OUMA ANNIE AND AND OUPA NEELS' CHILDREN AT A GLANCE

Susanna Maria (Sue) m Billy Lineveldt   

Their son Ian Lineveldt m Pauline Coetzee (4 children)

          Cornelia Caroline (Nellie) m Jacob Rudolph Steenkamp. Three children:  

Anna Catharina Steenkamp m James Dickie McClelland (1 daughter)

Maria Johanna (Marie) Steenkamp m George Erasmus (1 daughter)

Jacob Rudolph Steenkamp  m Maxie van Eeden (1 son)

          Jacobus (Koos) m Tinkie: their only daughter Rentia du Plooy m Jan van Blerk

          Petrus (Piet) m Dorothy Bebington and had 2 sons:

          Dennis du Plooy m Ruth Williamson (4 daughters)

          David du Plooy  m Sandra Bebington (3 children)

          Anna Catharina (Ann) m Wiener Forget, had two sons;

          Louis Forget m Ria

          Andre Forget  m Chrisna

          Cornelis Willem (Neels) m Elizabeth (Bessie) had 2 sons:    

          Neels du Plooy m Isabel, had one son

          Don du Plooy

NEELS AND ANNIE'S THREE DAUGHTERS

The three Du Plooy sisters were very close. My mother, Nellie, was the middle one. Sue was only a year older than my mother: she was born in 1901. When they were little girls, they shared a bed. Sue was afraid of the dark and she used to go to sleep clutching a matchbox in her hand, two matches protruding so that she could easily strike one to light the bedside candle.

When I was three years old, my father was transferred to Kimberley, and we went to live with Ouma and Oupa du Plooy at 16 Tapscott Street until I was five, when my sister was born and we moved to a house of our own.

Ouma and Oupa had the extended family living in their house: besides us, there was my Auntie Sue, who was (whisper it!) divorced and had come back to her parents' house with my cousin Ian.

When Auntie Ann came on holidays from Pretoria, where she worked as a typist, the three of them would gather in the kitchen or in one of their bedrooms and chatter for hours. They laughed a lot. I liked to hang around and listen, and I soon learnt not to draw attention to myself, or they would send me out to go and play. Under the kitchen table was a good place for an inquisitive five-year old.

During the War cosmetics were scarce: they would scrape out the stubs of their lipsticks with a hairpin and melt the bits together in a spoon over a candle flame. There would be enough to pour into a tube and make a new lipstick. Auntie Ann usually donated four or five stubs to my mother and Auntie Sue's one each.

Auntie Ann was six years younger: she was a city girl and had lots of different colour lipsticks. Mum and Auntie Sue wore quiet pink lipsticks.

The matter of Auntie Sue's divorce was not mentioned, except in hushed tones among adults. Divorce was a bit of a disgrace in those days, no matter who was the "innocent party". Auntie Susie was once bitten, twice shy ... I never knew her to have a boy friend. She went everywhere with her friend Madge Bennie, who was a fellow-teacher. Madge wore suede shoes and smoked through a cigarette holder. Those were two new and fascinating things to me.

Auntie Susie was also a teacher and she was the headmistress of the Newton Primary School. The nail of her middle finger grew down like a parrot’s beak. She had slammed the finger in a door when she was young. She was a keen knitter and a keen reader - always doing intricate patterns, while reading from a book propped up on a cushion in her lap.

I, too, was a keen reader. I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. I don't think the grown-ups realised I could read, or at least how well I could read, so nobody cared what I had hold of. They mostly thought, if they thought about it at all, that I was looking at the pictures. This gave rise to the notorious sex maniac episode, after which I found gaps in the bookshelves and Auntie Sue started to keep her library books in her room.

THE SEX MANIAC EPISODE

No TV in those days, WW2 was in full swing and after dinner the family sat in the sitting room listening to the radio, reading and knitting and doing jigsaws. Sometimes friends came round and they played bridge. If I sat quietly behind the sofa they sometimes forgot to pack me off to bed.

The little table beside Auntie Susie's chair was a good source of reading material. She kept her little stack of library books there for the reading-cum-knitting sessions of an evening. One day I had one of Auntie Sue’s library books and I was reading it with great interest, until I asked my mother at breakfast: "What's a sex maniac?" (I pronounced it man-eye-ack)

"It is a kind of murderer", said my mother, "Why do you ask?"

I said there was mention of one in Auntie Susie’s library book, and my mother was right, he had indeed murdered someone. When I wanted to go back and finish the book, I couldn’t find it anywhere. My mother and Ouma and Aunt Sue all helped me look, but the book was gone, never to be seen again. One of life's little mysteries.

I didn't like to attract too much attention and did a lot of my reading behind the sofa. (From there I also heard a lot of interesting if often mystifying grown-up talk.) 

Auntie Sue also had a dog called Rex whom she dearly loved. Everybody else disliked him because his hobbies were jumping up against you and/or sticking his nose in your crotch. Ouma complained that Auntie Sue always had dogs but she, Ouma, had to feed and look after them. This was a lesson to my mother and we were never allowed a dog until I had already gone to boarding school and my sister Marie got her dachshund Cleo. But that is another story.

THE SCHOOL VISIT FIASCO

The tradition in primary schools was that on the last day of term, you were allowed to bring your little pre-school brother or sister. I was very keen to go to school and one end-of-term, when I was five, Auntie Sue took me with her for the day. I was so excited I couldn't eat my breakfast.

It turned out to be a disaster. Auntie Sue taught the eight-year-olds. The classroom had two-seater desks. Everybody wanted me to sit next to them. Auntie Sue got me to sit next to a little boy in the front row and introduced him as Heinie Bigalke. Consternation! I promptly burst into tears, and wouldn't say why.

 The truth was, I was terrified of Heinie Bigalke because I had heard Auntie Sue on many occasions telling my mother about him and how naughty he was. One of his exploits was to tie a string of fire crackers to the school cat's tail. The cat ran franctically and the next day the gardener found it under a bush with a burnt tail. It was still terrified and the vet had to sedate it.

The day I overheard that story, I couldn't sleep and threw up all night, as was my wont if something had frightened me during the day. I felt so sorry for the cat. My mother thought I had a weak stomach: I never let on about my fears.

When order was restored and I was sitting between two girls, a safe distance from the dreaded Heinie Bigalke, lessons started. At first I enjoyed myself: I called Auntie Sue "Miss" like the other children and I was pretending to be a real schoolgirl. We had Scripture first, Miss read a Bible story and we said Our Father (who art in Heaven, Harold be thy name).

Then we went to a bigger classroom and we had singing, together with another class. We sang "My Grandfather's Clock" and "Hansie Slim". Then the bell rang for "playtime" and we went outside. I basked in the attention of the "big girls": we shared our sandwiches and somebody had a skipping rope ... they let me swing one end while we chanted "salt, mustard, vinegar … pepper!"

After that, we went back to our classroom for sums. I could count, but "sums" was new to me. I sat quietly and admiringly between my two desk-mates, who enjoyed being "big girls" and impressing me. "Tables!" they said. "You'll find out about tables when you go to school!" I could hardly wait to go to school and find out about tables.

Then disaster struck again: after sums came spelling. Auntie Sue, a.k.a. "Miss", read out the ten words the class had had to learn for homework. My mentors smiled kindly at me and gave me a pencil and a bit of paper so I could also pretend to write the words.

Well, I knew nothing about sums, but to a reader of books about sex maniacs, spelling words like "pretty" and "elephant" was a piece of cake. I was the only one in the class who got all ten of the words right. Suddenly I was invisible. Nobody spoke to me. I learnt something about discretion that day. Nobody likes a smartass.

Auntie Sue didn't take me to school again.

AUNTIE ANN

Shorts, turbans, red lipstick and painted toenails ... oh, the glamour!

My mother's younger sister, my Auntie Ann, didn't live in Ouma's house, but she often came for holidays. She was a typist in the Landbank in Pretoria.

I thought her very glamorous because she painted her fingernails and her toenails red; she wore eyeshadow, and mascara which she put on with a miniature black toothbrush. She spat on the little tablet of mascara, rubbed the toothbrush vigourously over it and applied it to her lashes. How I coveted that little doll's toothbrush! She smoked through a cigarette holder; she had perfume called Evening in Paris, in a little blue and silver bottle; she wore slacks and shorts and sometimes she sat on a deck chair in the garden wearing a set of lounging pyjamas in green and black stripes, that tied in front and left her midriff bare. My mother and my Aunt Sue did none of these things.

Auntie Ann's boy friend was Uncle Wiener. She had a photograph of him on her dressing table, in his uniform. She told me his full name was Louis Maurice Wiener Forget, (For-zhay - Uncle Wiener was of French heritage). I used to chant it when skipping. It is a good name to skip to.

He was a Captain in the Army, serving in Egypt. Dealing with General Erwin Rommel and his tanks. Auntie Ann was always writing letters to "Uncle Wiener in the desert up North" which we then walked to the corner to post. I thought The Desertupnorth was the name of the town where he was.

Funny about that … my niece Belinda told me, years later, that when she was a little girl in Rhodesia, she thought Downsouth was a placename, because people always called South Africa "Down South".

In Pretoria, Auntie Ann lived in Eaton Hall. I didn't know that this meant she had a flat in a building called Eaton Hall. The only Hall I knew, was the Kimberley City Hall, a very grand edifice with an imposing flight of steps leading up to a portico with corinthian pillars. I thought it only proper that a glamorous person like Auntie Ann should live in such a building in Pretoria.

I gleaned from my mother and aunts' talk that she worked in a place called The Typing Pool with a lot of other ladies whom she referred to as "the girls". The head typist was Miss Itsy van Zweeten, who had been overseas several times and had a coat and skirt that she got in Belgium. I imagined them doing their typing at little tables round the pool, wearing swimming costumes and flowered bathing caps. (I had seen Esther Williams movies.) All except Miss van Zweeten, who was in the Belgian coat and skirt.

During the war, there were RAF and WAAF people stationed at the SA Air Force base outside Pretoria. What with Uncle Wiener being Army, Auntie Ann didn't think much of the Air Force. She spoke slightingly of the Raffs and the Waffs who spent their time swanning round town dancing and drinking cocktails while Uncle Wiener had to get on with the fighting in The Desertupnorth.

I had great admiration for the legendary Uncle Wiener who was single-handedly holding the enemy at bay. Every night when I said my prayers, I added "…. and please take care of Uncle Wiener in The Desertupnorth."

If I had met a Raff or a Waff swanning round our neighbourhood, cocktail in hand, I would have given them a piece of my mind.

NELLIE

My mother Cornelia Carolina (Nellie), born at Hopetown on 12 May 1902, was the middle daughter of  Neels and Annie du Plooy. She and Sue were just one year apart in age - Ann was five years younger. The three sisters were very close. Before her marriage Nellie lived with her parents in Kimberley and taught the kindergarten class at the Newton Primary School. Most of her class consisted of children from the Newton Orphanage.

Whether they were actual orphans or still had a parent somewhere, they were certainly starved of love and affection and my mother was frequently admonished for undermining the dignity of the profession, neglecting discipline and  "spoiling" the children. She saw nothing undignified in hugging parentless four- and five-year-olds and letting them sit on her lap. She had the best-behaved class in the school and they got the best marks, so her critics didn't have much of a leg to stand on.

She had a lot of artistic talent but her parents could not afford to send her away to art school. Instead she went to the Teachers' Training College and once she was earning a salary, she paid for art classes with Miss Sarah Reid, an alumnus of the Slade School in London.

She became well-known as a painter, and held her first exhibition in Cape Town in 1933.

She did not marry young: she was a 32-year old schoolteacher when she married my father, Jaap Steenkamp, who was five years her junior, in 1934. I was born in 1939,  my sister Marie followed five years later and my brother Rudolph two years after her.

She was a gentle and loving person and she never shouted at us nor smacked us. I never knew her to use even the mildest form of bad language. We all teased her for years afterwards about an embarrassing experience she once had at the grocer's. Those were the days before supermarkets: you bought your requirements over the counter. The upmarket grocer in town was Andrew Kiddie's. Mum was in Kiddie's on a busy Saturday morning and she wanted to buy a bottle of "Mrs Ball's Chutney". The saleslady asked her what sort of chutney she wanted. She had to raise her voice above the hubbub, when one of those moments occurred when there is a momentary silence, with only Mum saying loudly: "Ball's!"  Everybody looked at her, a few people sniggered and Mum was mortified.

 It was always her dream to have a "real studio", but that never happened and our house always smelt of turpentine - Mum would set up her easel in the dining room or in the sitting room or wherever the light was best.

She may have been an artist but she was also a very practical person. She was a good cook and she made all my and my sister's clothes when we were children. She could turn her hand to anything. My father was not much of a handyman and Mum was the one to turn to if anything went awry.

One day my brother, who was about fifteen at the time, was fooling around with one of Dad's hunting rifles, which he knew very well not to do, but he was showing off as boys his age will do. Next thing we knew, the thing went off and shot a dirty great hole in the wall. My mother saved him from a dreadful fate by patching that wall before Dad came home. She made a sort of papier mache paste and stuffed the hole, smoothing it over and touching it up with her oil paints mixed to just the right shade.

It was not until we were all in high school that she went back to teaching. She taught art at three of Kimberley's high schools. She also taught various crafts: pottery, pewter and batik, at the local Technical College.

Despite all her teaching commitments, her charity work and the many committees on which she served, she was always there for her family and held the reins of her household firmly. After she was widowed, she lived with her second daughter Marie until her death at age 92.

PETTICOAT PIONEER

In 2002 the Kimberley Africana Library published "Petticoat Pioneers", a book by Maureen Rall, celebrating the women who pioneered life on the Diamond Fields and in the early days of Kimberley.

In the chapter on artists, Nellie is featured and with the permission of Mrs Kokkie Duminy of the Kimberley Africana Library, I quote from the article:

Cornelia Carolina du Plooy

Cornelia Carolina du Plooy, known as Nellie, was born in Hopetown on 12 May 1902. Her artistic talents first came to the fore when, as a schoolgirl in the little riverside town of Douglas, she helped her father by drawing blueprints. A pretty village with the Vaal River lying at its feet, Douglas provided much for the artist to commit to paper and canvas and the young girl was able to sketch and paint to her heart's content.

Nellie attended the Douglas High School and subsequently the Kimberley Teachers' College which later became the Diamantveld High School. While teaching at the Newton Primary School, she studied fine arts with Sarah Reid, a graduate of the Slade School of Art in London and Paris.

After her marriage to Mr JR Steenkamp in May 1934, he was transferred to Cape Town and here Nellie's career as an artist blossomed. Four years after arriving in the Mother City, she held the first of eleven one-man exhibitions, followed by ten others held in Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Cradock, Douglas and Kimberley.

Kimberley was fortunate that the couple returned to the city in 1944, for her contribution to arts and culture was enormous. Here she staged one-man exhibitions and exhibited sketches, watercolours, pastels, oils and Batik at numerous group exhibitions. Public buildings also benefited from her talents: she was responsible for the windows in the Diamantveld Dutch Reformed Church (see left) , painted the backdrops at the McGregor Museum in Beaconsfield and the ten panels in the Kimberley City Hall.

She was commissioned to paint the portraits of many prominent figures, including Mrs Maria Malan, the wife of  Prime Minister D.F. Malan, in 1949; Dr J.B. Hertzog, Judge Bok, Judge Hugo, Mayor Jacobus Smit of Kimberley, and various others. She also painted portraits of various family members, and that of President P.W. Botha and one of her grandfather, Genl. PJ de Villiers, which is now in the Military Museum in Bloemfontein     

For the schools this teacher/artist had a special affection and she designed many school badges, including those of Newton Primary School, Diamantveld High School, President Swart Primary School and Adamantia High School.

Mrs Steenkamp, who worked under her maiden name, was one of the founder members of the Kimberley Arts Foundation and was a member of the Board of the William Humphries Art Gallery for 23 years until her resignation in 1984.

On the occasion of her 90th birthday in 1992 she reminisced: "I have been drawing and painting ever since I can remember, but I had to give it up in 1980, when I started having problems with my eyes."

Nellie du Plooy died in Kimberley at the home of her daughter, Marie Liebenberg, on 13th July 1993, two months after her 91st birthday. She was survived by two daughters, a son and three grandchildren.

The Nellie du Plooy Trophy for outstanding art work by a Year Ten student.

In Nellie's memory, her children donated a trophy to the Douglas High School, where she herself was a pupil, for outstanding art work by a Year Ten student. The annual award also includes a cash prize.

A second trophy, the Japie Steenkamp Trophy for entrepreneurial achievement,  memorialises Nellie's husband, who was born in Douglas and also attended the Douglas High School.