We loved all the scenery, wherever we were, but that in the Eastern Free State—winding through flat tops and buttresses with delicate pastel-coloured rock strata (think of the Golden Gate National Park) in the exposed rock outcrops—was a delight. The train, winding through hill after hill at an easy pace, gave us plenty of time. There was plenty of concerning soil erosion, but I am pleased to say these massive dongas, attributed by my dad to bad farming practice and droughts, have actually healed themselves since our childhood. Nature is such a wonder.
Two musical happenings on trains come to mind. The first featured a minstrel who sang to passengers from the platform at Excelsior Station. He was possibly a one-hit wonder. I can only ever remember him singing a single song, “Abie My Baby Boy”, twice and a year apart when the train pulled into Excelsior. He would get a few bob (a shilling was a “bob”) before the train pulled out toward Thaba Nchu and Bloemfontein.
The other happening came about when I explored the train one day. I wanted to see if I could walk up the corridors right up to the front, to stand right behind the steam locomotive. That was my fantasy: to stand near that hammering beat. It was a long way for my pre-teen bare feet, leaving their soles coal-black from all the soot lying in the corridors. Bedding attendants would mop the soot away twice or three times a day, but with most carriage windows open to catch the breeze, it was a losing task in those steam days.
Eventually, I reached the end of the “white” coaches. There was a sort of rope barrier at the entrance to the first “non-white” coach, which was a sitter, not a sleeper coach. I stood stock-still in astonishment at the sight of this very full coach of seated people, mostly ladies, who were swaying from side to side in their seats, swaying in time with one another, and singing in the most wonderful harmony. They treated the clack-clack, clack-CLACK as their drums. This was a stirring sight and sound. I felt very uneasy, knowing I was not allowed to go into the non-white coach, but I could not pull myself away.
Soon, the train reached a steep enough hill for the rhythm to slow, and the song was changed for something more stately and hymn-like. Still I listened. I got a smile or two from the singing mamas, and stayed more. The train picked up, and that solemn song was replaced with a rocking, marabi swinger. This was heaven, and served to imprint forever more on my mind an absolute connection between our local music and rail travel. Those slow stopping trains were often referred to as the “Mbombela”.
I was eventually gently urged away by one of the catering staff and returned slowly back to our compartment. My world would never be the same again. Every time since, when hearing marabi, I hear a train; and hearing a steam train, I hear marabi.
There was a pedal organ in the sun-porch of my Uncle Dirkie’s house. We had to pedal it for its bellows to wheeze out notes when we tapped them on the keyboard. It was an antique. I don’t remember who the manufacturer was, and anyway, Granny did not like our “noise” when we tried to play it.
Other than that, I do remember a couple of times when a gramophone was brought out and the grown-ups danced. They appeared to be shiny-eyed with happiness at dancing, something I could not understand, because it entailed men and women grabbing each other in a way nobody would normally allow! One 78 in particular was a big hit. We nearly wore it out. It was a schmaltzy song, but I only ever remembered the chorus, something like:
The best thing about the Karoo, and what people find strikingly so, is its silence. In the heat of a summer day, you will not hear even an insect. One of my favourite pictures of my son-in-law is of him standing, head cocked to one side, in the veld outside Nieu-Bethesda, trying hard to hear anything at all. He didn’t.
Missing from the Karoo these days are vultures. They were everywhere to be seen, soaring at very high altitude in the 50s, but within a decade they were all gone. Were they poisoned by toxic meat left for jackals? I miss them.
The Colts XI
When I turned fifteen, I was in what was called “JC” at school: Junior Certificate. Cricket was a passion. Interfering with the enjoyment of that passion was pressure. The only pressure I had experienced up to that age was keeping out of trouble. The trick was to not be around The Brother (the main source of pressure) or my parents. When around them, the discovered successful tactic was a genre of theatre, maybe. It was called, not ADHD, but ADAD, for Act Deaf And Dumb. I am not saying I did not suffer from ADHD. I don’t know that. I am saying I may have suffered from both.
Once in JC, I was picked for a team known as the “Colts”. Usually, the Colts ended up in the First Team in Matric. I didn’t. The Colts turned out to be my last hurrah in cricket. The captain of the Colts was one Richard Mundy, who was in my class—the ‘A’ class, the Smart Class. He was often in the top seven when results were announced. Right through primary school, he trailed me, as did most boys. Things got tougher at Maritzburg College, and I trailed behind Derek Attridge, then Sean McAllister, sank to midway down the results, and maybe Richard Mundy began to beat me.
Early in the year (the cricket season straddled about three months either side of Christmas), the teacher in charge of the team, Max Prozesky, called practice sessions every afternoon of the week, and sometimes even Saturdays when we did not have a game. Not for me. I suffered enough pressure from my dad, who had not made it to Springbok cricket. He admitted eventually that he did not put in enough practice at bowling, and less in batting.
Frank Smith, a canoeing and running friend who was at my dad’s school a few years before him, told me after my father’s passing that my father was startlingly talented as a leg-break bowler: fast, with buzzing spin, sharp turn, a humming top-spinner, a “not fair” hideous back-spinner, and a wicked, puff-adder-strike googly. I had never seen anyone turn a ball close to how much my dad did—so much so that when I first saw Shane Warne bowl on TV, I instantly checked his birth year to see if he was possibly my dad reincarnated. It turned out he was born in 1969, so (if this is how reincarnation works) he was possibly my dad born again. They had similar bodies, broad and a slightly burly mesomorph shape. Warne’s application meant that he put in his thousands of hours and was usually able to drop a ball on a coin. My dad, on the other hand, could not guarantee where a ball would land. His accuracy rate was possibly half that of Warne. The sound, however, of Warne’s fingers rasping as they spun a ball was the same as the sound my dad’s hand made. Their top-spinners would crash through the gap identically, and their back-spinners could get right up a batsman’s nose. Their googlies were likewise identically undetectable. And my dad would have loved Liz Hurley.
Anyway, back to the Colts. I learned a big lesson after the team gathered around (away from Max Prozesky’s ears) and we all resolved that the demands were too high on our time, that we had other things to do, and we wished to return to a maximum of three coaching afternoons per week: batting, bowling, and fielding afternoons.
The resolution was that our concerns would be relayed by Richard Mundy. The time came. The team stood in a line on Barnes sports ground, and Richard told Max the team was bothered about things and we had concluded we should raise the problems with him. Prozesky was slightly taken aback, but he kept cool, and then asked—or rather challenged—Mundy to itemise the problems. Maybe it was too much for Richard Mundy. He is no longer with us, so we will never know. Max was met with stony silence from the whole team, most of them concentrating their gazes on the dryish grass of the sports field.
Nothing was said for seeming ages. Then Max, who I am sure was genuinely interested and seeking resolution, began to challenge each team member, one by one. Each in turn remained obdurate and silent. When he reached me, I recited what had transpired in the discussions. Max now became, for the first time, a tad stroppy. His voice adopted a clipped, barking tone. He asked all of those in favour of our resolutions to step forward. After a few dead silent seconds, I stepped forward. I was the only one. That was when I learned that there are many ways people can rat you out. Max then wondered if we all wanted to play cricket or not. Minutes went by. I was fed up. I suddenly wanted nothing to do with the team or the game, and raised a hand.
“I’m out, Sir.”
And that was that. Max shrugged, bowed slightly, and gestured toward the school buildings away across the terraces, as if saying “After you, sir.” I took his cue, strode up across the field, up the terraces, changed out of my cricket togs, and cycled home. To this day, I have no idea whether the Colts did well or not, and have never cared a jot about it.
I was in a hot-headed state on leaving the team, but cycling home steadied me. By the time I lay down on my bed to think about things, it had occurred to me that leaving cricket was a release. There was far too much pressure on me from my dad to do well. On one hand, despite his ability to bowl lethal fast leg-breaks, he never made it to the Springboks. He blamed the change from matting wickets to turf, explaining that he lost his spin, but Frank Smith told a different story. Frank said the problem was simple: my dad had never, once he mastered the art of spinning the ball as much as he did (and that was more than anyone else I have ever seen other than Shane Warne), applied himself to other qualities like line and length. Had he practised enough to land a ball on a small coin as Shane Warne did, the history of cricket would have been very different.
So, the pressure was on me to get into the Springboks because my dad hadn’t succeeded in that, but also he was just plain jealous and moody when I did well. I couldn’t win that one, and was glad to leave it behind. At around the time that this all happened, he was beginning to act very strange, and it was some while before I realised that something really terrible was going on inside him. He was obviously not well. He hardly reacted when I told him I had stopped cricket, and I was glad to be freed up to concentrate on my other stamina sport loves: running and canoeing.
Late July 1962
“Let me” (pausing and breathing through slightly flared nostrils) “rephrase this,” said my dad.
Propped up on pillows in his hospital garments, his legs were uncovered to allow for easy changing of biopsy dressings. His legs were scrawny, emaciated, where scarcely three months earlier they had been athletically, or even massively, muscled—legs a bodybuilder would be proud of. On his birthday on Jan 14, he was only 53 years old. In March, only 3 months before this moment we were locked in, he looked more like a 45-year-old. Now, he looked 70 plus. It was difficult to look at him.
I hovered uncomfortably near the windows of my dad’s hospital ward, trying to catch a breeze to cool my perspiring armpits. I could feel drops of sweat trickling down my side to my waist.
“I know I can trust you to be honest.” Turning to me, fixing his eyes, burning straight into mine: “Has the word cancer been used at all, at any time, in any discussion you have heard, relating to my condition?”
With all the heavy, laboured emphasis, there was no weaselling out. He was in all sorts of pain, and wanted his answers. If his questioning sounds legalistic, that is because my dad was a civil servant. Anything he did (or was allowed to do) at work was mired in clauses, sections, subsections, codicils, appendices, references, Roman numerals, points—all of these laid down in a manual or a gazette. Not consulting that manual was tantamount to fumbling in the dark. People who progressed in the civil service were people who spent time looking up and learning those regulations. The questioning was becoming torture.
We were on the third floor of what was then the newest block built at Grey’s Hospital, built to replace the wartime timber prefabs, in one of which I had been born. Below, next door to the hospital, stretched the old Voortrekker cemetery gravestones—some big and elaborate, most of them small. I saw a posy of bright flowers on one. Somebody was still attending to an old grave, remarkable because the burials had taken place more than half a century before.
Although I was a little deaf, I had picked up the word cancer, overhearing discussions about his condition. More particularly, the doctor had cautioned anyone against mentioning the word to the patient. The belief in those days was that people hearing they had cancer just gave up any desire to live or to fight for life.
“I am not a doctor.”
“DON’T play funny games with me now!” said my dad. “Answer me. Now.”
“I don’t hear very well.” Awkward. “I can’t be sure what I have and haven’t heard.”
“Kaah!” he rasped. He did not like to blaspheme. This was his generation’s respectful, but exasperated, substitution for the word ‘God’.
“Do you have to be so evasive? Come on now. What I asked is clear enough. Answer me!”
He persisted, wore me down, eventually resorting to shouting, soon adopting an abrasively desperate tone, edging on acidic, hysterical falsetto. It was difficult. I had little wisdom at that age. I saw he would not give up, and finally weakened, saying:
“I might have heard people talking about cancer.”
“But,” he roared, “were they talking about me having cancer?”
“I can’t be sure what was said. I know nothing about this medical thing, and it’s best not to ask me.”
He turned away to the window, was silent for a while, and said in a small voice, “I’m asking you, not them, because nobody but you will tell me the truth. But, anyway, what you have said is enough.”
He was silent for what felt like five minutes, then said, very quietly, “Thank you.”
That did not make me feel better. As soon as he’d registered that his odds were on cancer rather than not, a feeling of personal doom gripped me. I had just, if the doctor was to be believed, killed my father. I should, I thought then, have just walked out of his ward. Would that have been better? He would also have taken that as a ‘yes’ to cancer. Not a winning strategy.
The following day, when I visited after school, the nurse intercepted me in the corridor, saying that he was in a coma, not responsive, and that he was unlikely to come out of that coma, certainly not soon. The day following that, I was called out of class at Maritzburg College. Family friend Dulcie Somersvine was outside in her car. I knew what to expect. Using one of my nicknames, she said gently, “Charlie, your dad…”, and here I am lost for details; it’s all a blur. I remember she told me he had died in his sleep, or rather in a coma—much the same—and said simply and in a terrible, heartfelt way (they had been friends since before WWII) how relieved she felt that his suffering was over.
That worked for me, too. It had been hard to bear seeing him waste away, grinding his teeth against pain, and struggling to accept his decline. He still lives in my imagination as an imposing figure with wonderful posture as he walked, with the gait of an athlete. Even dancers walk like that. His stride was difficult for me to keep up with, right up until the cancer stilled his legs forever, just a few months earlier.
After he was buried, it took time for me to come back to life. I remember food not tasting of anything in particular. I ate because that’s what one does. There was no colour in the world, and absolutely nothing was fun or funny. The gigs I did with the Chris Roering band were the exception. They felt like “living”, every time. Burger Street
Our family holidays, with one exception, were all taken in the Karoo, on my grandfather’s farm “Vinkelfontein” in the Hanover district. The exceptions were two taken in Swaziland on the farm “Stroma”, belonging to my Uncle Frank and Aunt Kathleen. Aunt Kathleen was never called anything but “Kassie” by us. I was said to be her favourite, and it worked both ways. I adored her. The earlier of the two Swaziland holidays was taken when I was a baby, still 22 months of age; the second in my eleventh year.
For whatever reason, I do not remember my childhood in Burger St, Pietermaritzburg, with any great enjoyment. The highlight of our childhood days was racing up the pavement to meet my dad striding home from work. He was a lovable father then, but various currents in the tide of his life took a toll, and he grew more and more discontent, most particularly with the ruling Nationalist Party.
As a civil servant, his early training had been in the discipline of a system said to mirror the British Civil Service closely. The earliest place of work I can remember visiting him in was the Colonial Buildings. From there he moved to the Bantu Education Dept, in the tallest (at ten storeys high) building in Pietermaritzburg. He ended his working days in Pietermaritzburg in the Natal Provincial Administration buildings, on the corner of Bank and Pietermaritz Streets. It was the last of these that I remember best because I was older, but my favourite interior was that of the Colonial Buildings. It was cool inside even on hot days and was grand enough that I felt compelled to be very quiet there. That was never difficult because at the age I visited, I was still a toddler, and we never wore shoes much (they were preciously kept clean for Sunday school). On those shiny floors, I could move as quietly as a panther (or Gurkha, my dad would say) in the night.
Of those three buildings, the NPA was the most densely populated with workers. Offices were smaller than in the Education Dept building, and those in turn were smaller than those in the Colonial Buildings. Floor polish was the aroma that greeted one in the older two buildings, but the NPA, with many more people per square metre, was a competing mix of four main smells: stompies, a pungent mix of Jeyes Fluid and urine, and acrid body odour. Each desk seemed to have an ashtray piled high with stompies, and the wastepaper bins were rank with the smell of emptied ashtrays too. Aircon was not yet a thing until well after my father had passed on, and when they did come along in public buildings, they were bulky, noisy rattlers. I could not understand how anyone could get work done with that noise, but at least that kept people cool—when they worked.
When my dad started work there, telephones were still scarce. Not every desk had one. Residential telephones were scarcer. Even when I moved from prep school to high school, applying for a phone in the home meant a wait of at least six months. Some people waited two years. Our first phone came sometime before I went to prep school, perhaps 1949, when I was four. The number was then 5791. Later, it was prefixed with a “2”: 25791. There was no such thing as dialling long-distance calls back then. They were called “trunk calls” and we had to phone a certain number to “book a trunk call”. Later, the exchange1 was upgraded. Pietermaritzburg gained a dial code, 0331.
Music and Flowers: Maritzburg Nights
Between the ages of eleven and sixteen—meaning from when I became “aware of music” to the age I started to “perform music”—I heard few bands. What memories I do have, few as they are, are thrilling, golden, and unforgettable. There was bebop, as played by Trevor Ivans and co, and there was dance music. I do not recall hearing dance music played by whites in that period. It was happening, I just didn’t get to hear it. There was a really good guitarist I heard several times in my teens. He was named Johnny Mans (or Maans, not sure).
What I did get to hear was in two venues in the “Indian Area”. One was the “Kismet”, a couple of blocks east of where we lived. The other was the Taj Mahal, a good walk down to lower Church St. For obvious reasons under apartheid, and because these were licensed venues and I was underage, I never actually met the musicians, nor could I socialise. So I lurked around the wide-open windows and listened all I wanted to. Windows in Pietermaritzburg heat were always wide open (aircon was rare back then), and I could watch and learn as much as I liked. Nobody paid much attention to a white boy leaning on the window sills. I always found a nearby tree to sit in when the windows were too high off the ground.
I loved those nights. Pietermaritzburg is subtropical and big on gardens. On hot nights, the fragrance of some flowers wafted far and wide, and I will always associate music and fragrance as one and the same in my young mind. I was not one to bother with identifying plants, but I think the most beguiling of the fragrances I picked up on my Maritzburg night walks was probably from moon-flowers. Honeysuckle and jasmine were around as well, and many people had rose gardens. Those walks were such aromatic treats.
Youngsters could, and did, walk all night safely back then. I know now that it was because of a curfew that the streets were so deserted, but I did not know that back then. I thought, since blacks were workers, that they went to bed early!
There was a well-known Indian bandleader back then known as Mannie Ray. He had the most gorgeous tone on alto sax, though I never really heard him play anything other than the “sweet” instrumental hits of the day. I never heard him play jazz.
Prep School
Three of my siblings went to a pre-school, crèche, and/or nursery school. I did not know, nor ever asked, why I did not. It was no setback. I was usually top of my class throughout my years at Merchiston Preparatory School, from six years of age through to my twelfth year. Occasionally I was unseated from the position by one or another bright pupil. Usually that was Hugh Watson, who was eventually awarded Dux of the school. My results were better than his in average and aggregate, and I was top most of the time. When I asked why he was made Dux and not me, I was told I did not have the “correct temperament” (I suppose they were talking about leadership). I equated ’lead’ with ’ego’ and it was not for me. That does not mean I had no ego: I was enough of a showoff to be regularly confined to my desk after school. I liked that: I finished the punishment lines quick enough to do my homework too, meaning I did not need to heft a satchel full of books back home.
The most potent effect of not being dux, since I had worked quite steadily to stay on top, was to lose any further interest in competing for the top spot. It made me look for other things to do. However, that was not the only reason my school results took a dive.
The decline started late in my eleventh year. It was the result of an unsavoury incident perpetrated by a neighbour. To cut a very long story short, he first scared the daylights out of me with two handguns, then laid me down between those two guns and tried to sodomise me. I don’t panic easily, and believed—evidenced by his sighs and grunts—that he had lost focus on the two handguns. I was not strong enough to topple him off me, and he did not stop trying to penetrate. I was too strong, and he did not succeed, but the result was he left me, as Oprah Winfrey puts it, “just so much wreckage”. everything changed: nothing would ever be the same again. I would never really trust anyone ever again. Seventy years later, I still have trust issues.
From that incident onward, I changed, withdrew, and grew secretive; stopped trusting anyone at all. So began the years of trouble sleeping, the neurosis, and the depression that characterised my high school years, though not everyone picked it up. I don’t think anybody could have realised how important it was to me to be top of the class, and they didn’t ask. Nor did anyone take particular notice when my results took a dive.
Other than family holidays, in time I went away for days or weeks with others: to Umtentweni to the Guys’ banana farm, and for some other holidays with best friend Eric Hobson’s family—once to Umzinto, and many times to his uncle John Slatter’s farm near Merthley Lake, about halfway between Greytown and Muden.
Jeff Guy was brother Al’s best friend at Merchiston Prep, and when they completed primary school, Jeff moved on to Hilton College and Allen to Maritzburg College. In the first year of high school life, for the Easter holidays, Mrs Guy phoned and invited Allen to spend that holiday with them. Much to Al’s shattered disgust, she insisted I come along too.
Train trips were nothing new, but always exciting. We did not have a car until I was twelve. I had been to the Karoo and back by train at least six times by the time Al and I took the Durban train, and then changed at Durban to the South Coast line, which was not yet electrified. We both loved steam locomotives, so that turned out a happy trip, weaving through the coastal dunes, crossing many rivers and lagoons. Al had no one to impress, so I was let off the usual hardships of digs in the ribs and cheeks, punches to the shoulders, and the occasional bum kick. These were manifestations of Al’s boredom, and there was nothing to be bored about on that trip. I knew full well, though, once in the company of Jeff and his siblings, Al would feel compelled to maintain the pecking order and would have his usual “sport” with me. I was reaching the age when he found it difficult to get me to cry. The fun was going out of it.
While Allen was still at prep school, my parents assigned him the duty of taking me to “Friday Night Bio”. The Merchiston boarders had movies every Friday night, and “day farts” were allowed to come too. Those were amongst the better times I could spend with Al.
One night stands out. I am not sure why he was walking with me at night, or even whether we had been at the school, but as we strolled down Burger St near Boys Model School, some amazing sounds hit us. We stopped. It was a balmy, warm night. Across the road, French doors in a house had been opened outward onto the stoep, and in the brightly lit lounge was a band. By that time, Al was a jazz fan. We were mesmerised.
The band was playing “Frenesi”. John Gay, later a drummer with me in the Chris Roering band, was on baritone sax; a lady named Peggy on piano; Bobby Kok on double bass; Trevor Ivins and a very young Lionel Kielly on tenor sax. I think the drummer was named Alan Harris.
“Te veel water onder die brug,” as the Arch would say.
It was pure magic. They were really swinging, in a more West Coast way—fluid like Stan Getz, rather than a swing big band. I had heard enough of Stan Getz (Al’s first love, even before his swing days) to know the West Coast guys: Shelly Manne, Bob Cooper, Bud Shank, Conte Candoli,2 and so on.
We stood in the deep shade of a tree. Burger St was an avenue in those days, lined with exotic trees that flowered in red and yellow, and grew seed pods once a year. Today, Burger St is treeless, and the poorer for it. Those trees were great for a monkey-like me: I doubt there was a single tree between Merchiston and our house that I had not shinned up at least once, and Pat Whitbread remembered, when my parents asked her to find me, she went up Burger St from tree to tree until she found me up one.
We stood, cloaked in the sounds and moon-flower fragrances, until they had all taken a solo—perhaps twenty minutes. Unforgettable.
I was glad to leave Merchiston. It was not that the school itself was in any way hard on me. I was as lucky as most of the boys were, but this must surely have been largely because I had an older brother and had learned how to stay out of trouble. Some of the teachers were not cut out for the job, and some were just plain sadistic. Thinking about it years later, and having been told that teachers, as a reward for military service in WW2, were given a free teaching qualification on return. I don’t know the details, but it would probably have been either a degree ending with a year of classroom experience with a diploma to then add to the degree, or a teaching diploma from a teacher training college. The latter took three years in all. The degree took either three (Arts) or four (Science) years, and a further year for the diploma. I have no idea how one can return from a war and adjust to anything at all, let alone studying, so I do not wish to judge the teachers whom I remember as a bad fit for teaching. To state things as bald facts, though, a few were just plain cruel, and surely must have been war-damaged.
One boy named Ivan, during a woodwork lesson, had a one-inch-broad chisel thrown at him by the woodwork master. I don’t to this day even know whether that master had the excuse of fighting in the war, languishing for years in a POW camp, or whatever, but there is no excuse for slicing the web between a boy’s thumb and index finger. He had to be taken off to hospital. Luckily in those days, Grey’s Hospital was just across the road. That particular injury was said to cause lockjaw from tetanus if not immediately treated, plus it needed several stitches to close the wound. The incident happened out of the blue. I didn’t hear well, though not so badly as a child, but others I asked afterward agreed the teacher appeared to have snapped without warning.
During a maths class in Std 5, my teacher asked me if I had been talking. I hadn’t, but he still threw a blackboard compass at me. It was a huge implement really, more than 30cm long in its prongs. I escaped injury by instantly, on seeing the projectile launched at me, lifting my desk lid. The blackboard compass impaled its needle in the hardwood lid, and Mr Vic Elson had a devil of a job prising it out again. Once more, my classmates said this fit also appeared from nowhere. Lifting the lid was the sort of skill one can develop and hone only from having a big brother. Trouble lurks, and can explode anywhere, anytime.