My dad had a brown corduroy jacket(1) ever since I could remember. I coveted that jacket. It looked so grand to me. When I was small, and he held me I would rub my face on it. There was something very comforting about its velvety ribbed texture. It felt like being stroked.
He was the kind of man who just never wore his clothes out. Being an anaesthetist, he spent his working time in operating theatres, pretty much immobile, so his clothes were never put under any stress or friction and when he threw things away it was at moms insistence that they were “old” (?) or “out of fashion”, not because they were creased or torn or had suffered any kind of trauma.
In those days the drug of choice for anaesthetists was something called Fluothane but for reasons unexplained (presumably the machines had some kind of leak or de-pressurisation valve or something) there was a lot of the distinctive smell of Fluothane in the air in operating theatres and it got into the clothes of the people in the theatre. In fact, mom used to complain that the smell came into the house with him in the evening and sometimes he was even a bit sleepy as a result of it.
So this jacket always had a faint smell of Fluothane. And I associated the smell with both dad and the jacket. How odd, thinking back!
One of the saddest of life’s little rituals is the disposal of the clothes of the deceased. Usually, it’s done by the nearest family member. Someone’s got to do it. Some people postpone it for quite a long time, others get it over with as soon as possible.
About a month after dad’s funeral, I found my mother standing in front of the open doors of dad’s cupboard with an earnest expression. She opened and shut her mouth a few times, almost like rehearsing, before she said anything. Finally, she said, “You know, I think I’m going to call the Jewish Senior Citizens people to fetch this. They can either give it away or sell it”. That sounded good to me.
“Is there – is there anything that you’d like?”
Hesitantly I pointed to that jacket, “That.” I said. “I’d like that jacket”
Silently she took it out and draped it over my arm. Then she kind of patted it, as if I were holding a small dog or something. For a moment neither of us moved. We didn’t look at each other. This is dad’s jacket. Dad’s jacket. How dare I hold it, or take it, or whatever? But it fit me perfectly, unlike everything else that I had ever bought, which required extensive adjustment before I could wear it. Although many years separated us in age, we were of very similar stature. I had a million memories of him in that jacket and although it was quite ridiculous, I felt that I was usurping his position by taking it. But the alternative was for it to go to a stranger, which was unthinkable. God knows what sort of event the jacket would be appropriate for, but at least I had rescued it from a worse fate.
The jacket hung in my cupboard, unused, for a while. Then in the second year of my Eng. Lit. Studies at UCT I noticed that it was a quiet, understated fashion for guys there to wear baggy old sports jackets, baggy jeans that were a bit too long and dragged on the ground, Lennin-type spectacles, and smoke a pipe. Beards and long hair were also very much de regeur. This was the seventies, you understand, hippies ruled the world, Americans had landed on the moon in 1969 and were starting to concede that the Vietnam war was a disaster, movies like “Coming Home” and “Apocalypse now” were starting to scare the shit out of people, sex and dagga were compulsory subjects at UCT, AIDS hadn’t been specifically identified yet, and young people who hadn’t washed in a week were sitting in circles on the grass singing “Kumbaya” and “Where have all the Flowers Gone?” – and over us all hung the shadow of the mushroom cloud of death in the echoes of the atomic bombs of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. There were no guarantees that we might not be the very last generation on earth. We went to sleep with that echo ringing in our ears and we woke up to it in the morning. God himself seemed to have abandoned humanity – he disappeared up into space during the Holocaust and was never heard from again. If you even mentioned Him at UCT you would be met with the bitter laughter of children who had been abandoned by their parents and had learned the hard way to live without them. Feral children, such as lived in the deep forests of Europe after their parents had been murdered – often, before their eyes. Where was the Great and Glorious, always Victorious God then?
The world was super-tender, and super-savage, all at the same time. Never had Charles Dickens been more right: it was the best of times, and it was the worst of times.
These were the days of military conscription and the Bush War in South Africa, and impressionable young boys fresh out of matric were being conscripted into the South African Defence Force because their leaders needed cannon fodder in an attempt to fend off the inevitable “Swart Gevaar” (“Black Threat”) which was then already starting to engulf the White Kingdom. So off they went, some of them to be converted into killers, cripples, corpses, criminals, PTSD sufferers, whatever. (Eventually when my turn came, I got to see them all).
But my time had not come yet. My mommy was determined that her little boykie was not ready for the killing fields. And thus, I was sent to UCT. But the problem was that I was now out of step with the other students. The boys in First Year UCT were mostly war veterans. They were men, and I was just a boy. Most of my old friends were now in the army, so friends were few. And they kept getting fewer, as more and more people saw the writing on the wall and left the country. I wasn’t going anywhere, but the country was changing under my very feet.
When I first tried the jacket as a university dress accessory, I overdid it a bit. Despite never having been a smoker I bought a Sherlock Holmes-type pipe because I thought it completed this image that I was trying to create.
Unfortunately I did not try it out in the privacy of my own room first and instead I took it out with a flourish on campus when wearing the jacket, and lit the damn thing because I was showing off. I choked, got an asthma attack, and passed out on Jamie steps. Thus my pipe-smoking career had a life of about twenty seconds.
Later in that same year my new university friends inducted me into the joys of smoking stronger stuff, which for some reason did not have the same effect on me and produced a far more pleasurable experience!
But times were moving on, and I was not so steadfast in my habits as dad had been.I wore that jacket under all sorts of conditions which dad would never have contemplated, including, on one occasion, as a motorbike jacket. One day I went to fetch my younger brother from school, and I went into a corner too fast. It had been raining, the road was wet and slippery, and I went down. It was never the same after that.
The next day I examined the jacket while standing in front of a mirror. I looked like a tramp. The mystique had gone out of it. The jacket that had looked so grand on Dad, looked like nothing on me. It was over. I took it off slowly, knowing that I would never put it on again. It had done it’s time. Memories of Dad no longer clung to it. It was just an old piece of clothing – anyone’s clothing. My memories of a wonderful man we’re now detached, in my heart alone, and there they would be safe for the rest of my time.
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(1) Corduroy – a velvety, ribbed fabric with quite a thick, plush effect, suitable for cold weather. The word is a French derivative from “cord du roi” - “Royal fabric”.
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© HARRY FRIEDLAND
May 2023
