Otherwise many more farmers would be ruined every year. When his cattle had the heart-water, or his sheep had the blue-tongue, or there were cut-worms or stalk-borers in his mealies, Webber would look it all up in his books. I suppose that when the kaffirs stole his sheep he would look that up too.

Still, Koos Steyn helped Webber quite a lot and taught him a number of things, so that matters did not go as badly with him as they would have if he had only acted according to the lies that were printed in those green books. Webber and Koos Steyn became very friendly. Koos Steyn’s wife had had a baby just a few weeks before Webber came. It was the first child they had after being married seven years, and they were very proud of it. It was a girl. Koos Steyn said that he would sooner it had been a boy; but that, even so, it was better than nothing. Right from the first Webber had taken a liking to that child, who was christened Jemima after her mother. Often when I passed Koos Steyn’s house I saw the English­man sitting on the front stoep with the child on his knees.

In the meantime the other farmers around there became annoy­ed on account of Koos Steyn’s friendship with the rooinek. They said that Koos was a hendsopper and a traitor to his country. He was intimate with a man who had helped to bring about the downfall of the Afrikaner nation. Yet it was not fair to call Koos a hendsopper. Koos had lived in the Graaff-Reinet District when the war broke out, so that he was a Cape Boer and need not have fought. Nevertheless, he joined up with a Free State commando and remained until peace was made, and if at any time the Eng­lish had caught him they would have shot him as a rebel, in the same way that they shot Scheepers and many others.

Gerhardus Grobbelaar spoke about this once when we were in Willem Odendaal’s post office.

“You are not doing right,” Gerhardus said; “Boer and English­man have been enemies since before Slagtersnek. We’ve lost this war, but some day we’ll win. It’s the duty we owe to our children’s children to stand against the rooineks. Remember the concentration camps.”

There seemed to me to be truth in what Gerhardus said.

“But the English are here now, and we’ve got to live with them,” Koos answered. “When we get to understand one another perhaps we won’t need to fight anymore. This Englishman Webber is learning Afrikaans very well, and some day he might almost be one of us. The only thing I can’t understand about him is that he has a bath every morning. But if he stops that and if he doesn’t brush his teeth any more you will hardly be able to tell him from a Boer.”

Although he made a joke about it, I felt that in what Koos Steyn said there was also truth.

Then, the year after the drought, the miltsiek broke out. The miltsiek seemed to be in the grass of the veld, and in the water of the dams, and even in the air the cattle breathed. All over the place I would find cows and oxen lying dead. We all became very discouraged. Nearly all of us in that part of the Marico had started farming again on what the Government had given us. Now that the stock died we had nothing. First the drought had put us back to where we were when we started. Now with the miltsiek we couldn’t hope to do anything. We couldn’t even sow mealies, because, at the rate at which the cattle were dying, in a short while we would have no oxen left to pull the plough.