MOVING house is a palaver at the best of times. Moving a whole commune has to be planned like a military manoeuvre and it can still finish up as a rout.
Transport was the first problem. We did not want to pay an exorbitant price to a removals company, but we had to shift everybody’s worldly goods 20km up the road. It might not be far on a highway, but it’s a long trip through suburbia on a Saturday. Mike and Maggie would only be joining us the following week, but we still had five cars between us.
Unfortunately, only Carl’s station wagon was capable of taking much of a load and that didn’t include furniture.
I put the problem to my boss and promptly got the loan of a 2-ton truck, on condition that I – and only I – drove it. This stipulation necessitated a change in tactics. When you have two women in an organisation on the move, the obvious thing is to put one at each end, packing and unpacking and leave the men to do the ferrying. But we couldn’t do it that way.
Linda and our incomparable Swazi maid, Esther, would go with the first load to the new house, to make sure it was habitable by the time we all collapsed and the packing would have to look after itself.
Among the results of this strategy were that the wastepaper baskets were transported full, as was the teapot, the marmalade was packed with the books – and the garden tools, still muddy, landed up among the pillows!
When I picked up the truck on the Friday night, I slipped into dispatch department and requisitioned a dozen strong cardboard boxes. Packing by the uninitiated requires more packing space than an expert would dream of using. Patting myself on the back for my forethought, I drove my truck-load of empty boxes out of the dispatch yard.
It was blowing a gale and my concentration was taken up entirely by the problem of driving a large and unfamiliar vehicle in rush-hour traffic.
It didn’t seem to like me, this truck.
The gear lever was conspiring with the clutch to dislocate either my elbow or my knee, or possibly both. And then it didn’t want to go through our narrow gate and up the curving driveway backwards. We got to the house eventually, the truck and I, but not without first scaring the living daylights out of the gate post, a couple of rose bushes and the cat.
That the gale had blown eleven of my twelve boxes off the back was merely a minor irritation.
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