Caledon Rally

The Cycling Accident

Driving towards Glencairn from Fish Hoek a little after two on this Sunday afternoon, I saw two cars parked on the hill side of the road. A cyclist was lying in the road, between the two cars. The man had the bicycle still trapped between his legs and was trying to lift himself up.
It is not my habit to stop at roadside incidents or accidents: When there are enough bystanders milling about already I do not want to become part of the traffic congestion problem. But this case was different. Although there were two guys standing around, no-one was actually assisting the cyclist to get up and out of the road. I pulled over and assisted another bystander to help the man and his bicycle to the curb. I realised that I recognized the cyclist from before: I have seen him on the road around Cape Point some weekends when I practiced for the Argus. It may even have been at one of the road events organised by the Pedal Power Organisation. He is one of those tough old septuagenarians that start each race slowly, grinning at the youth sprinting away from the start line, catching up with them and passing them gradually and steadily once they run out of steam past the halfway point.

I sat down on the curb next to him. He looked dizzy and shaken. His helmet was perched on the back of his head and his spectacles sat at a skew angle. His white hair was long and a tiny pony tail stuck out the back of the helmet.
Apart from the normal tar burns he seamed all right and in control. We decided to stick his bicycle in my car so that I can take him home. When he tried to stand up his right leg it just would not function; I realised that something more serious could be wrong and that I could not take him home and leave him by himself.
While the other bystander phoned for paramedics, I asked a few questions to find out if there were any relatives that we could contact. I learned that the cyclist’s name is Derrek, and that he cycled and lived alone in the valley. He was going to do the same Ride for Sight event as myself that morning, but when it was canceled due to the rain, he decided to do the route himself once the rain had stopped.
(He was only about 5km from home when the accident happened.) Derrek did not know how the accident happened – he just remembered hitting the tar. He had a theory that the problem was caused by the handlebars coming loose, but when I stuck the bike into my car I did not notice anything particularly wrong with the steering.
As is typical with cyclists, he was very concerned about the state of the bicycle. He told me that the bicycle was used by the British team in the Tour de France in the 1970’s and that his son, who lives in Hungary, bought it second-hand. The bike was old, with the gear shifters on the down pipe of the frame.

Once the paramedic arrived I waited in the background. The paramedic very efficiently completed his tests and decided that since Derrek could not stand on his right leg his hip would need to be x-rayed to determine the extend of any damage. An ambulance was summoned, which arrived promptly ten minutes later. They lifted Derrek onto the stretcher and stuck him in the back of the ambulance. Before they closed the doors Derrek still had a chance to enquire about his bike. I assured him that I would follow the ambulance to the hospital. They drove off in the direction of the Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic, following Main road through the congested traffic in Kalk Bay and St James.

I had mixed feelings to be back at the Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic. So many important events in my life played out at this venue. My daughter was born here, shortly before Christmas in 1997. We met many of our closest friends here, doing antenatal classes in the months before. My wife died here, before Christmas in 2004, after a two year-long battle with leukaemia, and the side-effects of a bone-marrow transplant.
Be that as it may, I could not leave Derrek on his own without knowing that some relative or friend would be by his side for what may follow after the radiologist had made a diagnosis.
While Derrek laid waiting in the Emergency Ward, I asked the staff if I could be by his side, seeing that there were no other relative or friends.
Up to now he had complained very little about pain – he must have a high pain threshold, because I have had my share of cycling accidents and I know how tar burns hurt – but now the initial numbness of the fall started wearing off and the pain were registering on his face.
To try and distract him, I asked him more about his cycling exploits. He told me about the Camino de Santiago that he did recently. He started from Paris and completed the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. He had also taken part in the ride from George to Cape Town the previous year. I have been daydreaming about doing these rides, so he found in me an avid listener and admirer!

Eventually a porter arrived and Derrek was wheeled off to the radiology section. I tagged along, and just as well, because the diminutive radiologist was not strong enough to move his frail body from the bed to the x-ray table. At one point I even had to assist: I had to don a protective jacket and stood holding a reflective plate in the one hand with the other hand holding Derrek’s uninjured leg up the air, out of the way of the camera angle.
Derrek was still hoping that the damage was not too serious as he was able to move the leg a little now without all that pain. I had to break the news to him that that was probably due to the morphine starting to work, and that the radiologist had already spotted a hip fracture in the first few photographs.

Back at the emergency ward we exchanged more cycling stories until Derrek’s daughter arrived. She received the text message I sent while she was having coffee with friends in the Olympia Café in Kalk Bay. I wondered if she was already there when the ambulance drove by. Life is full of strange coincidences!
Quite naturally she was emotional, but fortunately she was assisted by a good friend from the UK. Derrek’s daughter told me that he was already seventy seven years old, and that he was busy practicing for his 11th Argus tour this year!

I can only pray that in the eve of my life, God would grant me the health and courage to be as active as you are, Derrek. I am sure that you will overcome this setback and that you will do that 11th Argus yet, if not this year, then maybe next year!

Lynn and Pepsi

I was just sitting there, in the corner of the Brass Bell pub, minding my own beer and staring through the open window at the one guy in the waves, trying to get some sort of ride with his body board from the choppy sea. I had just dropped off my daughter for a sleep-over date at a friend’s house in Fish Hoek. I had this beautiful Saturday evening to myself and I had no plans. After sending a text message to Graham to see if he would like to meet me for pool in Obz, I relaxed into the corner to enjoy the view and the cold draught.

The elderly couple that came up the stairs and through the entrance door into the pub, headed straight to my table. Oh no, I thought, trying to avoid eye contact by looking through the window at the surfer, they are going to spoil my day by talking nonsense, all in order to try and talk me into buying them drinks. Their clothes looked worse for wear and they were carrying a plastic packet each. She also had an old, faded towel bundled up.
The woman boldly came and sat right next to me, while the man sat at a distance at the opposite end of the table. My interest was now tickled by this bold woman and I took a closer look. I did not pick up any smell of methylated spirits or bushfires as I expected to. They might be in their early sixties, I thought. He was small and wiry and had the unshaven look of a Greek fisherman. His eyes looked sleepy; from drinking sweet wine in the sun, I thought. He looked good-natured though, judging by the wrinkles around his eyes.
She had a wild bunch of curly hair that refused to be kept in place by a faded baseball cap. She wore modern, square-rimmed spectacles with a pink plastic frame. It drooped slightly on the one side. Her beautiful features and her eyes, alive with interest and curiosity, looked like that of a girl much younger that has not yet experienced the rough side of life.

‘Ooh I’m so cold’, she said, her tongue struggling a bit. I tried to ignore it and hoped that they could not notice through my opaque sunglasses that I was looking at them out of the corner of my eyes. She repeated the sentence, this time shaking a bit with a mock shiver. ‘Well, go warm yourself in the sun’, I replied, hoping in vain that they would both go do that, or at least get the hint, and I would be left in peace.

I opened the gap and she wasted no time in getting a foot in the door: ‘We had a nice picnic on the beach and now I’m so cold.’ Well, I thought, here we go; instead of telling them to get lost you are being too nice again.

Someone from across the room greeted the man and he waved back a bit drunkenly, mumbling something. She was obviously accustomed to him communicating like this and she asked who he was talking to. He mumbled a bit more and she understood that too. She asked him to go and buy two Sherries, turning to inform me that they only came in for a sundowner after their picnic.

I relaxed back into my corner, thinking this won’t be so bad after all; at least they were buying their own drinks and will not be pestering me just yet. It was when the women struggled to light a cigarette that I noticed her hand: her left hand was missing fingers, several fingers! She noticed me staring and, thinking it was due to her smoking, apologised, exaggeratingly waving around her head as if there was a big cloud of thick smoke that she was trying to steer away from me.

‘I have to stop, I know, but I only smoke when I need to relax’, she said. ‘And after…’ the man said with a glint in his eye. ‘No splitting, hey!’ she interrupted him and laughed, looking at him lovingly. ‘You are not allowed to split, you hear!’ she repeated. ‘No, a gentleman does not tell’, I added and she laughed and slapped the table.

‘What happened to your fingers’, I asked, thinking that she probably cut them off when cleaning fish at the Kalkbay harbour, while under the influence. I mean, I have seen how fast and skillful those ladies work, and it is known that alcohol abuse is a problem in these parts. ‘You know, I like the way you just ask straight out’, she replied, moving closer and holding the hand under my nose unsteadily. ‘I was born like this.’ Right, I thought, here comes the story. I looked over at the man on the other end of the table. Surprisingly, he had not bought a drink for himself. And it was not Sherrie that he bought for her either; rather some hard-tack liquor like brandy, judging by viscosity and colour of the liquid sloshing around the ice cubes in her glass. He looked like he had seen this movie before and was resigning himself to see it again.

‘What’s your name’, she asked. I said my name and, as usual, had to repeat it a few times and spell it before she got it. The normal joke about which brother, Cain or Abel, was the naughty one, followed. She introduced herself as Lynette, Lynn for short, and said her husband was Ernie or Ernest. ‘Ask him about his nickname’, she prompted me, winking. I looked over at him to see if he wanted to be part of the conversation. She gestured to Ernie to come and sit next to her. ‘I don’t bite’, I said, ‘come tell me about your nickname’. ‘It’s Pepsi’, volunteered Lynn. I misheard her in the din. ‘What – Pipsi?’ I asked, thinking that I am about to hear some distasteful story about a boy wetting his bed in hostel bedrooms. ‘No, Pepsi!’ said Ernie, laughing shyly. ‘Like Pepsi Cola. Do you see?’

Ernie went on to explain that the year he was born was the same year that Pepsi Cola made its first appearance in Cape Town. The delivery trucks used to drive up Voortrekker Road in Parow as his mother would push his pram on the pavement. ‘There goes Pepsi’, his sisters would yell as the trucks go past, and somehow the name then became his. ‘It’s a nice name, don’t you think?’ he said proudly.
‘So where does Elsies come into it?’ asked Lynn. ‘No, I grew up in Elsiesriver, but I was born in Parow’, replied Pepsi, a bit perplexed that she did not know this. ‘Thirty-nine years I have been married to this man; next year it will be forty’, said Lynn. ‘Oh I love him so. You know he took me and did not care about my hand. We all liked the boys, you know, but nobody thought that I would get a man because of my hand. But he wasn’t bothered about it at all. In those days it was a skande, you know what I mean? Parents felt that they had to hide you if you had a gebrek – I even had to get married with a very artificial looking glove over my hand!’

‘Anyhow, where was I? Oh yes, I was telling you that I was born with it like this. But you know, I can play the piano!’ She demonstrated by banging away at the table. ‘I teach music too. I am a music teacher, yes I am. Not the teenagers, please; I like teaching the little ones. They are not shy to ask about my hand either, just like you, sommer straight to the point. They say “What’s wrong with your hand” and then I tell them and then they accept it and we get on.’ She held the hand up for me to see again. ‘When I was a girl some doctors from overseas were here; as if overseas is somehow better’, she snorted. ‘They looked at my hand, they prodded it and pinched it and they said that they could extend my fingers by using bone and flesh from elsewhere in my body.’ She pinched her thigh. ‘But they said that once they do that I would not be able to move it and use it the way I was used to. That meant not playing music anymore.’ Her face contorted. ‘You know I even do concerts? I play at fund-raising events at schools and churches. Fifteen thousand rand at the one church, I’m telling you!’ She took another swig from her glass. Pepsi meanwhile had produced a little bag of raisins from somewhere and she grabbed a handful from him. ‘But when I was young the piano or organ always had to be set at an angle so that people won’t see my hand, you see. So that people would not be offended by it. My father was a minister and I played at lots of churches, but always the piano had to be set so as to hide my hand.
It was a hard decision, that of the operation – the hardest a sixteen year old have to do, and that on my own. You know I went up that mountain’, she pointed through the window up the mountain past Boyes Drive. ‘My father was a minister and they were always away in Jo’burg or Kimberley or somewhere; and I was in boarding school. I sat alone up that mountain for a long time and thought about never being able to play music again. For what, so that I can have pink fingers? Long, useless fingers – you could put a ring on yes, but no other use! But you know, I was always a bit of a rebel?’ ‘I bet you probably still are’, I replied. She laughed heartily and a wet raisin landed on my sleeve.

‘Pepsi, why are you so quiet?’ I asked. ‘Does Lynn do enough talking for the both of you?’ He laughed and replied softly that that’s always been the case.

‘So do you have any children?’ I asked. ‘We have a boy and three girls. None of them are married – they all just shacked up with someone’, her face sagged a little, but then lit up again. ‘And we have nine grandchildren.’ Pepsi’s eyes smiled.
‘And you, do you have children?’ she asked. I replied that I have a daughter of nine years old. She asked about my wife. I told her that I am a single father. Then followed the normal, careful, but probing questions about my single status.

‘But you have a girlfriend?’ Lynn asked. ‘No, I’ve been dumped’, I replied. Another raisin went flying across the table. ‘What is the problem then’, she asked, laughing. ‘I don’t know; I guess it must be me.’

‘No’, said Lynn, rubbing her fingers together. ‘I know what it is - it’s money. I’m telling you, that’s all that women are interested in. They make me sick, my species, all they want is money. But not me, look at me and my Ernie, we don’t have much, but we have each other. Forty years almost now!’

‘What can it buy you? It can’t buy you happiness, and if you don’t have that you have sweet blou all. Oe, laat ek nou my draad kry!’

‘Look at my brother, for instance: he’s an anesthesiologist in L.A. – not an anesthetist – an anesthesiologist, he oversees them. He has all this money. You know he has a farm and he breeds racehorses, and all that stuff. For five years he and his wife struggled to have a child. Him, with all his geleerdheid, and they couldn’t conceive.’ I saw the irony: ‘Yes, and you two had four children and lots of grandchildren!’ She laughed. ‘Yes, a whole nageslag, I’m telling you.’
‘You know when finally their baby was born, the girl suffered from epilepsy. They took her to all the best specialists in California and they operated her brain and tried to remove the epilepsy and she became a kool! My brother’s marriage eventually ended in divorce and I think it was this thing with his daughter that drove them apart. You know, he still comes to visit and once or twice he brought her with. He told me, you know that he told me that he would trade everything he has and owns to get his daughter’s health? No, money can’t buy you happiness.’ She shook her head a few times to accentuate the point.

Pepsi had meanwhile made an exit from the pub, taking his plastic bag with him. Lynn looked as if she was just starting to enjoy herself. ‘Nou waar’s my mannetjie nou?’ she noted his absence with surprise. ‘Jy weet, ek het hom so baie lief.’

‘Listen you tell your daughter; how old is she again?’ I replied with her name and age. She held a crooked finger in front of my face. ‘Well, you tell your Anja that she must find herself. She must get her education, and not just matric, that is worth nothing. She must get her education and she must develop herself. Has she decided what she wants to do yet?’ I told her about Anja’s interest in the arts, her ballet and violin lessons. Her face lit up and got a dreamy quality of a young girl seeing herself on stage. She waved her arms about, almost knocking another patron glass over. ‘Oh, the arts! I love the arts. I mos told you I am a musician. Well, you must tell her, tell her what this aunty said, she must rely on her self. You know her daddy and her family and grandparents and uncles and aunts – that’s all nice to have. But in the end you just have yourself; you must know yourself and make and trust your own choices. You must determine your own direction.’

With that, she gathered up her plastic bag and her bundled up towel. She turned her cheek to me and leaned over for a kiss. I gave her a hug and a kiss. It is not every day you get so much advice for the price of a hug and a kiss.

I watched her make her way through the pub and out the wrong door, the one leading to the restaurant. Then I made a quick exit.

Tribute to Allen

The year was 1989, it was either late Saturday night, or early Sunday morning and the music inside Kippies was deafening. The cigarette smoke was hanging thick and at some tables patrons still managed to have some sort of a conversation by shouting at the top of their voices. Sitting alone at a table opposite ours was Allen Kwela, the legendary jazz guitarist, hurling abuse at the Kippies House Band that everyone else seem to be enjoying so much.

I started going to Kippies, or to be more precise, the Market Theatre precinct, when I was still a student at the Vanderbijlpark campus of Potchefstroom University. The powers that be at the university decided that us engineering students needed to be closer to the smoking chimney stacks of Sasolburg, Vanderbijlpark and Vereeniging, and moved the engineering faculty there. I do not know if they factored into the equation the fact that students may have the occasional need for libraries, theatres or other cultural activities. Perhaps they thought that since we only paid for theoretical and technical instruction, that was all we were entitled to.

When hanging out at the Shakespeare Inn to play pool and hustle the Iscor employees with their pockets full of hard cash - their weekly wages - got boring, I would drive to Johannesburg on a Saturday afternoon. I would browse around the flea market and catch a show at the Market Theatre, but all of that was just warming up for the real show: the entrance to Kippies was just a sharp left as you exit the Market Theatre building, around ten in the evening. Quite often it was the Kippies House band playing - Rashid Lanie, Barney Rachabane and Vusi Khumalo are some of the names I remember. One evening I was fortunate to see Allen Kwela play with them. Allen's face really expressed his love for the music he was playing. To try and describe it here would not do it justice, suffice to say it was a pleasure to watch. As always I stayed right until the end and drove back to Vanderbijlpark in the early hours of Sunday morning.

I was so impressed by Allen Kwela's music that I started pestering the record shops, but I learned that no one had actually recorded him up to that point. Eventually I spotted an ad in the Vrye Weekblad: a French couple residing in Johannesburg had made a private recording and was selling copies. I telephoned and managed to buy a cassette. It was one of my favourites as long as I still had a cassette player.

A year later I was working at the CSIR and was still driving through to Johannesburg some Saturday evenings. This particular evening I decided to take my brother, Wikus, as a special treat since he started listening to jazz recently. Also in our party was a colleague and longtime friend, Dirk. The fourth person was a college friend of Wikus, a young fellow hailing from the north-east of what was then the Transvaal and, I learned later, from right-wing stock.

I found it strange to see Allen sitting alone at the table, not on stage, and clearly unhappy with the band's performance. Not lacking any courage after consuming so many beers, I walked over, sat down at his table and asked him why he was so unhappy with the band. He shouted that Vusi's drumming was too loud, and that he had often told him so. We had some beers and after the band packed up I challenged him to go on stage and show us how it is done. Allen was apologetic, saying that the management - the oafs - has banned him from playing there again. He would not go into the details. In a sudden bout of clarity, he said that we should come to his place where he would show us.

As Kippies was closing anyway - it was around one in the morning - I rounded up our little group and we stumbled to our car. Allen got into a car with another couple. Allen had explained that the chap was an Italian drummer and his girlfriend, a local lass. We followed them to Allen's flat somewhere in Braamfontein.

Allen's hospitality knew no end. He had very little to drink, but poured us all a mix of Tia Maria and Coke. He also offered us a puff of the huge cob that he rolled. Only the Italian accepted. While Allen and the drummer puffed away, we studied the walls of his lounge. Posters of Mandela and the ANC were stuck on the walls. It was the first likeness of Mandela we ever saw. The pictures were faded grey and white and one could make out very little of the young Mandela's features. The eyes of Wikus's friend were popping out of his head. He was probably already seeing himself calling his parents to come and bail him from goal...

Eventually Allen took out his guitar and a small amplifier the size of a shoebox. My friends stopped tugging at my shirt sleeves to get the hell out of there and settled down on the coach. After some tuning, Allen started playing and entertained this small, impromptu gathering for over an hour. By now the Italian was getting restless as his flight back to Rome was leaving by six and he had to get to the airport by five. (Remember when an hour was sufficient for international travel?)

We finally thanked Allen and said our goodbyes. As we headed up Jan Smuts avenue we could see the glimmer of the rising sun in the east. Would the Italian make his flight, we wondered.

Years later I saw Allen at a Guinness Jazz festival at the Market Precinct. I walked over and said: 'Hello, do you remember the boy from the Free State?', but he had no recollection of that evening. I later read that he was recovering after being mugged and having his guitar stolen. Someone had lend him the money to replace it.

It was only in 1998 when Sheer Sound published Allen's CD 'The Broken Strings of Allen Kwela', with well known artists such as Sibongile Khumalo, Barney Rachabane and Vusi Khumalo, who I guess had learned since not to drum so loudly.

Allen Kwela died of asthma in July 2003, at the age of 64 - still relatively unknown and poor. He enriched many lives with his music - I still cherish the good memory of that evening in Braamfontein.

Hamba kahle, Allen.

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