Luck
Those who, reading this, think I have had a hard life, are right. It doesn’t matter, though. It is a happy, interesting life to look back on. Given that I have never been able to set aside any money, you may be thinking I am most terribly unfortunate. Not true. What follows is a list of close shaves.
I am the luckiest of people, for the wonderful people I have known, the generous angels like bass player Trevor Donjeany who gave his entire gig fee to me when he found me weak with hunger in Yeoville, Maeder and Lesley Osler, who gave me a home when I found myself at a loss when son Donovan suddenly had only a week to get to Montreal for his new job, and the almost countless luminaries who have sustained me with their insights, humanity and understanding through the years.
Bombs and Lightning
I know: it sounds like a band that Axl Rose might have started but, let me list.
Bomb #1
How many people get to tell of “My First Bomb”? It’s like Art Kelly’s words of his Shortest Blues Ever Written:
“I didn’t wake up this morning”.
Most “My First Bomb” stories do not get written because they do double duty, along with “My Last Bomb”. Bomb-ees don’t get to write much. My first happened on my first ever “away” gig with a band other than Chris Roering’s. As related in the Pietermaritzburg chapter, this was with the Shange Brothers in Umkhumbane (aka Cato Manor).
Bomb #2
I turned right from Church Street, Pietermaritzburg, into Commercial Rd, driving a 25 seater SADF bus carrying members of the SADF Entertainment Group Big Band. As I pulled up at what Maritzburg seniors called “The New Town Hall” (the old one had burnt down in 1905), and after passing the Anglo Boer War Memorial on the corner, a bomb went off at the Old Magistrates Courts, across the road. They are now the Tatham Art Gallery.
I was crawling the bus at the time, easing past the town hall portico. The portico did fine with the mayor’s limo, but I did not fancy my chances with the bus. Quite gaga from the explosion, I managed to ease the bus to the curb, to check the passengers and survey the damage. I was a little stunned, and my hair was full of tiny shards of glass from the shattered driver’s window.
Apart from being shaken, everyone else was fine. Buddy Slater picked himself up from behind a bench had had been sitting on, awaiting the rest of us, and bemoaned the state of his tux. He had been sipping from a carton of milk, and his tux and face were dripping with its contents.
We all survived, unhurt, dazed but physically unharmed. Bombing campaigns do engender a sort a faltering in the day for long years after, though. A glint of a windscreen can flinch one’s muscles involuntarily, for the big bang that I hope never follows for you or anyone else.
Bomb #3
After a divorce, I ended up in what the media terms “reduced circumstances” and could no longer afford lodging in Troyeville. I was still in the SADF Entertainment Group Big Band, and moved to men’s single quarters in the army base at Voortrekkerhoogte. One evening, after spending the afternoon reading quietly in my room, a rather spartan enclosure about as homely as the average jail cell, I went outside, had a look at the evening, stretched and turned to set off for supper at the refectory.
The next thing I was dizzy, confused, and stone deaf: a bomb had exploded, not close, about 100m away, but it knocked me silly, and the blast threw a cloud of dust a hundred metres into the air. Five more bombs followed, all further away. What does one do? It all happened so quickly. I lurched to the single quarters entrance steps and sat with my head in my hands, trying, as the saying went “to figure my Arthur from my Martha”. Trumpeter Eddie Payne, who lived in the neighbouring room, appeared, checked I was ok, and others arrived all eyes wide and exclaiming.
After supper, I lay on my bed thinking “I really must get in touch with my brother, and tell him to stop bombing me”. Absolutely nobody in the army could know that he was in London, working for IDAF, and a member of the ANC in exile. I suppose bombs will have this effect, but I then got the giggles, because I knew that Al would have retorted “Your fault for joining the bloody army, you gink”, or something affectionate like that.
You probably already realise I am a Peter Sellers fan, now able to understand the connection and significance to me of Inspector Clouseau’s:
“Spesh-ee-al deuleevarie, un beumb”
Bomb #4
Bertha St Braamfontein.
Lightning #1
At about six years of age, and standing in the open front door of our Burger Street home, on a baking hot afternoon on a seemingly cloudless day, a bolt of lighting hit a tall tree in the garden opposite and slightly to the right, in home of an elderly couple we knew as Mr and Mrs Dando. The sound it made was louder than any blast I had heard until then, louder than the Howitzers’ 21 gun salute to the Royal Family in ‘47 (I screamed and cried all the way home, much to my dad’s disgust - he was a bombadier in the RNFA, and had wanted to stay and watch the rest of the parade). I, at two years of age, was branded a “sissy”. Oh, well.
The tree in the Dando’s back yard split into two for around a third of its height downwards, leaving each half of the trunk listing crazily on each side of the vertical, and smoking, with even some little flickering flames, though the tree did not catch fire. Neither rain, nor cloud were visible. Even at six, I was sure there had to be clouds for lighting to happen, because I had by then seen more than a few dramatic Maritzburg storms. I went to the back verandah. Looking out was like another world. Dark, dense, heavy clouds bucking and heaving with flashing lightning, another crash went off, and I backed away, relatively quickly, geologically speaking! Sunny in the front of the house, dark and storming in the back. Unforgettable.
Lightning #2
Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays were my canoeing days. Back from school, I would raise my Gladwin and Antrobus “Bird Dog” double, and bearing the weight of the cockpit on one shoulder, set off at a trot downhill to Victoria Bridge in Alexandra Park. where the Dusi Canoe Marathon used to start. It was a winding, twisty paddle all the way through the banks - this was in the days before the river was canalised to Massons Weir, and then on Low Level Bridge, where heft the canoe again and run home to St Patricks Rd. It would have been easier with a partner, but I was a difficult, hot-headed, bad-tempered impatient canoeist, and I could not keep a partner for long. As punishment for being bad-assed, I reconciled myself to going alone.
Paddling in the rain In calm water just below Masson’s Weir, lightning struck a tree 10 metres away: deafening crash, blinding flash, but it’s over too fast for one even to lose balance, and that canoe was quite broad in the beam. I caught a nasty hit of static electricity. It leaves the armpits aching and sore, I suppose from lymph glands. There wasn’t much point in getting out of the river. Both banks were treed with very tall gum trees, and I made for the lower bush a bit further down the river. I didn’t think the smaller indigenous trees would attract as much lightning. A minute later, delayed shock hit me, and I beached the canoe on some rocks above a small rapid, just to catch my breath and calm down.
Lightning #3
My friends Trevor Bartlett and Raymond Frost were canoeing the same stretch, and I told them I would cycle to Masson’s Weir and wait for them. They made very fast time from Victoria Bridge, or else I dawdled, but I got to the weir barely in time to wave at them as they passed, going really well.
A storm was overhead, and I wanted to ride home quickly. I had parked my bike against a gum tree. I mounted the bike. About 4m from the tree, pedalling hard to get out of soft sand, lightning struck the gum tree like yet another bomb, and down I went. I felt shock up through my arms, and lay on my back with sore arm pits again, until my breathing eased. There is no way to tell anyone how loud ligjhtning is from a few metres away! It is total decibels! Feeling the current up my arms like that, I rather dramatically thought the lightning had actually struck me, through my handlebars, but soon realised it can only have been static, or I would not be alive. The blast of lightning left behind a stench that I later realised, in chemistry classes at school, must have been nitrogen peroxide, from burnt air. Another escape from that great big welder in the sky.
Lightning #4
Washing dishes in the kitchen at our Chartwell House one day, and just as with my childhood Burger Street lightning incident, look northward out of the window ahead of me, I could see only blue sky. But out of nowhere came a swish then an explosion, and I found myself on the seat of my pants, back against our fridge on the other side of the kitchen, once again with that bruised feeling in the armpits.
Lightning had struck the lightning conductor, standing 2m away from the window at the sink. I only got a jolt, but it was enough to throw me across the room. There was a slight concave ding on the fridge from my head!
Lightning #5
As I neared the offramp to the N3 by pass, heading for Sharonlea, Johannesburg, a storm broke. Within a minute, it was almost impossible to see where I was going. Driving my most loved old Ford Sierra 2.0, I eased down the decline toward the Jukskei River Bridge but then - my wipers failed. I can just hear my father’s voice saying:
Well, that’s nice. That’s bloody nice.
I could see that it was daylight, that’s all. So, peering intently in the rear view mirrors, I pulled over. The wipers appeared to be jammed. Opening the door to free them, I was completely drenched within a second. I freed the wipers, and as my hand left them, lightning struck the roof of my car - a hiss and then the usual ten ton grand slam blast, and “gone in the stench of nitrogen peroxide”. I collapsed straight backward and lay gasping on my back in the left lane, huge drops pelting. They felt like hailstones, and that was good, because it helped revive me.
There was no traffic oncoming in the lane I was lying in, but a huge 18 wheeler was bearing down on me. I was not quick enough. First the front, then its horse and lastly the trailer wheels drove over my pony tail. I was left with a sorry pony tail that looked like a sawn off kettle cord. I am not big on appearances, but … Eish. Oy Vey. O me miserum. Eheu. I did not enjoy the me I saw in my car’s side mirror, as I lay back, flopped into my driver seat, panting and pale, for twenty minutes before driving on. Ghostly, ashen and bedraggled, I stumbled into the house at Sharonlea and sank onto the couch.
Note to self: Stop being a lightning conductor.
Note to father in heaven: Ok, ok, ok, you were a bombadier. Stop bombing me?
The Jaspers
As promised in the Foreward, what follows is about the other Jaspers in my life:
Jasper No 1
This Jasper was a male nurse at Greys Hospital. He already had a mention in he Pietermartizburg chapter (Part 3), so I will say no more about him.
Jasper No 2
This Jasper alreday was mentioned in Johannesburg (Part 2), but I did not say quite enough about him. He was the sound engineer working the recording console at Downtown Studios where the African Jazz Pioneers recorded their first album in 1988. Koloi “Bra Kar” Lebone was the producer.
I owe Jasper a huge debt. We had put down “Mzabalazo”. I had taken a solo, and Bra Kar was adamant that we should keep that solo, that I would never improve on it. I had actually, very nervous, cracked the first note of that solo, and by cracked I mean … badly cracked. I fell off the note.
Well, now, jazz is not always polite. Sometimes you accept a thing, warts and all, and that is how I felt about that solo. I did not enjoy Koloi keeping it, with such an obvious clanger on its first note, but he had good reasons. First, he said it fairly blew him away, and I would never improve upon it, and second, we were out of time, down to the last permitted minutes of studio time. There was no time even to fix it. I resigned myself to a lifetime of listening to a first note clam! We packed up and went back to our lives. At least, I thought, the record was in the can. That was worth a lot.
Imagine my surprise, on receiving my first copy of the CD, when I listened back and found that the redoubtable Jasper had fixed that clanger. I have no idea how he did it, and I don’t want to know! That solo on Mzabalazo remains my personal favourite solo ever. Months later, riding overnight to Durban in minibus, Sam Tshabangu complimented me on it. He said “That solo … you have that … sound. it takes me way, way back.”
Jasper No 3
I spent a lot of my youth walking all night, roaming every street in PMB. Naturally, I kept to so-called white areas, because wandering about in areas meant for other people would have been disrespectful. I had too mnuch energy, but I also suffered from bouts of depression, and endless walking, sometimes with quiet chanting, helped relieve that. In time, I realised that the one fed the other, leading to TED: a personal Jasper-ism standing for Tiredness Equals Depression. Walking made me more exhausted, and exhaustion made for more depression.
It was good to tackle a hill, so one of my favourite walks led downtown through to Victoria Road, where I would cross the railway track and head past Prof JCW Heath’s house and walk to the top of Roberts Road, a stiff climb, up to the bus terminus, where I would turn and head down again. Heath was long gone from that house, but his ex-wife, Jane, and their two children lived there still.
One pre-dawn morning found me rounding the bound, ready to tackle the hill, when I spotted a man, looking strangely intent in the morning mist, leaning against a railing beyond which I could see Voortrekker Hoerskool, where my friend Ian Coetser had been a pupil.
He greeted me. I was always shy, but also always curious, and interrupted the walk to take up a place against the railings he was resting an arm on.
“I am Jasper Swain”.
We shook hands.
“I saw my son again”
I did not see how this was unusual, and was about to say so. Father and son, the usual, right, but he spoke again, with a strange, distant but intense look, and I shut up.
“He comes by here often. He must like the spot. Of course, many people have died here”.
He said that with a general wave, taking in the notorious bend. It was statistically not in the same league as Old Howick Road, near the Royal Show grounds, for accidents because it was residential, where Old Howick Road was the main Johannesburg road in the days before the N3 bypass was built. Still, many vehicles had come unstuck on that tight bend at the bottom of a long, steep hill, especially in the days before air brakes became common. Driving a heavy vehicle downhill in the days of unassisted drum brakes must have felt like diving in a WWII kamikaze Zero fighter on steep downhills like those.
“Did your son have an accident on this bend?”
He shook his head.
“He died on the Johannesburg road”.
He may have told me where. I forget. What came to mind was a spot between Colenso and Estcourt. I knew why: there was a particular point on that road where one could look to the right and see a perfect bowl shape, a saddle between two hills. I loved to stop and look at that, whenever I travelled on that old road.
“I know this may be hard for you to accept, but … I come here, and to other places he likes, to speak to my son”.
We talked for a while, and parted after he told me that he was an attorney. I had actually seen the brass plaque outside his law office in my mind when he introduced himself, picturing it in Harwin’s Arcade. I was never quite sure where I had seen it. I meant to head to Shuter and Shooter and look for his book, but I forgot. Decades later, I found the book “On the Death of My Son” at a second hand book sale, and bought it.
I really felt for Mr Swain. I had said so when we met, but he was surprisingly upbeat, saying it was not that bad, since he was still in touch with his son. That remains the only time I ever met him.