Swing, Sing and All That Jazz

Growing Up I was born on July 15th 1934 in the tiny village of Zebediela, in the north-eastern part of South Africa. The first business mogul in South African history, IW Schlesinger, had a large house in the village. He started an orange plantation in the area, which soon became the largest of its kind in the southern hemisphere. My father, Charles Alfred Holloway, owned the butchery at Zebediela, and legend has it that I was born in Mr Schlesinger’s house, as there was no hospital nearby. I was about five years old when my family (father Charles, mother Hester, my older brother Alfred, and I) left Zebediela to move to the city of Pretoria. I started my schooling at age six there, but we were soon to move to another small town, this one called Vrede, in the north-eastern Orange Free State, where my father managed another butchery. When I was eight years old, my father died from bronchitis and pneumonia, and my mother had to take in boarders, as well as wash and iron other people’s clothes, to make ends meet. Alf and I were healthy boys, and we loved sport, so we played most games (rugby and cricket were of course the most popular ones, athletics and tennis came later, golf many years later). Rugby came first, and we excelled. We DID pass well at school though. So much so, that one of our neighbours, a Mr Jaap de Goede, one day spoke to us: “You two Holloway boys will go far one day. You, Alf, will do very well, but this little one (I was about seven at the time) will do even better.” I remember those words vividly, and will do so till my dying day. It was at Vrede where I got my first “taste” of rugby. The town team had a centre named Tom Prins, who was the team’s goalkicker. He kicked left-footed, and I decided that I would do that as well, so I taught myself to do so. It paid off, but I must not jump ahead of my story. We had a brown horse called “Dapper” (meaning “brave”) and I have pictures of myself mounted on “Dapper” as he “stood up” on his hind legs. I can’t remember what happened to “Dapper”, just that he faded out of our lives. My mother battled on for about a year after my father had died, but when a quiet, gentle man named Willie van Rensburg asked her to marry him, she accepted, because he at least had a steady job, although it was just as a railroad worker, in a small town not too far from Vrede. This town, Evaton, is situated near the large industrial town of Vereeniging (which itself is about 36 miles south of Johannesburg) very near the Vaal river, which separates the Free State and the old Transvaal. “Oom Willie”, as my brother Alf and I called him, installed us in a corrugated iron-roofed house near the railway station, and every morning he walked to work from there.