This blog just comprises vignettes written by my brother mainly to prove that despite his intelligence, he had a normal upbringing. What is singularly important is that he experienced the same anxieties, boredom and surprises as the rest of us. Only now after 50 years have I finally heard about Blaine’s entanglement with the law. What an admission. I never knew a thing. This is a random collection of Blaine’s musings of a life in a different age, an age of innocence and discovery. This is Blaine’s story.
Note: All writing in italics is by Blaine and the rest is by me – which is very little. I have let Blaine tell his own story.
Mr Davies: An Explosive Confrontation
Most men brought some memento back from the war. Dad didn’t bring a Nazi dagger or an Iron Cross. Being a tiffie (artificer – Technical Services Corps) he brought back cooler stuff, at least for me. There was a 25pdr shell casing, a 37mm shell casing, a 2pdr solid shot, a 6pdr solid shot and a hand grenade. He was a careful man. There wasn’t a sniff of explosives and the percussion caps had all been punched.
Like all kids we liked to bring interesting stuff to class. It wasn’t called show and tell then. It was a less formal arrangement. One day in Std 3 (grade 5) I decided to show off my hardware and make the other boys jealous. I packed out all my school books from my hard Samsonite suitcase, packed them in and clinked my way off to school. They were prominently put on display at the front.
Unfortunately, the headmaster, Mr Davies, happened to pop in. I didn’t like him. He had that colourless English pallor that immediately suffused red when angry. He immediately demonstrated this ability when he saw what was displayed. Luckily for me, this was 1966 or the school would have been evacuated, in complete lockdown and the dogs called in. The sniffer dogs would have been called in too. I tried to explain that they were completely safe as my Dad had sorted them out and he knew what he was doing. I asked to be able to demonstrate that they were harmless by dismantling the grenade. He was having none of that and bundled them off to his office with me in tow. I got 6 cuts. He called in the police who I gather took a very dim view of things.
I was now in deep dudu. How could I explain to Dad how I’d dropped him in it? Luckily no one contacted him. A few weeks went by as the police decided what to do with their dim view. Everything was eventually returned to school and I was called in to the office where this dim view was explained to me, at least this time not on the end of a quince stick.
“And don’t do it again” he admonished. The Git.
Mr Schroeder: The Peanut Butter Conspiracy
1968 found me in Standard 4 in Mr Schroeder’s class. He was a good looking man with well-built thighs that he showed off in his PT shorts when coaching rugby. He was popular with us (and the lady teachers) and I enjoyed him. I had always been pretty quiet and well behaved in class till then but this was my coming out year. I started chirping and have never really stopped since.
One day he entered in the morning with a satisfied grin and showed off his new acquisition. This was the latest model quince stick with a carefully bound tip. He proceeded to demonstrate its technical specifications by flexing it ominously. I couldn’t resist chirping him. What I said, I can’t remember but the upshot was I was smilingly invited to take it for a test drive so that its efficacy could be demonstrated. I smiling accepted. That was how honour was satisfied in those days. In the front of the class I was given a quick three cuts after which I smilingly agreed with a big lump in my throat that it indeed was a superior model. All very civilised and in this case it was not even punishment but actually just a joke. I had joked with him and he had joked with me. What repartee. We could go far as a double act. It would have had me in stitches before long.
We all took sarmmies to school. There was no special shredded wheat with olives, raw carrots and Feta. It was greased paper wrapped peanut butter sarmmies with a side order of Kool Aid. Tupperware had not yet started to contaminate the world’s oceans so lunchboxes were optional. The sarmmies and cooldrink had to be carefully arranged in your case lest you wanted to lick the peanut butter off from the greased paper. For some reason, Mr Schroeder took a liking to my peanut butter sarmmies and would daily sniff them out. He was very good about it and would only take one. The great day arrived eventually – the teacher’s birthday. He unwrapped my present: a loaf of bread, a pound of butter and a bottle of peanut butter. He got the message – honour satisfied.
Blaine on chess, table tennis and Ping-Pong
You came home day and said you’d learnt to play chess. So we drew up a board on paper and little squares with the names of the pieces. Only problem was we didn’t know any of the strategies. We invented all different methods of defence pushing up the pawns on the side to make horns or zigzagging the pawns across the board. The games were quite epic. I recall that I generally pursued an aggressive strategy which you more often than not carefully pick apart. We lost interest for whatever reason. Maybe we were both sore losers** as most of the time we discussed (argued slightly) things and never actually competed head to head. I don’t know.
In Std 7 I was friends with Chris Mollison. He had been playing since std 3 and was very good. He was already in the 1st team when we decided to play chess in his house in Cotswold. When I beat him he was shocked and demanded honour. I beat him again. This went on quite a bit. 4-6 games if I recall before he got the hang of me. Chris had great analytical skills and knew his strategies but it took a while to come to terms with my unconventional approach. It had progressed a bit past the horns or zigzags but it was still nothing like he’d ever seen.
He convinced me to play school chess and I think I progressed to about number 4. I hated chess because at any point there are endless possibilities. No matter what I picked I knew that there was one out there that I had just not found yet and it would stress me out. I gave up playing scramble with Pat because of that. She misunderstood. It wasn’t that I was a sore with her, it was because I was a sore loser with myself.
My chess career ended ignominiously. We were playing Marist brothers and sitting opposite me was this little std 6 dweeb whose feet didn’t touch the floor. He wiped me out and I retired.
I did have a final flourish. In std 9 I was desperately asked to play for our house, Aloe. I forget the 1st round, Mimosa was it? We won and it was on to Protea. They owned the first team. Chris was No1 and Crouse No2 (top swat from Cheryl’s year. He studied Greek because Latin was derived from it and then Sanskrit for the same reason) and at least 2 others. I don’t remember if it was 5 or 7 a side (it was definitely an odd number). Our strategy was simple, we swapped our order around so they would waste their strength on our weak players. I really didn’t want to play so made some excuse on the day hoping that the overall result would be a forgone conclusion. It was not to be. We were tied 2-2 or 3-3. Crouse and I agreed on an afternoon to play in one of the classrooms. We were playing roughly level when he made a strategic error and I pounced hard. He unfortunately stated that we must get a move on as he needed to get a haircut! I proceeded to slow the game down and kept apologising for my slowness and so on. Being an archetypal swot he grew increasingly agitated and started making mistakes and eventually capitulated. I’m not proud of myself but we had lifted the trophy against all odds and my match was pivotal. I bowed out of chess in triumph and have never played chess since except against children who I know I can beat. (Or I magnanimously let beat me)
** Do you remember the epic monopoly games we had, normally you and I against Mom and Cheryl? I recall we used to play aggressively, buying houses as soon as possible. I recall that we would just keep a tally in a book when we went negative. No one wanted to give up! I think some of the games went over a few days.
Do you remember playing ping pong on the kitchen table?
Toothless: PTSD
I found going to the dentist worse than what your dog feels going to the vet. Your dog has some vague doggy sense that some serious violation of his constitutional rights is about to be visited upon him. My more, shall I say, flamboyant friends attribute this sense to some mysterious alternative world that we are yet to understand and that I am too much of a linear thinker, in short, stupid. Wrong! Well maybe not about the stupid bit, but my dogs only ever go in the car when their constitutional rights are going to be violated. They are linear thinkers. It’s like 1 + 1 = , hmmm, let me think about that. Maybe they are not good at arithmetic but they sure as hell exercise their constitutional rights every evening on the neighbours’ pavement. I believe the subsection is referred to by them as squatter’s rights.
I digress. Dogs have this sense of impending doom but I would know it as an incontrovertible fact. The dentist in question was a Dr Allnutt. I swear he was a protégé of Dr Mengle or that Nazi character from Marathon Man. He was solely responsible for my lifelong antipathy to dentists. (I must admit that I have just quickly Googled him to see if I could locate him and visit something or other upon him – out of luck. Perhaps I should find his grave and do something with a wooden stake, or is it silver)
His surgery was just up 3rd avenue in Newton Park on the other side of Cape Road. Being a one car and one driver’s licence family Mom and I walked there. Luckily there was this cheap and tacky Italian café/restaurant next door. Even as a callow 5 year I understood tacky. There was a bead curtain separating the shop in the front from the seating at the back. The Italian ambience was tastefully recreated by faded landscape photos and the piece de resistance were the candles in fat bellied wine bottles with wax dribbling down their necks. After an information extraction session, Mom would guiltily attempt to make it up to us by treating us to a toasted cheese (hold the tomato) and a brown cow. The brown cows comprising ice cream in Coke were great but how we were supposed to enjoy the toasted cheese with our mutilated mouths was beyond me.
At about 5 years old I was having problems with my top front teeth and in their infinite wisdom it was decided by the powers that be, i.e. Dr Allnutt that they all had to come out. It must have been a moment of weakness when he decided on anaesthetic. Yikes, I was to be gassed. Luckily I hadn’t learnt about the Nazi predilection with gas, tooth extraction and medical experimentation, not necessarily in that order, or I might have … Nothing. I was as trapped and helpless as the Jews. It was arranged that I would return as the gas operator had to be deranged.
The appointed day arrived and we walked that final walk up the hill to the dentist. I was briskly taken in hand by a matronly nurse and frogmarched past two torture chambers, out the back to a kind of outhouse similar to what we all had at our homes for the gardener only properly painted and clean. I was locked inside without comment. I was trapped. What had I done wrong? I carefully lifted the seat to check for crocodiles and cockroaches as all kids do. I used to particularly fear the crocodile that lived under my bed at night time. I never heard him but he was there and sometimes I would pluck up the courage to check. How stupid. That was actually the opportunity he was waiting for to chomp my head off. After waiting an interminable time I decided to have a quick pee as I had eventually worked out that perhaps that was what they wanted me to do. No sooner that I had rearranged my boyhood and the door was yanked open and I was marched out to my final demise. They couldn’t have had a spycam so she must have been listening at the door. Why didn’t they just speak to me and explain what was expected of me. Nowadays we take our kids to therapy before the event to get a jumpstart on the post-traumatic stress disorder. On entering, the room I was confronted by two severely white uniformed men performing a final inspection of their tools. I would have pissed myself at this point if I hadn’t had the foresight to do that earlier. Perhaps that had been their strategy. I recognised Dr Allnutt and his implements but the new recruit took things to a whole new level of fear. What fearsome noise would his tools make?
All in all, it was an anti-climax. The new guy placed a mask over my mouth but didn’t ask me to count backwards from 10 as I was too young to count backwards and we didn’t have TV for us to learn how the world really worked. I fell gently down and just before I heard a gentle boom inside my head, I suddenly heard the traffic outside. My first trip and at the age of 5. I came around in the chair to a grinning Dr Alnutt leering over me and 4 or 5 bloody holes in my gums. Not an edifying sight and I’m not talking about my gums.
No brown cows today. Mom asked me if I could walk and off we tottered back home.
The experience that really scared me happened when I was a bit older. By now the teeth were firmly rooted and big. I had always suffered from colds and bronchitis as a child. A weak chest is how Dr McChesney described it in his professional opinion during his home visits. I am not knocking him, it’s just how they spoke to unworldly parents in those days. Our parents would proudly repeat these diagnoses during family teas. After all they were used to dreaded diseases like consumption and catarrh. Only the new-fangled disease of cancer was privately discussed and then in whispers.
On this particular occasion I needed a faulty molar removed. No conservative approach for Dr Allnutt. As Shrek would say: better out than in. Unfortunately I had the sniffles that day. Actually a nose blocked with toxic yellow stuff. They should have bottled it and used it for chemical warfare. I struggled to breathe through my mouth while he tried to fit all his tools inside. He soon lost patience with my refusal to open wide enough. No problem, he had just the tool for recalcitrant kids. It worked like inverse pliers. When squeezed, the jaws opened and could be locked in the desired position. Very medieval. He stuffed it into the back of my jaw and jacked it open. He grumpily proceeded while I gagged and drowned in my own snort and his extraneous fluids that splashed against the back of my throat. I told him that I couldn’t breathe, or at least I tried to. Whatever back-of-the-throat noises I could make and force past my deadened tongue that was, in any case, pinned to the opposite side by Dr Mengle’s assistant with her sucky tool was drowned out by the insane noise. The drill was pretty loud too.
It was decades later that I found out the correct description for that particular torture – waterboarding but with a twist. Your own fluids were used.
I finally, completely and irrevocably unfriended him then.
How easy our kids have it. The dentist is casually dressed in jeans and a snappy white top, a gentle happy smile and perhaps an earring. The nurse is friendly, slim and attractive to boys, men and dogs (perhaps the odd woman too). Gentle background music, pictures of cuddly animals pasted on the ceiling, family photos all with perfect teeth on the counter and mom holding your hand, guarding against the use of excessive force, complete the scene. It’s nearly paradise. They just have to work on the whine of the drill.
The use of fluoride has made dentistry a dying profession, and good riddance to them. One less Horseman of the Apocalypse. But you can’t keep a bad man down. Like a plague, they have mutated into a more virulent form whose sole purpose in this world is to suck the last cent out of parents who fear the social stigmatisation of their kids for not having perfect teeth. Aren’t my 18 remaining teeth, snaggled lower incisor and unsightly toxic mercury amalgam fillings good enough anymore. Don’t answer that.
Maybe I protest too much. We had it easy compared to our parents. If the toothache got too much back then, they would send you off to war. Problem solved.
Renewable Energy: Going Solo
Around standard 5 or 6 I started worrying about the state of the world. I thought a lot about zpg (zero population growth) and solar energy. I not could do much about the former except talk about the exponential curves and I wasn’t likely to be talking from a position of experience for a number of years. It would be similar to the absurd notion that a priest can counsel on marriage problems. However, the concept of solar energy awakened my inner engineer and I could do something practical about it. I could make us some stuff and save the family money. Two projects appealed to me, namely a solar oven and a parabolic reflector dish.
The dish looked very cool. The picture I saw was an elegant chrome parabolic dish on a tripod and with an arm sticking out of the centre to the focal point. It also showed how it could be folded up so that it could be taken camping. Alright, it was a bit beyond my skills and the limitations of Dad’s garage which was only for wood working. I decided to make a simple version to prove the concept to myself. I made a shallow square wooden box about 700mm square. I calculated the parabola, plotted it on paper and made a wooden template. I filled the box with mud and proceeded to create the parabola by scraping the template around an axis in the centre. This took a while as the mud kept slumping. With a lot of patience I got it right as the mud dried. I then raided my mom’s kitchen for the Al foil which I laid on the surface and somehow got it to stay in place. I tilted the box and hung a coke can of water at the focal point. Voila, warm water. The proof of concept worked to a degree, about 50 degrees in fact but the world would have to wait a little longer before I saved them. A few production and styling tweaks were outstanding.
Undaunted I tackled my next project which was a solar oven. I had read an article about one and it seemed simple. It was a rectangular box with a door at one end and a sloped window at the other. The idea was that you would chop a hole in the wall of your kitchen with the window on the outside and the door on the inside. I was already working out where I could fit it in the Kitchen when the time came. I had the planks and a Perspex sheet so it was a doddle. The article also mentioned that it was actually a double walled box with Glaubers Salt filling the gap. No problem there. I had some flat sheets of galvanised iron to make the inner skin and Hill’s Chemist up the road had always been good for my chemical supplies before. The masterpiece was duly constructed and the salt crystals poured into the gaps. The sun came out, the oven got warm and the salt melted, running all over the place. Nobody told me that Glaubers Salt melts at around 30°C. It is used to store heat at the temperature where it changes phase, namely 30°C. It is useful for systems that heat houses where only moderate temperature storage is required. That article had led me right up the garden path to where my test was done. Any idiot knows that this system would only be useful as a warming drawer at best. Also the aperture was too small. When I eventually got back around to solar radiation at varsity I could then calculate that I would get about 250W on the brightest summer’s day. Pity we didn’t have computer’s then. I would have Googled and Wikipedia-ed the hell out of that project.
My proof-of-concepts were marginal at best so it was time to start over again. But it was not to be as I was so deflated at not being able to save the planet that I moved on.
I briefly flirted with solar energy again in 1984 when I had my first house built. I specified a vertical geyser with a middle tapping off point to fit to a solar panel, but never actually fitted the panel. Fast forward 20 years and I fitted heat pumps to 2 houses myself. At least this time I had learnt my lesson and did not build them myself.
I can say that over my life, I have learnt about the problems of going solo.
Trees: Reach for the Sky
What is it about boys and trees – see tree, climb tree (maybe fall out of tree)? They’re as single minded as dogs – see tree, pee on tree. Actually Dean went through a phase of see tree, cut forest. Much to Dean’s embarrassment Dad always reminded him of it as we drove past a certain small forest that had for some reason had been a blot on the landscape of his mind. Since it was on the way to Granny Mac who we visited every Sunday, he couldn’t escape the ragging. He survived and grew up to be an accountant instead of a lumberjack which, after Monty Python had their way with them, is a slightly iffy profession. When you think about it though, as a person who oversees paperwork systems, he is probably more successful at ridding the world of trees than he would have been as a lumberjack.
I have mentioned Granny Dix’s Loquat tree which wasn’t much but we climbed it because, well, it was a tree. Granny Mac’s Syringa tree on the other hand cried out for boys to climb it. Girls too. Cheryl was a tomboy and was up there with us. Besides, there was nothing else to do. She was a really tough little girl who gave as good as she got. Dean and I could never make her cry no matter how hard we tried. Sorry Cheryl for those times I tried to hurt you.
The other great tree was the tree in the back corner of the Stirk’s yard that we could get to from our split pole fence. It was a lovely, er, Kaffirboom. I checked Wikipedia and I could only narrow it down to the Genus of Erythrina which wasn’t very helpful as there are 130 species. So I’m stuck with the Tree That Dare Not Speak Its Name. The Stirk girls and us had a great many hours of fun in that tree.
They moved out and an Afrikaner family moved in. They had found a sheet of steel and jammed it somehow at the base so that it stood up at about 30° to form a spring board for the lower branch. That was great fun until I misjudged my eager run up one day and badly bruised and scraped the skin off my shin against its edge.
In all my years of reaching for the sky, I had never been hurt as much as that day at ground level.
Babyhood: Escape from Alcatraz
What do you remember from when you were a baby? Nothing much as luckily most of that program gets overwritten with time. Imagine if we did, this world would be filled with even more dysfunctional people. After all, by the time you are two, you’ve been through the near death experience of birth; been converted to a sports model; had your nether regions routinely violated and closely inspected several times a day and been confined to a barred cell for hours at a time. Sure there were some great experiences like having access on demand to your mother’s wibbly wobbly bits.
But I suppose your brain is a like your computer’s hard drive where an expert can retrieve some of the data even though it’s been overwritten by other worthless stuff like pics and corrupted files like my bank accounts. I’ve never had to see a trick cyclist or undergo any form of hypnosis, but some stuff leaks through.
My earliest memory is of my Alcatraz -my cot. I remember standing up in it clenching the bars, being quite frightened and lonely in the night. I have no memories of my day time incarceration, only the nights. The cot was teak and lovingly made by Dad, an expert carpenter. My brother and sister had served their time in there before they were paroled for good behaviour. Actually, were we all roughly two years apart so they were actually released because of overcrowding. No such luck for me. If I didn’t behave myself I would have ended up being a white Mandela. That beautiful cot served the family well and Cheryl took it for her two children. I hope her grandchildren have used it.
My parents had twin beds on opposite sides of the room and my prison was at the foot of my Mom’s bed. I think that sometimes my Mom would pick me up and put me in her bed. In can only infer that because I knew that I wanted to get there and it was not right being imprisoned. I would then cuddle up against her broad soft back and be at peace. One day I started to climb and eventually managed to clambered out and slide to the ground without hurting myself too much. I swear that I remember that time and the sense of achievement that I felt. I do remember subsequent doing it some more and wondering why it had been so difficult in the first place. After that, the particular memory fades as I suppose it was now normal activity and nothing special.
I would love to undergo deep hypnosis and find out whether my parents ever had sex, what with the two beds and all. I suppose a lot of kids wonder about that. I obviously know they did it three times but more than that will remain one of life’s mysteries. In fact, the three times is also one of those mysteries. Perhaps we all were virgin births.
Health: What do doctors Really Know?
Every Sunday afternoon the family went for tea at Granny Mac. Mom hated it as she was the mother-in-law after all. She thought Dad was a mommy’s boy as none of his siblings visited as regularly as we did. We knew the garden upside down. The upside was the lovely Syringa tree that we climbed to the tippy top of and the downside came when Walmer decided to join the 20TH century and had a sewerage system installed. This involved the digging of an incredibly deep trench through her garden and along the roads. Luckily it avoided the flower bed. She probably demanded that they reroute to the opposite side and to be careful not to disturb the guava tree roots (maybe it was a fig tree). Moreover, she was the archetypal matriarch – she could bake. She could bake anything to perfection. She also kept a neat house and was always busy with crocheting, knitting and all the stuff that grandmothers do better than their daughters-in-law. She was a bit of an institution. When I became cognisant of her she was well into her eighties. Dad was a late family starter, a congenital defect that I proudly inherited. He was 46 when I was born and I was 46 when Imogen was born – sins of the father and all. She had this large array of progeny and had left her husband far behind – about 50 years behind. She had singlehandedly raised her family while running a restaurant at Schoenies (Schoenmakerskop, Shoemakers Head, outside Port Elizabeth proper). She could still thread a needle without her glasses. All in all, she pissed Mom off no end. Against such a formidable mother-in-law, Mom stood no chance.
Back to the story. On the way to Granny Mac, we would have to drive past the hospital for contagious diseases (the name escapes me) where people with diphtheria, scarlet fever, leprosy and a multitude of other plagues that god had visited on Port Elizabeth were kept in desperate isolation. Us kids would look at it with a kind of confused horror. Horror at what those horrible names invoked and confusion in that we didn’t actually know anything about those diseases. They were, after all, dread diseases from a previous generation. We did know about polio as Dad had had polio and his left leg was skinnier and a bit shorter. He would disguise it very well except when he was tired and he would start limping. It wasn’t enough to keep him out of the war, but then again he probably volunteered. Apart from the memory of the stigma of the White Feather campaign of WW1, it was the right thing to do. Very stoic – but that was Dad.
The only other disease that impinged on our consciousness was arthritis. That was because Aunt Auret suffered terribly from it. I remember that in desperation they went to see a herbalist in Humansdorp. This was the late 60’s and my family was catching one of the first waves of alternative therapy in South Africa. She initially reported an improvement which was probably psychosomatic so they probably treated her for that too. It was not to be and she suffered on terribly long after that.
One of the diseases that worried me was water on the knee! For whatever reason, some of my fellow rugby players in primary school suffered from that, particularly after a heavy tackle. The scuttlebutt amongst the kids was that you could get water on the anything – a frightening prospect. To this day, I don’t know what epidemic we were facing but by the time I got high school water on the knee had obviously been eradicated without the help of the Melinda Gates Foundation or Mark Zuckenburg’s philanthropy.
I was apparently a sickly child. Checking my school reports I found that I was absent for 23 days in Sub A and 21 days in Std 1. I don’t know why they didn’t report my sick days in Sub B. Perhaps it was a psychosomatic reaction to some experimental medicine that kept me healthy for the year or the teacher was just slack. Dr McChesney was the attending Physician. In those days doctors used to attend to you in your own home. To describe him I would say that he was the human equivalent of James Herriot except he didn’t fix pigs, well maybe sometimes. He drove a brown Rover 3500 and was an allround nice guy.
In those days, doctors were the most respected members of the community apart from the Dominee if you were Afrikaans. They represented all the old world values of dignity, probity (no fee gouging), they were the most educated members of the community and they were rich but not flashy. In short, they were so were highly respected that one never asked for a second opinion. They also didn’t know very much then but we didn’t know that.
I was described as suffering from Asthmatic Bronchitis. Yikes, I was suffering from two diseases at the same time. How lucky. Whenever I really didn’t want to do something, I could start wheezing. Unfortunately, it could work the other way. I late 1968 P.E. was devastated by floods. Our street was flooded and people had boats out in the street. I could only watch through the window while Dean and Cheryl cavorted as I had a ‘weak chest’.
What the hell medical description is a weak chest? One day I was at home with a ‘weak chest’ and Dr Chesney was called out. He listened carefully to my ‘weak chest’ through his stethoscope and surreptitiously proclaimed to Mom that I had a case of “stokkies draai”. I was chuffed. I knew enough Afrikaans to know that a ‘stokkie’ was a little stick and ‘draai’ was to turn. So putting it all together and giving it an idiomatic twist I thought that it was an apt description of the crackling phlegm noises you get in your asthmatic chest that sounds like leaves or branches rustling. I thought I was vindicated but little I did know that the actual idiom meant to bunk.
My Life of Crime: Foiled Again
My sneaky side came to the fore at age 5 and my crime spree started. I knew that Mom’s wallet contained silver coins and brown coins and the silver coins bought me a whole lot more sweets. The solution was straight forward. I wrapped Aluminium foil around a brown coin and took a silver coin in return. They looked perfect to my young eyes. This was the ideal wheeze because it was not actually a crime since no one suffered a loss. As each person handed the silver coin on to the next and it was accepted without demur, there was no problem. No harm, no foul. Such was the irrefutable logic of a kid. I remember Mom scratching around in her wallet in the shops, muttering about who was covering her coins with foil. I just stood there and silently urged Mom not to strip the foil off. When I saw the problem that my trick was causing, I realised that Mom just didn’t have chutzpah and stopped doing it. It still wasn’t a crime.
Much later I could further I could justify my activity as similar to what Central Banks do all day namely to increase the money in circulation by printing it.
My criminal self lay quiescent for a number of years but my ideas for generating cash were not successful enough and the extent of my hobbies and the expense involved drove me to desperate measures. I had inherited a huge Meccano set from Auntie Sylvia’s family when they left the country. Even better, it came with a pile of monthly Meccano magazines. Instead were all these amazing machines that ran the gamut of the mechanical. I had added a bit to the set but what I was missing was the real stuff: pinion, bevel and worm gears, sprockets and chains, ratchets and all the little things that make the world work. I had spied a good toy shop in town we they carried Mechanical extension packs with all the goodies that I coveted. I immediately shuttered off that side of my brain concerned with my strict upbringing and liberated a few of the more interesting pieces. Mea Culpa.
Phew, that was like confession. I feel liberated.
“My name is Blaine McCleland and I am a thief. I have been straight for 17155 days.”
Money: A Never Ending Childhood Quest
The most vexing problem facing anyone and one that remains for the rest of their lives is that of making money. And it starts young. As kids we got pocket money and, like for all kids, it was never enough. Dean’s problem was how to fund his weekly purchase of Purnell’s History of the Second World War. This was his passion and he could not wait to collect his weekly copy from the CNA. His weekly pocket money did not cover the cost and when the time came to buy the binders at regular intervals, it was a big, big problem. Dean was a lazy little sod around the house and, as he hated gardening, he had few prospects for earning extra. This resulted in him having to implement severe strictures on his expenses which meant that Cheryl and I thought him to be snoep. We were forever fighting with him to contribute to presents for Mom.
My first attempt to make money outside of the closed financial system of my family had been by ‘printing’ money and was a failure. I was about 11 at the time when I embarked on my next attempt which was totally legit. It involved entering a kind of crossword competition that was printed in the Sunday Times and was similar to Scrabble but consisted of a fixed list of words. I drew a number of grids in pen and ploughed through innumerable combinations. I posted in my best attempt and was rewarded with a postal order for about R5 for placing somewhere in the top 50.
You might have thought that I was destined to be a champion Scrabble player. No so. My success had more to do with my sheer bloody mindedness as my girlfriends will testify to. They refuse to play Scrabble with me as I take too long. I was relieved to hear John Maythem, a presenter on CapeTalk radio, admit that he too struggles with Scrabble although he has one of the most amazing memories and a deep love and command of the English language.
My next attempt was more lucrative. Our family used to avidly listen to “The Three Wise Men” on Springbok Radio where listeners were invited to send in questions to stump the team. Eric Rosenthal was one of the Wise Men. Dean had bought the 1968 SA edition of the Guinness Book of Records. The records relevant to South Africa were printed on green paper and bound at the end. I noticed that it had been compiled by Eric Rosenthal. I deviously realised that this would ensure that my question would be asked. I further deviously added after signing out my name that I was 11 years old. That would do the trick. Who could resist a precocious child. I was proudly listening when they asked my question. It asked who was the first South African to win a VC. It was not the most interesting question in the world but I think it was my strategy what done it. I stumped the team and received about R10 via postal order again.
Desperate times lead to desperate measures. Boredom also had a role to play in one of my other money making endeavours. It was school holidays and I convinced my Dad to allow me to work in the garden for the princely sum of 1c per hour. I cannily calculated that I was sure to get the job by underquoting. After all, who can resist a bargain. He smilingly accepted the deal knowing that he would get off lightly and I would soon stop in any case. He had not taken into account my sheer bloody mindedness. For a week I worked from when he left for work until it grew dark after he got home. I weeded and turned over every bed, push mowed all the lawns, trimmed the edges with clippers and basically ran out of work by the end. I had recruited Dean for company but he knew that this an uneconomic enterprise and soon dropped out.
On pay day I presented my accounts to Dad with all my timekeeping records. I had managed to put in about 60 hours that week. He was chastened by the exploitative nature of the contract and rounded it up to R1.
I had proven my business conceptualisation, contract negotiating and marketing skills and demonstrated my willingness to work. I just had to work on my value estimation skills.
Around about this time I indulged in another way of indirectly making money. I was allowed to catch the bus into town. Although we lived in the suburbs of the city, travelling to the city centre was called ‘going to town’. Since my passion for the Main Library and Alfred’s Bookshop was considered a worthy pursuit, it was easy to wheedle the bus fare out of Mom.
Buses were the most exciting things in a kid’s life. I particularly loved the ones with open back corner. There was a pole in the middle to hold onto and the ticket clipper hung out there with his change dispenser on his waist. The prime seats were the ones in the front at the top. Very cool. Apartheid meant that the blacks were only allowed upstairs but we could sit anywhere. I never thought that they were being treated harshly as they actually had the best seats. I did feel sorry though for the old and more traditionally built mamas who had to drag themselves up the winding stairs
Then I realised that there was fare breakpoint at the top of Russell Road, I would hop off there and save a few cents. Remember that Chappies bubblegum, one of a kid’s major food groups, were 4 for 1c. Using the underrated Bubblegum Index, one can calculate an inflation of 20000% (200x) since they now cost 50c each! It sounds horrendous but actually equates to 11% pa over 50 years. Chappies are definitely underrated in the world of economics and as a possible reserve currency. Thus my new financial enterprise was born. It was similar to many financial deals in this world where the payer actually receives nothing in return and finds that they have to pay other hidden costs. In this case it was shoe leather and body fuel. I just had to do the marketing to my Mom and the footslogging but I didn’t have to produce any product. My financial ambitions knew no bounds. I started by stopping inbound on the top of Russell Rd as it was a doddle to walk down that steep hill into town, a distance of 1.7km. Walking up that hill was a different matter entirely. That was mastered and extended until I would walk the 6.5 km home giving me a money earning potential of about 40 Chappies. Doing overtime occasionally, I would do the round trip and earn 80 Chappies. I was a titan in the making.
I also tried my hand at plant maintenance. The Schroeder’s lived across the way from us and on going away one day they asked me to water the vegetable garden for about five days. This was Mr Schroeder’s personal pride and joy and probably his escape from his impressive hausfrau. There were sunflowers and mielies standing over six foot and a lot of unmentionable vegetables that Germans love to boil. In typically Germanic fashion, the house and the garden were impeccably maintained. I got a bit slack in the middle and missed a couple of days until late one stinking hot afternoon I realised the error in my ways. I rushed over to find the sunflowers drooping and even the hardy mielies were looking tired. I subjected them to an intense remedial course of water and luckily they seemed to recover. Although the work was easy, I realised that I didn’t have the aptitude for plant maintenance.
Awkward Moment: There Are No Smokes without Ire
There are a few things that a boy growing up fears. The first is being caught masturbating. It’s just so bloody embarrassing. Hopefully it’s your dad and he’s a good guy. Perhaps he might lend you his stash and tell you to check that the door is properly locked in future. My dad was not that but luckily I was never caught with my pants down, so to spank.
No it wasn’t any of those embarrassing situations but one of those that could lead to you being disinherited or at least not spoken to for a long time. It’s about the day your dad finds out that you smoke.
By now I was 17 years old, illegally riding my 175cc Yammie and was the proud owner of a haversack to carry stuff. To all you gentle readers who were born post about 1980 I must explain. It was not your ergonomically designed, multi-coloured, rip stop nylon backpack designed to improve your posture complete with a full range of zips, pockets, velcroed bits and extra loops – the luggage equivalent of a Swiss Army knife. No siree. It was a rectangular heavy duty canvas bag with a flap and straps. Maybe your dad still has a fishing bag like that. I was proud of mine and did some pens drawings on it. It also had a peace sign or two.
As I have mentioned before, Dad and I had our special routine that bonded us and that was the early morning cup of coffee. We had drifted apart a bit and I definitely wasn’t up for early coffee on the weekends. It was the vacs after matric and I worked at the harbour doing impressions of a tally clerk. To save up money for varsity, I pushed the overtime. I would leave home at 6:30 am and return at 8:30pm (I had a bike by now otherwise it would have been 10:00pm). Early mornings were not my finest hour but dear Dad stoically made me coffee as well as my sarmies for the day. It was just after 6:00am while I was struggling to wake up with my coffee when Dad turfed the contents of my bag out to retrieve my lunch box. Oops! I had forgotten to take my smokes out the previous night as I had been so exhausted.
“So you’re smoking now!” was all he said. He was a man of few words and that had been a lot.
Big Walk
Driving in the car the other day with my daughter (12 yr old) and her friends, I heard them complaining about some physical activity or other. That dredged up something from my childhood when I was her age. It’s entirely possible that I was younger as all that I can definitely recall is that I was in primary school. That puts the time frame at 1968-69. That something was the dreaded sponsored activity. It was not that the activity was ever dreaded since it was something to do in the pre TV days, but one had to approach the long suffering neighbours and ask them to sponsor so much per km or per hour or whatever was relevant to the said activity. Even more dreaded was having to collect the money afterwards.
On this occasion it was a Big Walk in aid of cerebral palsy, I think. Maybe it was for cancer as in those days there were endless tok-tokkie drives to raise funds. The first thing that was big about it was that it included a lot if not all the (white) primary schools in Port Elizabeth. The second thing that was big about it was that it was a total of 26km! For primary school kids! In hindsight, what was even more remarkable about it was that no one, ourselves and our parents, didn’t stop and say, “Hang on a bit. This is a bit too much to expect from young kids. After all these are supposed to be fun events.”
It probably was a Saturday morning when we arrived at the starting point – the Walmer Country Club. We were expected to walk around the Cape Recife Nature Reserve to the cerebral palsy school at Driftsands next to where the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University is today. I remember a lot of milling around and as soon a school group was corralled, and I presume checked off by their teachers, they were sent on their way. I don’t recall any adults walking with us though. I don’t even remember any parents chivving us along or marshals along the route but I presume there must have been at the few critical turning points.
For those who do not know Port Elizabeth this involved walking in the middle of nowhere. In the first 7km one passed only two roads bearing off to the right and finally arrived at the Schoenmakerskop Tee junction. Turning left at this point, one passed about 20 houses and for the next 17km there was just the road and nothing except for the Willows holiday resort until one reached the turnoff for Admiralty Way at the extreme south eastern edge of built up Port Elizabeth in Summerstrand. Now it was only about 1.5km to go, skirting the suburb, before arriving at the end point. Job one. Somehow get home. Get on with life and the dreaded money collection.
Now we really come to the ‘when I was young bit’. It’s trite, passé and particularly boring to our kids, but it stands in such stark contrast to how things are today that one cannot help but be drawn into bringing it up.
It started at the beginning where, having found some fellow school pupils, we were formed into a small group, were ticked off and sent on our way. I remember Andrew Miller, a classmate and neighbour, in my group. No adults. We ambled off not really knowing or understanding anything about our undertaking. We all knew how far it was as that was on our sponsorship forms, but no one had internalised it. We just walked. I remember that I had some sarmies (sandwiches), probably peanut butter wrapped in wax paper and a small bottle of fake juice (Oros or such like). There was no special runner’s bag and if I had a bag at all it would have been a small duffel bag slung over a shoulder. None of us had sun hats as the only hats we owned were our school caps and we definitely weren’t wearing those. Sunscreen? Forget it. There was no such thing as SPF. The only things that existed were sun tanning oils and not sun protection creams. One would have been better off using cooking oil than anything available in the shop. Tee shirt? No, I don’t think we had them in those days. For athletics we wore vests. So I would think that I probably wore a white short sleeved school shirt. Our shorts would have been our standard issue white cotton PT (Physical Training, nowadays called PE – Physical Education) shorts. No light weight, anti-chafe poly whatever running shorts. I never owned short socks until I wore long pants halfway through high school so I suppose they would have been my standard grey woollen school socks or my rugby socks. I had no other socks that I can recall since if we were not at school then we were barefoot. On the few formal occasions we would just wear our ubiquitous grey school socks. Now we come to the piece de resistance. The tackies. The standard issue tackie was a thin rubber soled white canvas tennis shoe. I remember having to apply a white gunge with a sponge every odd week to make them look respectable again. Apart from them I owned a pair of rugby boots, black Bata school shoes and slip slops. I was happy as the less I owned, the less I had to polish. But I digress – back to the tackies. These were no Nike Air Maxs orthopedically designed to minimise knee and ligament damage while maximising the impact on the wallet. These were as cheap and nasty as they come. They were good for all sports and activities except rugby and watersking. And so we walked.
Our group slowly spread out. At the Schoenmakerskop junction we were directed down Marine Drive. I recall soon after that I couldn’t resist anymore, so I finished my sarmies and juice. By now Andrew and I were alone or in a very small group and were getting bored. Some boys who had started after us came running past us so we thought, what the hell, let’s run and so we ran. We ran and we ran and then we separated for whatever reason, so I ran and I ran. I felt a bit like Forrest Gump who didn’t know why he ran – he just ran. Sometimes a boy would overtake me and sometimes I would overtake someone. Generally I wasn’t alone. I could normally see someone ahead and if I turned around, there would be someone behind I suppose. Apart from that there was nothing – just bush and very few cars. Today I see people who can’t walk around the block without carrying a water bottle and I just shake my head. It’s just so precious. I don’t recall a single watering point on that whole journey.
I was a bit exhausted on the final stretch but I did not dare walk the final few metres as I recall a lot of the cerebral palsy kids in their wheelchairs cheering us on. This was the only support we had got that day. It was not a race as people started at different times and it was meant to be a walk, but I was quite chuffed when I came in somewhere between 40 and 50 out of the hundreds (possibly 1000’s) that took part. Somehow I got home and said hi to my parents. Nothing special. Job done – except for collecting the sponsorships.
I suppose I ran about 15km. Now running 15km is no real biggie if you run regularly. But In those days it wasn’t a fad so generally it was something only a few adults did. I don’t remember primary school athletics ever featuring a mile event but I do remember that there was an annual intra-school cross country of about 3km that no one ever trained for. We just played rugby in winter, cricket in summer and cops and robbers at break time. Whenever I got home I would barely say hi to my mom, bolt down a cup of tea and a sarmie and rush off to the local green where we would have a knock up game of whatever with whoever pitched up. In winter it would almost be dark before I would drag my sorry arse home, knees all bruised and grazed and my bare feet throbbing. In this way we were not only naturally fit but, more importantly, tough. So I suppose when faced with the Big Walk that turned into a run, it was just something you got on with and didn’t think much about otherwise. As far as I remember, I didn’t suffer from any blisters either in spite of those atrocious tackies.