O1B2F7E. MARINUS+MONDI 1982

MOMENTS IN OUR LIFE-1 2026-03-23

O1B2F7E. MARINUS+MONDI 1982

This is a moving addition to my life story. The contrast between the early years in Brackenfell with the "Polyotters" and the eventual farewell to Mondi forms a powerful circle in the narrative of Marinus's growing up years.

MARINUS - TEMPERAMENT AND FIDELITY

Marinus was born almost exactly two years after Christiaan, on 8 January 1982 07:30, in the Louis Leipoldt Hospital in Bellville. Dr. du Toit handled the birth. What was special is that he predicted the exact date when Rinie came to him nine months earlier for a pregnancy test. It was a relatively easy birth, because Marinus was a normal-sized baby, just over 7lb (3.2kg). Once again, Rinie's parents came down to assist her.

He had a very easy-going nature from a young age. In 1985, when he was only three years old, we rented a house in Stilbaai for a week with Rinie’s mother, Ilse, her 4 daughters and their friends We had a great time there. When we got up in the mornings, he greeted everyone with “Moze!, Moze!” - he couldn’t pronounce an “r” yet.

He quickly made friends, from Sub A onwards, several of whom he is still good friends with today, 37 years later. To me this is one of his best qualities. Some of his lifelong friends are Johan, who now runs a restaurant in Swellendam; Ben runs the restaurant at Tokara, an exclusive wine estate at the top of Helshoogte outside Stellenbosch. Christie, who lives on a farm on the Paarl side of Wellington for years with Olga and their child, is also someone Marinus regularly visits when he comes to Wellington.

We had a nice big swimming pool when we lived in Brackenfell - that was one of the reasons I bought that house in Sonop Street, so the kids could swim during the hot summers. To teach them to swim, we bought two “Polyotters”, a blue one for Christiaan, and a red one for Marinus. It was like a bodysuit that they put on, with polystyrene sticks pushed in the front and back to help them float. Later, when they could help themselves quite a bit, they swam just with those inflatable rings on their upper arms.

One hot afternoon I went swimming, and then lay down on my stomach next to the pool by the steps to tan. For some reason the gate wasn’t locked. Then I saw Marinus coming in, without his inflatable arms. I told him he couldn’t go swimming without them, but he said he could swim already. I decided to let him try.

He went down the steps and went forward in a swimming position, stroking with his little arms. But he couldn’t stay on top of the water, and slowly sank under the water. I still remember him trying to swim, and I only saw his two little eyes as he sank. Then I stood up and pulled him out, and said to him: “See, you can’t swim without your little arms yet.” Thank heavens that I was there, otherwise he would have drowned that day.

The innocence of his childhood was shaken early on. When he was still in Sub A in Wellington, he had a girl friend, Carmen. They were very close to each other. One day she and her mother were on their way to school in their car, when they hit a coloured woman. The windscreen was shattered and a piece of glass penetrated Carmen’s forehead. She was still alive and was taken by ambulance to Paarl MediClinic. There she died. It was a tremendous shock for Marinus. At her funeral he was one of the pallbearers. It left a deep impression on his young mind, to have to learn of the death of his friend at such a young age.

Around 1996 he regularly walked in the evenings to one of his friends down in Malan Street, more than 2 kilometres away. He often came home long after midnight and walked alone through the quiet streets at night. We never worried about him. Today one can no longer risk it, due to the extremely high crime levels.

When Marinus took over Christiaan's Rapport deliveries, it was clear that he did not have the same business sense as his older brother. The number of his newspapers gradually decreased, because he was not, like Christiaan, constantly recruiting new subscribers. When he was in Standard 10, he regularly drove around to his friends in the Passat. He called it "my car". He had little money, and could never fill the tank. Apparently he ran out of gas several times. Then he would take his two-liter Coke bottle and walk to the nearest gas station that was still open.

They had a band, like many schoolchildren - guitars, drums and singing. Once there was a music festival in Worcester, and everyone went there in the Passat, with their instruments. Marinus says they heard a squeaking sound every now and then, but didn't know what it was and just drove on. When they came back and he told me about it, I looked under the car. The bodywork above the rear wheels was polished to a shine. They had loaded the Passat too heavily!

He always did well academically, but never stood first in his class - he was second in matric. After school he went to Europe with us at the end of 2000, where the four of us went on a five-week tour with our RCI timeshare. After that he went to work in and around London for two years with his “Working Holiday”. His easy-going nature served him well and he quickly made friends with Ingrid Muller, her mother Rana, and 3 sisters, and later went to live with them in Hastings, 116km south of London.

After these two years he returned to South Africa and enrolled at Stellenbosch University for a B.Sc Biology/Botany. Perhaps because he had now found something he loved, his grades skyrocketed, and over the next few years he was the top student every year with his M.Sc and PhD. When I asked him one day why he didn’t do so well at school, his answer was that he didn’t want to stand on stage where a fuss was made about him!

He really wanted to be a lecturer at his alma mater, but despite his top performance his applications were rejected every year because the position was reserved for affirmative appointments. So for six years he only got a Post-Doc appointment about every four months. He couldn’t even buy a cell phone, because you are required to provide a statement to show that you receive a regular monthly salary!

Somewhere an Australian university advertised for a three-month project. He applied, and got the job. There he met Prof. Robert Peacock, and he saw what Marinus was made of. When La Trobe University in Melbourne placed an advertisement for someone to manage a three-year project to reintroduce an endangered orchid variety, he recommended that they hire Marinus.

The rest is history. Marinus, Frieda-Marié and Bernhard moved to Melbourne in 2023. They worked there for almost three years, but because jobs in the academic world are no longer so secure, he started looking for jobs in the biological or botanical field in the private sector at the end of 2025. Frieda-Marié has family in Adelaide (population 1.3 million) and they once visited them and liked the city, which is much smaller than Melbourne (5.5 million).

A smaller firm there, which works with the re-establishment of vegetation on overgrazed farms, offered Marinus a job and they moved to Adelaide after his job at La Trobe expired. Frieda-Marié has been working for a logistics firm in the USA for years, which often means she has to get up in the middle of the night for meetings, and she is starting to think about also working for a local firm, with normal working hours. Bernhard, who is a very smart child, quickly adapted to the new school.

AN ODE TO A TRUTHFUL FRIEND

Mondi was a lovely dog, with a beautiful disposition. Completely black. She was one of a litter of Louis and Moira’s two spaniels. She was never angry, except when some stranger knocked on the front door. Then she would growl quite a bit, until one of us greeted the visitor, after which she accepted the person. She rarely barked, as some dogs do, which can be quite an irritation.

She was actually Marinus' dog - he loved her very much, and would take her for a walk from time to time. When she saw one of us take the collar, she would dance on her hind legs with joy, pawing the air with her little front feet. As usual, we often went for a walk in the “Perdeskoen”, with her on the leash. I once asked Bernhard Behne of “de Fortuin” if we could go for a walk in his vineyards with Mondi, and he had no objection. There on the farm we untied the leash, and Mondi could sniff around to her heart's content, but never going far from us.

You don't realize, when you are in the moment, how much the children enjoy having a pet. I have always believed that all children should have a pet, to teach them to think of someone else, and not just themselves. We took her to the vet quite regularly, for annual injections and check-ups. She was with us much longer than any of our previous pets - she would have been nineteen years old on February 10, 2007.

From reading letters about our other pets, I realize how I myself have changed over the years, how our lives have changed because of our animals. Now we are at that stage, to which we have gradually come, that we don’t want to get any more pets, because it causes problems when we go on vacation. Why didn’t it matter before? Did we care less about what happened to them before? It can’t be – that’s not what I read there. Do we object more to having someone else look after our animals when we’re away? Then we are getting lonesome, aren't we? I don't know. Our hearts are too complicated for me.

Some of the greatest sorrow is not your own, but having to witness the sorrow of those you love. That's why we cry when we see the sorrow of others. Let me get these words above off my chest first.

We all probably knew in different ways that Mondi was on her last few days. About three weeks ago, she stopped eating her usual dog pills that she had lived on all these years. She still ate some of the table scraps, which she had always loved before. But we could see that she was losing a lot of weight, and you could clearly feel her ribcage when you stroked her. She now often stood with her head hanging down, so that I later named her “Eeyore”, after the gloomy donkey in the beautifully innocent children's story “Winnie the Pooh”.

I bathed her in the bathtub last Friday, to get her clean for her visit to the vet. She could always sense when such a bathing session was coming, because it was something she never liked, although she accepted it with resignation. When I went down to the bathroom with her towels, while I called her, she would peer at me with her head hanging down, standing in the passage. Then I had to pick her up and close the bathroom door behind her to stop her running away. Now lukewarm water is poured in, I pick her up and put her in the bath. Water is poured over her and shampoo rubbed all over. All the time I am talking to her. When all the soap has been rinsed off, she is usually first rubbed dry, and then blown dry with the hairdryer. I think this last part of the bathing session was quite enjoyable for her, but the most enjoyable part was when I let her go. Then she would run and rub her head against the carpet and the living room furniture.

This time it was hot outside, and I didn’t want to dry her off too much, because she didn’t like it, so I just carried her outside and let her run around to rub herself against anything hard. Later, when she was dry, I brushed her fur a few times, after I had first cut out the caked hair. I wanted her to look and smell nice for the vet.

On Saturday morning I put her on the back seat of the Mazda and we went down to the consulting rooms in Piet Retief Street. After I had given up her name, I first let her walk around outside a bit, in case she wanted to pee or something. It’s something I’ve never done before, because I was always afraid that she might run out into the street, but now she was quite weak. She was still very curious, as she had been all these years, but now much slower, sniffing around between the little gravestones with her characteristic shuffling step. After a while I picked her up and carried her inside, so that we would be there when it was our turn. She wanted to walk around, but I just held her here between my legs and scratched her head. Quite at ease.

I was still playing with her, when Bruwer Morkel greeted me here at my side. I picked her up, put her down on his table and told him that she wasn’t eating her food at all anymore. After he examined her, took her temperature and listened to her heartbeat, he said we could just spoil her with treats from the table – she’s already very old. He gave her a steroid injection to perk her up and a few pills to help with her appetite.

That didn’t really help. Marinus said she looked weaker. I realised she probably only had a few days left when we cut meat off the T-bones for her at the Sunday braai and she wouldn’t even eat that. The Bob Martins pill that she used to eat like a treat remained lying untouched, as did the appetite pill that I covered with a teaspoon of fish paste. We were to be at Kagga Kamma timeshare from Monday 11 September to Friday the 15th, and I was glad that Christiaan couldn’t go with us, so at least someone would be here with Mondi.

I actually half expected, or feared, that Mondi would be dead when we got here yesterday. Marinus went outside for a long time to check on her, but when he came in, Mondi came in with him. She still hadn’t eaten anything, but her tail wagged as always when you talked to her. She was lying on the carpet in a few places, and I had to clean up spots in two places that looked bloody to me. I think it was from behind.

I think she had cancer in her intestines and that was the reason she hadn’t eaten anything for the last week or ten days. I wondered during the week at Kagga Kamma whether I shouldn’t put her down. What had kept me from deciding before was that she never cried when we picked her up or played with her, which told me she wasn’t in pain. But I didn’t know how to get past Marinus. Of the four of us, he was the fondest of Mondi.

When Christiaan returned from Stellenbosch last night, he was noticeably relieved that Mondi was still alive. He said he had prayed that Mondi wouldn’t die while we were gone. I don’t think he knew what he would have to do.

Now the problem has been solved for us. This morning when I pulled the curtain back, I saw Mondi lying in the swimming pool, in the corner behind the leaf catcher. When I told Rinie that Mondi had drowned, after she got over the shock, she said that she had asked the Lord last night to show us what to do – whether to let her go, or whether to continue like this.

One consolation is that she could not have suffered long in her weakened condition – it could have lasted at most two or three seconds from the time she fell in. The last time she fell in – it was before I had strung ropes around the pool for her – was in February this year. I was in our bedroom at the time when I heard her fall in. I had to run through the house and was able to catch her just in time before she went under.

Marinus buried Mondi this afternoon at around four o’clock. When we told him this morning that Mondi had drowned, it was raining lightly outside. He immediately went to get her out of the water and I just saw him go around the corner to the lapa with her in his arms. I did not go out to him – what could I say to him anyway? “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.”

He left the house a while later and went for a long walk, despite the rain that fell quite hard at times, a gloomy, quiet and windless rain that fell straight down.

After we had decided earlier where Mondi should be buried, Marinus went back several times during the day to sit with Mondi, where he laid her down on the table. Every now and then he touched her little feet or stroked her head. At about three o’clock he started to peel away the top layer of semi-digested compost in the back corner and made the little hole deeper with the crowbar. I gave some advice, but was really just there to be with him. When he nodded in the affirmative, I asked Christiaan to go and call Rinie. It then started to rain again. Marinus sat down with Mondi again and I could see that his mood was very full, but when I asked him if we should wait until the rain stopped, he just shook his head. I told him to close Mondi's eyes, but I couldn't hear his answer.

They came out with the big blue umbrella and we were silent spectators as Marinus carried Mondi in his arms to the grave and laid her down gently. Marinus went inside and we each laid a flower sprig on top of Mondi. When Marinus returned, he placed a note on her, along with his flower sprig. Then he carefully spread the orange clay soil over her with the shovel. All we could hear in the silence were his soft sobs. And he is not one to show his feelings. My child, my poor child...

Many years later, when Marinus read this ode to Mondi again, he wrote me the following:

April 22, 2025 2:40

Hello Dad

Thank you very much for the new edition. I always enjoy reading about Dad and our lives from a long time ago. I just cried all over again when I read that piece about Mondi. I made a copy of that note that I put in her grave, and kept it through the years. Now I went to search for it:

My friend of many years

Lying against the side of the swimming pool like rotten leaves

No longer alive and full of spirit.

When it came to hearts you were a giant

If only we could see your smile

Would we ever recognize you without it?

If only we could hear your words

What lessons lie buried in your heart?

But only your eyes bore witness

Of the love and life that was in everything that you touched

The eternal optimist

How we will miss you

How will we ever measure your worth?

You who we will never be able to forget.

Love

Marinus