Page 269 - The Diary of A. H. W. Behrens

129
1927
March 1927 and proposed to her. She asked for some time to think about this but after a brief exchange of letters she agreed and after 2 months of correspondence she came to Pretoria
in May and we got engaged in Bourging’s house in Pretoria.
I was very happy and we were very happy until now, at the end of 1943. Not for a single moment did I ever regret having married again and I thanked God who gave me my Bertha, a German-speaking Swiss of 35 years who had been in Africa for 5 years.
After our engagement we did a journey by car to Bergheim, Rustenburg, Rama, Bethanie and Brits and then wanted to go to Theodor in Florida, but Tiene, Theodor’s wife, was quite horrible on the telephone and said that, “she did not want to have a foreigner under her roof” and that is how it stayed. We never visited them and have become estranged until today. Bertha was in no way guilty but I had already experienced something with Tiene before my engagement in my house in Brits where I accommodated her with her children for reasons of friendliness, she hit my girls and Theo then wrote to me that I had treated his wife “worse than my kaffir girls”.