Route 77: A Poememior

Once there was a Dorian

Tell me what created timelessness for you as a child for

therein lies your myth to live by

(Joseph Campbell)

A Story about a Storyteller 1944 ‒ 1956 (0-12)

Here’s John Irving:

A fiction writer’s memory is an especially imperfect provider of detail; we can always imagine a better detail. Being a writer is a strenuous marriage between careful observation and just as carefully imagining the truths you haven’t had the opportunity to see.

(Trying to Save Piggy Sneed)

As Dylan Thomas intones ‘to begin at the beginning.’ So here’s to my parents, Reggie Haarhoff and Patricia Purchase who married in 1941 in Kuruman.

Tender Love Story

the widower of 56, with a retarded son,

chugs down Jones Street in his V8 Ford.

sees a nurse of 26 window-shopping

outside John Orr’s with his cousin’s daughter

(who will become my godmother) courts her.

the war rumbles far away in Europe,

near in news, shortages, coupons

and a desert death toll.

and she escapes from this diamond city

to a military hospital in Middelberg,

somewhere in the Transvaal nowhere

to put miles between this age gap

and bringing up a backward son.

the man writes letters in his lovely hand

blue-black Quinck on blue bond

from a ticket booth at a rugby match

where he earns Saturday cash.

and one day off duty, she enters her room

in the nurse’s quarters. the winter smell

of freesias in full bloom announces

he has come for her. they marry with

a promise of release within six months

if she, number fourteen of fifteen children, is not happy.

(they share fifteen years before his heart stops.)

and as they sit down to their

first wife-cooked meal –

meat, potatoes, peas and rice,

he scrapes blade against sharpener

as if washing hands. yet still

the roast resists the knife.

he speak his fatherly words

never mind, my dear.

at least the gravy’s tender.

My parents’ wedding: Reggie Haarhoff and Patricia Purchase

I was born in a flat above a cinema and a bank, across the road from the market place. A fine balance between left and right brain. 27 July 1944. A Leo. My late uncle Alan Christie’s birthday. The doctor, nowhere to be found, so Great Aunt Gerty, midwife extraordinaire, brought me into the world. Looks like a drowned rat, mused my father. Perhaps this is where the story begins.

I was a mistake. After my sister’s protracted birth, the doctor told my mother, No more children. But somehow I wriggled into life.

Mother as a bride

Wanted

once upon a therapy

I swam back in space

to the sea before

my mother knew

she bore me.

the doctor’s warning

that another birth

might drown her life and mine,

sent fear

snorkelling into the womb.

in the beginning fluid,

I, a snail thread

on a sea bed of time,

heard the Universe sound this one. yes.

Years later, when someone in Pringle Bay asks if I have any dicey relationships, I mention a sister. The person responds, In a former life you were her executioner. When I was little my three-year-old sister suggested, Why don’t you take him to Dr Weinberg and let the doctor chop his head off?

Sister Joy and me

Moments when Dr Death nudged my shoulder. Whooping cough as a baby. Parents tried to find an airplane, for some believed that a sudden drop in altitude would dislodge the cough and leave it in the sky. Then off I went to a farm cattle kraal where a dose of cow dung ammonia was supposed to ease hacking lungs.

Are optimists born, made or both? Lil, I nearly did fall down, I said to Lillian, an older cousin, often in our home (my mother a generous gatherer of family) when I tumbled head-first, nose grazed, from a teak feeding chair, which converted to a rocker. Coming ninth in a class of thirty-two, I’d offer solace, Don’t worry, Mom, there are twenty-three others behind me. At eight, the school doctor declaring, Your right eye is weaker than your left. Me to Ma, He says my one eye is stronger than the other. Enter spectacles.

Down the road, the cafe, Mookery’s, divided our white 1940s suburb from Kimberley’s Malay quarter. Here we met the other South Africans. Buying sherbet. In 1948 I heard my mother, hunched over the old valve radio, crying as she listened to the insistent beep-beep announcing that Jan Smuts had lost his seat in parliament. Later I wrote a story, The Silver Tickey, about that day. Not even my silver tickey could console her.

Memories unfold in a love for water. I learnt to swim in the Vaal and Modder Rivers on the Smith’s farm. Drinking milk from the cascading corrugated sheet, the white waterfall. Another memory of a four-year-old, from a beloved six-years-older cousin, Joan Peirson, now in Wales. Joan’s pilot father Donald was killed in World War II. So Joan, Chris, her brother, and Aunt Erica often holidayed with us. Four children elbowing for space, making imaginary ‘my side’ borders, asleep in the backseat of the Ford V8, three adults up front. Driving 1000 km through the night to Herold’s Bay or Ganzekraal, Lillian and Percy’s farm near Darling. Here’s Joan’s gift:

Long before you wielded words

We dug runnels in the sand

At Herold’s Bay. In play mode

I taught you to curl your tongue

Like the crisp wave breaking;

When the consonant crested

Your lips, we shouted

The twisting words in rhythm

To our stamping, splashing feet,

Laughing.

Your father alone, was saddened.

He loved your

Lound the lugged locks

The lagged lascal lan.

Until then I had thought that my father, old as a grandfather, had scant connection to me. This gift gave me another perspective. I need to reinvent myself and change my story. The past is not fixed – it’s a moveable feast.

Enter the imagination. Another ‘memory’ from the annals of Dorian @ four:

A Motorbiker and A Boy

I imagine you on your bike,

goggle cap, ear flaps,

jacket, leggings, gloves.

on a Saturday spin, 1948,

purring past the park in leather trim.

350 CCs bloodred, silver streaks.

then a boy roars suddenly

out of the fete gates,

under your wheels.

no time to swerve,

to lock brakes.

you skid leather along

the tar in a screech-scream,

the bike stripping paint

in a wheel buckle blowout.

you metal-slide for

a jangle-tangle moment.

when stillness descends,

a boy, aged four,

with a leg as bent

as your front wheel fork,

lies, out cold, in the road.

when the ambulance

has sirened him off,

you answer the cop’s questions,

shaking like a rattle nut.

you drag bike and you home,

tend to the exhaust burn

mercurochrome knuckles,

knees, elbows, kick start ankle.

sixty years on in an age of helmets

and padded jackets, finger-flick starters,

the boy thinks of you and says

I’m sorry I wrecked your bike.

And a beloved half-brother, Allan, older, much older, from my widowed father’s first wife. Strange stories about her – passing herself off as an Egyptian princess in Cape Town. My father struggling to support her. Hysterical when she discovered she was pregnant. Did she harm her baby son? Let him fall? Who knows. In his forties his heart stopped beating.

Bronzed Shoe

for Allan (1921‒1968)

your shoe stood on

the mantelpiece

above the fireplace

where your father lived

with his second wife

and us, your siblings.

it rested alone,

its left-foot friend, long lost.

I often balanced it,

cool in my palm.

studied its leather tread

glazed in a bronze age.

hand stitched, double thread.

the shoemaker’s elves

could have shaped it.

tongue, eye, sole and instep

sang in unison.

the nails tacked

a horseshoe heel

for the luck of the road.

your body trod to

a kind of manhood.

you wrote gentle letters

each birthday, in pencil,

from the Home, with poems

copied letter by letter.

for you never stepped

to cursive script

with run-on lines racing

to the edge of the page.

your mind had long gone wandering

still shod in its childhood shoe.

Of four grandparents I saw only one in the flesh – Granny Harriet. And one anecdote only of my father’s mother, Susannah (Olivier) to Japie, father Reggie’s dad. Japie, do you think you are a boarder in this house? she asked. I have been wife-told that I carry such genes. In her eighties, Granny Harriet walked around our midnight kitchen, singing, ‘Tell Me The Old Old Story’, the motion of her wrists and hands kneading endless bread:

Keeping Track

the old coke cooler

with its flatpan tray,

stood outside the window

where Granny Harriet,

with thirty-three grandchildren,

slept her senile sleep.

raised on bricks like a tokoloshe bed,

it sagged, rusted in chicken wire

and trusses with trickle holes.

woodrot spat out screws and splinters.

this ruin, taller than a ten year old,

was my robber bank, bars for badman,

shoot-out rock, crow’s nest

for island sighting,

but most of all

my pitstop and grandstand finish

for the tricycle track.

legs over handle bars

I pumped round trees

citrus, fig and vine

circled in a brick blur

past the corrugated fence

with a green-flake paint ad,

sandpit S-bend,

grape-shaped bridge

and down the straight

ringing the finger bell,

frantic at last lap,

flashing by the check flag

and crowd roar from the cooler,

spinning a Trinity of wheels.

then, laurelled and champagne-sprayed

I fizzed into the breakfast room

where Granny, woken from slumber,

looked up at me and quizzed

ferreting the fridge of her memory,

‘Now who are you again?’

And watching my father at his shaving ritual:

Magnified Moment

one morning I saw it,

watching my father shave

in his swivel mirror.

one circle showed his human face,

aged, grey, wrinkled, nicked skin.

then he swung it on its axis.

in the reverse moon

his face magnified,

bristles thrice their size,

pores a diamond design.

a blood river cut

through a wild sea.

over his shoulder

in a ring of silver,

I saw a thousand fathers rise,

large as gods.

Then one day King George VI came down our road:

King Dreams

my boyhood filled

with the Idylls of Kings.

their fine robes and gold,

their off with your head

ascendancy.

from old King Cole,

to sovereigns, monarchs,

to Fairy Tale Tsars and

High King Sundays,

we read, played and sang

their sceptres into being.

and then, in ’47,

an earthly King came

down Dalham Road

from the war memorial,

with the Long Tom

Boer War gun,

to the Malay Quarter.

coming to the city

which bestowed

the Big Hole diamond,

embedded in his crown.

I took my riempie chair

to the pavement’s edge.

fingered for luck

the George Rex tickey,

scrubbed, in my pocket.

Union Jack, homemade,

at the ready, unfurled.

crowds jostled under pepper trees

waiting in the sun.

and he came down that road

made royal for a day,

the engine purring past.

perhaps he gave the backseat wave.

as the cavalcade

drove from sight

and the crowd changed

back to neighbours,

like a mustard seed,

a pepper berry,

the deep King stirred,

regal, royal,

constellating kingdoms,

palaces and succession,

made conscious in me.

Off to school at six. Behold the report. Like doctors and dentists who display qualifications on their consulting wall, as a Prof of English forty plus years later, up this went, enlarged, behind my Windhoek desk.

Sub A (Grade 1) School report

From red trike to bike. Hercules. Black like Henry Ford’s Fords. Bell and dynamo. Sweet mobility. I peddled bicycle (it steered itself) to the Victorian library near the Kimberley Club where Rhodes plotted and dreamed. I’d climb the patterned spiral staircase in search of adventure. Secret Seven, Hardy Boys. Back home I played imaginary games, sometimes alone in the backyard, marked by the citrus, and fig trees, a grapevine. Constructing narratives in which I was hero. Later to encounter the myth of the archetypal hero’s journey.

Dynamo and GPS Dream

I cycle in the dark,

along a country road,

a breeze blowing

through my shirt.

I find clamped

to the front fork

that simple bit

of bottled physics.

it decked a boy’s bike

with rotating coils,

magnetic fields

and pulsing current.

I flip the dynamo spring.

the head settles, nests

once more on the front tyre.

whirs to pedal rhythm.

pump legs to meet this

necessary resistance

and speed to steady this

broad-as-a hand beam.

for I need this bright genie

of the silver lamp,

balanced like a nose

on a handlebar moustache.

yet how to follow the road

through moonless twists

shortcuts left-rights, straight-ons

in this all night saddle ride?

a GPS lights sudden

on the crossbar

like a bird and perches

on the bit that turns the wheel.

this global voice and leglight

in tandem, sing, shine, hum

direct me through motion

to a dawn destination.

As soon as I could escape I was swapping comics in a Saturday morning bioscope queue. And stamping my feet as the stagecoach, with the runaway horses, raced towards the precipice, following the fortunes of Francis, the Talking Mule. Then anguishing over the doctor who had taken his suffering wife’s life, a mercy killing, and disguised himself as Buttons, a circus clown, to escape detection. Who never removed his painted face. Cecil B DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth with James Stewart as Buttons. 1952, an impressionable eight-year-old, the story moved in me. When the circus train crashes, Buttons is about to leave and shake off the FBI agent shadowing him, but he returns to save a life, administering a blood transfusion. The agent assists Buttons. Then the reluctant arrest. My early introduction to irony, understatement and letting the audience/reader add the two and two. Buttons off to ‘meet his girl.’. The death penalty implied.

A first. I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. Madelaine, she’s eight, me six. She, the initiator into these mysteries. At their Modder River home in a dark secluded shed. Madelaine. A name that still holds electricity, like Guinevere (a triangle with Arthur and Lancelot), another myth that inspired and set me yearning for I knew not what.

First music. The love songs that my parents courted to in the late thirties. Nelson Eddy and Jeanette Macdonald in brittle 78rpm on the gramophone. Wanting You, Indian Love Call and Richard Tauber’s tenor voice crooning One Day When We Were Young. And the Sunday school Elim choruses and jubilant Wesley hymns in the hymn book. Seventy years on I can sing many by heart. And organist Tommy Marnitz in our Gothic Trinity Methodist Church. Long before stories took me up and away beyond conventional religion.

Music Man

so there he was on Saturdays

honkey-tonking a piano

hauled up the grandstand steps

ungrand lid flung open

to the corrugated roof

draped in black and white

at the school derby versus

the local college green and gold.

he twisted and thumped

underneath the arches

old tunes into ra ra ra

Lili Marlene

we’re proud of our school yes

we’re proud of old boys’ high

Pistol Packing Mama

rugby playing KHS

put the college down.

on schooldays he turned

choir master for a period

trying to harmonise

testosterone groans

with broken voices

teach them the base for

Carol of the Drum

ram pap pa rum rum pap pa rum

his discipline thin

as his waving pencil.

on Sundays he left

the raucous boys

and lethargic masters behind

fingers and feet pressed

in service to his great love.

shed of other roles he sat

before ivory stops pedals

in the Gothic church.

before organ pipes

thick as rugby posts

thin as his pencil

he played a Bach fugue

kept choir anthem company

piped Wesley hymns

oh for thousand tongues to sing

to Lazarus the dead

transformed aglow, this maestro

now at home, no longer alone.

Given my father’s heart-struggle for breath, my matron mother donned her starched uniform with epaulets and went back to nurse. She, during her training, a gold medal winner at Kimberley Hospital. Our V8 downsized to a blue Ford Poplar.

A Snap in Time

the three of us stand, Kodaked

beside the house with corrugated roof

half squinting into the sun,

Sunday dressed for church.

my mother in a navy frock

with white trim around her neck

my sister in a flared mid-fifties dress

both with bags and matching hats.

me in a black and white blazer

a size too big, grey shorts,

school shoes, grey socks

Brylcreamed hair, arms hanging.

behind us rests the A-frame swing

with flaked paint and two slatted seats

facing each other like a couple

hooked to a shared footrest.

weeks before his finger click stills

and the coffin lid snaps shut

my father’s morning shadow unsuited,

falls onto the edge of the photograph.

We took in boarders. One, John Taylor from Swaziland, at school with me, us sharing a room. A multitude of imaginary adventures. After the death he left our house and school. Where is he now?

A cautionary tale. Once cycling with a friend in the veld after rain. In the cub’s green cap with yellow piping. Two ‘coloured’ youths cycling nearby. I made some sotto voce side-mouth remark to my companion. One of the guys cycled slowly towards me, lifted my cap off my head and dumped it in a muddy puddle. It shrank. Each time I wore it, I was reminded of my too-large-a-head folly.

And outside my bedroom sash window, this:

The Orange Cosmos

each season the tree grew

its solar system

with a hundred suns.

we stretched on bare toes

into evergreen heaven

and when we landed back,

feet flat on earth,

we clutched an orange orb

in our fingers.

the rolling and squashing began.

we thumped with the base of a thumb,

roller-skated it under foot,

and worked its leather.

roughed it up and down

the brick wall until it was putty.

we punctured it

with a needle.

a windmill shaft

tapped a citrus aquifer.

as the crochet point withdrew,

a drop of juice surfaced

on the pock-marked lip.

we sucked this ball

of sweet and sour fire,

until the well was dry.

turned it inside out

and tore the pulp with milk teeth,

spitting pips and inner skin

till bitter rind remained.

then we stretched our length

travelling through space

to land astronaut fingers

on another aromatic planet.

our lips glistened in a kiss.

Fifteen years passed in Dalham Road. On a visit around 2000, our shrunken home, now transfigured:

A Bedroom and a Chapel

fifty years on in Kimberley

I visit my childhood home,

a small Victorian with stoep,

corrugated roof,

three tiled fireplaces

and a front door with a bird

set in stained glass.

the Catholic Bishopric,

a grand Victorian brother,

stood solid as faith next door.

the fence came down

when the Church bought

and blessed the house

after our departure.

in a timeplay overlay

I walk room to room

to the murmur

of a confirmation class.

in the kitchen that held

the Aga icon and an eight seat table,

nuns ladle Friday soup

to vagrants who queue

under the old lemon tree

bitter-sweet on the tongue.

I enter my parents’ room

stand next to the hearth

with its marble mantle.

green lilies bloom on the tiles

under a pressed ceiling

where my father in pyjamas,

the crotch gaping a little,

home between heart attacks,

writes me a note for school

in a pencil scribble scrawl.

where my mother, days later ‒

her eyes have not slept all night ‒

summons me on Ascension Day ’56

your father slipped away to Jesus.

in their bedroom

a statue of Mary now

altars the bay window

in this Our Lady’s chapel.

her sceptre holds sway

over these instants,

mottled lemon yellow.

this house, this home,

absorbed into her Queendom.

At age eleven, my first poem landed to hold the grief surrounding my father’s death. Spinster, Aunt Edith, my mother’s older sister, stayed with us. She helped me. Writing and healing were to become twins. Edith had returned from the Transkei in her brown Citröen, that classic with the running board, lamps and mysterious hydraulic elevation. The only one of fifteen siblings to attend university. Edith headed a mission school. Rumour has it, she never married, saying no to an alcoholic’s proposal. Why? Grandfather Henry James Purchase, their father, a charismatic Native Commissioner, horseman, anti-Boer jingoist, womaniser, and alcoholic.

Later I revisited this first death:

My Father’s Face

sedan doors shut sharp as gunshot.

we walk a mourning step

to the parlour corner

near the mine museum

and man-made hole

flooded in days when he hung

a young man’s moustache.

the street, paved with the living,

sparkles like the gem

that polishes the city.

frosted panes in coffin scroll

announce the partnership.

Human and Pitt. Kimberley.

he always quipped at names

undertaking the grim humour of death.

he lies in a room

shaved of smell,

upper lip scraped

in the blue of morning,

clean as my chin

its stubble still inside its skin.

and that mouth so dry.

no jest can bud around his tongue.

the pocket, bereft

of his flourishing pen,

surrenders a white handkerchief.

beneath the pin stripe and tie,

his heart, that offending organ,

which plucked his fine-hair breath,

lies deep in its earth,

mined of its diamond.

I see my first death mask

shrunken in the retreat of cells.

and after the black car

had purred us home,

I took to pencil and pulsing type

and, in the erratic clatter of passion,

rhymed to my father’s face

my first boy’s ballad.

I kissed my words as full stop

on his sweet-fleshed fontanel.

Yes, there are dogs in this story:

The Ride Home

after my father’s death

our dog Duke went

on daily walkabout.

trotting to town, calling at

the baker, for breadcrust

the butcher for bone

the barber for a pat.

and at office for a meeting.

he’d arrive after five

sitting on the back seat

Of a thumping V8

Buick, de Soto, Hudson

I half waited for a royal paw.

doctor, magistrate, magnate

in chauffer mode, opened the door

and out stepped Duke

with a tail wag.

back at the pillar and bronze plate

Hilton 18 Dalham Road

so Duke showed a boy

the pattern of a working life.

I venture forth into the world,

ply the writing route

faithful to images and rhythms

after twists, turns, surprises

I arrive sure as story

dropped off at the front gate.

Exit childhood. In hindsight I carried these two thoughts with me. ‘The inner child is the carrier of our personal stories,’ says therapist Jeremiah Abrams, and Alice Millar writes ‘Only when I make room for the voice of the child within me do I feel myself to be genuine and creative.’

Bill Haley, Pat Boone, Elvis and teenage me jiving in luminous green socks 1957 – 1961 (13-17)

The son of a widow, told to emulate a dead perfect father, to be man of the house. No place to rebel. The result? A protracted adolescence and a subversive, continuing rebellion. A late developer. A mediocre school C 60% performer.

Yet learning poetry by heart. Quotes cling like the burs in my socks walking through the veld. As a teenager, when dealing with the ‘thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to’ (Hamlet) I recited quotations written in my left-hand scrawl, recited until a sense of euphoria, courage and possibility rang through my cells. ‘Diamonds are made under pressure’ (appropriate for a Kimberley boy), and ‘oaks grow strong in contrary winds’.

I took to lifelong foam, brush and razor, a ritual link to a lost father.

Skin Deep

in the mornings

I lather my father alive

in shaving foam.

the tube breathes him

as I unscrew and snake

lime, camphor, menthol

onto soft bristles.

And in the church choir I sang, How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds. Dorian to solo-sing the third verse. Organ plays opening bars. This is how it goes on the day:

Dear Name the Rock on which I build.

(no words come out of my mouth)

My Shield and Hiding Place, (Choir mistress sings solo, looking at me)

My never-failing treasury filled (Dorian joins choir mistress in duet)

With boundless stores of grace! (Dorian sings last line alone)

And of this choir mistress:

The Singing Teacher

twice a week

one hour alone with her.

all body and auburn hair,

she teaches an adolescent

through images and fingers.

the singing is already there

in the instrument, in the body,

plexus, chest, throat, head and mouth.

she touches each with her palm.

let it unfold its smoke.

my eyes follow her flowing dress.

now her hands lie flat

on her diaphragm.

light the breath on the banks of ‒

she gestures ‒ subterranean rivers,

so it rises from the hot core.

deeper, draw it from

deep inside you.

she strokes her throat with her nails.

the polish matches that hair.

clear the chimney of debris and dry rot

so the timbre can climb on tendrils.

she waves her wrists

and leaves a scented breeze.

let sound ascend on an updraft.

yes, like that. beautiful

through the roof of the cave.

your head is a cavern, you know.

the river narrows between us.

she reaches forward

and places her thumbs and fore

on my cheek bones.

she taps the spot exactly

where my eyes and nose meet.

these holes here

ring and resonate.

let the voice currents

echo in these chambers.

tap... tap... tap.

she is a bright woodpecker.

here... here... here.

you are a maze of passages.

she touches my ears with

her thumbs. they pulse.

hear the humming of the bees

from deep inside the hive.

her fingertips on my lips

now open, open the cave. like this.

I see her tongue stir

below a front-row

audience of teeth.

beneath a palate dome

built for arias.

your notes will rise

sure and sung through,

exalting the valleys and mountains

with songs for all seasons.

just sing, sing, sing.

her mouth closes. red lips rest.

the river widens between us.

she drops her arms. The hour’s up.

I swoon from the hive of