Page 207 - Bulletin 9 2005

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became stumps and soon a game was on the go. All was going well until an old lady
driving past in her carriage was hit by a passing ball. It was not a maiden over, but it

was certainly an old dame over. She was furious and insisted in laying a charge with the
police. The cricketers delayed her long enough for the bowler to make a hasty exit and

run back to his police station where hastily he donned his uniform and helmet and

assured the angry woman, when she was finally escorted to the charge office by the
apologetic players, that he would make every effort to locate the guilty party and charge

him. When Farqhar, the unofficial mayor of Camps Bay called the offenders in, they
convinced him that none of this would have happened had they a proper cricket pitch of

their own, A lovely story, and now it is safely pinned, like a butterfly, in this book for
posterity.

My own family history includes the story of my grandfather, a recently qualified lawyer
arriving from London to be told about a wealthy only-child who had been jilted by her

fiancé. Catching the first available ox wagon to Kimberley. he wooed and wed her, and

lived happily ever. His friend Isidore Cohen had invited him to invest in Camps Bay.

“What?” said my wise grandfather, “no one will be mad enough to buy land in such a
windy wasteland” and he bought land in Muizenberg instead. I needed to find out where

my grandfather had gone wrong.

To do so, I had to start somewhere. My grandfather and Mr Cohen were too recent. Mr

Turok had started his project with a picture of Prince Henry the Navigator. And his
chronological tables started with the settling of Camps Bay in 1652. I had problems

with that - major problems. Prince Henry never set foot in South Africa and van
Riebeeck never settled in Camps Bay. There were people here long before the

Europeans developed a hankering for nutmeg and cinnamon, pepper and cloves, and
decided to sail around the Cape seeking spices. I decided I would start with the

Goringhaikona and the Kochoqua who had pastured their cattle here long before the

first white men sailed around our seas and began trading rusty knives and beads for
cattle, leading to the downfall of the Khoisan economy.