Читать книгу I Beg to Differ - Peter Storey - Страница 7

Homes and Schools

Number 570 Schoeman Street in Pretoria wasn’t my first home, but it is the first that I recall with clarity. I had been born at 25 Muir Avenue in a town called Brakpan, where my dad was involved in building the new Methodist church. He was good at that sort of thing, and actually used our back yard to cast the rose window that would dominate the sanctuary. My birth at 3.30 am on a Sunday was apparently a difficult one and my mother often reminded me that I had been lucky to emerge alive, having been dragged out of her womb with a pair of callipers. She said it took a nurse and doctor 45 minutes to ‘bring me round’. These reminders often coincided with bad behaviour on my part. Her logic seemed to be that I owed her both gratitude for surviving birth and contrition for the tough time I had given her. Looking back I think Mom’s family were rather hard people and I’m not sure she was very good at showing affection – although, as is sometimes the case, I’m told that the primary school children she taught for many years experienced her quite differently. Dad was differently made. He was a gentle and sensitive soul whose heart had been softened first by the beauty of the Lake District poets and then captured by the servant-spirit of Jesus. I don’t recall him teaching me much in a direct way, but I watched his life and knew it was deeply good. In his leisure hours he was a craftsman of sorts, having inherited woodworking skills from his father. I never tired of watching him work the stubborn kiaat he used to make bedroom furniture and lounge stools. No mechanical tools in the 1940s and 50s – everything cut, shaped, planed and sanded by hand. He also loved to work with metal, and built an ‘O’ gauge scale model Class 23 locomotive, soldering the intricate bits out of odds and ends and filing pistons and drive rods out of nails. He had to wait until a couple of years after the war to power the loco with an electric motor from Britain. The train it pulled was modelled on the Orange Express, which used to ply between Joburg and Durban – altogether a remarkable work.

There lay between father and son a very ‘English’ reserve which meant that I probably learned more about Dad from his sermons than any conversation. It was in the pulpit that he could speak eloquently of the things that mattered most. Words like ‘Grace’ and ‘Love’, ‘Nobility’ and ‘Truth’ were the ones he most often used, and it was evident from his life that these virtues had taken up residence long since within. For him they were inextricably bound up with the experience of knowing Jesus. But there was another tributary too, from which a unique beauty had flowed into his soul: in one of his last letters he urged me to read the English poets. “Try Wordsworth’s Excursion,” he wrote. “It holds all the great spiritual values that have made our English tradition, which we dare not let die in South Africa without handing ourselves over to an inhuman authoritarianism.” He had been re-reading The Excursion and said he “knew again how our blessed tradition has moulded and sustained my thoughts of freedom and human dignity – in other words, why I think the things I do.” These may seem unfashionable words in our days of post-colonial revisionism, when the ugly underside of Anglo-empire is rightly exposed and trashed, but it is important that we do not forget the virtues he spoke about. They too are part of our bequest and over centuries those virtues have inspired many a determined resistance against tyranny. South Africa may be free, but freedom is not enough: the brutalities of the past survive under new guises and they have left us callous, uncouth and uncaring of human life. In our speech and in our actions, we are a violent people who have to relearn the virtues before we can become a kinder, gentler South Africa.

Brakpan was a grimy mining town on the East Rand, later claiming dubious fame for also being the birthplace of BJ Vorster, one of South Africa’s toughest apartheid prime ministers who came to power after the assassination of Hendrik Verwoerd. Many years later I was to have a brief encounter with him, one with a friend’s life at stake.

Methodist ministers are committed to itinerancy, promising to go where the Annual Conference sends them, and when I was two years old Dad was transferred to Ermelo. There are snapshots only of life there. I have mentioned the impact of World War Two and the fall of Tobruk. It was in Ermelo that I made my first friend, Michael Russell. Michael fell out of Dad’s Chev one day as it went around a corner: one moment he was there, the next not. Luckily he landed in a sand-bank but carried a long scar on his forehead all his life. Our family, consisting of my parents, my older sister Valmai, our Airedale dog and I, lived in a church manse3 with a large field as our back yard and I recall thorny bramble bushes and two cows. I have a fairly clear mind-picture of the Methodist church where Dad preached, and a ministers’ concert at which the famous Reverend JB Webb conjured sweet music using a violinist’s bow on a carpenter’s saw gripped between his knees. It was when Dr Webb was suddenly moved to the prestigious Methodist Central Hall in Johannesburg, that Dad succeeded him at the main Methodist church in Pretoria and we took up residence in Schoeman Street.

The house had a big palm tree on the front lawn and a tennis court in the back yard. Methodist manses were social centres in those days so our home was constantly frequented by members of the congregation. Church youth and young adults used the tennis court on summer evenings and weekends. We also housed our ‘farm cousin’ Hector Thorne from Warmbaths, some 70 miles to the north, so that he could attend Pretoria Boys’ High. He got my bedroom and Dad built in a portion of the veranda for me. With just a quarter inch of hardboard between me and Pretoria’s bitter winters, I learned to deal with cold early in life.

My first school was Miss Mickey’s Kindergarten just up the road in Arcadia. There is a vague memory of getting into trouble for kissing a girl, but I cannot swear to it. Then on to Arcadia Primary School until Dad was transferred to Kilnerton Training Institution outside of Pretoria in 1948. Kilnerton demands a chapter all to itself, but in terms of schooling it meant that I was moved to Hatfield Primary on the eastern edge of Pretoria, nearer our new home. Both schools offered me a strong learning foundation. Memories of the classroom are minimal though and it seems that apart from the brief flirtation at Miss Mickey’s, I kept out of trouble. A scary exception was when, exploring a store-room in the rambling Kilnerton Mission House I found a small bottle of deadly strychnine poison and took it to school, proudly showing it off to my schoolfriends and then carelessly leaving it in a desk. My parents were summoned and had to witness me being dressed down by the school principal. He was pale with what I thought was rage, but in retrospect it was probably shock. No doubt he was imagining little bodies lying all over his school – a scenario that could well have been actualised. My most vivid memories have nothing to do with learning really: special assemblies on the day the war ended, with all of us singing Now Thank We All Our God, the visit of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery soon thereafter, who arrived in his famous Desert Rats camouflaged open Humber car and talked down to us in clipped, superior tones, then gave us all a half-holiday. There was another when the new Union Castle liner Pretoria Castle came into service on the Southampton–Cape Town run; we felt we had launched her ourselves. My strongest subjects were English, History and Art and I did reasonably well in the others – except for Arithmetic. From very early on I developed an aversion to numbers and mathematical symbols, which still leaves me disadvantaged.

The insularity of a white English-speaking child’s life in the South Africa of the 1940s and 50s, not only in relation to the other ‘white tribe’, but more so when it came to black people, was almost absolute. My memories of early childhood carry only two black images: one was Mita Gongo, the Xhosa domestic worker in our Pretoria home, whose kind, lined face remains quite clear to this day; the other was roving bands of young black men, some of them playing mouth-organs, who were seen walking down Schoeman Street on Sunday afternoons. They were no doubt mostly employed in white homes and gardens, enjoying their only day off, but Mita Gongo called them ‘Amaleitas’ and there was something vaguely threatening about them, possibly because Mita didn’t like them. Other black persons touched my life in a tangential way, like the old man who drove the horse-drawn ice-cream cart down Schoeman Street, selling wafers for a tickey – threepence – but there is little other recollection of them, such was their place in our universe. My childhood memory is a parable of the general white experience. Black persons impinged on our lives only in a marginal and subservient role and things would have remained so had the Methodist Church not later intervened with the move to Kilnerton, taking our family out of its white bubble and locating us in the middle of a large black college campus.

Methodist ministers were paid very little, so outings and school holidays were severely limited, but we did venture occasionally to Johannesburg, 30 miles away, for a shopping day and maybe lunch at John Orr’s department store. En route we usually stopped on the side of the tree-lined road to pick mushrooms in the fields. Joburg had trams – red and cream behemoths that rumbled on tracks down the middle of the city streets. Every so often the spring-loaded arm that connected one of them to the powerlines above would jump loose, the tram would screech to a halt and the conductor would fish out a long pole from its tubular hiding place and juggle the arm back into contact – all in a shower of crackling sparks to entertain us.

Dad would sometimes swop pulpits with JB Webb and would preach in the Central Hall in Pritchard Street, the church where, in the 1920s he had first experienced the call to be a minister. The organist then was the famous Rupert Stoutt, who unbelievably would still be there when I entered that pulpit some 50 years later.

School holidays were usually spent with relatives, sometimes with Hector’s family on their farm near Warmbaths. The farm was a poor investment that never repaid their back-breaking work. Their humble farmhouse had rocks weighting the tin roof to hold it down. Cattle and peanuts or sunflowers were what they farmed and their life was hard. There was the heartbreak of one holiday, when anthrax struck Uncle Strett’s herd. Hector struggled to hold back his tears as he shot the doomed beasts and we retched with the stench of burning cattle carcasses. Uncle Stretton Thorne was a hard-bitten, pipe-smoking ‘bloedsap’ United Party supporter. The next farm belonged to the Tromp family, with old man Tromp a passionate Afrikaner Nationalist, full of bombast now that his party was in power. At night I used to lie on the carpet next to the crackling fire listening to the two of them almost coming to blows as they argued. However, the Tromp/Thorne feud was as much about pride as politics: whenever Tromp decided to plant sunflowers Strett would stubbornly plant peanuts, and vice versa – and Tromp seemed always to be right. He became more prosperous as Uncle Strett and Aunt Muriel sank deeper into debt. Those farm holidays taught me a deep respect for the farmers of our land, not to mention politics 101. I also learned something else: anxious to prove my manhood, I nagged Hector to take me hunting. He finally agreed and we set off with me proudly hefting the .303 rifle. It was a long, burning hike before we crossed some spoor. “You’re in luck,” Hector said, “that looks like kudu.” Sure enough, after another 30 minutes, there the beast stood in the bush: a magnificent bull, at the shoulders as tall as me, with long horns spiralling majestically skywards. The day was dying and the animal was silhouetted darkly, all except for the pink glow of his soft translucent ears against the setting sun. He seemed to be looking straight at us. “He’s yours,” Hector whispered, and then added, “if you want to kill him.” I was transfixed. I never even raised the rifle. I knew I could never kill something of such grace and beauty. The moment when that great animal won my heart stayed with me and I have never wanted to hunt again.

Another holiday venue I enjoyed was being packed off to my dad’s sister Beattie and her spouse Harry in Germiston. They had chosen a road less travelled by my Methodist family: Harry liked his whiskey, and Beattie was, well, very sexy. The house had some slightly risqué pictures and one or two charming art deco nude statuettes, all of great fascination to a pubescent boy. They also had the latest audio technology called a radiogram, combining a radio and gramophone in one piece of furniture. Cousin John’s latest vinyl record with Roy Rogers singing Don’t Fence Me In would play on the one side, until Uncle Harry walked in, flipped a switch, and immediately the radio took over on the other. Their home was so full of things.

Most of my wartime Christmas hand-me-downs – 1930s-era Hobbies Annuals, Dinky Toy cars, puzzles – had once been owned by John, and he had a Lionel train set which I loved to lay out and operate. Harry was an inveterate tinkerer and accomplished radio ham. I used to sit next to him as, with a whiskey in his left hand, with his right he delicately manipulated the glowing dials to pick up voices from thousands of miles away. His garage was filled with technical junk that provided an endless treasure-trove for me, and wonder of wonders, on the back lawn stood a full-size radar aerial discarded from one of the navy’s World War Two frigates. How this massive piece of hardware travelled the thousand miles from Simon’s Town to Germiston and into Harry’s yard remains a mystery.

It was while staying with Uncle Harry and Aunty Bea that I met Field Marshal Smuts. They took me to a United Party fête in the grounds of Victoria Lake, and there he was, in full khaki uniform with red cap band and tabs, medal ribbons from three wars, Sam Browne belt, and swagger-stick tucked under his arm. I clearly remember him leaning down to shake my hand, his kind, lined face with its white goatee beard close to mine. “How do you do, young man?” he asked courteously. I have no idea what I replied but my aunt preened with pride. And then, on Victoria Lake I fell in love for the first time with boats and boating, but the story of that romance belongs in another chapter.

When I entered Pretoria Boys’ High School (PBHS) in 1951 the impact of the National Party regime elected in 1948 had already been felt there. Before their more infamous legislation against black South Africans, they attacked those of their own kind whom they saw as anglophiles. PBHS was a favourite school for Afrikaans-speaking farmers who sent their sons to learn English and receive a more liberal education. The new regime put pressure on such families to end this practice and by the time I arrived, the hostels had been gutted of many stalwart Afrikaner boarders – often the backbone of the school’s gees (spirit) and its rugby prowess. They were transferred to Afrikaans Hoërskool across the railroad tracks. PBHS was weakened, its discipline became poor and my time there did not serve me well. Had I stayed, I think I might have ended up a problem to society. I was an inconsistent scholar, excelling only at English, History, Geography and Art, the last mentioned subject taught by the great and gloriously eccentric Walter Battis. I tried other languages but gave up uselessly on both Latin and German, settling finally on Geography as an escape. I had a handful of good school friends but because Kilnerton was so far from the Pretoria suburbs where they lived, I saw little of them after school.

The year 1952 saw the tercentenary of the landing at the Cape of Jan van Riebeeck and the first Dutch East India Company settlers and a handful of boys from PBHS would be selected to travel to Cape Town for the celebrations to be held on the new Foreshore, the reclaimed land outside of Van Riebeeck’s Kasteel de Goede Hoop. The Nationalist government planned to use the commemorations to emphasise the civilising role of whites among the ‘backward’ indigenous people. Living at Kilnerton my parents were not impressed, but I hoped very much to be chosen because I’d never seen the Mother City. I believed it to be a place of great beauty – and it was a seaport, and that was where I would find ships. Sadly, I wasn’t selected. Cape Town had to wait.