When first we came to Bibbey's Hoek our closest neighbours were a couple of skinny, seldom-shaven hillbilly gentlemen living in a corrugated-iron shanty a short way up the forest track. They represent the last remnants of the Knysna Woodcutter families who were the founding fathers of the area - with pretty good odds on your founding father being your founding grandfather, too, or at least a close founding cousin. Emerging only seldom from their forest fastness, walking a very upright and measured walk, they would make their slow way to the liquor store some four kilometres away, or, occasionally, into Town for more sustaining supplies.

Almost every plot in the area has its share of gravestones. The names carved into them have roots that run deep in the damp, black earth of the forest; so deep that many of the older tombstones are rain-worn to mere lumps of rough, anonymous rock. All of the local smallholdings were carved from the forest using hand-tools and sheer bloody-mindedness. The woodcutters were a hardy, self-contained lot, surviving the multiple onslaughts of Leopards, Elephants, rain, rapacious Timber Merchants, isolation and malnutrition. Late in the 19th century, the British colonial government finally surveyed the plots, and, in an attempt to slow the wanton destruction of the forests and entice the woodcutters out of its darkness, formally deeded the properties to the various woodcutter families.

The graves go mostly untended, for Woe To Newcomers like ourselves who dare to interfere with these ancestral shrines by chopping back the rampant weeds. Children who died before their doop — their christening — were never given stones to commemorate their brief journeys through life, but their burial places were nevertheless remembered, in at least one case for generations after their passing. Quite soon after moving in, we were warned, in serious, alcohol-fragrant tones, not to plough beneath an ancient dead oak tree that stood near the house, due to great-tannie Wilma's stillborn twins having been buried there. After some enquiry, suitably lubricated with cheap wine, and some inspired guessing about probable life-spans, we figured that the twins might have been buried under the tree sometime in the late 1920's or mid-thirties. We took great care never to plough anywhere near the Big Dead Tree, instead planting a flower-bed that fared miserably due to the thirsty presence of some Pendoring Trees - Thorn Trees. Years passed and the Big Dead Tree rotted bit by bit. Branches blew down in every winters' storm, until the fateful day when the last remnant, looking like the jagged stump of a badly shattered tooth, succumbed to gravity, helped along by rats tunnelling their way beneath the roots. We never found any bones under the tree. But then we never looked too hard, not wishing to disturb the spirits of this place who lived here and who loved it so long before us.

Being only the second English-speaking family to move into Bibbey's Hoek, we were naturally regarded with some suspicion. Who knew what strange City ways we might import, what foreign ideas. Contour Ploughing, Chicken Tractors, Sheet Mulch and Indoor Plumbing - dangerous notions that might lead to any manner of mischief. In time it dawned on us that the locals were right - in at least some measure. We certainly did tend to do things strangely. Sometimes to great effect; othertimes retreating from our book-learned fancies to return to the plainer methods. Most of our "innovations" were manifested in tackling things in ways that would likely have been used by their forebears hundreds years ago. Solutions and methods long forgotten and now distrusted in favour of ways learned at father's knee, or the back of his hand.

So, for a long time we were viewed from afar as alien beings, and only the drunk or the unusually daring would stop to pass the time of day with these Engelsmanne with their odd way of talking and poor command of Afrikaans. A polite "Gooie môre" in the street frequently met with a shy flutter-of-eyelids-and-turn-away, or, on a good day, a dignified, chin-in-the-air nod without breaking the nine-thousand-yard stare required to continue walking in an upright fashion; never an enthusiastic greeting. I cannot ascribe this to unfriendliness or indifference, merely to our very differentness, and after a couple of years we noticed a slow thawing in attitudes, as we sought advice in solving various problems, shared the fixing of storm-damaged fences, assisted in the repatriation of strayed cattle, helped to take stabbed relatives to hospital in our car, and suffered along with the Old Families the careless, facile, wealthier-than-thou invasion of the SUV-toting, greener-than-thou Enlightened Beings.

One of the turning-points in our relationships with our genetically-challenged neighbours came one hot, humid, February Saturday morning as I sat tinkering with the lawn-mower, trying to repair the abuse suffered at the hands of work-hating hired help. As if from nowhere — since even the dog failed to register his presence — appeared Mikhail Zeelie: one of our shanty-dwelling next-door neighbours. He had clearly had a drink or two. Not enough to impair him or render him obnoxious, but just enough to lubricate his chat-buds and to overcome his natural and traditional reticence.

Now a thing that you have to understand is that time in Bibbey's Hoek moves at a different pace to the world we had previously inhabited. A simple "Good Morning" can occupy one for the best part of an hour, and stopping to watch a newborn calf easily justifies a whole morning. So our conversation was far from hurried, as we learned one another's ways and expressions. Pauses between polite greetings and comments about the beautiful weather easily lasted ten minutes as we savoured the gentle early-summer sunshine. Certainly conversation became much more fraternal once Mikhail discovered that my grandmother was a daughter of Clan Terblans, one of the Original Four Families in the district. And when I mentioned that I was able to brew my own beer things got positively chummy.

"When last did your family live in the area?" asked Mikhail.

"I don't really know," I confessed, "most of the old people who might have known are dead, now, and what's left of her family farm near Humansdorp." — a town several hundred kilometres to the East.

Now, the Terblans family were, indeed, one of the first four boer families to be settled in the South Cape, so they are accorded some special measure of respect by long-established locals.

"There was a Henry Terblans who used to live down the road." Mikhail pointed Eastwards towards the Pine plantation, "Are you related to him?"

"I don't think so."

"There was another house down there where the Pine trees are now. That was Henry's house. He was given the plot by the Government, but he had to stay there for twenty years before it was really his. What a shame! He was married to a woman whose family were from Karatara" — a village about 25 km distant along the mountain-chain. "She was never really happy here, it was just too far from the place she was familiar with."

I can scarcely imagine a place more similar to Bibbey's Hoek than Karatara.

"She worked on old Henry for years to move back there. Eventually he gave in and they moved, but he didn't really like it there, so he came back. But his house had been knocked down and the Pines had been planted. You see, he had only lived on that plot for about fifteen years, so he never really gained ownership of the property."

We paused to reflect on the injustice of the countless heartless bureaucrats and power-brokers who had for centuries manipulated these people and treated them like pawns. No different here than any other place or time in human experience.

"It was a nice house too." Mikhail said. "A proper clay house. With two water tanks!" The very height of luxury.

"Oh! There was also old Frans Terblans. Do you think you were related to him?" asked Mikhail, becoming anxious to establish with certainty the precise familial relationships between me and people he had known.

"Well," I explained, "my Granny was one of seven daughters, and they only had one brother, Uncle Richard, who always farmed at Palmietvlei until he died about ten years ago. Perhaps he was a cousin of this Frans."

"Yes. Perhaps so. I remember old Frans working in Humansdorp for a while, so they must have been cousins." said Mikhail, evidently satisfied by this somewhat tenuous logic. "He lived in the house I am living in."

"Of course, it wasn't really exactly the same house. It's that house next-door to you." he said, pointing to the smallholding Westward of us. The house in question is a quaint cottage constructed of corrugated iron — a heavy, durable corrugated iron made to last a hundred years; not the paper-thin rubbish you buy today — and painted a pale yellow, with a green roof, the kitchen built as a separate annexe to isolate the heat and hazard of the fireplace. I look onto it right now as I sit at my desk. The structure must be about 80 years old or perhaps even more, and sadly, rust is beginning to streak the chimney where the paintwork has been neglected. I fear that one day the owner, or, more likely, her son, will simply knock it down despite the legal protection it allegedly enjoys as a National Heritage — a protection largely unenforced by a government that cannot spare the resources to protect our history nor our wild places, but manages to justify spending mind-bending sums on armaments.

"That house once stood where I live now." a couple of hundred metres to the North.

A steep gully lies between the two sites, through which flows a stream when rains have been regular. The stream forms the bottom boundary of our property and feeds an earth dam which we had enlarged to serve as our swimming pool and backup water-supply. It is due to this repetitious hill-and-gully structure that the Bibbey's Hoek road is known to many as "the rollercoaster road".

"Sometime — oh, it must have been in the nineteen-fifties — my grandfather was living there, when he decided he didn't like the view. So he decided to move the house. They packed up everything in the house, and took all the glass from the windows. Glass was very expensive, in those days, and hard to get, since it had to come all the way from Cape Town.

"They tied wire bracing to the wooden frame, and then jacked the whole house up." This, at least was plausible; the old houses were built on a foundation of Yellow Wood or Stinkwood logs laid on a bed of sand hauled up from the nearest beach or river. In the past forty years a great many of these houses have been demolished simply to get at these foundation logs which have become tremendously valuable due to the rarity and scarcity of the much-prized wood - high-value furniture timber.

"Once they had the house raised up a couple of feet they built a sort of sled underneath it. Then they hauled the house to where you see it now using a team of eight oxen." he said, as if this were a perfectly ordinary, everyday thing. "Then they put all the glass back in the windows and just moved back in. My grandfather much preferred the new place."

The house, now somewhat modified to suit the present inhabitants, still stands on the next-door smallholding to ours. I could not help picturing in my mind's eye the sight of a team of six or eight oxen dragging a house-on-a-sled down the rutted path that qualifies as Robby Road; the stresses and tensions as they had to negotiate the narrow corner and the relief of settling the building onto its new site.

A short while later, Mikhail finally came round to the true purpose of his visit. "The girl..." he said, pointing with a polite nod of his chin in the direction of my wife. "Would you consider allowing me to marry her?" he asked shyly. You may consider that this bolt from the blue caused me some confusion, and it took a considerable time to establish that Mikhail believed her to be my daughter.

"I could offer you a Cow and a Goat for her hand in marriage." he said.

Clearly this was a serious offer! On the other hand she is a woman of clearly superior virtues, and it would be a foolish man who would accept the first offer for her hand.

"How about throwing in a Pig as well?" I countered.

Mikhail's eyes narrowed as he deliberated on this. Certainly a counter-offer had been expected. But a Pig? That was raising the ante very high very fast, indeed! Full ten minutes he sat, thinking, weighing up in his mind the extreme price I was asking for my "daughter's" hand against her high status so clearly implied by my asking for a Pig. Not merely a second Goat. Two Cows, even. But a Pig! After a time he seemingly came to the view that the Engelsman was obviously clueless as to the full worth of a Pig. I mean, Pigs don't exactly grow on trees, now do they? A slowly drawled, "Nooo... that's a bit too much for her." he said upon sober consideration.

Graciously he doffed his hat, bid me Good Day and took his leave. Walking stick tucked under his arm, staring piercingly into the distance as he strove to maintain a dignified balance.