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
