SATURDAY dawned and the great trek began. The first ferry run was a total convoy, carrying everything that could be put into the available vehicles. This included the contents of the pantry, which would keep Linda and Esther busy unpacking for quite some time.
Leaving them to it, the rest of us returned with the truck and the station wagon and proceeded to load whatever would fit where, with no regard whatsoever for priorities. We just carried on carting anything that was there to be carted.
When we finished our eighth run, at seven o’clock that night, Linda called a halt. We would all, she maintained, die on our feet if we didn’t eat. There was a leg of lamb in the oven and we weren’t allowed to let it burn. Good thinking.
I didn’t want to die on my feet. I wanted to die in my bed. But where was my bed? Where was anybody’s bed?
Fortified by a good dinner, we had to make yet another run to fetch the beds.
We were all in – and sort of organised – by lunchtime on Sunday, with the best part of a week to recover before we had to welcome Mike and Maggie and all their household furniture.
Their part of the move would have been easy, had it not been for the refrigerator. It was wider than the front door.
With the best part of a dozen university degrees and diplomas between us, some of them in engineering, we couldn’t fathom out how to get it through. So we took the front door off its hinges. We later had the proper method explained to us by an ‘unskilled’ labourer.
So now we were all there and had to get down to the business of governing our republic-within-a-republic.
We called a cabinet meeting round the kitchen table to dish out portfolios.
Mike was unanimously elected prime minister and chancellor of the exchequer, and Maggie stood unopposed for food, fish and agriculture.
Geoff became bar secretary, with me as his chief buyer, for the simple reason that my office was almost next door to the world’s largest discount liquor store. Carl got parks and gardens (lawnmower repairs included) Linda was planning to leave shortly, so she was declared ‘without portfolio’, but it was minuted that her successor must be prepared to take responsibility for maintenance.
That left me with public relations, communications, labour relations and animal welfare.
My first duties under these hats were to organise a house-warming party, apply for a telephone, drive illegally – apartheid worked both ways – into Soweto to fetch Esther’s passport and go to the SPCA and adopt a dog!
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