I've had a great life...its been a roller coaster ride....but backwards...super exhilarating on the uphills and terrifying on the downhills ...this is the tale of that experience on planet earth
Two events stand out for me during those first two years. The first was my Barmitzvah. I had taken extra lessons, gone to Hebrew school and prepared for ages. My Torah portion was Deuteronomy Chapter 4 vs 1-24
The barmitzvah itself was remarkable in one respect. I remember getting my tallit from my dad and him hugging me and kissing me on the cheek. It was the only time I remember my dad showing me affection up to that point or since, and it quite surprised me. Temple Emanuel was a reform shul so we read rather than sang the prayers. I completed the experience which was really to run the entire service and felt a great sense of accomplishment for doing so flawlessly. There was the Barmitvah Party where we had a DJ host a dance and I got to kiss a girl… I remember kissing either Gail Lashanski or Belinda Finch that night, but I cant recall which. We called it “getting off” as in “Gail, do you want to “get off”?” Then we would go outside, find a spot on the grass and lay down and kiss….we were so immature and it was very naive, but cute. I still have two gifts I got for my barmitzvah. One is the Guinness Book of World Records that I thumbed the pages ragged, and the other is a book called the Twentieth Century which I read cover to cover many times…its a big coffee table book, and it really informed me. In the Guinness Book, I especially loved reading about the crazy records people were up to in the Human Endurance and Endeavors section. You have to remember that this was LOOOOONG before the internet…so this sort of thing was magical.
The other major experience I had in the first couple years of high school was to go on Soccer Tour. This was organized by Benny Stalson at our temple, and he pulled together a bunch of kids from all over. Mostly kids who were from “the wrong side of the tracks”, and we would get on a train and go to Natal to play in soccer tournaments. I played my natural position as a central midfielder and captained the U-12 and then the U-13 teams the following year. The tour included kids up to U-16, but I only went those first couple years. It was a relatively inexpensive tour, so my parents could afford it. The journey was amazing. About 100 kids, many of whom were the kind of kids who look for and get into trouble, on a train, staying in hotels, free to roam a coastal town….We played in Durban, East London and also Port Elizabeth. It was so much fun. I remember the gambling on the train playing Klaverjas (pronounced “Clubby Ace”), a game that looked like, but was nothing like Bridge.
I had great experiences traveling with and playing on these soccer teams. I met and made friends with kids I would never otherwise encounter. Hardscrabble kids, many of them. They came to my defense once in East London, when I got picked on for being a Jew and some big guys started pushing me around. My soccer buddies stepped in and sent them packing. I came back thinking I was a tough kid. I remember that there was this one kid Alan, who lived in our apartment building, and he was always looking for a fight. So I agreed to meet him outside one day and have that fight he wanted. I remember being nervous standing there feeling like I was going to get hit, but I balled up my fist and hit him in the nose before he moved and he ran away crying. It was a relief. I don’t even think I hit him very hard. I felt bad about it though, and later I sought him out and took him to the cafe around the corner and got him an ice cream.
The cafe around the corner was run by a couple Greek guys who I became friendly with because I literally spent all my free time there playing the pin-ball machine “Doodlebug.” I still look for that machine whenever I see pinball machines.
I became a master of that machine and could ratchet up the games super fast. If someone was playing, you would put your tickie (5 cents) on the table top indicating you were next. I used to laugh because some people would put 20 coins on the table, and I would put one. I literally could play for hours with one coin. I would often sell my games to the next person.
I also used to spend my afternoons when I wasn’t doing gymnastics, playing soccer in the park across the street. There was always a game. Typically, there were about 20 African men, local workers, who would play and I would join in. That’s where I learned a lot of my footy skills.
I have two main recollections of my time in the Marin View building. Neither of them happy. The first was that my dad was depressed. His business had failed and he knew himself as a lesser man. He took a job with the Jewish Board of Deputies, which was essentially a fund raising job that he did at night. He spent most afternoons taking a nap. We were not terribly engaged, except we had dinner each evening and he did come to watch me perform in gymnastics. I remember that he tried to make a go with a multi-level company called Holiday Magic and he gave me Napoleon Hill’s book “Think and Grow Rich” which I read (and applied) much later in life. For most of my teen years, my dad occurred to me as sad and depressed. A shell of his former self.
The other memory was ultimately sad. I took a call on the phone one day from a stranger to hear the caller say that Pixie was dead. Pixie was my dad’s younger brother. He had been a big game hunter and was killed hunting elephant in Zambia. Pixie and Iris had three daughters, Cindy and Shelly who were twins, and Linda who was a couple years older. I told my dad that Pixie was dead and the anguish that caused him made me cry. I learned later that Pixie was killed by an elephant who ran her tusk through him before throwing up down wind. She then stomped a large area of bush looking for him, but he was eventually found up against a deserted ant hill. Very sad.
My experience of the move was that I went to Jewish Summer Camp hosted by our Temple youth group leaders, in Margate, near Durban in among the sugar cane fields. I met my first ever girlfriend at camp. Simone Sylvester, who I used to go to movies with when we got back home. I remember our first date was to see the move “A Man Called Horse” and we sat in the front row because even though it was a matinee, and even though the theater was empty, those were the tickets we had, and there was an usher who literally stood two rows behind us watching us for the whole movie! Only 12 years old, we were so shy and innocent that we took pains to pretend we were siblings so people wouldn’t think badly of us.
Going to camp involved a two day train journey to Natal. There is something magical about train travel during those days. The clack-clack, clack-clack sounds that became a rhythm that persisted. The smell of train coffee, so sweet, in the morning. The passing wilderness that changed constantly given South Africa’s scenery. The puffing of the steam engine. There is nothing quite like falling asleep to the rocking rhythmical sway of the train as it steamed through the darkness. Waking up in Natal, tropical temperatures, palm trees, sugar cane fields….made the arrival special. I remember pulling into the station in Durban, and in the excitement having to wake up the deaf kid in our compartment because he slept through it all and was going to miss the bus ride to camp.
Camp itself was fun too. There was a meal Hall, where meals, and singalongs, and movies were shown. The campers camped in canvas tents, 4 to a tent. There was inspection every morning and the tent had to be spotless, every article of clothing perfectly folded. I hated inspection. The camp counselors always found some small defect to punish us for. Punishment tended to be carrying a big log back and forth across the soccer field for an hour while the other kids had fun. I hated that, and I seemed to be unable to avoid punishment literally every day for the duration.
One night, I woke up literally covered in ants. My cot had sunk one leg into an ant colony and I ran screaming from ant bites to the shower and washed millions of ants it seems, from my body. I was traumatized by that experience. The trip home seemed really long. The train stopped for no apparent reason in the middle of nowhere for ages. People, mostly Africans riding in the less than luxurious third class cars, would get off the train and play soccer nearby till the guard blew his whistle, and then everyone would clamber aboard as the train slowly gathered momentum.
Sadly though, when I returned from summer camp, a two week stay, we had moved from our home to this second floor apartment in Glengazel. The biggest impact on me was that my dog, Sandy, had been given away. I was devastated. The apartment, a 3 bedroom two floored apartment, was about three quarters of a mile from the high school, and the bus stop was on our corner of the apartment, so I could roll out of bed, grab a slice of toast with fish paste on it as I walked out the door, and jump on the bus to get to school in minutes. I had a harder and harder time getting out of bed as I grew into my teens, and catching that bus always seemed much harder than it should have been.
Anyhow, that first day, I put on a brave face and went off to school at Northview High school. I was a little scared and a little excited for the new adventure.
High school was actually very scary at first. It was big, much bigger than the primary school. We moved around between classes. There were both lots more kids and most of them were bigger and older kids. It seemed like every older kid was a bully who bullied younger kids. For example, on my first day at school, I went into the bathroom and there were about 10 big kids in there smoking (actually giant kids in my eyes).
“Hey kippie , come here” an ugly giant kid said
I walked over to him shaking in fear
“You gonna tell anyone you saw us smoking?”
Me: “no”
“You better not or I’ll fuck you up, understand?”
Me: “yes”
He looked at me standing there shaking in my brand new school uniform. Spotless with a shine on my shoes. I looked at his scruffy jacket, stained shirt and threadbare tie. Then he reached down and buttoned my jacket, suddenly and forcefully he pulled my jacket down over my shoulders so my arms were pinned. He picked me up (I think I weighed about 80 pounds dripping wet at most) and he hung me on the hook on the back of the bathroom door.
The boys all were guffawing as they snuffed our their cigarettes and left me alone hanging on the back of the door.
The school bell rang and I could hear feet heading down the hall to class. Then it was quiet. I had tears in my eyes as I looked around the empty bathroom thinking about what I should or could do.
I was about to yell for help when the door swung open and the gym coach,Mr. Bam, came into the bathroom. I didn’t know him as the gym coach or even his name yet. I caught his eye and he gently took me down.
“Who did this?” He asked kindly.
Me: “I don’t, I don’t know sir. It’s my first day” I stammered trying not to cry.
“Ok laddie, go to class”
“Yes sir” I brushed away my tears and went off to find my class.
High school scared the shit out of me.
The game the school played was rugby. There was no soccer team. The rugby coach, who was our PE teacher, said “this is a rugby school, don’t even say “soccer”, understand?” It was intimidating but we learned how to play rugby during PE. I liked the contact although I was small, and I took to the position of scrum-half in part because of my size and in part because I got to run the game. The PE teacher was also the rugby coach, and he told me to turn out for rugby.
The school uniforms were different too. At primary school we wore short pants, a short sleeved shirt and a tie. In high school we wore long grey pants, a long sleeved white shirt, a navy stripped club tie and a navy blazer. Being 12 years old in the same school as 18 year olds wearing the same uniform was very intimidating. I literally walked around terrified.
We were placed in a class and we had 2 years to get oriented. Standard 8 was the first year you could get school colors (like a letter for a sport). All the blazers were navy blue, but “half colors” were illustrated by a yellow striped navy blue blazer. Full colors was represented by a white blazer with a ribbing of yellow and navy string. Very few students had either half colors and fewer had full colors.
In addition to a class, we were assigned to a House. In primary school the houses were named after antelope there was Roan (red), Kudu (blue), Eland (green) and Sable (yellow). In primary school the big house rivalries were track and swimming. At the track meet the tug of war was the most fun to cheer for.
In high school, the houses were named for great men of science there was Lister (blue), Edison (green), Newton (red) and Fleming (yellow). In high school the houses competed for everything it seemed. I was assigned to Lister. Blue. I had been in Roan in Primary school. Red.
You got a small colored pin to wear to denote your House. The House used to meet occasionally to learn cheers and establish team spirit .
There were so many things I was interested in. All new for me, I played rugby and cricket and field hockey, I did gymnastics and track. I fenced and I joined the cadet band playing the bugle. I sucked at the bugle, so I switched to the snare drum. Thats where I learned how to do a double diddle. I never really was able to do a real drum roll. When my kid got a drumset later in life, I marvled at his ability to do that. I am still very keely aware of drum solos in rock bands. I listen to them with a mixture of awe and amazement. In any event, we used to form up and learn to march and play every Friday morning. Plus we had to wear a cadet uniform. We were literally being trained to be in the army.
I turned out for fencing. It seemed magical. Those trippy uniforms with that wire mask and we got to fight with swords (foils)! Loved it. I got quite good at it too.
I joined the chess club. Weekly tournaments against other schools and a weekly meeting to learn new strategies.
I turned out for cricket and actually was a reasonable off-spin bowler. I took extra coaching in a batting cage to become a better batter and bowler. Mr. McCorkhill was the cricket coach. He was the groundsman who took great pride in keeping the fields immaculate. Its hard to emphasize this enough. The way the school was organized was that you had the buildings at the top of the hill, then there was an embankment with steps down to the cricket field. The cricket field doubled as the track and also as the hockey fields. At the far end of the field as you sat on the embankment, was the tuck shop to the right. The tuck shop was upstairs and there were change rooms downstairs. To the right of the Tuck Shop was the swimming pool. Below and down the hill of the Tuck Shop were the two rugby fields oriented end to end. On the left side of the cricket pitch were the practice nets and the maintenance shed. It was common to watch the workers, often Mr. McCorkhill himself, mowing the lawn to keep the pitch in perfect shape.
Mr Mac, as we called him, was a Scott with a thick accent, and he could not pronounce my name easily, so he just changed it to “Hole-in-the-ground” or “chasm” variously depending on his whim. He was a good cricket coach who encouraged me to develop my spin bowling. Through the years, I played on the A and B teams variously depending on who was there and who was missing.
I was low in the batting order on the A team and a late game bowler. In cricket, the fast bowlers generally bowl first and the spin bowlers later as the batsmen are less skilled. My best batting outing on the A-team was to score 38 runs to win the game coming in 7th in the order, and my best bowling outing was to get 3 out in 4 overs to win the game. In my senior year I was on and off the A-team and when I was on the B-team I captained it. In one game, we literally got the entire side out for 3 runs. We got lectured for being too gleeful for our celebrations on getting the whole side out for only 3 runs at the next practice. Sportsmanship and all that.
I joined the photography club. The club was organized by Mr. Bowie, the Biology teacher. He was an excellent photographer who was nationally recognized. We used to enter slides into a slide club that was judged by experts each month. I fancied myself as a fashion photographer and my friend Isabel Gariezzo was my model. In the club itself, we met weekly but had monthly black and white competitions with judging of images from the shooting assignment and guidance for composition and contrast. We were also strongly encouraged to submit slides for the judged events. It was out of this participation that my friend Eddie and I put in dark room at my brother Derrick’s house in their servants quarters (they didn’t have servants.)
I turned out for gymnastics. The tryout was in the Hall, there wasn’t a formal gym just then, but one was being constructed. There were lots of kids at the tryout.
They had us trying out doing some basic tumbling tricks. Hand springs and head springs for example. All of this was easy for me. Then he asked those of us who could do do flick flacks (backward handsprings) and only a few kids would even try. Of course I nailed it.
Gymnastics was coached by John Bam on the men’s side and by Lynne Boardman in the women’s side. The tryout was being managed by some of the older kids, and it became pretty obvious right away that I stood out. Pretty soon the coaches and all the senior kids were watching me execute the tumbling passes. After the try out the coach came to me, and he recognized me from being the kid was hanging on the back of the door, and he said “hey Kippie, you going to come do gym?“
I nodded, and that was the start of my gymnastics career really. The gym club met every afternoon after school for a couple of hours, and the practices were with boys and girls. Once the new gymnasium opened, we used to go at recess and either do some practice, if an event was coming up, or are we used to play one-bounce over a volleyball net with a soccer ball. My friends Errol and Eddie and Jeremy and I used to play soccer or do gymnastics pretty much every recess. By the end of my high school career when I was a top-notch gymnast representing Southern Transvaal and South Africa, I would often have several girls come to watch me practice, which I found kind of enjoyable. I was as bit of a show off. I’ll have more to say about gymnastics later but suffice it to say that gymnastics was an important part of my life in high school.
There was built in fear turning out for rugby. We felt tough pulling on the jersey but there was definite nervousness too. I remember the coach who called rookies “Kippie” saying “when that ball comes out, hit him kippie, wrap him up” – I was trying out for scrum half – number 9 – the link between the forwards and the speedy backs. Kind of like a quarter back to the fly half – the central back who ran the team.
I enjoyed youth rugby. I liked the contact and enjoyed the strategy, and I was smart enough to run the game. I remember one game, our first match with another school, and I was the scrum half on the A team.
In rugby, one weird thing is that when the other team scores on you, the restart is to give them back the ball in good field position.
We got our asses handed to us by the other team. It was like 60 to 0. We got humble very quickly, and our fly-half, Clive, broke his collar bone. He was a tough guy too and it spooked all of us!
The first two years of high school were uneventful. I figured out pretty quickly that I didn’t like French or Latin and so I went into the sciences. The track I chose was the Math/Science track. This meant that over the final three years of high school, I took a year or algebra, a year of trig and a year of geometry. I also took a year of botany, a year of physiology and a year of zoology. I also took a year of geology, a year of meteorology and a year of physical geography. In addition we had to do English and Afrikaans which included literature. composition and vocabulary. Additionally we had to do both South African and also world history as well as physical education.
At that time, we had two servants who were resident, Abbiotte, the Gardner, handyman and server, and Rebecca, who cooked and cleaned and did laundry. We had another servant named Rose, who came weekly to do the ironing. When we moved into an apartment, Rose continued to work for my parents.
To be fair, I had a very rudimentary appreciation of Apartheid’s impact on everyone. I knew then that black Africans needed to have a “pass” book to be in “white areas”. I was aware of the “whites only” signs everywhere, on busses, in movie theaters and so on. I had it that blacks were not so much inferior, but rather, they were the “servant” class. To be sure, I had many interesting conversations with the servants, and got their wisdom in those talks. In many ways, Rebecca was my surrogate mother. She made me breakfast, made my lunches, made my bed, and cooked for our family. I spent many hours in the kitchen watching her cook and chatting with her.
Our yard was my playground and Abbiotte kept it up beautifully. I remember him mowing the lawn with that green electric power mower, watering the flowers, pruning the trees and the rose bushes. I learned a lot about gardening by watching him work.
The other adults in my daily life were my sisters Sue and Carol. Derrick was off at boarding school till I was 5 and then he went off to England to go to college after spending a year at home, but Susan and Carol were in high school. They both went to Waverley Girls HS, and wore their blue school uniforms to show it.
Sue had a yellow room just off my room, and Carol’s room was pink just beyond Susan’s room. Susan and Carol used to fight like crazy. I remember hair pulling, shoe throwing, screaming, biting and scratching fights between those two.
My mom and dad used to argue a lot in those days. And if my mom was mad, she would say “don’t call me mom, I’m not your mother! Call me Matilda”… my dad would go silent for days or even weeks. It seemed like someone was fighting with someone most of the time.
As I reflect on what it was like to be a small child who is so confused by the mixed messages of being told you are loved, then the fear experienced during the many violent beatings, then the feelings of abandonment as love is withheld, in sort of a circular pattern that occurred more or less randomly, I can see now, how that ongoing experience impacted my life in predictable and sad ways. As an adult I came to realize that I maintained a deeply and strongly held belief that I was simply not lovable.
When the girls were a little older, and started dating Malcom and Rex the fighting between them died down a lot. I loved Malcom and Rex. They were like big brothers to me. Malcom was cool. He had a cool car he used to drive too fast. He was a big Arsenal fan and obviously a big influence on my allegiance to Arsenal Football Club. Rex was cool because he was super chill, and he had a great sense of humor. He and Malcom got along great and made us all laugh so hard. Rex was a Liverpool fan. Derrick supported Leeds United and Howard supported Manchester United. So, the English First Division, (now the Premier League) was always a hot topic in my house.
When Derrick came home from boarding school to finish his last year of high school at Damlin College (kinda like a community college), he slept in my room, and his friends Peter Stayne, Howard Petrook and Isaac Misrache were always around. Howard was like another member of the family. So between Derrick and Carol and Sue and Rex and Malcom and Howard and others, there were always lots of people at our house, and I was the kid hanging around and watching and listening and participating where I could.
I was much younger than everyone so I had to grow up fast, which was possible with everyone around being much older. I got exposed to what they were talking about, what they were listening to, and what they aspired to. And because everyone was concerned with themselves, I sort of skated along under the radar.
My parents often had cocktail parties and there I was mixing drinks for all the guests. What’s weird now is that nobody seemed surprised that a 9-year-old kid could run a bar, make a scotch and soda, or a gin and tonic. It was, I suppose, where I first developed my current interest in mixology. The first drink I was allowed to have as a little kid was a beer shandy. Basically half beer and half 7 Up. I think I was 10 when I tried my first one. It’s what all the kids drank at social events all the way until I graduated high school (the drinking age in South Africa was 18 years old.
Life was pretty idilic during my primary school days. We weren’t wealthy, but we had a nice house in a nice neighborhood, we had servants. We belonged to the Country Club, and my dad was a popular figure both there and among their friends. As far as I was concerned, we went on great vacations, we ate well, and we lived a life of privilege. Not wealthy, but well off. As a child I had no worries other than when I’d see my friends, we would see what sort of mischief we would get into. we had very active imaginations.
I came home from school one day, age 11, and heard the unusual sound of someone crying coming from upstairs. Curious, I went upstairs, and followed the sound to my parents room. I opened the door to find my dad sitting there alone, on the edge of his bed, tears streaming down his face.
It took me a minute to take in what I was seeing. He sat there not seeing me, crying hard, with a gun to his head. He kept a small pistol next to his bed. I knew about it and had taken it out to look at in the past, but there he was, gun to his temple, and his finger on the trigger. His eyes were closed and he had tears running down his cheeks as he sobbed.
I dived at him and wrestled the gun from his grasp, and because I surpised him, I was easily successful in doing so luckily. I set the gun down and held my dad tight. Then a broken man, although I didn’t know it just then, he sobbed uncontrollably on my shoulder for a long time.
We didn’t discuss the situation ever again.
He was deeply ashamed, I’m sure.
After that I learned that my dads business had failed and his partners had left him holding the debt. The story is that his brother and a friend had walked away Scott-free but we lost everything. Including our house.
I am struck by the similarity to my own experience right now. Losing everything in middle age and having to start over. My dad never really recovered. He spent most of the rest of his life depressed. He never really achieved the stature he had earlier attained after that. When he died at age 79, he was a shell of himself.
Right around the time things went bad for our family, I had started Hebrew school and began studying for my bar mitzvah and the Temple had a Big Walk to raise money for their building. First prize offered was a brand new bicycle of my choice. Well the bike I had at the time was a crappy 3 speed red bike with straight handle bars. I wanted a green banana seat bike with chopper handle bars. I set my sites on winning that bike and I raised the most money of all the kids by getting sponsored for about $20 per mile and I walked 10 miles.
One of the highlights of my young life up to that point was going to the factory and choosing the exact bike I wanted and then riding the 15 miles or so home following my dads car. I remember that ride. There was a long hill and I fell far behind, which was a problem because I didn’t know the way home, and it was getting dark. But at the top of the hill I saw my dad had pulled over and waited for me. I was relieved. I was so proud of that bike, and rode it to school every day till we moved to a small apartment across town.
During my last year of primary school there were two situations that happened while on the soccer team that had an impact on me.
The first situation occurred after a game where a kid had scored an own goal. I was the goalkeeper and I had an emotional reaction to being scored on by my teammate. It wasn’t anything that I took off the field as I recall, but the coach, a Mr. Muller, was exorcised that I had excoriated my teammate on the field. He pulled me aside at the next practice and told me that I needed to apologize to the team publicly or he would drop me off the A team onto the B team. Well at the team meeting, which took place in a classroom, Mr. Muller was speaking about something related to the tactics of the team when he suddenly asked me if I had “anything to say”. A little confused, I thought he was referring to the conversation he was just having, and I said “no sir”. He said “Fine. You are dropped”. I was stunned, I had written a speech to give to the team about sportsmanship and teamwork and an apology for being out of order during the game the past week. But there it was. I got dropped to the B-team. I resolved to be the best player I could be even as I was dropped. The lesson in that experience, which was really to be appreciated later. was that I had as much fun on the B-team as I did on the A-team, if not more.
The other experience actually occurred when I was on the team bus heading to an away game. Mrs. Muller (not related to the coach) was driving the van and my neighbor Grey and my friend Gary were in the front seats of the van. I was at the back of the bus. We were getting close to the field, the van slowed as we came to an intersection. I leaned over the back seat to put my watch into my kit bag. Then the world started spinning. We had been hit by a truck. When the vehicle stopped moving, I was on my back with a small cut in my head. I jumped out the now broken window and ran to the front of the vehicle. Mrs. Muller was in the street up against the curb. She had been thrown out of her door. Gary and Grey were in the front but seriously banged up. Both kids had broken bones. I stayed with Mrs. Muller till the ambulance arrived. Looking around, I surveyed the scene and the weirdest scene was that the truck had gone though a fence and spun around and fallen on its side, but the contents of the truck, a single cow, was actually standing in the swimming pool of the house whose fence was breached. I got real lucky.
The school year, which in South Africa was January to December, came to an end and I went off to summer camp. When I came back two weeks later, we had moved. I went with my mom to shop for my new school uniform. It felt like I was growing up because instead of shorts, we wore long pants, and instead of a shirt with short sleeves, we had long sleeves. It was kind of exciting.
During my primary school days, my dad seemed larger than life. He took us on trips, like to Durban where I caught my first fish on the pier, got exposed to the wonders and creatures of the ocean at the Durban, especialy the massive Groupers that were in the salt water aquarium. I ate ice cream on the beach, and played in the surf always wary of the Bluebottles, jelly fish and shark nets.
One of my favorite trips was the time we went to Paradise Island off the coast of Mozambique where we snorkeled, water skied and went deep sea fishing. To get there we first had to across the border into Mozambique on our drive to the coast. The border crossing was always the same. A long line of cars that you pushed to the front so you could save gas, then a little hut and a pole across the road that the border guard lifted so you could pass after they checked your passports. Then the drive through the bush to Lorenzo Marques, now called Maputo, where, as I recall, we are Prawns Peri Peri in a restaurant in a tent. As I recall, the prawns were Tiger Prawns, so big I could only eat 6! Then, on to the coast where we met and then flew with Iris and Laddie on his small plane to the island. That holiday was the best adventure. I loved the island. Everything about it. I remember climbing a palm tree to pick a green coconut. A local yelled at me but I plead innocence because I had permission. He took his machete and cut the green coconut open and we shared the water.
Paradise island was magical. Azure blue water. Crystal clear. Abundant fish and cowrie shells. In the evening the local fisherman would lay their catch out on the beach and we would barter for fish. The hotel chef would then prepare the fish for our family dinner. I just loved it all.
I went out on the deep sea boat with my dad one day. It was mostly boring (I was 6) but I have one great memory. My dad was fighting a fish. I looked over the side as the fish neared, and the deck hand reached over to gaff the fish with a long hook. I watched as the red fish on the end of the line was gaffed. But instead of impaling his hook into a red rock fish looking creature, he gaffed 150 pound Hammer Head Shark that took the fish! All of a sudden it was mayhem as he held on to his hook with all his might and the skipper pulled out a shotgun and shot the shark allowing them to muscle it onto the deck.
The next year we went to Barazuto on the Mozambique coast. It wasn’t the same as the island but it was still fun.
We went to Durban and stayed at the Surf Crest Hotel on the beach. I almost broke my neck on the trampoline there. But i loved swimming in the salt water pool, eating Red Toffee Apples, and playing in the surf. I remember getting stung by blue bottles though. Painful. The aquarium was astonishing. The Grouper are really massive fish, and I remember those and the tiger shark in the tank and as I noted, I caught my very first fish at the pier in Durban.
Durban was cool. Natal, the province where Durban is located, is the home to the Zulu Nation. The Zulu are a proud people who are decedent of Shaka, King of the Zulu. They are very colorful people and one of my enduring memories is of the Rickshaw Rides on the beach front in Durban. The bead-work on those Rickshaws and headdresses are amazing.
I LOVED going to the game reserves to see the big game. We always used to count the big game we saw. The best was to see a kill, or at least a chase. You get really good at looking for animals. Its hard to see them sometimes since they are so camouflaged. You learn little tricks, like if a leopard is in a tree, it forgets its tail and its tail hangs down, so you look for the swinging tail.
I remember being chased by elephant while my dad filmed his 8mm film of the elephant crossing the road getting as close as he dare. Imagine my mom backing up while my dad hung out the open passenger door with his camera mounted on the door yelling “Faster! Faster!”
My dad was vibrant in those days. He raised money for the school to build a swimming pool that they named after him. He ran, as I recall, to try to win the Mayor of Johannesburg seat. He lost. He was the President of Allenby Country Club where I swam and he played Lawn Bowls. In short, he was larger than life to me then.
I have this memory of a big crate of oysters arriving and us all sitting and shucking oysters and eating them at a big table in the yard. I remember that day because my brother Derrick was home from the army camp, which I thought was cool. I wore his helmet all day, and he had brought his rifle home which was very impressive. My dad shot it aiming at some eucalyptus trees off in the distance. It was very loud!
We went on a trip with our standard 5 class (6th grade more or less). We went to the caves at Umshangla rocks and to the Kruger Park. What I remember is that my parents gave me 3R for a weeklong trip. I spent it at the first store we stopped at about 3 hours into the trip. So, I was….. deprived… my friends all had pocket money but I didn’t. It was my first awareness of being poor. Well I say poor, but I mean in comparison to my friends. We had so much more than the native Africans, that it was hard to feel poor. It really was colonial living. I am somewhere in this picture…
My progress in gymnastics had my parents bring me to a diving club that met at Ellis Park on the other side of town. I more or less hated it. We had to get up super early and the water was really cold. I wasn’t fond of diving. The pool was impressive. There were 2 one meter boards one on either side of a 3 meter board, and on the deep end side of the dive pool there was a 5 meter and a 10 meter concrete tower.
One of my worst experiences as a child occurred when I was standing at the edge of the 10 meter platform trying to get my courage up to jump when I was pushed off the board … I fell a little awkwardly trying to get my feet underneath me and luckily wasn’t badly hurt. My ego was mostly bruised. I’ve struggled with height since then. I’ll say more about my gymnastics later.
In between 1964 and1972 I went to Bramley Primary School. I played soccer, cricket, ran track, swam and dived, and of course I did gymnastics at the Wanderers Club. In high school I added squash, tennis, fencing, gymnastics, cricket, rugby and field hockey. My life was one sports season to the next. My best friends at that time at school were Martin Hurwitz and Graham Rodin and Eddie Sender, in addition to my neighbor friends Grey Stead and Anthony Glass, and the son of one of my parents friends, Michael Egdis.
On Sports Day at Bramley, we assembled in our House (think of Harry Potter) and the House I was assigned to was Roan – we were the red house. My dad was always present at the school. Here he is dealing with the trophy’s on sports day. A friend recently told me that he still remembers my dad at the school. You can see me as a 6 or 7 year old in these two pic, I am leaning forward in the first one, And walking with a Housemate on the field.
I loved sports day. It was so much fun
We used to fly kites in the afternoons at the school, go swimming and diving at the Kingfisher Pool around the corner, play soccer on the play field and play Gaining Grounds (a rugby ball kicking game), and ride races on our bikes when we weren’t playing organized sport. We also played tons of board games, monopoly especially, and we had a Spirograph that I loved playing with. We did puzzles and played cards. The main card game we played was Clubby Ace (more on that later). It was a complicated game that emulated the Bridge that my parents played. We also read books and magazines and listened to the radio. There was no TV to distract us. We had to use our imaginations.
My dad had a Dry Cleaning Facory called Swift Dry Cleaning downtown, and it was always a treat to go to the factory. Mom worked in her rooms (what clinics were called in South Africa). What I remember about visiting her practice “Hosey and Chasan” that was her partner, Francis Hosey. She was always very nice to me and although I never knew her well, she did have the most amazing collection of matchbooks in her house. They had a bar that they had stapled literally hundreds of match books floor to ceiling on every vertical surface. Anyhow, the elevators in my moms building had mirrored walls and they were just out of alignment enough so that you could see thousands of iterations of yourself. I used to ride up and down in the elevator to stare at that. The dentist I used to see was also in that building…as well as the dried fruit place.
One time when Derrick was home from high school before he went off to college, I took a one Rand note (a dollar) I found on the desk in our room (he was asleep) and went after school to the corner cafe, where I became the yo-yo champion, to buy soccer cards.
I used to collect soccer player cards. They came 3 to a lucky packet which cost 3 cents each. I spent about 66 cents and purchased all the lucky packets they had. My little suitcase was filled with cards and gum!
I had a stack of cards and came home feeling a little guilty. I “hid” the change around the back of the house and hid the cards in the Wendy House. Rebecca, the maid found me out back and took me by the hand dragging me inside. She spanked me with my mom on the phone yelling “hit him again” over and over.
By the end of the night, Rebecca, Derrick, my mom and dad had all spanked and beat and whipped me. It was the most severe beating I recall receiving as a kid. Literally hours of getting beat by multiple people. I spent a lot of time under my bed the next few days. My safe place.
At school we played this game where we would stand 20 feet or so away from a wall and have to flick the card to the wall. Whoever was closer, would keep both cards. I got really good at flicking cards so eventually nobody would play me. And I had a fat pile of soccer cards. I was a big fan of Powerlines at that time. They were a great side with a Brazilian midfielder named Santoro who was tricky as hell. My love affair with Powerlines lasted till high school when we got season tickets to Highlands Park.
Coke, Fanta and Sprite made branded yo-yo’s and the store would have these Brazilian guys, who were ridiculously good, run yo-yo competitions outside the café. I was often the winner, I could do all the basic tricks and do loop-the-loop over 200x. The prizes varied. Usually it was yo-yo strings, or vouchers for a soda, or even a new yo-yo, which I wanted badly because my yo-yo was always so beaten up.
I spent hours and hours playing with the yo-yo. I picked one up recently and could still do many tricks! I’ve still got it! LOL
(This guy is who I always imagined I was…I could do some of what he does but he is insane
But in reality, this guy is demonstrating the tricks I did.
One of my pure joys from that era of my life was to go to the professional soccer matches. My uncle Anthony was the radio commentator of Highlands Park, and I used to go to the games with John, and we would get to sit in the commentary box. Often at half time, John and I would go down to the dressing room and ask the players to sign our cards, and we often got lucky. My strongest memory for some reason, is the side Addington FC, a team from Durban that wore white like Leeds.
My auntie Stephanie was involved in show jumping, and I spent many an afternoon with John and Mandy at the show jumping events. We used to search for horseshoes and play throwing games with those. I loved going to those events…the horses were magnificent and I still enjoy watching show jumping having been so close to it as a kid. Sadly I discovered I was allergic to horses and so I was never able to ride much.
I did have a tendency to get “up to no good” as my mom would say. For example, When I was 9, I was playing a game with a friend in my room pretending something or other and I had climbed on top of the cupboard – about 6 or 10 feet tall – Sandy, my dog, got excited about me being up there and put her paws up against the cupboard with all her force causing the cupboard to rock back and forth. Well I lost my balance and fell to the stone floor breaking my left wrist one more time.
My mom, bless her, heart, heard the screaming, came running and assessed the situation the conversation went
Mom: (screaming) “What are you doing?”
Me: (bawling my eyes out) “I fell off the cupboard”
Mom (spanking me) “What were you doing on the cupboard?” (Spank)
Me: (sobbing) “I think I broke my arm” (holds arm up)
Mom: (spank) “serves you right, get in the car” (to my friend next) “Go home!”
Food was an interesting thing for me in those days.
I usually ate millie pap and gravy for breakfast made by the maid. She used sour porridge and made the yummiest savory stew to go along with it. To this day I still prefer a savory breakfast. For lunch I often had a cheese sandwich or a hot dog sandwich or my favorite toasted cheese and tomato. Yum! I still make toasted cheese and tomato at every opportunity, and I have been working on a refined version of millie pap and gravy.
We also had a puffed wheat cereal that I ate dry by the handful. I hav enot been able to find anything like it in America.
My mom used to say that I “only ate three things”. Lamb chops, grilled prawns and Chinese food. Which was defintely true.
Sunday nights we usually had chops and chips (lamb chops and French fries) – I loved those meals, still do.
We had a formal dining room and ate dinner as a family served by Abbiott, the Gardner by day, white-coated waiter by night. My mom had a little bell and would ring for the servants to bring the next course or take away dirty dishes. We literally ate 3 course meals every day. Nobody was allowed to leave the table till everyone was done and I always struggled to finish what my mom dished up for me. I Remember people sitting staring – glaring at me really – saying “eat Neil” over and over while I ignored them. I sometimes would get my cold dinner from the night before, for breakfast the next day. It wasn’t always like that. We all used to fight over the bone marrow in the soup, the roasted potatoes, and the bread-and-blood drippings when Meat was carved. I still have a serious craving for those tidbits.
What is so odd about that, is that today I have a very expanded and developed palate. I eat pretty much everything, and my self-expression is that I LOVE to play in the kitchen!
During the year before I broke my arm, just 6 years old, I got to go on an ocean cruise with my parents, on a Union Castle Line cruise ship called The Rainer Dell Mar. It was a big purple ship with a red and black chimney and white masts etc.
I loved that voyage. We were gone a month in all. About 10 days to cross the ocean leaving from Cape Town. I remember departing and the thousands of colored streamers that were thrown from the ship to the shore. There was a band playing on the dock and people were very cheerful.
I had the run of the deck and made friends everywhere. A sailor taught me how to play the slot machines, and I made a fortune in 5 penny pieces called “tickies”. I remember carrying handfuls of coins in my shirt back to the cabin.
There was a movie theater on the ship that played several movies, one of which was Bambi, that I couldn’t get through because the fire scene was too scary for me.
I remember coming into Rio de Janeiro early in the morning as the sun was rising. The water, which had been brilliant blue, was brown as we entered the river mouth and the Sugar Loaf mountain and the Christ Statue looked over the city.
I remember bits and pieces from that trip. The hot Coco Cabana Beach sand, so hot, I couldn’t walk on it. I remember the castle in Uruguay, the yummy steak at the BBQ by the river in Argentina.
I have flashes of other memories as I write this, one being the Crossing the Line Ceremony on the ship. The sailors all dressed up as women with wigs and balloons in their shirts and were tipped into the pool after having shaving cream (I think) pies shoved in their faces. It was a big fanfare with Neptune being the judge and jury. Of course all the travelers were watching and laughing and applauding. Being only 6 I took it more literally.
Two tastes have stuck with me from that voyage. Thousand Island dressing, which I’d never had before, and Hearts of Palm which I just love, both alone and also in a salad. Its a real treat for me.
I remember one night late, close to the end of the trip, when I came out of the cabin to go to the bathroom and the whole ship was alive! My parents had put me to bed about 6:00 and I had no idea that anyone else was awake. I felt totally ripped off.
My youth was joyful. We were really the last colonialists. I was actually born in an English Colony, The Union of South Africa. I remember when we became an independent country in 1961 – I was in grade 2 of primary school 1966 when we got an oversized coin commemorating 5 years of independence from Great Britain. It literally made no difference in my life.
We lived in kinda a big house on Lynden Road, well it seemed big to me. There were servants quarters, near the kitchen, 4 almost- bedrooms, well really 3. Although Derrick and I shared the glassed-in porch, in truth, he was mostly gone, but when he came home, he shared the room with me.
Derrick was gone a lot, he was 12 years older than me, and when I was born, he was shipped off to boarding school in Port Elizabeth – Kingswood College I think. As a little kid I sure looked up to him and my sisters – worshiped them really. Derrick was close friends with Howard, and Carol was dating Malcolm for most of my recollection. Sue started dating Rex soon after Carol and Malcolm started dating. The both ended up marrying them. It’s crazy to write this now given that Sue and Rex are long divorced and both Carol and Malcolm died a few years ago (2016) and then Sue passed away suddenly in 2019. Her sudden unexpected death was truly shocking. I now that Sue passed away, it’s just me and Derrick left, and Derrick has recently chosen not to talk to me, which is so bizarre. Life is short. He was always a selfish bully when it came to me.
I was kind of a wild kid I suppose. Well not really wild, but more like curious and fully self-expressed. I have a couple of key memories: for instance I remember climbing, a ladder at age 6 or 7, and then continuing to climb to the high peak of the roof. I felt like the king of the world sitting there astride the peak. I felt pretty accomplished till I realized how high up I was, and then I was suddenly both terrified and stuck. The evening ritual at the time was that my mom would ring a “dinner bell” to get me in from around the neighborhood. I heard the bell. I yelled down
“I can’t come!”
Mom: (sing song) “why not?”
Me: “I just can’t”
Mom: “Where are you?” (still sing-song)
Me: “Up here!”
Mom: “Where?”
Me: “Up here!”
Mom comes out and looks up!
Mom: (panicked and screaming) “Stay put don’t move”
Luckily the painter was still there and he crawled up to the peak of the roof, had me climb on his back, and he climbed down.
Naturally I got thrashed for that. More on my routine thrashings later.
There are memories I have of setting the grass on fire once. I think I was 6 and we had this great vine of granadilla (passion fruit) between our house and the neighbors- Mr. and Mrs. White, and my friends and I used to spend hours climbing around he vine picking granadilla’s and eating the sweet crunchy nectar.
Well one winters day (Johannesburg had dry winters) my cousin Terry and I were playing in the back yard and we tied a rubber duck to the pole of the clothes line. It was a metal pole so I didn’t think much about setting the mound of dry grass and the duck on fire.
What I did not anticipate was that the dry grass would catch fire. That led to the trash cans behind the garage catching fire. That led to the dry granadilla vines that were above the trash cans on the fence catching fire. It all happened so fast that before I knew it, the flames were reaching to the sky.
I did the only thing I could think of. I ran away.
Well, I wasn’t allowed to cross the street at that age, so I “ran away” to the end of the block. I tried to persuade a well dressed African man to hold my hand to help me across the street (I had to hold the hand of an adult to cross the street), but he wasn’t having any of it. I was negotiating with him when my dad called – or whistled – for me to come home. Reluctantly I walked home, my head hung low. I knew I was going to get whipped.
My dad thrashed my behind till I was crying hard. He used to hit me mostly with his belt when he punished me. He was brutal. He sent me to bed .. it was lunchtime.
Corporal punishment was commonplace. My friends dad’s used canes, sjamboks (rhino hyde whips), paddles, and branches to whip them. Anthony’s dad used a sjambok, and Grey’s dad made him go and cut a branch from the willow tree in their yard. I was the lucky one. Throughout my life, I got hit by adults. By my parents, by my siblings, by my teachers, by the maid, and by the school Principle. I don’t think a week went by till I was finished high school where I did not get caned. Not one week. I got beat with a strap my first day of primary school, and with a cane during my senior year of high school. I had beatings at home until I was about 14. When I was 16, and my dad slapped me hard across the face, I stood toe to toe to him, coldly told him menacingly that “that will be the last time you ever hit me”. It was.
Grey lived next door, Anthony across the street more or less. We were famous friends. We built model airplanes together in the Wendy House, we had sand clog fights over the back fence pretending we were on ships of old. In Joberg, the dirt made these big clumps that we called a “sand clog” that, when thrown with enough force, exploded on contact. We used to use the metal trash can lids as shields and the clogs would explode when they hit them. Great fun.
One of my purist pleasures was to climb the Pussy Willow tree in the front yard while it bloomed, and play with those soft flowers. Being up there with the birds and the bees was heaven.
In the fall, we used to make kites and go up to the primary school soccer field and see how high we could get our kites. My record was 6 balls of string. The kite was literally tiny in the azure blue sky. Bringing it down and keeping the string from knotting was always a challenge, but we had a blast.
My brother came home from boarding school and was home for a year when I was about 6. He used to tease me. I had big ears. It seemed that my ears where the only part of my body that was growing! So he would say “Stand on the desk, and flap your ears and see if you can fly to the bed (across the room)”. And of course, because I worshiped my big brother, I tried. He and his friends had a good chuckle.
Living in that house was like living in a castle for me. I was tiny and the house seemed so big. It was the 60’s so there was sparse phone service. In fact, we had a party line, which meant that the phone had a distinct ring if it was for you, and other rings for other people. You could listen in on a neighbors conversation if you wanted. 5 homes were sharing a phone with us at first.
One day when I was about 6 years old, my dad said “let’s go” and we jumped in his car. I had no idea where I was going. We were going to a farm nearby to select a dog.
We needed a dog. We used to have Happy, a big white mutt with brown ears that showed up and stayed. Cheri was a French Pug, and my sister Sue had Cleo, a little black Miniature Poodle. Cleo and Happy died so my dad took me to get my dog.
I knelt at the edge of the wire pen and this little brown and black striped puppy with a short tail came scampering over. I immediately named her Sandy. I loved Sandy. Sandy was wild.
We sent her to Dog Training Camp, and after that, every week I’d take her to dog training class. Being South Africa, dog training class was training your dog to attack (black) people. We would set the dog off after a man running with an arm guard (a big hessian cover) and the dog would sprint 30 or 40 yards after the running man and launch himself at him taking him down. Those brave men used to only get bit on the arm guard. Amazing.
There I was, just a little kid, training my dog to attack black men. Thinking back on it now, it’s so weird. But gradually I got control of Sandy. More or less.
Sandy and I were inseparable. I loved that dog so much. She was my companion. My friend. My playmate. She slept on my bed and to this day I like the feeling of my dog laying on my feet.
I say “almost”, because Sandy would do stupid things. We used to have the whole family, and extended family, over for big Sunday lunches. Every Sunday. Roast beef or roast leg of lamb, roast potatoes, salad and always ice cream. Granny Annie, my moms grandmother would come over. She used to make these great perrogen – little Russian mince meat pies – that went great in soup. Well Grannie Annie was old and she walked slowly with a cane and Sandy insisted on jumping up to greet her and inevitably would knock her over. Occasionally she would get hurt. And both me and the dog would get whipped.
Another time I got into trouble was when I was about 5 or 6 years old. I came home from school and really needed to go number 2. I ran in and ran up stairs to the toilet at the top of the stairs.
I was sitting on the potty looking at the 4″ square white tiles and noticed that the grout was poking out…now I didn’t know what grout was, and there was no malice in my actions. Picking at the grout, a tile fell to the ground. I picked it it up and tried to put it back in place (I was completely ignorant of the process or method of securing a tile to a wall – I was 6). Two tiles came away and fell to the floor.
I finished my business, and flushed the toilet.
I picked up the two tiles and tried again to replace them…but this time 4 tiles fell away leaving a big grey hole in the middle of the wall. I was petrified. I knew I was going to get whipped.
I thought about it a minute and said to myself that “if the whole wall was the same color, nobody would notice”…..(6 year old logic)
I proceeded to remove every single tile…floor to ceiling…from the entire room. It took a while. Then I went and hid under my bed.
Needless to say, I got thrashed by my dad with his belt. Did I say he was brutal? He was.
One time I avoided getting thrashed because my mom and my sister came to my rescue. My dad thrashing me with his belt was something I hated, and he was so brutal that even my mom and sisters would cover for me. I tried to avoid it at all cost. The truth is he didn’t beat me often, but when he did, it was harsh. I was bruised for weeks.
The situation in question was that dad forbid fireworks. In South Africa, being that it was an English Colony, we celebrated Guy Faux Night. This was the main fireworks night that we had. There were always sparklers (which I was allowed to have) and at the end of the night, the organizers would burn a big straw man filled with fireworks on a bonfire. (Maybe the origin of Burning Man? – just a thought).
Well my dad was opposed to fireworks. He would say “its just like burning money”. He had strong objections. Well in spite of that, I always managed to talk my mom into buying me a package of “Tom Thumb” fire crackers. Small crackers that I could play with.
She would get them for me as long as I would light them at the bottom of the garden. Well one day I took the liberty of lighting one in the living room.
I didn’t notice it but a spark landed in the middle of my dad’s favorite chair. What happened was that it burned a hole in the middle of the cushion about 3 inches around. This was an unmitigated disaster. The reason is that every night, and I mean every single night, my dad would come home from work, go to the living room after dinner, go to his favorite chair, FLIP HIS CUSHION OVER, then sit and read the newspaper.
He did this every single day without fail.
I was in fear. He was going to thrash me for so many reasons (wasting money, lighting fire crackers in the house, and lying) and it was going to hurt bad.
My sister and my mom came to my rescue…for a very long time…..what they did every day for years…was tell my dad that they just flipped over the cushion for him….and he bought it every single day. I kid you not.
When we were packing for the move to America 12 years later, he saw the burn and asked about it and my mom said “Oh, than happened years ago ” and he just shrugged…I feigned ignorance.
I was sporty but small. I played soccer every day. I’m our back yard we would set up goals and play 3-and-in for hours. If my friends could not come over to play, I’d kick the ball 20 yards aiming at the clothes line, and I’d hit it quite often. If we weren’t playing 3 and in, we played one bounce, an elimination game allowing only one bounce between touches. We got pretty good with our feet. Often, after Sunday lunch, all the boys (I was almost always the youngest) would go play One Bounce in the back yard. I was given a yellow, full size, soccer ball for my birthday present one year, and we literally played the cover off of it. Soon enough it was no longer bright yellow, it was a mix between brown and gray.
Derrick was a big cricket fan and when he was home, we would put up a milk crate for wickets and he would bowl to me … when I got my very own new cricket bat it was like a magical day.
The bat was a white willow with a red taped handle, the spring went half way down the bat. I got a brand new kookaburra ball too. That deep red shiny ball with the single yellow stitched seam, and I used that ball to break in the bat by putting it in a sock and hitting the bat a thousand times
In the summer I spent most of my time with my cousins John and Mandy. John and I would play cricket in the back yard, and John and Mandy and I would play tennis or swim in their pool when at their house. Sometimes John and I would go to the Wanderers Club to watch Test Cricket. I recently watch professional cricket on the telly and wow, what a slow game it is. It does seem that the batters are better than they were because they seemed to just score a mad amount of runs, hitting the boundary at will.
I used to love spending time at John and Mandy’s because they lived near the Zoo and the War Museum. We literally spent all day there so often. I really became interested in war machines after studying the equipment there hour after hour for years.
John had a kids chess set and I became interested and taught myself how to play. I was about six years old at the time. I played with Eddie my very smart close friend who was my closest friend all through high school too. Eddie also did gymnastics with me and we also made our high school projects together.
I really grew up in the shadow of the war. Uncle Anthony, John and Mandy and Adrienne’s dad, was a Spitfire pilot who fought in The Battle of Britain. He always seemed larger than life to me. More about him in a bit. My dad and his brother, my uncle Neville, were in the South African Army infantry serving in East Africa during the war. I understand that my dad was somehow involved in guarding German and Italian prisoners of war in Kenya. It was here in East Africa that my dad developed his deep love of the African Bush, and through him, how I developed that same love. My dad was so proud of his time in the service that he married my mom in his army uniform.
We didn’t have TV growing up, there was no TV is South Africa until about 1976, so we either sat in the living room reading in front of a coal fire, or we listened to radio dramas, and we sometimes used to have movie evenings. Often it was my dad showing his 8 mm home movies, but as I got older, it was rented 16 mm movies, and invariably we saw black and white war movies. Films like The Battle of Britain, The Longest Day, and other black and white films glorifying WWII. I became good at running the projector during those days. It made me feel important to be in charge of the projector, changing reals and fixing skips. Those skills carried over first at high school where I often ran the projector when we had things to watch like the test match between the All Blacks and the Springboks (rugby), and then in college when I was still running the protector on the day I graduated at the graduation ceremony.
I also had an HO train set and a “Scale Electrix” car racing kit. The Lotus was my favorite car.
I used to set up the train – which took hours – and play with it when I could get the electricity to work, which always seemed difficult, and I also used to spend hours building a great race track for the cars and play with them either by myself or with friends. It often took hours because the I was into car racing from early on. Kyalami Race Track was near our home and my dad used to take me to watch the races. I remember being in the Pit on practice day one year, when I almost got nailed by an F1 Ferrari as it came into the garage. I jumped out of the way of the wing….it probably was not that close but it scared the shit out of me. I think it might have been this car…. I have followed F-1 since those days as a result of being at the track as a young boy. I am still a fan.
During those days I had already started gymnastics. I remember my mom bringing me to the Wanderers Club when she found me doing handstands and cartwheels. I was a little pipsqueak in those days but a little wild and fearless. I tried all the tricks and learned all the skills I could on all the apparatus but tumbling was my first love. We used to do these huge displays for people (parents and family members I guess) – and I was always a contender in the hand stand competition.
The instructor was a guy named Neville Graham who was a national team gymnast and he was also the son in law of my parents good friend Iris and Laddie who had this amazing yard with a fish pond and big trees where hundreds of exotic birds were resident. (I recall falling in the fish pond fishing for tadpoles when i was 3 or 4.) They used to feed the birds every day around 4:00 and it was like Dr. Doolittle. I remember being there one day when a peacock came to feed. It was amazing to see so many birds – all quite wild, including a peacock – standing patiently waiting for Iris to spread the seed.
On Sundays, my dad and his mates used to work on cars. Laddie had a pit so that they could get under the car to do oil changes and so on. I used to like hanging around and listening to the men talk about the engines. It was this experience that had me take apart my first car as an adult and try to rebuild the engine.
I was 6 years old when I broke my arm the first time. I was on the high bar and I was doing giant circles with the coach – that day a guy named Phillip, spotting me. Well I lost my grip and went flying. I landed more or less on my head between two mats and unconscious fell over onto my left wrist folded awkwardly underneath me cracking my ulna styloid process.
The trip to the hospital is vague, but I remember the anesthesiologist telling me to count to 10 and I remember getting to 3!
I woke up in the dark not sure where I was when I felt the weight of the cast on my arm. I remember feeling like I was a “big shot” because I had a cast.
I was pretty hard on the cast and had softened it up so much that the doc extended my time and wrapped it again with fresh plaster. It was pretty heavy, and when the cast came off, my arm involuntarily floated up… it was weird. I stood there with my left arm extended out sideways. It stayed there for a few minutes. Totally weirded me out.
In those days, my diet was mostly supplemented by icing sugar. My mom used to bake a lot and I used to lick the dish but my favorite thing to do was to take a little silver egg cup and press it down into the icing sugar and just lick that. Needless to say my teeth suffered. I had so many cavities that needed filling. I spent many an hour at the dentist. t had one of those drills that had a long metal chain that drove it and it made a terrible noise. I hated it. The ritual was that if I was “good”, I got to go into the dried fruit store in the lobby after being at the dentist, and I always selected dried apricots. Still have a fondness for them.
I was born into a northern suburbs dwelling reform Jewish family, the youngest son to two older sisters, Sue (8 years older) and Carol (9 years older) and my brother Derrick (12 years older) of Cynthia and Selwyn. I was born when we lived at the Kelvin Rd house, but I have really no ongoing memory of 16 Kelvin Road. There was one time when I do recall the maid beating a snake in my bedroom, a Cobra as I recall, coiled to strike! My earliest continuous memories are related to a time only after we moved into our house at 44 Linden Road. My earliest childhood memory there is driving my blue peddle car up and down the long driveway at the Linden Road house. I think that memory is so strong because the new driveway was so long that I really got up a head of speed in my little peddle car.
44 Linden Road 1962-1970
Linden Road was a double story house with 3 upstairs bedrooms and a glassed in patio. My parents room and Susan’s room opened onto the patio. Derrick and I shared the patio, which means that it was more or less my room since Derrick was mostly no longer home being that he was in England at Leeds University. When I was 6 he was home for a little while, and then again when I was maybe 12 years old. My parents room and Carol’s room opened onto a wooden deck on the opposite side of the house over looking the Stead Neighbor’s house.
The house had two bathrooms and both were upstairs. My parents had a full bathroom on suite while all the sibs shared the other bathroom and separate water closet with just a toilet and sink. That little room lived at the top of the slate covered stairs. I remember it vividly. There is a memory trick called the “memory palace” where you use your childhood home to recall non-related items. I can vividly recall this home with great detail, and used that trick once to great effect while studying in college.
I remember my kindergarten years going to the little nursery school down the street. Certain features stand out. In addition to the long driveway that I used to drive my sky-blue pedal car up and down, one of my favorite memories is of the sweat pea flowers. My mom planted sweet-peas outside along the whole length of the fence facing the street. It was about 50 feet long and the spring bloom had a wall of aromatic pastel flowers outside. We literally had full vases of sweet smelling sweet peas all over the house! It was glorious.
There was a “Wendy-House” in the backyard, underneath a great big old oak tree that I loved climbing. There were fig trees, a mulberry tree, a green-gauge tree, a granadilla vine, and a couple of plum trees. Summers were great. We spent all our time outdoors climbing trees, playing cricket and one bounce (a soccer skills game), and we ate so much fruit off those trees. My neighborhood friends or my cousins or even my siblings boyfriends were all at one time playmates.
I also kept silkworms because we had a mulberry tree and silkworms eat mulberry leaves. I recently read about how it was illegal to take a mulberry leaf out of China, who were trying to protect their silk trade. It was always a fascinating thing to watch a silkworm making its cocoon. And it was magical to watch them emerge as moths and mate and lay eggs. We kept the silk worms in a shoe box that had a few knife-poked holes in the lid. Picking fresh mulberries while we gathered leaves for the silk worms was fun. We would be stained purple from the juice running down our chins.
We also used to keep an eye out for the occasional chameleon that showed up in the yard. They were fun animals to play with. They really could change color effortlessly. I was fascinated by how their eyes moved independently and with their ability to gradually blend into the background. Sort of like those body paintings where the model is disappeared into the background.
We used to try to catch those giant grasshoppers when they were around to watch them feed on grasses we pulled, but the best insects to capture by far was the Preying Mantis – super creepy to watch as it decapitated the male as they mated.
This is the tale of my life. It’s told to give context and color to my life, mostly I am writing this with my kids in mind. It occurs to me that they don’t really know that much about me. I realized that my kids really have no real understanding about my youth, where I came from, what my experience of life has been and what drives me. This blog is meant to fill in gaps and give context.
Two verses of Maya Angelou’s poem And Still I’ll Rise resonate with me as a poetic summation of my entire life:
Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. Weakened by my soulful cries.
You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise.
My story is broadly divided into my time in South Africa, and then and my time in America. My time in America is divided into the period from my arrival thorough my marriage and up until the birth of our first child, Sam, and then the period of being a couple with children, and finally the period following my divorce. This first section covers the years 1959-1988.
South Africa: 1959 – 1977
I was one of the very last colonialists in South Africa.
I was born in Joberg, Joes, Johannesburg – Peter Tosh sang “what’s the word? Johannesburg”.
For me, Joberg occurred as a big dirty ugly city with no redeeming value. It was originally a gold mining town, and large yellow sulfa filled mounds of sand are dotted around the city along with the sometimes still active gold mining derricks. These mine dumps, so called, are the major feature of the city. It was also the case that the deep mine explosions when the miners detonated the dynamite to break up the rock, would cause tremors through the city like an earthquake.
I lived in the suburbs north of the city. Bramley first and then Glenhazel where I lived till we left. Unlike the bushveld, which were rolling grasslands with occasional trees, the suburbs of the city was heavily treed with a large variety of trees. The northern suburbs were also quite nice, filled with stately homes by any stretch of the imagination. The northern suburbs of Johannesburg certainly spoke of opulence compared to the squalor of the townships not far away.
My Life: A Memoir 