FAMILY FEARS AND FUN

My mother was a wonderfully eccentric woman with a wealth of
idiosyncrasies. She was an Afrikaans farmer's daughter with three
sisters and one brother. By the time the fifth child arrived, a fourth
girl, my grandfather who died before I met him, had had enough of
daughters, so he named her after himself. My youngest aunt, who has
since gone on to be with Jesus, was burdened with the name Pieter
Schalk Willem. To all and sundry she was known as "Piet!" My mother
was fortunate enough to be given a feminine name, Elizabeth Helena -
"Bessie" to her family and "Beth" to my father. My father was
thirty-one and my mother nineteen when they married. My mother had
limited education but a brilliant mind, and was fluent in Afrikaans,
Zulu, and English. My father was far more extensively educated, with a
memory unlike any I have ever known, but he spoke English (in a
variety of accents), very little Afrikaans, and a smattering of Zulu.
How these two ever met and married remains a mystery to me, but as
their offspring I have had the opportunity to observe and relish the
weird and the wonderful in total opposites.

My maternal grandfather was known as "Piet Vloek" in the farming
community in which he lived. This name, loosely interpreted, means
"Piet Swearword", because his language was colourful in the extreme.
My mother was never obscene nor profane, but she had a vocabulary in
four languages, the fourth being High Dutch, that served her well on
every occasion. Her main passions in life were sport, politics, and
criminal law, from where I obviously inherited my enthusiasm for TV
shows featuring serial killers. My mother would attend High Court in
Eshowe to listen in on murder trials which she could follow in all
three languages without needing the benefit of a court interpreter.
She read Benjamin Bennett books avidly. He had been a court reporter
and his books dealt with all the lurid murder trials in South Africa.
My mother regaled me with tales of these murders, as well as many
others which had been passed down in folklore, while I took all of it
in with wide eyes and wider mouth.

I was always a good audience. My father's stories were completely
different, steeped in history, filled with poetry and verbatim
conversations he had overheard and never forgotten, and replete with
anecdotes ranging from his boyhood in Pietermaritzburg in the early
days of the twentieth century through to harrowing stories of his days
"up north" in the South African Air Force during the Second World War.
He knew so much about so many things that it was like living with a
talking encyclopedia. His passions in life were sport, politics, and
anything currently newsworthy. Needless to say, conversations at
mealtimes were never boring. My mother, father, paternal grandmother,
three much older siblings, my younger brother and I would sit around
the dining room table and DISCUSS things, that varied considerably
from the sport currently being played - we listened to test matches,
boxing matches, Wimbledon, the Olympics, etc on the radio - to the
latest world crisis. I still don't do "small talk" very well.

I have no idea how this blog arrived here, because I intended to
regale you with a blog about fear. I just hope you have found some of
my family history entertaining. One last bit of family information.
Although not at all "religious", my mother had been brought up as a
devout Dutch Reformed churchgoer, until such time as she met my
father. So while she read our tea-leaves, she would warn us against
sewing anything on the sabbath. There was no need to warn me not to
sew anything at any time at all, and the sabbath was an unknown entity
to me, but the warnings came nevertheless. The reason, so my mother
would inform us earnestly, as she swirled the remaining drops of tea
out of our cups before placing them upside down on the saucers to
drain, preparatory to reading our futures in the leaves, was because
IF YOU SEWED ON THE SABBATH.......dramatic pause, Satan would sit in
hell with you and make you unpick every stitch with your teeth! No
wonder sewing is anathema to me.

Back to fear as a semi-final note on my parents. My father was totally
fearless except when it came to spiders. He had once been bitten on
the neck by a black button spider and barely survived. Mind you, he
had also been bitten in the leg by a crocodile which he had to drown
in order to get free, and the resultant infection nearly did him in,
but he didn't ever develop a fear of crocodile infested rivers in
which he regularly fished. He also survived numerous bouts of malaria,
and a near lethal dose of blackwater fever, but his only enduring fear
was of spiders. On one notable occasion he was driving his new young
bride along a track in Zululand when he saw a spider on the window. He
didn't hesitate, but dived head first out of the moving car. Only once
my mother, who had never driven a car in her life, had managed to
bring the car to a halt in the bush did they realise that the spider
was on the OUTSIDE of the front window. It was fortunate for both of
them that the driver's window was open when my father dived through!

My mother, on the other hand, was able to face really terrifying
ordeals undaunted. While her husband was fighting "up north", she had
to raise three young children on her own, with food rationed, endure
two farms going bankrupt because of a tsetse fly epidemic, move to
town, among many other trials that would have reduced a less
redoubtable human to a state of gibbering insanity. But my mother had
fears of her own. She, who shot lion and leopard on the farm when they
raided the goat and cattle pens, was rendered incoherent by
blue-headed lizards and chameleons. She once jumped fully clothed into
the municipal swimming pool when someone tried to put a chameleon on
her shoulder. But her BIG FEAR, which she managed to pass on to all
her offspring, was a fear of storms.

To this day I am afraid of storms. I remember my mother closing
curtains, herding us into dark passages with no entrance of light, or
into built-in cupboards. If that was impossible for any reason at all,
we would huddle around the table, fingers in our ears, feet lifted off
the ground in case stray lightning bolts came under the door. This
particular fear came from being caught in a thatched roof house as a
child, experiencing it being struck by lightning, and burning down
around them. My father made it much worse by giving us a catalogue of
information of what we should NEVER DO in a storm, from running water,
to talking on a phone, to swimming or using an umbrella. Fishing rods,
golf clubs, and metal umbrella spikes all made excellent lightning
conductors. To this day I pass on this information to anyone who cares
to listen. And all these years later my faith in my father's general
knowledge is intact. All the things he warned us about have been
scientifically proven to be accurate. Google it if you don't believe
me.

I loved my parents and grieved desperately for my mother when she
died. I was at bible college in America at the time, and was consoled
to be told that she had a deathbed conversion before going on to be
with Jesus. My father, to the best of my knowledge, though he had
every opportunity to follow Christ, chose his own way. I won't know
till I get to heaven myself. I know that I can hope they will both be
there. And this brings me to my point. I really really really wish
that I had received Jesus as my Saviour earlier. How wonderful it
would have been to be able to repay my loving, colourful parents by
being able to share my faith with them. I DID try with my mother, only
to be met with a barrage of insults in four languages. My father died
three weeks before I got saved, and my mother was still in a state of
mourning her lifelong companion. But, in God's mercy, He allowed me to
speak to my mother on the phone from America when she was in hospital
during her final illness, and tell her how much I loved her, and to
hear her tell me the same.

I urge you to share your faith with those you love NOW. You may not
immediately receive a rapturous response from them, but keep loving,
and keep trying, and I pray that you will have the blessed assurance
that one day you will be together again. God bless you, Fiona