My Life




CONTENTS

1. Introduction 2

2. Grove Lodge 5

3. Somerset West 7

4. Caledon 9

5. Boarding school 13

6. The Albion Hotel 15

7. Pinelands 19

8. Rugby 24

9. Table Tennis 25

10. Assisted Cycling 26

11. A party... 29

12. University 30

13. 1953... 38

14. Third year 40

15. The fourth year 41

16. Leaving S. Africa 44

17. A day trip... 50

18. A romantic... 55

19. Leeds 58

20. To Spain 59

21. Luis 64

22. Benidorm 67

23. Blanes 70

24. To Germany 72

25. The voyage back 75

26. An overview... 76

27. Back in Cape Town 77

28. Leaving Cape Town 79

29. Life in Durban 82

30. Summer Holiday 86

31. 1961 in Durban 90

32. 1962 95

33. 1963 98

34. 1964 103

35. 1965: Retirement 106

36. Holiday in Europe 107

37. Making Money 116

38. Ruby and Martie 121

39. Playing the Recorder 125

40. Moving house 126

Omissions: lunch at Tarifa with Morales,

NOTES: 1. Re Isaac Bashevis Singer and his relationship to cockroaches, particularly the cockroaches of New York, see his magnificent novel Shadows on the Hudson. 2. This book is still in process of being written, and this note will be constantly revised. Whether or not I finish it may depend on whether there appears to be any demand for that. I intend to furnish pics illustrating this book on other websites. These are (at present):

www.GurthsHilda.blogspot.com (11 pics of Hilda and others);

http://sites.google.com/site/gurthsalbums (other photos)







Chapter 1 : Introduction




I am now setting myself the task of writing the story of my life. Why do it, and for whom? I am living in David's house, so is Lauren : we are three. She is doing a French course, needing regular work. So out of solidarity, to share her burden in a sense, I must impose a similar chore on myself.

One needs to know some basic things about the person who is talking.

I think I owe what I am largely to the genes of my mother, who was the niece of South Africa's most famous Afrikaner, at least in poetical and cultural circles. The poet C. Louis Leipoldt, who was also a child specialist who held a post of medical inspector of schools, wrote books on cookery and travel, detective stories and short stories with a supernatural flavour. He was one of South Africa's most notable eccentrics, who proposed that babies should be raised on wine rather than milk, among many other heresies.




My father often thought and said that I was just as crazy as my famous great-uncle. My father was a Capetonian who went to work in German South-West Africa as a young attorney, studied German diligently, and while living in Luderitz summoned my mother from Cape Town to come and marry him.




I was born at 6.40 a.m. on 19 September, 1935, 9 months to the day after their wedding, and lived in Luderitz for my first 3 years and more. No memories remain from that period, maybe only one or two murky and vague half-memories, yet I feel that desert place in my veins. Water was brought by rail from over 1000 kilometres away – because there was none there.




As a memento of that time, I have a photo of myself brandishing a golf-club on a course entirely devoid of anything resembling a blade of grass.




In 1939 war was looming – not a good time for a South African to be in a German colony – so my parents returned to Cape Town.




My mother and I settled down in a boarding house in Mowbray.

I remember much from those days. Young soldiers on leave, used to give me war medals, someone gave me a magnifying glass, and some young man gave me belts of liquorice. I loved walking down the road and exploring a nearby brickfield.

My mother used to go up the hill with me and I would career down the road in my wagon. My father was working 50 kilometers away in Somerset West, and only joined us for weekends.




My parentswere impressed by how quickly I learnt to tell the time, so my father gave me my own pocket watch at age 4.




He was also greatly impressed by the drawings I made of fighter planes and elephants, copied from cigarette cards. Drawing was my father's Achilles Heel; though good at mathematics he could not cope with the drawing needed in an engineering course, so he had to give up his attempt to qualify as an engineer, and took up law instead.







(Much later I did that same engineering course myself, I even had the same instructor (Sammy Sacks) as my father had had – only I was first in drawing class at the end of the first year, and got the class medal)




I went to school (Mowbray Primary) at age 5 but was found to be too clever to start in Sub A so within a few weeks I found I had skipped the first 2 years of schooling and was in Standard One.




A dubious step on the part of the authorities, which might easily have done me more harm than good. Whether or not it actually did, is a subject for endless speculation. Maybe another time!




Chapter 2: Grove Lodge




We moved to Grove Lodge, a larger boarding house, in 1940.

The scene of many happy memories for me. Many children lived there, we were all organised by the landlady's 12-year old daughter, who had us playing monopoly, doing gymnastics on a horizontal bar, building a hut and drinking cocoa in it, playing rounders on the lawn, building and flying model aeroplanes – a regular tomboy she was, and not at all a bully of us smaller kids. We loved the life.




I remember walking along the streets from school, enjoying the beauty of the golden, shiny beetles in the sun, along the hot sidewalks bordered with hedges harbouring also the black and red beetles, often seen coupled rear to rear.




Later in the afternoon I would walk down the street to the station, to meet my mother there on her way home from work. She worked in the census department during the war years. She was an elegant and beautiful woman then, though I never found her sexually attractive. I felt strengthened by her sterling virtue and reliability.




At school I was certain to always be first in class, yet when we did handwork across the yard in the teachers' training school, I realised that I was not so brilliant in practical matters, and that my “superiority” depended entirely on the lucky and arbitrary chance that we were not marked on our handwork.




But even from such an early age the competitive spirit was very strong in me, and I was quite vain about my “success”.




Two key events occurred in Mowbray at the age of 6. Firstly, the birth of my sister, who became the most important person in my life. Secondly, the beautiful, new, blue Willys car that my father bought.




In this car we journeyed to Robertson, 100 miles inland, to spend the 5-week summer holidays every year. There we lived in my greatest paradise, in a wooden bungalow on the banks of the Breede River. Down the steep bank, at the river's edge, was tied our rowing boat, in which we explored the upper and lower reaches of this wide stretch of river,

from the rushing, non-ridable narrows upstream, to the weir past the reeded islets downstream.




Just below the bungalow the water was very deep, 20 feet they said, and a young boy drowned there one year. The broad sand beaches were of the whitest, finest sand. Across the water was a spectacular rock “koppie”.




Going to the loo was an adventure, crossing the burning, sandy track in bare feet to the loo with wooden bench seat and a bucket below the hole.




A nest of bees in the eaves of our shack provided sweet music and a bee sting for good measure. At night we would sleep on the front yard under the tall bluegums standing at the top of the river bank.




One picture in my mind is coming home to the sunny dining-room in Grove Lodge, eating butter and missing the “farm” butter at Robertson.




A few years later there would be another paradise in my life, “Plankhuis” - more about that later. And later in my life I also considered other places to be paradises – but of lesser order :

Gruinard Bay on the west of Scotland, Torremolinos, Benidorm and Blanes in Spain, Paleokastritsa and Mikonos in Greece.




Chapter 3 : Somerset West




My life in Mowbray came to an abrupt end when I turned 9: we moved to Somerset West, a name ever beloved to me.

This was something new to me, at least in my conscious memory – living in our own house instead of a boarding house. There was the thrill of having a garden where flowers and vegetables were grown, our own cat, large wild grounds behind the house where we hunted wild cats, but perhaps the less said about that the better. My father jokingly wanted to call the house “Dead Cat Corner” - I shudder to think of the brutality of our minds.




At school my firstness was even more remarked on, but at woodwork (luckily carrying no marks) I did not shine with any noticeable brightness! I was also starting to emerge as a sprinter of some speed, to add another string to my vanity.




My greatest love at that time was my bicycle, a new acquisition resulting from the discovery of my father's bicycle which had been stolen years before. It was a smallish bike (my father was rather short) and he gave it to me. What bliss to explore the countryside, or ride down to the beaches a couple of miles away at the Strand.




Living so near the sea meant that we practically lived there over the weekends. Like all the beaches in this part of the world, the beach was of finest white sand, and this beach at Milk Bay was also ideal for small children with a very gentle slope into the sea, and very low waves.




Yet living in our own house had a downside for me. I felt a bit lonely after the company of all the kids in the boarding house and our games and pastimes. Now I had only two friends – a boy in my class called Churnett whose father was a builder and lived in a house consisting of three interconnected rondavels, which seemed very original and exciting to me. Our other companion was the boy from next door, but I saw little of him generally.




Chapter 4 : Caledon




Near my tenth birthday (Sept 19th, 1945) we left Somerset West and took up residence in the Park Hotel, Caledon. Where we stayed for 15 months.




At this time my knowledge of Afrikaans was rudimentary. In Caledon I went into an Afrikaans school for the remainder of Standard 4 and the whole of Standard 5. The strange language caused my class position to drop from first to tenth. Later it rose to second, but I could not beat Wiid du Toit, my rival for first. I'd get my revenge on him 3 years later, when I'd moved back to an English school in the city and we took the same provincial exam (Junior Certificate). I was third in the province, but Wiid was not anywhere special.




Concerning school in Caledon, one of the most important experiences of my life was played out there : my first great obsessive love. I sat midway in the left-hand column of desks – she sat in the next column to the right, a bit in front of me, so I had the best possible view of her all the time.




What is worth saying about her? As did I, she got the prize for best behaved pupil – she was of a very serious mien. Grave, tall, slender, beautiful, long, lustrous black hair in thick plaits (or plait?), blue eyes, an alabaster skin showing blue of veins (or do I only imagine this last?).




Of course she dominated my fantasies. She was supposed to be the girl-friend of a boy Jannie Beukes who sat a couple of places in front of me, but I never saw any sign of this from her. Immediately in front of me sat Jannie Vosloo, who became my best class-mate. I visited his home, and we went to the deserted aerodrome together.




But I spent more time with Nico Wessels, who lived in the hotel where I did, so we were natural playmates. He was in the class above me, and in love with a girl in his class called Marlene Fick. We used to walk the street near the girl's hostel together, in search of a possible meeting or sight of Marlene or possibly of Roleen, another girl in my class that seemed more friendly and possibly more accessible than the remote Eulalie (my great obsession) who lived at the other end of town and was not likely to be seen near the hostel.




At home Nico and I got up to mischief. We each had a long glass tube which we used as peashooter. Ammunition came from the grain mill across the street. Targets walked along the street below the upstairs windows of our rooms, where we lurked behind the curtains ready to strike. And strike we certainly did, to our huge mirth.




On my own I got even nastier. Crab apples grew in the back yard of the hotel, and I slung them down on the heads of passers-by under the window at the end of the passage.




We were never uncovered or punished in these exploits, and I don't think too much harm was done.




My taste for dubious pranks had already shown itself in Somerset West, where I laid a rope across the gravel road in front of our house, attaching the far end a yard up a fencepole. As a bicycle crossed the rope, I would pull my end, causing the rope to rise and trip the bicycle up (or rather down!) What fun! It still gives me glee to think of it.




Caledon was the scene of some of the happiest times of my life, partly because of our holidays and picnic excursions, and partly because of the people living in the hotel.




Every weekend there would be car trips to the sea about 25 miles away. One favourite spot was a river mouth just east of Hermanus, where a sandbank formed a large shallow lagoon. I loved rowing with my arms on my pumped-up inner tube against the wind. Then we would lie in the sun in a spot sheltered by dunes and bushes, to regain warmth. I loved to see the men enjoying their Sunday siesta in the stupor of sleep. Who were these men? My father and one or two of his friends from the hotel.




But the real paradise was Plankhuis, a seaside house miles away from any other buildings, inaccessible by road, only reachable by a trudge over sand-dunes of over a mile. This belonged to a lawyer friend of my father, but our family was most welcome to join him and his family of wife and four sons over a weekend.




After the long, laden trudge across soft sand, we emerged at the edge of the plateau, with a stunning view of the coast below, and a steep descent down the face of the dunes. Below was a strip of flat land, where the house was, and then the sea, beyond a wide expanse of low rocks and sandy-bottomed rock pools. Here we fished for small, delicious klipvis or swam in the largest pool.




The primitive conditions, with no electricity and a brack well the only water supply, added a spice to this holiday.




The war was now recently over, with an important result for me: toy cars again became available. Some cheap, plastic pick-ups from America, with no floors, but I loved them nevertheless. But most I loved the Dinky Toys from England – beautifully made metal models with rubber tires. I pulled my current favourite along the passages on a string, or waited for the silver paint to dry which Errol Anders, my father's best friend, applied to the headlights of my cars.




My father was always popular in hotels – in the lounges and at festive days he took over the piano to the great delight of his listeners, dishing up exactly the sort of music they most liked. Whereas in the privacy of our house at Somerset West I was likely to hear also Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which enraptured me, or his favourite Chopin, for which I think I was rather too young. I preferred the Blue Danube!







Chapter 5 : Boarding school




After 15 months at Caledon, there came another big change in my life. We left Caledon and returned to city life in Cape Town. I moved into a boarding school – Wynberg Boy's Junior and then Senior, while my parents and sister moved into the Albion Hotel in Buitengracht Street in the city.




I found this boarding school life almost infinitely depressing.

I spent all my time replaying my memories of happier days in the past. Clinging to them as if they were all I had left. And yet I find it hard to understand why I was so miserable. Most of the other boys seemed to relish the life, hardly any of them ever seemed at all sad to be away from home. Maybe their homes were just not so much! I don't know.




I can't say that I was badly treated by my schoolmates – at the impromptu touch rugby games favoured by my dormitory companions, I was quite popular and even felt quite admired – even the biggest bully in the dormitory, who was quite gentle in a rather slimy way, and preferred to humiliate his victims in more subtle ways, left me more or less alone or even gave me a back-handed compliment by calling me “little fisock”. This was to distinguish me from “big fisock”, whoever that might have been – I have forgotten.




I think what I most hated about this life was the sheer slavery of it – having to rise at the crack of dawn to go and do morning prep in some godforsaken classroom before breakfast... and then more of the same after supper – I actually hated schoolwork, although it was the source of my glory and fame at school.




Already at Caledon I had found the discipline of school very irksome. So much so, that I had already formulated my main ambition very clearly : to be free of all necessity to work, and to lead a paradisal existence consisting of a perpetual holiday! To anticipate things a bit, but not to hide the inevitable sequel: I achieved this ambition at the age of 29, and have not once regretted my choice in all the years since.




One thing I DID enjoy, in summer time, was the Saturday afternoon excursions to the tidal swimming pools at Kalk Bay station. Swimming in the water, then lying on a rock in the sun – my idea of bliss.




But most of all I did enjoy the Sundays – when after the excruciating boredom of enforced church attendance I was free for a few hours to catch a train to the city and spend time with my family. Even these hours could be tinged with sadness, caused by their necessary brevity.




In the Albion Hotel I led a different life, a few hours every Sunday but more importantly during school holidays. Then life reverted to the pattern of Caledon : my father's hotel friends playing a big part in my life as admired and beloved beings, numerous and frequent trips, by car, to beautiful picnic and seaside spots (usually in a big party including hotel friends), time to play for hours with my Dinky Cars and Meccano set... what more could my heart desire?




Chapter 6: MORE ABOUT THE PEOPLE IN THE ALBION HOTEL




I am inserting this chapter now, although I have already reached chapter $Aug58$, because I see that I have said far too little about the Albion Hotel.

In my memories it is one of the 4 or 5 most beloved residences of my life, the scene of great joys and happiness.

Most of this wealth which I experienced was due to the nature of the people who were there: the manager, George Shultz and his wife (a woman, unlike her husband, who was hardly ever visible. I think she was nursing her second baby).

She also had a son, Johan, about my sister's age, who was her (and my) great playmate.




Johan was usually pedalling his car around the passages of the hotel, but often joined our games with toy cars and other toys on the lounge table. One of our favourite games was to dangle balloons out of the upstairs lounge window, on long lines. These balloons would then swirl around in the usual south-easter, above and amidst the traffic in the busy street below.




Then there were two very young married couples staying permanently in the hotel. As prelude to being able to afford their own house and raise a family.




Frank Jacobs was a garage mechanic, very muscular but not overtall, with a young wife, Phyllis, one of the most adorable people I ever met. She was beautiful, but more than that, somehow she just seemed to be good. I could never have imagined her resorting to deceit. Her personality was a quiet, relaxed, effortless one.




Somewhat more vivacious, and seeming to promise a promiscuity far removed from the likes of Phyllis, was June Hammond, a slightly plump but decidedly pretty and attractive woman. (once, a few years later, I had a dream about her, after which I wrote about her : “I have never seen a warmer nature.”). She was married to Dennis Hammond, a mechanic who was also a motor electrician and had his own band, which rose spectacularly during and after the time we knew him, taking him to overseas tours and plenty of money.

Dennis had enormous personality and well-deserved popularity, he was the life and soul of the party, but never too self-assertive.

But his marriage to June failed, and he found a possibly more suitable wife in a singer called Margaret Long.

These two couples, and a third couple, together with my father with his wife and two kids, were the regular members of our numerous excursions and picnics.




The third couple was May Howes, the plump mother of Dennis, and her husband George, who consumed huge meals but remained as lean as a bloodhound. They did not reside in the hotel, but were nearly always there. Many a time George would drop me off at the boarding school after a Sunday outing. He went in for large cars, useful for our group picnics. He had a large Hudson, and later a Studebaker Land Cruiser.




(Even after leaving the Albion Hotel in 1949, May and George remained friends of our family and visited us in Pinelands for several years. They were the closest to my parents' age group, being not much older.)




One weekend at Cape Hangklip I remember very well. It was during the long school holidays, and the party included all four couples mentioned above. In our bedroom at the Albion were three chameleons I had kidnapped from the Wynberg Boys' High School grounds, who resided on the curtains. These chameleons went with us, by car, to Cape Hangklip for the long weekend. I had to pay particular attention to them in the car, so see that they did not get squashed, or too hot in their cardboard box.







One beach at Hangklip was full of broken seashells and rotting seaweed, with plenty of weird sea fleas and other species. The chameleons had a glorious feast on the shiny bluebottle flies.




I was enchanted by the semi-drunken party where Dennis played his guitar while singing a very dirty song. May I think cracked some ribald sexual comment about Frank and Phyllis, whichI thought she might find a bit embarrassing, but such was the general harmony in this group that there were never unpleasant moments.




I also remember there was a table tennis table there ( we stayed in a sort of holiday barracks with a sort of recreation hall) and a couple of good players to be seen, but this was before my taking up the game.




I remember two of my greatest joys during this period. One was the icecreams, slabs of icecream with chocolate coating, on a stick, obtainable at a small cafe across the street, and the other was Pepsi-Cola, which I upheld as superior to “Coke”, and best drunk with Christmas cake.













Chapter 7 : Pinelands




But plans were afoot to make a big change in our lives. My father was having a house built on a new plot in Pinelands, an expanding “Garden City” 5 miles from the city. Most Sundays we would catch a train to Woltemade station, then walk a mile to our plot to see how the building was getting on. My mother had designed the layout and size of the rooms, windows, and front porch. And I had spent hours daydreaming about how to arrange the furniture in my bedroom.




Finally, after long delays, the house was finished and we moved in in March, 1949. I left the boarding school to live with my family once again, but continued at Wynberg Boys High as a day scholar.




What pleased me the most about this change was that it meant I could have a bicycle again. Without consulting my parents I took 10 pounds of my saved-up money and bought myself a brand-new BSA roadster bicycle. I had to use my father's garage to keep this bike in. Usually, in good weather, I used this bike to get the 6 miles to school every day, and the 6 miles back. Actually it was six and a quarter miles – I don't want to rob myself now of that extra quarter mile!




And on a Saturday morning, like as not, I would take the bike for a 30-mile spin over Constantia Nek and along the Twelve Apostles, around Table Mountain, Lion's Head and Sea Point and from there through Observatory, usually battling against a strong South-Easter, on my way home.




A lad a block down the road, who went to Rondebosch Boys High, met me in the street and through him I met Hemmo Alting-Mees, who lived a mile nearer the mountain and also went to Rondebosch. The three of us became cycling companions and went on many short trips during the weekends. We also rode the hundred miles to Robertson and camped there for a week during the holidays. That was the only way I was going to see my beloved Robertson again – my father had given it up.




In fact I felt a loser in many ways by the move to Pinelands. Without the presence of his hotel friends, my father lost contact with most of them and so his circle of friends diminished considerably. I realised how much the contact with all these friends of his had meant to me. How much satisfaction and stimulation I derived from seeing them.

With that, my father also seemed to lose interest in going for drives and picnics, so that pleasure was curtailed for me as well. I was thrown more onto my own resourses for a social life, and I found myself lacking in such resources. My only friend really was Hemmo, and I never felt very close to him anyway, nor did I really like him or admire him as I did my father's grown-up friends.




About the only people that visited our house were the Van Heerdens. Nols was an advocate and so connected professionally to my father, and his wife Peggy was a very attractive woman who had a little local renown as a tennis player. Needless to say I was head over heels in love with her – I only hope it wasn't too obvious to everybody. Typically they would arrive in their A40, come into the lounge where I would sit on a chair in the corner, an onlooker tolerated by all the adults, with no real part in the conversation.




Sometimes they would come for an evening of bridge with my parents, then I would probably not see them at all, but I could lie in my bed at the other end of the house and listen to them calling “One heart!”.




I did well at school, and took the Junior Certificate exam at the end of 1949, coming third in the Cape Province. The boy who came first was G. C. Brummer, grandson of one of South Africa's greatest writers, the famous Langenhoven. I regarded him as my real rival, especially as I was the great-nephew of Leipoldt, just as famous a writer and usually considered as by far a better poet. A battle of the generations!




(But 2 years later, when we next did battle in the Senior Certificate (matric), we were both beaten by the “upstart” Mervyn Samuel Gotsman... and Brummer was still ahead of me; I was pushed down to fourth place.)




In 1950 it became known that a new boy, Cyril David Karabus, was coming to our school. From Beaufort West, where he happened to have the misfortune of coming second to GC Brummer, who was in his class! He was reputed to be very bright, and a fellow by the name of Torrington remarked to me in the playground that my reign was over!




Sadly for Karabus, who was a very mature, good-natured and likeable person, he had drawn another tough opponent and never managed to beat me in the school exams, though he showed his calibre by being placed eighth in the province at the final matric exam.




I did not miss any of my ex-fellow inmates from the boarders at Wynberg! I very much enjoyed the lunch-break games of touch rugby that our class played every day. Because I was the fastest runner on the field, and scored nearly every time I got the ball! Lucky for me Hilary Spears was not a sports fan – because eventually one day he was talked into a game with us and turned out to be faster than me, so he caught me when I got the ball and stopped me from scoring.












Our class was 8A in 1949, 9A in 1950 and 10A in 1951 (matric year for me). The “A” classes were made up of those who took Latin, who were also the brighter pupils. About half my class were Jews – there were no Jews in the B classes. They were really a very bright bunch, but mostly small and not very athletic, but nevertheless very keen on the daily lunch-break Touch Rugby, in which I gloried so much. In summer we played cricket instead (with a tennis ball) and there I did not shine at all, neither with bat nor ball. Cricket is rather a discouraging game for an unpractised batter, because its nature is such as to deprive of practice those who most need it! The remedy is of course practice in the nets, but I lacked motivation for this, at boarding school already.







Chapter 8 : Rugby




I had already played a bit of rugby at Caledon, before I came to Wynberg, and there I was put into an under-13 side as lock forward. I played in this position for 4 years, and never reached the “A” side in any age group. My potential as a possible back-line player was apparently not thought of, although those in charge should really have known better.




In the sprint events, over 100 and 220 yards, in the school sports every year, I was usually placed 4th in my age group.

The two fastest runners were Lionel Shapiro and Roy Blumgart, who ran for Wellington and De Waal. The third fastest was Ronny Gomes, who ran for Van Riebeek. The fourth house, Rhodes, had nobody to speak of. I was the second fastest in De Waal, just a bit slower than Gomes.




Shapiro and Blumgart were the natural choice as wings for the rugby “A” team, and Gomes was a really great centre, with a great side-step and ability to break, and a bit of weight, being a bit more solidly built than the wings, making him hard to stop.




I would have been of much more use in the back line, a fact which apparently penetrated the minds of the sports masters after about 3 years, and in an inter-house match I was put into the wing position in order to mark the fast Shapiro, who was running round his opposition usually. With the ball under his arm, he was simply not fast enough to get past me, and I brought him down every time he got the ball.




But it was now too late for tears. It was the end of the season, and next year I decided I had had enough of the farce of being a lock and quit the game, using the need to study as my excuse. I much preferred the touch rugby at breaktime, where everybody's position was the same and I could use my talent of always being in the right place to receive the ball and my speed to do something with it.




It was now my final year and I had discovered Table Tennis.




Chapter 9: Table Tennis




After one year at boarding school, the principal retired and was replaced by W. E. Bowden, an army major and excellent teacher of mathematics. One early innovation of his in the boarding school was a ping-pong table. I immediately liked the game, although none of us knew anything of its possibilities. Nobody among us had any idea of what topspin could do, or backspin could do, for that matter. I don't remember where I first picked such ideas up, but at age 15 I was practising the classical attacking and defensive spins with the boys who lived next door, in their garage, in Pinelands. My cycling friend Hemmo also got interested, and we became regular practice partners. We both joined a club and hoped to improve our standard to fifth league in order to make the lowest team in the club.




Those were the days before modern bat surfaces spoilt the game by rendering defensive play with its long rallies of attacker versus defender obsolete. Cape Town's stars were Theo Paitaki and Monty Shotland. Paitaki had a famous backhand attack, but Shotland retrieved almost everything from far behind the table, and long rallies of spectacular play delighted the local crowds. These two players were an inspiration.










At first I concentrated on back-spin defense, but later developed a back-hand attack that impressed many players better than myself and with which many years later I was still causing upsets by beating provincial players. By 1970 the loop drive had really changed the nature of the game and I was not all that attracted by the new table tennis and gave it up without taking the trouble to practice and master the loop drive.




Chapter 10 : Assisted cycling




Let's go back to cycling for a while. By 1950, cycling was one of my greatest joys. At weekends, I loved the scenic roads around the peninsula, toiling up the long, steep climbs and feeling the strength of my pumping heart, flying effortlessly down the long downhills. On schooldays, there was always the long rise from Claremont to Wynberg. Coming home, I rushed down this stretch with the South-Easter behind me at about 30 m.p.h.

In those days, very few bikes were fitted with the derailer gears so common today. Quite a few bikes had Sturmey-Archer 3-speed gears, which enclosed their gears in the rear axle hub. I had the rarer 4-speed hub, and soon I doubled the number of gears from 4 to eight by fitting two sprockets on my rear axle, one of 12 teeth and one of 19, which combined with the Sturmey-Archer gears to give me gear ratios from very high to very low. My highest gear enabled me to take advantage of the downhill and following wind to reach a very high speed with very little effort. This created a spectacular effect and onlookers found it hard to believe I could go so fast pedalling so slowly – they obviously thought I was shamming my pedalling movement.




Once I had reached the bridge into Pinelands on my way home, with a mile and a half still to go, I encountered the school buses, double-decker diesels, on their afternoon shift. I would stop behind one of these while pupils were getting off, then when it pulled away I would stick behind it, my front wheel inches from its back bumper, easily matching its acceleration and top speed with the aid of my gears. Then when it slowed down for the next stop I would go flying past in a sort of triumph, something in the spirit of a formula one driver overtaking his rival. Eventually the bus would catch me again and overtake me, but then I would catch it when it stopped again and repeat the exercise all over again. A real cat-and-mouse game! Hoping incidentally to catch the attention of the pretty girls in the bus!

On other routes the double-decker electric buses, with overhead electricity supply lines, were a much tougher proposition with their greatly superior acceleration, also these drivers seemed to have little respect for the 30-mile-per-hour limit applicable in those days, and would charge along at more like 40 mph. I found these tough adversaries better left alone.

With lorries on the lower main road, I did not scruple to grab hold of the bodywork and hitch a free ride.




My schooldays were approaching their end. What was I to do next? My father suggested I become an accountant, but that seemed too boring for me. I felt no strong calling in any direction, and would have opted for a permanent holiday if I had had the means. Alas, I did not, so I opted for a career as Mechanical Engineer, based on my old love of cars which was fading away somewhat and also on my facility with maths, thinking I would have an easy time with math courses and not have to do much hated swotting of the other work. In these thoughts I was mainly correct, and so it worked out.




Chapter 11: A party at the home of Hilary Spears




Soon after I had finished with school, a party was held at the home of Hilary Spears, who had been in my class. Hilary played no sports and did not shine in class, but I would call him the most remarkable person in the class.




He never competed in a race, but he was the fastest runner in sight. And most to the point, he was the only person who came from a home that had anything resembling culture in it.




He was the only person in the class that took a musical subject: his instrument was the cello. And music is certainly the most valuable thing in the world. In comparison to Hilary, the rest of us then were total ignoramuses living in a different world, a sub-world.




The party was intended as a sort of re-union or farewell party for the members of Hilary's class. Which was in a boys' school and did not contain any girls. So girls were also invited to the party, to make it more interesting.




Hilary's father, Frank Spears, was a well-known architect and radio actor, while his mother was Dorothea Spears, a poetess whose poems were regularly published in the Cape Times, Cape Town's foremost newspaper. (My judgment is based on quality, not circulation).




I came to this party as a sort of prodigy with a reputation for brilliance. On the bookshelves I saw many interesting books, such as the Sonnets of Shakespeare, and Bergson's Creative Evolution. The prettiest girl, Alison, seemed taken by me and gave me her attention, waiting on me fetchingly.

But then this attention seemd to diminish somewhat.




I remember we played an interesting game where you had to make a drawing depicting some proverb. My picture showed the rear view of a crowd of dogs staring at a mountain range in the distance, with stars overhead. It still amuses me.




Then there was some dancing, but I did not dance. I sat on a bench and noticed someone else also sitting on a bench. It was a very attractive girl of 16 who projected great sensitivity and sweetness, as well as virtue. I sat down and chatted with her. She made an indelible impression on me. I did not see her again for about six years. Her name was Eileen Buchanan.






Chapter 12 : University




At school I had failed to get A's (80%) in English, Afrikaans and History. In fact, in history I got a mere C (60-70%), much to the disgust of Tasker, our weird history master, who had expected 3 A's from this super-bright class containing me, Karabus and the prodigious Clive Young, but instead he got none. His own fault entirely, since he would insist on us learning from textbooks not approved by the provincial authorities. Which dumbskulls probably did not know what we were writing about and must have thought we had all been taught fairy stories instead of history.




More to the point, Tasker had succeeded in almost completely destroying my handwriting by his pressure on us to write 9 foolscap pages per hour. We were submitted to frequent “time trials”. For Tasker, quantity was quality. Clive Young was a brilliantly fast writer, with an excellent memory which enabled him to memorise most of the textbooks parrot fashion. Often as not, he beat me in the class exams into second place, but only in history of course. He was nowhere near an “A” aggregate – that level was reserved for Karabus and me.




However, when it came to writing the matric exam, my writing was to all intents and purposes illegible, so I don't know even how I managed to get a pass mark.




Yet such was my mastery of Mathematics, Physical Science and Latin (I must have scored close to 100% in these subjects) that I not only managed an A aggregate (despite my two B's and a C), but, as stated before, was placed fourth in the province.




Now in my first University year (1952) my 4 subjects were Pure Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Physics and Engineering Geometry. No more pressure on my handwriting, which commenced a slow but steady recovery.

Revelling in the subjects which came easiest to me. Getting unheard-of marks. (I remember one tussle with my closest rival in Applied mathematics, a student from Rondebosch High called Borcherds. He managed to get 127% in one test, not enough to match my 133%!




In case you are wondering how it can be possible to score over 100%, let me explain.




In standard 9 at school, I once scored a genuine 300 out of 300 marks – a true 100%. Next time around, (next quarter), I scored 106%. But that was not a genuinely flawless performance, lthough for all I know it might have been. The paper had been judged too difficult so marks had been added to everybody's score.




At University, the reason was different. To enable the brighter students to show their paces, the examiners decided to add an additional section to the normal paper, containing more challenging problems. The idea was that the cleverer ones should finish the main paper as usual, and then be given the opportunity to tackle the hard section for additional marks, in effect making the paper worth 140%.




And that option was not worthless, because the marks from these weekly tests were also partly carried over into the final mark for the year, which thus did not depend only on the final exam.




This new system had disastrous results for probably the most brilliant pure mathematician in the class, the fabulous Claude Lovelace, who stumbled around in a perpetual dream of mathematics, whose parents were fabulously rich and who gave away his whole fabulous collection of classical music records to the music library so that he could concentrate on his mathematics!




Poor Claude was like Atalanta at the sight of a golden apple. He had no eyes for the main chance, went straight to the most challenging problems, which unfortunately did not leave him time to do the more prosaic 100%-worth of the paper. He ended up with an appalling mark of around 50%, which put him out of the running for the class medal in Pure Mathematics.




I would have got this medal myself if I was not pipped by the brilliant Laurie Mackay, an older pupil who had done Pure Maths before and who was now for some unaccountable reason required to do the course again! Something to do with time delays and change of courses.




One thing I liked about Mackay was the way he would sit on a bench high up in the chemistry lecture theatre, with a chessboard out of sight on the bench between him and a buddy of his, surreptitiously playing a game of chess during the prof's lecture.




A very good comment on the system of lectures. I never saw the point of these lectures, where a lecturer simply copied stuff onto the blackboard and everybody struggled to recopy the stuff into their notebooks with no time for discussion of any sort. What an utter waste of time! They might just as well just have distributed written tracts. To this day I hate lectures of all sorts, where a single speaker addresses a captive audience. Each member of which receives exactly the same words of wisdom, at a speed not of his choice or necessarily, capability to absorb. Much better to read a book, at your own speed, in the time and place of your choice!




Incidentally this Mackay was a very interesting character, one of my role models in some ways. He looked rather ordinary and wore spectacles. He was extremely modest and quiet, yet at lunch time he could be seen sitting on the lawn, surrounded by an admiring circle of young women hanging from his lips.




Added to that, he was a wing in the University first rugby team, a proof that he must have been a very fast runner. During the long vacs, he would get employment on a vessel going to the Antarctic. On return he would show us class-mates his wonderful photographs from the Antarctic, of icebergs and other polar fauna.




Like myself, Mackay was doing Engineering and so was in my drawing class as well. For all his multi-talented brilliance, Mackay, like my father, simply could not cope with drawing. He could not even manage to pass Engineering Geometry at the end of the first year, and had to give up Engineering. So I got the class medal for this subject, as well as for Applied Mathematics, in which Mackay was also not quite in the same class as Borcherds and myself. I don't recall who got the medal for Physics, the remaining one of my 4 subjects, but I know that it wasn't me. Pity!




University was a different world to school. Boys in my class at school, who had got 80% in maths, struggled to pass University first year maths. On the other hand, Leslie Lyon van Zyl, who was in the same year as me at Wynberg, but in the B class for duffers, did poorly at school, I think because he didn't like the subjects in the curriculum. When he was free to choose those subjects himself, at University, as I did he got much better results.




In fact he performed outstandingly well in the first year Engineering courses, being one of only 3 to get firsts in all 4 subjects, together with me and one other whom I do not remember. And that was out of a large class of about 150, all drawn from the cream by school standards.




1952 finished as the most brilliantly successful year of my career, regarding academic performance.




Before I go on to 1953, I must make mention of my most important experiences during 1952. These were my studies in psychology, philosophy and music. These were entirely off my own bat, my own private business that had nothing to do with my Engineering course or bursary.




I found Freud very interesting, in fact I might as well say that he saw what few people in this conditioned age are even now able to see – how much we and our lives are affected by purely arbitrary and unnecessary taboos and conditioning.




And how people can become completely irrational, even mentally disturbed, as a result of this conditioning. I read his books one by one, in the order written, from cover to cover, absolutely absorbed and entranced by the genius of this man. But what amazes me most in this day and age is to see how little he was understood and appreciated by those one would expect to be able to.




But I stopped about halfway through his books. I felt I had read enough, I had got the picture, and understood the whole story perfectly.




In philosophy, I found the greatest genius was Nietzsche, one of t he few philosophers to realise that philosophy went, or could go, beyond being an exercise in futility.




I don't agree with his theory of Eternal Recurrence, yet it deserves thought. A mathematician with some understanding of the concept of infinity will probably not be able to swallow his theory, which depends on considering the possible conditions of the universe as being finite in number. That would depend on a notion of quantum space, and quantum time, for a start. I suppose I must concede it might not be totally out of t he question. But I don't buy it anyway.




But all philosophical ideas were in a sense old hat to me, I had had them all myself. From my point of view, there were no original thinkers.




In music it was very different. I had one hell of a lot to learn. My knowledge of classical music was extremely rudimentary. I knew some of the more popular music, but had no conception of Bach or Mozart whatsoever.




In the first year drawing office, all the Engineers, Electrical, Civil and Mechanical, had desks in alphabetical order, from the front of the room to the back. So Stanley Brown, studying Civil Engineering, a Bishops boy, sat immediately to my left, and Borcherds, my rival in Applied Mathematics, sat in the row in front of me, a little to my left. I enjoyed his repartee and comments on events from time to time.




Stanley Brown helped to open the doors of music to me. He was particularly obsessed with Bach, whom he regarded as the greatest of composers, and particularly his organ music. After lectures, he took me along with him to the music library, where one could listen to a huge repertoire of classical music through earphones.




So I gained experience of the joys of baroque music. After that, I went there very regularly throughout my engineering course, and went through the repertoire of the music of the great composers. This study of classical music brought me the greatest riches that I was to possess in this life. I discovered that music went much further than words could ever do, even the poetry of a Shakespeare.







Chapter 13: 1953, my second year at UCT




1953 was to see an almost total collapse in my exam performances.

I merely managed to pass second year Pure and Applied maths, and was nowhere in the running for class medals against my old rivals Borcherds and Mackenzie, who were doing Civil and Electrical Engineering respectively, but were members of the same maths classes.




Superficially, the reasons for this decline in my performance appear to be as follows.




In first year, we had to write weekly tests in Pure and Applied Maths. This meant that once a week, the day before the test, I revised the week's work, which means I went through the week's collection of transcribed but still incomprehensible notes to study them in order to penetrate their meaning and understand what they were all about. Thus I arrived for the test well prepared, red hot in fact with everything newly fresh in my memory. A system that worked perfectly for me.




In second year, the weekly tests simply fell away and their was no urgency or reason to study the notes until the midyear exam. And then the backlog was too great and I had left myself far too little time to get on top of the work. And there was simply too much of it to swallow in one dose.




The other students were more disciplined than I was, and were prepared to work regularly, but I needed the stimulus of immediate competition to motivate me. I had no inherent love for mathematics to make me study it. Such a love I was to develop about 30 years later, but at that time I found maths appallingly futile, as I did in fact find all technology. I believed in and longed for a more “natural” life, one of living in tropical paradises and eating fruit off trees: the Garden of Eden, you might say. I hated work like a curse.




Chapter 14 : Third year




We have seen that the second year was academically disastrous for me. The third year was just as bad, but at least I no longer had to do maths, which no longer interested me. Instead I had to do much experimental laboratory work,

and laborious designs of bridges, cranes etc. But the real problem was love, co-called. Sometimes better referred to as lust. In my case, better defined as obsession. This was a more passionate and intense obsession than at Caledon.

It started when I saw a girl in a raincoat from behind – a bit below the medium height, all I could see really was hair that could not be described as special in any way. What was it, then, that I saw? The style of movement? Hardly, I think. Something in the air, something atmospheric? Perhaps. I don't know. But when I come across the term coup de foudre, it seems the best way I have seen to describe what happened to me in one moment. It had something of an electric shock about it. About her face I saw and knew nothing, but I knew it could not disappoint me.

Nor did it when I saw her next in a common room basement. I thought she was ravishingly pretty!




What followed was a year of total obsession, a year of illusion, or rather self-delusion, during which I imagined, whenever I passed her along the walkways of campus, that she shared a mutual passion with me. I saw it in her face, in the nervous the passionate way she glanced at me.




As she walked up the library isle, while I watched seated on one side, I wondered if everyone around me could hear the beating of my heart, and thought that if I had to get up and accost her, I would pass out from excitement and nervousness. I felt absolutely paralysed at such a thought.

I could see no way around this impasse, and despised myself for my frailty.




This experience made me see myself as weak for the first time in my life, and caused me to start worshipping the idea of strength. Beethoven's dictum pleased me the most : “Strength is the moral code of those that raise themselves above their fellow-men, and it is also mine.” But it took me a year to find enough strength to act in this affair. During that year of obsession I lived a magical life. I experienced something that I coined the term superessence to describe. And the philosophical question uppermost in my mind was : “What are the determinants of superessence?”




Chapter 15 : The fourth year




The fourth year brought more strength, action, disillusionment, and relative sanity. One day she chanced to come and sit a few metres away from me, I can't remember whether to the left or right. And eventually we exchanged a glance. At that moment, or a bit later (my memory is a bit blurred) I saw that the clock was showing the end of a class period, and I said to her: “Are you finished?” to which I think she made no reply. I got up and left.




A few days later I saw her walking up the aisle. I got up, approached her from behind, and accosted her. In effect, I made a date to meet her later in the day, to go for a walk.

When the time came, we met, and walked along the road from the university that goes past the zoo. There we sat on a bench and talked. I was much stronger then than a year before, and I could only laugh to myself as it became clear that I was nothing at all to her, she had not even noticed me on the walkways of campus, far from being on the point of collapsing from passion for me. What a huge joke!




I had no option but to give up my delusions and return to a more mundane level, and try to win her as a more common type of girl-friend. I took her to a concert at the school of music, on the pillion of my motorbike. I liked her arms around me, but I never embraced her or kissed her.




Soon afterwards she had a nervous breakdown – this stemmed from heavy disappointment. She HAD in fact been passionately in love – in this I was not mistaken, but with someone else, not with me! And he had disappointed her.




I went to visit her in the nursing-home – her mother was a doctor and saw to it that she got elecro-convulsive treatment, much to my horror and disgust. This obnoxious woman, whom I met but once, had the cheek to phone my mother and ask her to stop me from seeing her daughter.

As if my mother could or would have done anything of the kind. And my love herself told me she really appreciated my visits.




But it was not to be. Nothing further ever happened between us. Dozens of years later, I saw in the alumni magazine that she had married a pastor in West Germany. And then also, or either before or later, I was in Caledon and inquired at a cafe about the love of my childhood, and heard that she had married a dominee! These serious, religious types ever appealed to me, though I can't stomach their absurd superstition.




Dieciseis de diciembre, 2009:

diez puertos.




There is no good or evil, no right or wrong, no valid commandments or religion. These things are fictions generated in order to manipulate and control others. They are socio-political stratagems.




In the evolutionary scale, they appear already in other social species which antedate man. They have great survival value for whichever species is using them. The invention of falsehood goes back much further in evolution, as seen in cases of deception such as camouflage, and antedates the development of social species.

So the valuing of truth is dubious, as we are truly “people of the lie” and the most useful truth must recognise this. Within more limited circumstances, truth may be found to have other uses, such as being a source of aesthetic pleasure.

On the whole, I would estimate that the volume of fictional works exceeds the volume of non-fictional writings in value:

in other words, lies are more valuable than truth.







Chapter 16: Leaving South Africa




I am getting impatient to leave the shore of South Africa, at least in this story. Note that in those days that is what one did: in a mailboat. One did NOT depart from an airport in a Boeing – those were still in the future.




I was 20 years old, and had been awarded a so-called Brush Commonwealth Scholarship. Brush was the name of the manufacturing group of companies which made diesel engines and electrical equipment mainly. They forked out a living wage for 2 years to selected graduates in Engineering.

During those 2 years one had to clock in and out daily to get one's salary, but that was about all one had to do.




My first factory was the National Gas and Oil Engine Company, in Ashton-under-Lyne (near Manchester). This factory had the usual set of workshops: pattern shop, foundry, machine and tool shops, fitting shop for assembly and testing of engines, etc.




I met a delightful pattern-maker in the pattern shop, who helped me make a beautiful bedside lamp for myself out of wood, and also a wooden case for my slide-rule. (A slide-rule is another prehistoric animal, like the mailship recently mentioned, since replaced by electronic calculator). Very few of my activities and experiences in these factories seemd to have much connection with engineering, yet I suppose they were all valuable general experience. In the next factory (taking a glimpse into 9 months later) I met up with other engineers, from other countries, in the same boat as myself, and we would engage in surreptitious games of chess, hiding behind the machines and playing on scraps of paper instead of a board.




I stayed in York House, a nice boarding house in Ashton, 5-10 minutes walk from the factory. One resident was Roger Calvert, the accountant for the factory. Two others were Tom Paterson, a rather lugubrious Scot, and James (or was it David?) Cahill, of slightly more optimistic outlook. These three and I formed the nucleus of a regular nightly poker game. My first school. Cards were already in my blood from the numerous family games of vantoon, poker etc., inspired mainly by my card-obsessed ouma. I loved gambling, the way good luck seemed to dog me. There is nothing I love more than a piece of outstanding good luck, unless it is a long run of outstanding good luck.




Let's take another jump into the present, just for the relief of contrast. It is 2 Jan, 2010. Two days ago I was playing scrabble on the Internet with someone calling herself pamclay , from India. She had 3 hours to go to New Year, I had 6. I was very lucky, she was astounded, and was wishing me a lucky 2010. I said that I liked 2009 and would rather it continued! But she told me I would be even luckier in 2010. So what happened yesterday? I played my first game of 2010 and got an astronomical score of 525! (well last year my best was 556, but anything over 500 is very, very nice to get). What I like about scrabble is that luck plays a huge role. And yet so does ability, and there is always more to learn. It is now my favourite game.




Staying at York House was also a Swiss confectioner, who was always pestering me for a game of chess, about which I knew next to nothing. Repeated drubbings from Paul taught me something, as did also a primer on chess I found in the lounge. This was the beginning of my chess career, which led to me winning a Tournament in Durban in 1964.




(This claim means almost nothing; the very best players in Durban did not take part. To define my strength a bit more accurately: I was definitely among the top 12 actively competitive players in Durban, at that time, most definitely not among the top 2, and probably somewhere around number 6 to 8.)




Every day at lunch time I would go home and snatch a 10-20 minute lie-down, made desirable by our late poker nights. While prone I would feed on some classical music on the radio. Books I enjoyed at that time included, I remember, Antic Hay. No other book specifically, comes to mind as I type these words 54 years later. During these two years in England I read mainly Dostoevsky, Turgenev, DH Lawrence and Aldous Huxley.




At “work” we were supposed to take a 15-minute teabreak twice a day. There was a hall with a piano in it, where we went for tea, a few of us students. One was from New Zealand, another from Wales, another was a fellow resident of York House called Arjun Bhagat, who had an impressive Oxford accent and an Oxford personality to go with it. I never clicked with him – he projected no self beyond this stereotype, which I could not see as sincere.




I would extend my teabreak to 45 minutes to practise my pieces on the piano – Beethoven's Fur Elise and Moonlight Sonata, slow movement, about the only two pieces I could play by heart. The New Zealander was quite impressed; he was a similar sort of dilettante to myself, with a microscopic repertoire including a Mozart piece which I rather envied him for. Sometimes I would hear him whistling Beethoven's Violin Concerto, finale.




But I found all these people, British and Colonial, dead in expression and being. A very young student from Germany, Dieter von der Heide, I found much more alive, with spontaneous zest for life. He also took to chess in York House, somewhat under my tutelage as I was slightly more advanced than he, and I gratefully remember his glee when he caught my king in the open and hunted him down. I had no British friends in these two years; my best friends were Latin Americans (Peru and Mexico), Indians and a Bulgarian.




I owe my first lessons in Spanish to these Latins; the lessons were to relieve the boredom of the shop floor. I remember the first sentence Orestes Pastor chose to teach me: me gusta esa mujer, pero no es posible. (A sentence which comes uncomfortably close to being the story of my life).




Spanish became a lifelong study for me, and at age 22 I took a six-month holiday in Spain. This was an early step I took in my life to anticipate my early retirement and start having a good time before I died from the boredom of work.




To take another look ahead, after retiring at age 29, I started studying Greek as preparation for a 4-week holiday in Greece. This was another study which gained enough momentum to absorb me for many hours during the years ahead. Apart from learning modern Greek, I can also recite long passages from Homer. A possession that gives much artistic satisfaction. As an inveterate novel-reader, I gained much joy from reading the novels of the Cretan Nikos Kazantzakis, which, like the work of the great Cervantes, lose nearly everything in translation.




Going back to my stay at York House: by April 1956 I had been in England for 4 months and seen only the miserable winter of Manchester. Now the season was changing and luring me on my motorcycle to explore the terrain. I remember the utter delight of getting out of the city for the first time in months and seeing the green, sprouting crops on the way to Liverpool.




In August I had a 2-week holiday, so I took a 4-day ride up into Scotland. At the end of the first day I slept in a small hotel in Cowdenbeath, not far north of Edinburgh. The second night I slept in a bed-and-breakfast house in Carrbridge, where I enjoyed a good game of draughts with the family. I thought this area most heavenly.




From Carrbridge, to Inverness, the north-most point of my ride. Then south along the Caledonian Canal. Past Fort William, then around Loch Leven, past Kinlochleven, not wanting to miss this part by taking the ferry, the more direct route. Then through the incredible Glen Coe, the mountains seen in glorious colours. In the light of that day, Glen Coe was the most beautiful sight I have ever seen.




After spending the night in a very small bed-and-breakfast house in Crianlarich, itself a very small town, I returned to Ashton the next, fourth and last day of my trip. Resolved to spend more time touring Scotland the next August.







Chapter 17 : A day trip to Loughborough.




I played some table tennis in the factory's club; I was about the second best player there, Owen being possibly a bit better and the captain of their team. I played in some league matches – I remember playing in one hall where the thermometer showed 37 degrees Fahrenheit (3 deg C) – my hands seemed to be too frozen to hold the bat. And I remember slithering along the snow-bound roads on m y motor-bike to get to the venues.




The sports day of the Brush Group, of which my factory was a part, and whose headquarters were at Loughborough, was held somewhere near midsummer. I was in the bus taking competitors from Ashton to Loughborough. I remember some of the good-natured ribaldry and chaffing in the bus.




I was supposed to be a reserve for the two members of the table-tennis team; the management had, understandably, not wanted to include me, as a temporary “foreigner”, in their local team – after all, next year I would probably be at Loughborough and then again upset the natural result of these inter-factory challenges.




I did not mind going along as reserve, although on strength alone I should definitely have been in the team. It was an enjoyable trip, my first glimpse of Loughborough, where I was to pass the next winter, and I particularly remember going for a walk of about a mile, from the sports fields to the town centre, buying a “Milky Bar” of white chocolate and enjoying it on my way back. One more card in my deck of chocolate-eating memories.




Back at Ashton, in September the summer reached the hottest I'd yet experienced in Britain. I remember lying in the sun on the crown-bowls field, sweltering in my half-removed overall. Quite a nice game, incidentally, which I never came across anywhere else, but played a few times at Ashton.




CHAPTER XX LOUGHBOROUGH




My scheduled 9 months at Ashton having come to an end, I was to spend the next 6 months at the Brush Electrical Engineering Company's factory in Loughborough.




I rode down through a summery landscape, from Ashton to Loughborough, in early October, 1956. My chattels went by train. The factory ran a hostel for students very close to the factory's sports fields and pavilion (bar). The table tennis room was also to hand. I was installed in this hostel, sharing a room with two Indian engineering graduates, Hira and Mehta, and a younger British student. Hira became the best friend I had in Britain, for we had a lot in common. First we played chess, and found we were fairly evenly matched. Then it turned out that he was also keen on table tennis. Another Indian in the hostel, Chaudari, was just as keen on table tennis, so the three of us spent much time in the table tennis room. We also spent much time in the bar, mainly playing darts where I had no edge and did not need to offer a handicap. Hira also loved snooker and billiards, to the extent that he confessed to me once, that during his first interview with the personel officer, all he could think about was how to play an in-off shot into the corner of the room off the man's head!




The three of us also went for motorcycle rides in the countryside. I had a 250 cc BSA, Hira had a 350 cc machine and Chaudari a 500 cc one.




But our main passion was cards, especially poker and brag (a 3-card version of poker, with suicidal betting rules). Together with other hostel students and their friends, we had late-night sessions most nights. Stakes were low, just high enough to give the game some reality.




I kept a careful record of my winnings, and so did Hira. We were both biggish winners.




Hira knew someone from Ghana called Billy Sam. I can't recall whether he was also an engineer, but I do recall that he was fairly famous in Ghana as a guitarist. Billy, Hira and I went to restaurant which Hira recommended for its Indian curry, and it sure was good. Then we went to Bill's flat (he did not live in the hostel) where he enchanted us with his beautiful playing. He also composed a piece for each of us on the spur of the moment, and delighted me by playing the Moonlight Sonata movement – like I did, he knew every note by heart, and he made it sound better on the guitar than I ever heard it played on the piano!




I was a regular member of the factory's table tennis team, and played weekly league matches against teams in the Leicester league. One night I had to play against a team with a woman in it, at home. She was quite solidly built, and played with a grave, stolid passion. I had been playing an effortless, highly polished style with success and amusement rather than passion, but I was getting bored with this, and this night marked a sudden switch to a more passionate, violently aggressive game. It was just another side of me craving expression.




Hira and I had even more in common. He was also relishing the novels of Dostoevsky and Lawrence, and introduced me to astrology – the western astrology, as he called it, not the Indian. He impressed me by his ability to guess people's birthdays, and helped me on my first steps to do the same. The first thing I discovered was an ability to guess Aquarians – perhaps not too surprising since my mother was an Aquarian. This was the first stage in my interest in Astrology.




In 1979 I stayed in a commune that included an astrologer, Katinka, who taught me to go beyond sun-sign astrology and how to draw up and interpret complete horoscopes. A few years later I embarked on my own program of scientific research, in line with my training as Bachelor of Science, in order to test statistically certain postulates of astrology.




The results of this research were published in Odyssey, a South African magazine, in 5 issues starting September 1983. In effect, I modified the assumptions of astrology in a way that has not yet been understood by more conventional astrologers. But I am trying to limit the application of astrology in this book, just as I am limiting any exposition of my philosophic nature and convictions, for the simple reason that I don't think there is a suitable audience for my views.

The thinking of the world is not nearly free enough to profit from them – much more radical thinking would be needed than is regarded as palatable in this age.




In all the years since 1957, I have not seen Hira again, but we have continued to correspond, at intervals of about 7 years on average. Our last communication was as recent as 2009.

Bear in mind that I have no other correspondents worth mentioning at all, to see the true position held by Hira in my life. What I valued the most in Hira was his unfailingly fresh and cheerful attitude and approach. His was a mind of very great clarity. I just could not see any sign of a chained mind in him, and he was completely ready to enjoy life to the full on the highest levels. He combined these attributes with a practical side, and had a very successful career in his chosen fields.




Chapter 18 : A romantic stocktaking




It is time to move on from Loghborough to Leeds, where I lived from April, 1957 to January, 1958. But first I want to correct the overall impression created by preceding chapters that I did not lead much of a sexual life. I have dealt with my two major obsessions, for Eulalie and Winifred, which were never equalled again in my life, but I have left out much else which occupied my thoughts. I now wish to fill in the picture, before the reader proceeds under wrong assumptions, about other women who were and remain important personages in my memories.




Most of my life was spent under the prime domination of some romantic passion or other. There were seldom any periods to which this did not apply. Some of these passions were very episodic and shortlived, and practically all of them found no physical or indeed any expression other than in fantasy.




For example, shortly after entering boarding school, at age about 12, there was a girl of about the same age. How did I meet her? Well, a group of us boarders – 4 or 5 – climbed over the fence one evening into an adjoining garden where there was fruit on trees. This was simply illegal, simple theft. But then we were joined in the tree by this ravishingly lovable and loving girl, the daughter of the proprietor. The sum total of my life with her was these minutes, yet the emotional resultant was like a precious jewel that shines on for ever.




More or less around this time, a more stable object of my admiration was one of the two young wives in the Albion Hotel, where my family lived. My emotions for her were not so obsessive or compulsive, but I saw her as an ideal and very beautiful character, as a wife. And she remains as an ideal type for me, to this day.




Next, at age 16, came Peggy, the advocate's wife, mentioned previously. My love for her has remained very strong through all the years. Three years ago, when I was living in Rondebosch, I used to walk the 20 minutes to a house she lived in when she was raising a family, just to soak myself in the ambience of that past love.




After that came the grand obsession with Winifred. About the same time my sister was becoming a woman, and my love for her was definitely taking on sexual tones. And on leaving for England, she took over the first place in my thoughts, whereas Winifred fell out of them entirely. This is a good place to state clearly that my sister was by far the most important person in my life for a period of 16 years. After that, after 1970, her importance to me diminished.




And that brings this stocktaking up to date, that is, up to my arrival in Leeds in April, 1957. So far my stay in England was without any romantic interest worth mentioning. The only person worth mentioning is the woman on the mailship: Rowena Essex-Clark.




She was a very handsome, very nicely-built young woman, newly qualified by 3 courses of psychology and I don't know what else, bound for I know not where, but definitely rather clued-up and not too dull-witted. I remained in love with her for ever, but not too much. Mainly it was a ship-board romance for me, as I never saw or heard of her again.




Chapter 19 : Leeds




This time the lodgings found for me by the Brush Group were not to my satisfaction, so I moved to 83 The Drive, Roundhay, 10 minutes walk from Roundhay Park, where I often wandered alone. My landlady was Mrs Dolan, and there were two other boarders, Eric and Chris.




I had pleasant games of tennis with Chris on the courts down the road.




I lived 9 months in Leeds, and this period is important in my memories, but I now choose to skip over this period without further ado, and to get to Spain.




In Leeds I met Javier Orozco, a Mexican who added to my Spanish. He, together with Professor Whiteman from UCT, were the two men in my life that most closely met MY idea of saintliness. Javier and I used to go into one of the smarter hotel lounges in Leeds to have our favourite drink, a Laager and lime, and discussion about Spanish and other things.




The two years of my Brush Travelling Scholarship were due to end in January 1958, but Brush were quite willing to let me extend my stay in Europe, pursuing my own life, before buying me my return ticket to Cape Town. My immediate plan was to go to Spain for 6 months, and then consider my next move. My intention: to have a wonderful holiday, a break from the tyranny of clocking in, in beautiful surroundings, and in a stimulating culture. (Mainly I had been disappointed in Britain because their culture was too similar to the South African, and therefore not so interesting. I wanted something much more different.)







Chapter 20: To Spain




I took a boat to Spain, from England to Vigo in north-west Spain, in January 1958. My motorbike and trunk I left in storage in London, and took a small suitcase with me. I wore my UCT jacket, blue with gold braid, a rather vulgar uniform I think. And I had two thick woollen jerseys against the cold of

mid-winter.




Disembarking in Vigo, I made my way to the road leading inland towards Madrid. I planned to get ahead by hitch-hiking. I had been told that hitch-hiking was not common in Spain and that the gesture of thumbing in the desired direction would just not be understood – I should rather advance boldly into the road and show any driver my raised palm as a signal to stop.




One of my first victims, if not the first, was a fish lorry carrying fish to Madrid, with a crew of 2 and a bunk in the cab. Progress with this heavy load of fish was very slow up the tortuous road through Galicia, which seemed to be a never-ending mountain pass.




I loved these drivers. Socially they were probably on the lowest rung in Spain, they spoke a coarse slang and soon taught me hijo de puta and similar compliments. When we came to a town we would stop for a bite, maybe some chops washed down with generous helpings of red wine. The price of these refreshments was unbelievably low. Any way these drivers were not in a mood to allow me to pay for anything, and when we eventually came to their stopping-place for the night, Tordesillas in the snow-bound mountains, we made plans to sleep. One driver would use the lorry bunk, the other and I entered a hospice which seemed to have very earthen floors with constant steps up and down. The passages led to a room with beds, where I slept like a log.




Next morning I parted from them; they were on their way to Madrid, further into the snow – I just wanted to go south to get beyond the snow-covered latitudes.




After a reasonably short wait by the side of the glittering, snow-covered road, a car stopped and the kind passengers took me on to Salamanca. They quite enjoyed my beginner's efforts to talk Spanish.




In Salamanca I was inside the main square, surrounded by arched openings onto the sheltered arcades. Hordes of small children were running about, noisily and in high glee.




I did not delay there; back to the roadside where a very friendly driver took me on to Bejar. Here I ran out of lifts for the day, so I went to the railway station. I had on my two jerseys and jacket, and also my fairly thick raincoat, at least it wasn't very thin. I waited for the next southbound train to come past. I had toothache and I rested my jaw on my fists on the table, and sought additional shelter under my hat. I think, anyway, that I had a hat, but maybe I didn't.




After hours and hours, the train came and I pushed my way into a coach crammed with very young soldiers. They made a space for me in a corner. My toothache was bad, so I could hardly sleep at all, but I think I must have dozed off at some point, meanwhile I was absolutely delighted by the conversation and personalities of the young soldiers. To judge from their comversation, they seemed more like students of literature than soldiers. They were dellighting in the rich variety of suffixes that Spanish nouns can take.




Next morning the train arrived at Caceres, the sun was shining, there was no more snow at this latitude, and my toothache was gone. What a mass of benedictions! I was ready to think my little hotel room a palace, and was particularly delighted, as I walked around the streets, to see that all the cars bore a number plate staring with CA and then 5 digits. Exactly as in Cape Town, my home town!




From here on I suffered no more from the cold of winter. I resumed my hitch-hiking, and several lifts took me to Seville, and then on to Cadiz, where I slept one night. And from there, eastwards past Gibraltar towards Malaga.




I had a lift from an American who told me that Torremolinos was a very nice place to stay, with a very nice pension, the Pension Beatriz. I had also slept in the famous Marbella, but the place seemed much too deserted. Fuengirola was even more bleak, it seemed to consist of nothing but a walled bullring surrounded by fields of short grass.




But when the American dropped me off at Torremolinos, I was inclined to think I had found the place of my dreams. And indeed I led a very rich life there for three months.




The Pension Beatriz was the centre of my joys. I was soon playing my beloved card games, the Spanish versions that were easy for me to pick up, with the family of the pension which included two nice daughters and a baby girl. The one girl was really pretty, which delighted me although she was engaged to an Austrian visitor.




The Spanish food, things like paella were a real delight for me, and the waitress was very sexy and vivacious. Her name was Inocencia, but Felipe, a rather cynical and aristocratic visitor from the Basque country, said she was not so innocent. That I can believe. Another visitor (pension resident) was Fred, an American who was trying to be a writer. He was certainly intelligent, and gave me a tough game of chess. Fred was fascinated by the way his coloured sunglasses transformed his nighttime views.




Much time would be spent on the pavement in front of the pension, sitting in chairs, reading the Fall of the Reich (borrowed I think from an elderly British woman), eating almonds and watching the passers-by. Adjoining the pension was the Bar Central, which was always full of interesting people. One of these was a concert pianist with a Swiss wife. He was sometimes away on concert trips. I thought them a classically handsome couple, and he liked to play the Spanish chess putzers, pretty old fogeys by my book, who liked to show off by playing 3-minute games.




One game, I pointed out to him a move he had missed, winning him the queen. Oh, so you know chess, he said to me. I played him, but he was too good for me.




When he was away on a concert trip, his wife and 10-year-old daughter, both beautiful if rather sad blondes, could be seen walking together in the streets. I was in love with this wife and about 5 other women at the same time. I called her La de Plata, the Silver One. To myself, I mean.




Apart from her, there was the pretty daughter of the pension, then there was a young American woman with her boy-friend, a young American painter who painted nothing but garlic, who had an aprtment in the village but came regularly to the pension for meals. I called her La Humilde, the Humble One.




Then there was La de Oro, the Golden One, a local wench with the golden hair that is the Spanish blonde, who used to walk by in the street. I followed her and tried to befriend her, but she was not too keen to hear too much about my troubles, telling me simply that “Me parece Ethpanya” (I like Spain).




And maybe that exhausts the list of my Torremolinos loves. Strange that these were all very grown women, whereas a few months later, in Blanes, the combined ages of my three greatest loves was 28.




But Patricia Boorman, if not a love, was certainly a most valued friend, ever since the evening, early in my stay at Torremolinos, when she presented me with the remains in a bottle of liqueur, and so opened up to me the delightful habit of guzzling sweet liqueurs. She was from London.




Chapter 21: Luís




Luis Alderete Mills, a lad of 18 from Valladolid, came to stay at the pension soon after I did, I think. He became my best friend in Spain, and we did many things together.




Such as: walking the streets of the town together, on the lookout for pretty girls. One of our favourites, a tourist from Sweden, we called La Jugadora - exactly why I don't remember, but we never really got to know much about her.




One night, together with an older man, we went to a nightclub in Malaga where Luis saw a pretty tourist, from Ireland, called Sheila. Or maybe she spelt it differently. He danced with her, and she told him “te quiero”. Poor Luis was very smitten and in the days that followed was forever writing her name on walls.




On these walks we might stop near a lamppole and start bombarding it with pine cones, seeing who could score the most hits.




In the pension lounge, we got intoxicated by the flamenco music which was forever playing on the local radio station. In a fit of enthusiasm, Luis would grab one of the rolled periodicals delivered by post and waiting to be taken by their addressee, lift it high in the air and bring it down with a tremendous thump on the table. An old, doddering Belgian guest, half asleep in his chair, jumped up and scurried out of the lounge in alarm, to the unbridled mirth of Luis and I.




Luis challenged me to draughts, Spanish style, and on cleaning me up would start singing a victory march. Eventually I got irritated by these gloating songs and socked him one. That upset him and he called me a brute: these young Spaniards, like the soldiers in the train, are extraordinarily civilised and gentle.




Luis, Patricia Boorman and I hired three bicycles and went for rides together. One ride left an indelible impression: because of a misty quality of the air, which was more typical of Britain and which I rarely saw in Spain, the landscapes and seascapes and beachscapes took on a magical, dreamlike quality.




Luis and I spent much time playing poker, just the two of us. Mrs Griffiths, the kind lady who lent me the book on Hitler, also lent me two tiny packs of cards, which we used. Later a group of medical students from Madrid came to stay at the pension. They joined in our poker and we had uproarious sessions on the sunroof of the pension, revelling in the sun in the bracing February air. From this roof we had a good view of a towering, volcano-shaped peak, crowned with snow or ice, visible at some distance. A beautiful sight against the blue sky.




Another friend of Luis and me was a 47-year-old man from Madrid whom I thought and wrote of simply as “El Madrileño”. He was an enthusiastic participant in our childish games, such as racing twigs down the water channels which ran through the fields surrounding the town.




I remember Luis named his racers “relampago engrasado” and “puta”. There was a series of putas that went up to puta III.




Luis was foever crooning the song “your eyes are the eyes of a woman in love”, but he had great trouble pronouncing the English w – he made it sound more like a g. Unfortunately, I seem to remember that I was pretty useless at helping him to overcome this hurdle.




As I said, Luis had a penchant for writing on walls; on one of our walks he wrote something that remains engraved on my memory: Esta vida sin cariño no es vida.







Chapter 22 : Benidorm




After three months in Spain, I had to exit the country to get another 3-months visa, so I hitch-hiked down to Gibraltar where I spent a day or two. In a hotel there I dreamt of Eileen. (see page 25). Then back to Torremolinos to say goodbye there. Happy as I was in Torremolinos, it was best that I moved on and saw more of Spain and lived other experiences.




But I was very sad as I travelled on through strange towns filled with unknown strangers. Nerja, with its tragic rock platform over the sea, a platform with plaques celebrating the tragic murders of civil war, made a fitting counterpoint to my depression.




So I did not enjoy the places I passed through very much. This was not arrival, like my first days in Spain, but a departure. I had to find a new life, one to compare with my life in Torremolinos.




Eventually I came to Benidorm, and took a room there. It was a lovely, huge, dark room overlooking the old, central square of the town. This square was at the foot of the headland covered with older houses. To the east stretched a wonderful beach about a mile long. Many hotels were being constructed along this beach, but right then the overcrowding had not become excessive, and the town retained a charm that had disappeared by the time of my next visit eight years later.




It was May now and the temperature was perfect for swimming. A short walk down from my room to the beach, a beach that reminded me of home, of Muizenberg with its ultrafine, white sand. In fact, this region of Spain is called Costa Blanca, a reference to the unusual, white sand.




I set myself to learn how to swim the whole length of the beach, breast stroke. At first I could only swim a hundred yards or so. But every day I swam a bit further, marking my progress by which hotel I reached. Within a few weeks I made it all the way. As I clambered out of the water I felt quite cold, and not in a mood to swim all the way back! After 15 minutes at the charming little hut at the end of the beach, where refreshments were served, I ran the mile back home along the beach, to get warm.




Another task I set myself at Benidorm was to study German. I devoted many hours to this.




There were no other guests at the pension where I had my room, and no meals were served. I made an interesting experiment here: I live on cold food for a couple of weeks. No cooked meals. But of course this was not a raw diet. I ate a lot of bread, cheese, olives and fruit, and probably salami and other savoury sausages. Nevertheless I was surprised at how good I felt on this sort of diet. I did not miss the usual cooked dishes at all.




My social life during the 4 weeks at Benidorm was practically nil. However, I did make one friend, a brilliant 20-year-old called Boris – I think he was Dutch – who worked as interpreter for one of the larger hotels. I met him on the beach, and he used to visit me at my room and share liqueurs and talk with me. He was a very intelligent and interesting companion. Our meeting was really the result of the fact that he noticed me on the beach and was struck my me – it was certainly not the other way around. I was the one who stood out like a sore thumb, he was the one already at home in the environment.




But most of the time I was rather lonely in Benidorm. Sun and sea and sand were great compensations, however.







Chapter 23 : Blanes




Blanes, the southernmost town on the Costa Brava, was my third and last long stay in Spain: I was there 6 weeks. It was now June and there seemed to be a lot of kids around. Perhaps it was the school holidays. I was like the Pied Piper, followed around by a horde of kids, for whom I performed sundry feats of magic such as floating razor blades and Spanish coins on water, and entertained by buying them icecreams and tickets to the autochoque (bump cars). One ten-year old I was seriously in love with and went to visit her mother who was very friendly to me and wrote me letters on behalf of her daughter when I had returned to South Africa. But Pilarin told me her brothers (her father was not to hand) would not allow her to have a boyfriend before she was fifteen. I called her La Desinteresada (Unselfish One) to myself, because she shared my gifts with the other kids.

I think Pilarin loved me, but was not in love with me.




But Alicia definitely was, and this made it heaven for me to be with her. She was 9 I think. The first time I saw her walking with a friend near the harbour, I couldn't help exclaiming “Princesas españolas!” which I think rather pleased them.




I used to climb a hill behind Blanes every day and one day I met Alicia on the top, with several other kids. We joined forces, and walked to the exquisite beach of SanFrancisco nearby, Alicia riding on my shoulders part of the way. Our togetherness was also exquisite, we were so absorbed in it that she lost awareness of what was going on around her, and started mislaying her things. Her friends remarked on her obvious distraction, which was very sweet to me.




I met her father in the garden of their holiday house, a fine, expensive property on the hill above the harbour. He was a well-to-do man from Galicia in north-west Spain. We had a pleasant chat.




I remember Alicia's voice asking me “Has visto todo en Blanes?” and saying “Nunca me ahogo” when I asked her to be careful when swimming. (“I'll never drown.”)




Of course I was now a long-distance swimmer and amazed a little German tourist whose parents were always nagging him on the beach: “Mache dein Mund zu!” (close your mouth). Amazed him by swimming out through the harbour and disappearing in the distance, to reappear hours later.




He said I swam “sehr weit”. (very far). A great compliment from a great tourist.




This was the best way to explore the beautiful coast, which consists of private properties – you can't walk or drive next to the sea! I would swim along, then land at some private landing spot to inspect it, before continuing.




My time in Spain was coming to an end. What next? The idea of going to Germany had been in my mind for months; somehow I did not feel certain that it was time to return to South Africa and see my beloved sister. She was now almost 17, and I had not seen her for over two and a half years. But I had found our exchange of letters satisfying. I could feel her genius in her writing.







Chapter 24 : To Germany




Sometime near the end of July, 1958 I caught the train to the border at Port Bou. Once in France, I started hitch-hiking : I was aiming at Germany.




I was very lucky to have a wonderful person stop and give me a lift. He was a French Canadian on holiday in France. It was obvious that he had friends (or relatives) in France, for he went to a private house at the end of the day, to overnight with friends. I I went along, and was put up with the same hospitality as he! This gave me an opportunity to experience the French personality, so vital, even electric, compared to the more reserved, less flambuoyant Spanish. this in fact struck me very forcibly the moment I crossed the border, and I wondered how national characters could contrast so extremely. I was also struck by the difference in the women, who seemed to have much more sensitivity, as well as beauty.




My friend had told me he was looking for a place where he could stop and paint. He was entranced by the light in South France. Light which was to me no different to my daily bread in South Africa and likewise in Spain. But I knew how rare it was in Britain, and I could imagine, maybe in Canada too.




So we parted: he found a spot to his liking, stopped, and I continued hitching from there.




Lifts were rarer from here on, and by the time I got as far as Marseilles I decided to proceed by train.




The train proceeded through impressive forests and ravines to Strasbourg. I stayed the night at a hotel in Kehl, just inside the German border. I watched a family, with grown-up daughter, arrive in the reception in the lounge. What impressions, of German flowers in the garden, German guests in the hotel... how different from the atmosphere of Germans abroad and on holiday! In comparison to the holiday-makers whose tribe I had joined, the life I saw in Germany seemed bleak and grim. Officials shouting orders on railway stations. It seemed as if there was a war on: I suppose there was. In the post office a poster insisted: “Unteilbares Deutschland!”




I got a lift in a lorry, through the rather impressive Black Forest, to Stuttgart, where I put up in a hostel in Bad Cannstadt. I went to the Mercedes Benz factory to discuss the possibility of getting employment with them. This would have required me to sign a 5-year contract.




In the Mercedes waiting room I had pored over a brochure of Mercedes models through the years, in Spanish, entitled “Un viaje retrospectivo”. It matched my nostalgic mood. I was feeling too lost and alone. I went to sit on a bench by the side of the river Neckar. Nobody was in sight, and the weather was dull. In the distance I made out a poster advertising a movie. It said: “Heute: Heimatlos”. That seemed to refer to me. I sat there, and decided to return to South Africa forthwith.




Having decided to wend my way homewards, I felt as if a load had been taken off my shoulders. I took a train to London – there I had a hilarious experience.




Taking my motorcycle out of storage, the licence of course was out of date, and I didn't get far before a traffic cop spotted me. It seemed I was in trouble! But no, when he heard that I was booked for a passage to South Africa within a few days, he said the courts would not stop me for such a trivial offence. The joke was that I took advantage of the cop to sell him the bike for the princely sum of five pounds, which solved my problem of what to do with my machine, which by now had decidedly seen better days, and was hardly worth taking back with me to South Africa.




Soon afterwards I found myself on the Carnarvon Castle, bound or Cape Town.







Chapter 25 : The voyage back




Like my voyage out on the Stirling Castle, the voyage back was a wonderful experience, one of my best holidays ever.

Going out, I won the shipboard table tennis competition: going back was the same again. But now I also won the chess, having learnt to play the game in the meantime.




This time I found the young, beautiful, attractive married and marriageable women at my table nauseating and disgusting. I could not stand their lies, their falsity and arrogance. They were not to be compared with my angelic 10-year old loves in Blanes, nor even with a ten-year old girl on board, whom I loved dearly. The first night we played tombola, I won the first House and stopped playing and gave her my winnings to play with: to her great delight she soon won the House. What is the use of blase, conceited females who are above being thrilled by anything? I detest them.




But this period of bliss also had to end, and soon I stood on the deck and saw the familiar, yet suddenly unbelievable, mountains of the Hottentots Holland range, across the Cape Flats.




CHAPTER 26: AN OVERVIEW OF MY FINANCES IN EUROPE




When I left South Africa I was worth about one or two hundred pounds. My salary in Britain was about L500 a year, of which I saved about L400 in the two years. Then UCT sent me L300 as a postgraduate award, for my studies in England. (Technically, my employment by the Brush Group was named a Scholarship, the main idea being that by loitering on the shop floor one was actually learning a lot about engineering.) (An idea that I don't particularly think it behooves me to quarrel with).

Then there was my gambling winnings from my card games. But that I forwarded in entirety to my sister, as it didn't amount to more than peanuts anyway.




So by 1958 I had ample funds to finance my six-month holiday in Spain.







Chapter 27: Back in Cape Town




On docking in Cape Town Harbour, I found my parents on the quayside waiting for me – I'm not sure if my sister and ouma were there too. They were obviously glad to see me, and we were mutually surprised at each others' accents, so mine must have changed a bit. If so, I doubt whether any such change survived for very long. When I hear myself, I sound VERY South African.




It was August; my sister's and my birthday were just around the corner. I stayed at home till my departure for Pretoria in June, 1959. For me, a happy, carefree period mostly, near to my adored sister.




I looked around for a job. I took a train to Somerset West to visit the Explosives Factory in search of a job. I visited the Cape Town Tramways Company in search of a job. I visited the Salt River Railway Workshops in search of a job. They managed to sign me up. This was October 1958. My career with the South African Railways and Harbours lasted till May 1965, when I retired.




My earliest memory of this job is sitting on a couch in a darkish passage waiting for an interview. In my wallet were four tightly packed pages of my diary of my last days in Blanes. I saw again the harbour and my girl friends and their voices. I felt extreme nostalgia for this lost idyll.




Being interviewed by a clerk I found very soothing. I seemed to be treasured as a valuable fish by some fisherman. I was amazed by the friendliness and respect shown to me – apparently the railways found it very difficult to find engineers.




At home, a great pleasure was in the fact that my parents had bought a “gram radio”, as it used to be called in those days, and started a collection of classical music records. I revelled in the heroic vigour of Beethoven's First Piano Concerto, espicially as I was contemplating some heroic action of my own.




I felt it was time I tried my luck with Eileen Buchanan (see page $$). I found out that she had moved to Somerset West with her parents. By February 1959 I had earned enough to buy a new car, my first, a Volkswagen beetle, for exactly L600.




I phoned her up and arranged to come out to her home and take her for a drive along the coast from there. After that she would catch a train to Cape Town on Saturday afternoons, and we would see a movie together. During the week, she had an office job in central Cape Town, for which she commuted the 60 miles there and back daily, by train I suppose. So during the lunch hour I would meet her outside her office to spend half an hour with her.




She was the first girl I kissed, a very exciting experience with her, much more so than with any other girl I kissed till 1995, 36 years later.




But her interest in me faded out, and after about two months our “affair” seemed over to me. She had not been at all the kind of person I imagined from our single meeting in 1952, six or seven years earlier. It was a shattered dream. But it did not upset me too much. I was rather pleased with the poem it led me to write.







Chapter 28: Leaving Cape Town




In June 1959 I was transferred to Pretoria, to work in the offices there until I found a more permanent position on the railway staff. I found a suitable room in the Burgerspark Hotel, a modest but comfortable enough home. There was a very beautiful young woman living there called Annetjie Pohl, but she was not very friendly and was, I think, engaged. But she furnished thoughts for day-dreams and relieved the otherwise boredom of existence.




I made a good friend of a colleague, a Yugoslav, some years older than me but also at the start of his career with the Railways. We spent most of our free time together, taking a couple of Yugoslav girls he knew to the drive-in cinema, going to swimming spots in the weekend. One weekend he took me with him (actually I took him in my car, he did not have one) to stay with some friends of his in Jo'burg. Presumably Yugoslavs, whom he knew by virtue of their common nationality.

Funnily enough, like Hira in England, he was also a good chess player, and also a good table tennis player, much better than Hira. But he had not played for years and had lost his form. I hammered him when we played at our boss's place.

Years later, in 1971, when I had not seen him for 6 years and he had resumed his table tennis career, he was playing for Northern Transvaal and was in the provincial team visiting Cape Town. I went to watch him play against the Cape Town stars, and though he lost to most of them, he would have thrashed me.




At the hotel in Burgerspark I was washing my car in the driveway when a fellow resident took up with me and befriended me. She was an attractive young woman who had come to stay there to get away from her husband, bringing with her her two kids, a girl of about 4 and a baby boy of 18 months. She had thought I looked lonely and she was quite right about that.




Every day on coming home from work I would come into her room and get onto the bed, but not with her – with her 4-year old daughter. This girl loved me, and I loved her too. Her name was Irma de Vos. (I can't remember her mother's name, it is as if I never knew it, which can hardly be the case)




I took them for a drive to the Hartebeespoort Dam during the weekend. My relation with the mother remained very platonic on my side, but she accepted this pretty well, I'd say.




In September I was given the job of holding a vacant position in the Germiston works until it could be permanently filled by a suitable candidate. It was too senior a position for my level, but they had to make do with me for three months. Every day I commuted the 30-odd miles from Pretoria.




In the Germiston office I remember dozing to recover from the late nights with Jovan Radmanovic, my Yugoslav friend.

The work I had to do was routine and boring stuff.




In December, 1959, I drove down to Cape Town for my summer holiday, to be reunited with my family. Jovan also came down to Cape Town on his own free pass. I found him a nice hotel near our house in Pinelands, and he spent much of his time with us. He, I and my sister went down to the Boulders for a swim, and had a good time.

In January 1960 a “permanent” position was found for me in Durban, where I lived and worked from then until my retiral in May 1965.







Chapter 29 : Life in Durban




Durban might be the cockroach capital of the world – if not, it is not for want of trying. The cockroaches are carefully nurtured in the city sewers, and never disturbed. Their large, shiny bodies cluster and hang, layer upon layer upon layer, on the walls in the darkness. Isaac Bashevis Singer would have found many, many, many good friends in Durban, if he had ever been so fortunate as to spend a night here.




These cockroaches make it easy for the Indian waiters to reward mean-tipping customers with an extra portion of cockroach in their soup or curry. Mind you, even the best tipper would still stand a good chance of finding one of these large, shiny jewels as hidden treasure in his food.




Looking for lodgings, I found an ad in the paper and moved in to the home of Mrs Galvin and her family: her 44-year old daughter Noreen, Noreen's 75-year old husband Clarence, two dangerous, hefty sausage-dogs, which spent most of their time out of harm's way (my harm!) in Mrs Galvin (Agnes)'s bedroom. Mrs Galvin also had an unmarried son, the manager of a non-European compound in Durban, who resided in the compound but sometimes visited his family.

Then there was Alice Jacobson, Agnes's second daughter, born out of wedlock, fathered by a high Jewish official in Indian railways, and aged 13. This family were in fact refugees from 1947 India. Alice was spectacularly, obscenely pretty, and was at a Catholic boarding-school in Durban, and came home for the weekends only.




I fell very much in love with her. I would lie in my bed on Saturday mornings, waiting to hear her arrival from school, with emotional anticipation. She was friendly with me, would bump her knees against mine under the table when we played cards, enjoyed hearing me play Beethoven's Minuet in G in the piano, and wrote me love letters in an unknown script to while away her time. If only I could have deciphered them!




Her mother was always encouraging our friendship and trying to further my suit, as she regarded me as good marriage material. Agnes and I liked each other a lot, she always used to say If only she had met me when she was young... and I thought her a handsome woman, with a powerful personality, despite her 64 years and the fact that she was supposed to have cancer.




In the evenings I would take them to the waterfront in my car and we would stop at drive-in cafes for chips, hamburgers, cokes, ice-creams etc.




Poor Clarence had a hard time of it. His wife Noreen was a fat nursing sister, usually in uniform, with a carping, indignant manner towards her husband, who was really the soul of gentility and good breeding, while Agnes really had the soul of a criminal tigress. She would pour boiling water from a kettle onto him at the bridge table. Sometimes he used to knock on my door, seeking refuge from the storm, and scurry inside when I opened the door to him. Poor devil! I don't know what he did to deserve these she-devils.




What else did I do during 1960? I joined the Durban Chess Club and played 13 rounds in the Candidate's Tournament during the year. (There were 4 tournaments. The Championship, for the top 12 players, then the Candidates, for the next 14 aspiring to promotion, then the Major A, and finally the Major B. Those who came top in their section were promoted to the next higher section the following year.

I won this Candidates competition with 13 straight victories.




My game was very stodgy in those days. Invariably I avoided open games, replied to 1. e4 with 1...e6, and opened 1. d4..., 2. c4. Most of my games were long ones and went to the end-game. In later years I became more playful and imaginative.




My days at work were half boring and half pleasant. The boring days were those spent in the office on routine paperwork and correspondence. The rest of the time I got out of the office, and travelled all over the Natal System.

Either I was a member of a board inquiring into some accident, at the place where it happened – we would travel by chauffeured railway car, or else, for a longer inquiry, our caboose would be attached to a train, and we would live in it, cooking our own food, for a few days.




Or else I might undertake a tour of inspection of all the water pumps in Natal, for which I was responsible, together with the Chargehand Pumpfitter. We would travel in his pick-up truck, and overnight in restrooms or maybe a hotel.




Or else drive my boss, Geoff Notcutt the Locomotive Superintendent, in a huge railway Ford sedan, to one of the locomotive depots at Stanger, Empangeni, Pietermaritzburg, Glencoe or Port Shepstone, for a get-together with the Locomotive Foreman of that depot.




Or else be sent out to the scene of an accident, to superintend the removal of wreckage from the line, while the Civil Engineering department supervised the repair of the line. Likely as not this would be in the middle of the night.




In such ways I travelled widely in Natal and became familiar with many beautiful places and routes. And also had some very pleasant times playing snooker with my fellow members of the board after a day of inquiry, or playing cards with them in our caboose. One person, Bob Mazzoni, was a particularly pleasant character. He functioned as our secretary on every inquiry, typed down the statements of all our witnesses, and even drew up the final reports – all we really had to do was ask the witnesses a few extra questions and finally sign the report. Bob was a stocky fellow with the build and look of a bespectacled prizefighter, a very efficient and imperturbable worker on the board, who actually refereed boxing matches in his spare time. Years later, long after I had retired, I caught sight of him on television, refereeing an important boxing match. He was also a believer in table tennis as good speed training for boxers, and I remember some good games with him on one of our trips.




Chapter 30 : Summer holiday, end of 1960




During my 5-week annual vacation, I first drove down to Cape Town for Christmas and New Year with my parents and sister, then drove back to Durban with my sister, staying at the most beautiful bathing resorts along the coast. From Durban she flew back to Cape Town.




While in Cape Town I met her boyfriend Michael and his sister Yvonne. One day we drove to beautiful Ceres in two cars. Lucky me, I had Yvonne all to myself in my car. She was a beautiful woman, with a generous build, an excellent swimmer and intrepid diver from high rocks into the small river near Ceres, an intrepid swimmer into underwater caverns and through underwater narrows. I felt rather a coward beside her casual daring. I tried to make progress with her but didn't achieve much, though she was friendly towards me.




A day or two later my sister and I left Cape Town. I was still very lovesick over Yvonne, which still clouds my memories of the start of this trip with my sister. But the feeling faded away within a couple of days.




We spent a night at the hotel in Mossel Bay. Into the dining room came a honeymoon couple. The woman was very beautiful and impressed me very strongly.




We took a bungalow at Knysna for a few days. My sister managed to swim a few strokes in the Knysna lagoon, about three strokes was about all she could manage. She was very thin that year. She had had much grief with my father over Michael, my father wasn't too happy to find a sleeping, drunken Michael inhabiting his front porch. Nor do I think my father was very impressed by the fact that Michael's main source of income was from the sale of scrap metal. The metal being supplied by his car smashes.




But I liked Michael, who had an Irish type of madness and charm, and whom I considered a considerable poet after seeing an epic he wrote about himself and my sister, somewhat in the style of Sohrab and Rustum. I was very impressed by his genius in rendering his name from Raymond Michael Gilman to Ramogil, and my sister's name Elizabeth Bruins to Elzabru, thus creating a memorable couple. Michael was lean and rather tall, not like his more solid albeit shapely sister. In a way I am sorry he did not marry my sister: it could hardly have turned out more unfortunately than her marriage did.




Back in Durban I stood in my office on the sixth floor and looked down on the roof of the bus which contained my sister and which was about to leave for the airport. A very painful sadness was hurting me, the sadness of parting.




Before I go on to 1961, I must remedy an important omission regarding my Hungarian friends. Soon after coming to Durban I met the Drexlers, a Hungarian family (the German name is immaterial).




One of my colleagues at office was a young Hungarian, Nesmelyi by name, and he introduced me to a pair of small Hungarians who used to call on him in his office. One of these was Ernst Drexler, a Civil Engineer (self-employed consultant). I became very good friends with him and his wife Marta and 3-year-old daughter Martie.




They had left Hungary during the troubles of 1956. I was a frequent visitor at their flat, where I mostly played games with Martie. The mother showed me a lot of warmth, but as in Pretoria, my main interest lay in the daughter. We all went to the beach very often, and on longer excursions we sometimes went in two cars, with Martie preferring to go with me. We were a bit naughty – I allowed her to steer my car sometime.




Martie and her parents conversed in Hungarian, so I picked up several Hungarian phrases: Come here, my kitten, are you stupid, what are you doing, what have you done, stay there. Ernst also taught me the word finom (fine).




This friendship with the Drexlers was really my main one in Durban. It continued without any disharmony through my stay in Durban, that is, till I left in May, 1965. And it continued beyond then, as you will see.






Chapter 31 : 1961 in Durban



A young graduate, Blodwen Davies by name, came to Durban early in 1961, having heard about me in Cape Town and, from what I heard by letters from my family, it seemed as if she had already conceived a passion for me and set her cap at me. This is not the type of thing that puts me off at all, but I did feel a little wary at the prospect of meeting what sounded like an unprincipled bluestocking.




She came to stay in a hotel just down the road from my office, so I got into the habit of popping in every day after work for a chat. She was certainly intelligent, without being at all pretentious, and became a very good friend of mine. Unfortunately I could not find a way to respond to her sexually, as I could just not find a single thing about her to attract me physically. So life became a little frustrating for her.




But still, she enjoyed my company and valued my friendship highly. She was reading Atlas Shrugged at the time of our meeting, and lent it to me on finishing it, which did not take her long. Both of us found this book unputdownable, and she also recommended The Fountainhead, which she had read previously. I found this book even more readable. 48 years later, when I first tried to reread them, I could not get past the first pages of The Fountainhead, but managed to finish the other book in about a month, though I found it terribly long-winded in parts.




Blodwen took to calling me El Diablo, which I found pleasing and flattering. Somehow I basked in her love, although I could not return it. Once we were at the small swimming pool among the rocks at Uvongo beach, and I was swimming up and down the pool while she lay in the sun. She took some photos of me that showed me as happy and fulfilled, something nobody else had ever been able to do. And even thereafter, nobody ever managed to take pictures of me that I liked as much.




Within a month I had met her best friend Siggi, who was librarian at the Pietermaritzburg University Library, despite being only about 23. Siggi was another very intelligent girl, but unfortunately she did not fall for me. I was Cupid's victim on this occasion. She was half-Swedish, a very handsomely built and sufficiently goodlooking blonde “bombshell”.




Round about this time I left my lodgings with Mrs Galvin. Alice had fallen more out of love with me, and more in love with another boy. Also I wanted a place where I could be more private. I found a suitable furnished room in a block of flatlets where my contact with other occupants could be as minimal as I chose. This was Greengates, in Clark Rd.




Siggi and I were both at Blodwen's wedding to Conrad Reitz, who was a probation officer like Blodwen and had met her at work. This wedding took place around May or June, and Blodwen left Durban soon afterwards. I was still in love with Siggi, but she had not softened towards me.




Seeking a way, any way, to win her good graces, it occurred to me to suggest that we cross the Sahara together, in my car. This took her fancy, to the extent that she suddenly thawed completely to me, start calling me “honey” and acting in a loving way. I was in the seventh heaven. I spent a night with her in her bed.




At this moment I happened to be doing a job at Albert Falls, a hamlet not too far from Pietermaritzburg, and I had the use of a railway pick-up truck to get around. I was sleeping at the Albert Falls Hotel, and visiting Siggi after working hours.




The next morning I stood on the ground in the sun at Albert Falls and was glorying in the thought that eventually, after 25 frustrating years of the longings of life, I had found my mate.




Back in Durban I had a rude shock a few days later to get a letter from Siggi saying in effect that all bets were off, and that she could not trust me. I forget why. Whatever the letter might have portended, I felt that her love for me had disappeared as fast as it had appeared, and that there was no future for us. I felt in fact that the episode had taught me a lesson, not to push my suit against unwillingness, but rather to abandon unresponsive objects as soon as possible.




That I could reach such a conclusion I find rather a remarkable piece of good sense, for my whole life so far had given me little reason to think that I would ever find a “responsive object”. It would take another two years of patience before I at last found a case of mutual attraction and could break my virginity.




During 1961 my sister and I took our annual leave in September. She flew to Durban, and from there we set out by car for Mozambique. I have some photos of this trip: they are more eloquent than what I could write.




Two photos show my sister on arrival at Durban Airport: a ravishingly beautiful, poised, sensitive yet sophisticated woman. The excessive thinness of nine months earlier was replaced by the full ripeness of young womanhood.




Another photo shows her standing on the stoep of the hotel in Goba, the first place we came to across the border. We were thrilled with the friendliness and enthusiasm of the very young waiters with their perfect Portuguese: vinho verde e branco. Very different from our native and Indian waiters and servants in South Africa, who were much more stolid.




We were also thrilled with the hotels in Lourenco Marques, the capital city. The Portuguese cuisine was head and shoulders above what we had experienced in South African Hotels, and less expensive. The Hotel Aviz became our favourite.




I also have photos of Liz on the small boat that took us to Paradise Island (Isla Santa Carolina). And pictures of her there.




But before we went to Paradise Island there was San Martinho and Xai Xai. San Martinho was a puzzling and bewildering place, because our hotel seemed to be in the middle of nowhere with no beaches in sight. Instead there seemed to be beaches scattered out sight in all directions, all deserted and apparently unusable because the sea was too shallow, the deeper water lost in the distance.




Our hotel room was nice, Liz had a new boyfriend, a colleague of hers, Manny Pereira, to whom she wrote in the hotel room. I talked to her about one of my favourite love stories, Turgenev's On the Eve.




At Xai Xai we found a wonderful hotel with a wonderful beach right in front of it: The beach sloped down steeply into the sea, and 40 metres out to sea ran a bar of rocks, parallel to the shore, creating a fairly sheltered pool between rocks and sand. Still, the water could get quite rough, and the waves could sometimes pass over the rocks, making swimming more fun for me.




Paradise Island was a true paradise. It had the special quality of most small islands, with a rather large hotel with many Rhodesian guests. With a nice table tennis table, on which my sister could impress me with her forehand drive, learnt from Manny.







Chapter 32 : 1962




My 1962 year had as main character Chris van Schalkwyk. Chris was a fairly lowly clerk in the railway offices, but I wouldn't have met him there. I met him in the Durban Chess Club, to which he belonged.




He was a professional violinist who had played in the first violins in the Durban orchestra, and given solo, touring concerts with his wife, Clementina, also a violinist. Due to some scandal with a married woman Chris was sent packing from the orchestra, and indeed he was rather an unappetising womaniser with a club foot and a stunning power and talent on the violin, and also a drunkard to boot.




The only job he could then find was as junior clerk in the railways offices, an absurd occupation for a man like Chris.




When I met him, Chris was married to another woman, Mabel, older than himself. He used to tell me that she was highly developed sexually. She often nagged at him, but his only response was: “There's the door, Mabel.” I didn't much care for her, and found her totally unappetising, but I suppose she wasn't too bad a person.




I visited Chris regularly at his flat for games of chess. He was keeping up his violin playing, and spent hours practising the great concertos for violin: the Sibelius, the Brahms, the Max Bruch, the Mendelssohn, the Beethoven. He played them all, and he played them unbelievably well, even without any accompaniment. To my enormous pleasure and appreciation.




I didn't find him quite so impressive when trying to curry favour with a young married woman in a nearby flat, or when waxing maudlin in his cups.




Just before Easter we conceived the idea that Chris would give me violin lessons. With excitement I bore away his no. 2 violin, a beautifully-backed French instrument dated 17-something with a very nice sweet-and-sour tone but lacking the power of his no. 1 instrument. I saw it with reverence, as it lay in my car as I drove away with it for the Easter weekend, as a baby requiring devotion. I think I paid him L100 for this violin, or could it have been R100. So confusing, these changes in the currency.




This made a considerable change in my life. It meant that every day, after work, I rushed home to my room in Greengates, practised for an hour, rushed into town for supper at an hotel, then rushed home for another 4 hours of practise.




This I kept up for the rest of the year. Then it fell away as I concluded that I could never master the violin to my own satisfaction. But this experience was certainly not wasted effort, as it taught me a lot and was an enjoyable, sometimes miraculous process.




At the end of 1962 I took my annual leave in December once again, and once again this was the occasion for a joint tour by myself and my sister.




This time she flew to Durban, as in 1961. After some days spent in Durban and environs, we toured down along the garden route to Cape Town, where I stayed with my family. The places we passed were our familiar favourites. As we got closer and closer to Cape Town, we grew sadder and sadder, at the prospect of this heavenly holiday coming to an end.




Chapter 33 : 1963




My practice of the violin fell away. Instead I decided to resume my table tennis career and joined the Umbilo table tennis club.




Durban was blessed with a large hall devoted to nothing but table tennis. The tables were of outstanding quality. Every day I met Piroska there, a Polish young woman devoted to table tennis, who played in a high league, and we practised together for hours. I reached perhaps a higher form than ever before because of all this intensive practise.




The Umbilo club was part of the Umbilo and Congella Sports Club, which comprised many sporting facilities and also a very comfortable and attractive bar-lounge at the one end of the table tennis hall. I spent many enjoyable hours in this club.




There was a young girl there, a schoolgirl in fact, who smiled at me in a friendly way. I found it came naturally to me to respond to her, unlike the case of Blodwen. I thought her attractive. I took up with her, and we became lovers fairly soon. This is where we both lost our virginity, which was not found to be a difficult process by either of us.




Her name was Hilda. I was 27 and she was 17, in standard 9 at a Durban school. She lived with her father in a boarding house on a pleasant Durban thoroughfare. He was of German stock, while Hilda's mother, of Afrikaans stock, whom I did not meet for 6 months, lived on a smallholding outside Bloemfontein with her second husband and other two children, Hilda's brother Michael and sister Ina. Hilda was the eldest child, Michael was 16 and Ina 13. I did not meet Michael and Ina at first, as they were in Bloemfontein.




I was a very regular visitor to this boarding house, naturally, which I shall call Jumbo's. The place was run by Jumbo's mother Mrs Posthumous, and Jumbo was an exceedingly likeable youngster with many jockey friends. Another resident was an oldish man, the father of one Melrose, who never came to visit her Dad. I forget his name, but he was a delightful old crank who told us that Jesus was a Cape Coloured. He and Jumbo were as thick as thieves, together with a very friendly young man who was always high on marijuana. We four men all got along very well together, and we loved to sit together on the stoep and watch the passing parade.




Hilda and I played cards together in the boarding house – for more serious games we went to my place ten minutes walk away. Her father did not object to our relationship, though he did once say that he thought Hilda should be getting around more and having more fun at her age, having more friends I suppose he meant. He did not seem to be worried by any impact on Hilda's schoolwork, though I suppose he did not worry because Hilda was near the top of her class.




Soon the July school holidays arrived, and Hilda's sister Ina came down to see her Dad. Jumbo was delighted with the discovery that Ina “poked”. He was always raving about his preference for very tight, unstretched vaginas. He had not managed to deflower Hilda, much as he must have wanted to, because she was much more reserved and shy than Ina. And a strong character who could keep a man in his place with ease.




Michael, Hilda's brother, also came down to Durban, and father with children went to stay in a holiday shack at Munster on the Natal south coast for a week or two.




I drove down to Munster to spend a long weekend with them. This was a very enjoyable time for me. My mood as I drove home with the moonbeams turning the sea below into a sheet of silver was happy and grateful though tinged with the sadness of our temporary parting.




Once Hilda had returned to Durban, our relationship continued as before. We went together in my car up the north coast for a weekend camping in my small parachute-silk tent. Jumbo warned her to beware of the snake in the tent. He was a very pleasant joker always.




And one day I drove her south to the Oribi Gorge, where we enjoyed a beer in the hotel.




The summer holidays at the end of 1963 were approaching. I was not planning on my usual trip with my sister, but instead to go with Hilda to her mother's home in Bloemfontein for a few weeks, and then down to Cape Town to see my family, with or without Hilda, whichever way that might turn out. My parents were quite eager to meet her, and my sister was due to marry Manny Pereira within a few months.




Hilda and I had an interesting drive from Durban to Bloemfontein im my Beetle. We spent a night in a hotel at Cedarberg. We had whiskies and soda in the bar, and behaved like a honeymoon couple in our bedroom. What a romantic place Cedarberg seemed to me!




On their smallholding about 5 miles outside Bloemfontein I met Hilda's mother and her husband Oom Dennis, also his son from a previous marriage. Or did he perhaps have 2 sons? I'm not sure. We three or four boys slept in parallel beds in one room. Hilda and I were not given our own separate room, things were not as officially open as all that!)

Nevertheless we contrived to couple somewhere, on some bed or sofa in some room, in a way I'm not likely to forget soon or ever.




All of us had a lot of fun on the farm. There were delicious ripe peaches to picked in the orchard. Oom Dennis fancied his table tennis, so I took him on in the yard. At night we all sat around the kitchen table and played Black Sal (hearts) and had an uproarious time.




Hilda had a friend called Ariena or something like that. Ariena's boyfriend was a Justin or Jurie I think, or something like that. He drove a small Saab which he boasted would eat my Volkswagen beetle up for breakfast. I took that in good part, as I thought he was probably right, but I was a bit concerned with what he might do to Hilda, with whom he flirted a bit too much for my liking. I must confess, though, that I wouldn't have minded it if we could have exchanged girl-friends for a night. The two girls would not have played ball though ... or would they have?




It turned out that Hilda was not coming with me to Cape Town, so I left Bloemfontein and went down to Cape Town for a fortnight. How I missed Hilda, and more especially our sex together! I drove back to Durban via Bloemfontein, where I spent a few last days with Hilda. This was the last time we met on these terms...




Because within a few days of my return to Durban I got a letter, which, shockingly, began “Dear Gurth”. Breaking it off.




The efforts I made to salvage the affair, I prefer to pass over. I was beside myself, but to no avail.




Soon after Hilda returned to live with her father at Jumbo's, and I continued to visit Jumbo and his friends there, so I continued to see quite a lot of Hilda, but I wouldn't say that we were friendly. There was really nothing in common we had any more, once out of love with each other.




CHAPTER 34: 1964




Early in 1964 my sister got married, and I got leave to attend the wedding in Cape Town.




I had dropped my chess in 1961 when I was too interested in Siggi to be bothered with chess. In 1964 I took it up again. A Chief Clerk in the Staff Section at railways headquarters in Durban was keen on chess, and invited me to his home where I met some friends of his, the Jouberts. Suset was a rather beautiful blonde, still at University, her father was a school principal, and her mother played Beethoven's second piano sonata rather to my liking. Suset herself was brilliant at chess, and more so at the piano. She also did art. But she was taking a Science degree.




I was certainly taken by her, and we corresponded by letter when she had to go back to Wits University in the Transvaal.

But I never made any further progress with her – she did not respond to more far-reaching overtures.




During 1964 I also met up with the Galvins again, and we became friendly again. Alice was much more grown-up – she turned 18 on 25 August 1964 so she was only six months younger than Hilda, something I never realised before, but only do so now as I type these words.




I found her attractive still, but got no better response than before, despite her mother's efforts to sell me as a good husband for her.




I also played chess in the Palmerston Hotel, where the members of the Durban Chess League gathered to play. The top players in Durban did not play here, but only in the Durban Chess Club. Kevin Claudius was the main organiser at the League, and he also played at the Club and was indeed the chess correspondent for the Natal Daily Mercury.




He organised a chess tournament in which the 9 regular League players competed. I won all my eight games, beating Claudius into second place. To celebrate, I had to play all my competitors simultaneously, plus Errol Tarpey, the previous year's winner who was now back in town. As reported faithfully in Claudius's column, I won all these games except the ones against Claudius and Tarpey. I never had any pretensions to speed chess or simultaneous play, anyway, so these losses did not greatly upset me.




In 1964 I got into a poker school, my first since Ashton and Loughborough, but now the stakes were much higher. I found these people through Jumbo and his jockey friends – a lot of these jockey and turf people like to gamble at poker too.




I did well and started to do a serious mathematical analysis of all poker situations. This work absorbed me more and more : on my excursions by caboose with my railway friends, they were disappointed to find me without interest in our usual social pleasures after work – all I wanted to do was sit with my slide rule and do poker calculations.




Eventually in 1974, when I felt I had finished with poker and was clearing out junk in preparation for a long journey, I threw away all these calculations, about 200 pages of foolscap size. A pity. These calculations were quite extraordinary, and gave theoretical bluffing and seeing percentages for every situation, in fact covered all sides of the game, so one could have used them to program a computer to play unbeatable poker.




Those with no interest in poker should definitely skip this paragraph. But for those with more interest in the game, here are some useful facts about when to bluff and when to see what might or might not be a bluff. Firstly, considering how often you should bluff: of all the situations that your opponent has to face where from his point of view you could be or could be not bluffing, you should actually be bluffing one third of the time. If you bluff more often that that, he will beat you if he sees you every time he is in doubt. And if you bluff less than that, he will beat you if he never sees a possible bluff. If you bluff exactly one third of the time, it makes no difference how he reacts, you will maximise your winnings against best play. But if you know he is inclined to see too often, then you can do even better by bluffing less, and if he is inclined too see too seldom, by bluffing more. The last sentence is obvious. Secondly, considering how often you should see a possible bluff: you should see two thirds of the time, more often against a big bluffer, less often against a player who bluffs too seldom. Don't always see, and don't always believe!




I don't know why I give this information away for nothing – I've never seen it in any book on poker.







Chapter 35 : 1965: Retirement




At the start of 1965 I also started making my plans to retire. This event was to take place in mid-May. I arranged with my mother that she would fly up to Durban at this time, spend a few days in a hotel in Durban, and then go down to Cape town with me in my car, stopping at various points of interest along the way. For her, such places were the museums (she was the Chief Librarian of the Cape Town Museum), Port St Johns and Port Edward (never seen by by sister and me), and we also stopped over at the house of Professor JLB Smith, of coelacanth fame, whose wife was one of my mother's three oldest and best friends.




I started my everlasting holiday by moving in with my parents. My father admired my good sense and good fortune in retiring this early, free of the trammels of marriage and children. Within two months I was already in love with two pretty female chameleons in the garden, Rita and CuaRita.




One day which I was spending in bed with flu, my mother brought two chameleons in to see me. She said they were sitting right behind one another on the same branch. I recognised Rita, but was amazed by the second chameleon, who was almost indistinguishable from her, so I called her Cuarita.




Rita was fragile and delicate, with very fine scale and bone structure, but ominously pale skin. Her nose seemed to bear the scar of a wound. To her I wrote:




Rita Ritita,

Sweet little Rita,

How is your nosey today,

My lovey?




She took to sitting too low on the plants along the fence, another ominous sign, and died soon, still not quite fully grown, unless she was exceptionally small for her age.




CuaRita live on till February, 1966, and was the apple of my eye. I would sit down on the lawn, next to the rose bush she was sitting on, to admire her, and one day she looked at me with love, then climbed down her bush and across the ground onto my knee. She had a healthier colour than Rita, and should have lived to a ripe old age, but died in a terrible catastrophe.




While workers were removing the wooden tiles on our roof, I was stupid and misguided enough to walk over to my sister's house, a kilometre away, to help her and Manny repaint it – they had newly bought it, their first and last house. Trusting my mother to keep an eye on the chameleons. When I came back Cuarita was lying dead beside a rosebush, from which she had been knocked down by tiles dropped by the workers as they carried the tiles along the path to the front gate.




Many years later I came to believe that everything that happens in this world, including the massacre of six million Jews or 20 million Russians, happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds, but in those days I was still very far from such an insight. Still, I did not curse God like the character in Isaac Bashevis Singer's story. Probably because I did not believe in God. Eventually I came to see that the invention of impossible Gods by the various religious leaders and instigators did not actually disprove the existence of some God. Nowadays I can easily imagine a God that is neither a logical impossibility nor an insult to the intelligence, although let's be clear, It bears little resemblance to the popular versions.




From which I conclude that it is the existence and influence of the false religions that is mainly responsible for the prevalence of atheism. A false religion is more blasphemous than no religion at all. People who go around reducing God to a cliché with their “Praise the Lord!” give religion a bad name.




One link only to my years in Durban remained: my friendship

with Martie, who was nine by the time I left Durban. We continued to exchange letters for another nine years.




Also surviving were two other links to my past travels: Jovan, my Yugoslav friend from my Pretoria days, and Hira, my Indian friend in Loughborough.




I had not seen Jovan during my 5 years in Durban. Or he may have paid some short visit that I have forgotten. During these years he had returned to Yugoslavia to marry a sweetheart from his younger days, a very nice and pleasant doctor, then returned with her to his job in Pretoria. Now at the end of 1965 he brought Milena down to the Cape for their holiday. My brother-in-law Manny took us all to Koeel Bay in his new Cortina: He and Liz, Jovan and Milena, and me. I remember this day for the incredible fun I had surfing at Koeel Bay, a desolate beach far from any houses, set in a magnificent position against a huge mountain, the highest point of this coastal range.




This could be quite a dangerous area for swimming because of the violence of the sea and its currents here. On the day of our visit there was a temporary freak condition that allowed my fun: the huge waves came over a sandbar where one could stand and wait for them, catch them as they came over the bar, and then continue to ride them all the way to the shore over deeper water.




In those days surfing as we know it today was not so common, most people surfed in a horizontal position, not a vertical one.







Chapter 36 : Holiday in Europe




Liz and I had been considering a trip to Europe since before her marriage, and now we returned our attention to this possibility.




Manny and I got on well together. I had not seen much of him before I retired, but now I got to know him better. He played table tennis for the Gordons club, which I now also joined. I played in the first team (comprising three players) and he in the second. He had a nice table at his house a kilometre from my parents', and we spent much time practising together on it. He also liked chess, so we also spent many hours playing that too.




He and Liz and I would go camping for a long weekend, the three of us jammed like sardines in my small parachute-silk tent. We camped like this in the Cedarberg, an uninhabited region of mountain, forest and stream, and also at the lido in Robertson, the paradise of my childhood, where we swam and rowed on the river. These were happy days.




Now Liz and I were planning a 3-month holiday in Europe. She had never been overseas, Paradise Island in Mozambique being the farthest she had got. Manny was welcome to go along, but he preferred not to. So off we went, to a few raised eyebrows from my beloved ouma, my father and maybe a few others. But such did not bother us.




We left end of June 1966, and returned end of September.

First to Athens for a few days, then to Mykonos for a week where Liz extended her swimming range from about 3 yards to about 30. We were reading Simon de Beauvoir's The Mandarins at this time. We enjoyed the meat outdoors in the evenings, the spices were very nice at these restaurants in Mykonos. Every morning we breakfasted quite early in the pristine sunshine outside a little place which served yaourti me zakhari (goat's milk yoghurt with sugar), which I preferred slightly to Yaourti me meli, that is with honey. (in those days I was not such a health freak). This was a pleasure we greatly missed after Mykonos. We tried the same thing in Crete a few weeks later, but somehow it was not quite the same.




The beach at Mykonos was about as perfect as a beach can be: not overcrowded but with an interesting selection of talent to assess: my sister and I were fond of commenting on the various sights to be seen. She embarrassed me at times with the intensity of her stare at these – maybe she was a bit short-sighted. Also I found myself reminding her at times that sound carries.

Secondly, the water was just right: beautiful blue, not too warm as it later was in Crete and Thassos especially, and, like most of the Mediterranean beaches, really suitable for swimming as opposed to surfing.




Thirdly, the beach was just the right distance from Mykonos to give it an identity of its own – about 3 or 4 miles, requiring a slightly hair-raising trip by bus. Somehow, all bus-drivers in Greece seem to be bent on giving their passengers the thrill of speed and scary driving. The road was narrow with little view of what lay ahead round the corners. And the driver was like a bullfighter, trying to miss rocks, walls and other vehicles by as few centimetres as he could.




I must say this style of driving does increase the pleasure of eventual arrival. Which fortunately, usually occurs, against all apparent odds.




This week was for me the peak of our month in Greece. The next island we visited, Thassos, was a great disappointment. The layout of the place (like San Martinho in Mozambique) just did not seem to work or to make sense, and the layout of the sea was the same: mostly too shallow, and hot as pea-soup.




But Kerkira (Corfu) amply made up for this disappointment. It rivals Mykonos in my memory for its perfection, especially the spectacularly beautiful Paleokastritsa, which however suffered the disadvantage of being just a little too far from the town on the other side of the island. Making the bus ride just a little too long. So that we usually went to the beach at Pirgos instead, from where we could see Corfu town in the distance. But the water at Paleokastritsa was just as ravishingly cool as at Mikonos, and offered added interest in that I could swim out to the yachts anchored in the bay for a closer look and as an objective.




On the local flight from Athens to Corfu I was sitting next to my sister and one of us was sucking a sweet (present of the airline) which we transferred to the other for a quick taste. This behaviour was spotted by a young American couple on the plane. It led them to approach us and we all made friends. On arrival at Corfu they tagged along with us as we looked for beds and accommodation, especially as I had more Greek than they. Then after that we all roamed around the town for hours, talking about a wide range of interesting subjects. It was nice to have a conversation with such intelligent people, in English, in such foreign parts.




After we were in Corfu for a about a week, we moved on to Crete for our last week in Greece. In Malia, east of Heraklion, we found the most delightfully furnished little room at a place with a most friendly landlady, a welcome contrast to the man at the first place we tried. Liz was happily drinking some beverage in our room, some Greek wine I think, which gave her a buzzing in her ears which alarmed her slightly I think. But I myself wasn't too worried – it didn't seem too serious a problem to me.




From this room it was rather a long walk, some twenty minutes or so, past picturesque windmills, to the sea. Here the sea was a bit too warm and choppy, so that swimming was not ideal here. But the charm of Crete made up for it. I felt this special charm of Crete from the start, from our first stay in the Park Hotel in Heraklion before we set out for Malia.




After our month in Greece, we flew to Britain and found lodgings in London for a look-around there before hiring a car for a two-week tour of Scotland via the Lake District. I have two special memories from this trip.




The first was a night we spent in a Scottish farmhouse remote from any town, reached by a farm road taking us off the main road, into a vale among the mountains, with a gleam of a river in the distance below us. We had to share a double bed, though our usual practice was to spend the night in a room with two beds. What made this a special adventure was the electric blanket which neither of us had come across before in any shape or form. I also seem to remember a specially delicious porridge served up at this farm the next morning. How did we come across this place? A sign on the main road, pointing to “Bed and Breakfast”.




My second memory was the house where we put up for a night or two at Garstang, in the Lake District. The daughter of the house was studying Domestic Science, with cooking as a speciality and she created a wonderful meal for us. But the most special thrill was the bedroom we shared. On the windowsills and furniture were glass containers similar to huge ashtrays, overflowing with exquisite jewellery. What a beautiful touch! Never encountered before nor since. It was so nice speaking to these charming people, mother and daughter




Part 2

Chapter 37 : Making Money




Shortly before retiring I had read Darvas's beautiful and exciting book How I made 2 Million Dollars on the New York stock exchange. This aroused my interest in the stock exchange, which was to be the main source of my fortune. I bought half a dozen graph books and started keeping graphs of the prices of hundreds of shares (equities).




Upon retiring I invested my money in equities and started applying the investment principles of Darvas. But the JSE was as flat as a pancake, taking a breathing spell after a huge surge between 1959 and 1964, ended by a slight crash.




In two years my profits totalled zero, and my retiring capital of R10,000 (about 6 times the price of a new Beetle) stood at R8,000 after my 3-month trip to Europe, which cost me R1000 in airfares for me and my sister and another R1000 for our other expenses during the trip.




I considered it time to make some money. My poker calculations were now in a deadly state of completion and I was itching to apply them. I found a school that played for high stakes through a newspaper ad requesting card players. These players met weekly at the house of Hampshire and Ruby, right on Clifton's beautiful 4th Beach. Walking at sunset along the footpath between beach and houses showed 4th Beach in an unfamiliar light, the tranquil home of residents rather than the crowded playground of holidaymakers. It was October, a beautiful month according to Leipoldt's poem, and in reality the evening light made the drive from Pinelands a pleasure.




I found the poker very exciting, as I had never played such high stakes before, and I was a regular winner. Going home with my pockets full of banknotes and nearly all the silver, which I spread over the carpet to gloat over. Then I would go to bed, by now probably 3 a.m, to dream of yet still more and more poker hands.




I was winning as much money as my Engineer's salary had been, and actually I had to work much harder for it, for the poker player has to concentrate like hell if he is going to play well. He must constantly be keeping track of how much money is being played for and calculating the odds. But this was a job I loved doing, and a competitive sport at the same time.




I might have been a good player, but ultimately making regular, good money at poker requires the presence of players prepared to lose regularly. Fortunately we had in our school a lady who was quite happy to spend three quarters of her income on the pleasure of losing at poker, and could afford this.




A friend I met at the table tennis club, Ralph Buchinsky, introduced me to another school, poker-playing friends of his. I spent many happy evenings with these players, all young men except for the dentist Jackson, at the house of Solly Goldberg, who worked on the staff of Argus Ads. One player was Spike Maisel, a most genial and happy man, and another was Gerald Kark, who likewise contributed much. The good sportsmanship of all these young Jewish men, each one with his favourite, mantra-like sayings, and their unfailing good humour and wit, stay on in my memories after many years still.




One player, Brian Rutter, a student of biochemistry, also played with another school, the Old Ladies of Muizenberg, who played for high stakes. Solly also knew them, and he introduced me to their school as a very “competent” player. One of them was the 85-year old Kitty Marais, the others were ladies in their seventies or sixties. I only played with them a few times, and if I had had to rely on them for my bread I would have starved, they were all such good players.




In October 1967 the Johannesburg Stock Exchange suddenly awoke from its long stupor, and prices started to rocket, a huge boom that lasted till February 1969, but was followed by a disastrous crash that was to paralyse the JSE for ten years.




This boom was hectic for me. I was constantly buying and selling shares, and rushing around the banks banking my profits. I found that the principles of Darvas worked to perfection in such a boom, and I could read a potential star stock just by the shape of its graph. I remember the names of my breadwinning stars: Consolidated Lighting, Sidcor, Sagov, Comair, Adingra, Brozin, and many others. My father, mother and sister all got on the bandwagon too, investing whatever savings they had, buying shares tipped by me with complete confidence in my judgement. Which turned out to be well placed. Also they all had the good sense to get out when I told them to, else the eventual crash would have wiped out their profits and capital to boot.




After an overheated and frenzied boom like this, as in New York in 1929 when lift boys were buying shares, a crash is inevitable. The more frenzied the boom, the greater the crash. and the greater the crash, the longer the recovery period before the next boom can start.




Once prices start to fall, you HAVE to get out. In Darvas's words, “run like a thief”. Unless you happen to be a genuine investor seeking to safeguard your hard-earned capital, and willing to wait ten years without any income from that capital.




I got out in good time, having outperformed all the unit trusts by about 20%. I had trebled my capital of R8000, with some help from my poker winnings. Now I could only sit back and watch the prices sag and sag and sag for a couple of years, till they eventually bottomed out, a bottom that they would inhabit for another eight years. I could make no money on this market, as I was purely a bull not interested in conducting bear operations. But I did not need to make more, I had enough by now. I no longer needed to operate as a speculator looking for the big kill, I could relax and become a simple investor. Which is what I did from then on. I gave up my graphs and study thereof, and let the unit trusts do it for me. Letting them do the work for me might have cost me 20% of my potential profits as a speculator, but I could afford that.




Since 1969, the only time I have ever sold any of my units was in 1987, when I judged the market to be too high, and sold out everything when there was a 10% drop. Prices fell another 25%, then bottomed out within a few months: quicker than I had anticipated. So I had to buy back as soon as they started to rise again, else I would have had to take an overall loss or else give up on equities. From which I concluded that I could just as well have ignored the whole crash, and that my actions had brought me very little gain, and exposed me to a possible loss if my judgement had not been spot on.




So when the next crash occurred, round about 1998, I decided not to sell and endured seeing half of my capital wiped out. But within about three years it had all come back, and from there went on to new heights. I had correctly judged the crash to be not too catastrophic, since recovery was not overly delayed. A genuine investor in equities has to think in terms of tens of years.




Chapter 38 : Ruby and Martie




When Cuarita was killed by the roof workers in February 1966, I rescued another chameleon, Ruby, from her bush which was also in a dangerous area: the workers were not yet finished their job. I kept her in my room for a while, till the danger should be past. She usually climbed to the top of the curtains and onto the curtain rail: also a potentially dangerous situation if anyone should pull the curtains.




My poem A Sporadic Non-analysis, devoted to Stuart Parker ( see www.chameleons.weebly.com , my website containing my poetry on the page POETICS) can be dated to this time. It refers to Ruby at the end.




This was the start of my love affair with Ruby. She soon resumed her residence on the bushes under the eaves on each side of our front porch.




Ruby might be out of sight inside her bush, but if I stood next to it she would emerge and climb onto my outstretched hand. Then we would go for a walk in Pinelands, hunting flies sitting on wooden gates, and visiting a patch of “July flowers” where many mosquito-like insects gathered, a favourite food of Ruby's.




At night, coming home from the table tennis club in the dark, I would see her pale form asleep on a branch of the bush.




Liz and I went away for our 3-month trip, leaving Ruby behind, but when I returned in October 1966 she was still safe and sound, still happy to stay on one of her two bushes in front of the house.




A boyfriend came to stay with her for some weeks, Rodniki to her Rubiki. Eventually she appeared to be getting fatter; babies were on the way. One day I came home to find her looking totally emaciated, her skin in folds, and the bush swarming with about 18 babies. I sprayed water onto the bush, which she licked up avidly, being parched with thirst. All her precious reserves of water had gone into her babies.




Zinnias and other flowers grew on both sides of the path leading from the front porch to the front gate. Ruby would descend from her bush to make a foraging tour of these flowers, and was often crossing the path, with serious risk of being tramped on by unsuspecting visitors.




We didn't bother to lock the front gate in those relatively crime-free times. A delivery boy from the shops or pharmacy, or the postman, might suddenly barge in through the front gate and scurry up the path to the front door. I suppose I should simply have locked the front gate, but somehow this never occurred to me.




Instead I would be lying on the couch in the lounge, listening to classical music, with my ear open for any sound at the front gate. On hearing such a sound I would spring up from the couch and rush outside to intercept the intruder before he got too far up the path.




In such circumstances I did not feel free to go to Durban to visit Martie, who was always clamouring for such a visit in her letters.




During my 5-year stay in Durban there were several longish periods during which I did not see the child Martie, but whenever we came together again the same magic seemed to return immediately. We were simply enchanted by each other, a process I find very hard to understand as she was a type of person that I did not think I really liked, rather rough and insensitive as she dragged her little sister by the hand over the rocks, sometimes causing grazes to her knees. Also she had brown eyes, which I thought was a no-no for me. So did Alice incidentally. So my for my self-understanding.




About two years after my move from Durban to Cape Town, the Drexlers came to Cape Town for a holiday so I saw them again. Martie was now 11 and her younger sister Judy was 6.




At first glance Martie seemed a little shy, but within moments the old magic was working again and it was as if we had never been parted.




At Groot Constantia, Judy rode on my shoulders as we looked through the historic rooms of the old farmstead.




But too soon they had to return to Durban and that was the last time I ever saw Martie. Still we continued to correspond. When she was 13 she met the famous fruitarian writer Morris Krok in Durban and tried to interest me in such a way of living. She sent me a picture of herself at 13: from being an only slightly pretty girl she had already changed into an extremely beautiful woman. She was also embracing the Jewish faith, to the great satisfaction of her mother who had Jewish blood I think. That was, however, immaterial to me. One set of superstitions was as good, or as bad, as another, in my book.

In 1974, when she was 18, and when I myself had been following the fruit diet of Morris Krok and others for three years, I eventually found myself in Durban again and one day went unexpected to their house, which I had not seen before. As fate would have it, only Judy was at home. Transformed into a slim, ravishing beauty. So I did not see Martie, and I decided to drop the whole friendship there and then as she was no longer replying to my letters.




Sometime during the period 1965 to 1970, when I moved out of my parents' house to a new abode, I was involved in a romantic affair, the most important since my affair with Hilda. I can't be more specific than that, because of the requirements of discretion, nor can I go into further details which might encourage unhealthy speculation. After this, I did not sleep with another woman (in itself a rather vague statement, but purposefully so) until 1984.




Chapter 39 : Playing the Recorder




I started playing the descant recorder in early 1969, joined the Cape Town Recorder Guild, and practised diligently. Soon I was a good player. A very remarkable young man, Richard Oxtoby, organised this guild. The guild met monthly at the home of Mr Bongers, a Dutch contractor. Usually these meetings were attended by about 20 adults and about 20 schoolchildren. A very nice blend, to my mind. Assorted baroque music was usually played, or maybe some Mozart piece, arranged for several recorder parts. And the whole group would be assigned to these parts.




Weekends were also arranged, at the ecumenical centre in Stellenbosch, where players could get bedrooms for the night. The whole mass of players, about 70, were split into two main groups, and smaller groups also gathered to play separately - the many halls in this centre made this feasible.




The first time I went to one of these weekends, I met the Claydens, a family with 4 boys between about 10 and 4 years old, who were not really much interested in recorders, but became my best friends for about three years until 1973, when our ways parted.




I usually joined the Claydens for weekend excursions to some seaside or waterside place.







Chapter 40 : Moving house

Several factors caused me to move out of 5, Achilles Way round about September 1970.

My father had retired during the year, so I no longer had the house to myself during working hours. (My mother had a full-time job at the Museum).

My brother-in-law was a keen soccer and cricket player, whereas my sister had no interest in these sports, so when Manny was playing on Saturday afternoons, I took my sister out to the beach, or for a drive during winter.

But now she had suddenly become unavailable for these regular get-togethers with me, and I also noticed a sharp curtailment in her openness with me. This marked the beginning of the loosening of my bond with my sister, a process which only reached completion during 1983, 16 years later. But I felt this as another disruption in my “family happiness” at No 5. I was in the habit of visiting the Catholic priest in Pinelands, Father Seba, for some interesting discussions. He was quite willing to rent me a flatlet, with bathroom but without kitchen, in his house across from the church. So I moved in with him, and stayed there for 4 years.

This house was between my parents' and my sister's, about 5 minutes walk from each. So I continued to see my family regularly, and indeed this moved restored a greater degree of harmony between us.

My friend Lorna Clayden considered herself to be overweight, something nobody would have disputed, and was reading books on diet to find an answer. This was enough to motivate me to do the same. After reading some absurd books, such as Eat Fat to lose Fat, I came across a book Fruit the Food and Medicine for Man, by Morris Krok, in the library. In a word, this book stated that man should eat fruit only. I found the arguments for this heresy so logical that I determined to try this diet for myself, and started immediately, on 21 January 1971.

After one week I was amazed at the psychological changes in me. A chronic depression, which I had regarded as the “normal” lot of man, vanished, to be replaced by a new feeling of well-being. After another week I found myself going for a 12-mile walk along the beach from Milnerton - a month before this, a 2-mile walk had seemed too long to me.

Somehow I knew that wild horses would not drag me off this diet.







This radical change in diet was by far the most revolutionary event in my life, with the most far-reaching consequences.

Of course I lost a lot of weight, but I had never felt better, and that mattered more to me than anything else.

For the first couple of winters I felt the need to eat cheese. Eating cheese soon restored my weight from 109 lb to 135 lb. (before the diet it had been 154 lb).

By the end of 1973 I no longer felt the need for cheese. From this date onwards, for the next 9 years, I followed a raw vegan diet with 100% strictness. This diet included raw nuts and vegetables, as well as fruit which included avocado pears in winter. This was the same diet as that of Essie Honibal, South Africa's most famous fruitarian, who has written several books on the subject.




My recorder-playing continued. Dr Wiles was a physicist at UCT and lived in a beautiful home on the hillside below the university. He was also one of the group leaders at the recorder weekends in Stellenbosch, and provided much of the sheet music from his extensive collection. He and Mr Chiappini and I formed a group of 3 that met regularly at Dr Wiles's house to play trios. He played the bass recorder, Chiappini the treble and I the tenor recorders.




Father Seba gave me the use of the church hall, where I would spend hours at a time practising my scales, becoming quite a virtuoso on the tenor recorder, much to Dr Wiles's satisfaction. He had nothing but praise for my playing, whereas I myself thought it singularly uninspired. At least I knew how to fit in with the other players' lead. However, he was forever carping at Chiappini's style of play and failure to respond to his changes of tempo. I myself thought Chiappini's play musical and satisfactory, and changes of tempo perhaps not always such a good idea.




I arranged a three or four movement piece of Mozart's for the three of us, for the ensemble descant, treble and bass, for me to play the top descant line (Chiappini and Wiles played Treble recorders, instruments in F. Wiles also played the bass recorder, another instrument in F. I played the descant and treble recorders, both instruments in C. The fingering was different for C and F instruments, and many players find it confusing to attempt both fingerings. I know I did, and I once made a terrible hash at a concert given my myself and two women, when I tried to perform on the treble recorder).




The three of us spent many happy hours at Dr Wiles's house rehearsing this trio, and finally gave a performance at a large gathering of recorder players at Stellenbosch.




That weekend there were additional visitors from another province, including I remember one famous teacher of recorder playing. Three of these visitors also liked my arrangement, and gave their own performance of it. During this performance I remarked to Dr Wiles, who was sitting next to me: “But isn't the bass too loud?”. (The bass was being played by the famous teacher). “Yes, it is too loud!” replied Dr Wiles. Like myself, he was not impressed. The bass can easily become too loud and overpower the other instruments, but never in the hands of Dr Wiles.




Cont'd in file “my life part3.odt”




But my time in Pinelands was running... etc: