Sitting around chatting last week, a friend reminded me about Oom Apie, an old Knysna woodcutter I had once interviewed. It made me smile to remember, but also regretful because I had never written it up, and I now have forgotten so much.
It was back in the early 80s. I had heard much about Knysna’s woodcutters from my mother and grandparents, and they intrigued me. I wanted to chat to one of them about the old days. What a lovely man Oom Apie was. He lived at Diepwalle. I went with Action Ads’ Julie and Hanlie and we just rocked up and went to greet him. He welcomed us into his house, an old corrugated iron structure with a sturdy fence. It looked as if it had sprung up from the soil itself. Julie still has a photo of Oom Apie. He is wearing baggy trousers held up with braces, his shirt buttoned to the neck. His grey hair is thinning and he wears thick-rimmed spectacles. He took us inside and made us tea, quite happy to be interviewed. I remember being struck by a vase of beautiful arum lilies in a jug. He said they grew wild all over and he liked them. There was something touching about an old man living alone going to pick wild flowers for his home. It was a simple house. There was an old wood stove and hanging next to it a side of meat. He would cut off a piece to cook when he needed it. Oom Apie spoke of his time as a woodcutter, which was hard work for small returns. We asked if he had ever seen elephants and he had, several times. “One time we were chased up a tree by an elephant,” he said in Afrikaans, chuckling at the memory. The elephants could be a pest because they liked his fruit trees. One evening an elephant broke down his gate to get at the fruit. He showed us how he had strengthened it with pieces of railway tracks. Julie reminded me why I had never written up Oom Apie’s interview. “It was the violin. Remember? The Stradivarius. He played it holding it against his stomach.” I had forgotten. He told us someone had given it to him many years before. It had the name Stradivarius inside. I know that there are only about 650 Stradivarius instruments that still exist, and that there are many thousands of copies. But what if it were genuine? The old woodcutter playing the violin in his little forest cottage was so much part of the story, but at the time I was worried that if I wrote about the Stradivarius – even knowing it was almost certainly a copy – it might attract thieves to rob Oom Apie. Or unscrupulous dealers. So I never wrote it. Oom Apie must be dead by now, and the story of his life gone with him. But for that winter afternoon we sat with one of the last of Knysna’s woodcutters, shared a cup of tea, some yarns, and tapped our feet to his fiddle.
