Matumi 1998
I’m starting this letter while Eve is away in Kenya on yet another ILO assignment, having an interesting time among Masai, Somali and Lake Victoria communities, but pining for her Matumi paradise… I’ve come in from a barefoot mid-morning late summer walk all round the garden. It’s sunny but not hot, the lawn is new-mown everywhere. Trees, shrubs and beds are a leafy green, the hills and mountains all around, covered by natural montane bush, are in dappled shadow under clouds scudding through the blue. The pool is crystal – though the kingfisher who dives down from his perch in the sausage tree and skims the pool surface doesn’t like the modern salt chlorination system. Nor do the frogs.
This weekend the top of Mount Carmel, opposite, will be one of the venues for the national paragliding championships. I’ll look up from the pool at them, floating round in the thermals like colourful insects…
We often wake up to the sound of the Loerie or the bulbuls, look outside and wonder if we’ve died and gone to heaven…The house, cottage and garden area is on a hill at the top of a 600-metre bush driveway, with bougainvillea over the gate. The garden spreads over an area roughly 100 x 130 metres of mostly lawn, dotted here and there with beds and clusters of colour, fern and cactus, of trees and bushes - aloe, red ivory, coral and flame trees, hibiscus and poinsettias - then sloping on all sides into montane bush: our steep hills at the back, to the south and west, and the loftier Drakensberg foothills in front of us, across the valley, to the east and north.
I can hear our ever-flowing Houtbosloop river waters rushing down below, beside the ‘little Serengetti’ on the valley floor, 35 hectares of cut grass dotted with acacia trees. Alongside, but hidden by bush and tall riverside trees, the tar road runs towards Sudwala caves. It goes high up and over, through the pine and wattle plantations, to Sabie, and on to the escarpment from where you look down the breathtaking drop to the Lowveld and the Kruger Park.
Down here below me, a few hundred metres of that river, a particularly lovely stretch of it, is the northeast boundary of our own particular slice of this world of natural bush - 85 hectares running up and around the house, over the first hill and right up the next mountain slope. It is part of the total of 400 hectares of nature reserve which we share with three other partners. We can roam free on each others’ shares, but by mutual agreement, we leave it all wild, except for areas around house and cottage. So any disturbance we see over the entire area – a torn branch, an upturned stone – has been done by a baboon, a monkey, a duiker or bushpig… We use our binoculars and bird books to get acquainted with the many varieties. It’s all new to us, so we don’t mind the high proportion we find described as ‘common or garden’. We quite often go for walks: down to the stream and on to the river, up to the top of the back hill, picnicking by the old giant ficus at the river, along the canal on the neighbouring farm, where the 6-metre python is said to live (were we told this story to attract us to buying the place, or to put us off?). At night the stars make a brilliant canopy above our dark quiet valley, and other nights the moon rises big over Mount Carmel over which the sun also comes up. And evenings, and weekends, we go swimming in the buff, in the silky pool water.
The only other live-in partners are the artists Harry and Leigh Voigt and their son Walter, who built their high hillside house themselves 25 years ago. Both are well known and get high prices for their work – they actually live from painting! They have a fascinating house, with large abstract canvases and shelves and cupboards full of exquisite miniatures of nature and art. They are good neighbours, and have become friends. Leigh is even a kind of cousin of mine, as we discovered! She has just finished a book about their place and their lives here, lovingly illustrated with its flora and fauna.
There’s enough to jerk us back to reality from time to time, when the little old diesel engine on the water pump by the stream falls over, or we have to tramp the baking midday streets of Nelspruit looking for a spare part; or during a dinner party and the power suddenly trips, I slither down the dark slope with a torch to our Eskom switch house. Or beat my way to the electric pump by the river, to clean the ants nests from the timer box, so we can get the water back up to the house. Or Eve rushes down to the stream pump, to locate the diesel switch when our burly neighbours are cranking away without starting it properly. When we are having a sweaty hassle, Harry Voigt can be relied on: ‘don’t worry’, says he, ‘it only gets worse’. To add spice, he’ll tell you about the mamba in their bedroom last night…
But these petty crises don’t come that often, not yet anyway. So far we’ve been spared the long spells of Telkom or Eskom cuts that seem to be common among some other farms and homesteads in neighbouring valleys. We’re just up enough to get breezes, and not many mosquitoes – less than we get in our Johannesburg house, in Yeoville!
Above all, we have two of the greatest handymen/gardeners, Gezani, the lead man, and Lucky, who stayed on from the previous employers, who know Matumi and all its systems and quirks, and how to deal with them. Then there is Nomsa, who three times a week cleans house, washes and irons. They live in the two staff houses near the cottage. They are kind and cheerful people, and we owe them so much of our comfort and peace of mind that we want to give them back a sense of security for them and the future of their kids. One of our inputs is to teach Lucky to drive, so he can try for his dream of becoming a traffic cop. He can now drive well, but Nelspruit keeps failing him!
Our other partner-neighbours are the Reinders, a family from Johannesburg. They come down about once a month to their cottage, which is just below our gate, to enjoy the bush. And they love it.
The fourth partners are quite rich. The Wraiths own two sections of our BARR Estates nature reserve, and a long stretch of the valley and opposite slopes. This adds hugely to the spread of natural bush in our vision. They have a breathtakingly elegant spread of a house across the road, on the hill above the house where their friendly and helpful manager Rudi lives with his family, and the staff houses dotted around their parkland estate.
But nothing could be as nice as our house, simple as it is. Plain from the outside, built in 1974 by socialite refugees from Bryanston, it is a delight of space and open flow from the inside, with its galleries of tiled floors and high beamed ceilings. The northeast part is a run of big windows and glass sliding doors each end, one from the lounge on to the pool and the other on to the back terrace. There’s the big sitting room and jetmaster fireplace at one end, and towards the kitchen the open dining room with arches onto wide passages each side.
At one end is the large and light kitchen, with a big spare room/store-room behind it. At the other end are the main bedroom, guest bedroom, and two bathrooms. And two garages near the front door house our old Peugeot station wagon, which came with the house, and our Mercedes 200, less old - and less reliable. The cottage, on the upper lawn, is a self-contained little house with a nice outlook (we fancy the idea of moving in there when we get seriously old, and leave the main house to family, who can bring over our meals!). Behind the cottage is the staff house and garden, and then the bush walk down to the stream pump.
All this cost us a total of 600,000 Rand – about 100,000 US dollars, or 60,000 UK pounds. That is less than half what our son Andy and his wife Kate could get for their modest 3-up 3-down terrace house in the Charlton/Greenwich area of London.
All our water comes either from the stream, or further along, from the river, through PVC pipes, up to a reservoir on a hill behind the house, then gravity fed down to house(s) and cottage, each with a filter. We use the (cleaner) stream water, pumping from our little weir in the rainy season, and vary it with the river when its drier, because we can set the electric timer there for an hour or two every day and keep the water coming for the garden.
We got familiar with all this pump and pipe stuff on our many months of hunting for a property in the countryside round Nelspruit, Barberton, White River... We had some narrow escapes, were just about to put down a deposit on one place when I decided to insist on a proper check of the borehole yield. It was a trickle – and the driller couldn’t find any better source. Phew! And in the dramatically lovely mountains 30kms on the other (Mozambique) side of Nelspruit, which we had fallen in love with while staying in a local B&B at the end of 1996, we heard recently from a contact there that all the places we had looked at, and sometimes lusted after, had run completely dry through the latter part of last winter!
It was our exhausted main agent who one day in October 97 drove us up here. It’s about 30 kms outside Nelspruit on the Johannesburg side. We drove up the paved driveway (the first plus), and stopped at the gate. Our hearts were lifting, to go through that bush, then glimpse this garden and house up the hill, after months of looking at one too-glitzy, or too harsh place after another.
Sure enough, as we walked round the house, it fitted like an old glove. And we could see how we could lighten up the lovely interior spaces with our own stuff, and open the garden to the bush and mountain views a bit more. Which is just what we have done.
Wilf and Doreen Nussey bought Matumi after he retired as Editor of the Pretoria News. And they had loved and cared for it for ten years. He had worked in Nairobi in the 1950s, and we had in the 1960s, so within minutes of walking in we were recognising East African ethnic ornaments, and exclaiming over mutual friends and colleagues. From there, once we had decided to meet the price, it took only one convivial dinner to be accepted by the other shareholders, and given the full and friendly, and much-valued Nussey handover treatment – tours of the estate, drop-ins on key Nelspruit shops and fixers, and the encyclopedic, now much-thumbed Matumi manual.
We moved in just over a year ago. After a few months we had the pool built, and couldn’t be happier with it. We had its paving stretched into a shady area under one red ivory tree, where we often sit, with mountain views on two sides, alongside the cluster of ferns and cheeseplant, and a birdbath which is an ancient grinding stone found in the bush. Another favourite sitting place, with similar red ivory shade, ferns and birdbath, is at the table and benches made of sleepers, on the back lawn, from where we can look across and down the valley.
Next to that tree is another where we place the birds feeding tray with seeds, in winter. If we put out papaya for them to peck at, the monkeys will come clattering over the back patio roof, make a flying snatch from the crook of the tree and leap straight out into the wild bush. Otherwise, though our local troupe quite often comes into the garden or watches from the bush, they have never come into the house area. This is partly because, while we enjoy watching them (and they us) we never feed them, and if they get too cocky, we shout and fire stones at them, towards them really, with our catapult.
There was one period they decided to push in on the duikers’ feeding time! One of the loveliest traditions here, in the drier times, is to take old guavas from the fruit stalls, and lay them out for the otherwise shy red duikers, by the little back gate. Then we sit down and watch them, usually one at a time, prancing nervously in from the bush and nibbling, even on to the lawn, if you lay a trail. It got so that one was lying patiently in wait for feeding time to start, about 5 pm. But towards the end the monkeys got the message too – and while the duiker would slowly and delicately nibble, the monkeys would arrive and gobble the feast – and I couldn’t zap them while leaving the little buck in peace.
Baboons are very much around, but we’ve never seen them come into the garden itself. Which is good. Even on our longest walks we’ve never yet seen a bushbuck, or a bushpig - they are said to be aggressive if they feel got at. Nor have we yet seen a snake, venomous or otherwise, in threatening – or threatened – mode.
[On the narrow, thick-wooded path from stream to river, Eve once spotted one slithering across a branch, as I walked unseeing under it. There was a boomslang in one of the red ivories, which we watched clumsily fail to catch a colourful lizard, and then Gezani brought out our snake stick, with its loop on the end. He looped the noose over its head without haste, pulled firm, but not to hurt it, and then slung it far into the bush. That’s the way its done, we have learned. There was the medium size mamba that disappeared into a flowerbed before we saw it. There was a small mfezi, a Mozambique spitting cobra, that disappeared into the banana plant, and the pufadder we ran over down the bush driveway last summer, though it seemed to survive.]
We extended the back lawn by using the earth dug out for the swimming pool, and there we put our little open fireplace with its ring of log seats. Yet another sitting place is in a slightly jungly patch the other end of the garden, making a glade with its tall bamboos, aloes and bushveld trees…
Tony Hall
I’m starting this letter while Eve is away in Kenya on yet another ILO assignment, having an interesting time among Masai, Somali and Lake Victoria communities, but pining for her Matumi paradise… I’ve come in from a barefoot mid-morning late summer walk all round the garden. It’s sunny but not hot, the lawn is new-mown everywhere. Trees, shrubs and beds are a leafy green, the hills and mountains all around, covered by natural montane bush, are in dappled shadow under clouds scudding through the blue. The pool is crystal – though the kingfisher who dives down from his perch in the sausage tree and skims the pool surface doesn’t like the modern salt chlorination system. Nor do the frogs.
This weekend the top of Mount Carmel, opposite, will be one of the venues for the national paragliding championships. I’ll look up from the pool at them, floating round in the thermals like colourful insects…
We often wake up to the sound of the Loerie or the bulbuls, look outside and wonder if we’ve died and gone to heaven…The house, cottage and garden area is on a hill at the top of a 600-metre bush driveway, with bougainvillea over the gate. The garden spreads over an area roughly 100 x 130 metres of mostly lawn, dotted here and there with beds and clusters of colour, fern and cactus, of trees and bushes - aloe, red ivory, coral and flame trees, hibiscus and poinsettias - then sloping on all sides into montane bush: our steep hills at the back, to the south and west, and the loftier Drakensberg foothills in front of us, across the valley, to the east and north.
I can hear our ever-flowing Houtbosloop river waters rushing down below, beside the ‘little Serengetti’ on the valley floor, 35 hectares of cut grass dotted with acacia trees. Alongside, but hidden by bush and tall riverside trees, the tar road runs towards Sudwala caves. It goes high up and over, through the pine and wattle plantations, to Sabie, and on to the escarpment from where you look down the breathtaking drop to the Lowveld and the Kruger Park.
Down here below me, a few hundred metres of that river, a particularly lovely stretch of it, is the northeast boundary of our own particular slice of this world of natural bush - 85 hectares running up and around the house, over the first hill and right up the next mountain slope. It is part of the total of 400 hectares of nature reserve which we share with three other partners. We can roam free on each others’ shares, but by mutual agreement, we leave it all wild, except for areas around house and cottage. So any disturbance we see over the entire area – a torn branch, an upturned stone – has been done by a baboon, a monkey, a duiker or bushpig… We use our binoculars and bird books to get acquainted with the many varieties. It’s all new to us, so we don’t mind the high proportion we find described as ‘common or garden’. We quite often go for walks: down to the stream and on to the river, up to the top of the back hill, picnicking by the old giant ficus at the river, along the canal on the neighbouring farm, where the 6-metre python is said to live (were we told this story to attract us to buying the place, or to put us off?). At night the stars make a brilliant canopy above our dark quiet valley, and other nights the moon rises big over Mount Carmel over which the sun also comes up. And evenings, and weekends, we go swimming in the buff, in the silky pool water.
The only other live-in partners are the artists Harry and Leigh Voigt and their son Walter, who built their high hillside house themselves 25 years ago. Both are well known and get high prices for their work – they actually live from painting! They have a fascinating house, with large abstract canvases and shelves and cupboards full of exquisite miniatures of nature and art. They are good neighbours, and have become friends. Leigh is even a kind of cousin of mine, as we discovered! She has just finished a book about their place and their lives here, lovingly illustrated with its flora and fauna.
There’s enough to jerk us back to reality from time to time, when the little old diesel engine on the water pump by the stream falls over, or we have to tramp the baking midday streets of Nelspruit looking for a spare part; or during a dinner party and the power suddenly trips, I slither down the dark slope with a torch to our Eskom switch house. Or beat my way to the electric pump by the river, to clean the ants nests from the timer box, so we can get the water back up to the house. Or Eve rushes down to the stream pump, to locate the diesel switch when our burly neighbours are cranking away without starting it properly. When we are having a sweaty hassle, Harry Voigt can be relied on: ‘don’t worry’, says he, ‘it only gets worse’. To add spice, he’ll tell you about the mamba in their bedroom last night…
But these petty crises don’t come that often, not yet anyway. So far we’ve been spared the long spells of Telkom or Eskom cuts that seem to be common among some other farms and homesteads in neighbouring valleys. We’re just up enough to get breezes, and not many mosquitoes – less than we get in our Johannesburg house, in Yeoville!
Above all, we have two of the greatest handymen/gardeners, Gezani, the lead man, and Lucky, who stayed on from the previous employers, who know Matumi and all its systems and quirks, and how to deal with them. Then there is Nomsa, who three times a week cleans house, washes and irons. They live in the two staff houses near the cottage. They are kind and cheerful people, and we owe them so much of our comfort and peace of mind that we want to give them back a sense of security for them and the future of their kids. One of our inputs is to teach Lucky to drive, so he can try for his dream of becoming a traffic cop. He can now drive well, but Nelspruit keeps failing him!
Our other partner-neighbours are the Reinders, a family from Johannesburg. They come down about once a month to their cottage, which is just below our gate, to enjoy the bush. And they love it.
The fourth partners are quite rich. The Wraiths own two sections of our BARR Estates nature reserve, and a long stretch of the valley and opposite slopes. This adds hugely to the spread of natural bush in our vision. They have a breathtakingly elegant spread of a house across the road, on the hill above the house where their friendly and helpful manager Rudi lives with his family, and the staff houses dotted around their parkland estate.
But nothing could be as nice as our house, simple as it is. Plain from the outside, built in 1974 by socialite refugees from Bryanston, it is a delight of space and open flow from the inside, with its galleries of tiled floors and high beamed ceilings. The northeast part is a run of big windows and glass sliding doors each end, one from the lounge on to the pool and the other on to the back terrace. There’s the big sitting room and jetmaster fireplace at one end, and towards the kitchen the open dining room with arches onto wide passages each side.
At one end is the large and light kitchen, with a big spare room/store-room behind it. At the other end are the main bedroom, guest bedroom, and two bathrooms. And two garages near the front door house our old Peugeot station wagon, which came with the house, and our Mercedes 200, less old - and less reliable. The cottage, on the upper lawn, is a self-contained little house with a nice outlook (we fancy the idea of moving in there when we get seriously old, and leave the main house to family, who can bring over our meals!). Behind the cottage is the staff house and garden, and then the bush walk down to the stream pump.
All this cost us a total of 600,000 Rand – about 100,000 US dollars, or 60,000 UK pounds. That is less than half what our son Andy and his wife Kate could get for their modest 3-up 3-down terrace house in the Charlton/Greenwich area of London.
All our water comes either from the stream, or further along, from the river, through PVC pipes, up to a reservoir on a hill behind the house, then gravity fed down to house(s) and cottage, each with a filter. We use the (cleaner) stream water, pumping from our little weir in the rainy season, and vary it with the river when its drier, because we can set the electric timer there for an hour or two every day and keep the water coming for the garden.
We got familiar with all this pump and pipe stuff on our many months of hunting for a property in the countryside round Nelspruit, Barberton, White River... We had some narrow escapes, were just about to put down a deposit on one place when I decided to insist on a proper check of the borehole yield. It was a trickle – and the driller couldn’t find any better source. Phew! And in the dramatically lovely mountains 30kms on the other (Mozambique) side of Nelspruit, which we had fallen in love with while staying in a local B&B at the end of 1996, we heard recently from a contact there that all the places we had looked at, and sometimes lusted after, had run completely dry through the latter part of last winter!
It was our exhausted main agent who one day in October 97 drove us up here. It’s about 30 kms outside Nelspruit on the Johannesburg side. We drove up the paved driveway (the first plus), and stopped at the gate. Our hearts were lifting, to go through that bush, then glimpse this garden and house up the hill, after months of looking at one too-glitzy, or too harsh place after another.
Sure enough, as we walked round the house, it fitted like an old glove. And we could see how we could lighten up the lovely interior spaces with our own stuff, and open the garden to the bush and mountain views a bit more. Which is just what we have done.
Wilf and Doreen Nussey bought Matumi after he retired as Editor of the Pretoria News. And they had loved and cared for it for ten years. He had worked in Nairobi in the 1950s, and we had in the 1960s, so within minutes of walking in we were recognising East African ethnic ornaments, and exclaiming over mutual friends and colleagues. From there, once we had decided to meet the price, it took only one convivial dinner to be accepted by the other shareholders, and given the full and friendly, and much-valued Nussey handover treatment – tours of the estate, drop-ins on key Nelspruit shops and fixers, and the encyclopedic, now much-thumbed Matumi manual.
We moved in just over a year ago. After a few months we had the pool built, and couldn’t be happier with it. We had its paving stretched into a shady area under one red ivory tree, where we often sit, with mountain views on two sides, alongside the cluster of ferns and cheeseplant, and a birdbath which is an ancient grinding stone found in the bush. Another favourite sitting place, with similar red ivory shade, ferns and birdbath, is at the table and benches made of sleepers, on the back lawn, from where we can look across and down the valley.
Next to that tree is another where we place the birds feeding tray with seeds, in winter. If we put out papaya for them to peck at, the monkeys will come clattering over the back patio roof, make a flying snatch from the crook of the tree and leap straight out into the wild bush. Otherwise, though our local troupe quite often comes into the garden or watches from the bush, they have never come into the house area. This is partly because, while we enjoy watching them (and they us) we never feed them, and if they get too cocky, we shout and fire stones at them, towards them really, with our catapult.
There was one period they decided to push in on the duikers’ feeding time! One of the loveliest traditions here, in the drier times, is to take old guavas from the fruit stalls, and lay them out for the otherwise shy red duikers, by the little back gate. Then we sit down and watch them, usually one at a time, prancing nervously in from the bush and nibbling, even on to the lawn, if you lay a trail. It got so that one was lying patiently in wait for feeding time to start, about 5 pm. But towards the end the monkeys got the message too – and while the duiker would slowly and delicately nibble, the monkeys would arrive and gobble the feast – and I couldn’t zap them while leaving the little buck in peace.
Baboons are very much around, but we’ve never seen them come into the garden itself. Which is good. Even on our longest walks we’ve never yet seen a bushbuck, or a bushpig - they are said to be aggressive if they feel got at. Nor have we yet seen a snake, venomous or otherwise, in threatening – or threatened – mode.
[On the narrow, thick-wooded path from stream to river, Eve once spotted one slithering across a branch, as I walked unseeing under it. There was a boomslang in one of the red ivories, which we watched clumsily fail to catch a colourful lizard, and then Gezani brought out our snake stick, with its loop on the end. He looped the noose over its head without haste, pulled firm, but not to hurt it, and then slung it far into the bush. That’s the way its done, we have learned. There was the medium size mamba that disappeared into a flowerbed before we saw it. There was a small mfezi, a Mozambique spitting cobra, that disappeared into the banana plant, and the pufadder we ran over down the bush driveway last summer, though it seemed to survive.]
We extended the back lawn by using the earth dug out for the swimming pool, and there we put our little open fireplace with its ring of log seats. Yet another sitting place is in a slightly jungly patch the other end of the garden, making a glade with its tall bamboos, aloes and bushveld trees…
Tony Hall
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