Episode 16: School's Out
In 1954 Roger Bannister breaks the four-minute mile running on the Iffley Road track at Oxford. It’s a bit unfair — he has Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher as pacers who take him through each quarter.
My Life as an African: A BiograFictional Memoir
By the time I’m eight I am old enough to take the bus excitedly from Oranjezicht to town alone, to OK Bazaars. My mother gives me two shillings and six pence (2/6) to “secretly” buy, all by myself, a birthday present for her, a brooch with a gold-colored ring with a turquoise bird suspended in the middle. I’m proud of my good taste.
Reading
We read mostly English series books — the Just William series about William and the Outlaws, and the Biggles WWII adventures. WWII seems to us very recent. Howie and I think the following is really funny, capable of being repeated many times:
William to his father: When will be getting a car?
Mr Brown: Not while I’m alive.
William, after a pause: How soon after you’re dead?
We read the Teddy Lester boarding school books which seem to be set in the present 1950s. Years later I discover that they were written around 1910 and yet, probably because they are set in the countryside rather than the city, there are no anachronisms that make them seem out of date. I read the Hardy Boys and also, guiltily with pleasure, Nancy Drew.
I get Tiger, a weekly magazine from England, full of boys’ sports adventures.
But one of the girls in my neighborhood, Sandra, subscribes to Girls Crystal, the girls’ equivalent of Tiger, mailed weekly from England, and she lends one to me. I become absorbed in one of the serial adventures, and get my mother and father to get me an even more guilty surreptitious subscription to that. I don’t want anyone to see it lying around if they come to our house.
Roaming
On the slopes of the mountain near our house is the pipe track, thick black water pipes a foot or more in diameter running like a Roman road six or more feet above the ground, carrying water around the peninsula. I like to try to tightrope-walk along the lower parts, balancing on the pipes for short distances. I imagine I’m really good at it.
Nearby hidden on the mountain slope is an old quarry, a deep chasm in the mountain that one can find one’s way into. The local rifle club uses it for target practice and you can hear the shots echoing off the walls. When they are gone we go in and collect doppies (Afrikaans), the empty shells. If you half cover the top with two thumbs and blow over it there is a penetrating whistling sound.
Kits
When I go to town alone I make regular trips to the Jack Lemkus hobby shop in St George’s Street to buy balsa wood plane kits. Some kits are too difficult for my patience and skills, requiring days of careful assembly, but others, the simple gliders, are too unsatisfyingly easy to piece together, taking only a few minutes. It takes experiment to find the level of ambition that is both interesting and fulfillable.
The only plane I successfully complete is a Zippy, which my cousin Abner builds too. It takes great care and patience and days of work. At heart (all my life),) I am not an experimentalist or engineer. The kit contains long thin strips of lightweight balsa for the frame, and flat sheets with preprinted cross-sectional inserts that prevent the frame from collapsing. You have to carve and sand a block of balsa for the nose. I pin the plan to my mother’s bread kneading board, and then used more pins to force the long balsa strips to curve along frame’s arcs. Finally I cement the pieces together with airplane glue. The fuselage is translucent tissue paper cemented to the balsa frame, trimmed, then dampened with water to shrink taut, and finally, when dry, lacquered and painted. The engine is a a long rubber band that runs from the the nose to a hooked pin at the tail. You rotate the propeller many times to wind up the rubber band and then let it loose. It sort of flies, erratically. Abner, two years older, follows the instructions more carefully, sanding off any excess glue on the frame before overlaying the tissue. His looks much better.
Sports
The neighborhood boys congregate on our street on school-day afternoons and weekends. Cars come by periodically and they cede the right of way to us. We play until dark -- touch rugby and soccer with small teams in the winter, cricket with a tennis ball in the summer. We go out of the house barefooted when it’s warm. Sometimes we take our wickets and bat and cork ball to the nearby Gardens rugby club grounds and play cricket there. The cork ball has a moulded ersatz seam.
A leather ball with a real sewn seam would be great but that’s too expensive and even more significantly, too pretentious. You have to be talented to deserve one of those
Later I play cricket for the Under-12’s (second team), against other schools. It’s primitive, we don’t wear gloves, these are the days before helmets, and I get my thumb smashed against the bat by another school’s fast bowler. I go on batting a few more balls until I’m out.
At the Gardens tennis club lower down on Molteno Road there are red clay courts. I take tennis lessons, serving with a box of 100 balls until I get it right. Somehow the lessons stop before I get to backhand, a life-long deficit. The best rackets have real animal gut strings that warp if they are left in the rain or dew, and tennis presses to prevent a loss of shape.
Everyone wants a Dunlop Maxply, and eventually I get one for GBP 5.
Inspiration
In 1954 Roger Bannister breaks the four-minute mile running on the Iffley Road track at Oxford. It’s a bit unfair — he has Chris Chataway and Chris Brasher as pacers who take him through each quarter at the right pace. It doesn’t seem right.
Bannister is not a professional runner; he’s a working doctor. A month or two later Australian John Landy breaks Bannister’s world record. But Bannister beats him, though not his world record time, in their meeting at the Empire Games in the summer. This is legendary stuff and we know all the details. The iconic photo is an inspiration to us all.
To emulate him, my friend Max and I time ourselves for two laps around the local reservoir on the street where Max lives. We are sure, somehow, that two laps make a mile, and we practice often. At other times I pace out 100 yards on our road and then run 17.6 times up and down the length of road with a stopwatch borrowed from my sister Ruth, who has one for administering IQ tests in the Child Guidance Clinic where she works.
Jiu Jitsu
When I am eight my mother’s sister Yafa comes to visit from Tel Aviv, where she lives on Allenby Street. She works at Kupat Holim as a pharmacist, but we have photos of her in her dapper khaki uniform with the British Army in Egypt during the war. She might have been part of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. She used to send packets of military-issue Wrigley’s gum from Egypt by sea mail to my sisters, four crisp white sugar-coated little lozenges to a packet. It was wartime in South Africa, and they chewed gum as a treat during the day and stored it in a glass of water at their bedside at night, so as to reuse it the next day.
Yafa is a very good sport. I have a green coarse-leaved illustrated paperback book on The Art of Jiu-Jitsu that I study and she lets me practice hip throws on her on our front lawn. She helps me change water to wine with my chemistry set and phenolphthalein.
She is the unconventional one of my mother’s sisters. A few years later she begins to live with Julek, a formerly or perhaps still married man. There is something mysterious and unspoken about the whole business. He collects Israeli art and later they send me and my wife a delicate painting of vase of flowers.
When I visit Israel through the Sixties I usually stay with Naomi and her family, and hang out with my cousin Rivka whom I am very fond of — she has the gentle air that went with my mother’s family. But for a night or two, to be equitable, I go and stay with Yafa and Julek, and when I do, they carefully and ostentatiously go to sleep in different bedrooms. My father who has a twist of severe prudishness running through him, once, when he is arguing with my mother, tells her that Yafa is immoral.
One of my elder sister Shulamit’s male friends, a roué who has had many consecutive and parallel affairs and wives during his life, even through his 80s, remarks to us much later in the early 1970s, after meeting Yafa, with the air of a connoisseur: Yafa is a very attractive woman.