Of Diamonds and Dentistry

Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Brian La Trobe.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012901672

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4653-0170-3

Softcover 978-1-4653-0169-7

Ebook 978-1-4653-0500-8

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To a large extent this work is autobiographical. However the passage of over five decades may have dulled the accuracy of certain events and the characters portrayed. The author apologises, in advance, for any inaccuracies in describing certain persons or events.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

0800-891-366

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Orders@Xlibris.co.nz

700163

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1  In the beginning

Chapter 2  Schoolboy pranks

Chapter 3  Uncle George and holidays

in Cape Town.

Chapter 4  Life after school.

Chapter 5  Peggy: earlier years

Chapter 6  Those first years in Scotland and England

Chapter 7  My first digs and the start of a lifelong friendship.

Chapter 8  A major milestone: Peggy’s arrival

Chapter 9  The beginning of life together

Chapter 10  King’s College: the long climb up the academic ladder.

Chapter 11  A bicycle made for two

Chapter 12  Holland and Belgium on two wheels

Chapter 13  From academic study to clinical training

Chapter 14  Prosthetic dentistry

Chapter 15  The art of extracting teeth

Chapter 16  Meeting Dr Carpenter

Chapter 17  Charing Cross Hospital

Chapter 18  Italian Holiday.

Chapter 19  Pompeii

Chapter 20  Learning the Main Art of Dental Practice

Chapter 21  Practical Periodontology

Chapter 22  A step up the ladder

Chapter 23  The Count Down to Qualification

Chapter 24  The early years of dental practice

Chapter 25  Homecoming

Chapter 26  I hang my brass plate in Pinelands

Chapter 27  The passing of Lizzie La Trobe

Chapter 28  Change of plan

Chapter 29  Oranjemund

Chapter 30  The building and equipping of the new dental surgeries

Chapter 31  The opening of the dental clinic

Chapter 32  The Treatment of Edward.

Chapter 33  Other characters who touched my life

Chapter 34  The Ovambo clinics

Chapter 35  The dentigerous cyst

Chapter 36  The making of the movie of the operation.

Chapter 37  The history of the Mule Derby in my day

Chapter 38  The birth of the Pink Pan.

Chapter 39  The CDM Golf Course and Golf Tours

Chapter 40  Dental Clinic—ongoing

Chapter 41  The Plastibell episode

Chapter 42  Clinical trials conducted at the Oranjemund Dental Clinic

Chapter 43  Bonding plastic of juvenile teeth to prevent dental caries.

Chapter 44  Memorable Hospital Cases

Chapter 45  Re-implantation of Teeth

Chapter 46  Animal Crackers in my Soup

Chapter 47  Other characters of the time

Chapter 48  Long Leave 1966

Chapter 49  England and old friends

Chapter 50  Highlights of our continental tour

Chapter 51  The Journey home on the Jagerfontein

Chapter 52  Flying with Jack Campbell

Chapter 53  Illicit Diamond Buying (IDB)

Chapter 54  Arrivederci Oranjemund

Chapter 55  Life after Oranjemund

Epilogue

Acknowledgements.

To Peggy who bore my bad habits, moods, crazy ideas and our four wonderful sons: Christopher—Mark—Gavin—Andrew.

Foreword

by Bob Molloy.

Having known him for half his allotted span I’m pleased to write this foreword to Brian La Trobe’s memoir of a life well lived. His hilarious account of childhood years and early training in chemistry, medicine and dentistry could be simply be read as a laugh-a-line satire, but that would belie the fact he was at all times a serious student of the human condition, ever empathetic and willing to step in where he could.

An all-rounder, good at sport he also excelled academically and continued to do so throughout a career which took him to the heights of his profession. Much of his time as a dentist was spent in Oranjemund, a mining town in the Namib Desert which he describes with gentle satire. He set up the town’s first dental clinic and offered a very high level of dental care, including maxillo-facial surgery. At least one of his cases was presented at an international medical conference in Paris as a world first. Indeed a man for all seasons, he was an avid poet and published several booklets including poems on Oranjemund.

He was also a great community activist and among other things was behind the setting up of several major charity fundraisers. After Oranjemund he served several terms as mayor of Grahamstown and went on to international fame as one of the first eco-activists in the waste management field.

Among other achievements he designed and built SA’s first energy from Waste Project to produce electricity and developed a process to treat human waste by forced aeration composting. He also created processes to treat animal waste and developed a patented waterless, odourless sanitation system which is manufactured in South Africa and Ghana.

His work in this field attracted a swathe of awards including the very prestigious Gold Award for the best Innovation and Contribution to Health Care in Africa by the Organisation of African Unity and World Intellectual Property Organisation, the Terra Nova award for Land

and the Intel Environment Award presented at the Tech Museum Awards held annually in Silicon Valley, California. His ‘Enviro Loo’ was one of 580 nominations representing 80 countries considered for the Tech Awards.

In his acceptance speech Brian explained that half the world’s population—some 3-billion people—did not have access to fresh water and sanitation. His invention is a dry sanitation system that requires no water, chemicals or electricity for its operation. Today the Brian La Trobe Foundation continues this and other charitable work.

Bob Molloy

Keri Keri

New Zealand

January 2011

Introduction

Christian Ignatious La Trobe (1758-1836) while on his 83 day voyage to the Cape of Good Hope aboard the sailing ship Albion in 1815 held boredom at bay by reading and writing letters to his children. He kept up the habit throughout his year-long stay at the Cape Colony. As a result today we have the benefit of being able to read about his African experience because those letters were kept and eventually compiled into book form: La Trobe’s Travel to Africa 1815 to 1816 . It’s a wonderful read. You each have a copy and it is sincerely hoped you have read it.

My parents, your grandparents, you never knew. My father Frank died in 1953 and my mother, Elizabeth, known affectionately by all and sundry as Lizzie died when Mark was a few months old. It is a great shame that you did not have the enriching experience of knowing them. You will recall the wonderful times that you had with Granny Dolphin and what a wonderful person she was. You remember how you loved her and how she loved you. The hours of story telling of Xhosa legends of the past and the ghost stories that raised the hair on your heads. All too soon she was taken from us but at least you have fond memories of her.

When I came to write the history of the La Trobe’s in Africa for the La Trobe International Symposium held in Paris in 1997 I found it extremely difficult to write something meaningful about my own parents. It’s not often that the conclusion of one book ends up in the foreword of another but it is reproduced here to portray my feelings of inadequacy when writing about my parents.

These few pages, because of the necessity for brevity, depict an over-simplified tale of the lives of a few of our recent ancestors. While conscious of my literary shortcomings I was very aware of the impossibility of portraying what might have been a very full and fruitful life in a few lines. There is little comfort in saying that even Winston Churchill ended up as a few lines in a history book. For even when writing of my own parents, who in their lifetime gave to my sister, brother and myself so much of themselves with so much love, I wanted to tell the world everything about two wonderful people yet found it extremely difficult to select the most apt recollections from a flood of marvelous memories. What to say and what not to say. Let that be the epitaph to all the parents of this little La Trobe saga. For as they live, they die and their children and their children’s children bear testimony to their memory

The fondest memories of you all.

Are embedded in our minds recall.

Our children and those to come

Whose lives are still to play.

Have a thought so kind

For those of us today.

B.E. La Trobe. May 1997.

The art of letter writing is something of the past so you will be spared the trouble of piecing together the story of events in the lives of your mother and father. What I have written is not to perpetuate our memory longer than normal, that would be presumptuous and foolhardy, it is written because you might just find it interesting.

Chapter 1

In the beginning

My youth was spent in Port Elizabeth, the youngest in the family to elder brother Frank and sister Daphne—known to everybody as Tootie. I only ever went to one school, from kindergarten to Matric, at Marist Brothers and ended my career there as Head Prefect. My early life and formative years traversed the depression years of the Thirties. Times were tough. There is no intention to dwell on these years except to highlight odd things. Peggy, your wonderful and ever caring mother, also grew up in P.E. but our paths did not cross while we were at school.

The La Trobe family lived at 12 Raleigh Street, Port Elizabeth. The house still stands today. There was no television to watch and very little radio. School sport occupied Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. Once homework was completed in the afternoons the neighbourhood kids would congregate in the streets to play cricket in the summer; trees substituted as wickets and tennis balls for cricket balls. With each batsman’s dismissal there were huge arguments of out—not out as there were no umpires. In winter we played marbles, variations of Hide and Seek and street soccer with any sort of available ball. In November we flew handmade kites. If the group was really bored some timid soul would be coerced into knocking on some old ladies front door and run while the rest of the group would remain in hiding to watch her open the door to no one on her doorstep. That would induce great hilarity.

In summer we would play cricket until it was almost too dark to see the ball. Parents would sit on their verandas and watch until the mothers called us in when it was time for bed. A cry of Just another 10 minutes Ma would usually fall on deaf ears. The penalty of hitting a boundary ran the risk of breaking a window pane in which case the game would come to an abrupt halt. Players would scatter and disappear, up lanes, into trees, into hedges, over fences, back home to lie on your bed and appear to be reading a book and if asked by an irate mother, vow that God being your witness you had been there all afternoon.

If you were unfortunate enough to have been seen to be the batter, proud as you might have been with the shot, the chances were that you were in line for a hiding when your father arrived home but the worst would be when you would be made to go to the house with the fractured window and apologise to the unhappy owner.

Then there was tok tokkie, the attaching of a long piece of cotton to the front door knocker of a house then retire across the street behind a tree or bush, tug the line then give it slack. Watch the owner open the door to find nobody there and when the door closed repeat the performance. Great fun. A variation of this game was to collect dog turds, place them in a box then wrap the obnoxious load in a tidy brown paper parcel neatly tied with string. The parcel was then placed on the pavement in a conspicuous spot and the gang would watch from behind a fence or hedge. Many would see the parcel and simply ignore it. Others would stop, push it with their foot and look around to see if they were being observed. The majority would lose courage and walk on. All this would bring endless enjoyment to the hidden observers.

Ultimately someone after going through all the motions would pick up the parcel. A male would put it in his pocket and a female would deftly place it in her bag and walk on. This would bring muffled howls of disappointment from the watchers. During the next half hour the gang would entertain each other with enactments of what happened at home when the victim actually opened the parcel.

However the ultimate first prize was when the victim went through all the motions, picked up the parcel and opened it on the spot. As soon as the contents were laid bare the package would be dropped as if it was a freshly forged and seriously hot horse shoe. The guy knew that he was being watched. The watchers would roll around in the hedge splitting their sides with silent mirth as any noise could bring about instant retaliation if caught. Much more fun than watching TV. Although the word gang has been used there were no street gangs as the word today implies. Just a bunch of kids, making their own fun.

One of the daily chores after school was to walk to the United Dairy in Russell Road to buy a pint of milk. It was cheaper if you took your own jug instead of collecting it in a bottle. When I got home from school, mother would take a tickey (three pence) from her purse and give it to me with her right hand while the left offered the hated jug . I could plead, cajole, rant and rave and rebel but mother would say not another word, just look me in the eye with her two out-stretched hands until I gave in, defeated. She was a wonderful psychologist.

I hated with intense passion having to carry that jug of milk because when the other kids in the street saw me coming they would chant Here comes pussycat or here comes the udder fellow It was a daily chore because we did not have a fridge. Instead we had a bloody awful demanding icebox, my second pet hate.

Brother Frank hated the ice-box as much as I did as it was Frank’s job to go to the Imperial Cold Storage Company every Saturday to collect a huge block of ice weighing about 50 Kg, manhandle it into a hessian corn sack and somehow bring it home on his bicycle, uphill all the way. On reaching home the lump of ice had to be wrestled into the top chamber of the ice box where one could easily lose a finger getting it safely into its resting place. There it immediately began to melt, lasting about a week when Frank’s agony would begin again.

The ice box capacity would have been about half the content of a small bar fridge, barely big enough to house the family’s supply of eggs, butter and milk. My responsibility was to empty the large ceramic bowl placed on the floor under the box which collected the water as the ice melted. This duty had to be carried out every afternoon; if I forgot the kitchen floor would flood as the bowl began to overflow. Guess who had to mop it up? Forget this responsibility on two consecutive afternoons and you could be in line for a double dose of castor oil the following Friday.

This was a Lizzie favourite punishment; it would keep the culprit off the streets for a whole day as you dare not stray more than 20 metres from the thunder box because with castor oil when you had to go YOU HAD TO GO! And at the end of the purge Lizzie had the satisfaction of knowing she had a very clean child and you had a very tender and scoured arse. Heaven help you if you had a cough. When the content of your bowels were so liquid a cough could be a disaster. In such a case it required an inordinately powerful contraction of the sphincter muscle not to produce an embarrassing squirt.

No matter what you were suffering from the medicine of choice was a purgative, anything from Senna Pods, Epsom Salts, Extract of Lettuce or prunes, Milk of Magnesia, liquid paraffin (this was not a jet fuel but it had similar affects on the human gut) and of course the dreaded castor oil. The family doctors were no better. In those days all the GP’s made house calls. After examination with his stethoscope, taking the pulse, taking the temperature, looking into the ears and pummelling the gut he would ponder for a while, (all part of the bedside technique) then write out the prescription. Before he left, his parting words were always the boy must have complete bed rest for three days and see to it that he keeps his bowels open If you were confined to bed that meant only one thing, a daily soapy water enema.

To be subjected to such a process was downright demoralizing, embarrassing and uncomfortable. The equipment, every home had one, consisted of a two-litre can (the deluxe models had a ceramic jar decorated with cherubic angels sitting on clouds—what a fiendish sense of humour). The can was connected with a rubber tube to the business end of the system which was a vulcanite black pipe that had an on/off valve. It required a team of three to operate the system: the servant girl who held the can of soapy warm water at shoulder level, the caring mother and of course the poor bloody victim who was either crying his eyes out or earnestly requesting a postponement. Such pleas were as futile as throwing crap at a Boeing 747. The victim was made to assume an elbows/knees position on the bed, usually covered with a rubber sheet for obvious reasons.

If you were lucky the dreaded vulcanite tube was given a smear of Vaseline before insertion into your tender backside. Before opening the tap your caring mother who was only doing this for your own good would say to the servant girl: Are you ready up there, Elsie? Yes madam. Madam can give it a go. The tap would be opened and immediately it felt as if the contents of the Boulder Dam were being diverted into your bowels. You had to clench immediately so as not to lose it all. All entreaties to stop were ignored until the full two litres had been taken on board. Next you were told to rest in that position for five minutes.

Rest, my bloody Irish—all you were doing was concentrating on not spraying the entire room or anybody who was standing in the way. Finally you would be allowed to go to the toilet to evacuate the whole explosive load. Getting there was quite a mission, especially at 12 Raleigh Street as the toilet was down five steps outside the kitchen door and a further trot to the toilet at the end of the garden—sometimes you made it and sometimes you didn’t. That’s when I learned the meaning of the phrase: You win some, you lose some.

How things have changed. Kids today can have their antibiotic as a tablet, capsule or in liquid form; at worst they might get a jab in the arm or butt. Who has ever heard of an enema or being steamed to open your chest so that you can breathe. There were no antibiotics in our childhood. If you got an infection such as Tonsillitis, Diphtheria, Whooping Cough or Scarlet Fever you either got better or you fell off the twig.

If you contracted pneumonia everybody sat at your bedside, including the doctor, and watched the patient while you sweated it out through various stages of delirium. They waited for the so-called crisis which occurred about ten days after the start of the infection. If you survived the crisis you got better. Giving the child an enema, steaming or turfing it into a bath of cold water if it had a fit or convulsion gave the mother of the child something to do. Even convalescence had its hazards, two of which were Lizzie’s favourite tonics for children. Each guaranteed a rapid recovery.

Scotts Emulsion was packaged in huge bottles of about a litre capacity. I still have the image of the label imprinted on my mind. It was yellow in colour and depicted a fisherman clad in oil skins carrying a huge fish on a rope over his shoulder. It tasted like rotting fish liver in oil with a touch of cat sick, which is what it probably was. The other tonic was cod-liver oil and malt. This had the consistency of mud, used axle grease and peanut butter. The taste was vile. There was no question of a quick swallow; you just had to munch your way through it.

While on the subject of purgatives: when the chocolate laxative, Brooklax, first came on the market, mother’s brother Jimmy was a Custom and Excise man. He managed to get a few samples out of the first shipment imported. Knowing that sister Lizzie and Frank liked to clear their bowels and their minds every Friday evening with a good dose of Epsom salts and thinking that they might wish to change brands he brought around a few slabs of Brooklax. Unfortunately nobody was at home at the time so he just pushed the slabs through the letter box in the front door. Equally unfortunately the first one home was Tootie who happened to be a chocoholic. She ripped off the wrappers and chomped the lot without even looking to see where the stuff was made, let alone what it contained.

Very few people had house phones in those days so Uncle Jimmy would have no way of knowing until his next visit if Lizzie or Frank had tried the new fangled laxative and dear Tootie was not going to volunteer that she had scoffed all the gift chocolate which, as far as she was concerned, was like manna from heaven. Little did we know what was to come that night. The ferocity of poor Tootie’s gut response was equivalent to about 4 on the Richter scale. Each slab of Brooklax consisted of 15 little blocks per slab. The recommended dose for a very satisfying bowel movement was three. Tootie had taken 45 little blocks at one sitting! At some ungodly hour of the night the shit hit the fan both literally, figuratively, and physically and 12 Raleigh Street only had one outside toilet. The poor thing spent the entire night perched on the outside throne.

The whole family had to take turns in bringing her cups of weak tea laced with another of Lizzie’s old Dutch remedies called versterk dripples , (strengthening drops), or hold up her head as she became weaker . As dawn approached Tootie started to laugh and laugh and become quite silly, making light of her predicament. Lizzie said she was becoming hysterical . Only years later did I discover during my studies that "versterk dripples was a 90 % alcoholic extract of a very bitter herb. Dear Tootie not only had the shits—she was pissed out of her mind.

In voicing what life was like for those born before the 1940s, Alan Jones said it all: "We were born before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Zerox, plastic, contact lenses, videos, Frisbees and the Pill. We were before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ball point pens; before dish washers, tumble dryers, electric blankets, air conditioners, drip dry clothes and before man walked on the Moon.

We got married first and then lived together (how quaint can you be?). We thought fast food was what you ate during Lent, a big Mac was an over—sized raincoat and ‘crumpet’ was something you ate with your cup of tea. We existed before house husbands, computer dating, dual careers and when a meaningful relationship meant getting along with your cousins and ‘sheltered accommodation’ was where you waited for the bus.

We were before day care centres, group homes and disposable nappies. We never heard of FM radio, tape decks, electric typewriters, artificial hearts, word processors, yoghurt and young men wearing earrings. For us ‘time sharing’ meant togetherness, a chip was a piece of wood or a fried potato, hardware meant nuts and bolts and software wasn’t a word. Before 1940 ‘Made in Japan’ meant junk, the term ‘making out’ referred to how you did in the exams, a ‘stud’ was something that fastened a collar to a shirt and ‘going all the way’ meant staying on the bus to the terminus. Pizzas, McDonalds and instant coffee were unheard of.

In our day cigarette smoking was fashionable, ‘grass’ was mown, coke was kept in the coal house, a joint was a piece of meat you had on Sundays and pot was something you cooked in. Rock music was grandmother’s lullaby, Eldorado was an ice cream, a gay person was the life and soul of a party and nothing more and aids just a beauty treatment or help for someone in trouble.We who were born before 1940 must be a hardy bunch when you think of the way in which the world has changed and the adjustments we had to make.

Chapter 2

Schoolboy pranks

School was interspersed with holidays usually spent fishing on the Swartkops river, camping or—during the Second World War—illegal entry into a prohibited area between the mouth of the Swartkops River and St George’s Strand, now known as Blue Water Bay. This area was used as a bombing range by the RAF 43 and 44 flying school. It is still covered by good old East Cape bush and development has been concentrated on the other side of the national road.The idea of these forays into prohibited territory was to recover machine gun bullets and on one occasion to collect flotsam from the half section of a torpedoed US Liberty ship that ended up in Algoa Bay, and of course, watching Avro Anson aircraft with fledgling crews trying to hit targets along the shore line. It never occurred to us that we might have been in personal danger.

Sport revolved around athletics, cricket, tennis, swimming in the summer, rugby and hockey in the winter. How well I remember the purchase of my first Marist Brothers rugby jersey, probably aged about nine years. How very proud I was of it and my over-sized first pair of rugby boots (Lizzie said I would have to grow into them). The jersey has long since gone to where all good rugby jerseys go after falling off the peg but my first pair of spectacles acquired about that time are still around.The details of my school sporting career have been lost down memory lane but there still remains the the excitement of the first Under-11 rugby match against Grey College Junior and the occasional train trips to Uitenhage and Grahamstown to play against Marist Uitenhage and Muir and St Aidans. I was never an outstanding player but enjoyed every sport activity and managed in time to play rugby, cricket and swim at the first team level.

On the Arts side I had little to brag about. I thought that the musical appreciation classes were a joke—much to my regret in later life—though I did once appear on the stage of the Port Elizabeth Opera House at aged 11 in the School Gilbert and Sullivan operetta A Court Jester. I was chosen not because of any theatrical talent but because everybody in the school was forced to participate. Rehearsals lasted for over a year. I was supposed to have taken the part of the Chief Shepherd but was busted down to an ordinary shepherd because of consistently fluffing my five word, single sentence speaking part.

The shepherds and the soldiers only appeared in the second act so were kept under lock and key in a dismal and cold dressing room under the eye of Brother Alexus, a strict Germanic disciplinarian who belted first and asked questions later. The soldiers wore fezzes covered with silver paper (there was no aluminium foil in those days) and carried long shafted spears. The shepherds wore silver and green cloaks and carried shepherd’s crooks. It was a disaster waiting to happen.

All was quiet for a very short time until a soldier, out of sheer boredom, nicked the bum of a shepherd with his spear. The shepherd retaliated by swatting the fez off the head of the soldier and crushing it underfoot. This sparked a general battle of soldiers versus shepherds with Bro Alexus wading in with a few head claps in a vain attempt to quell the riot. When the call came to go on stage we were a sorry bunch. Few soldiers were capped with the fezzes so lovingly made for them by their mothers. Those lucky enough to have retained them during the fight all had battle scars of dents or missing crowns or lacked the decorative silver paper. Most of the shepherds had torn cloaks, some no cloaks at all. Bro Rupert, the producer of the operetta, resigned from the Brotherhood shortly after the end of the show.

My best mate at the time was Hugh Panther. Also in my class was a lad called Honeyball, nicknamed Beeswax, who had the most fearsome stutter. Every time he tried to say Hugh he went into a convulsion that made him blue in the face and all of those unfortunate enough to be downwind were sprayed with gob. Someone made the discovery that Honeyball had no difficulty in saying buck or any word ending in uck and as the opposite gender to ewe was a buck, Hugh was henceforth dubbed Buck.

To this day no one knows him by any other name. Interesting how nicknames usually stick for life and are even passed on to future generations. Andrew you will recall being called Lattie when you first went to St Andrew’s Prep—that was Frank’s name when he was at Grey college in Port Elizabeth many years before you were born. When Elizabeth, Andrew’s daughter, was very young she called Peggy Gie and me Buck—another repetition as in the case of Hugh Panther. An amusing one was connected to a boy with the surname of Kay. It was the standard joke of his class mates, particularly in front of lady teachers, to ask: Have you seen Kay to which the required answer was No. The punchline was: F.U.C.Kay tell him that I want a word with him. This never failed to elicit howls of raucous laughter from the class and a murderous look from Kay that would melt lard.

This prank lasted until the teachers caught on. The unfortunate young snotnose who pulled the gag once too often got his arse tanned by Brother Kevin with the class cricket bat. Bro Kevin never used a cane. Three butt blows with the bat pulled up a four inch welt that made standing up a pleasure for about a week.

I was only once at the receiving end of the Bro Kevin technique. In my second year of senior school, commonly referred to as JC (Junior Certificate—nothing to do with the coming of the Messiah) Bro Kevin taught Science to all the classes of the senior school and handed out a belt with the bat at the slightest provocation. I saw an opportunity to capitalise on the situation and make a fast buck. In a message quietly circulated to the entire school I let it be known that for premium of a tuppence a week anyone who got the Kevin treatment would receive a pay-out of sixpence. The response was awesome. For two days I spent the lunch break collecting premiums from all and sundry. My pockets were loaded with brass. With no actuarial experience I figured that at this rate I could make my first million just prior to matriculation. From then onwards Mondays were hectic with collecting premiums.

Fortune shone on me for from the instigation of the insurance plan Bro Kevin seemed to have lost the taste for the corporal punishment stuff. I was making a small fortune. One month to the day of the establishment of the corporal punishment benefit scheme disaster struck. At first break the entire classes of 7 and 8 were lining up to bear their bruised arses as evidence prior to pay out. At lunch time it was the same with classes 9 and 10. The next day the same thing happened. By the third day no one could sit down and I went into voluntary liquidation and insolvency, paying out zilch in the Pound. Bro Kevin invited me to his study where I found myself on the receiving end of the bat followed by a Bro Kevin recital on how he was onto me from day one but let it go for a month just so that I could build up some delusions of grandeur before busting me back to reality. Until I matriculated the bastard continued to rub salt into the wound by referring to me as the Bum-Banker.

Over weekends Buck and I would either cycle to Amsterdam Hoek to do a spot of fishing in the Swartkops River or, if we were particularly flush and could afford the seven pence return fare, take the train. At other times we would walk the last four miles to the northern bank of the river mouth. There was no bridge across the mouth in those days and the old single lane rail and cast-iron road bridge was higher up, west of the village. We would avoid the guards at the artillery gun emplacements on the northern river bank by heading north into the thick bush then cutting back to the coast.Those emplacements, built to house 12-inch naval guns as part of the defences can still be seen as one heads north across the new concrete bridge at the mouth. Having finally emerged on to the deserted beach we would forage for spent cartridge shells which became prized possessions to be shown and bragged about at school.

On one occasion when a merchant ship had been torpedoed in Algoa Bay it broke in half. A large stern section floated and was driven onto the St Georges Strand beach. The following Saturday we were out there and while the soldiers were enjoying their weekend break Buck and I were cruising on the beach for any worthwhile flotsam and jetsam. We found a large vacuum-packed tin of coffee and a wickerwork glass carboy filled with a dark brown liquid. Buck, who had more horse sense than I, said that I could keep both trophies but that I had to carry them home.

To carry both articles through the bush required a great deal of determination. Apart from their weight, each required an arm so there was nothing to fend off the thorn bushes. By the time we cleared the bush my arms were lame, bleeding and scarified, and my shirt was in tatters. Every time we saw a soldier or a policeman my bowels loosened and I would sit on the loot and my haversack trying to create the impression that I was having a rest. I was knackered by the time I reached home. My arms felt as if they had been pulled out by the roots. I just had time to conceal my prizes under the bed before falling asleep, exhausted.

The next morning I proudly gave my mother the tin of coffee whereupon she immediately demanded to know where I had got it. Eventually I had to tell her and got a hellava hiding and the further punishment of a tablespoon of castor oil which gave me the shits for three days. The carboy was clandestinely removed from the house. Buck wanted to try the wine. I told him to piss off as he had refused to help me carry. When he had whined for long enough I relented by saying that he could buy a glass for a shilling. He went home to pinch a shilling from his Mother’s handbag and when he got back he grudgingly gave me the shilling and we took the jar to the park. I insisted on having the first swig. I spluttered and choked—it was sodding vinegar. Buck demanded his shilling back. The loss of the shilling and back-breaking hurt of carrying that bloody bottle all the way from St George’s Strand threw me into a rage. It was the first time that I ever used the infamous four letter word and threw the glass stopper at Buck who was killing himself laughing.

When camping at the Swartkops River food supplies were always a problem. Buck and I would scrounge what we could from our homes but it was never enough. We had a chap in our class who was a bit of a wimp, useless at erecting our shelter (we never had a tent and instead hitched a piece of scruffy canvas between two bushes). His parents owned a hotel near Donkin Street. Hotels are a source of food so we always took him along. He later became South Africa’s leading theatrical playwright.

Naturally the chef would not just hand over things such as tins of bully beef and condensed milk. They were in short supply and rationed. There was a war on but we had a plan. The main electrical circuit breaker was high up on the wall behind the hotel front door. We used to wait until dusk and then hoist the protesting young lad onto Buck’s or my shoulders to throw the switch. In the ensuing chaos we would raid the pantry for our camping supplies. Tins of condensed milk were considered essential. They were consumed by knocking two holes in the top. Each camper was allowed a five second suck. On the count of five the tin would be dragged from reluctant hands and passed on. The procedure did not stop until the tin was empty. The tin was then opened and licked clean.

As far as I can recall no one looked upon this periodic deed as theft. We regarded it as a sort of Robin Hood concept of the rich providing for the poor. I’m sure none of us ever thought of mentioning this in our weekly confession. In fact Buck and I were deeply religious and seriously considered entering the priesthood. We were constant altar boys at the St Augustine’s Catholic Cathedral as well as at the Holy Rosary Convent. When not serving as altar boys we were members of the St Augustine’s choir as well as the Marist Brothers School Choir.

Getting up at sparrow to serve the first Mass at 7:00am was arduous but there were the compensations when serving at Nuptial Masses and funerals where the happy Bridegroom or members of the bereaved family could be relied upon to hand out reasonable tips or induced to do so by means not particularly subtle. I recall one particular funeral when Buck and I after the funeral service were in one of the funeral cars on the way to the cemetery. I was holding the Holy Water in a brass vessel, trying to steady it to prevent spillage. Buck had the brass-handled brush used by the priest to bless the coffin and its contents. To pass the time, Buck first tried to tickle my ear with the dry brush, then brush his hair.

I was powerless to retaliate. The final straw came when Buck dipped the brush in the Holy Water and proceeded to wash my face and drip water down the collar of my black soutane. There is just so much that flesh and blood can stand. In a rage I threw the entire content of the brass vessel straight at Buck’s smiling face. The bulk of the Holy liquid hit him on the chest and turned Buck’s white starched surplice into a soggy mess. Having vented my spleen we both realized we had a problem—no bloody holy Water for the Rev Father Wynne to bless the coffin of the recently dear departed. The situation was remedied by filling the brass vessel at a cemetery tap. Fortunately Fr Wynne was none the wiser that the dear departed was sent on his way with a dash of the municipal chlorinated stuff.

I repaid the compliment at the next High Mass. At these most solemn functions Buck had the illustrious position as the chosen one to hold the huge mass missal on his forehead and support it with both hands on the lower edge in front of the Bishop (Bishop Colbert) while he was vesting and during the Bishop’s reading of the Gospel. I assisted by holding the ceremonial brass candle holder with its lighted candle next to the missal. I got the lighted candle slowly and unobtrusively—to everyone except Buck—closer and closer to Buck’s right ear to give it a nice singe then retreat an inch or two. Buck had a noticeable blister before the Pax Tecum blessing at the end of the Mass.

Another happy recollection of those years was school holidays at a farm at Eagles Crag owned by Mr Henry Sangster, a life-long friend of my Father. The farm was situated near the railway junction town of Alicedale, about 64 miles from Port Elizabeth. The return train fare was about five shillings but I would often cycle there on my bicycle in an average time of around nine hours which usually included a couple of puncture repairs. Uncle Henry was a great character. He built a lot of weirs over the Bushmans River and had a mania for building in record time. I’m sure many of these structures still exist to this day. Everything he built had a caricature of himself drawn into the plaster with the inscription Built by H.H. Sangster in three days—poor but happy .

Uncle Henry taught me to hunt bushbuck and kudu, how to approach baboons to get within shooting distance and how to get to the top of the mountain that gave the farm its name—The Eagles Crag. In my youth I climbed that mountain more times than I had birthdays.

The other thing we did as kids was to dare each other to enter the railway tunnel on the farm just before a train was approaching, especially passenger trains that went faster than goods trains. The tunnel was about 400 metres long and had little alcoves every 100 metres for railway gangers. The aim was to make it as far along the tunnel as you could before jumping into one of these alcoves as the train approached. The rails and tunnel walls would vibrate with ever increasing intensity as the train approached and thundered past, engulfing you with sooty smoke. We would then make a dash for the tunnel exit and return relieved to the sunshine, coughing and spluttering.

I had fond memories of a time spent at the farm just before enrolling at Cape Town University, and I was very proud of my new driver’s licence needed for a holiday job delivering booze for the Algoa Bottle Store in Port Elizabeth. Once the delivery job was over—in the early part of January a couple of years after World War Two—Uncle Henry foolishly employed me to drive his five ton Chevrolet truck from the farm to Grahamstown to collect 10 Avro Anson aircraft purchased from the Air Force at 44 Air School at a cost of five Pounds apiece. Such were the spoils and waste of war . The aircraft were fully equipped, including radios. The one stipulation was that they were not to be used for flying. This didn’t worry Uncle Henry who wanted the fuselages for chalets at his guest house and to sell the scrap aluminium which was fetching premium prices at that time. It was a great tragedy. They butchered those fine old machines for scrap metal. There is not one left in South Africa today.

It never occurred to Uncle Henry or me that I could not handle the five-ton truck. After all I had a licence which is something Uncle Henry had never bothered about. Nor was I to realize that a couple of decades later I would return to Grahamstown to practice as a dental surgeon and become closely involved with Rhodes University affairs and the local Municipal Council.

On the first occasion I set off for Grahamstown in the truck pulling a large trailer, built by Uncle Henry in five days on the chassis of a 1937 Chrysler sedan which must itself have weighed a ton. The hitch to the truck was such that it required about a 200-metre turning circle. Uncle Henry said this didn’t matter as there was plenty of room to turn at the aerodrome and it was a straight drive back from Grahamstown to the farm.

I set out on that first trip accompanied by Phutomelo and Sepho, two young Xhosa lads who had never been to Grahamstown before although it was only 40 miles away. Phutomelo opened the gates and Sepho shut them. At the aerodrome with the aid of block and tackle we fitted and secured one fuselage on the truck and two sawn-off wings on the trailer. Sometimes we would load one engine on the trailer. As for the Chevy, when loaded that old truck had a will of its own. The first return journey from Grahamstown took about four hours. Uncle Henry’s only comment was to ask why the hell had it taken me so long.

There was always a fight between Phutomelo and Sepho as to who on the return journey would ride in the truck cab to open the gates and who would travel in the Anson fuselage perched on the trailer. Riding in the cockpit of the aircraft, holding the joystick wheel and pumping the rudder bars was tremendous fun. Waving to roadside friends, shouting a greeting from the inside of an aeroplane and making like Douglas Bader on the ground was a tremendous status symbol. To keep the peace I showed them how to draw matches for the privilege. As a sop to the loser whoever traveled in the plane would not only have to open the gates along the way but also have to close them.

One day, while Phutomelo was the acting Squadron-Leader of the plane, on the return sortie there was an incident that broke no bones but produced some lovely bruises and dented the young man’s ego with the local girls. At the first gate the truck came to a noisy stop in the usual cloud of red dust. Patiently Sepho and I waited for Phutomelo to jump down from the flight deck and open the gate. Nothing happened. Thinking that Photomelo must have fallen asleep I sent Sepho to wake him up. He returned a while later and said in the usual African stoic fashion: The Phutomelo, he is not there.

What the hell do you mean, he is not there? I asked.

I don’t know said Sepho, Maybe he went to make the water (to take a pee).

I now had a problem. It was impossible to turn the truck around with the burden of the laden trailer nor could it be reversed along the narrow dirt road. There were only three alternatives—carry on without Phutomelo, wait for him to pitch up or go looking for the silly bastard. I chose the latter option. Leaving Sepho to guard the truck I trudged back along the dusty road on a very hot summer afternoon dreading what I might find—perhaps a lifeless body, a body with fractured bones or whatever. After retracing the tyre treads for about 20 minutes there appeared shimmering out of the heat haze a limping Phutomelo, waving his hands in greeting.

Ai my Brian, my backside she is sore with the pain when I fell bollamakissy on the road, he told me. I went upside down three times before I came to a sudden stop with my legs around a tree and my bollas are now very sore and swollen.

He explained that when we were riding along he saw these beautiful black maidens carrying water buckets on their heads from the river.

I put my head out of the window of the plane to greet them. Greetings you beautiful maidens I said. Then my hat blow off in the wind. I shouted for you to stop but you could not hear me. I sprang out like a bird to fetch my hat but I could not fly so I went bollamakissy and now I am very sore."

The incident cured lover boy Phut of any similar actions and taught him a lesson in physics—what goes up, can come down—

painfully.

The fuselages of the planes were set by Uncle Henry on a concrete base and used as novel chalets for residents who came to the guest farm. The wings and engines were dismantled and sold as scrap. Mercury from the various cockpit instruments was drained into empty brandy bottles and sold to a wholesale chemist in Port Elizabeth. With hindsight it was all a terrible waste.

I have many fond memories of the Sangster farm, eccentric Uncle Henry and his wife Annie. They lived close to nature. The farm house had no electricity, and no refrigerator. Light was provided by candles and oil lamps; meat was kept in a meat safe which was a contraption made of wood with gauze sides to keep insects at bay, usually suspended in a tree near the kitchen door. When more affluent he built a cooler room that was a double-walled honeycomb brick construction, the space between the two walls was filled with cinder material kept moist with water gravitated from a header tank on the roof. It was surprisingly efficient; meat, butter, eggs and milk would be stored there. The radio was powered by a battery energized by a windcharger. Cooking was done on a large, black hell of a stove which consumed gluttonous quantities of wood and throbbed and thundered along one kitchen wall. In winter it gave the kitchen a homely warm glow but in summer it made life very uncomfortable for those who had the misfortune to work there.

Uncle H was of the old school who thought that water-borne sewage and indoor sanitation was for the monkeys who lived in the city. Water was to be used to slake one’s thirst, or sparingly to dilute whisky, to boil an egg, to irrigate corn and oranges and perhaps baptize the heathen but not, for God’s sake, to be wasted as a disposal vehicle to transport crap. He ensured this was so with two Long Drops or thunder boxes conveniently situated one on each side of the beautiful rambling old farm house.

During one particular school holiday when I was about 10 or 12 there was an incident that probably wrecked my immature ambition to train as a medical doctor. On an oppressively hot summer’s day around noon I was sitting in the shade of the orchard with a view of the farm house, propped up against the trunk of a tree fantasizing about my future life as a medic. I’d be dressed in a pristine white and creaseless suit with stethoscope strung nonchalantly around my neck strolling down a cool, hospital corridor amidst a galaxy of top heavy nurses, all doe-eyed with adoration.

The squeak and clap-clap of the fly screen door on the side of the house being opened and shut against its vicious and complaining spring jerked me back to attention. Uncle H was trotting resolutely towards the thunder box, entered with urgency and closed the door. Silenced returned save for the high-pitched resonance of the unseen Christmas beetles copulating in the trees above (you’d have to be enjoying yourself to make that kind of noise). The dreams returned but within minutes were shattered by a blood-curdling bellow emanating from the thunder box as the door burst open. Uncle H leapt forth, bare-arsed with his shirt tail flapping and his khaki pants trailing around one ankle, not a pretty sight.

Like the demented hunchback of Notre Dame he hobbled at great speed into the house, only to appear again within seconds still impeded by his dragging trousers but now armed with his double barrelled shot gun. He disappeared once more into the outdoor privy, clearly hell bent on destruction. There was an explosion that lifted the roof of the thunder box. A dazed Uncle H staggered from the interior in a cloud of blue smoke of a puke-provoking and appalling odour. Not only that, the old boy looked as if he’d been tarred and feathered in a lavish coating of shit and bits of newsprint.

What happened? I asked, wide-eyed and adrenalin pumping.

Speak up—I can’t hear what you are saying, he yelled.

Then overcome with shock he collapsed on the ground as Aunt Annie and all the domestic servants (remember the good old colonial days) appeared from the red hot kitchen. The wailing of Oh my God what have you done Henry from Aunt Annie and the cries from the assembled servants of Oh, my lord the master is covered in crap, fell on Uncle Henry’s deaf ears.

Eventually he was able to tell us that just as he tore a strip of newspaper from a pile of old London newspapers lying conveniently on the right side of the latrine throne—Uncle Henry did not believe in buying sissy toilet paper—a huge yellow cobra, disturbed from its resting place amongst the yellowing pages of the Daily Mirror, reared up its hooded head and threatened to strike. The next sequence of events are easy to imagine. Not wasting the time to pull up his trousers (probably never gave them a second thought). Uncle Henry charged into the house, picked up his 12 bore and rushed back to the thunder box in time to see the tail of the cobra disappearing down the long drop where it had probably had nested for years. With great presence of mind he shook one leg free of his pants, cocked the freed leg up onto the seat, pointed the gun down the fly-busy black hole, pulled back both hammers and let fly.

Uncle Henry never had the privilege of higher education but on that day, in a millisecond of his time between birth and death, experienced a powerful practical demonstration of the Archimedes principle and the laws of Isaac Newton all rolled into one, namely for every force, there is an equal and opposite force. However with a mouth full of shit, even if he had known, he was in no state to shout EUREKA.

The cobra departed for a higher plane to which doubtless the Good Lord grants to all God-fearing cobras but in the same instant Uncle Henry’s eardrums were split asunder. Impregnated with crap, ear holes, orbits, nostrils filled to capacity and his hair changed in an instant from grey to nut brown. Strangely, his pipe still dangled from his partially filled mouth. Uncle Henry later threw the pipe away; said it never tasted quite the same even after cleaning it with gasoline. But that wasn’t all. When he collapsed on the lawn he was immediately covered with a layer of crazed flies and bees that had also evacuated the long drop. The explosion had made them all agitated, psychologically insecure and generally pissed-off.

Uncle Henry wanted to be carried indoors and placed on the four-poster bed. This was immediately vetoed by Auntie Annie. So the dog’s blanket was fetched from the verandah to cover UH, to keep the flies down and as a first aid treatment for shock. There the poor old fellow lay until the doctor arrived from Alicedale some seven miles distant.

The doctor took one look and instructed me to connect the garden hose and start up the borehole pump. As UH was still totally deaf from the blast he wasn’t aware of what was to come but soon got the message when I appeared with the hose pipe. He shouted that he never bathed more than once a week and that he had bathed the night before. The gawking servants were instructed to leave and the doctor proceeded to douse UH with the freezing bore hole water until he was reasonably free of excrement, all the while UH shouting that he would not pay the doctor’s usual one guinea fee for such inhuman treatment. Aunt Annie tried to pacify him by saying that he should be grateful for the fertilizing benefit to the lawn and made it abundantly clear that he was not welcome in the farm house let alone the bathroom. It is doubtful if UH heard anyone or anything.

The doctor helped him hobble down to the Bushmans River half a kilometer away to finish his ablutions. I followed with UH’s spare pair of boots, a clean set of khaki pants and shirt, a cake of hard soap and an old towel which Aunt Annie said had to be burnt when the old man was finished with it. When UH returned to the homestead thinking himself once more acceptable he found to his chagrin that the tent used by the itinerant fruit pickers at harvest time had—on Aunt Annie’s instructions—been erected at the bottom of the garden. This was to be his bedroom and dining hall for the next ten days before he was allowed back into the farmhouse and the nuptial four poster.

After that Henry Sangster became a legend in his own lifetime as the incident became more and more embellished by the local pub yokels. Uncle Henry remained deaf until the day he died. Today there are at least six twelve-bore shot guns in the Eastern Cape that are reputedly the original as owned by H.H. Sangster—may he rest in peace. Years later as a dental student I would occasionally remember this boyhood experience and console myself with the totally misguided impression that at least as a dentist I would never have to deal with such a variety of body fluids. How wrong could I be? There are a small proportion of dental patients, infants, not so infants and even adults who because of anxiety, nervousness, pure terror or plain bloodymindedness will faint, fart, urinate, defecate, throw up, cry, scream, bite, have fits or impressive orgasms while in the chair; but that comes later in my tale.

Chapter 3

Uncle George and holidays

in Cape Town.

Our mother Lizzie had three brothers: Bill, Jimmie known as Jas and George the youngest on whom she doted. There were two sisters, Cissie and Bella. George was not much taller than Lizzie and she was short but he was considered by one and all to be rather handsome and what he lacked in stature he made up for with humour and the heart of a lion.

Uncle George worked in the bookmaking world,was mildly eccentric and kindness personified. A great practical joker, he was not too bashful to fart in public and then blame whoever was standing next to him of breaking wind! He loved to embarrass his friends and those he did not know with a whoopy cushion and he once caught my father Frank on one of his frequent trips to Port Elizabeth. He had acquired a very realistic plastic