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 Brian 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, 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.
Each story is narrated by Brian and appear on his weekly podcast which you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts.
If you like and appreciate independent thought and good writing please consider buying him a coffee, or a beer, or chucking a few bucks into gofundme so that he can turn all his 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.
Story 13 - Coming soon
Story 14 - Coming soon
Story 15 - Coming soon
Story 16 - Coming soon
Story 17 - Coming soon
Story 18 - Coming soon
Story 19 - Coming soon
Story 20 - Coming soon
Story 21 - Coming soon
Story 22 - Coming soon
Story 23 - Coming soon
Story 24 - 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 a grandson and is about to give me another in April. 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 Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast.
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 Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast.
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.
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 Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High 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.
Listen to Counting Toes as an audio file here.All Stories From our Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast..
BIG TUNA
These Stories from the Realm 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 Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast.
You can download More Twisted Tales as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
FASTNET FORCE 10
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 Little Blue Planet will be in a weekly podcast.
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. 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 realised 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 the Realm will be in a weekly podcast.
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 the Realm will be in a weekly podcast.
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 the Realm will be in a weekly podcast.
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.
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 the Realm will be in a weekly podcast.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
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 about my brother Pete and happened to him because he has now been paralysed for most of his life. 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 the Realm will be in a weekly podcast.
You can download Two Bricks and a Tickey High as an eBook HERE or as a pdf HERE. Or better yet buy the book.
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