Friedrich Fred Viedge b. 13 January 1913 d. 15 August 1996

From Rodovid EN

Events

13 January 1913 birth: Viedgesville

marriage: ♀ Jean Smith [Smith]

marriage: East London, ♀ Yula Pearce [Pearce] b. 24 May 1934

1 September 1939 child birth: ♀ Fiona Viedge [Viedge] b. 1 September 1939

1959 child birth: ♀ Katherine Viedge [Viedge] b. 1959

11 January 1965 child birth: Umtata, ♀ Gerda Wendy Viedge [Viedge] b. 11 January 1965

15 August 1996 death:

Notes

Fred (as Friedrich was known) has the reputation of being a really brainy guy. He went overseas to study to pass the entrance exams to get into medicine, and if Erich remembers the story right, passed within 6 months. He ran the hospital in East London. Erich is sometimes accosted by people who worked for him there. Beaujolais has school reports for Henry and Friedrich when they were both in about Standard 6 and Fred wasn't doing particularly well. Even Henry seemed more studious. He was a linguist like his father before him and spoke "Xhosa like a native," he told Erich once in that terse, gruff, staccato way of his, "which means bloody badly. They speak it bloody badly." Gerda wrote a moving portrait of Fred eight years after he died. Here are some excerpts: As a new igqira* (Xhosa for Doctor / Medicine Man) in some faraway rural location, he had been challenged to a race by the fastest runner in the village. They had not seen him take up the challenge there and then, and my cousin tells me it is still legend, how Doctor V----- took up his black bag and ran, in his suit, stethoscope flying, down the dust of the main road of the village, the local hero fading fast in his tracks. "Three score years and ten," he used to bellow, "that's all the Bible gives you," and cackle to himself, and joke with God, old pagan that he was. He was never sick. Not once did my father have a cold, not once did I see him cough. But still I was told of the pneumonia that would take him one day, "the old man's friend." Pessimism was his worst trait. But there was a wit that could make you laugh, and a love of poetry to make you cry, as he loped about the house, quoting verses loudly to no-one but himself.

An old colonial, and the son of a rich man, he had studied in Edinburgh. How he learned to love the Scots, but hate the rain. I grew up in a thirsty land, where every drop of it was precious, yet still my father mourned every overcast day. It reminded him, he said, of his homesickness while studying, how his heart longed for the African veld, for the wide open spaces, for the guttural tongues of home. We, however, were not allowed the luxury of any slang, and were constantly reprimanded to speak the "king's" English. He regaled us with tales of the ships sailing home during the war, zigzagging to and fro across the waters to dodge the U-boats, and how Hitler irked him for causing him a longer journey home. No wonder then, he flew the first flying boats in their splendour, across the mighty continent, remembering how they would dip down onto Lake Tanganyika - and the passengers would stop for tea, served in china and silver on crisp white tablecloths, set calmly amidst the thorny bushes, cicadas screaming, and against the wildest backdrop of the bush. He had loved flying, and wanted more than anything to be a pilot. His eyesight failed him, ruined (he said) by a youth spent reading by candlelight. He was born in the Transkei, a rural part of Africa, where even in my youth (in the 1960s and 1970s), the local black populace still wore the red ochre blankets and heavy beads of their tribe, and lived in huts of wattle and daub, there amongst the rolling green-brown hills of my childhood, and largely unchanged since his. Accountancy was a poor second to flying, and a choice made largely due to the demands of his father's business. It flourished despite him, and he took his inheritance and went instead to Edinburgh, where, he told me, the finest surgeons in the world are made. And so it was that they made him a fine one also, and he came back home, to practise in his Transkei as a doctor. He went bankrupt, funding medicine for those who could not afford it. He was always thus, and one day came home without his beloved huge overcoat, having literally given the coat off his back to a homeless man. Three hospital jobs followed (at least they paid a wage), and it must be testament to his skill that each retains a ward that bears his name. I remember nights he was out to all hours, scouring bleak locations, dangerous to a white man, for patients he was worried about. He should have had no doubt of his skill as a surgeon; I was seven when a man I did not know ran up to my mother, to her surprise pumped her hand and mine furiously, and I shall never forget him bending down to say to me "little girl, your father saved my life." Yet he doubted his medicine constantly, and never stopped learning, annotating books and journals in a spidery scrawl that drew the usual jokes about doctors' handwriting. Even today I can open Tennyson to find a crude ink of the tibia with all its markings. He was of the old school, believing a doctor ought to be knowledgeable in almost all subjects, but especially Greek mythology, the Roman Empire, and Latin. To me, he knew all things, and before their time. I was counselled to "press the oil" of the evening primroses that grew by the side of the road, and to wait for the day when doctors would manipulate genes. He had always been so, writing as a young man to beg some penicillin off the army, for a young girl whose life he thought to save. He got it, and it did. How he would have relished some of this age, and how he would have hated some of it too. He fell for the last time while in hospital; his doctor's decision not to X-ray meant they failed to find the fractured femur until it was too late for an old man to walk again. He would have been saddened by incompetence but, I think, shocked more so by indifference, he who would travel three days on horseback to treat those at the edge of an ocean, with no road inward. The pain of that broken leg must have been unbearable, yet bear it he did. To the end, Dad, bravely borne.

From grandparents to grandchildren