To say the Blue Notes blew me away would be the understatement of my life. I left the concert hall and migrated to The Adobe for the after-party. Where my brother found a piano at short notice I don’t remember, nor how he managed to get the band to play after their gig. Possibly he knew Maxine Lautre from his first days at university, when she was one of a fabled group of girls known on campus as ‘Les Girls’. They were all beautiful. One, Liz Douglas, later died tragically alongside many others when an SAA plane went down. Maxine was now Maxine McGregor and managing the Blue Notes, so that is my guess as to how the band came to be at the party.
I don’t think the piano was any great shakes; I do remember Chris testing it and being thoroughly unimpressed. He accepted the situation, though, and soon the band was wailing. I was in absolute awe of all the musicians, their ability, and their raw approach. The thing I saw—and heard—that made them so vastly different from any other band I had ever encountered was their direct, acoustic assault on a room. Classical musicians, to me, always sounded rather polite on their instruments, whereas jazz musicians didn’t. Well, not back then. Things change. Where most musicians, even jazz players, were content to “fill the horn,” the Blue Notes were content only to “fill the ROOM,” whatever its size—and The Adobe was tiny.
It was amazing to be completely surrounded, to be in the very midst of this sound storm. For the first time in my life, I was in my element. It was also the first—and possibly the last—time I ever heard a band rattling the rafters with not a single amplifier in sight.
I leant on the piano right next to Chris, watching his incredible hands playing, as Ntemi Piliso would later say, “the WHOLE piano.” I was mesmerized by the sheer power and volume of Dudu Pukwana’s beautiful tone, and by the way both Mongezi Feza and Nick Moyake, in their individual ways, crafted angular solo lines weaving through the harmony. The rhythm section—Louis Moholo on drums and Johnny Dyani on bass—laid down a truly incredible groove. Speaking with Chris during a break, the only thing I remember him saying (not to me, but to someone standing next to me) was:
“We use township harmonies.”
It did not sound to me like American jazz in any way at all. I had a long chat with Nick Moyake during one of the breaks. He teased me a lot, but ended up being very kind about it. Mongezi and I chatted a little, as did Dudu, though I didn’t speak much with Louis, Johnny, or Chris, whose wife Maxine was there with him.
The band took a few short breaks, but they played all night. It was the most incredible musical night of my life—so much so that for days, then weeks, then months, I carried phrases in my head (especially by Nick), replaying snippets of the whole band over and over in my mind. I fell asleep hearing them and woke to their strident clamour. The sum total of that night’s experience became the cover art for this book you are reading: a vividly backlit Mongesi Feza playing trumpet in “the other adobe”. I count it as a student painting, but I drew, then painted it mostly at home.
I was for some reason secretive about my music life. Very few of my student contemporaries knew that I was in a band, or so I thought, and I did not want to change that.
The Job Hunt
It was time to look for a job. On a scorching Pietermaritzburg day, I set out in the neatest dark trousers and whitest shirt I had. The shirt was still doing duty from my school days at Maritzburg College. After walking for a few hours, it was a relief to get inside, cool down, and catch my breath. I was pouring with perspiration, but that was just how things were in those days; air conditioners had started to appear, but they were far from common.
I sat and waited. From time to time, a tight-lipped, stern-looking man entered and left the room, glancing my way each time. I fancied he was taking a good, quick, secretive look at me. This was the office building of a stone quarry at Hilton—a long, uphill trek. Google Maps tells me today that the distance is 13 km via Old Howick Road, which was the exact route I took. I actually enjoyed the walk, having grown up watching steam locomotives battling up the old line, huffing and gasping beneath World’s View. Years later, I drove up there looking for traces of that old halt; it has vanished, though one can still spot the overgrown railway cuttings in places.
The reception area at the quarry offices had clearly not seen the touch of an interior decorator. It was, shall we say, rustic. As things turned out, I didn’t need to look at it for long. I was called in for the interview, which lasted perhaps three minutes.
The stern man asked what experience I had.
“Fresh out of school. None,” I said.
He asked why I wanted a career in blasting. Actually, I hadn’t even realized the job involved explosives. I was just, I told him, looking for a job, but if blasting was what it entailed, I would be happy to give it a go.
He shot to his feet, shook his head, and barked, “No!”
He turned at the door and added: “Good. LUCK.”
Well. That went well. The interview was over before it had even begun, and I started the long trudge home. My very first interview.
I headed across Hilton to the Crossways Hotel and bought a beer or two before hoofing it back to Scottsville down Old Howick Road, past Lexden, where I had attended a few Boy Scout camps during school holidays. All of those camps had been washed out by heavy rains, and I found myself wishing for a thunderstorm to cool me down.
This became the pattern for the next few job applications, culminating in an interview at the Mobil Oil Company down on Victoria Road, right next to where the Greytown railway line flanked the Dorp Spruit on its way past the Royal Show sidings at Victoria Road Station. Victoria Road Station had been the happiest of playing grounds when I was a child.
In those days, Victoria Road Station saw a daily procession of goods trains: truckloads of wattle bark coming in from farms all the way down from Kranskop through Greytown to the tannery at Plessislaer, and mine props bound for Northern Natal and the Reef. Those cargoes were replaced during agricultural show time with truckloads of brand-new tractors: Ferguson, Massey-Harris, Case, International Harvester, McCormick, Oliver, John Deere, Farmall, and more than I can remember. There were also crawler tractors and heavy earth-moving machinery from Caterpillar, alongside trucks offloading purebred livestock to be judged at the yearly Show.
The Mobil Oil interview—which turned out to be my final interview in Pietermaritzburg—was conducted by the father of a school contemporary. That last interview lasted longer than all the others put together, but it turned out to be a completely one-sided rant. On the walk there, I had dwelt a little on what it might be like working for this man, given that I had a massive crush on his daughter. Not that she even knew about it—I was catatonically shy all through high school.
Anyway, any romantic notions were nipped in the bud by her father’s tirade. With heavy emphasis, he glared at me and said:
“We know what you are—quote—‘up to’—unquote.”
I had no idea what on earth he was talking about, but as he went on, it emerged that “We” referred to the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Commerce. As for what I was supposedly “up to,” I never actually found out.
The CID Detective
That feeling of frustration and helplessness spilled over one day after a couple of beers at the Imperial Hotel—our very colonial drinking spot in Loop Street, opposite the Museum and the Police Station. With beer coursing through my veins, I took my Dutch courage across the street and strode purposefully into the main entrance of the cop shop.
There was no one about. Making my way deeper into the building, I turned into an office and found a middle-aged man with a center parting and a pencil mustache sitting at a desk. His lunch was laid out on a stretch of greaseproof paper on his blotter.
“I HATE you guys!” I announced, charmingly.
He froze, sandwich halfway to his mouth.
Looking back, it was certainly not my finest moment, and it turned out nothing like I had intended. It still makes me sad, sixty years later, to think of what I had sunk to. Apartheid, though, drove us completely insane. It was total. We were blocked on every front. There was no freedom of anything, let alone speech. There were laws against everything.
Apart from the laws directed against political activity, there were hectically insane measures, especially censorship. When Anna Sewell wrote her classic Black Beauty about a black horse, she could hardly have expected it to be banned in South Africa more than a century later. It has long been a book for children, though I read somewhere that she originally intended it for adults.
If you think about it for a minute, you can see exactly how it happened: some Afrikaner Broederbond lackey, sitting in sheltered employment for idiots, having scraped through a degree (or not!), took one look at the words “Black Beauty” and made up his mind. With the mandatory censor’s dirty mind, he was not about to allow a book that was surely about a beautiful dark-skinned woman to be sold on bookshelves where it might pass into the hands of impressionable youth. One simply could not allow that! “Beauty” and “Black” in the same sentence? Heresy! Like everyone in the civil service in the days when the National Party held sway, this moron wanted an easy life—and here was a gift from heaven. No need to even risk perversion by opening the cover. The title said it all: SIN!
I regret now spoiling that policeman’s lunch. The sandwiches actually looked quite nice. He had pulled his green government blinds down, and I have no doubt he had intended to have a quick snooze after ingesting his ham and cheese.
Remaining silent, he held my gaze. His expression made two things very clear: he was entirely unthreatened by me, and he thought I was a complete nutter.
“You Special Branch guys… I hate you!” I repeated.
He lowered his sandwich to the greaseproof paper, leaned forward, propped his elbows on the desk, and spoke.
“I am not Special Branch. I am CID. A detective.”
Letting that sink in, he paused for a moment, then pointed to his right—indicating, I imagined, the adjacent building from which we could sometimes hear screams issuing.
“Them,” he said quietly.
He did not ask me to sit, but I came to see that his expression was kindly enough.
“I fought in the war. Against Hitler. What they do… I was against it. We all were. I can’t believe what is happening here. I retire next year and I’ll be happy to get out. I don’t like those guys or what they do either. Can’t wait.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Weg is ek.” (Away I go).
He showed no sign of anger and had no aggressive reaction. He was surprisingly tolerant and easygoing—a very experienced man. I began to feel extraordinarily lucky that he didn’t get up or make a move to arrest me, or whatever else my overworked imagination feared. He appeared to be a genuinely good man. I felt a sudden surge of shame and relief.
“What caused this?” he asked.
I launched into the story of how the Special Branch raided my mother’s home regularly, arriving in the small hours of the morning. I told him how they emptied her drawers and cupboards onto the floor, examining her garments—especially her underwear—even using the point of a pocket knife to pry her coat away from its lining. Senseless destruction and bullying directed at a middle-aged woman.
“That dwaas wrote details on the back of his cigarette pack of when my brother and his wife were booked to leave by train for Zambia,” I said. “Then he and another guy arrived in the small hours a few days too late to arrest them. They weren’t staying at my mother’s anymore—they had already left! The fool was furious, not with himself, but with my mother. She was completely unbowed. She pointed out that he must have thrown the cigarette box away without writing down the details. I think he was just pissed off that she found it funny. How stupid can you get?”
The detective shifted in his chair. A ghost of a smile passed over his face. I remember thinking, he is going to cackle with that weird Boere falsetto scream-giggle, but he didn’t.
I wanted to leave, feeling I had said far too much and was only digging myself into deeper trouble. But in a quiet voice, he said:
“I don’t blame you for your anger. If somebody did that to my mother, there would be big trouble.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“You know that you can’t fight these people, right? They don’t feel. They don’t see what they are doing. My advice to you is… get out. Go. Overseas, preferably. Whatever your brother may be doing or may have done, they will be convinced that you are doing it too. Are there any other brothers?”
“No. I have two sisters.”
He waved a hand, as if to say the sisters didn’t enter into their calculations.
“Go away for a year. At least. They will stop raiding your mother. As long as she has a son in South Africa, they will continue to raid her. I know them. I know how they work.”
He lowered his hands and picked up his sandwich again. I realized the conversation was over. I wanted to apologize for interrupting his lunch, but couldn’t bring myself to say it. I left quickly.
Thinking it over while having another frosty beer at the “Imp,” it was clear that my bursting in on him was probably minor compared to whatever usually interrupted his lunch. A policeman’s lot.
Walking back to my mother’s place, I realized that the kindly detective had actually given me sound advice. I agreed with his assessment of the “specials.”
But… overseas? How on earth was I going to get there? I had no money, no job, a single change of clothes, and a trumpet.
Basically, nothing.
Despair and Rejection
I couldn’t handle “Mr Mac” telling me I would never get a job in Pietermaritzburg. The preceding weeks had seen me going from one curt, tersely handled job interview to another, but at least Mobil had come with a reason of sorts—even if it was entirely absurd. At that stage, my brother Al was in Grahamstown; if it was actually he who was “up to” things, there was no way I could have known what those things were. I was his junior by five years and knew next to nothing about his political life or activities. At that age, I was a foul-tempered person at the best of times, and the Mobil rejection hit me brutally hard. How could an apparently good man like Mr Mac simply presume to terminate my working life in Pietermaritzburg before it had even begun?
As the weeks dragged on, I couldn’t snag even a single further interview. My younger sister, Irene, had been working ever since my dad died—clearly, the Chamber of Commerce didn’t think girls could possibly be “up to” things! My mother was away in Richmond in the Great Karoo, looking after her own mother. I doubt I would have told her any of this even if she had been in Pietermaritzburg; in those days, we simply toughed stuff out. A decade later, after four years in England and with my own children on the way, I would finally start talking to my mother as an adult. But back in 1965, after failing to get anywhere near employed, I was as bitter as gall about the way my life was going.
I spent nights walking the streets, plotting in the dark. I didn’t hold a personal desire for revenge against the Mobil bulk depot manager, but I began to form a dark notion to kill—preferably a Special Branch man. The more I thought about it, the more I seethed with anger, and the less I knew how to cope.
The only person in whom I confided was my bandleader—and now lifelong friend—Chris Roering. I didn’t tell him I wanted to kill someone; I just ranted about the Nats over and over, round and round. After a few months of this, I felt as though I was neurotically chasing my own tail in circles. I felt like a coward, and worse, ashamed at not even being able to come up with something as simple as killing an enemy. Surely it was the simplest thing in the world? I thought. They were doing it all the time, and they got away with it.
In time, I came to realize the truth: I was never going to do it. I couldn’t kill another human being.
Then a new thought emerged: maybe I could kill myself. I had often felt suicidal, though I seldom got around to doing anything concrete about it—seldom, though I had made a few stupid, desperate stabs at it in the past. The Platform at Pietermaritzburg Station
The outcome of all those failed job interviews, culminating in my hotheaded interlude with the CID detective, was plain, pure, deep depression. I desperately needed work, yet unseen forces were stacking the odds completely against me.
Depression deepened and worsened until, one scorching day, I walked slowly from Scottsville to Pietermaritzburg station in a terrible state of mind. I made my way to a platform set across the two main passenger lines abutting the main platform, trudged out to the western end, and sat sweltering in the brutal sun.
My notion was to wait for some goods shunting to begin, then stroll off the platform toward the goods sheds. Nobody ever took any notice of people wandering through the marshaling yards. I wanted to get next to a train being made up, slip between the heavy iron buffers as they slammed together, and end my life.
I can’t say I wanted to think much about it, but I couldn’t help it. Suicide between wagon buffers was a frequent topic of conversation among the footplate-men and running staff I had befriended over the years. They all agreed that it was a quick, massively shattering shock, followed by perhaps twenty minutes of life at the most before the body gave out—usually much less. Their tales often touched on “sy laaste woorde op hierdie aarde” (his last words on this earth). In their eyes, it was almost never accidental. Perhaps a deaf or blind person could suffer an accidental death on the tracks, but no one else.
(Speaking of blind people, little did I know then that in less than two years, far away in the Northern Hemisphere, I would be left wondering how on earth Chief Albert Luthuli could be killed at a level crossing near Groutville station. He was said to be losing his sight, but how would he have been attempting to cross a busy railway line without a companion? I worked two main classes of engine through that very level crossing—the commonest locomotives on that section. One was the Class GEA Garratt; the other was the Class 15CA. The latter had the loudest exhaust beat of any locomotive I ever fired—some reckon it was the loudest in the entire history of the South African Railways—and the GEA was not much quieter. It is simply impossible to believe that Luthuli’s death was an accident.)
Back at Pietermaritzburg station, I sat on the wooden bench, staring straight up the line toward Prestbury. Just up the hill was Ian Coetser’s place. How many times had I shinned over the wall to join him in his den—a converted servant’s room or garage—to listen to what his mother called “duiwelsmusiek” (devil’s music, as she insisted jazz was)?
A few times, with shunting going on nearby, I stood up and took a few steps toward the edge, only to sit back down on the bench. Could I actually do it? A long time passed in the baking heat.
What if I can make a song out of this kind of low moment? I wondered.
A few musical phrases rolled round and round in my head, but they sounded so mawkishly self-piteous that I dropped the idea in short order. Still, I knew I needed to do something—to find anything that I loved—just to get back on track.
That phrase caught in my mind: back on track.
Looking down at my forearms in the glare, I noticed they were gleaming with sweat. It was hot, but I knew my state of mind was adding to the sheen. I thought and thought about it.
If only I can find something I like or love, I will do that. Then I won’t kill myself.
But what? What on earth did I love?
Music? Not really, at that stage. I didn’t think of music as a love; it was simply an activity—something I took to eagerly enough, but love? Not really. Anyway, what is love? I thought, feeling hopeless. I had recently lost the only instance of what I felt was real love in my entire life, and without it, the world felt like a cold, feelingless disconnect. (Today, I view it differently: I feel incredibly lucky to have experienced that love. There is nothing else like it.)
I thought about painting. Did I love that? Well, not really—I needed a break from it. I loved reading, but you can’t just read forever. So what was left?
I waited for perhaps half an hour in the hot sun. Maybe I lapsed into a daydream, or perhaps I even dozed off, but a sound made me look up.
Pulling up to a stop not fifty meters away from me was a locomotive I had never seen up close. I stood up, dropped down off the platform edge, and strolled over. The fireman was friendly.
“Durban,” he called down. “We’re going there, light engine.”
“Light engine” meant just the locomotive on its own, without a train of wagons behind it. The engine was being transferred somewhere for testing, though he didn’t know where. He was busy with his work, so after walking a circle around the machine, I returned to my bench. It was a handsome locomotive, built with reasonably large driving wheels—capable of hitting a neat sixty miles per hour. I thought it was beautiful.
They prepared to move on down to Mason’s Mill to replenish coal and water, and I watched happily as the Class 15AR cantered neatly past.
I sat there for a long time after it had gone, and then I realized I was wearing a smile. All of a sudden, it hit me:
“I LOVE steam locomotives! That’s it!”
I said it aloud to myself: “That’s it!”
I repeated it a few times—saying it so often I almost grew tired of the sound of it—but I was elated, breathing deeply.
As the day began to cool rapidly, I left the station, headed for West Street, and ran and walked home by turns—up the hill past Maritzburg College, past the old Police Barracks, down Lindup Road, and up through the university grounds, smiling all the way:
“That’s it! That’s it! That’s it!”
Oswald Pirow Building in Durban was where I was headed. Many a footplate-man had told me that was where a man went to find work on the engines.
Trainee Fireman
The fireman training course I attended was held in a room at Oswald Pirow House—the very same Durban building where I had signed up at Recruiting.Even getting accepted had been a close call. After the warning from the Pietermaritzburg Chamber of Commerce man, I was desperate for this job, yet my interview very nearly went the same way as all my other applications in Pietermaritzburg.
University was the tripping point. The recruiter explained that their experience with university degree holders was that they were “overqualified” and didn’t last long in the jobs on offer. Perhaps what saved me was the fact that I was not a degree holder. I no longer remember the exact words I used to change his mind, but it was something like a passionate, heartfelt plea to give me a chance. Whatever I said stopped him dead in his verbal tracks.“I am going to give you a chance,” he said, and just like that, I was “in.“What a relief!
A job firing steam engines was all I had left—it was as far into the future as I could see. And it centered around one simple, vital thing: overtime.Every other avenue I had explored up to that point indicated that, if I could manage the physical toll, firing would be the fastest way to earn enough money to get the hell out of South Africa before my towering rage at Apartheid caused a tragic, stupid end to my life—whether that came from suicide or murdering someone.
Once off campus, I had put all my energy into finding working people and asking them direct questions: what did they do, how did they get into it, and how did they feel about it once they were qualified? I found out that the skilled trades paid well, but took a long time to qualify for—an apprenticeship of five years on a tiny stipend before you got your “ticket,” after which the real money started.
I asked about office jobs, but any and all of them involved training periods of six months to several years at low pay. None of that was good enough for me. I wanted a short training period—a few weeks at most—and then I wanted to get earning and saving immediately. Looking back, I know now that I put an extreme amount of effort into what was essentially structured job research, though back then I would have thought that far too formal a term for it. In the remaining half of 1965—free from campus, free from studies, and free from an assured future as an art teacher, I thought rather bitterly—I sought out as many people to talk to as I could find. Waiting for buses was good. Sitting around Pietermaritzburg station was good. Roaming the sidings at Victoria Road station and chatting with footplate-men was something I had been doing since my schooldays, only now my focus was strictly on the work rather than just the steam engines.
Greyville Loco Sheds
Six weeks of formal training took place at the Greyville Loco Sheds. I moved into a room at the SAR (South African Railways) hostel on the hill at Clairwood, using the commuter train service daily between Clairwood and Durban stations. I could have taken a connecting train from Durban to Greyville station, but it wasn’t worth the hassle: waiting for a North Coast line connection was tiresome, and the walk from Greyville Station to the loco sheds wasn’t much shorter than simply walking along the tracks directly from Durban Station to Greyville Loco. So that’s what I did.
I enjoyed covering that distance at a stiff pace morning and evening. Durban is usually hot, so it was a sweaty affair—as anything in Durban usually is—but it kept me fit.Night shift was a different routine altogether, one that took some working out with the train schedules. It wasn’t my favorite thing: we did no actual firing at night, but instead had to “guard the locker rooms.” Nobody guarded anything in those virtually crime-free days, so it was a complete time-waster—lolling around on locker room benches, trying desperately to stay awake. I tried bringing a book, but the lighting was depressingly dim.
The Left-Handed Hammer
One morning, a “passed fireman” came by and beckoned to me. A passed fireman was someone who was fully qualified to drive and had passed all the necessary tests, but was waiting for a vacancy to be formally deployed as a driver. “Sien daar doer, anderkant daai skoot?” he asked, pointing off toward the furthest loco shed. It was a long walk. “Gaan soontoe, vra vir Jan daarso en kry vir my ’n linkerhandse hamer.” (See over there, the other side of that shed? Go there, ask Jan for a left-handed hammer.)
I stood my ground and objected: “Impossible. There is no such thing as a left-handed hammer.“The passed fireman immediately began to scream at me. “Toe! Toe! Hardloop! Jan wag daar, man!” (Go on! Go on! Run! Jan is waiting there, man!).
I stayed put, remaining completely silent. I was not going anywhere to collect a left-handed hammer.The passed fireman went absolutely ballistic, screaming furiously. Sometimes, I rather enjoy being stubborn. He got louder and angrier, eventually glaring at me with hot, genuine hatred. After perhaps a minute of this performance, his face suddenly creased into pure, unadulterated fun—all laugh lines and mirth. He cackled with a high falsetto laugh and began to stalk off. Ten meters away, he turned around, shouted, “Jy’s ’n fokken slim Jan!” (You’re a fucking clever Dick!) and dissolved once more into cascading cascades of falsetto giggles. Funnily enough, nobody seems to use that weird, high-pitched falsetto giggle thing these days
Which Depot?
There was no time. I wanted out of my predicament. It felt like a mental prison, and I wanted out right now. Working on steam involved six weeks of training. That was all. After that, the next crucial step in my strategy was joining the right depot. Since the key word was overtime, according to my research (hours upon hours of chatting with kindly footplate-men, guards, and shunters), two depots were mentioned most: Pietermaritzburg and Empangeni.
Empangeni was my clear preference. Pietermaritzburg had, ever since my lousy experience of trying to find work there, become an old song—one I was thoroughly tired of singing.
I had discovered that while there was plenty of overtime to be had in Pietermaritzburg, the secret, as drivers and firemen told me, lay in one magic word: “Junction.”
Any depot that functioned as a junction—meaning there were branch lines (preferably more than one) leading off to other towns, usually farming communities, sugar mills, steel mills, or mines—was your best bet. “Junction,” in these footplate discussions, was synonymous with “shunting,” which in turn led straight to that ultimate magic word: overtime. That was my be-all and end-all. Nothing less would do.
The main drawback with Pietermaritzburg was that it was much larger than Empangeni, with a massive hierarchy of footplate staff already established. This meant that a novice fireman could only hope to work local “shunts.” The overtime was decent, but it wasn’t nearly as good as in Empangeni. That was something I heard repeated over and over again: Empangeni was the king of overtime.
However, many considered Empangeni to be both a good and a bad choice—though either way, it meant serious overtime was to be made.
It was a good choice for the sheer volume of work. It was a bad choice because the water supplies along the line were notoriously dodgy. Water at most rural stations on the North Coast had to be chemically treated, I was told, because it was impure, brackish, or full of minerals. Chemical treatment didn’t always work—or perhaps wasn’t done regularly enough—resulting in a condition known as “priming.” And priming made a fireman’s life absolute hell.
Priming, I learned, occurred when bad water foamed wildly inside the boiler when heated. This foam traveled down the steam pipes straight into the cylinders, instantly washing away the oil lubricant and causing dry pistons to groan, bind, and even snap piston rings. South African steam locomotives were mostly of a two-cylinder design. When an engine primed, even if one cylinder was affected, the engine power was instantly halved. That meant complete engine failure in the section, a scary prospect on some sections where “permissive working” allowed more than one train in a section at a time. Engine failure was a collision waitingt to happen.
Priming is caused by over-filling the boiler, or bad water. Overtime in Empangeni, I came to understand, was most often a direct by-product of bad water.