Vrystaat Confessions

Tag: booze

Safety First, Old-Style

I was telling you earlier that the Road Safety slogan in the Vrystaat in days of yore was Friends Don’t Tell Friends They Can’t Drive Because They’re Drunk, Because Then Friends Will SHOW Friends How They Actually Drive Very Well When They’re Drunk, Thank You Very Much, and this was proven half true one night when I told Tabs, ‘Listen, I think you’ve had a few too many and the best thing to do is to let ME drive.’

It was all Bess Reitz’s fault. She was buggering off to America and insisted we drink beer at the Holiday Inn . .

. . and that we then repair to her garage opposite the Town Hall to drink beer. We were all sad to see her go, so we had drunk more than usual.

It was OK though, the cops wouldn’t catch us as a lookout was posted in the tree on the pavement outside Dr Reitz’s old surgery next door in the form of accomplished gymnast and ceiling beam swinger John Venning. Where a normal person would climb up a tree till the branches started thinning, John climbed up into the twigs, then the leaves, till his head, shoulders and belly button popped out from the very top. From this crow’s nest vantage point he kept a 360° lookout shouting, ‘Where are the coppers!?’ and ‘The coast is clear!’ and ‘Ahoy!’ and ‘The gendarmes are coming!’ and other helpful stuff.

Now it was true I had been with Tabs all night drinking and he could have said the same of me, but it was me talking, making my sensible suggestion. And anyway Pierre agreed with me, and volunteered to follow us and bring me home safely from Gailian after I’d delivered Tabbo safely home. We were all about safety, see.

– and Bessie would have vouched that I was in showroom condition –

Tabs was perfectly rational and amenable to my eminently sensible suggestion. ‘Tell you what,’ he said, ‘I’ll drive to the top of forty two second hill and then you can drive. I want to show you what my SSS can do.’ I was perfectly rational and amenable to that suggestion, and so we set off down Warden Street.

At 190mph.

Tabbo had a green two-door Datsun SSS 1800 (Geoff Leslie had famously called his red Datsun 1600 his ‘Triple Ess Ess Ess’) and that thing ~~fucked off~~ went fast. We touched the tar twice on the way down Warden street and flew up 42nd Hill at a hell of a rate of knots. By slamming into 4th gear halfway up Tabs kept our speed up, slacking off only to about 189mph. I was highly relieved when Tabs pulled over as promised and I took over, proceeding at a much more sedate pace.

Soon after, I turned sedately into Gailian and the road took a sharp left and I didn’t. Changing down into second I let out the clutch but I hadn’t taken my foot off the gas, so we leapt forward into the only deep ditch in the flat vlakte veld for miles around. Tabbo irresponsibly bit a huge chunk out of the dashboard. I thoughtfully didn’t, as the steering wheel stopped me from doing the same. Seatbelts hadn’t been invented yet. Or more accurately, the wearing of seatbelts hadn’t been invented yet *. OK, the wearing of seatbelts hadn’t yet become popular. OKAY! We weren’t forced by law to wear seatbelts yet.

As it turned out, speed hadn’t been the problem after all – it was the sudden stop that dented Tabbo and made him bleed untidily in the SSS.

Fortunately for us, Pierre was right behind and ambulanced us to hospital where the local vet stitched up Tabbo’s lip and he ended up looking quite handsome after that. As the doc said Vasbyt Tebs, he said ‘Hit it Doc!’ but gripped my hand tightly as he said it. It was True Valour in the face of Adversity, and a movie or documentary could be / should be made.

But the sudden stop, the bleeding and the hospital afterwards were NOTHING. We now had to face the hard part: Telling Stella. They were in bed in the wee morning hours dark; we couldn’t see them, we could just hear Stella after Tabs’ confession that ‘we’ had crashed into the ditch. She asked if we were OK. Hector was silent.
~~oo0oo~~
* I looked it up: The first U.S. patent for automobile seat belts was issued to Edward J. Claghorn of New York not long before our escapade, in 1885. So we weren’t used to them yet.
~~oo0oo~~

11 May 2014
Woken by the Tamboekie

Harrismith was not richly endowed with pubs. It had kroegs, but pubs, not so much. So before the Holiday Inn brought mid-West America to the Vrystaat vlaktes, we were forced to drink and drive.

In those days the Road Safety slogan was Friends Don’t Tell Friends They Can’t Drive Because They’re Drunk Because Then Friends Will SHOW Friends How They Actually Drive Very Well When They’re Drunk.

Not as snappy as Speed Kills but nevertheless a very valid slogan.

Favoured watering holes were Little Switzerland on the Oliviershoek Pass and, because after a skinful you want to actually negotiate a whole mountain pass, the Royal Natal National Park Hotel.

One legend of Harrismith District Mobile Imbibing was Rob, whose surname will remain a secret because he might have become sensitive to this well-deserved reputation earned during his lengthy youth later when he was probably telling his own kids to BEHAVE themselves. And Speed Kills, and Wipe Your Feet, and Two Drinks is Enough, and Abstain until you’re Married, you young ‘uns, and other things that would have raised a knowing grin on the faces of his old friends if they had overheard this theoretical speech.

I mean, his rollovers (how many?) culminated in his lying on his neck on the roof of Steph’s white VW Beetle and when Steph said “Rob! Are you OK?!” he murmured “Shh! My favourite tune is playing” as he adjusted the radio tuner which had gone off a touch as the vehicle bollamakissied.

Speaking of pubs, booze, cars and road safety:

The Catholics have it all wrong when they appoint Saints.

I mean NOT ONE of the barmen who put up with our shit has been nominated as far as I know – and they should be. They really deserve sainthood. Like the Little Switzerland barkeep who watched as we emptied the fine display of pampas grass in the foyer, stuck the stalks up our naked rears, set fire to the fronds and ran around the hotel corridors where innocent paying guests were slumbering, yelling “Flaming A’s! Call the Fire Brigade!” A pram was commandeered in the mock fire-fighting response – enough said, a grown man in a pram going Whee! Whaa! Whee! Whaa! – A fiasco.

Also a sainthood for Mother Mary, who loaned me her grey 1970 Ford Cortina to take an Aussie Exchange student there one night.

like this one

On the way back I thought I heard faint snoring and a swish-swish-swish sound from far away. I woke up to find I was going along at a fair rate with tamboekie grass hitting the windscreen, Yabsley the Oz asleep on the seat next to me. I slammed on the anchors and got out to look. I didn’t have a clue if I’d gone off on the right or the left of the road, but following our track back through the long grass we found the road above the pass, reversed and wound our way home much soberer. Had I killed Michael Yabsley I’d have changed the course of Aussie politics, as he went on to become an MP and the Aussie Liberal Party’s federal treasurer.

There should have been a law against drinking and driving.

I do tell my kids to BEHAVE themselves, but I have a hard time keeping a straight face.

——-ooo000ooo——-

I found a 1963 video of Royal Natal National Park.

——-ooo000ooo——-

kroeg – males-only bars

bollamakissied – somersaulted; rolled

8 May 2014
Hello Cock goes missing

Uncle Jack Kemp had a big dilemma. He loved a party and there were two parties on, one at our house and the other at Ronnie from Threeburgh’s place. To get from the one brandy bottle to the other he had to walk down our front steps, down our little-used front path and out the gate onto Stuart Street. He then had to cross the road and walk northwest to the other corner where Ronnie and Martie were whooping it up – and they could whoop it up!

Then he had to retrace his steps in case there was something more exciting going on where he had just come from.

After a few such sorties he went missing and Isabel Necessary asked her Koosie (pr: coosie) to Go And Look For Him Please My Love, throwing back her head to let out a peal of loud cackling laughter, drink in one hand and ciggie in the other.

I found him under the willow, flat on his back with the unspilt brandy glass balanced on his big boep. Hello Cock, he rasped. ‘Hello Cock’ he’d say to everyone. Saved him remembering names.

Uncle Jack was fine, he had just run out of steam and vertical-ness and was thinking about his next move. What lovely people were Jack and Isabel Kemp!

~~~oo0oo~~~

In the map the four dots mark our yard. Just above the top dot is the van Tubbergh home, showing the short route Uncle Jack had to negotiate. In the picture of the front of our house, there’s a willow tree on the left. Just out of picture on the right is the willow tree under which dear Uncle Jack came unstuck, where schoolboy me found and ‘rescued’ him.

~~~oo0oo~~~

19 Feb 2014
An Old Mystery: Whose fault?
There were two reasons we ‘borrowed’ Gerrie’s 1961 black Saab 93 4-cylinder 2-stroke late one night: (1). If you don’t give a car a run the battery can go flat, and (2). We had Larry the American Rotary Exchange student from New York with us, who might have heard that the Free State can be a very boring place with “nothing to do.” Especially at night. And also (3). A moving car is a safe place for schoolboys to drink beer in. These are facts.

Quietly wheeling it down the driveway we held our breath until we’d pushed it far enough, then quickly started it and we were OFF! Freedom! Beer! Speed! Steph was multi-tasking, driving and handing out the ‘longtom’ cans of Black Label beer his family’s obliging gardener had bought for us from Randolph Stiller’s Central Hotel offsales. My folks lost the sale because of their silly and pedantic “over-18’s” policy.

Tuffy always finished his before we hit third gear . . .

A quick routine stop to tap the fuel pump with the half brick kept under the bonnet for just that purpose, and we headed for new terrain.

We had already done the town athletic track and the school netball fields on other occasions, leaving our trademark donuts and figure-of-eights in the gravel.* This time our destination was Alfred vd Zeyde’s National Botanic Gardens on top of Queen’s Hill, stopping only once more to tap the fuel pump with the half-brick kept under the bonnet for just that purpose.

In the dark we met Kolhaas Lindstrom in his car. He was legit: He’d already left school and was a licenced driver. “Dice?” he challenged, and the game was on! Whizzing through the veld Rring-ding-ding-ding-RRriiing! It’s a two-stroke, remember?

Don’t believe the Minister of Transport, speed doesn’t kill you. Speed exhilarates. It’s the sudden stops that kill you. And the sudden stop and loud bang came as a surprise to us. Dead silence reigned until in an awed American upstate New York accent Larry exclaimed from the back seat, “We’ve had a head-on collision with a hill!” .

That broke the ice. The hill, meantime, had probably broken the suspension.

But no. A committee undercarriage inspection revealed all four wheels suspended in mid-air. Trying to gun it out left the front wheels whizzing around uselessly. Well, that is why there were five of us, so we man-handled it over the ditch and away we went, cleverer than before.

Forty five years later I flew in to inspect the scene of the mystery. Which was still unsolved and now a very cold case. The mystery was this: How could it be that such great and experienced drivers crashed? I mean some of us had been driving for . . well, months! And in not too many years’ time, we’d be licenced drivers.

I flew in via google earth. And there it was: A fault!! It was Queen’s Hill’s fault, not ours!

A great big fault – or ditch? – runs North-South across the whole hill. THAT was what caught us by surprise in the long grass.

I have little doubt that if one were to measure its width you’ll find it just a bit greater than the wheelbase of a 1961 Saab93!

~~~oo0oo~~~
- * Next time you’re wondering who made those ‘crop circles’? Think a) Homo sapiens; b) Homo sapiens subspecies pranksterii; c) Alcohol; These are facts.
31 Jan 2014
Rocky Horror in Senekal, Vrystaat

1971: Rugby in Bloemfontein, first test Springboks vs le Frogs, the French. We drove over in Tabs’ car to watch.

Apparently: . . . “this test is remembered for a famous tackle by Bourgarel on a charging Frik du Preez. Frik was charging down the touchline, all cylinders firing, on his way to what look like a certain try. Bourgarel, however, had other plans. The little French wing came from the side, fly-tackling Frik; dumping him unceremoniously over the touchline to the disgust of the crowd, who even came-up with a chant for the Bourgarel as a consequence. ‘Boe-ga-rel, gaan na die hel!’

One of the teams must have won, but I remember that test for something different: After the game, Tabs, Des, Raz, Stervis and I are driving back to Harrismith when the beer ran out and a kroeg – no way you would call it a pub – in the dusty metropolis of Senekal beckoned.

Tabs remembers us playing darts and drinking maybe quite a lot. By the time the barman threw us out Des had bonded deeply with one of Senekal’s left-behinds, and when we suggested we leave for home rather than go home with Deliverance for a braai, Des told us in no uncertain terms that WE could go, but HE was not leaving his lifelong mate – of three hours – in the lurch. There would be no abandonment, said Des with his nose in the air and his eyes closed – you know how he gets.

ONE fing we must NOT do, we were told, also in no uncertain terms, by Des’ Brokeback Mountain mate when we got to the small house on the wrong side of Senekal, is wake his wife. Lemme tell you carefully, you must not, no marrer whut you do, wake my wahf, you hear?

Wooden floors, five drunk ous stumbling around, I started to think this goon doesn’t actually have a wife. Conan meanwhile, is scratching around in the rusty barbarian chest deep freeze. He hauls out what looks like a roundish, rock-hard lump of blood in a plastic checkers packet, and suddenly I get a clear image: He DOES have a wife and she IS in the house! In that deep freeze! In fact, he’s offering us a piece of her for a braai! I’m tallying you, we’re part of his alibi!

Des, I urge, we should go, this is going to take forever, I’m tallying you. But it’s like Des told us: WE can go, but HE’s not leaving his lifelong mate; his china; his Senekal Soulmate.

It’s midnight in midwinter in Senekal, Vrystaat. It’s not warm. Eventually a fire gets going – sort of – and the icy red lumpy piece of deceased wife sits on it, refusing to melt. Its like big ice vs small fire and ice is winning. An alternative hazy recollection is the oven was turned on and the lump placed in there. Exact facts are in dispute among us hostages decades later. Maybe Stockholm Syndrome?

Meantime, Jack Nicholson has found some dop and we have to drink, and luckily this puts him to sleep and mellows the Glutz, who loves Jeffrey Dahmer less sleeping than awake; so we’re able to persuade him to make a bolt for it, hitting the Senekal dirt roads till we find the tar to Harrismith.

Stervis has a hazy recollection of a lump of red meat being put into an oven, not on a braai; and of the Wildman pulling out a gun, Clint Oosthuizen-style, and taking potshots at us as the getaway car spins madly down the driveway, slewing sideways and throwing up stones which put Rambo off his aim. Luckily the resulting dust plume obscures us from view and saves our lives. I like Stervis’ version.

Tabs has a slightly different recollection which the years have not made any less exciting: His version is also wilder than mine: He remembers this Clyde making threats against anyone wanting to pomp his Bonnie, who he thought we may have seen – maybe she was present? Having to protect his wahf’s honour made our Clyde mutter he was going to fetch his gun. We took the break and ran for the car. Out of the corner of his eye Tabs, now the driver of the getaway car, noticed one of us was quite a way behind in this desperate race. Des had refused to leave but seeing the departing car had changed what passes for his mind. As the car peeled out, wheels spinning, Des leapt the fence Olympic hurdler-style. His short cut got him to the moving car, the door was flung open and he dived inside, saving him from a feit wors van deaf.

Bliksem!

To this day I can experience that weird, out-of-body sensation of “WTF are we DOING here? Am I in a bad movie or having a bad dream?!” It’s the stuff of nagmerries, I choon you!

~~oo0oo~~

I had visited Senekal once before under happier circumstances.

~~oo0oo~~

Memories are dodgy things. Tabs pointed out in 2021 that it could not have been 1971 as we were both still in school. It was 1975 – I have fixed it here, but I’ve left this post as is so you can read about Bourgarel le brave Frog!

Boe-ga-rel, gaan na die hel! – go to hell

a feit wors van deaf – a fate worse than death, also with raw meat

nagmerries – worse than any nightmare

22 Jan 2014