The Mooi Moth by Tod Collins

We crossed the great Mooi river in the village with that name, over a good sturdy bridge and the road began to climb. I didn’t notice it the first time but the railway line between Durban and “The Reef” used the same bridge, but on separate tracks alongside where the cars went. We turned right as the road was climbing, past a sign that said “Treverton Preparatory School for Boys” and drove through two rows of gumtrees to the long low white buildings. Then we went to school there for quite a few years.

It was tough at that school for boys - about two hundred and fifty of us from all over the southern half of Africa – because there were bullies from Durban and Jo’burg, and track suits hadn’t been invented then and the winters were freezing especially when the wind howled from the snow on the mountains. The school uniform didn’t include

long trousers and our jerseys were thin and because most of us started there when we were six or seven years old there was homesickness and not many woman teachers only men. Those men were tough too, quite a few of them came from other walks of life and applied to the headmaster for a job as a school-master and if Mr Binns liked the fellow he’d teach. After two years of teaching, if Mr Binns hadn’t sacked him, he was given a certificate qualifying him as a teacher. Or so the bigger boys said.

The two sports we all had to do were rugby and boxing. The third sport that quite a few desperately homesick boys or the tougher chaps who wanted to become legends did, was running away. When a bloke did that it caused a wave of excitement through the school wondering how soon he’d get caught. The railway police were in on the job with the headmaster, we reckoned, because

they often found the kid on the train or skulking on the station and he’d be brought in Mr Binns’ brown van without windows. But one fellow from Jo’burg – Philip Silberman a really tough little guy who played scrum-half for the first team when we were the bigger guys – wasn’t caught for a week! And he came back under his own steam, not the brown van. Because he was hungry. If you had posed a general knowledge question to any of us bare-kneed boys, even the tough guys who did the bullying andcame from Umbilo or Mafeking, asking to name any two rivers in the world, I reckon all of us would have said, “The Mooi river and The Grantleigh spruit.” Well, obviously we knew the Mooi because that was our home for about nine months each year and we could see it from the main rugby field that was also the main cricket field when the snow wasn’t on the ‘berg. The Grantleigh spruit was a trickle that became a torrent after summer storms, and it ran alongside the main road opposite the entrance to Treverton, and joined the great Mooi near that double-purpose bridge. The railway line had to cross the spruit so there was a tunnel under the line where the water flowed. Clever chaps like Prof Coppens called it a culvert but to most of us it was just a long dark tunnel. Philip Silberman called it his “den” for that week. Philip definitely became a legend. Quite a lot of us were country kids and even those who came from Umbilo or Kitwe and other towns took an interest in nature things. There was a big light on the side of the wall of the dormitory called “The Cage” (other dorms were called The Tin, Little Thatch, Big Thatch, The Barn ) that shone into the quadrangle where a huge pine tree grew. That light stayed on all night I think to let brave boys, if they really wanted to, go for a pee at the joints on the other side of the quad. That light attracted moths, a myriad moths of amazing variety.

Thus collecting moths, like collecting birds’ eggs, was a fairly popular hobby and not a crime in those days. The beautiful biggish white ones with red rings around their bellies that mostly came when the Christmas holidays got closer was a favourite and quite a lot of us didn’t catch and kill those because we thought it was bad luck for the exams. The chunky red ones were favourites and even today, over sixty years later when I see such a moth I am whirled back to the early mornings, or just before a master shouted “lights out” at Treverton when we rushed outside to see what moths were under that light.

Because moths mostly came out at night, and Philip Silberman for his week in hiding only came out at night to fetch the bread and jam that a co-conspirator had hidden for him, he became known as the “Mooi Moth” right through until Treverton Preparatory School for Boys had to close after Mr Binns died.

Over thirty years passed and I was settled in Underberg as a vet. Nostalgic in a way because from Underberg we look at The Giant from one, and at Treverton we looked at it from the other. For a spell – too short a spell – a special man managed a farm called Burnbrae on the banks of the Mkhomazana river adjacent to the road that joins Himeville with Nottingham Road and beyond that, Mooi River. He smoked a pipe and had a nice slow gentle way of speaking. He came with a reputation of being a fine trout fisherman and because half the reason I came to Underberg was just that, during or after the work I did on his cows we used to chat flat-out about trout fishing and flies.

Once, I remember clearly, I moaned that I hadn’t caught a single Brownie even while the Nzinga river was boiling with the evening rise after I’d spent the day doing George Laurens’ cattle at Mount le Sueur. He gave me a little simple fly with grey wings that he’d tied, and said, “Next time you fish an evening rise, try this. It’s called a Mooi Moth.” That special man was Jack Blackman.

I think I used that fly until it was just a bare hook … or maybe, being an Awful Angler, I left it hanging from a basket willow somewhere, or wedged under a stupid rock on a stream bed.