Durban

JIMMY

My daughter Tamara was born in Durban. Everything else seems vague and unimportant, but in fact Durban was a tight turning point in my story.

Before I resumed performing with the Roering band, and maybe a year after returning to South Africa, one Durban evening I went down for a waddayathink at a local pub, the Tudor Inn (or Tudor Tavern, or Windsor Tavern or something cutesy and Olde English like that)—the first time I’d ever been there, in Morningside, a short walk away from one corner of the Greyville Race Course.

An elderly American with a short back and sides haircut seated himself at the bar next to me.

“The mashed-up condition of your chops tells me that you are a blower,” he said.

I confessed.

“Have you got your horn?”

“It’s at home, nearby.

“Go geddit. We’re gonna jam”.

I was thrilled, and that beat the shyness. Walking home, I realised his face was familiar from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember from where. Returning to the now rapidly filling up parking space outside the pub, a memory flitted by me of this guy’s face in a black and white photograph, but I still could not totally recall it. Not long after, he was announced as Jimmy McPartland, and this kicked off a great evening of Dixieland music with Steve Gale’s band. I connected with a memory of reading about him in a jazz magazine, either DownBeat or Jazz Journal, both of which my brother subscribed to years before in “Tabernacle days”.

After a few sets, the band assembled and invited people up to jam. I unpacked my horn, and, in full crippling shyness mode, saved solely by the trumpet I was carrying, heart stuck in throat, headed for the stage. There, I was instantly overwhelmed: for sure, I was no pro.

Jimmy, a cigarette between two fingers in his left hand carrying his cornet, gave one of those “everyone ok?” looks, pointed downward to the floor with his right index and middle finger, said out of the corner of his mouth, with the cornet against his lips:

“Uhn… uhn… uhn. Uhn. Uhn.”

…and sailed into “Back Home in Indiana”. Wow! He was halfway into the first verse before I could even get my trumpet to my lips. Fast tempo. I caught up, sort of, blowing a lick here and there, eventually taking a solo when called. I didn’t disgrace myself, but next to Steve and Jimmy, let’s say I squeaked home. The saying “If you can’t keep up with the big dogs, why not stay home on the porch?” came to mind, and I felt a bit of a Jimmy.

Still, I was breathless with excitement, because it was a close thing. Adrenaline had boosted me, and initial surprise and breathlessness were overtaken by “going for it” as I got caught up with weaving through the song.

Jimmy had been very encouraging. The Durban guys hadn’t.

He bought me a beer after our set, and continued with his wonderfully warm and funny banter. He was particularly amused at my name, repeating:

“Jasper. JASPER. How’d you get a name like Jasper?”

many times. I told him my dad was an admirer of a Pietermaritzburg guy who had that name. Jimmy kept up the banter:

“No, man, ‘Jasper’ is for RICH guys, man.”

We chatted about the business.

“I know, it’s different, it’s just not suburbia and all that,” he said, saying, most notably, that he and Marian “try to see each other when we can”.

I had not realised that Marian was British-born.

Jimmy’s words: “You’ve got the stuff! Just need more game time” kept me going for decades after. I would just roll them in my mind, in his voice. Thank you, Jimmy. You can never know what you did for me.

Half a century later, those words “Just need more game time” were echoed by Dan Selsick.

The Blue Note

I went only once to the Blue Note jazz club and can’t remember exactly where it was—it was in an industrial complex somewhere in the Point Road area, maybe. I went there for the first time in my matric year, and have no idea how we found it. Nor do I remember actually who “we” were. I had really wanted to go there before then to hear Tony Scott, the American clarinet player, but my dad refused.

“Too young,” he said, and that was that.

Still in high school, I did get to a Durban campus jazz evening where I heard Charlie Sayers playing an instrument I’d not heard of before: the flugelhorn. He sounded so mellow, so cool, a rich, full sound. It was smoky, a blue fug in there, but the music was great. I think the core band was the ever-present (in Durban) Kerdachi brothers: Simon on piano, Des on trumpet, Gerry on drums. I forget who was on bass. Right now, as I write, I think about Charlie Sayers. As far as I know, he is still with us.

Years later, in Johannesburg, I picked up a little professional jealousy about “the Durban guys” from Hymie Baleson. He asked, “Do you know the Kerdachis invented jazz?”

Eager to know where he was going with this, I asked, “Okay, really?”

“Yeah,” said Hymie. “Ask them.”

Oh. Kay.

I had picked up that the Kerdachi brothers were (how can I put this?) super-confident. However, I admired their talent, ability, and the fact that they had all put in the “hard yards”. Plus, they were all remarkably warm-hearted guys. Des was particularly helpful. He once said, “Come down and see me. We’ll run through some stuff together.” I took him up on that, and eventually hitched to Durban. He showed me lip flexibilities on trumpet, saying enthusiastically, “They’re the BUSINESS, man!” He was right. Alan Wright was equally emphatic about lip flexibility exercises. They were a game-changer for me, and in time, I was able to pass on a book about those flexibilities, to Johnny Mekoa and Feya Faku.

By the time Johnny Mekoa got them from me, he had already completely revised his embouchure and playing during a stint in the US on a Fulbright scholarship, but he nevertheless still affirmed that the exercises I passed on were kind of the last word for endurance on trumpet. He jealously hung on to the studies for a long time, despite my loaning them to him on condition that he pass them on to Feya Faku. I eventually “had words” with him, and he reluctantly passed them on to Feya. These days, everyone knows about them.

I had often heard from South African blacks that “those are very jealous guys”, but never fully understood. Later, on seeing how stubborn Mekoa was about passing that book on to Feya, I understood. Trumpeters are competitive. Trombonists share.

I often wish we SA musicians could learn from Americans. They are entirely supportive of one another and have always felt that there is room for everyone in the business. That was my start to developing a real embouchure in place of the strong-arm gnasher-smasher I was using up until then. My approach was:

• Press trumpet against lips until painful

• Take a huge gutful of air

• (Try to) blow the walls of Jericho down

It was Alan Wright (so helpful to so many brass players) who actually showed me how to properly do flexibilities:

“Go for the click,” he would say. “Diaphragm push, tongue raise/lower.”

Both Des and Al showed me how to use the diaphragm: Des said, “It’s like … WHO!” He told me to place my hand over my solar plexus and say “WHO!”. I got it! Now you know how I learned not to fight my horn!

Derailed In Durban

On return from England, Sandy, little Nandi, and I stayed with my mom in a little cottage in the backyard of her property in Bridge Road, Prestbury, Pietermaritzburg. I combed the newspapers for jobs every day, borrowed my mom’s Beetle for interviews, and went through a withering and defeating series of interviews, all with the same result. If you want to impress recruiters in Durban, don’t tell them you did four years as a labourer in England, preceded by a year stoking steam locomotives.

Well-meaning friends tried mightily to convince me to soft-pedal, to skirt the truth or “dress it up” in some way. “Say you worked in manufacturing,” they said. For my stint as a bran packer at the flour mill in Shelford, they said, “Say you were a miller.”

I disregarded them because I am just not a schmoozer. My feeling was that I would continue with the truth of my experience as I saw it, and one day I would be rewarded with someone who saw it for the good that it was and would go along with it. I felt as long as I set out the truth that I had been a labourer, I would have the advantage that this would lower the barrier to entry to a job, in the sense that someone, out there, would reckon they would get me at a lower pay grade than someone who inflated his claim, and I wanted that. I wanted to get in anywhere, and then prove myself. I had a certain confidence; I was no fool, and I had to tailor the way I did things to allow for my altered experience compared to what my friends knew and did.

Warehouse Man

It worked. After six weeks of interviews, I was interviewed by an English expat who had long worked in a shipping company as a warehouse manager on Maydon Wharf, Durban. His name was Ken Aitken-Smith. He was a sharp-witted guy, and saw in me exactly what he needed: someone with cargo handling experience, as in with my bare hands, but with a mentality that would get somewhere, and take the reins from him so that he could march up the corporate ladder out of what had become a trap for him, with no further prospects. My ship had come in!

I loved my job in Durban. My title was Administrative Assistant to the Warehouse Manager. The first year was very hard, mostly personal. I had returned to SA with Sandy, since marrying her in England was impossible as an illegal immigrant. As written elsewhere, Sandy hated SA, and was soon back in England. It was a wrench seeing the plane carrying her and our daughter Nandi vanish through the cloud cover on the low, overcast day I saw them off from Louis Botha Airport in Durban. The worst was not seeing Nandi. I had borrowed money for their tickets, and now on top of everything I was broke and saddled with a massive debt.

There was nothing else for it but to throw myself into the job. I had only ever done manual labour jobs facing minimal paperwork; now it was all admin, and nothing but admin, and I had my work cut out. At first, I stared at little documents placed in my hands, sometimes for long minutes. I did not know the difference, at first sight, between Credit Notes, Debit Notes, Delivery Notes, and Invoices, all of which were the stuff of administrative life.

Added to this, my job included shipping claims. Stuff gets damaged on ships, and we pursued claims for these on our clients’ behalf. It was just as well that I was not one to count things too much, because if Ken had told me I would be looking after claims on behalf of sixty-five clients, I may have fainted. Instead, I took them one by one, and soon got into using a dictaphone, using it to dictate sixty letters per day. Some days, I kept four typists hard at it. I hit up the Durban library in my spare time, studied the Shipping Act, and soon built up a success rate with our claims.

Most people in offices just copy what other people in their office do. This is Jasper’s Theory of the Civil Service:

We get our Civil Service from the British. They laid out everything somewhere in a gazette or manual that was intended to be followed by workers. People, though, only want to read comics and whodunits, and anyway, the definition of a Civil Service Manual or Gazette is “something that can’t be found”.

So instead, the newbie asks the oldest guy in the room. He’s the most experienced, so he has all the answers, right? Well, no. He has been there the longest because he doesn’t give a damn. So, the newbie gets the very worst “how-to” he can. It follows that the Civil Service runs on the lowest level of expertise available.

Ken gave me a lot of pointers, but learning and quoting relevant clauses from the Shipping Act in my letters tended to deal well with people who had obviously not kept up to date with the Act, and I had a lot of easy capitulations—kind of like “right is might”. We settled more and more. The railways, of course, just repudiated every claim, as the Act had been written partly to protect them more than anyone else. Some things you just can’t beat.

Inwardly, I had no time for documentation. I was more of an action man. My best times were the daily walks around the warehouses—all six of them, eleven acres under roof in total. I walked through every aisle in every warehouse, every day, and knew exactly when a package or crate was moved or missing. Being in my mind a worker through and through, I connected better with the staff on the ground in the warehouses, and got to know everyone fairly quickly.

Since the admin side was so unfamiliar, I took to taking a bus very early in the morning, and taking the last bus home at night. When I got a car toward the end of my first year on Maydon Wharf, I arrived just as early and stayed working much later, no longer limited by buses.

I was so strapped with debt I did not eat during the day at work, and had never been a breakfast guy. I soon took to smoking, with the happy result that it took away my hunger. Sadly, twelve cups of sweet black tea daily, washing down 70 Camel Plains, wasn’t a great health regimen, and I was soon hospitalised in St. Augustine’s with a duodenal ulcer. Nowadays we know ulcers are caused by the bacteria H. pylori, but back then stress was regarded as the main cause. They got to me before it burst, cured it, and I was back at work with a stern injunction from the doctor to quit smoking.

So, I quit cold turkey. From 70 a day to zilch. It was actually wonderful. I had no idea how unfit it was making me, and the whole episode resulted in a real change, bringing much more energy. I had learned about stress from the hospital stay, where I was kept in an isolation ward. The doctor forbade visitors from work or even family, so concerned was he about my stress levels.

On return to work, I also gave up the sugar in my tea and tried to eat more often, though I don’t remember being very good at that. I had no money. Everything went on the first day of the month. I bought monthly season tickets for the bus to get to work, paid rent, paid something toward the debt, and kept enough money for one meal per day. Then began the timeless stretch through the month to the next payday.

Within six months, I had developed a working rhythm, a style. I detested diaries, instead deciding to do everything “now”.

Ken was amused. “You can’t do everything now,” he exploded. “Impossible. Doesn’t make sense.”

I told him, “If you want me to keep a diary, you are admitting to overworking me. I am not going to allow that.”

With a slow, resigned sigh, he said, “Let’s see how you go with this.”

It worked out fine. Every time anyone came to me with a problem, they would invariably say, “Something must be done about this.” Well, what I know of grammar tells me that “must be done” is inherently passive, and at the very least is lacking in intentionality. So I would say brightly, “No, let’s do it now. As in right now. As in immediately. Let me go together with you and sort it out.”

I even got to be known as “DIN” for “Do It Now”—though a double meaning that I was noisy would not be unfair! After all, my modus operandi was to get as much work out of the way early in the morning before most people even got to work, so that I could walk around with my real purpose in life: to ensure that people in my ken would be made to bust their guts with laughter. I mean, what else is there?

When I did the Do It Now number, what would happen as we walked was that the “complainant” would begin to backpedal. Very often, when confronted with the person his secret agenda was to stab in the back, the problem began to melt right in front of our eyes. Sometimes, we wouldn’t even get to the offending location. Then the sentence usually began something like, “You know what, Mr Cook…” and the problem would be confirmed to have gone away, for now.

The first year passed quickly. The second was to see four pay rises. Ken Aitken-Smith was not about to let me go, that was for sure. He wanted to move on, and I was his upwardly mobile ticket. I gained confidence, and during that year began to assert myself.

I had seen a pattern, one I wanted to make a difference with. Ken had hired an assistant for me despite my protesting. He was surely concerned about my hospitalisation for the duodenal ulcer, and told me that the doctor had phoned him, telling him how seriously strung up I was. An assistant was his way of helping. I remember Ken as a gold dollar guy. He was always available. I could swing by any time to ask him for help. He was experienced and had some management theories of his own. One was:

If a thing goes wrong at all, it will go wrong all the way down the line.

I never forgot that observation. It was to prove itself true time and time again. The cure, I figured, was to get things right the first time, finish en klaar, so that was how I operated from then onward. I took more time to consider things properly, think them through from the outset, but once sure, I would press home.

The pattern I had seen with my assistant was one that I felt guilty of myself. All of my knowledge of the job had come from only three people: Ken himself, and the two Moodley brothers in the rear office, BS Moodley and SS Moodley. They shared the same second name, Soobramanian. BS was Brahmadevan and SS was Sathananthan. What a pair of powerhouses these brothers were! Nothing ruffled them. It grew on me that my assistant was spending most of his time in the rear office, and I realised that I had done the same for my first year. We were both schooled in the rear office by the Moodley brothers.

I was not privy to the budget, nor to salaries. Ken told me where I stood in relation to my budgetary limits: I was well ahead, my mistake costs were minimal, and operation costs were well within budget. All those good things. I had no idea who was earning what, and it stayed that way until one day I asked Ken if he realised that the Moodley brothers constituted a risk, in a way. He was unsure of what I meant, and heard me out.

What I meant was that it had come out during a conversation when BS gave me a lift home that he was looking around for another job. School fees were a battle, as was everything, even though his wife was working too. I understood that I was battling because I was a beginner in the game, but it was a shock to hear this pleasant, rather brilliant, and very principled man saying how hard he found it to meet expenses after a couple of decades in the business.

BS explained to me that the shipping and warehousing business in Durban was a small world. He had friends and relatives in the same line of work, and they all talked. He knew what Jack’s Shipping paid their clerks, what Rennies paid theirs, what Safmarine paid. When they upped their salaries, BS said, he would make his move. This was because our firm tended to play “wait and see” and would only raise salaries when kind of forced to by the other players in the game.

This was a shock. I could not see a happy working life without BS around. He was too helpful, too generous with his time, too indulgent with everyone who came his way, and an admirable teacher for the less experienced clerical staff. There was sometimes a queue at his desk of younger clerks waiting for his direction. It was the same with his brother, SS. Lying awake at night worrying about them leaving became a thing—not one I enjoyed. It grew into, as old Winnie would have said, a situation up with which I shall not put.

Satha later gave me a lift home, and it was like playing the same record. He was watching the salaries, and preparing to make a move too. Life was getting too hard for him in this firm.

Well, that just meant I lay awake in bed all the longer. This wakeful rumination had its good side: work was like a bit of a rugby scrum all day, with little time to think. Lying awake at night was a chance to set a plan for the following day, and to enjoy a chuckle at good and fun things that had happened during the day. At the best of times, it was an operation that swung along easily with the help of these two men.

They reminded me of a big band in their way. I loved big band swing, and no big band can swing more than its drummer and its lead trumpet. I came to see these two brothers as the drummer and the lead trumpeter, and a dark side crept in. The question that grew in my mind was: how will we manage without them when they make their move?

It became a question I did not want to answer, so I began to put it to Ken. He was slow to see it my way as a risk. At first, he played the old management song: “no one is indispensable.” Others, he said, would rise up and take charge given the opportunity.

Uncivil Service

However, there followed a series of incidents with one difficult client in particular, an irascible Joburger who tended to deal directly with either of the brothers, rather than through myself or my assistant. Ken found this irritating. His system, he repeated many times, was that all clients should observe “channels of communication”. Managers love phrases like that. The thing is, it didn’t work out that way. The irascible Joburger didn’t know me, and didn’t want to.

Further, under apartheid, Indians simply could not say no, and this overweight, florid, bad-tempered Joburger would drink and eat his way through a week, only to realise he had done nothing and needed to make up for it. The trouble was always that he did this nearly at the close of business. He was a manipulative, conniving bully, and that was why he dealt with the Indian staff. They would always do his stupid, late, troublesome bidding.

This client, more particularly than anyone else, became a difficult issue. Ken and I never got heated, but in a discussion one day, I pointed out that if he was not prepared to get on the phone to this dyspeptic client and tell him to his face that he should observe our channels of communication, then nothing would change.

I had a nickname for this client in my mind. In the back offices of my mind, he was named Bullyboy—part bully, part boy—because of his screaming on the phone. I don’t like screamers, but for the first time had to swallow that and find a way to deal with the guy. Not that I did. Bullyboy contacted either one of the Moodley brothers directly, and apparently had no intention of doing it any other way.

For that as my reason, and further because quite by chance (a document left open on a desktop) I discovered that the Moodley brothers were on salaries that were close enough to only ten percent of my own … Well, what was this? It was just plain evil and wrong.

When I put it to Ken that way, he still fended it off as “the way things are, just get used to it,” but I detected a slight discomfort. He was a fair man, and ultra-logical. I raised it every few days, and one day, a Friday, Bullyboy had been at his worst. He would scream on the phone at five minutes before close of business for us to despatch goods to him in Johburg by passenger train. The Trans-Natal left Durban at 6:00 PM. To locate the correct cartons, prepare and label them, and get them to Durban station was near impossible. Bullyboy didn’t care.

“Your problem!” he would scream.

Talk about ruining people’s weekends. Soon after one of these episodes, he paid us a visit. What I found was a florid, very overweight man, a walking heart attack waiting to happen, with the smelly stench of incompetence and boozy perspiration oozing from his pores. It was a Friday. He was due to fly back to Johburg that evening, and typically had a screaming bout before he left, demanding a quantity of cartons to be on the passenger train “for me to collect tomorrow morning”.

Yeah, right, I thought. No way this guy was going to be up early enough on a Saturday morning to go anywhere near the railways.

I had had enough of him, and a short rant to Ken ensued. He decided to placate me by taking me to the Berea Hotel for an after-work beer. That did cool me down, but it also loosened my tongue, and I confided that I felt “not cut out” for this. Bullyboy gave me the screaming heebie-jeebies, literally. I explained that I had thought my responsibilities were to include seeing to the storage and handling of cargo, not fielding incompetent, obese drunks who throw their large weight around.

Aitken-Smith understood, though he shot back that handling clients would likely be something I would face in any job. On the subject of the Moodley brothers, I told him how grateful I was to them, and how wonderfully patient and efficient they were, and reiterated my disgust at finding they were earning so little. Ken appeared thoughtful about that, but we had been over it before, and I left it. Further than that, we put the thing behind us and had a pleasant couple of sundowners. I was in time to catch two buses home.

Back in a Band

One happy thing that had happened at about this time was that Chris Roering had invited me back into his band, and most weekends were spent staying with my mother in Pietermaritzburg. Performing was a different kind of stress from my job, so I was happy, and the money really helped.

To my incredulous surprise, within weeks of this unpleasant Friday, Aitken-Smith announced a pay increase for me. There were three increases for me during that year. I wondered whether the Moodleys had also had increases. Early the following year, I was promoted to Warehouse Administrative Manager. Ken retained overall responsibility until Eric Farley, Group Warehousing and Transport Manager (who operated from the same building), ratified his transfer to IT, and Ken moved to Head Office in Aliwal Street, Durban.

It was a shock losing his ongoing support and easy ambience. I liked his style. He was not a “meeting man”. We both tackled stuff immediately and on the fly, and sought to improve things fundamentally to avoid any recurrence. Without him there, I felt truly alone, but soon enough I had other challenges on my plate.

A Striking Change

Some activists had gone head-to-head with “Tiny” Frame, who owned a large textile group, some of whose factories were in Claremont Township, Pinetown. Strikes followed. This was a new thing, since that sort of industrial action had been made illegal for decades. The strikes soon spread to the harbour, and naturally that included Maydon Wharf, where I worked.

I arrived a bit later than usual one morning, having gone for a haircut at a barber who, unusually, opened at 7:00 AM. He was quick and I got to work by 8:00 AM, only to find the entire street outside our offices filled to the sides with chanting Zulus in tribal dress, with shields and assegais. I walked through the throng. They looked peaceful enough to me, and strikes were nothing new to me after four years in England.

On my way to finding the spokesman, Charlie, I cast a glance upstairs to the office block. Several white faces peered down at the scene from fanlights in the gents’ toilet. They appeared incredulous at me walking through the crowd of workers. I am pretty sure most of them thought I would be slaughtered on the spot. I found Natal colonials to be like that—to hear them talk, the Battle of Isandlwana was just a hundred days ago, not a hundred years or more. Many talked of the Zulus rising in revolt one day, whereupon they would slaughter us in our beds.

I found Charlie, and asked what it was all about.

“We are striking for more money, Mr Cook.”

Well, I can’t say I was surprised. Although I was not privy to the payroll, it was obvious that pay was structured in such a way as to force everyone to do overtime in order to come out. As I turned to leave Charlie, he asked me to wait. He said there was a problem: there had been a request by the police for the workers’ leaders to come forward.

“What should I do?” asked Charlie.

I didn’t have to think for long about that.

“Get three guys who know absolutely nothing, and send them forward.”

He wanted to know why. Why not the real leaders?

“Because,” I said to him as quietly as I could, “there is a real chance you will never see those men again.”

I meant it. SA was not as bad as Mozambique, where the police were known for total impunity with the “vanishing” style of discipline, but this would not be the first time in our history that people would mysteriously vanish. Charlie gave me a very hard look.

“I am sorry,” I said. “You asked, and I truly fear what these people are capable of.”

With that, I turned and made my way upstairs. Predictably, the white staff upstairs were deeply suspicious.

“How can you just walk through a marauding impi of Zulus like that?” they asked.

I brushed them off. “They didn’t look dangerous. Most were smiling. And I know them all.”

No more was said, but I found them many times looking at me from across rooms, eyes a little slitted. I didn’t think for a moment they would leave the matter be, and I was right.

To make things worse, I was on the platform of a warehouse siding the next morning when a large gang of armed Zulus chased a terrified worker toward me. I got him behind me and said:

“Nobody is going to die here. If you want to kill this guy, you have to kill me first.”

They melted back into the warehouse, but not without glancing dangerously back at the blackleg, whom I knew to be a Pondo. Doubtless they took that as just another convenient reason to do him in. One or more of the white staff must have seen this incident, because someone brought it up later in a rather snide way.

“You and the Zulus have an understanding, I see,” he said. It was not kindly meant.

The Other Kind of Firing

Some weeks after the strikes, I was called to Farley’s office. Farley himself was away overseas on business. In the office were a bunch of managers, headed by George Clarkson, Regional Manager, who was over from Head Office. They were there, he began, to talk to me about my “costly mistakes”. I had indeed made one costly mistake, but Aitken-Smith had told me there was a budget for such contingencies, and I was way under budget.

It was a short meeting. I was handed a rather worn and fingered envelope and told my services were no longer required, and I was to leave the premises immediately—not even allowed to return to my office to pick up my personal effects. I argued rather bitterly, but then lost control, and realised I could never win against these guys.

In a fit of rage, I walked to my office purposely to spite the order not to, and chucked what little I had into a plastic bag. There were a few pens, a copy of the Shipping Act, some staplers, and the like. When I left my office and walked through the open-plan area to the front steps, nobody met my eye. I got in my car, drove home, and waited brooding and plotting until my wife Frances arrived home.

I had so loved this job. It felt like a logical step up from labouring in England. I had gained four healthy salary increases in the space of a year, and been promoted near the end of my second year. What I saw was a job for life. We would buy a house and retire on a comfortable pension. Boy, was I wrong!

It was a calamity in our young married lives. In the meeting, George Clarkson had told me that I was unlikely to get a job in shipping in Durban ever again. I brooded and brooded. My job options in shipping and warehousing were thus limited to positions in other ports. It meant that I would have to move from Durban, or start from rock bottom in another field in Durban. That would mean beginner’s pay again, and it seemed to be far too much “sod’s luck” for me to contemplate.

By this time, with the hiring of Dawn Dexter, our new vocalist, the band had taken on a new focus—from a mainly instrumental dance band playing standards to a five-piece playing pop named “Down to Earth”—and Chris was talking about taking the band on the road. The weeks went by, and I could not find the merest sniff of a suitable job. I lowered my standards, and still found nothing. Looking back, I let myself be traumatised too much by old Clarkson. To this day, I regard him as a dolt, just clever and tall enough to exert authority on people, but, like so many people, incapable of an original thought - in other words, not quite a fool. But close.