My Grandfather's Bakkie Sat Under A Lemon Tree For Six Years

The bakkie and the man

My grandfather drove the same white bakkie for as long as I was alive. It was a battered old thing, older than me, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and Sunlight soap and the particular dust of the small Free State town where he farmed a few hectares of not very much. He was not a wealthy man. He was a careful one. The bakkie was how he fetched feed, took vegetables to the co-op, ferried me to school when my mother could not, and drove himself, slowly and with great dignity, to church every Sunday in a jacket that no longer quite fit.

When he died, the bakkie stopped where he had last left it, nose in under the lemon tree at the side of the house, and there it stayed. Nobody could bear to move it and nobody could bear to use it. The tyres went soft. The lemon tree dropped fruit on the bonnet, year after year, and the birds did what birds do, and slowly the white paint went green in the shady spots. For six years it sat there, quietly becoming part of the garden, and every time I visited my grandmother I would look at it and feel a small ache and then look away.

I am, for the record, the least mechanical person my family had ever produced. I work with words. At the time I could not have told you a spanner from a spatula with any confidence. So what happened next surprised everyone, including me.

The promise at the graveside

The idea arrived at my grandmother's funeral, two years ago now. She had outlived him by six years, and at her graveside, standing next to that same white bakkie which my uncle had driven us all there in on a whim, having somehow coaxed it to start one last time, I heard myself make a promise out loud to nobody. I said, I am going to fix it. Properly. And I am going to drive it.

My uncle, who is mechanical, laughed, not unkindly. He said the engine was finished. It had sat too long, seized solid, and it would cost more to rebuild than the whole bakkie was worth. He was speaking pure sense. He was also completely missing the point, which is that the value of the thing had nothing to do with money and everything to do with the smell of pipe tobacco and the sound of it pulling up outside my primary school.

So I took the bakkie. I trailered it to the city, to the horror of my landlord, and I started learning. Videos at night. A patient older neighbour who used to be a diesel mechanic and took pity on me. And a very long, humbling education in exactly how much I did not know.

Learning the world of second-hand parts

The engine was indeed finished. My uncle had been right about that. It had seized and cracked and there was no gentle bringing it back. For a while I genuinely thought that was the end of the promise, because a brand new engine for a vehicle that old either does not exist or costs a sum that made me laugh out loud.

What I learned, slowly, is that there is an entire parallel world that keeps old vehicles alive, and it runs on parts that have already lived one life and are ready for another. My diesel-mechanic neighbour drew me a map, more or less, of how it works. He explained that for something this old you do not buy new, you go looking for Engines for sale that have been pulled from vehicles that were themselves too far gone to save, cleaned up, tested, and sold on to people exactly like me trying to keep a memory running.

It felt, the first time, a little like grave robbing, if I am honest. One vehicle dies so another can live. But my neighbour reframed it in a way I have thought about many times since. He said, nothing on a farm is ever wasted, your grandfather knew that better than anyone, and this is the same thing. The bakkie that donates its heart is not gone. It is in your grandfather's bakkie now, doing the work.

The scrap yard on a Saturday morning

I will never forget the first time I walked into a proper Scrap Yard on the hunt for parts. I had imagined chaos and I found something closer to a strange, honest museum. Rows of vehicles in every state of undress, each one a story that had ended, and men who knew precisely which one had the mirror or the manifold or the engine mount I was describing in my hopeless amateur way.

I was clearly out of my depth and clearly serious, and those two things together seemed to earn a kind of gruff patience. Someone walked me down the rows. Someone else knew, off the top of his head, which unit was likely to fit and which would give me grief. I learned to ask about used Engines the way you learn any new language, badly at first and then, over months of Saturdays, with a growing vocabulary and a growing confidence, until I could hold a real conversation about compression and mileage and what had been replaced.

I stopped being the girl who did not know a spanner from a spatula. My hands changed. There was permanent grime in the creases of my knuckles that no amount of scrubbing quite shifted, and I was absurdly proud of it, because it was the exact same grime I remembered on my grandfather's hands.

The morning it started

It took the better part of a year. There were weeks I wanted to give up, weeks the whole thing felt like a foolish and expensive act of grief. My uncle kept his opinions to himself, which for him was a form of respect.

And then, on a cold bright morning, with my neighbour standing over my shoulder and my mother watching from the pavement because I had told her to come but not why, I turned the key on the rebuilt engine, and after a cough and a shudder and one heart-stopping pause, it caught. It ran. Rough at first, then settling into an idle, that same low farm-vehicle mutter I had heard a thousand times outside a thousand places as a child.

My mother put her hand over her mouth. I sat in the cab and I could not see the dashboard because my eyes had gone, and I put my hand on the worn gear knob that my grandfather's hand had worn smooth, and I said, out loud, to nobody, there, I told you, exactly the words I had said at the graveside.

What it carries now

I drive the bakkie sometimes on weekends. It is not practical and it is not fast and it drinks fuel like it has a grudge. None of that is the point. The point is that on a Sunday I can climb into a cab that still, faintly, impossibly, smells of pipe tobacco and Sunlight soap, and start an engine that came from somewhere else but beats inside my grandfather's bakkie now, and drive slowly, with a dignity I did not earn and am only borrowing, down a road he would have recognised. Nothing on a farm is ever wasted. It took a seized engine and a scrap yard and a year of grime under my nails to finally understand what he meant.