Memory Project: The .22 Pistol

During my childhood I saw my mother in tears on many occasions. Her distress stemmed from hardship and homesickness. Separated from her family by 6000 miles, in a foreign country on an outlandish continent she often felt lonely and deprived of both physical and emotional support. It was a struggle bringing up three young children on the meagre income my father could provide, and at times she would become tearful. It was always the same lament containing recrimination aimed at my father, and vitriol for the hostile environment and the horrible people she shared it with. Why had he forced her to leave family and friends and come to South Africa where she knew no one, and then, just as she was settling down, why had he insisted on dragging her and the children off to this godforsaken place?

It took her a good 20 years to shake off her homesickness and chronic nostalgia for London and the English way of life. I used to think my father had made a huge mistake in bringing her to Africa. Right up until after her death I held the notion that she just wasn’t the pioneering type. But in the last decade or so I have come to realise just how strong and adaptable she was. Considering her background and her gentle nature, it must have taken a great deal of bravery to endure some of the demands that were made on her.

One of the ordeals that she had to endure was being left alone with three young children for a week or two at a time while my father was away in the bush. Admittedly there was little crime in Gwelo in those days, but the fact that my father bought her a gun is an indication of how nervous she must have been at night.

The gun was a Beretta .22 pocket pistol. It was so small it looked like a toy, and the cartridges were tiny. When he brought it home, he showed her how it worked, and set up a tin drum against the kaia wall to shoot at. She fired a few shots but was clearly reluctant and apprehensive, and relieved when the exercise was over. She used to sleep with the loaded pistol under her pillow, but I doubt whether she would have been able to use it had there been an intruder.

After my father’s death My brother asked me if I was interested in taking over the gun, which was unregistered and therefore an illegal firearm. Foolishly, I declined and now regret it. It would have been a valuable memento and I know my son would be keen to try firing it. Maybe Alan still has it stashed away somewhere?

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Nursing Notes

Henry Fuckit (my alter ego) worked as an orderly at Groote Schuur Hospital in the late 1970s. When he applied for the position he was interviewed by Matron Sharp, who described in much detail the duties of a nurse and what would be expected of him as a nursing assistant. She also issued him with a warning.

“In order to cope with the emotionally and psychologically distressing aspects of caring for the sick a certain degree of objectivity and detachment must be maintained. This is natural and healthy. But there is the danger of losing empathy for the patient and falling into the trap of regarding the sick person as an object and not a real person. Once this happens it is easy to see the patient's behaviour as irritating, or disgusting, or pathetic, and deserving of contempt and ridicule. Should you reach this state of callous lack of compassion your own humanity will be in serious jeopardy.”

Henry’s final interview with Matron Sharp.

When he handed in his notice, the briefest of missives which started with the words 'I hereby', he had the distinct impression she had been expecting it. Her face betrayed no surprise, or any other emotion. But she took too long to read it.

'I would like to thank you…' He really shouldn't talk shit to this woman. This was a good woman. 'My three years is nearly up and I must move on. The long and winding road, you know. I've been keeping a record of my impressions.' From his breast pocket he produced a piece of foolscap folded in half and half again, and waved it in front of her. 'This is my eight-page notebook. I've filled a few of these; quite a few.' He returned it to his pocket. 'I have written them up neatly in an exercise book, something like keeping a diary. I wondered if you'd care to look at it - some of it's quite amusing. You could browse through it, look for bits that appeal to you. You might find it interesting, see the hospital through the eyes of an orderly. Of course, I'm no Samuel Pepys or James Boswell. Just bits and pieces I've jotted down during quiet moments in the ward. Thirty escritoires to choose from. I've conducted many an interview from the overbed table parked at the foot of the bed. Did you know Hemingway preferred to write standing up? I suppose it could be considered a trifle unethical; a violation of privacy, trust; contravening the Florence Nightingale Pledge, especially the bit about holding in confidence all personal matters committed to my keeping. A bit rough, too. You might find some of the details just too explicit, the verbatim reportage embarrassingly exact. Just turn the pages, skim through it and pick out anything that catches your interest. You might find it tiresome, pointless, depressing. Like reading a Samuel Beckett novel, drivelling on about nothing in particular except that it's all rather desperately funny and wrist-slittingly nihilistic. Feel free to slam it shut and push it aside with a grimace of disgust. I'll fully understand if…'

'Mr Fuckit. I would like to read it. Thank you.'

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Memory Project: W Martin Contractor

What prompted my father to move to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 was the news that good money was to be made from carting gravel for the construction of the country’s expanding road network. He went ahead on his own and my mother followed a few months later with us children. He probably chose Gwelo for its central geographical position.

He worked for about a year before acquiring a 5-ton Bedford tip truck and going into the transport business. He drove the truck and, being a mechanic, did his own maintenance and repairs. He called himself W Martin Contractor and my mother kept the books. I still have her Cash Book, Ledger, Journal and Analysis, and it appears that the business lasted from April 1957 to October 1959. In those two and a half years he was away from home much of the time, spending a week to two weeks in the bush before coming back for a weekend.

He must have done quite well at first, because he bought a second truck and employed a native driver. However, he had joined the gold rush a little late and by 1959 most of the roads had been built. When the work dried up he sold his trucks and took a job at Afrox before moving to the CMED, where he worked on Gwelo Municipality’s trucks and earth moving equipment. Then he tried going it alone once more.

This enterprise involved buying second hand cars, doing them up and selling them at a suitable profit. I can remember one type of car that he overhauled and refurbished, there having been three of them. It was the Citroen 11 CV, a stylish and sporty looking car with a long bonnet, headlamps on stalks, running boards and a boot that was moulded to fit over the spare wheel. The bonnet was hinged down the middle and opened like a pair of wings, and the gear lever protruded from the dash and was moved in and out to change gear.

I sometimes helped him to bleed the brakes and clutch by getting behind the wheel and pumping the pedal until he called out from under the vehicle to hold it down while he released the trapped air.

This business did not flourish, and by the end of 1962 the future for whites in Rhodesia was looking increasingly uncertain. In 1963 my father packed his suitcase and boarded a train back to South Africa in search of work. He first went to East London and stayed with ex-Rhodesian friends, Ivan and Madge Kernick. Unable to find a decent job he served a short stint as a battery salesman and then headed for Cape Town.

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Beyond Redemption

The war in Ukraine has confirmed my belief that as members of the human race we will never be able to suppress our brutish tendencies and that civilization is merely a veneer that hides our true nature.

 

About a year ago I wrote a 30-page story entitled Vermin Control, in which The Creative Force decides to exterminate all of humanity by making them smaller and smaller until they are shrunk out of existence. Henry, the protagonist, meets the Creative Force, which reveals itself to him in the guise of Gudd and Sutton. He pleads with them to stop the process but fails to dissuade them.

In this extract they give their reasons for deciding to wipe our verminous species off the face of the earth.

“Instead of learning how to resolve conflict through peaceful means, humans concentrated on using science and technology to invent increasingly lethal military hardware. When the Second World War broke out it became clear to Gudd and I that the human brain was now hard wired to choose force above negotiation and compromise when in dispute with those perceived as the enemy. When you used Science to invent and produce the Atom bomb as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction we were forced to acknowledge that the species was set on a course leading to self-annihilation.”

“But after the horrors of the two wars we did try to reform,” Henry said without conviction. “Surely the establishment of the United Nations Organisation was a step in the right direction?”

“You know how ineffectual that enterprise has been. Since its establishment that organisation has been helpless in preventing the Cold War, the Arms Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as a long list of other deadly conflicts around the world that includes several genocides.”

“I think that’s enough about their predisposition to pick a quarrel and resort to violence. Cut to 1980.”

“Right. I know you can’t wait to hit him with 2020, Gudd.” Sutton swirled the ice in his glass and took another drink. “By 1980 the nations of the world were as far from being united as when the UN got going after the Second World War. Not only that; we were dismayed to see that utopian socialist ideas were being abandoned as a ruthless form of Capitalism took hold in the West and was spreading fast. It was clear to us that the Communist countries would soon succumb to the materialism and selfish individualism of the Western economic system. And all the while you were making great strides in Science towards the development of ever more lethal ways of killing one another.  We could not but conclude that as a species you were well on the way to a final conflagration terminating in your own demise. That’s why we decided to pull the plug and leave you to it.”

“I can’t honestly disagree with you and put up a defence. But what caused you to change your minds when you revisited us 40 years later? Why can’t you leave us alone to die out as a failed evolutionary experiment?”

Henry was looking at Gudd, who appeared more than willing to put this representative of Homo sapiens in the picture.

“When we left in 1980 it was with a sense of disappointment and betrayal that felt something like humiliation. On our return we were shocked at the degradation that has taken place over four decades. Disappointment turned to loathing and then rage.”

“Rage? I thought you said you had given up on us? Were you secretly hoping we might have been mending our ways?”

“Not at all. We knew you were incapable of intellectual and moral improvement, and even though you were further down the road of mental and spiritual decline, we weren’t all that surprised. What shocked us was what you were doing to the planet. We had hoped to find that war and disease had already begun to reduce your numbers. Instead, the population had proliferated from four and a half billion to nearly eight billion, and that was in spite of the almost certain probability the new additions would be born into miserable squalor. It was as if you had never heard of birth control. You had chosen to disregard the increasing burden being placed on a finite planet already struggling to sustain your insatiable needs. You continued to grow out of control like a metastasizing cancer.”

“A metastasizing cancer?” said Henry. “That’s an appropriate metaphor. I suppose what you are saying is that a cancer will continue to grow until it has killed its host?”

“That is how we see it, Henry. To save the host we are going to have to zap the cancer.”

The full story, which is set in Pearly Beach, is available as a Word document for free on request. Email blindoldtoppie at gmail. 

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Down and Out

 

Half a century ago, at the age of 21, I travelled around the UK and Europe for a year. Because I arrived without any money, I had to take temporary menial jobs to finance my stay. I worked on building sites as a labourer, was a window cleaner for a while, and even spent time as a lavatory attendant in Amsterdam in order to pay my way from one place to another. At times I was obliged to live rough, like sleeping on railway benches or in cheap hostels frequented by individuals who were down on their luck.

About a year after returning to South Africa, a fellow traveller sent me a book with this inscription in it: ‘Hello there. I wonder, doesn’t this strike a familiar note?’ The book was Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and it did indeed resonate with memories of roughing it in Britain and on the Continent.

It is now fifty years later. A week ago I was sitting in my car outside Blue Bottle Liquors, when a man approached me. He looked exhausted and dehydrated, as if he had been wandering in the desert for a week without a hat. He said he wanted to buy a rooidoppie but was R5 short. Could I help?

As I handed over the coin, I asked him what a rooidoppie was. He said it was a plastic bottle of wine with a red screw top. When he emerged from the bottle store with his purchase I watched him make his way down the street to a narrow alley and he disappeared from sight.

It was then that I remembered the Orwell book and its depiction of Salvation Army refuges, squalid doss houses and grimy city streets. I tried to imagine the kind of life endured by the man I had just helped to buy a bottle of booze. What condition would I be in, I wondered, if I had fallen on hard times and was homeless? I concluded that by now I would most certainly be feeding the worms.

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Mr Jonah

“The Minister is on the line and wants to speak to you.”

“I can’t talk to the dominee right now. Take a message.”

“Not that kind of minister. It’s the government minister.”

“Is that Mr Jonah?”

“Yes, Minister.” He was standing to attention and his hand was shaking. “Good morning, Minister. How are you?”

“Now listen, Jonah. I have received a report that the abalone resource had been almost entirely wiped out by illegal exploitation. This state of affairs cannot be allowed to continue. I want you to set up a meeting with the poachers and tell them that if they don’t stop their activities, I am going to send in the Army to sort them out, once and for all.”

“But, Minister, with all due respect, we have tried that already and it didn’t work.”

“Don’t argue with me, Jonah! Obey my instructions, or I’ll have your balls on toast for breakfast.”

Mr Jonah, who was coloured, turned as white as a sheet. He knew that if he confronted the poachers, they would either laugh in his face or burn down his house. On the other hand, if he defied the Minister, he would not only lose his manhood, but his job as well. In despair he jumped into his car, raced at a reckless speed to Kleinbaai harbour, ran to the end of the wall and threw himself into the sea.

It just so happened that the whale boat, which was loaded, well, half loaded with tourists, was returning to the safety of God se genade. A crew member managed to gaff Mr Jonah as they passed him and he soon found himself lying on the slipway undergoing CPR. It was then that he understood that he had been miraculously rescued in order for him to deliver the Minister's ultimatum

A meeting was arranged with the leaders from Blompark, Masakane and Eluxolweni. He threatened them with the Army, and, as predicted, they guffawed in his face. Then they offered him 50 thousand bucks in cash and all the perlemoen his freezer could hold if he released their confiscated rubber ducks and air tanks. Of course, he had no choice but to accept, shake hands and return to the office.

“The Minister wants to talk to you. And it’s not the dominee.”

“Jonah, I have just got back from my trip to China, and find that circumstances have changed, and the Army is too overstretched at the moment, so we will have to stop hassling the poachers until further notice. Do you get the picture?”

Mr Jonah got the picture. It struck him, then and there, that he, the minister and the poachers were all equally vrot. This was how people behaved the world over and it was impossible to change human nature. Only God could do that.

(Taken from Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes.)

 

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Crumbling Infrastructure

While I was building, I learned a few things about reinforced concrete. Eventually, depending on proximity to the sea and thickness of concrete cover, the steel will begin to corrode. As it does so, it expands and cracks the surrounding concrete, allowing more moisture to penetrate and speed up the process.

To slow the corrosion and extend the life of the structure, the rusting steel should be hacked free of surrounding concrete, wire brushed and painted or sprayed with a rust retardant. After closing up with cement and sand plaster, the outer surface of the building should be sealed with a waterproof paint or membrane. In this way the life of a structure can be extended for several years before it becomes unsafe and has to be demolished.

As has been widely demonstrated in South Africa, neglecting to maintain infrastructure leads to the inability to provide basic services to communities.

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