My Sister and I Bunk School

Daddy comes home.



Vernie & Daphne when they
were much younger

     I can remember Daddy coming home on leave from time to time; once for a whole month to do the ploughing and planting.   Bertha tells me that she would lead the two big bullocks pulling the planter which Daddy was riding on and controlling.   She says that they were huge and she was scared of them, but she was Daddy’s ‘boy’ and loved helping him.   Thelma, on the other hand, left school after passing standard six and was Mommy’s help in the house.   Bertha was at boarding school in Viljoenskroon.

On another occasion, when he had to go back to his military base, my mom went with him on the train as far as Klerksdorp and would return the next day on another train.   Daf and I stayed home from school the day that he left, but had to go back to school the next morning.   Mommy forgot to write a letter for us to our teachers explaining the reason for our absence, so our big sister, Thelma, wrote one for us.   Daf and I tried to be difficult by saying we would not go with a letter from our sister and she in turn said that she would tell my mom about us when she got home later that day.   So walking to school we decided that we would backtrack to grandpa’s old house once we had passed it and would spend the day there until we saw the bus pass by on the main road that afternoon.

Bert & Lydia Whittal 1941/42

The old house was used as a store and we found it locked with only the verandah room open.   Into this dirty and dusty place we crept and watched the bus pass by on its way to school.   We had nothing to do and soon ate our sandwiches, but we had no water to drink.   We dared not run to the windmill as we could be seen and the alarm would be raised, so there we sat like prisoners of our own doing.

Later my tummy wanted to go so it was decided that I could do my job on a piece of paper which we could then throw over the inside wall (there were no ceilings) and, when I had finished my task, Daf, being the biggest, took the paper and it’s load and threw it up, but… it all came back with some of the mess sticking to the roof and the wall !!!!!!!!   Now we had a bigger problem; no where to go and nothing to do and we had to put up with a bad odour as well.

Daddy & Mommy's
old clock

We started to blame one another for our predicament and decided to go play behind the house where we could not be seen from home.   We saw Petrus return with the cart and horses from the station from where he had fetched my mom.   When he brought the horses to the water trough, he saw us and came and told us that the ‘Missies’ wanted to see us at home and when we got there clever miss Daf went quickly and stopped the clock so that Mommy would think us to be home at the normal time.   Mommy was no fool and we each got the hiding of our lives with the double reins of the horses.   We still talk and laugh to this day about how we bunked school that particular day.   We never knew what my mom wrote in our letters to the school the next day.

That same old clock today stands in my lounge ticking away the hours and years, reminding me of my absence from school one day a long time ago and the hiding I was given.

Bertha had to leave school just before she was due to write her examination for standard eight when it was discovered that she had a curvature of the spine.   She went to Kroonstad for treatment and stayed with Aunty Ivy.   Nothing could cure the curvature; she has suffered because of it all her life, and the deformity has become very noticeable in her old age.   It was a very worrying time for our parents, but Bertha has been a fighter all her life and led a normal life and reared four children.   She is now 83 and lives in an old age home in George.

* * * * * *