Brian Hancock Books is a division of Great Circle Press
STORIES FROM OUR SMALL BLUE MARBLE
Stories From our Small Blue Marble are true stories that have happened to me over the last 60 plus years from growing up in South Africa to sailing around the world. There have been a lot of adventures and a lot of mishaps along the way, but they are all good and have formed the fabric of a life well lived. They are short enough that they can be read to the end long before your cup of coffee gets cold, or your beer gets warm.
I write and narrate each story and they appear on my weekly blog and podcast which you can hear on Substack here. Or just scroll down and have fun reading or listening. The stories are (roughly) in sequential order except for the first two because they were two of the most pivotal moments in my life, in addition to kids and marriage(s) of course...:)
If you like and appreciate independent thought and good writing please consider buying me a coffee, or a beer, or chucking a few bucks into gofundme so that I can turn all my books into audio books. It all helps. Also please consider signing up so that they land in your inbox.
Our Small Blue Marble is, of course, our little Blue Planet drifting though the universe - a little like me.
Pick a story. Any Story. They are all good but if you want to really appreciate the stupidity of it all, start with the first one and work your way through. It's a fun ride. Guaranteed; but without a money back option...:)
Story 15 - A Guest of the Government
Story 18 - Sailing the Atlantics
Story 19 - A Summer in Sweden
Story 20 - The Ponzi Scheme
Story 21 - Coming soon
Story 22 - Coming soon
Story 23 - Coming soon
Story 24 - Coming soon
Story 25 - Coming soon
Story 26 - Coming soon
Story 27 - Coming soon
Story 28 - Coming soon
COMING TO AMERICA
Here’s a good story for you. It’s called coming to America.
Back in 1980 I was working on a boat in Spain. I was just 22 and finding my way in the world. I got a letter from a friend of mine asking if I might be interested in helping him sail a boat from Boston to West Palm Beach in Florida. I wrote back, because that’s what you did in those days, and told him I was interested and he wrote back and said, “great I will pick you up at Logan Airport.” I mailed him my flight information and spent all of my money on a one-way ticket to America.
When I arrived in Boston there was no one there to pick me up. It was my first time ever in the United States and I didn’t know a single person on the entire continent.
I had just five bucks in my pocket.
Back in those days there was a mural of the northshore of Boston in Terminal E and I recognized the name Marblehead. It was a famous sailing town where Hood Sailmakers was located so I thought that I would try and go there. I asked the lady at the Information Booth how to get to Marblehead and she told me to take the underground to a place called Wonderland and then take a bus to Marblehead which is what I did. Things started to get really weird when I got on the bus at Wonderland. It was Halloween night. I had never heard of Halloween in my life and couldn’t understand why all these people in costume were getting on and off the bus. It felt like I had landed in Disneyland.
Meanwhile I was freezing in my shorts and flip flops.
The bust trundled up the coast going through Salem where thing started to get even more weird, and it finally dropped me off downtown Marblehead. Purely by luck I found the water and I found the Boston Yacht Club which was closed for the winter. There was a night watchman but he had never heard of my friend or the boat that I was supposed to sail to Florida. I sat outside the club feeling like I was going to freeze to death. I simply had no idea what to do.
Then the nightwatchman came running out and yelled “quick, your friends are coming into the harbor.” What had happened was that they were actually going to Marblehead, not Boston, and had some engine trouble which slowed them down. Of course there was no way for them to let me know any of this.
They had called on the VHF radio looking to see which mooring to pick up but noticed that the harbor was empty and picked up a mooring at the mouth of the harbor. The nightwatchman recognised the name of the boat which was a bit unusual. The boat was called Xargo.
So I tried calling them back but they had already flicked the radio off and turned the music on and opened the beers, you know how it goes.
I walked along the waterfront until I got to the harbor entrance. I could see the boat about 50 yards from where I was standing but they couldn’t hear me shouting. I was starting to freeze in my shorts and decided to walk back to the yacht club to see if I could at least sleep on a couch or something. Along the way I noticed a dinghy propped up against some guy's garage, and so I stole it. I pushed it down to the water and rowed out to the boat.
The crew were amazed to see me. We returned the dinghy and the person never knew that it was missing for a couple of hours. The crew felt so bad that they hadn’t been there to pick me up and told me that they would make it up to me and take me to a famous bar called Maddies which incidentally is where Ted Hood started Hood Sailmakers.
So on my second night in America we went to Maddies. The bar has not changed in 40 plus years. As you walk in the door there is a red bar stool and sitting there was a beautiful woman with auburn hair. I was a bit cocky so I went over to talk to her. I said, “you know you have beautiful wrists.”
She said, “I know.”
Well her name was Erin and we got married. Not that night but a few years later. We lasted about 10 years and had one daughter. That daughter, Tory, has given me two grandsons, Emmet and Cassidy. It’s a beautiful thing and only in America and guys, if you are ever looking for a good pick-up line remember, “you’ve got great wrists. By the way, she still has great wrists. I saw her not so long ago. As always thanks for reading.
Listen to Coming to America as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
If you are interested in the full story it’s in my second memoir Lapping The Planet. You can download Lapping the Planet as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
LEAVING SOUTH AFRICA
My previous story was about my arrival in America. This one is about leaving South Africa, the place where I was born and where I grew up.
As a kid I dreamt of sailing around the world and in 1979 I had the opportunity to join a boat racing in the Cape Town to Uruguay race. The boat was called Dabulamanzi, which is the zulu word for Sweet Water. Lovely name. It was owned by one of South Africa’s most famous businessmen, a man by the name of Gordon Renny. Many of you might have taken a Renny’s antacid tablet from time to time. That was one of his many businesses.
Gordon was a larger than life character. He was a big game hunter at a time when big game hunting really was just that. You had to go out into the bush for weeks and hunt lions and elephants. Not like these days where they pretty much bring the animals to you so that you can shoot them. He was also a big game fisherman catching marlin off the east coast of South Africa.
And he was a well known sailor.
In the late ‘70 the South African government clamped down on citizens having offshore bank accounts. They were worried that there would be a money drain which would bankrupt the country. Gordon, of course, had a Swiss Bank Account and he was busted. Because he was such a big name and famous person, the government wanted to make an example out of him and it was a big deal that was splashed all over the papers.
I had joined Dabulamanzi in Durban and we sailed the boat to Cape Town to get it ready for the Cape to Uruguay race. That was when Gordon locked himself in a hotel room in Johannesburg, drank a few bottles of brandy, took some pills and slit his wrists. He was, as he told us later, embarrassed and humiliated by the negative press coverage. Only thing was, he didn’t die. A hotel maid found him and they rushed him to hospital.
Meanwhile, we were in Cape Town working on the boat. We figured that our chances of doing the race were pretty much over, but we did get a message from Gordon to keep preparing the boat as he still wanted to do the race. So we kept working on the boat while Gordon was in hospital recovering.
He got out of the hospital and the race was on for us, but about three days before the start a young, well dressed man stopped by the boat and asked if he could talk to the captain. He was Gordon’s doctor and told our captain that we should call the race off because Gordon was suicidal and was planning on jumping overboard during the race. Now, we were just kids. I was 20. Bill Bullard, our skipper, was 23. We didn’t care. All we wanted to do was race across the Atlantic.
Anyway we took off for Uruguay and after a bit of a rough start the weather settled down. The boat had a center cockpit and at watch change at night we would sit in the cockpit and have a cup of coffee, except Gordon who was being a real pain in the arse. He would go off to his aft cabin, usually in a huff.
One night after Gordon had pissed us off we were sitting there just joking around saying pretty much if Gordon wanted to jump overboard we would help him. It was funny at the time, I guess.
Well, we sailed for 28 days with a spinnaker all the way to Uruguay. Halfway across I celebrated my 21st birthday. Funny side story. I was the sailmaker on board and I was down below repairing a spinnaker that we had blown out. I was using a hand crank sewing machine. It was my birthday and I managed to put the needle right through the index finger on my left hand. The needle came out again and left a neat stitch and yes it did hurt. Anyway it was a perfect passage and Gordon was really happy at the end. Now he was a bit of a cheap skate, if you know what I mean, but he did take us all out for dinner and the Punte del Este Yacht Club. After dinner he got up to make a speech and started to tear up. He told us that he had planned to jump overboard during the race, but he said that he heard us one night in the cockpit saying how we would help him jump overboard if he wanted to, and he said to us, “I was not going to give you bastards the satisfaction of killing myself, and now I am glad that I didn’t. I feel much better after being at sea. You all saved my life.” So there you go. Life hey?
After Punte we sailed on up the coast of Argentina. Gordon had found himself a very young girlfriend in Uruguay and she joined us. When we got to the Caribbean Gordon was a transformed man and to prove it he went out on the street of Castries in St Lucia and scored some pot from a local dealer and then came back to the boat and smoked a huge joint. I left Dabulamanzi in Antigua and went on to do the infamous ‘79 Fastnet race where 22 people died. I sailed aboard a British boat called Battlecry, but that’s another story.
This story is recounted in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. The story is called The Great Gordon and there is also an ‘almost true’ story in my book of short stories, More Twisted Tales, about a friend of mine who sailed on one of Gordon’s ships that sank in the Indian Ocean. It’s a great story and is called Pass the Antacids. I hope that you enjoyed this one. Thanks for reading.
Listen to Leaving South Africa as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
You can download More Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
KEES - A StoryCast interruption
My previous story about leaving South Africa was about when I sailed the Cape Town to Uruguay Race. This is a StoryCast interruption.
Previously it was the Cape to Rio Race, but Brazil put in some sanctions against South Africa because of apartheid, and the Brazilian authorities would not allow a race from South Africa to stop there. So the race went to Uruguay instead. This story is about the first Cape to Rio Race and a Dutchman by the name of Kees Bruynzeel. It's a good story and perhaps a lesson for us all. Here goes...
Great ocean races always generate stories that become legend. Here is one for you and it’s a good one. As a child I was enamored by the Cape Town to Rio race, partly because it started from my country, South Africa, and ended in a far away exotic destination, Brazil, the land of samba music, Copacabana Beach and caipirinhas, all the stuff that dreams are made of especially for a teenage boy.
I was 15 and it was my passion to track the boats as they sailed across the South Atlantic. Our local newspaper published their positions every day (can you imagine?) and I had made a chart out of a poster board. Every afternoon I would plot the positions of each yacht and daydream that I was aboard one of them.
There was one entry that I was particularly intrigued by. It was a yacht by the name of Stormy. I think that I just liked the name and probably didn’t know much about what was happening behind the scenes. The boat was owned by a Dutchman by the name of Kees Bruynzeel. He was 72 years old and had made some cash, more than a little, in the plywood business. Bruynzeel Plywood. Anyway Mr Bruynzeel had a heart condition and his doctors warned him about taking on a challenge like a transatlantic yacht race. They say, and I know that it’s a generalization, that Dutchmen are hard headed but Kees told them to stuff it and that he was going to do the race anyway. I guess as a compromise he took along a cardiac nurse and a “burial at sea” kit in case the worst happened
It didn’t happen. Not only did Stormy win line honors by being the first to finish, they also won the race on handicap, but here is the kicker. Mr Bruynzeel went on to live for another nine years. He was doing the Middle Sea Race which is a race from Valletta, the capital city of the island of Malta, up through the Strait of Messina, around Sicily and back to Malta, a distance of around 600 miles. He had stood his watch and then went down below to take a nap. That was where his crew found him four hours later when he didn’t come up for his watch. Yes he was dead but what a way to go and what a legacy and hats off to you my friend.
Listen to Kees as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
A SERENDIPITOUS PISS
After we left Punte del Este on our way to the Caribbean we stopped in Salvador, Brazil. The city is known by its more popular name Bahia and is a throbbing, dynamic city of around 15 million people. It was the main South American port where the slaves from Africa were dropped off and their influence is felt in the culture and especially in the food which is quite delicious.
We stopped for a few days to restock and top off the gas and water tanks. One night I decided that I wanted to go ashore and take a look around. We were anchored about half a mile from the dock area, so I took the dinghy and went ashore.
There is a huge elevator that transports people from the dock area up into the main part of the city which is called Pelourinho Square. If you remember the Paul Simon album The Rhythm of the Saints. The intense drumming on the first track was recorded in Pelourinho Square. Combine the music with the heat and humidity and poverty and the noise and general chaos and you know that you are in Brazil. The whole country has its own special beat.
I found a place to eat and had more than a few drinks and around midnight made my way back to the dinghy which was right where I left it. A strong wind had picked up and was blowing from the land out to sea. I took off in the dinghy but after a few minutes the engine crapped out and no matter what I did I couldn’t start it again.
Meanwhile I was drifting out to sea. I was so focused on trying to get the engine to start that when I looked up I was well past the mooring field. Next stop was Africa. I was well and truly screwed.
When we sailed into Bahia a couple of days earlier I had noticed a platform anchored offshore. The fishing boats would tie up there and gut their catches before going into the port. Purely by luck it was right in my path and I managed to hand paddle over to it. So now it was around one in the morning. I was safe but the platform was a disgusting mess of fish guts and seagull shit. I should have just sucked it up and stayed there for the night, but it suddenly started to rain and I was skidding around in the filthy mess. So I made a stupid decision. I decided that I would leave the dinghy and swim back to the boat which was about a mile or so, directly upwind.
Now I’m not a good swimmer but I was desperate so I swam in the direction of some lights which I presumed were the lights of the boats at anchor in the mooring field. It didn’t take long before I knew that I was screwed. There was no going back. I had lost sight of the platform. And the rain and chop made going forward very tough. I was pretty sure that I was going to die. All I could do was to keep on swimming, but I was drinking so much water and had no idea if I was making any headway, but I just kept on swimming.
I dunno, but it must have been well over an hour when I started to hear the clanging of halyards against the mast and so I knew that I was close to the mooring field. By pure luck the first boat I came to happened to be Dabulamanzi, my home.
What had not occurred to me was that once I got to the boat I wouldn't be able to get on board. The sides were quite steep and I was beyond exhausted. There was a line hanging overboard and I hung onto it and tried banging the hull and yelling but no one heard me. I was pretty much screwed and was quite sure that I was going to drown. I had nothing left.
As it turned out, the crew that had stayed on the boat had a big dinner and opened plenty of wine and beer and apparently it was a good time. My luck was that my crewmate Pete Schram woke up in the middle of the night needing a pee. He went to the back of the boat and peed overboard and then went back to his bunk, but something had bothered him. He had heard a noise that didn’t sound right. He tried to ignore it and go to sleep but he couldn’t so he got up to investigate and found me dangling barely conscious at the end of a line. Pete grabbed me and hauled me on board and that’s how I am still here today to write this story. I hope that you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.
This story is recounted in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. The story is called A Serendipitous Piss. I hope that you enjoyed this one. Thanks for reading.
Listen to A Serendipitous Piss as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
BIG TUNA
This story is called Big Tuna. It's about sailing from Brazil to the Caribbean.
These Stories from our Small Blue Planet are not meant to be in any kind of chronological order and they are not all about toes being chopped off and almost drowning off the coast of Brazil. Some will be pleasant stories like this one about the first time I sailed to the Caribbean, fulfilling a dream that I had had since I was a small kid growing up in a landlocked city in South Africa. Back then the Caribbean was called the West Indies which I think has a much more romantic ring to it, but Caribbean is probably more correct because it’s the name of the Caribe people that live there.
We left Bahia and sailed to Fortaleza before charting a course for Barbados. Here is a lovely side story. We were about 300 miles off the coast of Venezuela sailing along under full spinnaker. Our crew were young and strong and having the best time of our lives. We spotted what looked like some kind of raft or dinghy ahead and altered course for a closer look. Turns out it was a lone fisherman in a small boat in the middle of nowhere. We of course acted like fools yelling and laughing as we scooted by him less than 50 feet away, but he never once looked up. He was just fishing and had no time for a big beautiful yacht full of noisy sailors. He simply didn’t acknowledge us. Turns out these fishermen have a mother-ship and go off every day alone to fish and return to the mother-ship in the evening, nut seriously he could have at least waved.
We carried on and made our first landfall in Barbados. Dabulamanzi was South African flagged and all of our crew except the skipper Bill Bullard were South Africans. This was 1979 and there were strong sanctions against South Africa at the time and Customs and Immigration in Barbados would not let us stop in their waters let alone come ashore. We were persona non-grata. We did, however, anchor and used the VHF radio to order some rum punches which some kids brought out to us in their dugout canoe and that was my first taste of rum, and with a tropical island as a backdrop it was about as close to heaven as I had even been.
We upped anchor and headed for St Lucia which was about 150 miles away. We always had a fishing line over the stern and somehow we hooked a massive tuna. We estimated it to be around 300 pounds. It took us around five or six hours to land it. We were a sailboat and not a fishing boat. Our plan was to let it go but we didn't want to cut the lure because it would be stuck in its mouth for the rest of time. So we landed the fish in the boat and removed the lure but it was pretty much dead so we finished it off. Now we had 300 pounds of fresh tuna and no refrigeration.
It took us most of a day to fillet the tuna and we ended up with a mound of fish. Speaking of mounds, we arrived in St Lucia in a bay called The Pitons, with pitons being the French word for breasts. At each end of this stunningly beautiful beach were perfectly shaped mounds looking like… well you know.
Back then there was nothing on the beach. These days I think there is a Club Med there or something equally gross. Some kids rowed out in their dugout canoes and had fruit and vegetables to sell. We asked them if they could make a huge fire on the beach so that we could cook our fish. They agreed and we launched our dinghy and went around to all the other boats in the anchorage and invited them to a beach party. They all came. They all brought something from salads to bread to rum and cokes. The kids made a massive fire and then had some smaller ovens dug into the sand with some kind of crude grates over the top and they pulled the coals out of the fire and transferred them to the small ovens and cooked up the tuna.
I remember that night distinctly. There were so many different languages being spoken and everyone was just having fun and getting drunk and celebrating the sunset and as it turned out, the sunrise as well. It was pure magic. I was just a kid with a dream of sailing around the world and now here I was on a tropical island in the West Indies dancing the night away. By the way I can’t dance but it didn't matter. Rum lubricates everything.
So that’s my story of a magical evening in St Lucia. I wrote a fictionalized version of that trip in my book of short stories called More Twisted Tales. The story is called Nantucket Sleighride. It’s a lovely story of young love and tragedy. I hope that you will buy the book and read it and as always, thanks for reading.
Listen to Big Tuna as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download More Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
FASTNET FORCE 10
This story is called fastnet Force 10. It's about the disastrous '79 Fastnet Race where 22 people died.
My main goal when I left South Africa all those years ago was to sail around the world. It seemed highly unlikely that a kid from a small landlocked town at the bottom of Africa would ever be able to achieve that goal, but by the summer of 1979 I was well on my way. I had sailed Dabulamanzi from Durban to the Caribbean and we arrived in Antigua just in time for Antigua Race Week. It was a big regatta and boats and crews came from all over the world to compete. What I remember most were the perfect tropical sailing conditions, the copious amounts of rum, and the wet T-shirt contests. They also had the greasy pole competition which was fun to watch. Dozens of really drunk people would try and walk along a pole that stretched out over the water to claim a flag at the end of the pole which was covered in grease. I don’t know what the prize was and I don’t recall anyone ever making it to the flag. Antigua Race Week has since become very competitive and attracts some of the best yachts and sailors in the world. I prefer it the way it was back then.
I left Dabulamanzi and joined a brand new Swan 55, a British yacht by the name of Battlecry. It was actually a very famous yacht and we sailed it from the Caribbean to Cowes on the Isle of Wight which was where the boat was based. For the first time ever I was going to be in the thick of the international yacht racing scene and I was on a great boat with a great owner and really good crew.
I remember this so clearly. We were pulling into Cowes at the docks in the little marina at Royal Yacht Squadron, one of the most prestigious yacht clubs in the world. Word had spread that Battlecry was coming home and a sizable crowd had gathered. I was the bowman and had the dock lines in hand. I guess I was caught up in the excitement of it all and in my own self importance, but as we neared the dock I jumped from the bow of Battlecry, right onto the dock and then kept on going right into the water on the other side. The crowd was laughing. I was humiliated. Welcome to England.
We raced all summer and in August did the famous Fastnet Race. The race has been in existence since 1925, which coincidentally was the year that my Dad was born, and it was regarded one of the toughest and best offshore races on the sailing calendar. We took off from Cowes. The race would go across the Irish Sea and then round the famous Fastnet Rock off the coast of Ireland and then sail back to Plymouth on England’s south west coast.
There had been some talk of a storm out on the Atlantic that might make for some rough sailing but back then the weather information was sketchy at best and aimed mostly at shipping, not sailors on a joyride. We took off in fairly decent weather and sailed out of the English Channel and into the Irish Sea. It was our second night at sea when the wind really started to pick up. In the early evening we noticed a small boat coming up from behind. It was a trimaran with two young couples on board. The boat must have been around 35 feet max. They were flying and buzzing the fleet passing multi-million dollar yachts like Battlecry as if we were going backwards.
I came on watch around midnight. At the top of the companionway there was an anemometer and the needle was pegged at 60 knots. That was as high as it went. I tapped on it figuring that it must be broken but my crewmate told me that it had been pegged at 60 knots for a couple of hours. Then the wind really started to pick up. I think that the recorded top speeds that night of around 80 knots which is the same as a Category 2 hurricane.
That night 22 sailors died including the two couples on the trimaran. They never found a trace of their boat.
There were a combination of factors that led to so many deaths, most of which were caused by people abandoning their boats and getting into the liferafts expecting it to be better. It was a horrendous night. We were taking on water and starting to sink. Turns out that the ring frames that are part of the overall structure of the boat had cracked and water was coming in faster than we could pump it out. The decision was made for us to retire and head for Cork on the south coast of Ireland. With the wind direction the way it was the pressure on the broken ring frames was eased and we managed to get things under control. At least we weren’t sinking.
We were close to land at dawn and saw dozens of rescue boats and helicopters going out to sea. We had no idea of the damage that had happened overnight. We pulled into the docks at the Royal Cork Yacht Club and started to straighten things out. That was where I had my first pint of Guinness and I was hooked. We were at the bar hearing more horror stories of what had happened and watched the death tally rise. It was kind of unreal.
It was also clear that it was going to take some time for Battlecry to be fixed so I thought that I would take a little holiday and spent two weeks hitch-hiking around southern Ireland. When I got back to Cork the captain of Battlecry had organized a ride for me back to England. It was clear that Battlecrey was going to be in Ireland for an extended time, so I sailed a little Swan called Sophie-B back to England. That was when I thought that I should probably call my Dad to tell him about the storm.
What I didn’t know was that our local newspaper, The Natal Witness, had picked up the story about the storm and found out that I was on one of the boats and printed a story. The headlines were: Local boy missing in storm; presumed dead. There was a picture of me.
Back then there were no computers. All the crew lists were written in foolscap books and with so many deaths and so many people unaccounted for the race officials were having a tough time keeping track of everyone. My dad had been sending telex’s but the race officials had no clue where I was and if I was alive or dead. I called my dad and you can imagine his reaction. For almost three weeks he had been presuming that I was dead.
I think that it was Mark Twain who famously said, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
I hope that you enjoyed this story. It’s told in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. The story is called Fastnet Force 10. I hope that you will buy the book and read it. As always I hope that you enjoyed this story and thanks for reading.
Listen to Fastnet Force 10 as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
RACING TO DOWNUNDER
This story is called Racing to Downunder. It's about racing from England to Australia.
The news about the Fastnet Race and all the death and destruction that had happened that long night hung over the sailing community for the rest of the summer. Battlecry finally returned to Cowes and we started to prepare it for another transatlantic trip back to Antigua. I was sitting on the foredeck with my sewing machine repairing something, I can’t remember what it was, when I saw a tall guy with a big mustache stop by to talk to Terry Gould, the Captain of Battlecry. Terry pointed my way and the tall stranger came over. He said, “my name’s Skip Novak. I’m skippering a boat in the Parmelia Race that leaves Plymouth next month. We will stop in South Africa and the race finishes in Fremantle in Australia. I need a sailmaker. You interested?”
I was looking forward to sailing back to Antigua on Battlecry so I asked the guy. “What’s the deal?”
Skip replied, “there is no deal. You sail with us. We provide food. You get to have an adventure.” I looked at him and said, “I’m in.”
That’s how things were done back then. No pay, no prospects, but the promise of a big challenge and an adventure of a lifetime. I wrote a poem which you can find in my book of poetry. The poem is called, “I see things float by on the breeze.” It sums up in a few short sentences how I have come to live my life. I see things float by on the breeze and I catch them. I caught that one that Skip had dangled in front of me and it led to numerous circumnavigations and a firm friendship with one of sailing's most successful high latitude skippers. Skip and I have sailed well over 60,000 miles together.
I joined Independent Endeavour in Plymouth. It was a Swan 65. The boat had been bought by an Australian businessman and he was looking for a cheap way to get it delivered to Australia. Peter Wright was one of Australia’s richest men. He and his partner Lang Hancock had discovered gold in Western Australia and made a fortune. Peter owned the newspaper the Sunday Independent, hence the name of the boat. He may have been rich but he was cheap and a bit of a prick.
The race, called the Parmelia Race, was to celebrate the discovery of Western Australia 150 years earlier by the ship Parmelia. It was a pursuit race meaning that each boat had a different start date based on the boat’s handicap. Since we were one of the bigger boats we were among the last to leave England. We were required to stay in Cape Town for a certain amount of time before sailing to Australia with the same staggered start.
We took off from Plymouth at the end of September. There were 10 of us on board. We had a cantankerous cook who went by the name Dola, may he rest in peace. He really was a miserable prick. The crew were a mix of Aussies and American’s. Most of them went on to fame and fortune. Skippy Lissiman was a young Aussie. When we arrived in Fremantle he was immediately recruited to sail on Australia 2 in the America’s Cup. Skippy was the starboard headsail trimmer on the boat when they won race 7 against Denis Connor aboard Liberty and won the America’s Cup finally breaking sports longest winning streak. There was Steve Harrison who ran a successful rigging business and worked on all the Aussie America’s Cup campaigns and there was Gerry Downton, AKA Captain Tits. Gerry was and is still one of the most colorful characters on the international sailing circuit. He was my best man at my wedding. By the way, in my novel Murder at your Convenience there is a bartender at the famous Southport Raw bar in Ft Lauderdale, Florida. That bartender is based on Captain Tits.
So we took off for Cape Town. Couple of funny stories along the way. The boys had all given up smoking - not me - I never smoked. It seemed like a good idea at the time but a week or so into the race they were struggling. We saw a passing ship and Skip got them on the VHF radio and asked if they could spare some smokes, which they did. They dropped a few cartons off and we sailed by and picked them up. A week later we did the same thing and asked a ship for beer and the Captain kindly obliged. He wrapped a few cold cases of beer in a net and dropped it overboard. We scooped it up. There was a message wishing us luck from the Captain and crew of the ship World Navigator. In my novel Cinnamon Girl, I named the ship that runs over my main character's boat in the middle of the night; World Navigator.
Anyway, we tried a third time. This time when we saw a passing ship we explained who we were and asked if they had any ice cream on board. Our request was met with a stony silence and that put an end to those fun games. We had to wait until Cape Town to get ice cream.
We were in good shape when we got to South Africa. I think that we were in second or third place, but we still had a long and rough Southern Ocean leg ahead of us. The race favorite from the outset was a boat by the name of Siska. It was owned and skippered by one of Australia’s top sailors, a man by the name of Rolly Tasker. Siska was bright red and brand new and beautiful. They started behind us. I think that they gave two or three days head start.
This was my first Southern Ocean experience. We sailed deep into iceberg territory and dealt with gale force winds and huge seas in the Roaring Forties. Of course I loved every minute of it. I would be on the foredeck changing sails - our headsails back then were hanked on - and the wind would be howling. Sometimes we would see the Southern lights swirling overhead. The boat was sailing on the edge of control and I thought to myself that I must be the luckiest man alive.
We passed all the boats that had started before us and only had Siska to deal with. They were closing in fast from behind but they ran out of racecourse and we were first into Fremantle beating Siska by less than two hours. Rolly Tasker was sour about it and told the press that we must have cheated. We didn’t cheat. We were dumb and fearless and we won fair and square.
Funny story. It was all over the press that we were going to win the race and Peter Wright told Skip that we had to look our best. He was so cheap that he hadn’t even bought us T-shirts. Skip looked at me and I knew what he was thinking. We had blown out our red and orange spinnaker a few days earlier. I got to work and made red sarongs and yellow headbands for the crew. We rolled into Fremantle just as the sun was setting bringing with us a westerly gale which we carried all the way across the finish line. There were tons of spectator boats and we were a wild looking bunch in our brand new crew gear. The press were all over it and Peter Wright was impressed with the crew uniforms until he realized that I had cut up his $6,000 spinnaker to make the uniforms. We were well and truly famous for a few weeks. It seemed like the whole of Australia had been following the race.
This story gets even better. As part of the same race there was a cruising division. Those boats had to choose their own start date and time, they had to stay a minimum of a week in Cape Town, and they had to arrive at 11:00 am on Saturday November 25. The boat that crossed the finish line closest to that exact time would win a big prize. I can’t remember how much money it was but it was a decent chunk of change.
Of course it’s easier to blow off time than it is to make it up, so most of the cruising boats got to Fremantle early and just waited for the Saturday morning to cross the finish line. There was a French boat in the cruising division - I can’t remember its name - but they arrived early and decided to while away their last night at sea by depleting their wine reserves. They went back and forth about 20 miles offshore, but with the wine flowing and no one paying attention they ran aground in the middle of the night. There is an island off the coast of Western Australia called Rottnest Island. They hit it so hard that the crew were able to step off the boat onto dry land. They never recovered the boat.
Meanwhile five other boats sailed into Fremantle harbor all finishing within minutes of the 11 0-clock deadline. The race officials decided to award them all the prize money which they split six ways to include to the poor French team who had to take a ferry the last 20 miles.
It was a great adventure. I found myself in Australia in mid summer. I remember reading The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough and falling in love with the country, but I was broke. No money and no prospects, but as you will soon find out, I did just fine. I hope that you enjoyed this story and as always, thanks for reading.
Listen to Racing to Downunder as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
Listen to Brain read his poem Seeking Me here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
THE NULLARBOR
This story is called The Nullarbor and it’s about the time I hitchhiked across Australia.
Between Christmas and New Year another of the big international yacht races takes place. The Sydney to Hobart Race. The 600-odd mile course starts on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, and is usually a fairly rough passage across the Bass Strait to Hobart in Tasmania. Like the Fastnet Race it attracts some of the best yachts and sailors in the world. I wanted to be a part of it and looked into flying from Perth to Sydney. I don’t remember the exact amount of the ticket but it was around $200 to $300 dollars and I, of course, didn’t have that kind of money so I decided that I would hitchhike to the east coast instead.
Have I already mentioned that I was young and dumb?
Anyway, it's over 3,000 miles from Fremantle to Sydney and much of it is desert. The middle of South Australia is called the Nullarbor Plain and it’s a brutal, dusty and dry place and probably not a place for a hitchhiker, but I was determined to go to Sydney so I set off with a small bag. A friend drove me to Perth and then dropped me off on the far side of the city on the road that would lead all the way to Sydney.
I stuck my thumb out and was picked up by some bloke working on a farm about 200 miles to the east of Perth. He dropped me on the side of the road and since it was getting late, I decided to camp there for the night. Well camp may be a bit of an exaggeration. I didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag. I had some matches, a bit of food and a fifth of Fireball so I made a fire, drank some Fireball and went to sleep. I should have known better. No sooner than I was asleep I could hear the dingos. For those who are not familiar with dingos they are similar to coyotes. They are basically big wild dogs and they hunt in packs and for all I knew I was the only food for miles. Needless to say I didn’t sleep much.
There were no cars the next morning and I sat on the side of the road contemplating whether I should just go back to Perth, but I had already said goodbye to everyone so I kept my thumb out. In the early evening I got a ride from a farmer. He only took me a few miles and dropped me off where he turned off to go to his farm. He told me that if I didnt get a ride to walk down the road for a half mile or so and I would find their house and I could stay for the night, which is what I ended up doing.
It was definitely a bit of a strange night. The farmer, his name was Bill and his wife Belinda and I sat down to a big meal of pork chops. I remember the meal because Belinda told me that the chops came from their favorite pig whose name was Emma. She told me that they had slaughtered Emma because the dinner was a special occasion because it was going to be Bill's last meal. I wasn’t sure what she was getting at but after dinner Bill brought out the brandy and we got a bit drunk and I started to pick up on some kind of weird vibe. They were talking about a doctor that was coming in the morning to, ‘do the dirty deed.’ Their words.
I went to bed and Belinda woke me up for breakfast. Their children had all arrived and were having breakfast. Bill wasn’t hungry. I slowly figured out what was going on. The doctor coming to do the dirty deed was going to inject Bill with a cocktail of lethal drugs and end his life. Sure enough at around 8 the doctor arrived. So did someone from the local court and they signed some papers and then Bill said, “well let’s get on with it shall we?” And that was about that. A half hour later he was dead. The doctor had left and I was helping the kids carry their father to a grave which he had dug himself. We lowered him into the grave and placed his boots on the coffin and chucked dirt back in the hole.
It was a really weird experience. I still don’t know how I feel about all of it. I am all for assisted suicide but when you are right there in the middle of it, it’s another story altogether. When I wrote about crossing Australia in my first memoir I left this part of that story out. I couldn’t write about it, but when I wrote my second book of short stories, More Twisted Tales, I wrote it in because while the story which is called The Nullarbor is mostly true, it’s also fictionalized so I was okay with writing about Bill’s assisted suicide. Anyway, one of the sons dropped me off back on the side of the road and I started hitchhiking again.
Now this next part is also a bit surreal. I got picked up by a beautiful blond in a red convertible. She lived on a farm not that far from where she picked me up. I quickly noticed that she wasn’t wearing a bra and I spent a very pleasant hour or so looking down her blouse. We arrived at her farm, well her parents farm to be more precise, and without going into too much detail we ended up doing ‘it’ in the barn. Her parents were in the house. I wrote a poem about that encounter called Mary Fay and it’s in my book, A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry. You can get all the x-rated details there.
She dropped me back on the side of the road and I was just setting up my little camp for the night when an old Bedford truck came rolling along. They pulled over and I jumped in. They were four musicians heading back home to Sydney after playing some gigs on the west coast. The back of the van was full of musical gear and they had four or five big coolers filled with beer. That was all they had for the trip.
We rolled on through the night and in the early morning the truck started to make some bad noises. Luckily we were close to Kalgoorlie, which incidentally is where Peter Wright, the owner of Independent Endeavour had made his fortune in gold. We stopped there and I got out of the truck to try and find some place to sleep. The guys needed the back of their truck to sleep. I woke up with some mangy looking dog licking my face and snarling at me. I could make out some old man and he was berating me for sleeping on the side of the road. He thought that I was a passed out drunk but figured out after a while that I wasn’t and invited me to his place for breakfast. His place being an old corrugated iron lean-to shack. I knew that it was a mistake but I am a polite South African so I followed him and his dog. The dog was a mess. It had open wounds everywhere and the flies were sucking on them.
By now the temperature was in the mid 90s. The old man made me a disgusting cup of tea and kept insisting that I should have some breakfast. I was definitely a bit suspect of the whole situation, but he kept insisting. He said that his fridge was full. I could hear the fridge struggling against the heat and against my better judgement, I opened the fridge door. He had removed all the shelves and there sitting on its haunches was a whole skinned kangaroo. I saw that one of it’s arms had been cut off and then saw on the small counter next to the fridge that the arm was shoved into a meat grinder. The old guy had been making kangaroo patties. The old guy laughed his head off and I ran for it. He was clearly not all there in the head. The musicians were just getting up when I got to the van and we got it fixed in Kalgoorlie and we took off again for Sydney.
Now the Nullarbor is flat, hot as hell, and dusty. They had just finished paving it when I crossed. Before that it had been a mostly dirt road. It was there for the big trucks to haul cargo across Australia. In places the road goes for a hundred miles or so without a hill or a bend. Just straight highway. The guys were drinking beer and singing and having a grand old time.
If you plan to drive across the Nullarbor you need to add a roobar to the front of your car. It’s basically a V-shaped piece of steel there to deflect any kangaroo that tried to cross the road without looking. It was the strangest thing. We would see a kangaroo hopping along parallel to the road, basically alongside the van. Then for no reason it decided that it wanted to cross the road and would literally jump in front of the van. We would hit it with the roobar and the kangaroo would go flying. Alongside the road there were dozens of dead kangaroos. They guys told me that by morning there wouldn’t be any. The dingos come in the night and take them away.
It took us three full days and nights to get to Sydney. I remember coming down over the Blue Mountains. The terrain had gone from desert to lush landscape with tons of birds and tons of parakeets. It was unreal. We drove into Sydney and they dropped me off at the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron which was where the boats competing in the Sydney Hobart race were berthed. I walked the docks trying to get a ride on one of the boats but didn’t get picked up and the race left without me. I worked for a while as a sailmaker at a small loft in Sydney until I had saved up enough money to fly back home to South Africa. I was hoping to pick up with my childhood sweetheart again, but it wasn’t to be.
You can read about the trip across Australia in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High and a fictionalized version of it in my book More Twisted Tales. In both cases the story is called The Nullarbor. I have also included the poem Mary Fay from my book of poems, A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry. I hope that you will buy one or all of the books.
I hope that you enjoyed this story and as always, thanks for listening.
Listen to The Nullarbor as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
Listen to Brian read his poem "Mary Fay," as an audio file here.
You can download A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
You can download More Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES - PART 1
This story is called Under African Skies. It's Part 1 about growing up as a kid in South Africa.
I believe that there are just two things that a parent needs to do for their children, beyond the obvious, of course. They need to give birth to the child, or at least be there at the business end when the baby is born. Funny story. An old mate of mine was there at the birth of his child. He was at the business end. He told me later that it was like watching his favorite pub burning down. I understand having been there a few times myself. Anyway, I digress and maybe this should fit in the obvious column as well.
The second, and I believe the most important thing is that you give your children a great childhood. Childhood shapes us and generates memories that sustain us through much of the rest of our lives. Familiar sounds and smells can instantly transport you back to your childhood. The older you get there are fewer of these triggered memories. It’s the childhood memories that really count and it’s why I think that a childhood is so important.
I bring this up now because I had an awesome childhood. I grew up barefoot in Africa where we were allowed to roam free and get into all sorts of trouble. I had broken a leg by the time I was three, a broken arm by the time I was five and had cracked my head open twice before my tenth birthday and that was just the big stuff.
Africa has changed now, sadly, and that time and place will never come back. I feel so blessed to have been a part of it. There were a couple of bumps along the way but it was all worth it. I was a small kid and always felt the need to overcompensate for my stature by being daring and stupid, in short I was a naughty kid. Trouble always seemed to follow me.
I was the fourth of five children. My sister Sue was the oldest and the apple of my Dad’s eye. Pete was next followed by Topher. His name is Christopher but instead of going by Chris, he opted for the other half of his name and went by Topher. I was next, and then my younger brother Rob. We were all fairly evenly spaced around two years apart.
Our home was a large, rambling place that seemed big when I was small, but when I went back there as an adult, it didn’t seem so big after all. We lived on a dead end street and at the end of the street was a part agricultural college, part reform school. All boys of course. All schools when I grew up were segregated along gender lines and were for white kids only. Black kids had their own places out in the country but they weren’t required to go to school and no money was spent on educating them. That’s just how it was done back during those dark years of apartheid. Why on earth would a black kid need an education? Well now we all know. What a mess that country is in now that most of the population has no education.
Anyway…
Behind our house there was a field of corn, and after that a row of hen houses. We would sneak through the corn and come out the other side with a plan to steal the eggs. They had set up a guard dog on a long line and he could roam back and forth and protect the chickens. He was a nasty dog and hated us. When he saw any of us he would start to snarl and bark and chase after us.
Sometimes, when we got to the end of the corn field he was asleep and we could tiptoe to the chicken coops, lift up the lid on the nesting box, and stick our hands in looking for eggs. The hens would peck at us but we usually got away with a shirt full of fresh eggs and we would run home and our mum would make us scrambled eggs. It was just great fun, until one day my brother Pete decided that he wanted to befriend the dog. Pete had a magical way with animals and he would always friend them. Problem was he used to take me along with him as the fall guy.
So, with much reluctance I followed him through the corn. We came out right where the dog was fast asleep. Instead of just stealing the eggs and making a run for it, Pete wanted to say hi to the dog and sat on the ground a few feet from the animal. The dog opened one eye and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Some of his most hated foes were right there just sitting on the ground in front of him. He started to snarl. I wanted to make a run for it. I had already peed my pants, just a little. Pete sat still making some kind of clicking noises and slowly scooched forward. The dog could not believe what was happening. He snarled again. Pete was calm and held out his hand. The dog was getting really mad and I was terrified. I wanted to run but Pete kept making the soft clicking sounds and scooched even closer. Suddenly the dog stopped growling. He licked Pete’s hand and then rolled over onto his back. All he wanted was his belly scratched. It was a valuable lesson. Most fierce animals, people included, just want their tummies rubbed. He never gave us trouble again and we kept swiping eggs every day and never got chased.
We used to go down to the river and play what’s called in South Africa, klei lat. Basically what we would do was find a lengthy piece of bamboo. There were a lot of us. We would cake a nob of mud on the end. If you swung the bamboo stick you could throw the nob of mud at someone. It would fly through the air and if it connected, it would really sting. We used to set up two teams and pelt each other with mud for hours. By the time we got home there was mud everywhere. My Mum would hose us down and then chuck us in the bath two at a time. That was all sorts of fun until my brother Rob took a shit in the bath and then it wasn’t that much fun anymore.
We had servants. Constance was our housemaid. Mable was the junior housemaid. We had someone come in once a week and iron and we had a full time garden boy. We called him, boy even though he was a grown man. It’s just how it was in apartheid South Africa. Connie and Mable would clean the house every day, make the beds and cook our meals. Each night I would put my shoes outside my bedroom door and in the morning they would be back there shining clean. Connie would bring us tea in bed each morning.
I remember one morning so clearly. Her boyfriend was a lightweight boxer who went by the name Tap Tap Makatini. I googled him recently and it turns out he was quite a champion in the South African underground boxing scene. We had no idea. He would call us Master and bow and scrape to us when he came to visit Constance. In hindsight it was just so pathetic. This beautiful man, a champion boxer, had to bow and scrape to us. We were just teenage kids, but we were white and he had to get on his knees and bow in order to get by us to see his girlfriend.
As a result we were all huge boxing fans and the big, big event was The Rumble in the Jungle between Mohammad Ali and George Foreman. It was to take place in the middle of the night in a jungle in Kinshasa in Zaire which was in central Africa and is now known as The Congo. Side story. Many years later I was flying home from London to see my family. I took the cheapest flight I could get. My girlfriend Erin was with me (see/listen to my story Coming to America for context). We landed in Kinshasa, I guess to refuel. They were loading everything on board. Literally people had chickens in their carry-on. When we took off the door flew open and we had to return to the airport, which by the way was just a dirt runway. They gave us a new plane and we made it safely to Johannesburg.
Anyway, I digress again. It felt like they were boxing in our backyard. We are all big Ali fans and I remember that morning when Connie brought me my tea. All she whispered was, “Ali won.” It was huge news for us. We hadn’t been able to stay awake to listen to the fight on the radio. The fight started after midnight. We never had TV growing up. No one in the country did. It came after I was grown and gone. Ali won. Now that was news and I was a happy kid for weeks.
I would sit at the end of the yard every day and wait for our newspaper man. His name was Shake and he rode a very old bike delivering newspapers around town. He promised that he would bring me a budgie, a small bird. He also said that he would bring me a cage. I would wait every day for Shake hoping that he would have a budgie for me, but he never did. I wrote a poem about Shake. It’s in my book, A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry. It’s a very sweet memory. I still want a budgie.
One day we were throwing klei lat’s at each other when Pete noticed something. In the crack on the river banks there were legavaans. If you don’t know what a legavaan is, it’s a cross between a massive lizard and a small crocodile. They are about 3 to 4 feet long and have a large mouth with big teeth. Pete wanted one as a pet and he could see a scaly body in the cracks. He made me run home to get an old hessian sack - I think that it was what they used to deliver coal in for us back when we were young. I got the sack and when I got back to the river Pete made me grab at the legavaan. It was really a tricky business. I asked why he didn't grab the damn thing himself and he told me that his arms were too big to fit in the narrow crack and that my arms were skinny and they could fit just fine.
Well okay.
The problem was I could see the body but I had no idea if it was near the head or the tail. By the way we had caught a lot of legavaan’s just for fun, but now he wanted one for a pet. I poked at the lizard and it didn’t move. Then because all the other kids were urging me on, I stuck my hand in and grabbed the thing. I don’t remember where I got it but I would usually have to pull like heck to get it out of the crack, and of course the legavaan had its claws dug in deep and was going nowhere. Sometimes one of the other kids would help and we would yank the very pissed off lizard out of his muddy crack and it would come out squirming trying to bite us. We managed to stuff it into the sack and take it home. It didn’t take Pete more than a few days to befriend it and it quickly became his loyal companion.
Pete also collected a variety of snakes. We loved the snakes but one of them was poisonous. It was called a Red Lipped Herald. It wasn’t going to kill you but if it bit you a few times you would get really sick. We would use rubber bands to shoot lizards down off the ceiling and then chich them into the tank where the snakes were. Within seconds the snakes had it for lunch. On weekends my Mum would take us to the pet store and we would buy small white mice for 10 cents each. We would feed the mice to the snakes. Unlike the lizards who seemed completely unfazed when they were being eaten, the poor mice were terrified and their little whiskers would quiver as it was being eaten.
We loved it.
The snakes often escaped and we would find them nestled between our clothes. Connie and Mable hated snakes and they were terrified when they discovered a snake under a pile of T-shirts. Pete also had a pet crow that was a real bastard. It lived in his room. I hated the crow and the crow hated me and had a long beak to make its point. One day I won a small chicken at the town fair and brought it home. It ran free in the garden and grew into a large chicken who thought that she owned the place.
During the summer holidays we would either go to the mountains to go hiking, the game parks to see the wild animals, or the beach. We had a beach cottage on the coast just north of Durban in a place called Salt Rock. If the timing was right we would be there during the sardine run. That was when tens of thousands of sardines swam up the coast being chased by larger game fish. The newspapers and radio would report where they were and when they got to our cottage we would go to the beach with buckets. There were literally thousands of sardines in the water and all we had to do was stick a bucket in and we would have a bucket full of fish. My dad would make an open fire on the beach and gut the sardines and chuck them on the first. He would have already collected mussels from the rocks and they would go on first and we would eat like kings.
The only meal I remember being better than the sardines and mussels was the one time my uncle came to visit. He brought along a chicken and my Mum cooked it long and slow in a pot with herbs. It was really a feast and I only found out later that it was our pet chicken that I had won at the town fair.
There are so many more stories about growing up but one day my Mum put me in the car and we took off for town. She bought me a school uniform and a satchell and some books and said, “you are a big boy now. You start school tomorrow.”
These stories and more are in my memoir To Bricks and a Tickey High. The poem Shake is in my book of poetry. I hope that you will buy either or both books and as always, thanks for listening.
You can read about my experiences as a kid growing up in South Africa in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. It's a good read and I hope that you will consider buying the book.
I hope that you enjoyed this story and as always, thanks for listening.
Listen to Under African Skies - Part 1 as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
Listen to Brian read his poem Shake here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
You can download A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
MR GILES - A STORYCAST INTERRUPTION
This is another StoryCast interruption about my one of my parent's best friends.
When I was a kid my parents had two families as great friends. The Adie’s and the Giles’s. They would be over at our house many times for dinner parties and on Sunday’s, when the sailing season was closed because of snow in the mountains, they would come for a Sunday braai. A braai, by the way, is a BBQ, but only better. Well that’s my opinion anyway. Funnily enough some dude from Kentucky in the US opened up a restaurant in South Africa and called it Kentucky Fried Chicken. Instead of a braai, we would sometimes have KFC. I had never eaten coleslaw before. It was as if magic had come to darkest Africa.
Anyway, I digress. Mrs Giles was my Mum’s best friend. My Mum died over 50 years ago - I will come to that story - so I never really knew her, but Mrs Giles filled me in when I was an adult. She once told me that my Mum was the kindest, sweetest person that she had ever met. I will take that thought with me to my grave. Or the furnace, which is my preferred choicE.
Funny side story. You may have noticed that I refer to my parents' friends by their last names. We would NEVER call them by their first names. It was Mr and Mrs Giles and Mr and Mrs Adie. I bring this up now because Roger Giles, the last of the lot, died recently and with his death went my childhood. I guess from now on we are the old folks now.
I visited Mr and Mrs Giles when I was in my 50’s. I simply could not call them Roger and Shirley. They insisted on it, but my tongue could not make it happen.
There are two stories that I remember. My Dad visited the US in 1963 and bought me a Davy Crockett hat and a Buffalo Bill tent. Our dog ate the hat, but when we went camping, with the Adie’s and Giles’s, I took my tent. It was pitched away from the rest of the tents and at night, especially if there was a moon, the shadows of the trees would dance on the tent and scare the crap out of me. I would usually give it up and climb into my parents tent. Then one day Mr Giles came to me with a proposition. He would pay me 50 cents if I slept in my tent all night. It was enough money. I slept in my tent all night. It was only many years later that I realized that me creeping into my parents tent was disrupting their sex life.. Oh well, as far as I knew my parents had never had sex…:)
Many years later I was in Colorado. My daughter Tory lives there. I made a pilgrimage to Buffalo Bill’s grave. It was a somber place, for me at least. The old guy was long dead and I had never met him, but he was a part of my memories and for that I will forever be grateful.
Second story was this. Between Christmas and New Year our three families would camp together at Midmar Dam, the place where I learned how to sail. It was so much fun. Our parents got pissed by noon and we were allowed to run free. One evening my Dad, Mr Giles and Mr Adie were braaing. They had an old 44 gallon drum cut in half and had filled it with firewood earlier in the day. By evening there was just a bed of very hot coals. Then came the meat. I remember that for some reason they had taken the steel grate off the fire and placed it on the ground. They must have been stoking the fire. I walked up innocently enough to see if I could get some scraps of meat to chew on. I was barefoot and hadn’t noticed the red hot grate on the grass. Dad, Mr Giles and Mr Adie were well into their 15th Castle Lager and never noticed me. I stepped right onto the grate. For years I had the criss-cross marks as a scar on my feet. I really don’t remember, but I am sure that they just went on cracking open some beers telling my mum that I was her problem to deal with
I tell this now because as I said Mr Giles, okay I will call him Roger has now left for the Big Garden in the Sky. I never thought that I would be one of the old folks but I guess that from now on, I am one of the old folks. That aside, please call me Brian, not Mr Hancock. Mr Hancock was my Dad. I hope that you enjoyed thus story and thanks as always for reading.
Listen to Mr Giles as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
UNDER AFRICAN SKIES - PART 2
This story is also called Under African Skies. It's part 2 about growing up as a kid in South Africa.
It seems as if these days the teenage years are filled with angst. Mine were not. Not even close. I had an awesome time and loved every second of it. I had a steady girlfriend which helped - more on that in a bit - but mostly we never knew what stress was. All we thought was to have fun and we did have a huge amount of fun.
My grandmother worked for the director of the annual agricultural show, which in my hometown was known as The Royal Show and this meant that she could get us unlimited free passes. I used to go every day to watch the cattle being judged, the pigs and chickens too and of course the horse jumping. At night they would have an act and often they were two folk singers whose names were Des and Dawn Lindburg. They were just great and I really wanted to run away and join a traveling show. Dawn went by her stage name, Dawn Silver and I thought that was just magic. Can you imagine how awesome it would be if your last name was Silver?
When we got older we would hang around the beer tent which was always the busiest place in the show. As soon as it got dark we would lay on the ground behind the tent and stick our hands under the tent flap and look for any beer bottle that might have something left in it. We would down the dregs and it was great fun even though we usually ended up getting sick. One night I grabbed a bottle that seemed to be about half full and without looking I downed it. Someone had been using the beer bottle as an ashtray and I swallowed a few damp cigarette butts.
The Royal Show was where I found my first girlfriend. Her name was Liz. My best friend was a guy by the name of Mart Krige. He had a blind date and his date was bringing a friend and Mart asked if I could go with him, which I did because that’s what best friends do. We got to the showgrounds and it turned out that Mart’s date was a bit of a dog. Her friend, however, was really pretty and she asked to come over to her house that evening to meet her parents. I was crapping myself. I think I must have been 13 or maybe just turned 14. Liz was quite tall and I was not so Mart loaned me some boots that had heels. I showed up at Liz’s house and she came to the door and invited me in. I followed her across the living room to where I guessed her parents would be waiting to meet me. I was halfway across the white carpet when I looked down at my feet. They were covered in mud and there was a track that led from the bottom of my feet back to the front door. I was totally humiliated and it was made worse by the fact that everyone would know that I had been wearing boots with heels. Liz and I lasted until I left South Africa when I was 20. It was a really sweet love and I still think of her often more than 50 years later.
Somehow I managed to get into a lot of trouble at school. I committed various offenses but one of the worst was being part of a few that called a strike among the students to protest the length of our hair. The school had very strict rules about how long our hair could be. Anyway, the strike started out quite well and there was a big crowd, but not long after the school bell rang, one of the teachers told everyone that if they returned immediately to class that there would not be any trouble. She also more than hinted that those who didn’t return to class would be in serious trouble. Everyone capitulated.
I was part of the organizers and could not capitulate. Instead a few of us were rounded up and taken to the principal's office. We all got sentenced to four whips with the cane except my friend Lindsay Bassett. As the ringleader Lindsay got sentenced to six. The worst part of the punishment was that we had to report the following morning so I spent the whole night awake dreading what was going to happen. Sure enough at 8-o-clock the next morning we all took the long walk down the corridor to the principal’s office.
He took Basset in first and we could hear the whip coming down and smacking Lindsay on his backside. There was some talk and then another and then another until he had received all six. They call it getting “six-of-the-best.”
I was next. I was crapping myself. I had been caned a few times before but getting four was a lot. The headmaster, in all his cruelty, and yes as much as I think it’s funny now I don’t see how any grown man could in fair conscience take a stick and whip a small boy and think that it’s right. It’s not right under any circumstances, but times were different back then.
The headmaster made me pick my cane. He had a case hung on the wall with a variety of bamboo sticks and he left it up to me to choose what stick I wanted him to hit me with. Again, in my opinion now as a grown adult with children of my own, that headmaster, Mr Hector Commons, should have been dragged out of his office in handcuffs for child abuse. It wasn’t right, no matter what tradition or his church said.
Anyway… I chose the thin stick. As soon as I took it I remembered that someone had told me that was the worst one because the stick hits your backside and then swung around and the tip catches you at the top of your leg where there was no protection from your underpants.
He had me bend over and touch my toes and then said, “remember to say thank you after each one. This is for your benefit, not mine.” So I bent over. He told me that I needed to bend over even more and then he hit me. I heard the whip as it came down and felt the sting and then I felt the tip hit me on the side of the leg and it hurt like hell. I was completely stunned and of course forgot to thank him so I waited there like an idiot. I was not allowed to rub my arse and the headmaster knew it and that it was all part of the punishment. I remembered to thank him and then felt the second blow and then the third and then a fourth. He had me stand there for what felt like an eternity while he called his wife on the phone to make lunch plans knowing full well that I was suffering by not being able to rub my backside. Eventually he dismissed me and I found Lindsay in the bathroom with his pants down and his ass in a basin of cold water. I did the same. There was blood dripping from the top of my leg where the stick had all hit in the same spot and there was a huge welt. It took around a month for the bruising to go away. Meanwhile we wore the scars like a badge of honor. Everyone wanted to see them and we would always be dropping our pants so that someone could take a look.
One fun thing that we did in High School was to earn the Victoria Cross. The Victoria Cross is the highest award for bravery on a battlefield, like the Purple Heart in the US. In order to get the VC we had to run naked from our school, a mile or so along a fairly busy road, to the all-girls school at the other end of the road, climb up the diving board, dive into the water and swim 25 meters across and then run back to our school. Do I mention that we had to be naked, which is bad enough, but when you are in your puberty it’s even worse, but still what was a Victoria Cross worth if there was no risk involved?
I was one of the first group of kids to go for it. We took our clothes off behind the changing room and crept to the gates that would lead out onto the main road. Then we started running. Every time we saw a car coming we would all try and hide behind some scrawny bush hoping that we wouldn’t be seen.
Before we started the run we had sent off two of our friends to go to the girls school to make sure that we did the jump and the swim so when we got there and climbed under a fence we suddenly saw two dark shadows. We had already forgotten about the two that had been dispatched earlier. We were sure that we were busted until we remembered that they were friendly.
We all climbed onto the diving board. Luckily there was no moon. What we didn’t know was that the girls had already been told that we were coming. It was a boarding school so there were hundreds of girls hiding just out of sight, and as soon as we were on top of the diving board the flood lights came on. We jumped and swam across the pool. I’m not a very good swimmer and was left behind so once I got to the other side my mates had already climbed out and run for the shadows. I was left there all alone with almost no dick to be seen. Between the nerves and the cold there was not much to see. I wanted to explain that on a warm day with a breeze from behind there was a lot more there, but I never had the time.
We ran back to our school and earned our Victoria Cross. There were many other incidents like the time I got into a full-on fist fight with my friend Barry Sefton or the time someone sawed through the legs of the headmaster's chair and he went over backwards just as morning assembly started.
Here's a funny story for you. When I was a kid I had my birthday on January 25. Those were the days when birthdays were a big deal. When I turned 16 I had to apply for some kind of identity document and it needed my birth certificate. My Dad was digging through all my papers and I remember to this day his words. And remember that my father never once swore. He said, "Oh shit. We have been having your birthday on the wrong day. You were born on January 24. These days I make it a two day celebration.
My relationship with Liz was as sweet and as perfect as you could imagine a first love between two kids who really had no clue what the world had to offer. We used to make out on her bed and she had posters of Donny Osmond and David Cassidy on her wall and they were both witnesses to what went on.
So another funny story. When I was a kid there was only one kid that was overweight. We were all scrawny kids - not much more than skin and bones. Anyway, his name was Julian and we teased him relentlessly. There was one time when he sat on my chest and pulled my ears so hard that both of them ripped. I think that his Dad got transferred and they left town. I left to go sailing and when I returned a year later I though that I could pick up my romance with Liz. Turned out that Julian had come back to town. He was tall, dark and handsome and had changed his name to Rob and yup, you guessed it, he was screwing my girlfriend. Last I heard they were still married and had a few children. It was a perfect ending, and as I said I still think of Liz and our time together often. You never do forget your first love.
Eventually I graduated High School. We had all received a letter from the government telling us where we had to report to. We had all been drafted. We would have to serve two years in the military. Back then South Africa was at war with the Angolans on our northwest border, and with Mozambique on our northeast border. We were going to be pawns in a stupid game that ended up taking the lives of many of my friends. That story is coming up next. Meanwhile most of these stories are recounted in more detail in my first Memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. I hope that you will buy and read the book, and as always, thank you for listening.
You can read about my experiences as a kid growing up in South Africa in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. It's a good read and I hope that you will consider buying the book.
Listen to Under African Skies - Part 2 as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
PETE
This is one of my favorite stories. It's about my brother Pete.
You have probably gathered by now that my brother Pete was a big influence in my life. To this day he remains an influence. His soft voice and always calm demeanor are gifts that he has been given, and he knows how to use them. There was, however, a time when we were just kids and naughty one’s at that, so let me tell you the story of Pete.
Other than his ability to tame and care for all kinds of animals, snakes, legavaans, a cantankerous crow and a few scruffy dogs, Pete had a wild side. One thing that he loved to do was steal my mother’s car when she was asleep. My Mum’s story will be told, but for now let’s just say that she drank a bit and would pass out, especially when my Dad was away on business.
This was a perfect time to steal her car.
Mum was forgetful and always lost her car keys so my Dad had a button installed so all that she had to do was press the button and the car would start. Her car was an old Opel and it was a manual drive. Pete would push it down the driveway, let the car run down the hill and start the car when he was far enough away from the house.
Here is where I came in. Quite often, in fact more often than not, the car would go off the tar driveway and onto the grass verge and get stuck. Pete would wake me and make me help him push the car, but he always rewarded me by letting me come driving with him. Our neighborhood was quiet and we would drive around, Pete barely able to see over the steering wheel. He must have been 14 or maybe 15. The driving age in South Africa was 18, incidentally the same age as you could legally drink. Smart politicians huh?
We took the car most nights and never got caught. Then one time Pete made the mistake of stealing my Dad’s car. Dad was home and asleep. He drove a big old Valiant. I’m guessing that it was made out of steel. Pete managed to get it halfway down the drive and then it went onto the grass. He woke me up to help him, but the two of us could not move the car, so we woke my brother Toph who didn’t know about the car stealing that had been going on. He was half asleep but knew what to do and the three of us got the car back on the tar and out the gate. Then we took off for a drive.
Now, the Valiant didn’t have bucket seats. The front seat a bench and is was covered in plastic, I guess to preserve the upholstery of the car. Pete, Toph and I were cruising around the neighborhood and were heading back to the house when Pete decided that he wanted to see how fast the car could go.
At the time they were building a ring-road around our town. It was a big job and still under construction. The entrance to the on-ramp was closed by a few 40-gallon drums. Pete told me to get out of the car and move the drums. I was probably nine at the time, maybe 10. I knew that it was a really bad idea, but I did what I was told. Pete ordered and I followed. I moved the drums and got back into the car. We drove down the on-ramp and onto the highway. The road was recently tarred and there were still construction vehicles parked on the side of the road. We drove kind of slowly at first . Now picture this. Pete could barely see over the dashboard. Toph couldn’t see over the dashboard and I definitely couldn’t see anything. Because it was usually a warm summer evening we would sweat and then start to slip on the plastic seat cover. We thought that it was funny when we went around a corner and we all slid into each other stacking up like a bunch of pancakes against the door.
We drove for about a mile then turned around and that was when Pete gunned it. The speedometer on the Valiant was a red line that snaked out showing the numbers of how fast we were going. I was watching the red snake and it was starting to hit some high numbers. I remember this today like it was yesterday. Pete said, “shit, we’re going 90. It doesn’t feel that fast.” That was 90 miles an hour, not 90 kilometers an hour. South Africa had not yet changed to the metric system.
The Valiant was gliding along and Pete had his foot flat on the accelerator. We didn't die that night. There must have been some guardian angels looking over us. We returned Dad’s car. He never found out about it until many years later. When my Dad was older and we had all survived into adulthood, he loved to hear the stories. He said that he had no idea that we had taken his car. He knew about one incident when my grandmother, his mother came for a visit. She would come every afternoon to have tea with my Mum. She would pull up in her Morris Minor and as soon as she went into the house, we would jump in the car and take off. This was more fun because it was in the middle of the day and there were other cars on the road.
One day we stole granny’s car and when we got back she was standing there by the gate, arms folded, fuming. She had only come by to drop something off for my Mum and not have tea, and when she came out her car was gone. Ten minutes later, me, Pete and Toph pulled up. Dad knew about that incident.
We used to go to the mountains for some of our holidays. The Drakensberg Mountains are just stunningly beautiful and are a wonderful place to hike. We were let free to go wherever we wanted to. There were paths and we had some old crude maps but generally we had an idea of where we were and how to get back to the camp in the evening.
One day Pete spotted a nest and wanted to take a closer look. It was just the two of us. We found a path that would take us above the nest where we could look in, so we crept along the path which suddenly got narrow and suddenly there was a sheer drop of around 300 feet. We had both been so intent on trying to see what was in the nest that we didn’t notice that we were in deep trouble. My legs turned to jelly. I was so scared and couldn’t move. Pete had been leading and I was behind. In order to get back I had to lead but there was no way. Finally Pete cajoled and threatened me and inch by inch we made it back to a safer part of the trail. We were so filled with adrenalin I can still remember the high.
It was all good fun until one day we decided to go straight up. From the bottom of the cliff it didn’t look that high. There was no reason to climb it except that it was there, so we started to climb. No ropes or anything. I didn’t get far. I clearly remembered the day before when we were stuck on the ledge so I went down and sat at the base of the cliff watching Pete climb. He was almost at the top but couldn’t make it. He yelled at me to try and get above him so that I could guide him. I remembered a path back along the track that looked like it might lead to some place above where Pete was, and indeed it did. I found myself on a ledge and called for Pete and it turned out that he was just below me.
Now here is where the stupidity came in. Pete asked me if there was any kind of ledge that he could hold onto and I told him that about six inches above where he was, that there was a small ledge, probably around two inches wide. I told Pete about the ledge and without hesitating, he said, “I’m going to jump for it,” and he did. He had been standing on a small ledge, but he managed to grab onto the ledge just below where I was, but the problem was he couldn’t pull himself up and he couldn’t go back down to the ledge where he had just been standing. Usually you can swing your legs under and use them to pull yourself up, but he was plastered against the rock face.
I could see the tips of his fingers starting to turn white. Pete knew that he was in trouble and yelled at me to take my shirt off so that he could grab onto it and I could pull him up. I took my shirt off, and when I looked back down Pete was gone. I heard him hit the ground and screamed. To this day I wonder what would have happened if he had grabbed my shirt. For sure, I would have gone over with him.
I found Pete at the base of the cliff. He couldn’t move. He told me to run and get our Dad. I ran the mile or so back to the camp and found my father sipping a whiskey in his easy chair. He managed to get the camp ranger and some help and a stretcher and we made our way back to the cliff. It was dark by the time that we found him. Pete had not moved, He told our dad that he thought that his back was broken, and it was.
His spine had snapped.
Here is where the real damage was done. These days there would have been a helicopter and trained medivac team that would come with a vacuum stretcher and immobilize him. Instead they did that, you know, “you get his arms and I will get his feet and we will carry him onto the stretcher” thing. Of course his back bent even more and that’s where I think that the real damage was done.
Pete spent over a year in hospital At first he was paralyzed from the waist down, but with some multiple surgeries they found that some of the nerves to his right leg were only pinched. They were able to release the nerves and over a few months they healed so that he could use the thigh muscle on his right leg. Below the knee it was kaput and his whole left leg was paralyzed.
For a year he lived in a wheelchair and walked with calipers strapped to both legs and spent endless hours in physical therapy. He was finally able to ditch the calipers and walk with crutches and to this day, 57 years later, he is still only able to get around on crutches. Pete was just shy of his 16th birthday when he fell. I was 10.
Many years later, in fact the day that my Dad was being cremated Pete, my sister Sue, Toph and my younger brother Rob decided to go for a walk in the mountains. It was just too hard to think about Dad being cremated. We had never returned to that place in the Drakensberg, but we, for whatever reason, decided that we wanted to go back there. We were walking along a path not really sure where we were going, all of us in a bit of a daze when I said, “I know where we are.” I said, “just around this next corner is the cliff.” And sure enough there it was. It was a bit overgrown and was only about 30 feet high. The base of the cliff was on a slope and I have no idea if that made the fall worse or not. We closed the loop on that chapter; I will never go back there again.
Pete in his own way thinks that the fall was a blessing. He had planned to go into the bush after high school, but being trapped in a wheelchair he was stuck with his only option being to go to University, and he graduated six years later with a Masters Degree in Wildlife Management.
There are a ton of post accident stories worth telling. Let’s just start with the one night that we were sitting around a fire when Pete said, “does anyone smell burning?” What had happened was that an ember from the fire had landed on Pete’s left leg. Because he had no feeling he didn’t notice the ember cooking his leg, What he smelled was his flesh burning. Pete thought that it was funny even though his jeans were ruined.
Pete was paralyzed from the waist down, well most of it, but he could still use his hands so had got a scooter that he could use to get around. One day he was driving down a busy road. I was on the back when I noticed that his leg had fallen off the scooter deck and was dragging on the ground. Of course Pete couldn’t feel it. I gestured to him about his leg and when he turned around he didn’t notice a car pull in front of us. We T-boned it. Pete went into the side pretty hard. I went over the top. The person driving the car hit the gas and never stopped.
As part of his thesis to get his Masters Degree Pete had to prove that a certain area of a game park in the northeastern part of South Africa was getting over-grazed by hippopotamus, and not the deer, or buck as we call them in South Africa. When you fence in an area, no matter how big the space is, you disrupt the ecosystem and for years they had been culling deer to keep the numbers down in an effort to stop the overgrazing. Pete was convinced that it was the hippopotamus's that were causing the trouble.
Hippo’s are very territorial grazers. Pete’s theory was proven right. The hippos were the problem, but not all hippo’s. Just the ones that were grazing in the area that had been overgrazed. So he came up with a plan. He and I would camp out either side of the path that the hippos used when they came out of the lakes at night to go and graze on the floodplain. Turned out that we went to sleep and never woke up. In the morning we figured that more than a dozen hippo’s had walked between us to go out grazing for the night, and then walked back, and we never woke up.
The next night we took Pete’s dog with us and sure enough she woke us up so we followed the hippos for a few hours until we, or Pete rather, decided which hippo was causing the overgrazing problem. We shot it with a paint gun and then went to bed. The next morning we went down to the lake, the vlei as it’s called in South Africa, and we saw the one hippo with blue paint on its back so Pete had his guides go out in a canoe and shoot it. The hippo sank like a stone, but after an hour or so it popped back up to the surface like a cork. I guess that the gastric gasses had kicked in. The guides tied a rope around its ankle and the other end to a Land Rover, and pulled the hippo ashore. While they were doing that some of the other guides were making a fire. As soon as the hippo was on dry land they cut it open and went for the heart. In no time it was on the fire cooking. I ate some and it was good. What I didn’t do was dip it into the blood that was gushing out of the hippo. The guides loved it and we feasted on all the organs. Of course the hippo was cut up and the meat distributed among the guides and Pete and I had hippo steaks for a long time. The Afrikaans word for hippo is seekoie, which translates to sea cow. Yes, the meat tasted like a nice big lean steak.
The overgrazing problem was solved and for the first time in Africa culling hippo's became a thing.
One time I was visiting Pete in Botswana. He had married Daisy, a Tetswana woman. She already had three children from a previous marriage so Pete had an instant family. I was in Africa with my daughter Tory and we were on an extended trip through Botswana to Zimbabwe. One night we camped out by a lake. It was in an area called Moremi which was in the Okavango Delta. Pete and Daisy were in one tent, me and Tory in another, and my nephew Justin and his friend Mikey in their own tent. Quick side story. Many years later Mikey and his friends were out on a hunting trip when a gun went off and hit him. He has been in a wheelchair since.
But I digress. Tory woke me sometime in the night. The tent flap was wide open and there, less than 10 feet from us, a herd of elephants walked right through our camp. It was incredible how quiet they were. It was a totally magical experience and even though Tory was just seven at the time she remembers it well. As a teenager she used to write essays that said they were, “Based on my travels in Africa with my Dad.” Her teachers never believed her. That’s when you know you have done something good as a parent.
So the next morning we told Pete about it and he said that he also had a story. About a month earlier he and Daisy had camped in the same spot. Pete woke up in the early morning and felt a warm body up against him and thought that it was Daisy, until he realized that Daisy was on the other side of him. Then he saw a big tongue licking the dew off the tent and realized that his bed companion was a lion. He woke Daisy and they lay there completely still until the sun came up and it got warm and the pride left. It looked like there had been around a half dozen lions right next to their tent. I was quite happy that he hadn’t told me that story before we went to bed. I had heard lions roaring in the night and their sound made the hairs on the back of my neck stand straight up.
I once visited Pete with some of my friends who I was sailing around the world with. I was there with my wife at the time Erin. We had seen four of the Big Five, as they call it in Africa. We had seen lion, leopard, elephant and Cape buffalo, but we hadn’t seen any black rhino. Now these are dangerous animals. Their eyesight is bad and they generally have a bad attitude. Unlike most wild animals when they sense humans are near they generally run away. Not the black rhino. They come over and investigate and if they don’t like what they see, they basically beat the shit out of it.
We were on foot when we saw two black rhinos across a small, empty plain. We wanted to get closer. We were downwind so Pete figured that it was safe to go closer and we were halfway across the plain, about 50 or 60 yards from the rhino, when Pete picked up some soft sand and let it run through his fingers. The wind had changed direction and was blowing directly towards the rhino. We could see that the rhino had picked up our scent. We were suddenly in a bit of trouble. There is an old saying that bushmen have that goes, “when you see a black rhino, you first look for a tree to climb, then you look at the rhino.” The only tree near us was an acacia tree and they have long and very sharp thorns. Pete ordered everyone up the tree. My friends were incredulous. There was no way they were going to climb the tree. That was until one of the rhinos started to move toward us. That was when they started climbing.
It was just Pete and me left.
The rhino was still coming toward us. Pete took one of his crutches and threw it to distract the rhino who couldn’t see us but was sure that there was something to investigate. It came closer. Pete threw his other crutch and the rhino looked in that direction and then back toward where we were standing. Pete told me to run for it and I ran. The rhino charged. Pete, obviously, couldn’t go anywhere so he just stood. The rhino came to about six feet from him, still not able to see anything. He snorted, pawed the ground and ran away. I picked up the crutches. The others climbed down the tree all covered in blood. It had taken them 10 seconds to get up the tree. It took them an hour to get down.
One last story. I wasn’t there for this one. My Dad, brother Rob and Pete were in the bush and a similar thing happened. They didn’t see the rhino at first but they did see a baby rhino and Pete knew that where there was a baby rhino, there would be a mother rhino. Sure enough the rhino came for them. They ran and climbed the tree, Pete as well. My Dad and Rob swear that Pete’s crutches were 20 feet from the tree. Somehow he had run, paralysed leg and all.
There are many more stories that I can tell you about Pete and the trouble that we got into. In my book of short stories, More Twisted Tales there is a fictionalised story about the lion sleeping up against the tent. It’s called Good Women and Priests. For more about Pete there is a chapter in my book Two Bricks and a Tickey High. The chapter is of course, named Pete.
Pete and Daisy still live in the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Pete is the leading expert in the Birds of Botswana and has written many books on the subject. All three of their kids are in the safari business. The eldest Thuto, had won numerous awards as the best game guide in Southern Africa.
Pete is back in a wheelchair and stays close to home as his health has not been that great recently. I so want to go back and visit him and spend some time in a place where I am most comfortable; the African bush.
I hope that you enjoyed this story and as always, thanks for listening.
You can read about my experiences as a kid growing up in South Africa in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. It's a good read and I hope that you will consider buying the book.
Listen to Pete as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
GETTING WHIPPED - A RANT
This story is a rant about getting caned at school.
In my story, Under African Skies, I tell a story about getting caned when I was at school. It’s a funny story, well sort of. It was all just part of growing up in a public school in South Africa. Discipline was meted out the same way as it was done in England. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” was how things were.
I’m now an adult, a grown man with children of my own and two sweet grandsons. I have seen some things in life, but I cannot, in any way, get my head around the fact that adults thought that it was okay to take a stick and beat a child. In no universe is that EVER okay.
Our “beloved” Vice Principal died a few years ago. The school was in mourning. He was such a great man. He coached the rugby team and the cricket team and he was with the school for, I dunno, 50 years or so. I don’t think that he was a great man. He took a stick and regularly beat children. Sometimes until they bled. In no universe is that EVER okay.
They can try and pass it off as tradition. Well okay. They can try and claim that it was justified in the eyes of the lord. Churches have always provided a place for bad behaviour to hide behind. Well okay, but I’m here to tell you that it’s not okay to beat a defenseless child, and to play tortuous games like making sure that they thank you after each whipping and making them stand there unable to rub their backsides while you call your wife and make lunch plans. If you did that you were a sick man and should have sought help.
No, I’m sorry, In no universe is beating a child EVER okay. So, as much as I did enjoy my school years, and as much as I think that I went to some of the best schools in the world, if those people who beat me were still alive today I would show up on their doorstep and demand to know what they were thinking, or more to the point, weren’t thinking. I would suggest that they look inside their heads and ask themselves how they ever figured that it was just a fine thing to do to a defenseless child. Despite it being a tradition, whipping children was not the right thing to do. At some point in their adult lives that should have occurred to them.
I am happy to say that they no longer whip kids at my old school and as far as I can tell the students there have grown up to be awesome people, without the brutality of a whip for discipline.
Listen to Getting Whipped - A rant as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
GLEN - A VERY PERSONAL STORY
This is a particularly hard story to write and even harder to read.
I wrote this many years ago and then stashed it away on some hard drive. I never showed it to anyone. I never told a soul about this incident. As we get older personal matters seem to matter less, to me anyway, however these stories are my stories and all the bits and pieces that have made up my life so far so I decided to include it here. If you don’t want to read it I don’t blame you so fair warning. Skip to the next one if rape is a word that bothers you. Here’s the story.
Our neighborhood was flat and featureless, the homes mostly single level brick with tin roofs. When we were small the houses had low hedges around them but slowly, as we grew, so did the fences. The hedges were replaced with low walls and the low walls were replaced with higher walls. They were there to keep the “bad” people out, but sometimes the bad people were already inside the walls. They were our friends, neighbors; brothers of neighbors.
Across the street lived a family of boys. They were our best friends. Each kid matching the ages of myself and my brothers. We did what most boys did in South Africa in the 60s. We played in the dirt and we came home late each afternoon filthy and tired. We played war games and elaborate teenage hide and seek in the wooded area alongside the horse track. One day, in a moment of exuberance, I launched myself off the edge of a steep embankment and tumbled to the bottom in a heap of dirt and blood. I had grazed just about everything on the way down and lay sobbing until I was found by Glen, the oldest of our neighbors sons.
“Jeeze man you are a mess,” he said, not unkindly. “You are going to have to go home and get cleaned up.” He reached for my hand and pulled me to me feet. “Come on,” he said. “I will take you home.”
I was just 11 at the time. Glen was 16, a tall, gangly kid who was starting to deal with a persistent case of acne. He was a kind kid, always nice to me and I was happy for his help. I hobbled alongside him as we picked our way through the woods and finally up the hill toward our home.
“You had better come to our place and clean up,” Glen said. “You don’t want your Mom to see you like that.” I nodded, hurting, thinking that it would be much better if my Mom helped me but Glen was older, and older kids had to be respected. I sniffed and followed him through the front door of their modest home into the bathroom.
“You had better take your clothes off,” Glen said, and I nodded. “I will run you a bath.” I heard the water running into the tub in the next room. Ripping my clothes off was never an issue with me. All small South African kids ran around naked but even at that young age I could sense something different in the way Glen spoke. “Jus’ take your clothes off,” he said. “I will help you get clean and then we can put some bandages on those cuts.”
I stripped slowly, pulling my clothes over my head making sure that the soft fabric did not touch the open wounds. At 11, I was a skinny bag of bones, tanned dark brown from the hot African sun with the bits that did not see the sun a stark white against the rest of my body. I gingerly lowered myself into the steaming water feeling my grazed flesh tingle as the water touched the open wounds. Glen was helping me into the bath and I remember his breathing getting short and shallow. When he spoke his voice was husky.
“I am gonna wash you,” he said. “You need me to clean those grazes.”
For the next hour I soaked in the water. Glen helped me get the dirt out of the cuts and once dry, he bandaged each of them. It was a kind gesture on his part and my mother thanked him profusely when he delivered me back home across the street later that afternoon.
The Duncan Family were from Rhodesia, originally. They had moved south as militant blacks started to make whites feel uneasy and sensing a shifting tide the parents piled their four boys into the car, packed it to the roof with their belongings, and drove into South Africa, as immigrants. There was a trick these new settlers used as they drove to their new lives. They stuffed tennis balls between the old fashioned spring shock absorbers to cushion the weight of a lifetime of stuff packed high on the roof racks of their 60s Chevys and Valiants.
The Duncans bought the house diagonally across from ours. I was friends with Kevin, the third son, who was my age. A few years later he committed suicide; I never found out why but then I guess those of us left behind never know why. His older brother Sean was the only person I knew that conscientiously objected to military service and the last I saw of him he was being arrested by the military police. The youngest, Craig, had severe mental issues. Glen was the oldest, a big Neil Diamond fan as I remember.
Kevin and I were firm friends and we often slept at each others homes. One night, about a month after I had scraped myself in the bush, I was fast asleep in the spare bed in Kevin’s room. I have always been a light sleeper and I heard a scuffling by the door and opened one eye. Glen was standing in the doorway, backlit by the lamp in the hallway. I could see his outline and his skinny legs through the flimsy fabric of his pajamas. Mostly though I remember his breathing. There was an uneven rasping rumbling from some part deep inside of him. I closed my eye and pretended that I was asleep, but even with both eyes tightly shut I could sense that he was still there and I knew that he was looking at me.
“Glen,” I whispered. “What do you want, hey?” Kevin stirred but his low snoring was a sure sign that he was fast asleep. Glen had moved out of the doorway and pulled the door closed behind him. It was pitch dark in the room and I could not see him, but I could hear the rasping in his throat. “Glen for fuck’s sake what are you doing?” I said. “You are making me scared. I felt a light touch on my foot, a caress, followed by a low voice.
“Don’t worry, it’s just me,” he said. “I am coming to see if you are OK. I thought that you were crying.”
“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “I was not crying,” but as I said it I was not sure if I had been crying or dreaming or just asleep. I felt the bed sag to the side as Glen sat down and shifted my legs to make room.
“You were crying,” he said. “I heard you from my room.” Kevin grunted in his sleep and I rubbed my eyes. They were dry.
“It’s OK man,” he said. “I often cry at night.”
“I was not crying,” I whispered as loud as I dared. “I was asleep.” I felt a gentle hand on my leg and caught my breath. I was only a small boy but I still remember the shock of electricity that shot through me as his hand touched me. There was something incredibly exciting about the warmth of his flesh against mine. We sat like that for a long while, neither of us saying anything. All my senses were focused on the hand on my leg but all I could feel was a wet sweat as Glen sat beside me in silence. Then his hand started to move.
At first he was just rubbing my thigh. Gently. Slowly. There was nothing alarming in his manner except for the rasping in his breath. “Hey just roll onto your tummy,” he said in a low voice. “I want to rub your back so that you can go back to sleep.” I liked the sound of his voice and I liked the feel of his hand on my leg and it was warm and dark and late and I knew that his parents were asleep and Kevin’s low snoring was sort of comforting. So I rolled over, my face against the wall. I felt his hand slip up my thigh and his fingers caught on my underpants. He pulled back, but just as quickly slipped his fingers back under the hem of my undies and gently caressed the crease of my backside. I have to admit I liked the feeling and attention I was getting, but I knew that this was dangerous territory. Glen was almost an adult; I was a naive, under developed kid pinned up against the wall in a dark room.
We lay like that for a long while, the fingers moving rhythmically back and forth. I tried to fall asleep but every nerve in my body was on fire. Then slowly I felt the weight of his body on mine as he lowered himself over me. Just before he sank onto me he pulled the sheet back so that his skin was on mine and in an instant I knew that he was naked. Somewhere between the door and the bed he had taken his clothes off. My heart was racing but at the same time my body was stirring. I could feel the heat of him and his rasping breath was against my neck. I felt a dribble of spit land on my back and the wetness of it jolted my sense. I arched my back trying to push him off but he was strong and his hand reached out around my face covering my mouth and pulling my head back. For the first time I knew that things were going badly wrong but I had painted myself into a corner and was helpless to do anything about it.
Glen had one hand over my mouth, the other pinning my free hand against the wall. He was much bigger than me and while I tried to squirm he held me tight. “Don’t fight,” he said soothingly. “This is going to be fun.” I remember his words today as if he had just spoke them yesterday. “This is going to be fun.”
As I lay pinned up against the wall I felt Glen start to move, back and forth, rhythmically. I had no idea what he was doing but I could sense that it was much better to lay still than to fight. So I lay still. Glen was grunting, his movements getting more and more erratic and his breathing more and more intense until he suddenly rolled off me gasping for breath. He lay beside me while his body jerked back and forth until it slowly subsided and his breathing slowed to normal.
“Don’t you tell and fucking soul about this,” he whispered in my ear and seconds later I heard the door open. There was a momentarily flash of brightness from the light in the hallway and then the room was pitch dark again. I heard Kevin snoring gently and rolled over. My pajamas touched something wet and it startled me.
Well there you go. That's it. It's never good to have secrets so I am glad that I got that off my chest. I hope that you enjoyed, well enjoyed might not be the right word, but anyway, as always thanks for listening.
Listen to Glen - a Very Personal Story as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
A GUEST OF THE GOVERNMENT
This story is also called A Guest of the Government. It's about my time when I was drafted into the army in South Africa.
I remember the train pulling out of the station headed for Pretoria where I would start my two year draft in the army. I could see my Mum. She had stepped back into the crowd and was crying. I was her second child that had been taken by the government to serve in the military. My older brother Toph was first. Pete had got an exemption. I will come to that story next.
We got really drunk on the train. It would be our last night of freedom. I remember that every now and then someone would open a window and throw up into the night. The next morning we arrived in Pretoria. The side of the train was covered in puke. We were hungover and a sorry lot and the army was waiting for us.
It didn't take long. The corporals were there. “Sak for 50.” We learned quickly “Sak for 50 meant doing 50 pushups right there on the spot. Then there was “Fok weg” which meant start running and don't stop until you puked. That was just the first few hours. Then they took us in, shaved our hair to nothing and assigned us tents where we would live for our basic training. They showed us how to make our beds. The sheet had to be turned back exactly one bayonet length. The edges had to be perfectly square. We would rub the inside of the blanket with soap and use the two tin plates that we were given to form a perfect edge. It took hours to make the bed so we usually just slept on the dirt floor because the corporals would come in at all times of day and night for inspection.
Speaking of inspection. We would often have piss parades. They would come and get us in the middle of the night and march us off onto the parade ground and we had to stand there until we pissed on the dirt. None of us could leave until everyone had pissed. As you probably know, it's hard to pee when there are 100s of your fellow soldiers just looking at you because you are the last to pee and none of them could go back to bed until you pee’d.
Some nights we would anticipate a piss parade and drink a few gallons of water before going to bed. Sure enough around midnight we would have to go and that was fine until one in the morning when there was suddenly a piss parade and you had nothing left to pee. It was the army and that was that.
It’s funny now looking back on it, but they used to make us “parachutists.” That’s what they called it. We were parachutists. The corporals would come in and tell us to take the lining out of our helmets. We were left with around 10 pounds of solid steel helmet with no protection. Then they would make us stand on top of our cupboards, steel hat on, chin strap loose and when they told us to, we had to jump, hence the part about being a parachutist. We would jump the four feet or so. Our steel hats would come down a second later and whack us on the head. Some would pass out. Some, probably me included, would just have brain damage. It was really great fun.
Every morning at 6 there was an announcement over the loudspeaker. “Hands off your cocks and onto your socks.” That meant it was time to get up. I could hear the smokers reaching for their cigarettes and almost in unison, you could see the spark of a match and the red gow of cigarettes. Ten minutes later it was off to the shower which was ice cold and then if you needed to, you had five minutes for a crap. There was a long wooden bench, maybe a hundred feet long. Every two feet or so there was a hole cut. We would all park off on a vacant hole and every two or three minutes there was a flush that ran the length of the toilet taking everyone business with it. One day some mates and me had an idea. We got to the first hole and had some newspapers ready. Just before the flush came we set the paper alight and dropped it into the water. It carried down the length of the toilet burning arses as it went. Of course we got into trouble and had to spend the rest of the day groveling through the mud, but it was worth it.
After basic training we were allowed weekend passes and I would drive to see my girlfriend Liz. I had an old VW bug, turquoise green with a sunroof that leaked. I paid R100 for it which in today's money is just around $7 dollars. We were not allowed to keep cars close to the camp, but we did get a daily ration of cigarettes and because I didn't smoke, I used my cigarettes to trade with a corporal for his parking space.
Back in the late 70’s they had petrol rationing in South Africa. You could not buy petrol on weekends which meant that I could not make it from my camp to Liz’s place and back. Lucking a friend’s Mum would let me stop at theri place which was around halfway and siphon gas out of her tank to fill mine so that we could continue on the trip. Mrs Clarence you were a gift and a lifesaver. It was illegal to do what she let us do, but that was South Africa back then.
One day a few of my friends and I went AWOL, as in Absent Without Leave. We climbed in the back of a Bedford truck and hid under some tarps. The truck could get past the guard gates no problem and once out of the camp we jumped out of the truck and ran for my car.
We had to drive the perimeter of the camp and it was a dirt road and the car battery was under the back seat and the top of it was rusted. Those days the seats were made with wire springs and as we were driving along the back side of the camp trying to escape, the wire springs hit the battery terminals and the back seat caught on fire. As in a BIG fire. We all jumped out of the car to try and figure out what to do and then things started to get really bad.
I could see the Colonel of the camp coming my way. His car had all the flags on it and he had a military escourt. He pulled over next to us and asked what was going on. I pointed to the fire in my back seat. We were truly screwed. AWOL usually meant time in prison. The Colonel just had his driver get out and use the fire extinguisher to put the fire out. That was it. He said, “good day gentlemen” and drove away. We had been spared. I often wondered what would have happened if there was a full tank of gas siphoned from Mrs Clarence’s car under the seat when it caught on fire.
I hated the Army. I was sent to the armored car division and became a tank commander. It was such a joke. I was so small that I could barely see above the steering wheel. Some might remember when Michael Dukakis was running for president. He was trying to look tough so they took photos of him in a tank. He looked like a pimple on a horse's ass. He could barely see above the steering wheel. Anyway I was a tank commander.
Back then South Africa was fighting a war in Mozambique and a war in Angola. They were bush wars. My tank, a centurion tank, was made for desert fighting so when my mates were all sent off to fight they took their armored cars and went into the bush to fight the communist terrorists. I was left behind with my tank. By the way I only got to be a tank commander because we had to run a 30 mile road race with full backpacks and boots and rifles and that stuff, and I won the race and was then promoted to tank commander.
So while my mates went off to get shot up on the border I was left to shine my tank. It was all so ridiculous.
I remember toward the end of basic training we went into the bush for a week. They had us all line up on the parade ground. At the far end we could see a mountain of tins. They had taken the labels off the tins. The idea was for us to run across the parade ground and grab seven tins. One for each day. I remember running with some big afrikaans prick pushing me out of the way. When I finally got to the end of the parade ground all the big tins were gone. There were just the small tins left. They were the good stuff. The oysters and mushrooms. All the big tins were just jam. Seven days of Jam. That was their only meal.
At the end of the week they sent us off on a long hike in full battle gear. 40 pound backpack, boots, steel hat, rifle and of course, no water. On the way back the corporals made us pick up some wood. Earlier in the week they had brought in a few cows and slaughtered them and the night before we left for the long hike they had the cows hoisted on spits over fires. They were cooking before we left on the hike and there was a promise of a decent meal and even the possibility of beer.
Now, I wasn't interested in picking up sticks. I was gatfol, as they say in the army. I had had enough. When we got back to the camp after being out for about 13 hours we could smell the cows on the spit. Unfortunately those of us that hadn’t picked up sticks were pulled aside and made to go back out on the hike once again. We had to grovel in the dirt while all the others enjoyed beer and a huge amount of steak. We got nothing. Lesson learned.
One day I was sitting in the sun shining my tank when a kid approached. He told me that the colonel wanted to see me. I followed him and sure enough the colonel was there. It turns out that the Defense Force Yachting Championships were going to take place in Simonstown which is near Cape Town. The colonel said that he heard that I could sail and told me, “Okay you will represent this camp in the yachting championships. Moenie opfok nie.” What he was basically saying was that I must not screw up. I took a train to Simonstown. I think that it took two or three days to get there.
I won all seven of seven races. The wind was howling down the backside of Table Mountain and I beat the reigning champion, a man by the name of Bertie Reed. Bertie was a bit of a legend because he had won the Championships for years. He was unbeatable until I beat him. After he left the navy Bertie became one of the most celebrated sailors on the international single-handed sailing scene. He did two circumnavigations alone and really excelled. He was affectionately known as Bilton Bertie, biltong being that dry, spiced meat that every South African loved. It’s similar to beef jerky but so much better and made for all kinds of meat including ostrich.
Anyway, so I won the big trophy which was sent back to Pretoria on a plane. I had to take the train and when I got to my camp I could hear some marching taking place out on the parade ground. The kid at the gate told me to get into my step-out clothes. These were the fancy clothes used only for special occasions. You know, the kind of gear with built in creases in the trousers and shiny buttons on the jackets. I went to my tent and got into my fancy gear and went out onto the parade ground and there I saw the trophy on a table front and center. The parade was in my honor. I simply could not believe it. For the time I had been there I was called “die fooking Engelsman, which meant the fucking Englishman.” Now there was a parade in my honor.
The colonel was there beaming. My platoon was marching around the parade ground looking, surprisingly enough, like soldiers. Then they stopped and the colonel presented me with the trophy and he whispered in my ear. “You can go home now. You have brought honor to our camp.” It was six weeks before I was supposed to get discharged from the army but now all of a sudden I was free to go. I turned in my rifle and took a bus to Liz’s house. My military training was finally over. I was still alive but had lost friends in the ridiculous wars that were taking place in Angola and Mozambique.
Years later when the Soviet Union collapsed everything changed. You see, we were fighting a war against the Angloan's over a small dusty strip of land called the Caprivi Strip which was around 280 miles long and about 50 miles wide. Nothing really. The problems for the Anglonas was that they didn’t have an army, so the Cubans came and fought their war for them, but Cuba was broke and so the Soviet Union put in the money but when the Soviet Union fell apart they didn’t have any money to pay the Cubans to fight the war in Angola. Meanwhile South Africa was broke because the country was under so many sanctions from the rest of the world that they had no money so one day all sides just said “screw it” and the war ended. I think that it had been going on for at least 15 years. Meanwhile the Caprivi Strip still sits there. It’s completely uninhabitable because it’s littered with landmines.
I wrote a story about it in my book of short stories, Twisted Tales. The story is called, funnily enough, The Caprivi Strip.
I hope that you enjoyed this story. You can read all about it in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. The story is called A Guest of the Government. Stand by for the next story which is a very personal story about my mother. I appreciate you following along and as always, thank you for listening.
You can read about my experiences as a kid growing up in South Africa in more detail in my memoir Two Bricks and a Tickey High. It's a good read and I hope that you will consider buying the book.
Listen to A Guest of the Government as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
MY MUM
This is going to be a hard one to get through. My mother was a complicated woman. She was born in South Africa in 1930. I honestly can’t remember where. My memory has faded a little. You see Mum died almost 50 years ago, and a lot of my memories of her have dimmed. There are only snippets of stories and a few faded black and white photographs; that’s it.
Her best friend, Mrs Giles once told me that my Mum was a very sweet and very kind woman and that’s enough for me, I think. She met my Dad at a small airstrip outside of Pietermaritzburg, the town where I grew up. My Dad was a pilot who had flown troops back from Cairo at the end of the Second World War. I can only imagine the sparks that must have flown between the two of them. My Dad, a handsome pilot and Mum a pretty lady looking for a handsome pilot. The connection worked and they got married. Thankfully, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this.
My sister Sue was the first to come along, followed a couple of years later by Pete, then Christopher who goes by Topher, the second part of his name rather than the first. I was next and then my younger brother Rob. We were all evenly and quite neatly spaced two years apart.
I can only imagine that five kids were a handful. My Dad was a civil engineer working at first for the government, and then when he realized that he would not be able to make enough money to feed us all, he took a chance and joined a new start-up company. Luckily the business flourished, but it meant that my Dad was always away traveling on business leaving us brats, me being the worst of them, in the gentle care of Mum.
The only job she ever had - other than raising kids which is a huge job in itself - was working in a pharmacy rolling pills by hand. Those were the days when it was frowned upon for a wife to work. It would look as if my Dad didn’t make enough money to support us all and it would make him look bad. We had servants that cooked and cleaned and worked in the garden and took care of us kids. I think that probably Mum was bored and needed something to do with her days.
I have no idea when it started or why it started, but Mum started to drink. In those days everyone in South Africa drank. It was a throwback from the British Colonial days where everyone insisted on sundowners each and every evening. Think of the movie “Out of Africa.” The problem was, Mum drank more than the rest of them.
She was a frail woman. She was glucose intolerant long before anyone knew what that was and because of it, when she ate she threw up. I’m sure that she didn’t weigh anywhere close to a 100 pounds wet, so a couple of drinks was all it took to knock her over.
It’s not easy to write this because of what the alcohol did to her. She drank when my Dad was away on business trips. She once told me that it was because she was scared to be alone and in charge of the house and family. When my Dad came home she would white-knuckle it. Dad told me years later that he had no idea that she drank as much as she did. She kept it well hidden from him, but she went right back to drinking when he was away and it turned into every kid's nightmare.
When my Dad was away us kids would love to sleep on his side of the bed. It was a treat, but soon turned into something less than a treat. I think, but I’m not sure 100% that my three older siblings were the first to find her, but here is my experience.
I must have been 12 or so. Maybe 13. I was definitely wise to the drinking. The problem was that Mum smoked a lot and our little space in the house where we gathered as a family was always thick with smoke, so we all left Mum there alone. We called that room The Den. There was no TV in South Africa in those days; only books and your own thoughts.
When Dad was away I would lie in my bed and wait for her to go to bed. I had heard her banging into walls before and hated the sound of it so I would cover my head with my pillow and try to sleep but I had to come up for air every now and then. Then one night I heard an almighty crash. I jumped out of bed and ran to The Den. She wasn’t there. I went into the dining room, but because the lights were off, I didn’t see her at first. I did notice that all the silverware and plates that had been set ready for breakfast the next morning were on the floor. I looked under the table and there was Mum completely passed out covered partly by the tablecloth and knives and forks and spoons.
I screamed and Pete and Toph came running. We carried our Mum to her bed. As far as I can remember none of us ever spoke about that night again, but it would not be the last time I would find her like that plastered up against a wall or passed out on the bathroom floor. It was only when my younger brother Rob found her that we decided that we needed an intervention.
We didn’t include my Dad. I’m not sure why, but the intervention was run by Pete. We really had no idea what to do. Mum said that she drank because she was lonely and bored, so our plan, as naive as it was, was for one of us kids in turn to sit and talk with Mum each night in the smoke-filled Den.
I think that I was around 16 or maybe closer to 17. I was getting ready to leave for my stint in the army. Mum told me that she knew that once I was gone and Rob had finished school, that she knew that my Dad would leave her; and he did. On his many trips away he had been having an affair with his secretary, who would later become my stepmother. She was a wonderful woman and I don’t begrudge either of them. Mum was a bit of a mess and with all her children grown and gone, her husband moved in with his secretary, she had more time to think and drink.
I was in the army when my younger brother Rob called me and told me that Mum was in the hospital and said that I had better get home if I wanted to see her alive. I got a pass from camp and drove the eight hours or so to Pietermaritzburg. I didn’t make it. I was sleeping on the floor at my Dad’s little cottage when an old friend of my parents came by. The cottage didn’t have a phone. I remember him saying to my dad, “Yvonne died last night.”
And that was that.
I truthfully don’t know what they wrote on her death certificate, but I do know for sure that she died of a broken heart.
Mum was only 47.
I hope that you enjoyed this story. You can read more about my mum in my memoir Lapping the Planet. Stand by for the next story which is a very personal one about my mother. I appreciate you following along and as always, thank you for listening.
Listen to My Mum as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
Listen to me read a poem about my Mum here. It's in my book of poetry, A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry.
You can download A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
You can download Lapping the Planet as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
COUNTING TOES (NOT CROWS) - A StoryCast interruption
Please excuse this interruption from our regularly scheduled storycast, but this is a timely story worth telling. I suffer from neuropathy which is a problem with nerve endings. My feet are always painful and always numb. It feels a bit like a severe case of pins and needles with an occasional whack on the toes with a hammer. As a result I didn’t notice some strange happenings going on with the big toe on my right foot. It started to turn black. There was no pain because my feet are numb so I did what every dumb man would do, I ignored it. Until I couldn't.
I spent the better part of a week in the hospital while the doctors debated what to do with my toe. Eventually they sent me home with antibiotics.
Meanwhile the toe got blacker.
A couple of days ago I went in for a scheduled visit to the wound center at our local hospital. The surgeon dug around with a scalpel cutting bits of flesh off and then announced, “we need to take the toe.”
“Oookay.”
She said, “Can you come in Wednesday? I can get you into the operating theater then and we can amputate your toe.”
“Oookay.”
Then she said, “well you are here right now. Why don’t I just take it off now?” I said, a little too flippantly, “why not?” Then she told the nurse to go and get the bone cutter. That was when I realized that I was going to have to watch the whole operation. Sure enough she numbed things up and then started with the blade. So far so good. It was a bit of an out-of-body experience. Then she asked for the bone cutter. That was when I closed my eyes. I could feel her tugging away at things. There was no pain but I knew that she was cutting my toe off. The nurse kind of jokingly said, “oh there’s a bone shard on the floor. Do you want to keep it as a souvenir?” I didn’t find it that funny.
When I opened my eyes the toe was gone. There was just a big gaping hole pulsing blood. The surgeon stitched it up, the nurse bandaged it up and the surgeon said, “Same time next week?” Pretty much the same thing that the last hooker I was with said. That’s a joke by the way…:)
So there you go. That’s my story of how I went to the wound clinic with ten toes and came out with nine. I hope that you enjoyed reading.
Story update: There is a reason why there are operating theaters in hospitals. Doctor's offices are NOT the place to whack off a toe. The upshot is that the doctor botched things and the wound is now infected. This Wednesday, April 16, 2005, I will go back under the knife this time in an operating theater where they will take off the rest of my toe. Wish me luck.
Update to the update: It's gone wherever dead toes go.
Update to the updated update: There is now another toe that needs to go. The doctors don't know what's happening and I live near Boston where the best doctors in the world are. So I did what I should have done a long time ago. I wrote a poem. An Ode to my Toe. You can read it in my book of poetry A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry, or you can listed to me read it.
Listen to Counting Toes as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
Listen to Brian read his poem, An Ode to my Toe as an audio file here.
You can download A Skinny Book of Sketchy Poetry as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
SAILING THE ATLANTICS
This story is called, Sailing the Atlantics and it's about sailing from Cape Town to Gibraltar
Once I found out that my childhood sweetheart, Liz, had taken up with my childhood nemesis, Julien (AKA Rob), yes the same one who had once sat on my chest and pulled my ears so hard that they ripped, I figured that it was time to leave the comforts of home and go back out into the wide world of sailing. The only problem was, I was broke. So I hitched a ride with my old mate Phil Wade and his lovely (then) wife Suzie. Phil was a delivery captain who had logged well over 300,000 nautical miles taking a boat from point A to point B, and then taking another boat from point B back to point A. Phil was a wonderful man (Suzie too - yes I know that she was a woman, but she wore the pants). One thing I remember about Phil the most, and by the way may he rest peacefully, was that no matter the weather he would always salute the sunset with a bowl of popcorn and a stiff rum. Phil was a good man and I miss him.
Phil and Suzie were delivering a center cockpit shitbox from Cape Town to Tunisia. They needed an extra hand and I was the extra hand that they needed. I could only go as far as Gibraltar. South Africans were not allowed into any country in North Africa. The sanctions against apartheid were starting to cut deeply.
We sailed first to St Helena Island, a small volcanic blip in the South Atlantic. It may well be a small volcanic blip, but it comes with a lot of history and some extraordinary coincidences. Let’s start with this. Horatio Nelson, the famous British Naval commander was born on the island in 1776. His nemesis, Napoleon Bonapart died in exile on St Helena island on the 5th of May, 1821. Can you imagine? Coincidence or fate?
I am not this smart, but Wikipedia says, and I quote, “that these two extraordinary figures of history have a very deep common thread. The most significant confrontation between them was the Battle of Trafalgar, where Nelson's British fleet decisively defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet, effectively ending Napoleon's plans to invade Britain.” So now you know what I mean by coincidences.
When Phil and me and Suzie stopped in St Helena we went to Napoleon's grave, but he had long since been removed and was finally buried in France, but it was still a somber place. Well, I guess somber is a bit of an exaggeration. It was just an overgrown plot in the middle of a small island in the middle of nowhere but we went there anyway.
We left St Helena heading for Ascension Island, roughly 600 miles away. A couple of nights into the trip we lost our rudder. Luckily we suspected that it might happen, it was a bit loosey goosey in the rudder shaft area if you know what I mean, and I had gone for a swim and drilled a hole in the top of the rudder. No it was not an electric drill. That might not have gone that well. It was a hand drill; remember those? So that one night when things got a little sloppy in the helm department, we found the rudder trailing behind us.
We already had a plan for a jury rig rudder. Phil had lashed a floorboard to one of our spinnaker poles. That would be our new rudder. We would drop it over the transom with a halyard attached to keep it from sinking, and a line attached to the keel to keep it from floating. That was stage 1. Then we took the other spinnaker pole and lashed it athwartships. We led some lines from the make-shift rudder through a turning block at each end of the second spinnaker pole, and back to a winch in the cockpit. By balancing the boat with the sails we were able to make decent speed toward Ascension Island.
By decent speed I mean around three knots.
There was something about the speed of the boat that attracted fish and at any given time we would have 50 to as many as a 100 mahi mahi swimming alongside us. Mahi Mahi are also called dolphin fish or dorado, which is why I like to call them mahi mahi.
So we had a competition; me, Phil and Susie. This was the plan. We would spear a fish. Yes there were so many that we could simply lean over the side and shoot one. No need for a lure and a hook. Here was the competition. It was to see who could shoot a fish, land it, gut it, fillet it, cook it and serve it in the shortest amount of time. The catch was that we had to eat all of the fish. We had no refrigeration on board and snagging a big fish would just be a waste, so mostly we went for the small ones otherwise we had to gorge ourselves.
The competition got intense. I would get the butter ready. The lemon already sliced. The cutting board ready. The knife sharpened and the table in the cockpit set. Phil would hit the stopwatch. I would start the burner and throw in the butter. Then I would lean over the side of the boat and snag a fish. It took about 15 seconds to land it, gut it and fillet it. The butter was just turning that beautiful golden brown and in would go the fish. In less than 45 seconds the fish was on the plate ready for eating. It took me years before I could actually buy a fish from the supermarket. For me, fish was always free and those fish that we ate were about as fresh as you will ever get.
We stopped in Ascension Island. To be honest Ascension is a bit of a wasteland. There are two military bases there; one US and the other UK. It just so happened that we anchored off the US base and they helped us weld our rudder back together. It was the first time that I ever went to an American bar. I was completely blown away. It was huge. They had hundreds of bottles hanging from some overhead rack and all the bartender had to do was just push a glass up against a bottle and a full and legal tot of whatever was your pleasure poured into the glass. There was also a jukebox. I had never seen or heard of a jukebox, and it was awesome.
In my book of short stories, More Twisted Tales, I wrote a fictionalized version of our stop in Ascension Island. The story is one of my favorites and is called Nantucket Sleighride. If you read it, yes the part about me and the Dolly Parton lookalike lady having a quickie on the trash cans behind the restaurant did happen. That part is not fiction.
But anyway I digress.
We carried on to the Cape Verde Islands. They are a group of ten volcanic islands owned by Portugal. We stopped in Brava, the southernmost island in the group. It was really basic. We traded Bic Ballpoint pens for food and magazines for firewood. If I remember correctly there were a few Playboy Magazines among them. It’s no wonder they gave us a lot of firewood.
Then before we left Phill announced; “we need diesel.” We were on the south side of the island in a very remote anchorage and was told by some of the locals that the only place to get diesel on the island was at the village which was way up in the clouds. So, Phil, me and Suzie and one of the local kids walked for around three hours up and up and up into the clouds. We finally got to the village, and somehow the chief of the village had heard that we were coming and his wife had already prepared a feast for us. We were invited to his home for lunch.
Can you imagine this? Three rag-tag sailors having lunch in the clouds with some chief of some village on a small island in the middle of nowhere. We had a lot of wine and by late afternoon the lunch was winding down. That was when Phil brought up the diesel situation. Turns out that the chief had already had our gerry can filled with diesel and another for just-in-case. We were drunk, in a village in the clouds, with two gerry cans of diesel and a long dangerous path back to the boat and it was getting dark. Phil asked if we could rent a donkey but the chief just smiled. “No donkey,” he said. “The donkey is very tired but don’t worry. My daughter will carry for you.” He then presented his 12 year old daughter. And true to his word, his daughter carried the two really heavy gerry cans of diesel back down the rocky path and to the dock. We kept trying to help, but the girl was having none of it. It took us well over three hours by flashlight. We left the next morning. Here, by the way, is what Wikipedia has to say about Brava.
“Brava is the smallest inhabited island in the archipelago and the southernmost point in Cape Verde. Boasting deep gorges and dramatic peaks Brava is one of the archipelagos' most mountainous islands.”
We left the next morning to sail to Santa Maria which is one of the northern islands in the chain. These islands, except I guess Cabo Verde which gets some money from tourism, these islands rely on subsistence living. Fishing mostly. There was one morning that we were on anchor and we got word that there was some kind of consternation going on in the little village. One of their fishermen had gone out overnight and not returned. The whole day went by and he had not returned. There was no way to send out a search party so they just sat and waited.
The following morning I was up early and taking a pee off the back of the boat when I saw a small dot on the horizon. I watched it for a while and it got closer. Very slowly, but it got closer. It took me sometime to realize that it was the missing fisherman. He was rowing his little boat and towing something. Turns out that he had caught a huge turtle. The thing was probably 5 feet across. He was towing it behind his little row boat.
There was, of course, huge jubilation when he arrived back at the village and they celebrated by slaughtering the turtle. The whole bay turned red. I guess turtles have a lot of blood in them. We were invited to join in the celebration. They cooked the turtle on an open fire and people ate and danced and sang and then they gave us a few pounds of turtle meat to take with us. We couldn’t say no, but we didn't have refrigeration on board so Phil made a massive curry. Phil, like myself, is from that part of South Africa that brought over Indians, from India, to work in the sugarcane fields and most of them stayed and their food and culture was very much a part of my childhood.
Funny side story. The drinking age in South Africa when I was a kid was 18 but we could get away with it at around 16. We would go to a bar and the waiter, usually an Indian gentleman, would ask us what year we were born. So before we went to the bar we would all rehearse what year we were supposedly born that would make us old enough to drink. Problem was, after a couple of beers we had no idea what our names were let alone what year we were born and that was when they chucked us out.
In Pietermaritzburg, the town where I grew up, there was a huge Indian section. Of course it was separate from the white section. Indians, despite their beautiful culture and huge intellect were lumped into the same class as all black people, and therefore were considered second class citizens. Give me a break, but anyway. As kids we would pool our money and ride our bikes to the Indian part of town. Usually we would find some old chap willing to go into the liquor store, we called them bottle shops, and for a small payment buy us beer. If we were feeling flush we would have them buy a bottle of Old Brown Sherry. That stuff tasted like piss but we were able to get a good buzz going.
So I digress yet again. Back to my story. Phil made a super hot curry and we spent the next few days at sea eating curry after curry and then hanging off the back of the boat and shitting it out, especially after the turtle meat turned. The curry spices were so strong that we couldn’t taste that the meat was bad.
On the way between the Cape Verde Islands and Gibraltar we crossed the International Date Line. I remember that day so well. There was no wind so we dropped the sails and went for a swim. There is something beyond magical to swim in the middle of an ocean. You can see the rays of the sun go down and down until they fade to black. There are millions of fish. Who knew that any time under the boat there is a whole ecosystem of wildlife, but here is my story. We stopped the boat at noon, swam for an hour and when we gt got back on board it was still noon. We had crossed the International Date Line and gained an hour. It was just one of those magical hours in the journey that we call life.
Phil and Suzie dropped me in Gibraltar. They continued on to Tunisia. I couldn’t go because at that time I was still traveling on my South African passport. Many years later I was able to get a British passport because my Dad was born in England.
Earlier, when I had lived in England before doing the Parmelia Race, I was sleeping with a girl from South Africa. I liked her a lot and thought that I would surprise her. Back then there was no way to communicate. Letters would take weeks, so I surprised her by showing up at her house, except she was the one that surprised me. She was in bed with one of my best mates. I am happy to say that they are still married.
So, with my chance of getting lucky gone, I spent the night in a damp sleeping bag in Phil Wade’s boat. It was a Contessa 26 and on the hard in the Hamble. The boat was called Snowflake of Hamble. Life comes at you from all different directions. It’s how you react that determines what kind of life you will have.
I hope that you enjoyed this story. Read the short story in my book More Twisted Tales. It’s called Nantucket Sleighride and is a fictionalized version of this story. This actually happened. Anyway, thanks, as always, for listening.
Listen to Sailing the Atlantics as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download More Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
A SUMMER IN SWEDEN
In the spring of 1980 I was doing some odd jobs around a boatyard in the south of England when I got a call asking if I was interested in spending the summer in Sweden, well Scandinavia to be more exact. I think that you can guess my answer. It was to be my first paying gig as a sailor. 150 deutschmarks a day which was around $50. I was ecstatic and flew to Stockholm to meet a man by the name of George Minden, his wife Pamela and two very young girls. I think that they were around 5 and 7. Very sweet and they took an immediate liking to me.
George was a small Jewish man from Toronto who had made a pile of cash owning some high end restaurants and a boutique hotel called the Windsor Arms. In my book of short stories Twisted Tales, the Windsor Arms Hotel makes a guest appearance. His wife Pamela was from South Africa and was a real pain in the arse. Her idea of being rich was to drink champagne and eat caviar and wear inappropriate shoes on the boat, just because she could. The plan was for the five of us to sail across Sweden through the Göta Canal. It’s a 240 mile trip from a place called Söderköping which is south of Stockholm, to Gothenburg (Göteborg) on the west coast. We would have to lock up and down through 58 locks and two inland lakes. This was about as close to heaven as I had ever been, and it was going to get even better.
The first thing I noticed was how expensive everything was in Sweden, as in $30 for a six pack of beer. I was happy that I wasn’t paying. The second thing I noticed was, well let me tell you about that in a bit.
We entered the canal on a stunning Swedish summer morning. Me and George were in charge. Pamela was prancing around in a bikini and the girls were amusing themselves with some dolls and coloring books. I was happy, and then got even happier. Here is the second thing I noticed. In Sweden in the summer most of the women are topless. Let’s put this into perspective. I was a 22 year old horny male and Sweden has some of the most beautiful women in the world. I thought that I had died and was not close to heaven, but that I had actually reached heaven. The boobs were definitely a distraction, but I managed to keep one eye on the canal and one eye on the shore hoping that around the next corner there would be a topless girl.
The locking system was still manually operated. We would sail slowly into the lock, tie up loosely alongside and I would climb a rusty steel ladder to get to a big turnstile that would close the massive steel door behind us. I forget how the water came in but it did and the boat rose. Some of the locks were close to 20 feet high. We were sailing uphill.
The first lake we came to was lake Vattern. We entered the lake and sailed south for a bit and there on the shore was an old castle and if you can believe it, the moat was the marina. It was in the town of Vadstena and was built by King Gustav in 1545. At night they lit up the sides of the castle. Each evening George and I would sit in the cockpit and have a few beers. Pamela would fix dinner. It was my duty around bedtime to cover the windows with towels to make it look like it was nighttime so that the girls could go to sleep. The sun in Sweden in mid-summer sets around 10 and rises at around 3 in the morning, hence the need for towels.
Side story: I still can’t believe how my Dad let me leave South Africa. I was just 20 and was heading off on a boat that he had never seen and with a crew that he had never met; with no certain date of return. Phone calls were all but impossible and letters took forever. Very different from how it is these days. I don’t know how I would feel if one of my sons came to me and said that he was going sailing for a couple of years and would be back in touch in 2028.
It was when I was working on the south coast of England that I got a letter from my Dad telling me that he and Judy, my step-mother, would be in Rome for a few days later that summer and could I possibly meet them there?
I wrote back and said that I would. He had given me the dates and his hotel information. I took a late night flight out of Gatwick and ended up sitting next to this beautiful girl from New Zealand. We got along great and decided that when we got to Rome we would share a hotel room. That all sounded good to me, if you know what I mean, and it was. These things happen, you know. I have mentioned before that I was born under a lucky star.
Well, the next morning I was planning on meeting my Dad and Judy. I asked the girl if she remembered the name of the hotel where we were staying and she told me that it was the Ibis Roma Fiera. The name sounded familiar. Ibis is the name of a bird in South Africa. I dug in my bag and found my Dad’s letter. Turns out that they were staying in the exact same hotel. I called down to the front desk and asked what room Mr and Mrs Hancock were in and they gave me their room number. I looked at the key for our room. Dad and Judy were just a couple of doors over. You can’t make this stuff up but as I have repeatedly said, “I have had a charmed life.”
Back to sailing the Göta Canal. We crossed Lake Vänern and locked ourselves up to the second lake, Lake Vättern. It too had a castle that was at the end of a spit of land which stuck out into the lake. We anchored off and I read the girls a book about a fairytale princess that lived in a castle far away. Like in a place called Sweden.
After Lake Vättern things got a bit more industrial. The name of the canal changed to the Trollhätte Canal. We soon encountered some ships and the locks were big and imposing. We had to tie up alongside small freighters that were locking their way to Gothenburg. Still, I found it quite magical. We spent a few nights in Gothenburg and then headed for Copenhagen in Denmark.
Copenhagen is a city that I could get used to. It was clean, old and romantic. Even me, at just 22 years old, I could figure out that it was romantic. We visited Tivoli Gardens and it was wonderful. Many years later I went back to Tivoli Gardens and it didn’t seem the same. I guess memories are filtered through time and my memories have always been filtered through rose colored glasses.
We cruised through the Danish archipelago, which was just incredibly beautiful and finally came to our destination; a boatyard on the small island where the boat would stay for the winter.
In 1980 my sister Sue moved her family from South Africa to Calgary. It was a shocking change from the heat of Africa to the brutal cold of an Alberta winter, but she was not interested in having her boys being drafted into any senseless war. It was a pretty bold move if you ask me. My Dad and I agreed to meet her there. I had bought an old mustang and planned to drive it to Canada having absolutely no idea how far it was across the country from one side to the other.
George Minden kindly offered up his hotel, The Windsor Arms, for a few days free accommodation and I arranged to meet my Dad there. I left my small apartment in Marblehead and drove to Toronto. I was just going over the Peace Bridge that leads into Canada when it started snowing. I have never been in snow before and it was awesome. I got to the hotel and it was just perfect. Very British, very quaint and very upmarket. I took a shower and went for a walk and wondered why my head felt different. My hair had frozen. I had no idea that it would happen. That’s growing up in South Africa for you.
Dad was scheduled to arrive a few days later so the following day I went out exploring the area. I thought that my Dad was coming the next day, but I screwed up. He arrived the day that I was out exploring the countryside. I wasn’t there to pick him up at the airport so he took a taxi to the hotel. When he arrived he was sure that it had to be the wrong hotel. I am not sure what he was expecting but he wasn’t expecting a five star place. When he checked in he was greeted like an old friend by the front desk. At this point he was sure that he was in the wrong hotel. He found his luxurious room and had no sooner settled in and there was a knock at the door. It was a waiter with a big bowl of fruit and some flowers. This was getting to be too much for my Dad. He decided to take a bath and there was another knock on the door. The waiter was there with a bottle of VSOP cognac, one of South Africa's best, compliments of the hotel manager.
Luckily I arrived back at the hotel and Dad knew that he was in the right place after all. I was totally embarrassed to have missed picking him up but I think Dad was already halfway through the bottle of cognac and didn't care. He convinced me to leave my car in Toronto and fly to Calgary, which was a good idea. It would have been a long drive to western Canada in the dead of winter.
We stayed with my sister and her husband John and their boys Brett and Justin and then took a greyhound bus across the Rockies to visit friends that lived on Vancouver Island. It was, as I already mentioned, the dead of winter and of course we got caught in numerous snow storms. It was just great fun and a great memory that Dad and I talked about for many years after.
My Dad sent George Minden a case of excellent South African wine as a thank you. I have no idea where he and Pamela and the girls are now, but both girls must be pushing 50 with families of their own. I hope that they remember me. I am sure that they will remember that beautiful summer in Sweden.
I wrote a fictional story in my book of short stories, Twisted Tales about a bus trip across the Canadian Rockies in winter. It’s a really good one and has a twist in the end, just like it should. The story is called Miranda.
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There is also a semi-true story about my trip across Sweden in the Gota Canal with George and Pamela and the two girls. It's also in Twisted Tales. The story is called Ruby.
I hope that you enjoyed this story and thanks as always, for reading.
Listen to The Summer in Sweden as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
You can download Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
THE PONZI SCHEME
This story is called the Ponzi Scheme and it's a good one
I was minding my own business living in the south of England working on boats when my old friend Skip Novak called. In my story, Racing to Downunder, I talk about sailing with Skip in the ‘79 Parmelia Race from England to Australia. I hadn't seen him for quite a few months when out of the blue I got a call.
“Mugsy, Skip here.” My nickname since childhood was Mugsy and despite having lived on four different continents to try and get rid of it, I have not been able to shake it. For many years only my oldest friends called me that but with Facebook and that other stuff other people have picked up on it and started to call me Mugsie so I have given up running from it. Call me what you like. Anyway, I digress.
“Mugsie, what are you doing for the next year?” As usual Skip didn’t mince words.
“Nothing, I guess, what do you have in mind?”
“How about joining me in the next Whitbread? I have a boat and some money and I need a sailmaker.” This time I didn’t ask what the deal was. If there was one Skip would have mentioned it. To me it meant that one of my dreams, to circumnavigate the world, was going to come true. It did come true, but getting to the startline would prove to be a bit of a challenge.
Here’s the story. The boat that Skip had was an 80-foot maxi yacht being built in Wisconsin for a German banker who thought that it might be a bit of a lark to enter a boat in the Whitbread Round the World Race. Now, the Whitbread, as it was known, is a 27,000 mile lap of the planet. It was to start in Portsmouth, England, go 7,000 odd miles to Cape Town in South Africa. From there across the Southern Ocean to New Zealand then on to Mar del Plata in Argentina and finally back to England. No small undertaking. Including the stopovers it would take around nine months.
I don’t recall how Skip got involved but before I knew it I was in Wisconsin helping with the boat, and then luckily dispatched to Marblehead where the sails were being built at Hood Sailmakers. In my first story in this series, Coming to America, I talked about meeting Erin who became my first wife. This was perfect because Erin had graduated from Endicott College, a prestigious girls college not far from Marblehead and she knew the area. We got a tiny apartment in Marblehead and I started to work on the sails for the boat.
Now the German banker clearly had no idea what he was getting into. He kept sending money for the boat and sails and the boat was three quarters built and the sails about the same when he suddenly stopped paying. As you can imagine, that sent everyone into a panic. The word that we got was that the banker had fled Germany and no one had any idea where he was.
The banker was, apparently, a very highly respected person and high up in Deutsche Bank. I think he was third from the top. Anyway, he got there by being very good at making loans, however, as was later uncovered, he was running a ponzi scheme. He was loaning money to some of the banks customers even though they had never applied for a loan. He was using money from additional loans to service the bogus loans. According to a report I got to read once the dust had settled, Mr Banker had loaned some money, a sizable amount of money to a customer whose brother also worked at Deutsche Bank, and the brother was surprised and concerned to see the loan on the books. He asked his brother why he had not come to him for a loan. He apparently he told the brother that he could have secured a much better deal for him. The brother, the one who had apparently borrowed money, insisted that he had not taken a loan. It was all very strange and had the top dogs at the bank scratching their heads.
The whole situation was so mysterious that instead of just taking the banker in, they called for a Board Meeting to discuss the situation. Mr Banker knew that the gig was up and initiated the escape clause in his invisible contract. He and his wife and kids were on a plane to Rio de Janeiro before the door to the board meeting had even been closed. As far as I know they are still running native in Brazil.
Meanwhile we had a three quarters build boat in Wisconsin and a full inventory of beautifully sewn sails in Marblehead. The gig, however, was up.
We had heard of an American team getting ready to race the Whitbread as well. Some rich dude from Alaska had bought a boat and was having it modified in Holland. Actually it wasn’t just any old boat; it was a boat called Flyer which had won the previous Whitbread Race. In all their infinite wisdom, the American’s decided that instead of sticking with what had been a winning yacht and perhaps just tinkering around the edges, they decided to go whole hog and do a major refit. They planned to cut the boat just aft of the keel, run the blade aft just below the deck and replace the boats transom with a new one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. The problem was that the boat’s rating went up, and the boat speed went down. We would find this out just weeks before the race start.
Yes, you might have guessed it. Skip, myself and our very eccentric Swedish navigator had been recruited to join the American team, and the boat, which had been renamed Alaska Eagle
I hope that you enjoyed this story and as always, thanks for listening.
Listen to The Ponzi Scheme as an audio file here. All Stories From our Small Blue Marble are available on Substack here.
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