This forms the basis of page five of "Rain in the Karoo". It was expanded for the book.

I was born on Saturday sixth of January 1906 at ten to eight in the morning while the Doctor and my father had stolen off for a quick game of golf.

I was born in Somerset East, Cape Province, on the edge of the Karoo. Somerset East lies comfortably below the blue-green Boschberg that are top-covered with thick snow in winter.

From these mountains one can look across to Piet Retief’s farm, Bruintjeshoogte.

My father was a waterfall, my mother a butterfly. This will explain itself as I write. One brother Alfred on sister Doreen who helped me later in the Depression. In 1902 my mother had come out from London with Uncle George Webster of Middleton, Cape Province, told she might die, told by the doctor not to have children. They came in the first motor car to Port Elizabeth in 1902. Her brother Alfred Price a prize-winning student at the Royal Academy Schools later went to work for Uncle Charles Alias, 36 Soho Square, Costumier by Royal warrant to H. M. the King. W. Macqueen-Pope says that Uncle Alias was the finest costumier of the stage in his time, a far greater artist than Clebson (sp?). Alfred designed costumes for Chin Chin Chow & later in October 1917 was killed in Flanders. Uncle Alias’s firm, taken over by A. Nathan, made costumes from Picasso designs.

My paternal great grandfather was a Royal Engineer who built forts for Lord Charles Somerset along the Boschberg. He planted the famous Oak Avenue in Somerset East. My Grandfather John Battiss built the Town Hall and the Dutch Reformed Church in Somerset East and my father was the second youngest of sixteen children. My father told me there was another Battiss family in the Cape that sometimes gets confused with ours. My grandmother was May Roberts, born in Hartleigh, Ireland in 1844. The Battiss ancestors came to England from Normandy when the Huguenots fled from France and anglicised the name. My father’s people were hymn-singing Methodists and I was born in my grandparents’ home in Bathurst Street, Somerset East, assaulted with hymns within while from outside came the gentler drone of bees from the garden for my grandfather was bee-crazy. The first thing I recall was an earthquake. When I was four, my mother proceeded to teach me the alphabet by candlelight. I got as far as copying out A and B and then drew the candle. At the age of six I was drawing furiously.

[This is the end of this manuscript]

Later proofs:

Six numbered pages and three unnumbered.

The first unnumbered page is the poem "Karo" on p3

The second unnumbered page is the poem "Approach to the islands" which was not used in the book.

The third unnumbered page is a third - untitled - poem, also not used in the book apart from the fifth stanza used on p105 of the book. The first line reads: The cold touch of dead bees on a hot day.