Dolly's Story

After reading Amelie's post about her Great Grandmother, I commented about a passage in my own Grandmother's autobiography dealing with her mother's childhood experiences. Amelie suggested I post it here and so - with minor redaction and unfortunately sans photographs, at least until Monday, when I can get my hands on them - I give you my Great Grandmother, Dolly:

Extract from ch. 16, "Search For Pookha".

 On my eighth birthday I beat Dad at chess (with his connivance) and had a picnic party at Sandstrand. When my Mother was 8 years old, she was a thin starved child, racked with dysentery and rheumatic fever. She was a prisoner of war.

This is her story.

For almost three years my Mother, Helena Gertruida (Dolly) Jooste, with her mother, three sisters and two brothers lived in a marquee tent measuring 10 feet by 12 feet, without insulation, sanitation or running water, just large enough to hold three single beds and two benches. They were in a British concentration camp during the Boer War.

Two century-old photographs in the family album tell a poignant story about their experience, a story that grabs at the heart. With her husband and older sons away in a Boer (Farmer’s) commando, my Grandmother knew that she and the younger children would not be allowed to remain in their home in the big stone house in Heidelberg. The town had been captured by the British. For a last photograph she dressed the girls in their best frocks, tartan-patterned with wide lace collars, and the boys in their Sunday suits. In the photograph they are formally seated in their home alongside a polished walnut dining-room table. There is a second photograph, a snapshot taken a fortnight later. In this photograph, although my mother still has a ribbon in her hair and her sister Hettie's ringlets are tidily curled, the little girls' frocks and collars are crumpled, and they stare wistfully and anxiously at the camera. They are four and six years old. They’re seated on the ground, on a rug in front of a tent. Behind them their mother holds baby sister, Gerrie, in her arms, 14-year-old Maggie is beside her, and on either side are the two boys, twelve and ten years old.

Margarietha Jooste, my Aunt Maggie, published a book many years later about their camp experiences. She describes how the family was ordered to leave their home in Heidelberg in the Transvaal, to board a cattle truck on a train bound for Natal. "It took three days to arrive at Pietermaritzburg, during which time we did not receive food or water, and there was no sanitation. When we arrived at Pietermaritzburg, tired, dirty and hungry, we were photographed by the town people who came to gape at the Dirty Dutch."

The Jooste family was fortunate, being in Howick, in Natal Province. It was a well-run camp with a sympathetic British officer in charge. The death rate was half that of similar camps at Kroonstad, Mafeking and Brandfort.

Initially the daily ration of food for the family was half a loaf of bread and six mielies (corncobs) a day, plus whatever the khakis (the British soldiers) gave them, or what they could buy illegally. Maggie’s mother had sewn their savings, mainly in Kruger sovereigns, into body belts that she and her daughter wore under their clothes. Rations improved later but were still meagre. They were occasionally given a little sugar, coffee, tea and salt, but never any fruit, vegetables or milk. There were times when only an anonymously donated bag of bread or vegetables pushed into their tent during the night, saved them from severe malnutrition. The camp commander, who was probably the donor of the extra food, had a great respect for Ouma Jooste and other Afrikaner women who maintained their dignity and courage through the frightening change in their circumstances.

Letters written to Gert, their oldest son, a prisoner-of-war on St. Helena Island, reveal their initial shock and despair, their gradual adjustment to the camp's communal life, the formation of church and school and recreation centres for the children. Annie Jooste's strength and faith sustained them through hardship, physical and emotional suffering, illness and the death of little Gerrie, aged 18 months. Gerrie was one of twenty-six thousand women and children, who died in the concentration camps, mainly from epidemic diseases.

After Father Jooste and his two older sons had returned safely from their POW camps at St. Helena and Bermuda, the family started a new life. It was a slow painful struggle, but my Mum's memories of their home after the war were, she said, of a happy life in the big rambling stone house in Heidelberg.

Mum never spoke about her traumatic experiences, the wrenching away of her home, and the breaking up of the family, the humiliation and discomforts of camp life. On looking back I can understand why. During my own childhood the seesaw of racial oneupmanship had determined that English was "U" and Afrikaans definitely "Non-U”.  A whole class of citizens, unknown before the war, had sprung up after 1902. They were those Afrikaners who had not been able to return to devastated farms or resume their normal lives and had flocked to the cities, Johannesburg, Pretoria and Bloemfontein, to the mines and commercial centres. Many lived in shantytowns on the outskirts of the towns. The "poor-whites" had arrived.

As a child I soon learned not to talk about my Mother’s wartime experience. I was brought up in an English-speaking home, educated mainly at English-medium schools. The gulf between my English and Afrikaans relatives was very wide indeed.

So, the Joostes continued to grow, thrive, marry and produce offspring, all within their Afrikaans Protestant Dutch Reformed circle, until - along came Tom -Tom the Engelsman, the "Catlick", the Khaki, the enemy, oppressor and ravager of their country. He was a Rooinek, a “red-neck”, the derogatory name given to sunburnt British soldiers during the Boer war.

He was postmaster of a small country town in the Eastern Transvaal when he fell in love with the shy Afrikaans schoolmistress, Dolly Jooste, who had come to buy a stamp. And the story of John Savage and Johanna Rosslee’s courtship was repeated all over again.

Dolly (Helena Gertruida) was 20 years old when she wrote a despairing letter to her eldest brother, Cornelis. The family had forbidden her to have anything to do with Catholic English Tom. She wrote out of the anguish she felt, in an urgent mix of English and Afrikaans sentences. Her handwriting is scratchy and erratic and there are smudges on the paper where her tears have dried.

"I have no desire to live. Everything that makes life worth living has been taken from me. Is it a sin to say this, Neels? You once said everyone has free will and a choice of doing right or wrong. But what is “right” and what is “wrong”? And does EVERYONE really have this so-called “freedom"? Now you tell me we have a free will with certain limitations! Well, if there are limits then it is not "free”. Do you really believe that God cares HOW we worship Him? Where do the churches get the right to say that one way is right and another is sinful?”

Quiet submissive obedient Dolly’s uncharacteristic rebellion had its effect. Three years later on 7th April 1918, when Tom was on leave from the Signals Corps in Nyasaland, he and Dolly were married.

By now every one of the Joostes loved Tom. No longer a Rooinek and a foreigner, he was one of the family. Ouma Jooste called him "Spicey".

Author Iole Clarke

Copyright © 2007 Gillian I. Moore, Jennifer A. Holloway, Alan W. Clarke