On The Way To Uniondale Poem by Gert Strydom

One stormy Easter weekend
while I was driving on route sixty-two,
I found a beautiful girl
next to the road
just twenty kilometres from Uniondale
at the Barandas turn off,
the wind was swishing through her dark hair
and I heard it cry over the Kammanassie Mountain
and her thumb was out asking for a lift.

I brought the car to a standstill
and next to the road red allows were flowering
and she was dressed in a navy blue jacket,
and dark green pants
and I was worried that she was getting cold
and in the inside light of the BMW
she looked whitely pale
and smiled brilliantly
when we drove away
and when I asked where she was going
and she just answered
that she was coming along
which was kind of strange.

I still wanted to ask
what a lovely girl was doing alone
next to the road
when I smelled the apple blossoms
of her perfume
and she suddenly laughed shrilly
and the car door next to her
opened and closed and she was gone
and immediately I stopped the car
as I was sure that the woman
had jumped out.

Outside the car the road was empty
and while I walked up and down
without finding a sign of her
a police patrol car came along
and parked behind my car

and the constables were convinced
that I had given a lift to a ghost
and they called her Marie Charlotte Roux
and said that during Easter weekends
she wanders along that road
and to them my narrative
was an old well-known story.

[Reference: Accident on R62 where Marie Charlotte Roux passed away on the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle, when her fiancé GM Pretorius lost control on 12 April 1968 in stormy weather. A year later he married and it is said that she started appearing from that time, but stopped after he was killed in a car accident in 1984, but who really knows? Maybe she will appear again.]