Gunship Over Angola

The crash left me with a permanent aversion to crowded places. But it also introduced me to my guardian angel, who has hovered around me my whole life.

^{This photo was taken shortly before I was discharged from hospital after the bus accident.}

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My schooldays went by in a flash of sport, friends and fun. I had a great sense of privilege while growing up, and I don’t mean privilege in the material and financial sense of the word. My folks and my friends’ parents were neither wealthy nor poor, though they tended towards the latter. ‘Dumplings’ to fill our bellies and ‘bread and scratchit’ were regular items on the supper menu, often before the middle of the month.

Our education in the government schooling system was relatively backward by today’s standards, and television was not yet a reality. Yet we were wealthy beyond price. For example, just across the road was Laureston Farm, where a dairy herd of approximately 100 cows produced the freshest milk and the richest cream you could imagine. There was also a natural slip-and-slide chute shaped into the black clay on the banks of the Six Mile Spruit (today known as the Hennops River), which could be made even more slippery by spreading cow dung on it, and delivered hours and hours of glorious fun and laughter.

The Six Mile Spruit, or ‘the Spruit’, as we fondly called it, was central to the freedom of our outdoor existence. In those days, it flowed only about twice a year. I say ‘flowed’ but I really mean ‘flooded’, as it would burst its banks after a typical Highveld cloudburst, and the resultant spate would always create a playground of gooey mud in which we played rugby and football, emerging unrecognisable at the end of the games. Not surprisingly, clothes had a short lifespan in that neck of the woods.

On the banks of the Spruit we built a football field where, practically every single day, summer or winter, matches of ‘international importance’ were played, and it was on the Laureston Farm field that a crop of genuinely good players honed their natural skills. A significant number later went on to play professional football in South Africa and abroad.

Afrikaans was the dominant language in Pretoria during this period (1965–1975). I estimate that Afrikaans-speaking families outnumbered their English-speaking counterparts in Valhalla by about eight to one. Even though it was 70-odd years since the end of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), many of the Afrikaans-speaking kids had grandparents and great-grandparents who still had vivid personal memories of their awful treatment at the hands of British forces, or ‘khakis’. From time to time, English-speakers growing up in the area unfairly bore the brunt of that lasting animosity.

In our little part of Valhalla, the very southern tip of it, we ‘Rooineks’ formed a gang, telling ourselves that it was for protection against the ‘Dutchies’. In practice, it really meant that we could get up to more mischief as a group than we could have done as individuals.

One day my mom, ever the voice of reason in troubled times, asked me to name the members of our Rooinek gang.

‘Well, that would be the Van Jaarsvelds, the Swarts, the Du Toits and the Jouberts, Mom,’ I replied.

‘And the Afrikaans gang members?’ she asked.

‘Those bloody Robinsons, Beavers, Allisons and Smiths!’ I answered.

But, then again, what’s in a name?

The competition between the local gangs was not fierce and never resulted in more than the odd bloody nose, blackened eye or bruised ego. However, individual feuds, though rare, did exist. I had one that extended over a few years with an Afrikaans kid named Christo. He was a year or two older than me but could never be mistaken for a street fighter by any stretch of the imagination.

The origins of the friction between us started with his father’s ownership of a reasonably large peanut field, which lay adjacent to our bush playground. In great anticipation each year, we would wait for the arrival of the mobile peanut processing plant, which harvested, separated and packed the peanuts into hessian bags. Then we would strike with military precision on a daring mission across enemy lines to liberate a single 30-kilogram bag of unshelled raw nuts from behind the harvester/bagging machine. Enormously proud of our freshly acquired loot, and using the thick bush adjacent to the peanut field as cover, we would lug the heavy bag towards the Spruit and our hideaway, salivating at the thought of an endless supply of groundnuts at our disposal for at least a few weeks.

One year, in the midst of this clandestine operation and while we were crossing the open ground a short distance away from the relative safety of the Spruit, we heard a shout. There, 50 metres away, skulking behind some bushes, were Christo and his short, dumpy, red-faced and irate father.

‘That are my nuts!’ screeched Christo Snr. ‘Bring them here, you rooinek diewe (thieves)!’