Letter 001 - Early East London 1926

14th September, 2007

Dear Jeremy,

You have asked me to write about the experiences of my life. I just do not know where to begin, so shall I start at the very beginning? This should help me to get my thoughts organised and jog my memories.

You know of course I was born and brought up in South Africa when it was part of the British Empire. South Africa was then a bilingual country with English and Afrikaans (a language developed from Dutch) being spoken.

We were English speaking South Africans.

My Father, Maradan Carlin, was born on the 2nd August, 1900 in the part of East London known as the West Bank. This was on the west side of the Buffalo River. Earlier it had been called Port Rex. The family moved to live in a village called Woodbrook and he told us many stories of riding his donkey the five plus miles to school every day. It was a very naughty donkey and many the times he had to hunt for him in the veldt making him either late for school or late getting home at the end of the day. Dad left school and served an apprenticeship for seven years before he became a journeyman. He went to South West Africa which had been a German colony before the First World War and erected windmills with a team of African men. He had to shoot game to feed them. I remember horns kept in the garage which he had brought home as trophies and a box of fascinating semi-precious stones which he gave to me.

When I was born he was working for the Railways and Harbours as an engineer on a dredger called the "Success". The river needed constant dredging to keep the mouth from silting up. I recall going down with him on a Sunday morning to what we called 'circulation'. I am not sure whether this meant starting the engines up or just checking they would start on Monday morning. I do recall that the engine room was sparkling clean and all the copper and brass fittings shone so we could see our faces in them.

My Mother, Justina Smith (nee Young) was born in the Western Cape on 6th April, 1902. She remembered moving to Riversdale and later to East London. She went to the Girls' High School where I also studied. She was apprenticed to a chemist or pharmacist as that is what you did in those days. During the depression, after the First World War, she had to give up her ambition as the family needed more income when her sister, Iverna, was born on 12th January, 1918. She continued to work in the chemist shop. She learned a great deal about medicines. I think her Irish Grandfather had been an Apothecary in the Indian Army. I know he owned a chemist shop in Cape Town. My Mother was very beautiful - tall and slender with bright sparkling brown eyes, a lively sense of humour and lovely brown hair tinted with auburn.

My home town was East London, a seaport town, with a harbour on the Buffalo River. My birthday was the 27th September, 1926. My parents, nicknamed Babs (Maradan Carlin) and Jessie (Justina) Smith, moved out to live in the country in a village called Orange Grove {7 Kms West of East London on the Buffalo River - See attached map}. The property, Ravenswood, consisted of about two and a half acres. The house was built of wood and iron and was quite spacious. Three French doors opened onto the verandah which ran along the front and down both sides of the house. In the front was a small formal garden, a lawn dissected by a path, and on each side were five symmetrical circles in the grass and in each circle was a rose bush. Along the front of the verandah were hydrangea bushes with both pink and blue flowers.

Large blue gum trees, Eucalyptus, separated the property from the main road. On the right of the house was a large grassy area where my parents and their friends played tenniquoits {see http://www.worldtenniquoit.org/} and we children played soccer and rugby with our friends. Beside the house was lawn where several cycads grew. There were fruit trees; peaches, oranges, guavas and a large area where each year mealies (corn) were grown. Beside the garage was a large fowl run where my Mother kept her chickens. I remember feeding them with bran and crushed mealies and collecting the eggs. In the late afternoon we let them out to forage for worms and insects. Just before dark my Mother would go out and call them back into the shelter. She would call "kipp, kipp, kipp" and the hens would come back into the run.

The back yard, as we called it, had lawns where the washerwoman did the laundry every Monday morning. We liked to help her and rub the dirty clothes on a scrubbing board. The white sheets, after having Sunlight soap rubbed on them, were laid out in the sun to bleach before being rinsed in laundry blue. This was a small cube of Reckitts blue tied up in a rag and swished around in the rinsing water. Table linen and duchess sets were always dipped in a solution of starch so they would stiffen when ironed.

The backyard was our playground where we rode our tricycle, given to us by my mother’s brother Bill, when he visited from Kenya. Later we rode our bicycles there. We also had a swing and plenty of sandy places in which to make roads for our dinky toys and many a game we played with these.

Another game we loved to play was "Cowboys and Crooks" and the big garden gave us plenty of space to run away and hide and then suddenly jump out and overwhelm the unfortunate crooks. This game must have been inspired by the cowboy films which we were taken to see on special occasions.

There was a cinema in town called the Capital Bioscope where drinks and ice-cream were served while one watched the film. One could go in at anytime because if you missed the first part you could sit there and wait for the beginning to come round again. There my parents would sometimes meet their friends, the Abbots and the Webbs. On the way home we would buy potato chips from the Fish and Chip shop. These tasted really good and we had a lot of fun sharing them on the seven mile ride back home in the dark.

In those days we had an open three-seater Citroen motor car. The 3^rd seat at the back was big enough for two children to sit in, covered by a rug. When it rained we had to clip curtain flaps on the sides to keep us dry. What fun we had in that car.

During the school holidays my Mother would collect Auntie Nellie, and our cousins Pearl and Clarence, somehow we all squeezed in, and would drive down to the sea for a picnic. On either side of the double seat at the back were two tool boxes where two more children could sit.

On the left of the house, towards the back, my Mother grew vegetables and flowers. At the bottom of the garden were two large lemon trees and two lime trees. In the hot summertime we made ourselves lemon drinks to which we added Bicarbonate of Soda to make them fizz and this was very refreshing. Near the house grew a Gardenia shrub. I remember the lovely scent which wafted in the air when the flowers were in bloom.

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