Parents, part 2

In the previous entry we left off with the wedding invitations (to my parents’ wedding) having been sent out

Here the wedding party is standing on the steps of the Anglican church in Knysna.  I have no idea who half the people in the photo are.

My parents later told me that whenever we drove past that church when I was young I used to embarrass them by telling people “That’s where my parents were married.  I was playing outside while they were inside getting married.”  Back in those days it was a “scandal” if one had a child before being married.  I don’t know where I got the idea I was playing outside because I wasn’t even conceived until several months later.

What would also have been at least a little embarrassing is if anyone had known the real story.  My father was still a medical student, and so assumed he knew how babies were made.  And, even more importantly, supposedly also how not to make a baby when one didn’t want one (yet).  Well, I obviously didn’t get the memo because I arrived on the scene a few months before his final medical school exams, though more than a year after their wedding.  My father said that he had to hold me in one arm while holding a textbook in the other arm.  (I must have been a good baby if I didn’t require his full attention.)

Two of the professors in the medical school were Prof. Cock and Prof. Bull (and that’s supposedly not a cock and bull story).  There was another student in the class with the last name Cooper.  After the students had had their final exams, but before the results were released, my father happened to see one of the Cock and Bull duo.  He said “Congratulations Couper, you have passed.”  My father wanted to be sure, so questioned further and the prof said, yes, there is one Couper/Cooper in the list of those who passed.  According to my father, Cooper was a much better student, so if there was just one of them on the list it would have been Cooper rather than Couper.  The rather embarrassed prof decided that after speaking out of turn (he shouldn’t have been saying anything before the results were official) he needed to go and check.  Fortunately for my father, he was indeed the one who had passed.

After graduating from medical school at the University of Cape Town my parents moved to Uitenhage, a small town near Port Elizabeth, where my father did his internship and then went into private practice.  The card below is presumably from when he was still busy with his internship.

One day my mother was out for a walk, pushing me in a stroller, when she encountered another woman also pushing an infant in a stroller.  They recognized one another as having been at the same high school.  They hadn’t known one another well, having been in different years.  But the two young families soon became close friends.  My father had just started in a private medical practice and Malia’s husband Abe Levy had just opened a law practice.  Their son Jonathan was my first friend.  The Levys immigrated to Israel a few years later.  As far as I know we saw them just once after that, when they visited South Africa.  I must still have been quite young because I remember playing with Lego blocks with Jonathan.  Our parents stayed in contact until some time after my mother passed away.  In 2018 I managed to make email contact with Jonathan.  Malia and I also exchanged a couple of messages, which is how I found out that she and my mother had happened upon one another while each pushing a stroller.  Abe had passed away in 2001 (and my parents had passed way before that).

The only other friends of my parents from their time in Uitenhage whose names I recall were Reeve and Reeva Schauder.  According to a genealogy entry I came across, they had several children, though I don’t remember any, probably because they were born after we had left Uitenhage (though we still lived close enough for the adults to get together from time to time).

Later my parents moved to Port Elizabeth.  It must have been around the time I turned three because my brother Mick was born a little more than month after my third birthday and I know both my brothers were born in Port Elizabeth. 

Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage are a little over 10 miles apart.  At the time they were the center of the automobile manufacturing industry in South Africa, with Ford and General Motors having plants in Port Elizabeth and Volkswagen in Uitenhage.  In addition, Bus Bodies (later BUSAF), a major manufacturer of busses, had its headquarters in Port Elizabeth.  The harbor in Port Elizabeth was used for exports of bauxite, manganese, wool and other products.

For the first year or so that we lived in Port Elizabeth my parents rented a house in the central city area.  I think the photo below is at that house and that the dog in the foreground was called Chips. 

After that they bought a house in the Fern Glen area of Port Elizabeth.  They stayed in the same house until they moved to Pretoria at the end of 1979.  Considering how long we lived there, I am somewhat surprised that I don’t have a photo of how the house looked in those days.  The photo below is from when we visited South Africa in March 2019.  The house now looks nothing like it did when I last saw it in 1979.  It used to have a low stone and concrete wall, mostly to indicate the boundary of the property rather than to keep anyone out.  Back then, apart from an old gate for the driveway, there was a smaller gate towards the left for people to use.  There weren’t any rooms above the garages then either.

The second image, from Google Maps, in which I have drawn a small red circle on the roof of our old house, shows more changes.  I have no idea what the structure is behind the garage or above the pool.  Neither was there when we left.  The pool was there and looks much the same as the one my parents had put in.  Apart from the pool, my parents remodeled and extended the house a couple of times.  Initially it had just one bathroom.  Their first addition was a new master bedroom plus bathroom.  Later they built a new living room, moved the dining room to part of where the old living room had been and turned the rest of that area into a study/library.  They also added a laundry and bathing facilities for the house staff, who had previously had just a toilet and had to wash in a portable metal bath.

Aside on house staff:  It was common for middle-class white families to employ black women as housemaids and black men as gardeners.  Many of the housemaids (and some of the gardeners) lived on the property in “servants’ quarters”.  Typical duties of the housemaids included not just cleaning the house but also childcare and cooking meals.  Most live-in housemaids worked long hours, often with just Thursday evenings and every other weekend off.  Restaurants did particularly good business on “maids’ night off” (Thursday evenings).

Edith Hempe worked for my parents for about 30 years.  When my brothers were young my parents also employed a second woman at least part-time to help with childcare.  Also, for much of the time that they lived in the house in the photo above they had a gardener who worked for them 1-2 days a week and for neighbors on other days.  The photo shows Edith many years later, in Pretoria, holding our son.