‘RIDE THE WINGS OF MORNING’ A TRUE STORY BY SOPHIE NEVILLE
South Africa, February 1992
NEWSREADER: Fifteen people were killed in the fighting overnight across South Africa. An ANC leader in the black township of Imbali, was shot dead on Saturday night as he left a restaurant. Six people were stabbed or burned to death in fighting, which continued into yesterday in the Johannesburg township of Soweto.
SOPHIE: I am off to South Africa. For my health. I was grumbling about having to wait a few hours to change planes. It’s strange though; it’ll take a day to get from London to Johannesburg - but if you drove it could take five months. Birds fly to Africa all the time; well, once a year. I wonder if they know how long they’re going for, or when they’re expected back?
Equus Horse Trails, PO Box 57, Marken, Northern Transvaal.
7th March 1992
Dear Perry,
I never came to say goodbye. I’m sorry, I would have loved to have seen your new house; you’ll have to tell me all about it. I hope everyone is well. I thought I would die on the aeroplane but the endless fatigue that was oppressing me seems to have evaporated in the sunshine. My doctor said the arid climate would help me get better and I think it has. I go to bed at night feeling tired instead of ill. It’s such a relief. I look a bit pallid and have a spot right in the middle of my chin but Rebecca says that spots are good; a sign of youth and virility. She, of course, is beautifully tanned with a radiant complexion.
I’m living with Sarah-Jane, Rebecca and a tall blonde South African ranger in the middle of a newly established game ranch, three and a half hours’ drive north of Johannesburg. It’s quite a big property, about 42,000 acres with an enormous diversity of game. As I write I can see a small herd of waterbuck grazing in the evening light on the plain in front of the house.
The Waterberg is an amazing area, an old red sandstone plateau about 3,000 feet above sea level. On Sunday we were invited to a reserve on the edge of the escarpment where there’s a frieze of ancient San Bushmen paintings. I lay on the rocks watching black eagles circling around the flat-topped mountains and felt glad to be here. And very privileged.
One of the game scouts found a python last week. It had obviously just eaten a small antelope and was lying in the grass looking bulgy, not moving at all. Rebecca, who is fearless, went quite close. A few days later we were riding along with a client, an old boy who had a bad stutter.
MIDDLE-AGED MAN: B-B-B-B
SOPHIE: Birds? er… branch?
I saw his horse pick up its feet and step over what I thought must be a log.
MIDDLED-AGED MAN: B-b-bloody great snake.
SOPHIE: And it was too; another massive python. Andrew, who is the ranger, went over to see if he could pick it up. I dismounted too, as I thought it would make a good photograph. Well, don’t ever try to catch a python. Andrew is 6’3”. The snake reared up and lunged at his face, teeth bared. I was scrambling back onto my pony, but I think the snake thought twice about attacking us with so many horses about. It slid off under a thorn bush.
ANDREW: If a python does bite it won’t let go; you have to cut the head off.
SOPHIE: Can you imagine? Getting out your Swiss Army penknife and trying to cut the head off a fifteen-foot snake with its teeth stuck into Andrew’s nose? And although not poisonous, the fangs are so filthy you can get terribly infected.
We’ve only four clients coming this weekend. It’s just as well. Although Sarah-Jane brought her horses up here about four weeks ago, accommodation for the tourists is not exactly in a state of readiness. She has been using the main lodge on the reserve but we need to move into our new bush camp about two kilometres from the house. There’s still a great deal to do. I must get up and go and do it. You won’t believe this, but I have to write menus. I, of all the people on this Earth, am to be the cook. Rebecca is teaching me as fast as she can before she leaves to work on hot-air balloon safaris.
My love to Rupert, Sophie
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Dear Tamzin,
You would love the riding here. There are miles of sandy tracks taking you through unspoilt bush with no fences; no gates to open. Well, there’s a huge electrified game fence along the perimeter of the reserve to keep the elephants from wandering off, but we live in the middle so you can ride in any direction for hours without seeing a soul. Wherever you go there are birds; yellow-billed hornbills hopping about in the trees, brightly coloured weaver birds quarrelling incessantly over their funny-shaped nests and crowned plovers who shriek abuse at us if we cross the grasslands where they breed. We get followed by drongos all the time. These are rather smart black birds with forked tails, looking for insects disturbed by the horses’ hooves. You see some of the same species we have in England, like barn owls, and the skies are full of swallows. The Warden is having to do something about their telephone lines today. They’re rather low and the giraffe keep walking into them.
Sarah-Jane has quite an assortment of horses; one of every variety including a beautiful black Friesian who looks as if he should be carrying a knight, off to the crusades. Most of them are South African breeds I’d never heard of, such as Nooitgedacht and Boerperd, bred for working with cattle. Some of them know how to triple, a strange gait between a trot and a canter, which made me laugh quite uncontrollably at first but it’s very comfortable, especially since I sometimes find myself spending six hours a day in the saddle. Sarah-Jane’s business partner, Wendy, has a little skewbald foal that comes into the house. And there are three bullterriers - Tigger and two naughty ones belonging to the Warden who lives next door.
I love being outside all the time. I wake up in the morning, pull on a pair of shorts and step into the bright sunlight. The acacias are in bloom and fill the air with their scent. Everything here smells different; I feel physically relieved to be away from the dankness of England, the traffic and the rush. We live in an old, white-washed farmhouse made up of an office, a rather stark kitchen with a humming strip-light and three thatched rondavels where we sleep. There’s a biggish central area, once a sitting room, where Sarah-Jane has us organizing camping equipment and mending piles of tack. The horses have a 200-acre field with a couple of holding paddocks, and are herded into a yard every morning when we tie them up around a large Sourplum tree. Tiny blue waxbills hop about pecking at the horse food while a one-eared pony called Guido scoots around hoovering up the fallen fruit.
There are two grooms. One is a bolshie boy called France who is good at finding the horses but doesn’t seem at all keen on working with them. I asked him if he was interested in learning about stable management.
FRANS: No, I want to be a panel-beater.
SOPHIE: I didn’t know what a panel-beater was. The other chap is called Somewhere, but we can never find him. The tack shed is quite far from the big tree, so I spend most of my time lugging heavy saddles across the yard, wishing Somewhere could do it. Andrew says,
ANDREW: It’ll make you fit and strong. Please let me take that.
SOPHIE: ...and he carries them for me as if they weighed nothing at all. I can’t get over how polite the South African men are; they don’t just open the car door for you, they wind down the window too. It’s very flattering. Mum would love it. But we are well and truly behind the boerewors curtain here. Boerewors are big fat farmer’s sausages but the phrase has something to do with the white supremacy. Though not wanting to endorse this, Sarah-Jane feels she must offer work to the local Sotho people, and needs their help. We are separate. Their accommodation is the other side of the tack-shed but their hours are shorter than ours. They do seven hours a day and get paid, we work all the time for nothing.
Andrew is taking a diploma in Nature Conservation and is on attachment to Equus Trails for his practical year. He hasn’t begun to think about the projects he needs to complete, he just rides all the time. Rebecca has adopted a baby rat and was suggesting he should study its development, but he said:
ANDREW: Seeing it has a scaly tail, it would be classified as an exotic species and since it will inevitably become a threat to the environment, it should be despatched forthwith. Rather a short project.
SOPHIE: She was most offended. But Andrew is very concerned about this sort of thing. I was asking him to identify something strange in the bush when he said,
ANDREW: It’s an alien.
SOPHIE: It looks rather beautiful to me.
ANDREW: It must be eradicated.
SOPHIE: Why?
ANDREW: It’s an invader species, encroaching on the indigenous ecosystem.
SOPHIE: Was this a film we were watching; dialogue from Gate Masters of the Universe? No, we were looking at a tree. Apparently a South American one introduced by colonialists. Andrew grimaces at the sight of a stray prickly pear or any other plant that wouldn’t naturally occur here. He said that black wattle, originally introduced for tanning leather, is choking watercourses and getting totally out of hand in the Cape where it displaces the native fynbos. Australian gum trees are grown here extensively, for their timber which is good and straight, but drink so much they actively lower the water table. The rat is called Isit. Isit because whenever you make a statement South Africans say,
ANDREW: Is it?
SOPHIE: For example: ‘I used to work in London.’
ANDREW: Is it?
SOPHIE: I have a sister called Perry.
ANDREW: Is it?
SOPHIE: This flummoxed me until Sarah-Jane explained:
SARAH-JANE: The phrase is short for ‘Is that so?’ It’s a symptom of politeness. If you say ‘Hello’ to someone, it’s essential to ask how they are. If you forget they sometimes say, ‘Well, and yourself?’ as if you had anyway.
SOPHIE: The phrase will be used by complete strangers making business calls or even by people finding they’ve dialled the wrong number. What is currently worrying me is the health of our vegetables; a selection of alarming looking gourds and pumpkins which Sarah-Jane expects me to do wonderful things with.
SOPHIE: What is it? I found myself asking as I peered at something that looked like a green flying saucer.
SARAH-JANE: Don’t you know what a patti-pan is?
SOPHIE: Gemsquash, butternut, sweet potatoes. These creatures and great sacks of maize meal confront me before every meal; cooking here is a humbling experience. Somewhere and France (Somewhere in France?) have been most encouraging about what I manage to produce. All Sarah-Jane could say was,
SARAH-JANE: It had better be a steep learning curve.
SOPHIE: Thank you for taking me to the airport and for the lovely lunch before I left. You must think of coming out here; you’d love it. Oh, Tamzin, I had to tell you. Rebecca and I found a street in Johannesburg called Swartkoppie. It means blackhead. Imagine having to tell everyone you lived in Blackhead Street.
Lots of love, Sophie
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PERRY:
BBC Television, Elstree Studios, Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 27th February 1992
Dear Sophie,
Guess what I’m doing? Another couple of weeks’ filming, playing an expectant mother in frumpy clothes and greasy hair. Not glamorous. The BBC must have me down as a permanently pregnant actress. Only this time my bump is real and the ‘wrap’ is around 2.00am.
I’m sitting outside Make-up with a polystyrene cup of tea, waiting to be used. I must be mad to give up my comfortable suburban existence, but Rupert is on leave from soldiering, so I might as well earn some pennies whilst I have a resident baby-sitter for Atalanta.
We are now well installed in Surrey. I was quite shell-shocked at first. The outside of our quarter is perfectly hideous, but inside is a great improvement on the last. It feels more like living in an ice-cream container than a tub of margarine. And it has a DISHWASHER, yes I’m becoming quite ordinary. Just to make you feel a million miles away I’ll tell you about my local supermarket. Sophie, it is horrific – it has sixty, yes, 60 checkout tills. It takes half a packet of biscuits to get Atalanta around without whinging.
The real walks here are great though, straight from the back door into the ferny woods. Only problem is that Teddy and his push-chair usually have to come too, so my relaxing stroll is spent heaving him over tree stumps and dykes. The Army keep spraying vanilla smoke everywhere, which is a bit weird. It turns your nostrils black.
Mum and Dad dropped in; Mum had just finished a two-hour photo session in London, dressed as a policewoman in a size 12 mini-skirt and high, black, patent leather shoes One of the other policewomen said, ‘There’s a man over there peeing himself laughing’
It was Dad. He got glared at, which he said made him laugh even more. Mum said, indignantly, that she was doing it for an important German advertising company and was staggeringly well paid. She wasn’t clear about what product they were promoting. By the time she reached us she was not in a good mood, demanding a hot-water bottle and a pair of Rupert’s socks.
‘Daddy,’ she said, tartly, ‘has done nothing all week except strip the old paint off his boat. I hope he’s not expecting me to go onboard.’
She hates getting cold feet.
Tamzin and Johnty came to supper. They were very naughty about the people coming to see their cottage. Tamzin took a brief look round and declared that my house looks like a squash court; it’s quite true. Perhaps I should mark out the floor with red lines.
I need to get Atalanta a tricycle for her birthday – she wants a pink one, isn’t that typical? Tamzin said her friend Raddy has a little girl who wanted a pink one too. Raddy found an old bike on the dump and just painted it herself. The child caught her at it but seemed quite satisfied, despite the fact that it definitely looked a bit ropey.
Your car has been a real help. We even managed to get £7 a month off the insurance for keeping it out of London - Damnit, you could have claimed for all that time you were staying with Mum and Dad in Gloucestershire.
I’m visualising your very different existence now. I bet you won’t want to come back, but you will have to, to meet your new nephew/niece. I’m due in June, (if you can say that).
Lots of love,
Perry
*******************
Dear Perry,
I finally worked out how to light a gas fridge. You say to a man,
SOPHIE: Maak ’n vuur onder die yskas ...and do you know; it works. I’m not sure why. A direct translation would be, ‘Make a fire under the ice box.’ When I needed something done at the BBC, I used to say, ‘Would you mind…’ or ‘When you have time…’ or ‘Would you be very sweet and…’ It doesn’t work here. You have to say, ‘You must make this beautifully clean; now.’ Otherwise nothing gets achieved at all.
We have a great big Afrikaans builder called Johann, who just sits in his beaten up bakkie (or pick-up truck) swigging brandy, while he watches his labourers slowly clear the ground. We have clients arriving at the weekend and need the loos, or a ‘communal ablution block’, as he insists on calling the facility, finished and working. This, he fails to comprehend. I said,
SOPHIE: Johann, would you like to collect the cement sometime this afternoon?
JOHANN: No.
SOPHIE: He was so frustrating that I ended up hitting him on the chest with my pen. Standing in the middle of the bush surrounded by lavatory bowls. Word has gone around that I clobbered him, which everyone seems to think very funny. I expect it’s because they all want to ‘bop him one’ too, as Mary-Dieu would say. Anyway, you can just imagine me striding round saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ sounding more like an archetypal film director than I ever was when I was one.
There’s still terrible, green algae coming out of the taps. We don’t have a dishwasher, or a washing machine, but Sarah-Jane has found a redoubtable maid called Nelly. I asked her to teach me to speak Northern Sotho but she insisted we should concentrate on Afrikaans, saying I will suffer at the Co-op otherwise.
Hoping all is well with you, love Sophie
For more, plase see: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ride-Wings-Morning-Sophie-Neville-ebook/dp/B007RONM52/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
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