“Shitabrick!”
Not So Famous Last Words | Rev. David Herbert Allen | 1920ish – 1992
There is a memory of a photograph of my grandfather in short pants, on a sand dune, shirtless, laughing, but I cannot tell you where my grandfather served in the war, my mother used to be able to, but now she talks mostly about the farm.
I first saw this photograph when grandad noticed me reading Spike Milligan's “Rommel: Gunner Who?” and took it out of some box, presenting it with the words, “This is me in North Africa”
He and my grandmother, Marge ran Marge's Home Industries out of the cottage, converted from a servants quarters, when they lived with us in the 80s, after they had had to leave the farm. He replaced his train sets with a room to make eyes out of spoons, They were for her toilet roll covers, her fluffy eared keen dog, little red tongue toilet seat covers. Making these and making food was their primary function in our home. His secondary function was fart jokes.
Once when I had a runny stomach, was doubled over with cramps, he said to me, “Is the bottom falling out of your world, or the world falling out of your bottom?” He then placed me in a deep warm bath and invited me to shit myself at my leisure.
He was a Wesleyan minister who in his youth rode on horse back between churches and somewhere there met my grandmother. He came out from Scotland, when I can't say, why I can't say.
The rest of the farm sloped down away a gentle hill from the farmhouse. There was a shed, a reservoir and a dam, a small dam on the side of the dust road as you drove in, we, the cousins, my sister, would run through the brush and jump into the king weed that grew on the side of the dam, it's terse coils dipping us into the water and springing us out. There were giant rats in the sugar cane fields, and we lived in terror of them. They occasionally took chickens. The hen houses were under a large tree, with a chopping block on an old stump, axe embedded. Grandpa Dave named the chickens after the cousins, my sister, me: Andrew, Terry, Trevor, Michael, Mandy, Roger. The farmhouse itself was a dining room, a TV and settee nestled in the corner. The sitting room was for his trains. In retirement Grandpa Dave built a world of trains. A circular track that he would duck underneath, stand in the centre, hours applying grass detail to a miniature hill, staring intent of realism, through his just not quite bottle top glasses.
The long drive down to Ifafa every second weekend. Arriving on Saturday afternoon, we would wake Sundays to a long breakfast on the veranda, Grandpa Dave rehearsing us through the recounting of our weeks, each family member. He was excruciating in his need for detail. Every sixth visit one of us would have to kill a chicken bearing our name. And carve the roasted bird. After breakfast Grandpa would rise up and say, “Today we're eating Roger,” and lead whoever's turn it was off the chopping block and with his ineffable good nature tease us until we took our head off, and then we would laugh as he counted how long the headless chicken ran. The farm was an idyll.
People came and went into the fields, the farm manager an amorphous figure, part of the church, discussed but never seen. When they moved into the servants quarters there was no bitterness, an offhand remark from my father about “them” having to “give back the farm”, a comment from my grandmother about God working in mysterious ways.
She survived him by ten or more years and never stopped saying, “I wonder what grandpa would think?”. She knew what he would say in any given moment and completed his sentences with a loving irritation. “Oh Dave, of course you would say that.”
My mother told me he was in hospital and I raced back from Cape Town, hadn't been home for a while, and by the time I got there, he had passed. In the hospital corridor my cousin told me his last words were “Shitabrick!” My aunt who was there later told me he had sat up in his bed, after three days of not responding to anything, looked at her and said, “Shit! A Brick!” and then laid down and died. My mom always said my aunt was prone to exaggeration.
He possessed an impressive range of similar short sleeve shirts, in memory a shade of yellow green always, and black rimmed glasses and eyebrows that sprouted one black hair. He would hush us in church with a naughty smile on his face, and he always had money for the ice cream van.