Days of Books and Wine
Part 1
1970 - 1972
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| July 1971. Photo taken for my press pass on my first day as a reporter for Die Burger. |
As we get older we remember the past -- mostly with greater fondness, and usually as being much rosier, more pleasant, less troublesome than the present or the more recent past. One lives a life with so many twists and turns, with a plethora of experiences and it all seems to rush by in a blur. But some times always tend to stand out above the rest. In my case the seven years between finishing school and finishing university hold a special degree of nostalgia to them.
In hindsight, it is clear that I was always a late developer; well, later than my peers, in any case. So it came about that when I arrived in Heidelberg, in the then Transvaal, on a hot January day in 1970, I was still very much a callow innocent. Ahead of me lay four months in the Army Gymnasium, to be followed by my joining the regular army as a Gunner in the Anti-Aircraft Artillery and stationed at Youngsfield, Cape Town. This was followed by a stint at the Infantry School in Oudtshoorn the next year, by which time this stone had started its rolling habit.
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| 1970 - The Army Gymnasium, Heidelberg. A Raw recruit! |
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| 1970 - Strandfontein AA Artillery Range, Cape Town. |
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| 1971 - Youngsfield Military Base with fellow instructors from 10 AA Regt/AA School. |
Dissatisfied by the apparent lack of prospects the military offered in my immediate future, I decided to join the Cape Town Afrikaans daily paper Die Burger and become a reporter.
At school I excelled in writing, both in Afrikaans and English and I fancied myself a writer and a budding poet. Working in journalism seemed the best place for me, so I jumped in with gusto and great (somewhat fanciful, it turned out!) hopes.
At school I excelled in writing, both in Afrikaans and English and I fancied myself a writer and a budding poet. Working in journalism seemed the best place for me, so I jumped in with gusto and great (somewhat fanciful, it turned out!) hopes.
Suddenly I found myself surrounded by men and women who had already been to university and were much more world-wise than I. It soon became obvious to me that I had a tremendous amount of catching up to do. At school my reading included many of the classics and modern classics in both South African and world literature. However, apart from my young German teacher, my teachers were mostly of the older school and settled into their careers and lives, so they did not challenge me as regards my wider education. Of course I loved, respected and admired them, but it was Johann van Vuuren, my German teacher for my final year at school, who realised that I needed to graze beyond the fence of my formal education. He introduced me to Schiller and Goethe (in German) and to poets like Rainer-Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. This was to be invaluable to me in my years of studying German at university.
Back in Cape Town, 1971, and my new friends who introduced me to writers like Camus, Hesse, Sartre and Dostoyevsky. A whole new world opened to me, and I immersed myself into it, finding new joys with every page turned.
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| 1971 - the aspiring writer at his typewriter and smoking Gauloises. |
The first book I bought was Albert Camus's Selected Notebooks and Essays. What a discovery! I flung myself into reading the great French philosopher-writer's words and found every page a joy, a pleasure I had never imagined one could get from reading another's thoughts. This was followed by his The Outsider, which resonated with me on a level I could not have imagined. Meursault echoed much of what I felt. I had always been a bit of a loner, an outsider, but now I discovered that what I had felt was neither unusual, nor in any way "abnormal". I followed with the next novel of his I could lay my hands on: The Plague. This was another revelation to me and I enjoyed the novel tremendously. More, like his other works, it made me think, made me consider my place in life, and what I wanted from it.
This was also the year I discovered Tassies, better known as Tassenberg wine. I had been brought up with wine, being allowed half a glass of wine diluted with water at lunch from when I was six, as my parents believed not only in wine as a gift from the gods, but also that a child for whom wine is nothing strange is less likely to abuse alcohol as an adult. But now I discovered that wine, good books and good conversation were the three pillars of a life lived with joy and enthusiasm.
Around this time, too, one of the newspaper's photographers, Jéan du Preez, and I became friends, and now I could use the Yashica 35mm viewfinder camera I had bought from a technician in the Youngsfield base's transport park to capture the world as I saw it. Moody misty winter's mornings in the city, odd corners of old buildings, streets late at night or very early in the morning all were captured on film, images which Jéan developed and printed in black and white for me. Now my life was full of photography, reading, wine, and discussions until the early hours of the night.
Another author I was pointed to in this time was the great Hermann Hesse. Demian, Steppenwolf, The Glass Bead Game, Siddharta and Narziss und Goldmund led me into yet another dimension of life and philosophy I had been a stranger to. I devoured the books, often reading almost through the night (which was not a problem then, because I started work at the paper at ten o' clock).
Reading Camus led, inevitably, to reading his contemporary and political and philosophical adversary Jean-Paul Sartre. I found his novels like Nausea, Age of Reason and The Wall to be far more pessimistic, sombre and lacking the intrinsic spark of appreciation for life of Camus's and Hesse's works. Satre's Marxism, I believe, and his determination to infuse life with that ideology, led to his world view, his Weltanschauung, to be less humanistic and his works therefore to be grim and pessimistic.
1972 came and found me working in the night office of the newspaper, reporting on crime and accidents, fires and floods and the like. It meant that I started work at four pm and finished at midnight, except for the nights it was my turn to man the stop press desk. Now I had my days free! I was usually up and about by ten in the morning, wandering the city streets, drinking coffee in the tea room in in the Company Gardens, or coffee in what soon became my favourite haunt, Mark's Coffee Shop on the corner of Longmarket and St George's Streets. Here the friendly Mavis would serve me copious cups of black filter coffee, the occasional croissant and butter and a hearty, thick soup on cold winter's days. I would site there for hours, reading or writing and smoking Gauloises.
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| 1972 - photo by Jéan du Preez. |
This was also the year in which I discovered Friedrich Nietzsche and Chateau Libertas wine. The German philosopher appealed to me and I read everything by him I could lay my greedy paws on. Also Sprach Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, and more. At the same time I started on Fyodor Dostoyevsky, reading his The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Devils. His dark, sometimes tortured Russian world struck a cord in me. It served as a counterpoint to Hesse and Camus, and their world views. I was entranced.
The rolling stone rolled again towards the end of 1972, and I found myself living in a tent in the Moorreesburg caravan park and working as an apprentice miller at the Tiger Oats mill in the town. It was an intermediate job, as I had decided it was time to go to university, and had both been accepted at Stellenbosch University and been awarded a Cape Department of Education bursary to study to become a high school teacher.
These were often lonely days, as I did not have many friends in the small town. I still wrote religiously in my journals, and kept up my attempts at poetry, mostly in Afrikaans, but often English as well. I was still reading, usually by the light of a paraffin lantern at night in my tent. This is the period when I read more of Camus's works, like The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Fall and A Happy Death. Other authors I delved into during this semi-hiatus were Lawrence Durrell --The Alexandria Quartet, Bitter Lemons -- Christopher Isherwood -- Goodbye to Berlin and The Berlin Stories -- as well as poetry by Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Rilke, Peter Handke, Yeats and e.e.cummings, inter alia.
I did make one good friend, though. Peter worked at the mill with me, and we shared a love for wine and classical music, as did his fiancée Helen. We spent many wonderful long evenings drinking Chateau Libertas (I discovered across a case full of 1965 vintage in the storeroom of one of the two hotel bars in town!), Nederburg, Tassenberg (normally towards the end of the month when the month had almost totally outlasted my salary) and a few other wines from Helen's collection while listening to classical music and discussing literature and music.
Indelible memories of Moorreesburg include wandering the deserted streets on Sunday afternoons when everything was closed and a warm, dry wind was all that was out and about with me, and writing, and drinking coffee and smoking my beloved Gauloises in the only café in the town. It was run by a woman who fascinated me. She was probably in her early thirties, attractive in a not so obvious way (her face was rather plain), but she had an air of sadness about her that touched me deeply. I never did get round to finding out more about her, though, which is both a pity and probably a blessing in disguise, as I am sure I romanticised her situation far too much.
All too soon (and also not soon enough, actually) my time there ran out as the year ran out. Thus ended another period in my life; a period filled with a pot-pourri of experiences, books, wine, and days filled with reading, thinking and writing. What lay ahead of me was something completely different, but in some ways the same, but more of that next time.
The rolling stone rolled again towards the end of 1972, and I found myself living in a tent in the Moorreesburg caravan park and working as an apprentice miller at the Tiger Oats mill in the town. It was an intermediate job, as I had decided it was time to go to university, and had both been accepted at Stellenbosch University and been awarded a Cape Department of Education bursary to study to become a high school teacher.
These were often lonely days, as I did not have many friends in the small town. I still wrote religiously in my journals, and kept up my attempts at poetry, mostly in Afrikaans, but often English as well. I was still reading, usually by the light of a paraffin lantern at night in my tent. This is the period when I read more of Camus's works, like The Myth of Sisyphus, The Rebel, The Fall and A Happy Death. Other authors I delved into during this semi-hiatus were Lawrence Durrell --The Alexandria Quartet, Bitter Lemons -- Christopher Isherwood -- Goodbye to Berlin and The Berlin Stories -- as well as poetry by Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, Rilke, Peter Handke, Yeats and e.e.cummings, inter alia.
I did make one good friend, though. Peter worked at the mill with me, and we shared a love for wine and classical music, as did his fiancée Helen. We spent many wonderful long evenings drinking Chateau Libertas (I discovered across a case full of 1965 vintage in the storeroom of one of the two hotel bars in town!), Nederburg, Tassenberg (normally towards the end of the month when the month had almost totally outlasted my salary) and a few other wines from Helen's collection while listening to classical music and discussing literature and music.
Indelible memories of Moorreesburg include wandering the deserted streets on Sunday afternoons when everything was closed and a warm, dry wind was all that was out and about with me, and writing, and drinking coffee and smoking my beloved Gauloises in the only café in the town. It was run by a woman who fascinated me. She was probably in her early thirties, attractive in a not so obvious way (her face was rather plain), but she had an air of sadness about her that touched me deeply. I never did get round to finding out more about her, though, which is both a pity and probably a blessing in disguise, as I am sure I romanticised her situation far too much.
All too soon (and also not soon enough, actually) my time there ran out as the year ran out. Thus ended another period in my life; a period filled with a pot-pourri of experiences, books, wine, and days filled with reading, thinking and writing. What lay ahead of me was something completely different, but in some ways the same, but more of that next time.
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