At that time, they were living in what I thought was considered in Joburg as an amazing house in Rosebank. There was an annex—a cottage—in the back garden, and that was where I was put up. I was not quite as impressed with the grandeur of the house as Joburg people were, because Pietermaritzburg had many larger and more gracious colonial houses on bigger stands than I had encountered in Joburg. I had not seen any other ‘Millionaire Miles’ besides Rosebank, however, so my touchstones for housing grandeur were limited. I could not grasp what the fuss was about, regarding the Rosebank house, expensive and desirable as it was in Joburg terms, but that was just me.
So, I found myself in this very well-appointed cottage in the garden: beautiful, heavy lined curtains, deep-pile carpet, and so on. I see that now, but at the time—having lived most of my time with Carolyn in a humble loft with no ablutions, where we froze on winter nights as the wind blew straight through the cracks in the tiled roof—housing to me simply meant a roof that kept the rain out, and that was all. We kept each other warm.
After supper, I was shown to the annex cottage. Carolyn made sure there was enough of everything I needed (toilet paper, soap, towels), and left me in peace and quiet. There was no TV in those days—television was only introduced in 1976, and when it finally arrived, I thought it expensive and tawdry (spoiled as I was by the BBC), getting a set purely for my children’s entertainment. So I always carried a book in my overnight pack. Vacations were a good time to catch up on reading—the kind that offered a rest from compulsory reading for my English degree. At the time, I had started Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It knocked my socks off, but I digress.
Perhaps an hour after supper, the door quietly opened, and Carolyn took a running jump onto the bed. The bed was a double—something I had never yet slept in—so everything felt luxurious and a tad miraculous. She was in a nightdress with a dressing gown thrown around her shoulders. This was the Easter vac, and Joburg was already getting cold. We had only known each other for perhaps a fortnight in Pietermaritzburg, mainly around the Fine Art department. I was captivated from the moment I clapped eyes on her and found myself hovering around her—too much, even while she was working. But watching her draw was one of the most magical things about her; her line quality was uniquely her own. In so many ways she was already an Artist with a capital A, something fascinating for art students to witness as she worked.
I spent a lot of time working in the Fine Art department at night. Firstly, I was a slow worker. My drawing was not quick and decisive; it was slow and deliberate, so I needed to put in more hours than most people. Secondly, I tore up a lot of what I did, being impatient and impulsive. I may have been my own worst enemy, but to me, there was only one thing to do with something if it didn’t look right: destroy it. I read once that Ndebele warriors destroyed spears if they were not one hundred percent straight and true, and I felt the same way. Don’t let anything substandard survive; it becomes a threat to your own survival if you do. So I thought, and so I did.
It was as quiet as a cemetery in the Fine Arts building at night. I had a key. Before I got used to it, the key was a struggle to master, and one chilly night—clad in a greatcoat I had picked up in a seconds shop in Theatre Lane and carrying my yellowwood knobkierie, as I always did—I heard a growl some way behind me. I hurried, but could not get the key right in the lock, and that growl was an unmistakably aggressive sound. Turning just in time, I slipped the key into my pocket and grabbed the kierie from where I had leaned it against the door. The dog was already airborne after a dash and a leap, and there was nothing else for it. All my cricket practice at school paid off: I executed a solid square cut in the nick of time, knocking the dog past me with a snare-drum roll down its ribs. It crashed into the door next to me.
With an awful, garbled growl of pain, the dog got up and limped away. One fang had torn my sleeve and grazed my wrist, but there was no blood.
I had seen the dog somewhere before, but could not remember where. Getting the key action right, I ducked into the building and locked the door behind me. That dog, I knew, was rabid—I had once seen a rabid meerkat from a safe distance while standing on the back of a bakkie in the Karoo. It had been biting everything in its path: prickly pears, fence posts, everything. It had rabies, and this dog displayed the exact same behaviour. I have never been attacked by a dog since. I know they bark and warn, but a healthy dog does not attack unprovoked. Leaving later that night, I turned many times on the way back to my loft to check that it wasn’t stalking me, but I never saw the dog again.
A few days later, the Prof paused at my cubicle. He asked if I knew anything about a dog that someone had heard outside in a ‘commotion’ near the front door of the department a few nights before. She lived opposite the building. I think I must have blocked the memory of that dog incident out of my mind, because I instantly and unthinkingly disavowed any knowledge of the disturbance. The Prof walked on to his office. A few minutes later, it dawned on me: Oh, he means THAT dog.
I had to tell him. Knocking on his always-open door, I told him that I did, in fact, know something about the dog. I described my struggle with the key, how the dog went for me as I was pinned at the door, and how I had deflected it with my stick. Naturally, I explained how lucky I felt to have had the stick to parry the attack. The Prof was beginning to look furious and disapproving, but I pressed on:
“Professor, that dog had rabies. I had no choice.”
He looked at me for a very long time, then nodded and pointed coldly at the door. I left.
I forgot about the dog. Perhaps a fortnight later, the Prof stopped at my cubicle once again.
“Walk a few steps with me, Cooky.”
I got up, and we strolled out of the building, skirting it slowly. He paused near the fence of the sports field.
“Cooky, I know the owner of that dog. I went to see her. I did not name you, but I told your story and begged her—since the dog had just died when I visited in response to her complaint—to get a specimen and have the dog tested for rabies. The results came back today. The dog did indeed have rabies. The owner does not blame you for defending yourself.”
I thanked him. We turned and walked back inside. Absolved or forgiven—whatever it was, what a blessed relief!
Perhaps a week after this, shortly before the Easter vac, I was at it again, working late. I heard the department front door open. It was Carolyn. It turned out she lived a few houses away—less than a hundred yards, she said. She had been told that people sometimes worked at night and thought she would give it a try. Actually, I had never encountered anyone else working there at night. Sometimes I got a wave through a window from a Zulu night watchman, and once one even entered for a chat, but my Zulu was too rusty and he had no English; a bit of Fanagalo got us through the moment, and off he went.
But here Carolyn was. She chatted a little shyly for a minute, then made her way to her cubicle in the other wing of the painting section. I worked on, got some good drawing done, and decided to take a break. I found Carolyn and told her I was making tea.
“I would love some. Weak, black.”
I took it to her, proffered the sugar bowl, sat down on what we called a drawing donkey (an easel bench), and kept her company as we sipped. Tea finished, I got up to go, but not without telling her—catatonically shy as I was with women—awkwardly that her drawing was wonderful. It was. She was very pleased, and I left her, blushing like a schoolkid but elated that I had pulled it off. I seldom connected with people. These days, I realise I have long shown signs of what we have come to know as Asperger’s Syndrome, but I felt a breathless spark of a connection with Carolyn, if her wonderfully approving eye contact was anything to go by.
I began to visit Callie and see her drawings. In a funny way, I was in love with her drawings at first more than with her—although that is the same thing, isn’t it? One morning, when everyone else was at tea, I found her alone in her cubicle, drawing away.
“I am just rushing to get this done before I go to Johannesburg for the Easter vac,” she said without looking up at me.
I thought it better to leave her to it. But every split second of life presents us with choices, and as I turned away, I saw something, and other forces intervened. She was stooping forward. Her dress gaped at the front, and my mind emptied. I, the painfully shy, who had never yet touched a girl intimately, plunged my hands down the front of her dress. There are some things one can’t fight. Once again, nothing would ever be the same again.
Other than recalling that she looked up at me with fiery, burning eyes, I have a block regarding what followed. I do remember standing awkwardly, expecting retribution. Expulsion from the university probably crossed my mind. What I can say is that Carolyn’s reaction was totally gracious. In a daze, I trailed back to my cubicle, still wondering what on earth had possessed me.
Some hours later, Carolyn entered my cubicle. “I am leaving now, going home to Johannesburg for the vac.” She brushed my shoulder with her hand, slightly touching the back of my neck as she withdrew it. “May I write to you? Please?” I stammered out.
She stooped—another view; I nearly fainted—and wrote her address and phone number. I have forgotten the number, but I can drive to where the house was in Rosebank to this day. Then she turned, scampered to the front door, and was gone. I suppose she took the train; that was how she travelled to and from Johannesburg for the rest of the time I knew her. This all happened mid-afternoon. The Trans-Natal, in those days, pulled into Pietermaritzburg station at about 20:12 and departed about twenty minutes after that. Not knowing for sure that she was indeed on the train, I stifled the thought of showing up at the station. I thought: No! Don’t be a stalker! Poor me! I was so smitten.
I wrote that night. The Easter vac lasts around ten days, and a reply came within a week. Those were the days! She wrote very little—after all, we did not know one another well. I can’t for the life of me imagine what I wrote in the first place: probably “what I did today” or something similar. Awkward Holden Caulfield crap, I fear.
I wrote back immediately, and her reply—a line or two saying basically, “See you soon”—arrived later than she did. I was intensely happy with Carolyn for the next year, and we continued intimately for another. Then, she got tired of me. Even then, it was a special connection. One evening, seated on my bed and reading in my loft at Mr Russel’s Leinster Rd property, I dropped the book onto the bed, pulled takkies and on started running, blindly. I headed up Leinster, headed to the Scotsville Gold club - I had done many gigs there - it was not yet taken over by the University, and ran across the greens to the railway line skirting Oribi Village, climbed through a barbed wire fence and, still not knowing why I was running, found Carolyn Seawright next to the ballast. A goods train headed by an electric unit with the most panicky looking driver in it was applying brakes frantically when I whisked Carolyn out of the way. The train passed, and I walked her home to my place. She cried all the way. There was no need to talk. She had just had enough. Those fits welled up in her from time to time. In the morning she was calm and I walked her to her lodgings in New England Road. There were several such incidents throughout our time together.
I have no wish to share them. One never knows what really goes on in a person’s mind. I know was that life was inordinately hard for Carolyn. Her father was very wealthy, but that doesn’t always help. I would have liked to stay in a relationship with her forever, but it would not and did not work out. No matter who much I miss her (and I do, most days still), there were children, out there in the universe, waiting to be had, and nothing told me that Carolyn wanted to be a mother. I felt from the start there would be six of them. The works “six, maybe seven” floated into mind from time to time. I had to make other plans.
I am so glad I did. Children are the best. There were indeed “six, maybe seven”. I will be blunt: I am glad Carolyn was not mother to any of them. She was not a mother. She had legendary artistic talent, brilliant insights into art, writing and music, but in the end, I keep returning to her fraught relationship with a controlling father. He would like to have killed me, but, though he came close, here I am. In all the following years that I phoned her in Johannesburg for chats and to keep in touch, he never once passed the phone to her - it was always “over my dead body”. If I spoke to her, it was because there was no one other than her at home to answer.
When one does marry, one marries the larger family. I am glad I never had to cope with Carolyn’s parents: he had a fragile ego. Mrs Seawright was a psychology PhD at Wits, and though Seawright himself was clever, I think the missus was his intellectual superior, and it did not sit well with him. At a restaurant in Pietermaritzburg, he, ever macho, decided despite warnings from the waiter, on a hot curry. It left him speechless, waving a his hands in front of his mouth, and Mrs Seawright giggled. Instantly, he reached across the table, grabbed her hair, and smashed her face down into her own plate of food. She had to leave the table to clean up.
It was the most shocking thing to see. Years later, long after my father had died, my mother told me with a shrug that there was little affection between them once us children came along, but when I told her about Mr Seawright, she agreed that my father was “absolutely incapable” of that: aside from wicked humour at times, he never ran her down in front of others, let alone dashed her face into her food.
Mrs Seawright was a litte weird too. One day I was visiting, she fetched me a loud stinging flat-hander on the cheek as I stood back for her to pass me in their passage. I didn’t react. Mr Seawright was elsewhere. After a pause, without getting close to her, I asked her in a level tone why she had had hit me. By this time, both her hands were at her cheeks in horror at what she had just done, and she stammered “I don’t know, I don’t know”, and fled to her bedroom, saying “God, what possessed me”. Yes, indeed. I am glad I had nothing further in life to do with the senior Seawrights.
It would probably have ended up as “The Big Saxonwold Gundown”.
The End of the BA Fine Arts Road
One day, I was seated on the floor in the Fine Arts department next to senior lecturer Jane Heath’s office, gazing up at my still-life canvas. It had remained untouched for some days by then, and I was dully pondering what to do with it. I heard the main department door open, and Prof. Heath’s characteristic metal-heeled shoes clacking on the tiles as he entered the building. Stopping opposite the studio door, he paused, looked at me, then continued to his office in the back. Perhaps five minutes later, he reappeared at the studio door and wordlessly beckoned with his index finger for me to follow him. I rose and walked through to his office, wondering what it was about.
In his office, he asked me to sit. For a short while, he simply looked me in the eye. I could not read his expression. Then he said:
“You’re leaving university.”
I mean—WHAT? Where is this going? I sat silent. Jack Heath continued after a long pause. He must have been waiting for me to object or to say something, but I felt totally locked up.
“I can’t have you dying on me in my department. You’re in a worse state than the men I was with in the POW camp.”
I heard him out. He had been in touch with my mother, who was then (1965) looking after her mother in Richmond in the Cape Province, as well as with Dulcie Somers-Vine, head of Admin at UNP. He had “let them know.” My fees for the second half of the year would not be paid.
“So,” he continued, “you’re out.”
What does one say?
In retrospect, it was surely the right thing to do, both for him and for me. Now I know that I was too weak and undernourished to understand or fight the decision. He got up and said, “Come with me,” and I followed him to his car. We drove down Ridge and Durban Roads to the corner of King Edward Avenue, to H.M. Bass’s chemist.
“Get on,” he said, pointing to the scale outside the shop door. Scales like that were a feature outside chemists everywhere in those days. He slotted a penny in. After a couple of chinks and clanks, the scale hovered at 114 lbs—just over 51 kg in today’s terms. This is not a great body weight for someone standing 178 cm, and I saw his point. I was normally considered pretty skinny at 128 lbs, and at that weight, you can’t afford to lose fourteen pounds. Even my glutes were shredded muscle.
We got back in his car, and he drove me home to my white cottage in Hay Paddock. There, he walked to the back of his Morris Isis and unloaded a carton containing a gross of sardine cans, topping it with a loaf of very coarse wholewheat bread.
“Now, EAT,” he said, and drove away.
Inside my ‘adobe’, I stretched out on my bed, feeling dull, stunned, and out of kilter. To this day, it still feels strange how unilateral that was. My family were not big on discussions about anything personal, but it remains strange that I did not get a chance to run this by my mother first. Jack had done that, but it was hopeless for me: this was in the days before landlines were taken for granted in a small dorp like Richmond. My mother had a phone, but I had not had two pennies to rub together for more than a month. Phoning my mother could only be done by visiting someone who had a phone and asking for that favour—something that I was, at the best of times, far too shy to do. Besides, mulling it over as a possibility, I had no idea what to say. The first time I ever really went through it with her was more than twenty years later on a road trip to the Karoo, and she was equally at a loss.
I spent the following days ceaselessly walking, visiting friends now and then. Nobody had anything to say about me leaving my studies. I supposed they were incurious, or had picked up enough of a back-story from friends and acquaintances. It was strange. People who had talked freely with me about art, painting, and sculpture only days before now treated it as a no-go zone. Worse, there was a tangible sense of disapproval, and nothing would pass for easy conversation. I seemed to be persona non grata wherever I went.
I took it that they had a different understanding of things, perhaps tied to a romance between me and Carolyn Seawright that had recently ended. It felt somewhat loaded toward that. I did not care what they felt about it—I had my own challenges to surmount on that front, and there was no one to talk to. Chris Roering would have been that person, but his life had changed dramatically following the death of his father, Tommy, and I think he was spending most of his time with his wife-to-be, Rosemary Pugin, by then. Perhaps he had moved from Scottsville. Or maybe it was just me. Was I overwhelmed with the prospect of the world beyond university and unable to talk to Chris about things? Quite possible.
Back at home (these days, I feel I was incredibly lucky to have that lovely little white cottage in Hay Paddock), I tried to compose a tune, playing a theme over and over again on the vibraphone. But I was so slow at music notation that I kept forgetting what I had played; on repeating it a few times, it didn’t cut any mustard as a tune any longer. I would drift to the piano, strum some chords, then try on trumpet, then trombone, round and round like a madman. I kept all those manuscripts for forty years until they were trashed in a burglary on a farm outside Johannesburg, where a friend had assured me they would be safe. His most trusted worker was known by everyone to be the thief, but it was weeks before I discovered the incident, and I opted to leave it all behind me.
Back in mid-1965, I soon fell into a pattern of hitchhiking up and down the Great North Road toward Rhodesia. I tried to go see a friend, Anne Michaelis, in Bulawayo, but the Rhodesian immigration authorities weren’t amused when I produced seven shillings and sixpence as my total travel money, so I took to hitching only as far as Messina. I would spend the nights sleeping on bare earth under the stars, using the shopping bag with my change of clothes as a pillow. It wasn’t as cold there as it was further south, and I still love to think of how happy I was in that freedom and space, especially in that beautiful thornbush country. It was safe in those days. Nobody came near to harming me, and the only thing even approaching an incident was waking up one pre-dawn morning to look straight into the face of a baboon, who fled instantly.
I did many drawings and penned many tunes during the weekends back at home in the Hay Paddock ‘adobe’, where I made sure to return for gigs with my friend Chris Roering. Once, he gave me a lift home after a Saturday night gig and agreed when I begged him—once I had stashed my trumpet back at the cottage—to drop me off near Rickivy Poultry Farm. Hitching was good that day, and I made it to Messina by nightfall, where I bought something to eat and drink, then strolled out of town to find a clearing away from the road to sleep for the night.
The following morning, rising cold and a little stiff, I got a lift all the way to Johannesburg, where I went to visit my best friend at the time, John Lloyd, who shared a flat with another friend, Hugh Lewin, in Hoofd Street, Braamfontein.
This became the pattern, the only change being whom I visited during the week before wending my way back to Pietermaritzburg each Thursday. I sometimes got as far as the Karoo, where I visited my mom once in Richmond. Another time, I managed to get to Kromdraai, the Barretts’ farm near Ficksburg, where I spent a happy time with Helen Barrett, a contemporary from the Fine Arts department. Most times, however, I would hitch back from Messina to Pretoria, then cross the road and hitch back toward Messina. I didn’t always get all the way, but was quite happy to be left at the roadside anywhere in the bushveld to sleep—always some distance from, and out of sight of, the road. In those days, I could still drink milk, and that was what I lived on: about a pint per day, sometimes adding a banana or an apple.
All this time, especially at night under the stars, songs were roaring through my mind, though I seldom remembered them long enough to write them down. A lot of the time, my dreams—both waking and asleep—had me blowing epic solos in the Blue Notes, though I knew I did not then have the chops to cut it. It was an enjoyable fantasy, and I never gave up on it. Funnily enough, a tune that I had on my mind a lot on those bushveld nights was Tommy Roering’s “O Bosveld Maan”, resulting in a very special feel and approach when performing that number at our dances—something that Chris called in the early part of the evening when people were generally eating and background music was called for. All through this second half of 1965, I felt lucky to be able to return to the white Hay Paddock cottage that I could call home.
In the middle of the July vac, as I was seated looking out from the cottage up the hill, I spotted a familiar figure threading his way down through the long grass and mimosa trees. It was Brent Record.
“You’re going to bankroll me for a while!” he sang out with a winning smile as he approached. “I am flat broke and waiting for my student loan to come through. Not long!” he said cheerily. “Walk in,” I said as he reached the door. He had visited before, so he did not need to be shown around. “Sardines!” he said as we passed through the kitchen. He had caught sight of the carton containing a gross of canned sardines left by Professor Heath (the bread was long gone). “Yes,” I said. “And when you get tired of them, there are always… sardines.”
Brent had brought a lot of tea. He was a tea drinker of note. I hated tea. It was the only sticking point in an otherwise pleasant time. There was a pint mug and a coffee mug. Every morning he brought me the pint beer mug full of steaming, hot, strong tea (I wanted to kotch at the smell of it—he either affected not to notice or genuinely didn’t, giving off an air of disbelief that anyone would not want tea). There was a bed and an armchair. I slept on the bed in snatches during the day when he was out seeing friends, but took to the armchair at night. He took the bed. I saw very little of him. What he did for food, I can’t remember. You can’t eat sardines all the time.
Every day, he brought me tea as I shook myself awake in the armchair. Neither of us wore clothes much at home; Pietermaritzburg winters can be very warm during the day. Clothes were for going out in. I had two of everything, just as I had done since starting at university, so I washed one set each week and wore the other. I was not the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air! Poverty stinks!
Brent may have arranged to shower or bath at the men’s residence or elsewhere; I think he fired up the chip geyser once only. Getting wood was a problem for me, and anyway, after a winter of night-time washing in the freezing cold at an outdoor tap in Miss Russell’s garden, I was as tough as nails when it came to cold water and simply bathed in cold water at my cottage. It never felt that cold—I think the pipes may have been warmed by the afternoon sun, because I usually bathed only before a gig, which would have been mid-afternoon.
Brent and I were both so flat broke. When the toilet paper ran out, Brent reminded me to “do number two” wherever I could: visiting friends, or in shops, pubs, offices—anywhere there was a toilet and paper to be found.
After about a fortnight, Brent announced that his loan had been paid into his account. In those days, a bank account held in Pietermaritzburg knew nothing about a bank account being held in Durban. We were fairly and squarely in the Post Office era, so I have no idea how he came by the knowledge that his funds were available. Perhaps he had a local account, since he lived in Pietermaritzburg during term time. I had a savings book as a kid, but it was long unused, and I really knew nothing about money, had no accounts, and had no idea how they worked. The first time I ever used a bank account was in England, and I promptly closed it after a row with them for deducting bank charges. Only when the following bank did exactly the same did I learn. But it felt like cheating, and has done ever since. They get to use your money and then charge you for that as well? What? Criminal. I felt vindicated decades later when I read Lancelot Hogben’s remark:
“I think that sex is necessary and bankers are not.”
Maybe the internet or the blockchain or something will finish banks off forever, though don’t hold your breath. Those bean counters really know how to grab all the bread, although I have to say they have lost the art of walking around looking important.
Life was so simple. On the first of every month, I took a few notes from the most recent gig, walked to town, and paid my rent to the Corporation at Electricity House. The kind aunties always made sure to give me a receipt. I didn’t know why or really what it was for, but they always held it up and bade me to: “Keep this.” So I did. I developed a filing system of sorts back home once one lady explained to me, “Bring this to us to prove you have paid your rent.” I knew and understood nothing about banks and money, both of which always made me feel apprehensive—even perhaps a little asthmatic and short of breath.
After announcing his news about receiving money, Brent packed his bag in no more than three minutes. “Goodbye. Thanks,” he said, and sauntered off up the hill through the long grass and mimosas.
The Blue Notes at the (Other) Adobe
Towards the end of his final year in Pietermaritzburg, my brother Al rented a small cottage at 100 Topham Road. It was a strange little place—two rooms in all, one of which was a kitchen and toilet! The advantage was that it was cheap. It became known as ‘The Adobe’. He moved into it with Eileen, and I visited often. Notably, towards the end of his time there, he threw a party and somehow managed to persuade Chris McGregor and the Blue Notes to play at The Adobe when their formal concert was over and done with.