THE BEAST

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Loudly - very, very loudly - on that huge old wooden door, size of a barn door but much more solid - hundreds of years old oak wood, like the doors of Hampton Court, the castle that Henry XVIII stole from Cardinal Wolsey in 1525.

The bangs came in two sets of three blows, as if delivered by some beast with three fists, so loud that she imagined that she saw a flash of white light at the back of her eyeballs. It was unbearable.

"Who is it? Who is it?" She screeched frantically, her own hands clasped to her throat as if they were the claws of some other beast trying to strangle her. The monster never answered.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The fight or flight reflex wasn't working. She was bolted to the floor. Eyes wide and wild, face engorged with blood, her once imperatorius voice now down to a feeble pleading squeek - "Who is it? Who is it?" Clutching her throat ever tighter, squeezing her own throat closed, falling to her knees on that bare cement floor. 

The lights flickered momentarily, then went out. Darkness rolled down the mountain slope, levelled out on the river bank, hesitated momentarily, and then fell off into the water. It took to the water like some massive creature of the deep, gave off it's endless black ink, and made the water black.

The banging continued, and I, a mere witness who could only watch. The blows were so heavy that their vibrations were loosening the brass screws that held the door together. As if some invisible hand were turning the screws, I watched as they jumped and turned under this terrible force of those blows. This cannot hold, I thought.

Her face was deathly pale. Loose strands of her thick black hair fell over it. She continued to bend forwards until her face was invisible, against her knees, her tiny voice almost gone now, her hands still clutched around her throat. She was involuntarily strangling herself in sheer terror. A stream ran out between her knees. There is a point at which a human being reaches such a state of degradation that they almost cease to be human. It is a grave and dangerous point because it plays completely into a predator's hand: the victim herself has disposed of her own humanity, and despatching her now could be easily achieved without much compunction. You're no longer killing a human being - you're just, well, you're just killing a squirrel, or a tortoise, or a flea, you know. There's no humanity there to make you stop and think one more time. You could just do it and walk away with a clean conscience, as it were.

She feels - no, she knows, that the blow is coming. Like a lover at the point of being entered by her partner, wet as hell, loins and buttocks tensed in anticipation of the first thrust, aching with desire, regardless of which one of them is dominus, breath trapped tightly in her lungs, to be violently expelled at first touch, unbearable - how long can this last?

That's probably how serial killers do it: they dehumanize their victim - make them wear a sack over their heads or a mask or something, and gag them, so that they don't see their eyes or hear their voice - and having done that, the rest is easy. It's no longer a human being. The normal rules of humanity don't apply.

Of course, there must be exceptions. There must be killers who would actually want to watch the life force fade in their victim's eyes. But these are not utilitarian killers: they do not kill because they want something else and the victim just happens to be in the way: these people are artists: they kill purely for the pleasure of killing itself, and to enhance their style and the art form generally. All these dreary little cops-n-robbers TV series, where clever little psychologists and dedicated, hardworking, good old cops get on the trail of a serial killer and eventually they capture him and then it ALL COMES OUT how he was ill-treated by some swine of a parent or whatever, tralala, lala, lala, tiddley-pom - what rubbish. They've missed the bloody point.

The point, you see, for the true artists at Killer & Co, is the mystery, the fascination and the awe of death itself. How do we die? What goes first? What lasts longest? Is it, for example, true that "your whole life flashes before you" (and that it's so boring)?

There's a story (true? Not true? No idea) about a psychologist who attended the execution of the nobles at the guillotine at the time of the French Revolution: he got various prisoners to agree to try to blink their eyes after their heads were chopped off, as a sign that their brains were still working. The results of the experiment were inconclusive because there were so many uncontrolled variables not accounted for - but logically, if the brain can survive for five minutes without oxygen (I am informed that that is correct), then that detached head is still alive in every sense of the word when it rolls into the basket. Not for long, of course, but at least for a couple of minutes.

That would interest a true exponent of the art of murder.

I once had a nightmare about strangling a cat. I think I had thought it through pretty well. I tied a ribbon round it's neck - the cat thought we were playing. It was a pretty ribbon. I think it was a pink ribbon. It had a slip knot. Then as the cat frolicked, it became aware that it couldn't get the ribbon off with it's claws. But I didn't pull it tight - I just watched as the realisation dawned on the cat that it had a problem. It transitioned emotionally from playful mode into frantic mode. Cats can get pretty frantic and they look very funny when that happens - their fur gets all jagged and spiky and their movements become jerky and their eyes get a wild look.

Then very gradually I started to close the loop around it's throat. At first I don't think that it occurred to the cat that I had anything to do with it's predicament - but then - eventually, came the moment of truth, when it dawned on the cat that I WAS THE PROBLEM. In my nightmare, the surge of power that I felt when I could see that the cat now fully appreciated that it was in mortal danger, and that I was the master of its life and death - oh, I have to tell you, sex has nothing on that feeling!

The "terror phase" passes quickly. Now we're through the playful phase, and through the terror phase, and moving into the end game. The cat is now as much of a danger to itself as it is to everything around it. It thrashes around madly, throwing itself off furniture, leaping up, throwing itself against walls. It's starting to froth at the mouth, breathing comes with difficulty (I haven't closed off the windpipe fully yet), it's eyes are not coordinated - and then I close the windpipe. It's not jerking around wildly now, just twitching. I think it knows that it's dying. I am looking into it's eyes. It's quite still now, and it is looking into my eyes. For the first time - the very first time - we actually SEE each other.

It only went on for about a minute, but I know - I absolutely know - that for a moment there, we actually connected, animal to animal, and something very primitive and ancient happened. A spark passed between us. Did we switch places? Am I a cat, now? Did the old me die inside that cat's body? Who am I now?

But I have digressed. I just want to wrap up that business about the girl in the castle.

The massive door shatters into a million splinters and this dark, cold world falls silent. The killer blow had never come. For a full minute (which is sometimes a very, very long time) nothing moves and there is no sound. A cold Northern wind sweeps into the room, scattering anything and everything before it. It is not clear whether the girl on the floor is living or dead, but she does not move and her breathing is inaudible. It is a moment of uncertainty in the balance between life and death. A million stars sparkle in a sky which is so cold and so clear that we of this dreary modern time could hardly conceive of it, for this is the time before time, the time after time, the time of no time, the time of any time.

Ever so slowly, she relaxes the fingers round her throat, she relaxes her wrists, she relaxes her forearms, then her upper arms, then her shoulders. She draws her first deep breath, but still she does not dare to look up. Another precious minute passes. She opens her downcast eyes, braces her thin waist, straightens her upper body while still on her knees - suddenly she notices how they ache - and she looks at the place where the door had been. It's just a big square open space now. There's nothing there. Just a view across a dark and silent valley, lit faintly by a yellow moon, which also leaves a pathway to infinity across a cold, placid sea. The lemony light fills the room, the cold wind plays with her hair, her tears dry, and terror departs. The beast has gone.

She will grow old here and inherit the kingdom from her mother and father, and she will marry the queen of the neighbouring realm, and they will adopt many orphans of the endless wars in this corner of the world. Her kingdom and that of her spouse will enjoy unprecedented decades of peace and prosperity and eventually her subjects will bury her here on this very hill, with its beautiful view of the sky and the stars and the mountain and the sea and the road to infinity and she will watch over this place forever.

And fear and terror will be no more.

© Harry Friedland 28 April 2022

Galant

Galant was my mother's gardener. He was old when he started working for us. Once or twice a week he would arrive at our front door, ready for whatever needed to be done in the garden. He had a bitter aroma of burning newspaper about him because, like many of his kind, he did not smoke commercially made cigarettes, but rolled his own out of newspaper. God knows what was rolled into that newspaper but I don't think it was dagga.

He had a surprising history, but this being South Africa during Apartheid, and he not being a loquacious character, you would have missed it if you did not spend quite a lot of time talking to him. I would have been between nine and about fourteen years old at this time. And anyway, who talks to the gardener?

Well, I did.

There's a wonderful Afrikaans expression which does not translate well into English but I'd heard my mother use it when referring to Galant (she spoke English generally but switched to Afrikaans when she couldn't find an English expression. Or when she was very angry ...). She would say that Galant was "gepla deur die maan", ("troubled by the moon" - a bit crazy) - and he was, actually, but in a nice way.

He was a descendant of the Malay slaves who were brought to South Africa to work on the farms. These people were steeped in a culture which we whites knew absolutely nothing about, and which had a language, religion, terminology and concepts of its own. The Afrikaans language picked up some of the linguistic elements, but not the terminology or the concepts, which were entirely foreign.

Apartheid didn't just happen out of nowhere: prior to the coining of that term in 1948, there had always been a pretty clear-cut separation of the races on a legal and cultural basis in South Africa - as in America - and as with the black people in America, the Malays were foreigners, brought here against their will and yearning for a faraway country which they had no hope of ever seeing again.

There is a wonderful film by Rian Malan titled The Silver Fez, which deals with an old tradition, the Cape Minstrel Carnival, and into that Malan has woven the sad history of the Cape Malays. I saw the film when it first came out and I was fascinated.

From the film I earned about the "Nederlandsche Liedjies" - songs in the now all-but-forgotten language of the slaves - songs with a strange, sad, mournful tone, in a language which even the singers themselves, in some instances, no longer understand, the whole tradition having been passed down from father to son over several generations. I doubt whether the lyrics have even been reduced to writing - see here .

I was once in a lift with four Malay men. They were speaking to each other in a language which at first sounded like Afrikaans but I couldn't understand a word of it. It was Afrikaans dialect, alright, but understanding it was just out of my reach.

Yet as soon as the they had to speak to an outsider, they switched smoothly into Afrikaans.

The coloured population of South Africa has three totally unrelated sources: Firstly the remains of the indigenous XhoiSan tribes, then the mixed-race descendants of European settlers and black tribes (mostly Xhosa), and finally the Malaysian slaves who were Galant's ancestors. But of course the Nationalist Party, with it's desire to put everyone into a racial "box", simply lumped all these people together as "Coloureds"

But that is all by the way. I have digressed.

One afternoon I came out into the garden to find Galant holding the garden hose like a weapon, squirting a jet of water into a hole in the trunk of one of our old Oak trees - you know how old Oak trees tend to develop big holes, where bees make nests, squirrels hide nuts, and smaller creatures take shelter. Well, Galant had obviously taken a strong dislike to that hole.

"What are you doing Galant", I asked.

"Hy loer vir my. Ek gaat daai oge uit spuit" He said.

Then I noticed that the tree had two holes, fairly close to each other, and Galant saw them as "oge" - eyes. But why would that worry him? Perhaps if you live in a world occupied jointly by spirits and human souls, where magic is part of the ecosystem, then a weathered old forest sprite might well be thought to be looking at you!

So we spoke about the spirit in the tree for a while.

"Hy like nie vir my nie" se Galant

"Hoekom, Galant?

"Nee, master Herrie, hy's kwaad vir my ommat hy dink ek het een van sy voelkies vermoor"

"Wat! Het jy, Galant?"

"Nee, master Herrie, daai ou voelkie was alreeds vrek toe ek daar aankom. Hy't sommer daar gele innie modder tussen die wortels van die boom, toe kry ek hom daar, en ek het hom sommer daar ook begrawe. Maar die blerrie dom-astrant boom dink nou ek het hom doodgemaak, en nou is hy die hel in met my en hy will niks van my weet nie. Ek pleit al hele oggend met hom maar nee, the case is closed, se hy.

Nou loer hy onophoudend vir my. Ek is bang hy gaan 'n doekum op my sit"

A little explanation here. A "doekum" (my spelling) is a spell or a curse, the effect of which (as far as I know) is that the subject of the spell/curse will fail at all his endeavours. Only the person who imposed the spell can lift it. But if Galant could render the tree unable to see him, it would not be able to curse him. Like Chinese ghosts, spells can only travel in straight lines, ie., line-of-sight.

It was a long, hot morning, some kind of holiday I guess, and we got into a rambling conversation. My mother had gone out, there was no-one to supervise Galant, and he obviously wanted a break. I fetched a Coke for each of us and we sat on a gentle rising slope in the lawn, behind the old tree, away in the farthest corner of the garden, and he told me stories - how true they were I'll never know but overall I had no cause to doubt him.

Galant was a young man at the time of the First World War. The SA Army had established a separate corps called the Cape Coloured Corps, and Galant had signed up for training. A whole different picture of Galant began to emerge: in my mind's eye I saw a strong young man, an idealist, proudly wearing his country's uniform, embarking on Army transport to go North to fight for his country, bearing his Lee Enfield .303 rifle on his shoulder.

See here: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/cape-coloured-corps-and-first-world-war

The Cape Coloured Corps distinguished themselves in battle in both West and East Africa and at one stage went as far north as Ramallah in Palestine. But the Corps suffered the same fate in South African history, as the Tuskagee Airmen in America. It seems that coloured soldiers in both South Africa and America were very shabbily treated when their fighting days were done: they were gratefully received on sign-up, and then shamefully forgotten afterwards.

So here was Galant, literally an old-time war hero, mowing the white madam's lawn to eke out a living in his old age. Utterly shameful.

As I grew up I forgot about Galant and he went out of my life and I don't even remember the last time I saw him. This must be the first time I've thought about him in 50 years. - But my mother painted a portrait of him once, a long time ago. I'm going to try to find it, to put it up with this post.

Sic transit gloria.

__________________________________

🅒 HARRY FRIEDLAND March 2022

🅒 Painting by Dolly Friedland

Tales from 🅒"MARIMBA" BY Harry Friedland

PLAIN SAILING? - NOT REALLY ....

One day I was out sailing in Table Bay with a friend of mine. We had gone round the back of Robben Island and were heading back to the yacht club when a large cargo ship came out of the harbour mouth, heading out to sea.

Inevitably, we were going to cross paths with it at some stage. Since the rule is that larger ships always have right of way over smaller ships, there was no question of who was going to have to give way to who, but my friend was skipper and I got the impression that we were on a collision course. I said to him, "we'd better go round the back, we're going to cross its path in a few minutes"

But he's a cheeky bugger, and a reckless lawyer, and I could read his mind. He saw this bloody situation as a challenge, and he wanted to beat this ship to the crossover point.

Understand the physics of the situation: a big ship like that cannot turn, or change direction, or speed up or slow down at short notice. For example, it takes an oil tanker a mile to turn. This is such an old rule and so universally accepted that there are no exceptions. It is ingrained into everyone on the water. Ship captains are not even obliged to blow the horn for very small boats. It's a case of "YOYO" - You're on your own!

Clearly, my friend had no intention of diverting to go round the back of that ship. I was crapping myself because there wasn't much wind, we weren't really making any speed, and the big ship was making good time. As we got closer I could see exactly where the crossover point would be, and we were both going to get there at pretty much the same time.

It's just occurred to me now that we never even got the name of that ship. All I remember was seeing a bunch of the crew leaning over the deck rail, yelling and waving at us, but my friend had his head down and he was gunning for a point just ahead of the ship's bow. If we made it at all, it was going to be a scrape. I could actually hear the water breaking off the ship's bow (that ship, not our little floating bathtub), we were that close. By now, we could no longer see the crew up on their deck, because we were under the curve of the hull. It was black, and it loomed above us like doomsday.

And then I remembered something awful, and I don't know whether it occurred to my friend at all, because he was so intent on getting round the sharp end of the bow that I don't think he had anything else on his mind - but it's this:

Under the "sharp point" at the front of the bow (it's not really sharp, it's actually quite round), every large modern ship has a very large bulbous protrusion like a giant hot water cylender, just under the surface of the water, which bulges out IN FRONT OF THE BOW and sideways as well. Because its under the water it has no wake and it's hard to tell exactly how far ahead of the bow this thing extends - and clearly my friend was judging the potential point of impact off the wake, not something underwater and ahead of the wake.

I visualised two sorry little Jewish lawyers bobbing out there in the freezing Atlantic, dying of hypothermia or dehydration or starvation, our bodies washing up on Clifton Beach days or even weeks later - or maybe never. How long would it take our wives to get Presumption of Death orders from the High Court, and for the insurance to pay out? If they found pieces of the yacht wreckage in three or four days, the Court Order could probably follow in about six months and the insurance would pay out immediately after that ... (Courts are very reluctant to issue Presumption of Death orders because there are notorious cases of people faking their own death to get the insurance money, so they give the matter lots of air, in case the "deceased" pitches up).

So there we were, and things were moving fast.

Oh - and remember that a sailing yacht has a big keel which extends downwards below the hull for quite a few feet. We needed clearance for that over that forward protrusion, too. And at the bottom of the yacht's keel is a little radar sensor which is intended to let you know when the draught below the hull is too shallow. It gives off a beeping sound in the cabin, which speeds up as the distance closes. Suddenly, that thingy started screaming at us. Do we start saying the Shema now, or do we wait till we're in the water?(you're supposed to do the Viduy - your final expiation of sins - if there's time, just before you die, and the Shema is a big part of that. I did it for my mother at her bedside as she died). I should ask my rabbi, (I did call him, back then, but there was no time now!)

We got right under the bow. I think I could have reached out and touched it. And then there was this massive BUMP as the keel hit that bulbous thing, and a horrible scraping sound, and as the keel moved away from the ship's bow, so the top of the yacht pivoted over in the opposite direction, towards the bow, throwing my friend and I flat onto the deck. And then we were over it, and quite gently, the bow of the big ship nudged the back of our yacht out of the way, spinning it round about 90 degrees (there was that horrible scraping sound again), and suddenly we were bobbing around madly like a little toy on the landward side of the big ship, my friend and I clutching desperately at the rail, speechless in terror.

We seemed to have made it. Wounded, yes, but not dead. Were we taking on water? That remained to be seen. I assumed that the main mast would have smashed against the big ship's hull and shattered, but no, it must have missed, it was still up there. The sails were flapping around madly, the sheets were tangled, everything that wasn't fastened down in the cabin was rolling around with a terrible racket, about twenty empty beer cans were rolling back and forth across the floor, there was broken glass all over - it was hectic. But no water. Thank god, no water.

What was going on in the hull? - Who knows? But if there's no water in the cabin, that's a good start. Kind of. The rudder had been knocked off its pivot, but it was still there. With shaking hands, we fixed it back into place without speaking.

"Get the sails down!" He yelled at me. The language was out of control. Swearing at each other, at the wind, at the sea, at the ship disappearing in the distance, at our own little boat, it all helped. My deck shoes had come off and I was barefoot. Where the #*#!! had my shoes gone?

I looked for the crankhandle that would bring the sails down. Gone. "You lost the crankhandle, you stupid bastard!" He yelled at me "You owe me R500,00!" (This was 15 years ago. It was a bargain). I didn't answer. There would be time for that. So we brought the sails down by hauling on the sheets with our bare hands, just like they would have done in the 16th century. Our delicate little lawyer's hands took a beating.

Suddenly, we were into the lee side of Lion's head, the wind dropped to zero, the sea went flat as glass, the boat became still. We didn't speak. We just lay on the deck in the sun. We were shocked, bruised, aching and exhausted. Our clothes were dripping wet. Obviously we had this silent understanding. We were just going to lie there till our clothes dried and we thawed out. It might take an hour, two hours, a day or a week. The longer the better, in fact. We needed the time.

He broke the silence after a while. "Look, the motor's still there!"

Most sail boats have a small outboard motor fixed to the back. Just in case. I think we had both assumed that we had lost the motor - especially as the rudder had been knocked out of its pivot - but there it was, bobbing along cheerfully at the back of the boat, like a happy puppy. Oh motor, we love you so!

So we just put our heads back down and continued to lie there. I was thinking about the universe, and how wonderful it Is to be here.

_______________________________________ (c) Harry Friedland 16 April 2022

FRIEDLAND TO THE RESCUE!

My dad was an anaesthetist (American: "anaesthiologist") in private practice and he worked at various hospitals around Cape Town. The practice in those days was to batch together the operations which were planned for one doctor, so that he would spend one day at one hospital and the next day at another instead of having to go roaring off to different hospitals at random times on any day. I got used to hearing about these batches, which were referred to as "lists":

"Do you think you can drop in to Pick n Pay to get a few things today, dear?"

"No dear - I have a list out at Constantiaberg all day"

And so on.

He also regularly did a list at No. 2 Military Hospital in Wynberg, which yielded various thrilling benefits for us kids. My favourite memory from those times (I must have been about eleven) was that on Saturday mornings they used to test the old Dakota personnel transport military planes after servicing by taking them on a flip round the Peninsula, and the children of the military personnel were invited to go aloft. (My dad actually carried the rank of “Major” because he was a specialist, but he would never tell you that. I doubt whether anyone outside the military ever knew that). There was one curious rule for these flips: NO WOMEN! so it was a father-and-son experience of note.

The Dakota was an ancient twin-prop flying machine from WWII, known in the army as the “Vomit Comet”, for obvious reasons. There were no longer any spare parts for these planes but they were such wonderfully reliable planes that they were kept in service for many, many years after the war and spare parts were hand-made by expert machine-shop men. To this very day I still see at least one Dakota taking off and landing at Ysterplaat air force base every day. They were the workhorse of the military, especially after Anti-Apartheid sanctions kicked in. Travelling in a Dakota was a deafening experience - they had two long rows of benches, one down each side of the fuselage, and the seats were iron benches. There was a glass dome between the pilots’ seats, and we kids loved to take turns getting up into the dome, from where you could see so far to the horizon that you could clearly see the curvature of the earth. Oh, Galileo!

Over time we met many of the military personnel and my dad became one of the go-to doctors at "No. 2 Mil" as it was known - and we got to know some of the kids.

One night my dad got a call from the hospital. They had to deal with a naval emergency: somewhere between the islands of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha (a distance of +/- 2 800 kilometres) - a crewman on a cargo ship by the name of the Vershamian, had fallen from a mast down into the hold. He was very badly injured and in need of urgent medical attention. The SA Navy had responded to the SOS but the nearest fast ship was the SAS Good Hope, flagship of the SA Navy, berthed in Simons Town

They decided to go on the spur of the moment and thus the call to my dad.

He got to Simons Town in the very early hours of the morning. The ship was ready to sail when he got there and they left as soon as he arrived. The Good Hope was in constant contact with the Vershamian and they knew that the crewman was still alive but in considerable distress.

The sea was very rough, the Good Hope was moving at full throttle, and my dad was no sailor. The journey took almost a week, most of which time dad spent in his cabin hurling his guts out, along with an assistant who was of no assistance at all and in much the same condition. No-one else would enter the cabin because of the mess and the smell and these two worthies were being bounced from wall to wall due to the ship's violent motion - but needs must, and they pressed on.

At some point the ship's cook came into the cabin saying, "here, I've brought you some soup, it's got body in it!"

But both Dad and his assistant misunderstood what the chef said. They thought he said, "It's got a body in it"

They looked at the cook with bleary, uncomprehending, revolted eyes. There was no need to utter words of refusal. They thought the cook was mad, and he thought the same about them.

They rendezvoused with the Vershamian at midnight. The sea had not calmed down. The normal method of ship-to-ship transfer would have been by shooting a cable across the water, creating an impromptu cable car, and riding across on that: but the sea was too rough, the ships could not get closer to each other due to the danger posed by the unpredictable motion of the sea, and an alternate method was required.

They resolved to lower a lifeboat manned by twelve sturdy oarsmen, carrying the doctor and his assistant and their equipment and thus traversing the gap. The crew on the Vershamian (who did not have the training or the skill to do the boat transfer) would then have to lower a rope ladder for the doctor and his assistant to ascend to the deck of that ship, and those two poor tortured gentlemen, weakened by a week of vomiting and pummeling, would then have to climb the ladder up to the deck of the ship. According to my dad the transfer was terrifying - whenever the puny little lifeboat descended into a trough, the waves around it were so high that the searchlights from both ships, which were tracking their movement, would lose them, and they would be clothed in pitch black darkness. They question of their direction of travel would immediately become a problem - for all they knew, the force of the water might have spun the boat around and they might be heading right back to the Good Hope - or worse, out into the great black nowhere of the Southern Atlantic … and then the searchlights would reappear and they would reorientate themselves and press on. It was actually insane.

They reached the Vershamian. The massive black hull of the ship, from right up close, loomed impossibly high over them. It had never occurred to my dad that a ship looked so huge from close up. For a while the oarsmen couldn’t find the ladder. The voices of the Vershamian’s crew, who were trying to guide them, were blown away in the storm, and only occasionally did the light from the two ships manage to pick the figures of the men out, and then they were gone again. Simply finding the ladder was suddenly a problem. The violent motion of the sea kept threatening to smash the life-boat against the hull of the ship, which would have turned it into splinters instantaneously, and the oarsmen on that side strained to stave off the ship’s menacing hull.

After an age they found the ladder, swinging wildly in the wind, teasing the oarsmen by evading their hands in its crazy arc, with the added danger that if it did actually strike one of them, the chances were that it would knock him right out of the boat. Not only that but due to the heaving sea, whatever rung of the ladder they did manage to grab hold of, would be either too high or too low to step on to as the water surface heaved up and down: and the climber could get crushed between the lifeboat and the ship: and if he slipped and fell into the water, he would most likely never be seen again.

My dad was a timid, gentle, modest, quiet and kind man. In all my childhood years, I never heard him swear. People in our neighbourhood treated him as some kind of a saint - and perhaps he was. My parents kept a huge medicine cabinet (double door, floor-to-ceiling) at home and our home was a first-aid station and a refuge for every bruised knee, broken bone, threatened suicide, abandoned wife, widow and lost child in the area. I can’t even remember the names or the number of children who were bathed, supplied with fresh pyjamas, fed a hot supper and allocated a bed over the years. As soon as some sad soul or broken body presented him-or herself at the door, “the team” would spring into action and do their amazing thing. None of these people were ever charged anything. My dad was that curious phenomenon, the poor doctor. 

In his regular, paying job, it infuriated my mother. “Aren't you going to chase up that bugger? - he hasn’t paid his bill for months!”

“Dolly, don’t embarrass the man. So he didn’t pay. So he obviously hasn’t got the money. Leave him alone”

It was a queer attitude, but that was his way.

We never had money, but we survived. And he never asked our private school for a remission of fees. People who lived better than us got remission of fees.

That such a man would be in this mad situation, did not make sense at all. I never thought of him in terms of ”bravery” or “courage” or such heroic nomenclature. And yet, there he was. And one more  thing - he did not tell us this story when he got back. It took years to get it out of him.

So - back to the Vershamian. Eventually my dad, and his assistant, and their equipment made it up onto the deck of the ship and their real work could begin - a week after leaving Cape Town. Fortunately it had not been in vain - the seaman was still alive. It turned out that he was an Arab, as were many of that motley crew. This ship was of the lowest kind - commonly referred to as a “tramp steamer”. These ships often stay at sea for long periods of time because the cargo gets traded during the journey and the ship has to divert from one destination to another while at sea - but in this case, and due to this emergency, and the fact that the patient could not be transferred to the Good Hope because of the weather conditions, they had diverted to Cape Town. The patient needed to get to a decent hospital as soon as possible.

This Vershamian was much bigger, heavier and slower than the Good Hope and therefore in spite of the weather conditions it was calmer on the rough sea. And then things improved further because within a day or two the weather improved. My dad was treated like royalty and he was forgiven for not being able to keep up with the captain’s drinking, because he was “der doktor” and had his own kind of honour. And he had done a damn brave thing, which immediately made him one of “the men”. And he and the Captain got on like a house on fire, despite the vast differences between them. I dare say that my dad had one of the best times of his life at that point.

The rest of the trip was uneventful and they got back to Cape Town (in due course) and the officers were invited to our place for dinner and the roughest party that the Friedlands ever hosted, was enjoyed by all - including some nameless females who no-one could guess how, had been invited. It was rip-roaring stuff, I tell you! My dad’s face was flushed and shining with perspiration, and he spoke (or rather shouted) in a wild and reckless tone that I had never heard before, and never heard again. My mother was in much the same condition and had to go and stand outside on a few occasions because, she said, she needed air. She was mostly accompanied by some of those dodgy-looking girls and everyone seemed to be the best of pals. You must remember, this was the Sixties, and dagga was as common as cigarettes at parties - but I’m not saying anything.

My dad grew increasingly silent in his old age. Eventually he hardly spoke at all. My mother would ask him questions and then answer them for him. My oldest granddaughter, who actually met him, once said, “Oupa Matty never says anything”. I loved him very much.

________________________________________________ © Harry Friedland, 1 April 2022