Open Writing

Our favourite game reserve, Welgevonden, trilled to the sound of running water. Water burbled down pathways, rivers tumbled down hillsides and rushed across concreted fords in the red-dirt roadways. Rain splashed through thatched roofs onto piles of sheet music, which we ran to rescue, and woke us with waterfalls which soaked us in the waterlogged hours of pre-dawn.

When we weren’t moving beds, couches and music from under the leaking roofs, we enjoyed watching the monkeys and great-eyed antelope that visited the lodge, lit by the concentrated light of warm sun shining through freshly-washed air. We played music every chance we could get – duets, trios, quartets, quintets, sextets. Among the guests at the lodge, six of us were musicians:

Good friends of ours for many years, Roland and Marion were our hosts at the lodge, Ntwane, deep in the heart of Welgevonden.

As a musician, Roland is extremely versatile, playing bassoon, clarinet and French horn with equal expertise, though unfortunately not all at the same time. On this trip, Roland was our resident bassoonist.

His wife, Marion, is a superb pianist, a sight-reader of many notes with absolute fluidity, a marvellous accompanist, chamber-musician par excellence and soloist most wonderful.

Jack was our horn-player. Jack and I have been friends since, as teenagers, we were both members of the SABC Junior Orchestra. He still plays the horn which was dented when he fell off the back of an impromptu stage, luckily onto soft grass, when the orchestra was rehearsing for a performance. The dents were carefully removed. Later, Jack and I spent years together as members of a wind quintet who met each week come what may, to talk, laugh, eat and drink, and almost incidentally, to play music together. On this trip, Jack was accompanied by his wife, Dolly.

Clarinet, on this trip, was played by our good friend, Brian. The quintet of which Jack and I were members met Brian when we played background music at the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of him and his wife Barbara. That was nearly twenty years ago. Since then, Brian and I have regularly played in various ensembles together.

Ben was the other indispensable member of our wind quintet. An oboist, Ben was a founding member of the earlier quintet of which Jack and I had been members, and of the amateur orchestra to which we still belong. We both attend rehearsals each week and enjoy concerts with the orchestra four or five times a year.

Ben and Brian ended up sharing a sleeping-chalet, with single beds, a fact about which they were both teased mercilessly.

The non-musicians at the lodge were my husband, Leon, and Carol, a good friend. Luckily both are keen audience members, and Leon is, in addition, an experienced page-turner for harassed pianists.

While we played music, Dolly, Carol and Leon read, watched the monkeys and listened to us. They chatted, and sometimes Leon turned pages for Marion at the piano. As friends of long-standing and all competent musicians who participate primarily for the joy of making music, we played well and easily together, agreeing that it was a pity that our audience, while hugely appreciative, wasn’t more numerous. It was felt that the antelope, big cats, elephants and rhinos really didn’t appreciate our talents as much as they could.

When we drove out to visit the animals, it was a different story altogether. Our appreciation of them was wholehearted and breathless. After an hour or so of driving up impossibly steep hills, with the Landrover grinding its gears and slipping backwards on slick rocks, bumping over boulder-strewn roads eroded by rushing rain, and seeing not one iota of game, we came across a plain filled with impala. A huge herd of dainty red-brown does and their handsome, horned men-folk grazed peacefully, side-by-side with a herd of zebra. They watched us we coasted past, then lowered their heads again to the lush green veld. Within minutes, we stopped to watch a herd of huge eland thunder past. These are the largest of the antelope. Grey bodies almost ghostly against the green trees, they disappeared over a rocky outcrop. There were tsesabe and red hartebeest, blue wildebeest, warthogs and a giraffe with one horn shorter than the other.

Then we came across a lioness lolling in the sun-baked centre of the road, feeding two cubs. They were about a month old. We watched as she tried to dislodge the little ones by rolling over, but they clung like burs and tumbled with her, attached only by their suckling mouths. They toppled over her, and disappeared behind her tawny body. Eventually, they re-appeared, with rolling gait, around her head, sat in the road and cleaned their milk-coated muzzles with over-large paws. They pounced on her twitching tail and chased each others’, while mother lay supine, occasionally opening a lazy eye to check on her offspring. We watched for a long time, until another vehicle arrived at the site and we decided to move on so that Mother and babies wouldn’t feel crowded by humans in their rumbling vehicles.

We were on our way back to the lodge, looking to the left in the gathering dusk, trying to see a herd of zebra galloping away in the distance, when we came rather too close to a quartet of rhino’s on our right. They looked like moving rocks, a massive male, two huge females, and a youngster. Strange sounds emanated from them as they moved slowly backwards then forwards, shifting and shuffling. The so-called ‘white’ rhino is usually silent, placid, almost bovine. Not this crowd, however. They squealed and grunted, growled, stamped their feet and kicked up a surprising amount of dust, considering the recent rains. Frans, our driver and guide, carefully reversed our vehicle to a safe distance, and we watched, fascinated, as this prehistoric quartet performed a far from silent dance around each other. The male was aggressive. He wanted to mate with the older of the females, who was the mother of the youngster, and was ready and willing to kill both the youngster and the second female to achieve his goal. Both females were equally willing to protect each other and the youngster, no matter how much blood was spilt. Tempers were hot in the rhinoceros world.

Eventually, Frans decided that if we waited, this aggressively protective dance would become a nasty fight in which we could become embroiled. With a word of warning to us, he started the Landover’s engine, put it into gear, and accelerated quickly past the four rather startled rhinos, leaving them to their conflict.

Back at the lodge, we enjoyed dinner, then played a raucous and unseemly game of Balderdash. The more wine and sherry we imbibed, the more we enjoyed ourselves. There was no music that night.

Before brunch next morning, Marion and I enjoyed some flute and piano music as the others trickled into the main lodge from their chalets. When the full quintet was present, we played music by Reicha and Danzi, Haydn and Mozart, Prokofiev and anyone else we came across in those frequently-rescued stacks of music.

As the day cooled toward evening, we drove off in the Landrover once again, enjoying the fresh air, the amazingly green bush, the rolling hills, the sound of running water, the jewelled flash of birds and their liquid calls. Today it was the elephant who were more vocal than ever before. These lovely grey shadows of the woodlands and plains, huge and potentially dangerous, are generally silent. This afternoon, as we sat watching a breeding herd forage through the dense undergrowth, moving in and out of the dappled shade, we heard a distant trumpeting and the crackling of trees being pushed over and trampled. The entire herd turned toward the sound, ears flapping in agitation. After a while, the sounds stopped and the mothers and their young turned again to ripping tufts of grass out of the ground and tweaking the freshest leaves off the ends of branches. Just another peaceful afternoon in the bush.

That night, after supper, we played sextets until midnight – Mozart, Dvorak, Rimsky-Korsakov... It was our last night together and we all felt a little sad. Next morning, we were up early, packing piles of music into brimming brief cases. Brian’s electronic piano was returned to its custom-made case. Suitcases were carried up the crunching gravel pathways to the Landrover, the trailer was packed, and we drove to the main gate, enjoying the sight of kudu bounding away from us and baboons scratching themselves in disdain as we passed. Then, it was farewell until ‘next time’.

The music that we shared that weekend did not end with our goodbyes. Though we would miss Roland and Marion, the rest of us were determined to found another wind quintet, one which would play together regularly.

Magical music in the bush would lead to the creation of a new musical entity, as yet unnamed. Who knows what harmonious delights will follow?

Until next time, ‘here comes Treble!’

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by Isabel Bradley