What we will do to earn a crust
A junior relative asked the other day whether I had had any other cool jobs in my career. I had just told her about counting squirrels at the Hudson’s (not Hudson) Bay Company in London. London, England, that is. There’s another HBC in London, Ontario.
Well, catching earthworms on a Toronto golf course at night during the last days of winter was certainly a cool experience. Not to say freezing.
The worms would be sold to fishermen at the start of the season. We literally bagged them, running around the fairways and greens with miners’ lamps on our heads. Our reward? A dollar for ten worms. So on a good night, we could earn three dollars.
But that’s how it was then, trying to scratch a living in that tough climate. One early morning, my friend Vincent Langley and I were at the tail-end of a queue of perhaps fifty people, lined up for work at a car wash. We had been there in the dark since five o’clock. From previous experience, we knew there was little chance of being selected that day. But we waited anyway.
A man drove up in a truck, wound down his window and told us he had a job for us. He took us to a six-storey block of apartments, with glassed-in passages on three sides, gave us buckets and mops and told us to clean the passages.
When we were done, three hours later, he sat us down at a kitchen table and gave us each a plate of egg and bacon. One egg, one strip of bacon. We thanked him, finished the meal and prepared to leave. We asked the man for our payment.
He nodded at the empty plates. “You’ve just had it,” he said.
The squirrels we counted at the Hudson’s Bay Company were pelts, of course. We counted them in tens. Then they were passed on to be tied into bundles. Eventually, they would become coats or rugs.
Two men were responsible for the binding. One would hold a piece of cord at the required length, and the other cut it. Often, there would be delays at that point of the production line. The Australian who had the cutting job was painfully slow.
At lunch one day, we complained to some others about this chap. A New Zealander from another team said they had a South African as the cutter who was also annoyingly slow with the knife. He couldn’t be as slow as our man, we said. It became a bet. We asked the foreman to put the two of them in a team together.
We gave them most of a morning to settle in, then strolled over to observe. The Australian was on the floor, leaning back against the wall and holding out the knife. The South African was sawing the cord back and forth, languidly. Almost all their energy was directed at the conversation they were having.
One cool job I did have in London, in between proper jobs in newspapers, I nearly blew. It was at the Army and Navy Stores in Victoria Street. The pay was fair, the staff canteen cheap, the environment pleasant. But one day an elderly gentleman came in and said he wanted a swordstick and bulletproof vest made for him. I thought he was a nut (which in retrospect he might have been) and sent him on his way.
The manager saw the old man leave, and asked about it. I told him. “So,” the manager said, “did you take his measurements?” It appeared the Army and Navy Stores offered a line in both, swordsticks and bulletproof vests.
Another job, which was decidedly “uncool”, I’d had earlier in the same area. A Polish man was renovating an old four-storey house and looking for a brickie’s mate. I had no experience but I was desperate.
The fourth floor façade overlooking the street had already been knocked out. My job entailed carrying a hob of bricks, and then cement, to the bricklayer who was replacing the wall. It was exhausting work. At the end of the day, I would have a snack and fall into bed.
Then all at once the other workers started knocking down the façade on the ground floor. When I first saw this, I was alarmed. Surely we should be getting danger pay? What was to stop the rest of the house falling down with those pillars gone? Then I would look at the broad back of the bricklayer alongside me and feel reassured.
The following Monday morning, when I reported for work, the owner of the building took we aside, told me I no longer had a job and paid me for the week ahead. “The bricklayer has quit,” he said.
Why?
“He’s says it’s too dangerous working up there.”
From one aspect, that Hudson’s Bay Company job was certainly deserving of danger pay. Every evening, when we left the cavernous building, we would have to run a long gauntlet to the Blackfriars tube station. In pursuit would be a pack of stray dogs, chasing the smell of squirrel on our clothes!
A duel with a lone stranger
It is one of Murphy’s lesser-known laws that a stranger can often be a fiend you do not know. No matter what the old song says.
Coming into the bar, he gave the impression of someone better suited to be throwing people out of it. A large man in height and girth, discharging cuffs in all directions, he demanded a gin and tonic and then proceeded to address the assembly at large.
It appeared he had just been to Oasim, the medical building around the corner.
“Now where can that name possibly come from?” he asked so, thinking he really wanted to know, I told him.
“It stands for Odds and Sods in Medicine,” I said. And realised too late, by his reaction, by the cold Paddington Bear stare, that it was a rhetorical question.
Rhetorical, because he had wanted to answer it himself.
“Yes, indeed,” Gin-and-Tonic allowed. “Odds and Sods in Medicine. So named by Dr Frank Counihan, a Quixotic gentleman.”
The large hand around the glass moved nearer, the stare shortening on its focal axis.
“You, sir,” he said to me, “are obviously someone who has travelled. Would you happen to know the derivation of ‘scuba’, as in diving?”
That was the time to have left, pleading an instant appointment, perhaps at Oasim. But I mistook madness for myopia.
“Well, yes. I believe it’s something like, let me think. Self-Contained Underwater . . .”
“Breathing Apparatus,” G-and-T conceded, so making me thirty-love. But I could see it was going to be a hard set.
“How long is a nail?” Next service, exploiting the backhand.
“As long as it needs to be?”
“No,” he said. “Precisely two and a quarter inches. It’s a measure used by tailors.”
Time for a fast return. “There’s a little town in the North Western Cape called Reivilo. Where,” I asked, “does that name come from?”
“It’s Olivier spelt backwards,” he said, quick as a flash. “Now, one for you. In which ship did Francis Drake sail the world?”
“The Golden Hind.”
“No. Good try. Right ship but wrong name. It was called Pelican at the time. Renamed later.”
“Could you,” I ventured, “list for me the five boroughs of New York City?” He was good, but I had him for a point. He got Manhatten, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn but missed Staten Island.
Audaciously, G-and-T came back to me in the same court. One US state was surrounded by seven others. Which? Didn’t know, couldn’t have guessed. Kentucky.
A bumper now from him, since we were right out of tennis-type metaphors. “How much coal can you get in a room?”
“A roomful?”
“Wrong,” he said. “Nine tons. A room of tons is nine tons. Look it up. And what is a frog?”
“Frog?”
“Yes, other than the slimy thing in ponds.”
Fortune must look kindly on amateur builders and one-time brickie’s mates. “A frog is that little hollow in a brick,” I said, “where you slap in the cement. It’s what helps hold walls together.”
“And an elephant, apart from the tusker kind?”
“It’s a size of paper,” I said.
“A pig?”
I shook a head that suddenly had begun to swim with creatures in various forms of mutation.
“A pig is a segment of an orange. What,” he asked, “would you say a ram was, if not an uncastrated male sheep or the zodiac sign or – “
“Hold on,” I said. “Whoa!” For a minute I thought I had checked the verbiage but he was just ordering another gin.
“A famous English sportsman,” I said, “scored a half-century for England at Lord’s before lunch and then went on to net the winning goal in the European Cup Final at Wembley.”
“You mean on the same day?”
“That very afternoon. It was that silly time of the year when the seasons overlap. He had professional contracts to honour in both codes.”
G-and-T drew deeply on his memory reserves. “Denis Compton. No? What about his brother Leslie? Quite right. Leslie never played cricket for England. Peter Parfitt? Bill Edrich?”
Mild panic began to produce the most unlikely names from the past. “Trevor Bailey? Cyril Washbrook? George Mann? How well known was this chap?”
“Practically a household word.”
He fired a frustrated cuff. “All right. You’ve got me. Who was it?”
“Roy of the Rovers,” I said and fled.
John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heals column.
Setting a minnow to catch a game fish
There we are, quayed-up so to speak, among the Hout Bay gulls. Three hundred broad-shouldered, muscle-honed specimens from the top drawer of South African deep sea angling.
And me. A minnow among leviathans.
Standing about, wiping nerve symptoms from palms, I find a public relations hand-out in the clutch of one. I read it and am startled by the small print on the last page which describes this event as “a must for anyone who has ever matched his strength and wits against the great fighters of the sea”.
Had I seen this before leaving home yesterday, I would still be there, mowing the lawn, though at 6am on a Saturday such activity might have excited the neighbours, not least before we don’t have a lawn.
I cast around for an escape route but am hemmed in on all sides by a phalanx of oil-skinned Titans, rods and foul bait to the fore, eager for the fray.
The sponsors, mine hosts, purveyors of last night’s free Italian whisky (what do you mean, Justerini isn’t Italian?) are in evidence too. One slaps another and points in my direction. The two become mirthful. Press-ganging suddenly takes on a new dimension.
So. Nothing for it but a bold face. However pale. Dread minutes pass.
When the boats arrive, all 35 of them, it is small consolation to find that ours is among the largest. Most of the rest I wouldn’t sail in my bath.
We board. I am consoled further to find at least a pair of kindred souls among our complement. They are immediately recognisable by the position they take up at the gunwales, heads well over the side. And we have yet to leave harbour.
They introduce themselves by shaking hands from a position somewhere behind their backs. One is the owner of a pizza parlour in Johannesburg, the other a wine farmer from Paarl. Nino and Theuns.
I meet the crew. Titans all, preoccupied with discussing traces and breaking strains, wind directions and, paramount, the prospect of landing the winning marlin or the tagged yellowtail worth 62 000 rands.
Our vessel moves out, motors growling like a well-trained Rottweiler. The growl says, those fighters of the deep had better watch out. For some reason, I do not feel reassured.
Up on the pulpit deck is the skipper, guiding us through the Hout Bay heads. He is a large, genial man. He is also a cigar smoker, one of which he lights as we accelerate through the first breaker.
Twenty-five grams of Marzine (my sole breakfast intake) struggle gamely on my behalf and barely win. The smoke wafts down to Nino and Theuns, who begin making goose-type noises. They both come close to abandoning ship.
The crew has set up the rods in their slots. There are seven of them, too many by four for my fancy, bristling out around the stern.
Reports start coming in on a radio from boats further out. No one is catching. How long did Hemingway’s Old Man of the Sea go without a fish? Eighty-four days? There could be hope yet.
At once, one of the lines goes with the sound of a small siren. I stumble down the gangway to watch the action. And discover, with abject horror, that I am intended to be it.
Protests are useless. The crew is insistent. Guests first and Nino and Theuns are hardly fit for that category. I am bundled into a swivel chair, harnessed up, handed the screaming rod.
To begin with, I decide big game fishing is a cinch. The angler is merely a fulcrum between a fixed point, the harness, and a moving force, the fish. All he has to do is heave and reel, heave and reel, heave and reel.
But after twenty minutes, I have the distinct feeling that the only thing still attaching arms to torso is the fabric of my windbreaker. Then the line goes limp. Reaction from the crew is as if I had dropped a vital catch in a Test match. I am slightly exonerated when they pull in the line and find the tunny has straightened the lure.
So to the cabin for liquid therapy and a stocktaking of limbs. Duty has been done, permanently, surely.
No such luck. Not an hour later, we strike a school. Five lines howl. This time we land five good-sized long-fin. The deck is awash with blood. I slip in the stuff and end up atop Nino and Theuns, by now prostrate in the bilges. We might be a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie.
For the record, our boat caught the largest fish of the day, and contest: 80 kilograms. The second day was aborted after an hour because of a gale. During that time, the biggest catch was five kilograms – about a quarter of the size of my biggest the previous day, as I shall remind by grandchildren.
There is a second national big game competition at the end of the month and another during the next. They will be at least one contestant short on each occasion.
Time Wounds All Heels column.
Duel in the African sun
Somewhere in Mozambique – With consummate poise, I execute a series of big cape passes, the odd natural or two thrown in for good measure. After five minutes of this, I am quite prepared to retire behind the makeshift bullring for a quiet bottle of lunch.
But the crowd will give me no respite. Five veronicas, the classic pass of the big cape, bring them to their feet. A languid relobera, a sweet chiqueline, and I begin to feel that I will never again be able to find peace of mind in the mundane world of journalism.
Then they let in the bull.
Being at all times honest to a fault, I will be the first to concede that the animal which comes pounding into the arena is not a fighting bull in the true sense.
Possibly, it is slightly smaller than the fighting variety. And, well, possibly a bit younger.
I am also willing to admit that its horns are not of a size one normally associates with fighting bulls. But further than that I am not prepared to budge. (My colleagues, with their usual cynicism, will claim this description perfectly fits a calf. But if there is any such talk, I shall sue.)
At one stage during my training, I had considered taking the first charge on my knees, as I had once seen the great Antonio Ordonez do in Seville. Now, however, I reject that plan as frivolous and exhibitionist.
My substitute ploy, though less spectacular, is far more effective. I merely turn sideways to the line of the bull’s attack and disappear.
For ordinary mortals, the trick would be impossible. But for a man of my lateral proportions (I would make the young Sinatra look like an overstuffed gourmet) it is easy.
Bewildered, the bull blunders on.
Twenty metres away, an aged toureiro is reclining against the bamboo stockade, chatting to a friend in the stand. The bull takes him unawares, horns ripping through his trousers, raising a bruise on his thigh.
Hopping about indelicately on one leg, the man lets fly two flurries in Portuguese which I interpret loosely as “Please, you must be more considerate” and “Why do you not use the cape?”
Back in the middle of the sandpit, I feel it is time to establish supremacy. Shoulders erect, I leap nimbly into the air and yell “Toiro!”
It is a terrible mistake. Hardly have I landed when the bull is upon me.
Round and round the ring we race. After five laps I am ahead. On the seventh, I almost lap my snorting adversary, but manage to check my pace.
By the ninth circuit, we are both dead beat. We face each other through the settling dust. The bull stands there, chest heaving and mouth agape. I stand there, chest heaving and mouth agape. It must be a horrible sight.
After a statutory two-minute pause, we are at it again.
The bull comes on. Hopefully, I extend my cape. It is a reflex action, like the threshing of a drowning man. Amazingly, it works. The bull tears at the red square, misses comprehensively, and ploughs a neat furrow in the dirt with its nose.
When it charges again, I have summoned up enough energy for a lame veronica, while shuffling off in the direction of where, in cricketing terms, square leg would be.
Now the bull, with evil aforethought, decides on a change of tactics. From a distance of two metres, it suddenly takes off. I choose the same instant to get my front foot trapped in the folds of the cape, and fall.
Fortunately, the bull has badly over-judged its leap. By the time it is able to turn, skidding like a puppy on a polished floor, I am thirty metres away and still moving.
The chase begins afresh. Midway through the eight round, it is obvious which way the result will go. The bull begins to move in for the kill.
What happens next is not in the script. At the height of its final lunge, the bull seems to lose co-ordination and crashes down in a superb belly-flop. From this position, legs splayed, it eyes me like a beached porpoise.
Now the aficionados are around me, slapping my back and mumbling praises. Someone thrusts a bandarillio, the long coloured dart, into my hand. It is the old toureiro, his thigh bound with an incredibly dirty handkerchief.
“Come, amigo,” he says softly. “Now you must place the dart in the toiro’s neck to signify the kill.”
But something in the man’s tone makes me decline. I have never been able to stand the sight of blood.
Particularly my own.
From One Man’s Africa.
At least reporters got a response
By the sort of contradiction that modern technology often inflicts upon us, the personal computer most “print” journalist use to transmit their copy is, essentially, impersonal.
They simply send a story through the international ether. Sometimes its receipt is acknowledged, sometimes not.
The post office cable, the old-fashioned telex message, was an umbilical cord. It even has its own idiom.
Cable-ese we called it. Because the cost of press telegrams was calculated by the word, and that cost obviously ballooned with distance, prefixes were used. Un- meant no or not; pro- for or to; et, and; ex-, from; and con-, with. Soonest meant as soon as possible.
It was a shorthand that sms experts might consider looking at today.
This genre of language produced one classic story of the Reuters man dispatched by his London office to Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution. A week passed with no word from him. The foreign editor sent a cable: “Why unnews?” he demanded.
Not much was happening on the spice island after a spate of killings and arrests, so the reporter sent a message back. “Unnews, good news,” it said.
The response from the foreign editor came the same afternoon. Short and sharp. “Unnews, unjob,” he cabled.
A threat like that would have sent most journalists to their typewriters to dash off the first “situationer” piece that came to mind. This correspondent, however, was made of sterner stuff. “That makes you forty-love,” he replied.
The need to keep down cabling costs led to some wonderful invention. Another Fleet Street friend spent three weeks in Addis Ababa during a similar lull in news. Eventually, he sent the foreign editor a two-word cable: “Nunc dimittis.” Which translated, as choirboys past and present know, means “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace . . .”
Quick as a flash, the foreign editor replied with another biblical reference: “Matthew 24.6.”
My friend reached for the hotel Gideon’s, looked up the reference, then rang for bar service. Matthew 24.6 held no comfort for a restless soul.
It read: “But the time is not yet.”
Often, service messages could take on a certain ambiguity. More so if the receiving party chose to read them that way.
Eric Robins, a veteran Time correspondent, was declared a prohibited immigrant in the former Rhodesia after Ian Smith’s UDI. He and I were staying at the same hotel in Lusaka when he received the notification. Earlier, Eric had written a profile of Sir Roy Welensky for the magazine. Welensky was the first and last premier of the doomed Central African Federation, a former professional boxer and a florid personality.
At three o’clock in the morning Zambia time, hours before publication of his piece, Robins was dragged from his bed by a porter monitoring the hotel telex machine.
It was a message from his New York office. “How old Welensky?” it said.
Eric was infuriated. He knew Roy Welensky’s date of birth had to be in a hundred files in the Time library and that the person editing his article could easily have looked it up.
So he sent this message back: “Old Welensky fine,” it said. “How you?”
From One man’s Africa
A holiday not to be forgotten
Dear Mr McGregor,
First let me say how much the family enjoyed those few days at your hotel. We are only sorry that you will not be able to accommodate us next season but unfortunately, according to your receptionist, you are fully booked for some time hence.
That is a great disappointment, considering the marvellous stay we had at “Bluewaves”. However, it must be an encouraging situation for your good selves. You seemed to have a number of vacant rooms when we were there. Perhaps the economy really is set to pick up, as some predict.
My wife mentioned on the telephone that we are returning your snooker balls plus table tennis set by courier. How they came to land up in our boot remains a mystery. The children deny all knowledge and I must accept their word, although I do appreciate that Mrs McGregor will be suspicious after the incident involving the shoes.
Believe me. That was no more than an ill-conceived prank, collecting them from the corridors and mixing them up like that on the stairs and in the foyer. Yet, while the thought might be admirable, inviting guests to put their shoes out for cleaning is an old-fashioned practice I think you would do well to review.
In our experience, this no longer happens at most holiday hotels (and, I assure you, we have stayed at a good few). The trend seems to be towards a small cleaning set, lodged in the cupboard where one keeps the spare blankets. It’s merely a suggestion.
Of course, the matter might have come to nothing had the housekeeper not done herself an injury by falling down like that (How is she, by the way? We sent her flowers) and if the youngest – with the best motives in the world, I might add, which is why my wife was a bit sharpish with your good woman – had not undertaken the job of polishing them before her brothers threw them down the stairwell.
Being a parent yourself, I imagine you will appreciate that four-year-olds are too immature to know that one should not apply boot polish to suede leather, but that is Melissa’s nature. She will make someone an excellent wife some day, she has this absolute fetish about polishing things.
And colouring things, for that matter. That, of course, would explain the rather unfortunate development on the Thursday afternoon when you were showing the “Creatures of the Lost Lagoon” DVD which, incidentally, we did not think suitable for young children and we were not surprised when Melissa left.
Even so, we misunderstood her completely when she announced that she was going off to “paint the porch”.
Both my wife and myself interpreted that to mean that Melissa was intent on altering the colours on the front of the doll’s house she was given last Christmas, perhaps using her paint-by-numbers set.
We certainly were not apprised of the fact that the gentleman in Bungalow 3 owned a car of such manufacture, or we might have immediately been suspicious.
Nor did we realise that our daughter would have ready access to the materials with which (if I may say so) you maintain the “Bluewaves” pool in such exceptional condition.
It may be of some consolation to the person involved to consider that he must now the most waterproof vehicle in the country, but I would urge that you get your staff to put a lock on that shed.
On the subject of presents, our eldest assures us that he acted entirely without malice when he went to practise his new trumpet that night behind the ladies’ powder-room. He says when he blew down the overflow duct, it was merely as an experiment in resonance and he had no idea anybody was “ensconced”.
Still, I imagine Mrs Clifford sees the funny side of it by now.
My son also asks me to apologise on his behalf for his language to you in the affair over the pedal-boat. Normally, he never uses those terms. Indeed, we were not aware that words like those were part of his vocabulary.
Gary says it was a reaction to having been called a “bloody Vaalie” but I myself believe his response was out of genuine fear, considering how far out to sea he was when he decided to “abandon ship” , as he puts it. The redeeming aspect of it all is that he is a reasonable swimmer.
My son also says – and I think he has a point – that if it is the rule of the hotel that those craft should not be employed beyond the mouth of the lagoon, you should have a large notice up somewhere to that effect.
Did you manage to get it back, by the way? Although, of course, you are bound to be insured against that sort of thing.
I trust your electricity will have been restored by this time, and the other repairs done. I am not an expert in these matters, and it is probably none of my business, but if I were you I would get somebody to have a look at the wiring.
It seems ridiculous to me that an entire hotel should lose its power because a small metal spaceship becomes jammed in a light socket. And my friends tell me the fire would never have happened if you had installed an adequate “earth leakage” system.
Once again, sir, let me express our sincere regret that you will not have room for us next year.
Yours etc.
P. S. We will certainly try again closer to the time, in case there should be any cancellations. The prospect of another holiday at “Bluewater” is too good to be missed.
From John Ryan’s Time wounds all heels column
If you can’t stand the heat
It was in my early years of bachelorhood that I discovered a feeling for the culinary arts.
Some men resist kitchens as they might the main computer room at Cape Kennedy, but I have never been one of those. My attitude to that traditional female preserve is: If you can’t beat them, scramble them.
In this mood last weekend, my family in town at a matinee, I decided to whip up a Quiche Lorraine for us for supper. Now a Quiche Lorraine, as any gourmet cook knows, is a tricky little dish in that one has to achieve just the right blend of bacon, cheese and seasoning, being in the process extremely canny with the salt. A pinch too much will spoil everything.
I had just finished this delicate preparation, had just popped the flan into a preheated oven, when the doorbell rang.
It was a young man from a commune down the road, though I hardly recognised him at first behind a flour-mask that extended from chin to eye-level. He seemed equally taken aback to find me in my ruffled apron but recovered to ask if I could let him have a bouquet garni, mispronouncing a name I could see was as foreign to him as colloquial Kurdish. He also asked if I knew anything about pastry-making.
Is the Pope a Catholic, I said to myself, but aloud I told him, “I think you’d better take me to your recipe.” We picked up the bouquet garni on the way out.
The kitchen in the commune was enviably large but in a state of devastation. Unwashed utensils lay about as though distributed by a hurricane.
At the centre of things was a pastry board containing a very solid lump of dough and surrounded by ingredients that indicated a production line for a steak and tomato pie. The recipe was there to prove it, though half hidden under a jumble of plates and pans.
It seemed my new friend George (for the sake of anonymity) had drawn the short straw in the cook-of-the-day stakes. His commune mates were all down at the beach.
Thus far, George had followed the recipe in good faith, taking care to prepare everything before the actual baking process. But the tomato looked as if it had been garrotted, the onion chopped by the simply process of throwing it under a bus. The garlic had been butchered skin and all.
I set all this aside, suggesting it might be saved for some future soup, and called for a new lot. I began by showing George how to skin tomatoes by immersing them in boiling water, then in cold.
Next I demonstrated the best method of slicing onions, halving them first to stop them rolling around. Then I tapped the garlic to loosen the skin.
“Now the way to crush a clove of garlic,” I told George, “is to place it in salt. After that, it comes apart at the point of a knife. Like so.“
Having adjusted the oven, I trimmed and floured the meat and placed it all in a pie dish with salt, pepper and the bouquet garni. I rolled the dough to the thickness of a five-rand piece, set it with a hole at centre, decorated the top with pastry leaves and brushed on the beaten egg. I considered breaking the egg with one hand, as I am able to do, but rejected the idea as possibly too ostentatious. Then I put the pie in the fridge for ten minutes to relax.
“That’s a good tip to remember,” I said to George. “A lot of cook books don’t tell you to do that.”
While waiting for the pie to settle, I put on the kettle with George’s permission and made us some tea, pouring the tea into the milk to scald it. Somehow tea never tastes the same the other way about.
George had seemed most impressed at all these goings-on and said as much. “Look,” I told him, “cooking’s just a matter of knowing a few basics, then being able to read the recipe.
“Women deliberately load the whole thing with mystique. It’s a defence mechanism. They’re afraid we’ll think less of them. If too many men came to realise how easy it was to cook, the stature of the woman slaving over the hot stove just wouldn’t be the same.”
George said he saw.
After ten minutes, I took the pie from the fridge, baked it for 30 minutes at 220C until the pastry was well risen and golden brown, then lowered the heat and left the rest to George. I told him the meat should be done in about two hours and suggested one or two accompaniments. Perhaps just cauliflower and peas, if George could manage those.
George could hardly thank me enough and rushed out ahead of me to buy the frozen vegetables.
Outside, a light rain was falling but the world seemed an exceptionally good place. I got to thinking how right that axiom is, about it being better to give than to receive.
In these spirits did I whistle my way home, back through the front door and up the stairs. Back to the acrid and highly distinctive smell of burning Quiche Lorraine that emanated from the kitchen.
Still, the tinned spaghetti we eventually had for supper was opened to a nicety.
High Noon in torrid Luanda
November in Luanda is a knock-down and drag-out month for heat. Which, like Bermuda’s sandflies and Daytona Beach’s mosquitoes, is not a fact you will see bandied about in travel guides.
By eleven o’clock, even the black Angolans – whom one would expect to be reasonably immune to the situation – are scurrying off to find some respite among the palm groves.
They dart from one pool of shade to the next, criss-crossing streets and alleys as they go, like a terrorised crowd fleeing before some hidden sniper.
One o’clock is the meridian. Now the siesta is fully into its stride, the pavements downtown deserted.
Except for me, trudging along on a pair of fried eggs. Intermittently massaging a neck gone stiff to no avail, from turning to look out for taxis.
And a solitary policeman. Grey of face and uniform, he keeps measured pace on the other side of the street, plainly suspicious of the stranger who chooses to venture out in this sauna weather.
With sidelong glances, we watch each other through the haze that rises from the tarmac. Clomp. Clomp. The sound of our feet is an infraction upon the gentle snoring of the city.
I think this could make a good movie scenario. Then remember that it did. ‘High Noon’, of course. Gary Cooper, the late Princess Grace, and the most convincing bunch of renegades that ever appeared on celluloid.
The vision of Deadwood Gulch (or was it Dodge) grows as we turn a corner, still faultlessly in step, and head towards the old town hall. It’s the heat, naturally, and the silence, the shuttered buildings and the minute hand up in the clock tower, moving fatefully onward.
In my mind, it becomes a game. The cop, gun strapped low, can be Cooper. A little darker and rounder, perhaps, but pure granite underneath.
Me? I’m Tonto, Festus or Pancho. Some such sidekick. Not quite a Cooper but the next best thing. A veteran of shoot-outs and bar brawls.
Striding out to our next showdown, I smile conspiratorially across at my partner. He responds with a frown. Deadwood Gulch fades into reality.
My hotel still being a long way off, I start whistling to lighten the load. The policeman’s frown darkens so I stop. Maybe it’s a jailable offence to whistle during the siesta.
At once, an alarm bell begins to ring somewhere ahead of us.
Cooper, that was, acts commendably in character. The large gun is palmed, quick as a flash. He turns towards me but is persuaded by my idiot expression that I can have nothing to do with this new development.
Together we move towards the sound. The source turns out to be a jeweller’s shop, which fact causes us to exchange meaningful glances.
Peering through the glass frontage, we see the alarm on an inside wall. Its little hammer is beating in agitation. There is no other sign of movement.
The policeman and I confer by way of jumbled sign-language. The front door, we agree – after furious pulling and pushing at the knob – is impenetrable.
But running down both sides of the shop are service lanes. My companion signals that I should tackle one while he investigates the other.
Stumbling past dustbins, I find a small window near the back of the building. It is open but stoutly burglar-proofed.
I chin myself up on the ledge, long enough to gain an impression of a dark room, full of packing cases and broken timepieces. Also to glimpse an indefinable shape – possibly someone’s cap – edging forward above the level of a work-bench.
I drop down, charged with adrenalin, and sprint back to the street, clearing the dustbins like a steeple-chaser.
Taking the bend at full speed, I run straight into the chest of a grey uniform, which clutches me eagerly. Surprised, I stare into the face and, suddenly, the heat of the day gives way to a clammy chill.
It is not my policeman!
Stuttered explanations fall on foreign ears. I point wildly at the interior of the shop and the new cop grunts knowingly. Though he is shorter than my friend, his grip is ferocious.
I consider the circumstantial evidence. A burgled shop, a stranger in obvious flight from the scene. My fingerprints on the windowsill.
Of course, everything will be sweet when Cooper shows up. If he shows up. What if he had taken off after the real burglar? Never to be encountered again? Or not by me, at any rate.
But even as I stand there, with the policeman’s arm around my throat, Cooper emerges from the other lane.
He is carrying a large ginger cat. He drops it as he takes in the scene, stands poised for a moment, then moves to the attack.
A barrage of slaps to the other policeman’s neck secures my immediate release. The invective that accompanies this threatens to curl the paving stones.
The second cop retreats, spectacularly abashed. My friend takes my arm. And together, Cooper and Festus (or Tonto or Pancho) go forward in search of new pursuits.
A cold beer, I feel, would be an adventure in itself.
From One Man’s Africa
A hot time in the hollow tree
News that a library in the north of England has banned from its shelves a book about the sex life of the natterjack toad makes one wonder what on earth its subscribers may be missing.
He hit town just after dark, riding fast, the sweat of the journey turned to salt on his brow, the taste of dust on his tongue where it had seeped through the neckershief. It had been a long day and it could be a longer night.
He barely slackened pace as he swung into the main street, past the single saloon, for he knew where he was going. He had been there many times before. At a faded sign that said No 17, outside a rough clapboard house, he dismounted and drew his sword and pistol, placing both in a stained duffle bag on the carrier.
Then Horatio Frog leaned his off-road bicycle against a tree.
When eventually he spoke, the question emerged as a hoarse croak. The dust had done something diabolical to his larynx. Yet the answer from within the house was eager, as always: “Yes, kind sir, I sit and spin!”
The lady was a spin doctor for her cousin in local government yet, in the matter of dialogue, Horatio Frog had to admit she lacked imagination.
But with one bound, that left the front door swinging drunkenly on its hinges, he was by her side. He spoke again, passion rising in his voice like a river: “Do you always sit and spin in a sheer négligé from Paris?” asked Frog.
At once, there was a frantic rending as Frog tore away at the material, of the neckerchief still around his mouth. Then, hotly, their lips met and the air became filled with the chemistry of old, of many such nights and many such meetings.
And once more, Missy Mouse (for it was indeed she) fell limply into his arms. Though not without some difficulty, for Frog had forgotten to unbuckle his scabbard.
His embrace was hungrier this time, almost animal. Missy Mouse could feel a wild urgency in him. She managed a small, nervous giggle before they finally came together as one and the night exploded in a myriad stars.
Later, much later, she found the energy to speak. “Of course, you know,” she said, ‘Without my Uncle Rat’s consent, I couldn’t marry the Pres-i-dent.”
The effect on Horatio Frog was as though shocked by a thousand volts. “Marry?” he exclaimed. “Who the heck’s talking about marrying? I’m a travelling man, woman, you know that! I’ve got a reputation to keep!”
But even as he uttered the words, Horatio Frog realised the game was up. For there in the doorway stood Uncle Rat himself. In one large hand was a shotgun; in the other, the stained duffle bag and one of Frog’s bicycle wheels.
Escape was impossible and Uncle Rat laughed and shook his fat sides to see the frog so compromised.
Their wedding, in a hollow tree by the lake, was an elaborate affair although to Frog’s mind the breakfast – prepared by the bride’s fair hand – left a good deal to be desired. “Two green beans and a black-eyed pea?” he muttered to her between the speeches. “Don’t you know anything about insect cooking?”
But in the night, when they were alone, when the moon hung like a plump cricket (or so Horatio Frog imagined) on the water, it was good, it was grand.
Missy Mouse whispered tenderly, “Did the earth move for you too?”
“It wasn’t the earth,” said Frog. “It was the rotten moss in this old tree. I’ve noticed it before.”
“Before?” cried Missy Mouse. “How could you have noticed it before? Unless you were here with another woman?!”
It was their first argument and one aggravated when Missy Mouse got around to producing the honeymoon brunch – two stale carrots and a frostbitten radish. Clearly, Frog thought, her talents lay in other directions. And it was this thought that brought them together once more. So they made up. And made up.
Afterwards, Frog took her sailing on the lake and it was thus the tragedy struck that has become legend. Their beautiful pea-green boat became snarled up in a bunch of weeds. Frog tried to punt them clear with a runcible spoon but to no avail.
So he persuaded Missy Mouse that they would both have to step out on to a convenient lily-pad and push. That lily-pad, as we now know, was actually a large green snake in cunning disguise who swallowed them up.
‘It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again,” the snake was to comment later, to no one in particular. “These mixed marriages never work.”
John Ryan’s Midweek column, Cape Argus.
A wing and a prayer
LUANDA – Perhaps because of their maritime background, the Portuguese display a healthy cynicism about airlines and flying.
Many still maintain the acronym of their national carrier, TAP, stands for Take Another Plane.
And in the old Lourenco Marques, Mozambique, expatriates from the mainland used to say the name of the internal service, DETA, was equally cautionary. It warned travellers: Don’t Expect To Arrive.
What slogan, one wonders, would they apply to the present-day TAAG (Transportes Aereos de Angola) line in this other independent province?
Terror And Anguish Guaranteed? Transports Arabs And Goats? Either would be apt.
Travelling TAAG is like being on a mid-quality indigenous bus in almost any part of the continent, with the essential difference that the trauma is all taking place at 30 000 feet.
The impression that this may not be your ordinary everyday shuttle begins with a small maul at Luanda Airport at six in the morning – a crush of humanity, of people violently intent on being somewhere else.
To say the aircraft eventually becomes packed would be a laughable understatement. Every seat is taken, three-quarters of them twice over. The additional numbers consist of children, lap-held. Some are sucklings, noisily having breakfast. Most of the rest could qualify as the oldest babies in the world.
Such congestion makes it difficult to slap at the mosquitoes and flies that screen anxious first-timers from the demonstration of how they would be expected to conduct themselves should the aircraft end up in the drink.
A subjective appraisal of conditions suggests that prospect may not be too far distant.
Outside on the apron, a hefty queue of passengers snakes its way to another TAAG 737. Following it is a tractor and trailer bearing that flight’s luggage.
A man in overalls is riding shotgun on the trailer. It hits a rut in the tarmac and several suitcases and parcels fall off. This amuses the trailer attendant to the extent that he tosses a few more over the tailgate for good measure. He continues to chortle as he arrives and helps load the hold.
After the plane to Malanje takes off, five cases and two parcels remain scattered on the apron.
While the cabin doors of our aircraft are about to close, two white men clamour up the stairs. “We’re with the commander,” they say. Immediately, two seats are cleared in the front row and the congestion ebbs back to compensate.
Coffee, tea or milk? A ridiculous prospect on Flight 016. Although there are five hostesses aboard, adding madly to the overload, no trolley would be able to negotiate the aisle.
TAAG captains seem to have a width of discretion on public safety. The man who flies us to Lubango takes the direct route, right over the war zone. And he does not bother with the tight-circle descent, the internationally accepted way of keeping missiles out of posteriors.
We eventually return to Luanda by a deviation further out to sea, taking in distant aspects of Benguela and Lobito. That pilot should go far; the other, the further the better.
Lubango airport is like a scene from MASH, abuzz with helicopters, hospital planes and MIG-21s and 23s. The MIGs are enthralling with their low sweeps and parachute-assisted landings. We have a fair opportunity to appreciate them. The plane from Luanda is an hour late.
But its lateness is less surprising to the government officials who have delivered us to the airport than the fact that it has arrived at all. Apparently every day at Lubango airport contains an element of lottery.
Just ahead in the queue is our commander himself. At the foot of the stairway he is stopped by a private in the Fapla army, who says he may not proceed until the aircraft is searched.
“But I’m the captain!” says the captain.
“Maybe you’re the captain in the air,’ says the soldier, ‘but I’m the captain on the ground.”
TAAG advertises 15 regular flights out of Luanda. Insofar as it is within my power to decide, the airline will be at least one passenger short on every such occasion.
From “One Man’s Africa”
John Ryan 