The vegetation on this level of the mountain is mainly grass, long
and silky, growing thickly in between the slabs and outgrowths
of pale stone. Here and there the ground has subsided into dips
that might suggest some sort of impact, but otherwise there is
nothing to give away the traumatic events of May 15, 1948.
I recalled Mr Botha miming how his father scooped up the
loose earth from molehills with his hands, to put out the flames.
“If you look carefully, you will find lots of things – small pieces
of metal and glass,” he had told me.
I was worried about not being in exactly the right area, so
I moved my laptop from place to place and squinted at the
screen in the afternoon sun to try to make sense of the single
photograph I had. It depicted the smashed tail section pointingsteeply downhill, with the plantation of trees and the vistas of
Bosch Valley descending in the background.
Mr Botha knew that tail section well. He had explained how
his father had it brought down off the mountain on the back
of a lorry, and installed it in the backyard of his own mother’s
property in Vrede. Mr Botha remembers clambering around
in this piece of wreckage with siblings and cousins at his
grandmother’s house.
Although Couzens’ article said the tail was later signed by
local people and taken to adorn a café in nearby Nelspruit
or Dullstroom I asked Mr Botha what happened to it when
the house was sold and although he was unsure he thought
“someone probably sold it for scrap”.Eventually, my eye caught a shape that was definitely man-
made: two small strips of aluminium the length of my palm,
pitted and bleached almost white by weather and perhaps fire
too. Then another sliver of aluminium the size of a coin, and a
tiny blob so smooth and perfectly white that it could only have
been a fragment of smashed china.Welling Up
It started to get chilly up on the summit as the sun crept
round behind the mountain, dropping much of the crash
site into shadow. On a clear day, an aeroplane approaching
from Durban would slip through the gap between these two
mountains effortlessly. In cloud, not sure of his bearings or
altitude, Commander Smith must have known he was in
trouble, even if the rest of his passengers did not.
As I returned to the farm Mr Botha greeted me like an old
friend and quizzed me about every detail of my climb up the
mountain. He recounted again his father’s memories of the
air hostess and his eyes welled up: “I’m so happy you made it
there!” he said. “No one has ever come to visit that site before.”
As I drove back along the dusty farm roads and the sun set
orange over the plain, I realised how much my visit meant to
this quiet farmer.
I also realised how much the accident must have impacted
his family – a new and unprecedented form of modern
catastrophe, visited on a sleepy and remote rural community.
While my mother, her brother and their parents had been
traumatised by the loss of their beautiful sister and daughter,
Mr Botha’s family had also been deeply affected by finding her
and the other victims of the disaster. And yet for almost 70
years we had been unaware of each other and of our shared
experience.Bruce Campbell would like to thank the Sunday Times for
granting permission to reproduce parts of Tim Couzens’ article.Mercury Airways’
DC-3 ZS-BW Y had
been built for Eastern
as NC30039 but was
transferred to the
USAAF as 43-2017. It
was brief ly registered
as NC4 425N before
transferring to
Mercury and taking
up its South African
registration.
N H
C
L • Mercury
Airways stewardess
Paula Rauch
photographed a
year before the fatal
incident. She worked
for South African
Airways up until a
few months before
the crash and is seen
here wearing her SAA
uniform.
V A
http://www.airlinerworld.com 39HE was sure it was going to land
right on top of him. But it didn’t,
and then he knew it was going to
hit the mountain