n an earlier episode I mentioned that my parents bought
their first house in Fern Glen, Port Elizabeth.
We moved in when I was about 3 years old, in 1957. At that stage there weren’t any houses south
of the red line in the image below, just open veld. The highway, William Moffet Expressway, at
the right hand end of the red line, hadn’t been constructed and there was no
road of any description through the Baakens River valley at that point.
Most of the roads in Fern Glen, including the one past our
house, were still unpaved. A grader used
to come by occasionally to smooth out the gravel surface. It wasn’t until several years later that the
roads were paved. In contrast, for the
development below the red line paved roads were put in and stood idle for a few
years before any houses were built.
The fancy-pants label “Fernglen Forest” is recent – it
definitely wasn’t called that when we lived there. (And none of those businesses that Google
shows were there even by the time my parents sold the house in 1979.)
Google Maps image of Fern Glen. The superimposed red 1 indicates our old
house.
At about the point marked with a red 2 was the open end of a
large concrete storm-water pipe. My
friends and I sometimes crawled a short distance into that, or looked for small
fish and crabs in the water. We didn’t
go very far into the pipe. I have since
heard from some of my contemporaries that they explored extensively inside such
pipes in other parts of the city.
Not only were there no houses (or roads) south of the red
line, but the vegetation in the veld was mostly scrub, whereas now it is more
substantial. The first of the photos
below was taken when we visited the area in March 2019. It shows the view looking west from from the
point marked with a red star on the Google Maps image. The photo shows much more substantial
vegetation than existed back in the day.
The second image is from Google Street View, at the same point and in
the same direction. That’s somewhat more
like the veld used to look. The third
photo was also taken in March 2019, aiming south from the same point. The name “Upper Guineafowl Trail” is
recent. Not only was it not called that
back then, I don’t even remember seeing guineafowl there, though I often walked
my dog or ran through that area. Part of
the reason there was less vegetation in the ’60s and ’70s may be that back then
there were occasional veld-fires that burned back most of the scrub. The fires sometimes came worryingly close to
the houses.
Photo taken in March 2019
Photo taken in March 2019
A few trails are visible in the Google Maps image. There used to be many more, crisscrossing the
veld, made by people walking to and from the ‘coloured’ township of Fairview,
which was on the other side of the Baakens River valley, south of the part
shown in the Google Maps image. I knew that
most of these people were forced to move out of Fairview at some point but I
didn’t know when until I searched the Internet for information. I found the following Master of Arts
dissertation “More than an Apartheid loss: Recovering and Remembering Fairview,
a ‘lost’ Group Areas history” by Inge Salo, from my alma mater (the University
of Cape Town). The quotes below are from
the dissertation:
Fairview was declared a “white” area in terms of the Group
Areas Act in 1968. Removals of the
people who had been living there took place between 1969 and 1973. (There were other parts of Port Elizabeth and
Cape Town where local residents were moved to make way for “whites”, District
Six in Cape Town being the most famous. In
many instances these communities had been living harmoniously adjacent to “white”
areas. The forced removals obviously
caused much resentment, fracturing the communities and moving people much
further from employment and other opportunities.)
“For all former residents who had to
leave Fairview described the removals as a traumatic experience. If not
personally, because they were too young to grasp what was happening, then
certainly for their parents.”
A quote from a former resident:
“It was hard, it was hard, as I said my
husband didn't want to move, he didn't want to move…You know....the day when we
moved people from ‘Joburg’ [Johannesburg], English people, ‘nie Boere nie’ [not Afrikaners] … they
bought the house, while we were in the house they bought the house, and they
were waiting for us, sitting in the car outside wait[ing] for us to get out”
Although the ruling National Party government had
overwhelming support from (white) Afrikaners, there were also plenty of
English-speaking whites who supported Apartheid. Essentially all white South Africans of that
era benefitted to at least some extend from Apartheid, even those who opposed
the system.
From the dates given above, the removals must have been
taking place while I was in high school.
I probably didn’t read newspapers back then and wasn’t really aware of
the removals. After I went off to
university in Cape Town and later to compulsory military service, I do remember
on trips back home during breaks seeing that buildings in Fairview had been
razed and that no new development occurred while my parents were still in Port
Elizabeth.
“After the majority of its residents
were forcibly removed, Fairview stood scarred and under-populated for almost a
decade before development finally began (Evening Post, 14 March 1989). This is
depicted best in the 1980 aerial photograph of Fairview (Figure 6) in which
there are visibly a lot less buildings and houses and more trees that fill the
empty spaces.”
In contrast, District Six remained mostly undeveloped from
the time the old buildings were razed until the end of the Apartheid era.
Back to more pleasant memories …
Below is a closer view of the area around our house. (In a later episode there are even closer
views. I have kept the numbering the
same across the image below and those in the later episode. For instance, the red 1 always indicates our
house.) In 1957 when we moved in, it
wasn’t just the area below the red line in the image near the top of this
episode, some of the houses marked below hadn’t been built yet. What were then still initially vacant lots
include where there are now houses indicated with a 2 and a 6. Most of the other houses were already there,
including 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. Even many
of the ones that were there have been modified substantially in the past 40+
years. There were no swimming pools in
the area in 1960 either.
The house marked 6 was a vacant lot for many years. A few days ago I remembered something about
it that I hadn’t thought of for more than 50 years. While the lot was still vacant some of the
older kids in the neighborhood cleared much of the vegetation and made a
cricket pitch in the middle of the lot.
I have no recollection of the names of the other kids who played cricket
on that makeshift field.
The house marked 2 was built just a few years after we moved
in. One day while the lot was still
vacant, one of my mother’s friends, Betty van Tonder came for a brief
visit. Betty had two daughters, Annette
and Frances. The visit was intended to
be so brief that Betty left her daughters in the car, which was parked out in
the street (with the engine off). We
were standing the front yard when one of the girls managed to release the
handbrake and the car started rolling down the rather steep hill. (Either the car had been left in neutral or
one of the girls had managed to get it into neutral. As is still the case today, most South
African cars have a manual gearbox – what Americans refer to as a stick shift –
rather than an automatic one.)
Fortunately they managed to steer into the vacant lot rather than going
straight down the hill. Betty ran to try
to stop the car and fell (or was hit) breaking a leg. The bushes in the lot eventually stopped the
car.
All I remember about when the house marked 2 was being built
was that one of the workers was rather overweight and we kids rather nastily
referred to him as “Fatty Boom Boom”. More
on the people who moved into house 2 in the next episode.
The people who were in the house marked 3 were the
Drennans. They moved out after a few
years. About all I remember is that they
had a son, Evan, who was several years older than me. I managed to find Evan on yesterday Facebook. He remembered our family and noted that my
father was master of ceremonies at his wedding in 1973! Evan said they moved away in 1964 when his
father was appointed to a position at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, about
80 miles from Port Elizabeth.
(Grahamstown is now called Makhanda but, somewhat surprisingly, Rhodes
University hasn’t changed its name, at least not ). In searching for information I came across
this article mentioning Evan and others being savaged by a dog:
The Heines lived in the house marked 4 for several
years. They had 4 sons, the second of
whom, Bryan, was at school with me from pre-school through 12th grade. He is the only high school classmate whose
wedding I attended. The Heines moved
about a mile away, probably when we were still in elementary school. The father was an owner of Heine and Strydom,
a company that operated breakdown trucks (tow trucks) and currently sells car
parts, though I don’t know if it did the latter back then. The father died tragically in a boating
accident at some time in the ’70s.
At one stage we had a marmalade cat called Marmalade. The cat later disappeared. According to my mother a woman living in the
house marked 5 enticed the cat to move there.
More on a subsequent resident of that house in the next episode.
The Doubells lived in the house marked 7. My father had what seemed to be a running
battle with Mr. Doubell. Not a physical
battle, I should note. The Doubells
sometimes hosted noisy parties, which disturbed my father’s sleep. I suspect that on some occasions he called
the police to complain about the noise.
Mr. Doubell had a racing car – like a Formula 1 car (what Americans
refer to as an open-wheel car) that he sometimes drove up and down our
street. It was probably not licensed for
use on public roads and my father complained about that too (maybe even to the
police). Evan Drennan reminded me that
the Du Preez family, who lived next to the Doubells, had a baboon that
sometimes used to escape. In recent
years I have seen some of my Facebook friends from Port Elizabeth mention
attending wild parties at the Doubells’ house!
The first residents I recall the house marked 8 had two
sons. I don’t recall the name of the
family or of the sons. One son was about
my age and we used to play together. The
other son was younger and had Down syndrome.
That son died while the family was still living next to us. More on subsequent residents of that house in
the next episode.
In our early years in the neighborhood there were two older
boys living in the house marked 9. I
sometimes climbed over the fence between our houses to play with them (the
fences of 4 of the houses met at that point).
There used to be a shed at the bottom of their yard. A boogie man (bogeyman) lived in the
shed. At least that’s what the kids who
lived there told me. Who was I to doubt
them, especially as I even saw the boogie man on a few occasions! It probably wasn’t until after that family
had moved that I realized what was supposedly the boogie man was one of the
older kids wearing a deep sea diving suit similar to the one in the photo
below. When one is very young it is
quite scary when a creature like that comes lumbering towards one. More on the subsequent residents of that
house in the next episode.
A diving suit, similar to the one that the people in the
house marked 9 had in their shed.
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