, fed the five thousand and still managed to listen to the Queens speech, but then she was in training having done it in England, South Africa, Malawi and Lesotho. Rob and Kathy had enjoyed a Christmas totally cut off from civilization at their trading station in Lesotho with only the sounds of carols being sung in Sesotho drifting down from the mountain village and cries of ‘Give us Pom Pom’ coming over the hedge from passing herdboys.

My children remembered camping out in the mountains and waking up to find decorations and tinsel wound round the guy ropes of their tent and a pillow-case full of presents at the foot of their sleeping bags. They could recall the sound of the herdboys high in the mist on the mountain-sides calling out ‘Christmas, Christmas’ and the increasing heat of the sun as it melted away the morning haze. I had a vague recollection of sitting in a rock pool with a silver wine bag on my head, but thought it best to let the memory slide gracefully away. We had each come a long way to be at Bulklip that day, and we all thought of our families scattered around the world, and just wished that for one magic moment, we could have them with us under the oak trees down in the Milagro.