A man with a strong respect for Authority, he wasn't going to lose his job just because his wife and a bunch of greedy kids wanted to try a bit of illicit diamond selling.
Frikkie watched us from a distance, taking no part in the search for de Silva , which I thought was proof enough that he knew where he was. But we never saw him again and over the next few months the completely tortoise faded from our lives. Ansie thought he might have fallen in love with a lady tortoise and followed her into the veldt.
My mother referred to him bitterly as 'that tortoise that could have made us rich' and for a long time afterwards I found her intently sweeping aside the bougainvillea branches and peering underneath the aloe bushes.
Ansie and I went away to college after that, and slowly my brothers grew up and left home too. Frikkie, who turned out to be the brightest of us all, won a bursary to study zoology at the university in Port Elizabeth. He did his doctorate on the Chelonians of the Northern Cape and became quite famous at the university when he discovered a new sub-species of tortoise. The local paper ran a picture of him with a tiny black tortoise in his hand, and made him sound like a bit of a freak, enthusing over his tortoises and telling the reporter they each had their own personalities. My mother pasted the whole article onto a piece of cardboard and framed it. It joined his graduation photo on the mantelpiece, next to the wedding photos of the rest of us and pictures of her many grandchildren.
When our parents celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary, all five families descended on the small house in De Aar. Ansie and her husband came from England and my brother Andre flew over from Canada. The rest of us came up from the Cape. The reunion was noisy and cheerful with many of the cousins meeting for the first time.