One of the joys of growing up in Africa is walking around barefoot. You can walk and run on the grass. Walk on the pavement. Walk on that strange 1970s surface – Slasto, a slate-like substance – which often surrounded suburban swimming pools. There was nothing finer, more blissfully elemental, than walking barefoot across a wooden floor.
I am knock-kneed. When I was growing up, my knock knees needed remedial action, so I was carted off to a gruff German physiotherapist in Parktown, Johannesburg. Her house was tree-encircled, therefore free of sunshine, therefore cold, which seemed somehow to magnify her coldness.
She had me pick up marbles with my toes and walk across the linoleum floor with my toes clenched. I did strengthening exercises to raise my collapsed arches. Orthopaedic supports – they looked a little like old-fashioned shoe horns – were inserted into my shoes to bring my splendid knock-knees into acceptable alignment.
Given these supports, which were uncomfortable and demeaning, I took off my shoes and sand-shoes (called takkies in South Africa) at every available opportunity. Walking on grass at home and school and at friends’ houses was an easy pleasure, but the feeling of feelings was to walk on the outfield of Wanderers cricket stadium in bare feet. The outfield was a carpet of lush, magnificent green. It was so spongy, that it almost embalmed your foot. These were the days of heaven.
As primary schoolboys we used to go to the Wanderers on Corlett Drive to watch four-day matches on Friday or Monday afternoons, often getting into the ground for a nominal sum or sometimes for free. The pocket-money we saved by not paying entrance fee was spent guzzling Ma’s Pies, sometimes Chicken and Mushroom, sometimes Steak and Kidney.
They came in little tin foil trays. You needed to eat most of the pie before you found the single piece of chicken – or steak – meant to give them their flavour. At least there was cool-drink, in a range of radio-active colours, to wash them down with. The food was revolting, but delectable, too.
Watching the cricket we’d come for was almost an afterthought because it meant being still, which was difficult for all of us. I did see Graeme Pollock, true. And Steve Jefferies, with his high leg and whippy cartwheel action.
Alan Kourie was slow and dependable, like a water wheel. He batted without back-lift and without flourish, as if he was struggling to stay awake. His preferred bat was the Duncan Fearnley.
Kevin McKenzie, sans helmet, only a cap, was pathologically busy. Jimmy Cook fiddled with the top of his pad when batting because he imagined it needed to be adjusted. Henry Fotheringham had a kind of cheeky, smiling neatness that was a form of subtle assertion.
I think Pollock rested his bat on his shoulder, giving him a martial air. It was heavy and dangerous, like a broadsword. In a quieter, less obvious way, he was as intimidating as Viv Richards. He must have been hell to bowl to.
Alvin Kallicharran, who stayed on after the West Indian rebels had departed, took small steps. He had fine, quick hands. Hugh Page had a lazy approach to the crease, almost an afterthought, but was quicker than his run-up suggested he should be.
I remember the late Mike Procter, barrelling in from over the horizon like the arrival of the slightly dishevelled infantry. Sylvester Clarke was all chest. He trundled in almost comically until one of his off-cutters sliced you in half.
Such heroes were the backdrop to our scratch games at lunch or tea-time, when we’d flood onto the field for 20 minutes or half an hour, so we could be heroes too. Someone always brought along a plank that had been whittled into a home-made bat. The handle was often covered in red, yellow or black masking tape. Sometimes you had your own bat, which you may or may not have been reluctant to share.
Matches were of the “electric wicket” and “one-hand-one-bounce” variety. We played with tennis balls, occasionally weighed down with tape on one side. At lunch-time it was pandemonium on the outfield because hundreds of boys – and some fathers – were all doing exactly the same thing.
There were matches everywhere. In the mayhem, amidst the shouting and confusion of many over-lapping games, it was possible to lose your ball or have it stolen, particularly if it was hit far and you weren’t quite sure where it had landed.
The complexion of these lunch-time pick-up games was changed by the clanging of the five-minute bell, a kind of pre-death knell, death knell. When the bell tolled you knew that you needed to start wrapping it up, because soon the players would be coming down the stairs from the dressing-room alongside the edge of the grass embankment. I can hear the clatter of their spikes on the tar still.
Unfortunately you couldn’t walk barefoot across the Wanderers outfield all day. Sometimes you needed to put on your slops or sandals or shoes, and come indoors. Parents were distant planets, only hoving into view now and again, before continuing on their slow, pre-occupied orbit. There was no TV and sisters didn’t play cricket. Friends weren’t always available, so you needed to make a plan.
I must have been about nine years old when I went through an obsessive bout of pencil drawing. I was fascinated at the time – I’m guessing this was 1973 – with Ajax Amsterdam, the most successful football club in Europe.
What really fascinated me about them was not their glamour, nor their conspicuous success, but how they looked. I was nine and hopelessly shallow – it mattered how things looked. I had never seen a thick vertical stripe down a shirt-front before.
Yes, I had seen horizontal stripes and hoops. I had even seen thin vertical stripes. But I had never before seen an assertively thick red stripe, somehow made more suggestive because it was cast against a pristine white backdrop.
So, this was Ajax. They came from Amsterdam. The world was a far bigger place in those days and Johannesburg was far away from everything except Pretoria. Ajax Amsterdam were in Europe, on the other side of the equator. They were thrillingly exotic.
Amsterdam was a liberal city whose progressive bent shaded into carefree Dutch promiscuity. But they weren’t so promiscuous that their club didn’t know how to win at football, which they played with a flourish as unmistakable as the red stripe on their shirts.
My pencil drawings were little comic or story books. They told the story of European Cup runs gleaned from other sources, magazines and books. I was nine years old, and hadn’t learned the art of dynamic movement, which meant the drawings had an immobile, frozen feel but this didn’t feel important at the time.
What was important was that my pencil drawings, each with an accompanying caption beneath, was a launch pad for my imagination, which was fervent and busy. Through this portal, I stepped into another world.
Youth, for many of us, is a time of invented worlds, particularly if we are lonely or quietly self-sufficient or slightly in-turned children. I was a gregarious, free-spirited child, often curious, and in search of things I couldn’t name.
I was also introverted, happy to make a nest somewhere and read Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines and John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, featuring Richard Hannay, Buchan’s upstanding hero.
Such books were housed in a book room on the first floor of H.A. Jack Primary in Highlands North where I went to school. It was a room into which I was occasionally allowed, either because I was a monitor or a prefect, or perhaps because I had some feel for the job in need of doing.
This meant bringing 30 or-so hardback copies of H Rider Haggard’s novel into class for distribution, although maybe I was allowed special dispensation to read by myself.
The book room was dark and airless, with the books themselves arranged on Meccano-like shelves. They were nominally hard-backed but the backing was soft. The books had a subtle, almost delicate, smell, part pulp, part ink, part dust and stale air. So began the soulfully lost, uncounted days. They slipped away like mine dump dust on a September wind.
Class readers by Buchan or Rider Haggard represented the literary high bar. Below that were more plebeian tastes, Wilbur Smith, Louis L’Amour, the Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe Hardy and their friend (and my favourite) Chet Morton.
I owned a free-standing pine bookcase, the shelves staggered in such a way that the top shelf was narrower than the shelf beneath; this, in turn, wasn’t as wide as the shelf beneath that. There were three or four shelves in all, as I remember.
My Hardy Boys hard-cover collection was pridefully arranged on the top two shelves. Each book came in a different, brightly-coloured, spine. I was proud of the books well into my early adolescence until – again, I’m guessing – it was pointed out that Frank, Joe and Chet were a little too primary school for any self-respecting high-schooler. We were now all wearing long trousers, no longer boys, yet to be men. It was time to say goodbye to fictional Bayport, the backdrop to their happy-ending adventures.
In my pencil drawings I discovered the Ajax players: Johan Cruyff, Ruud Krol, Arrie Haan, Johan Neeskens, Piet Kaizer, their captain. My favourite player, though, was Johnny Rep.
It must have been the unusual name, Rep, rather than any deep-seated appreciation of his football talent, which was significant. A winger with naughty eyes, Rep twinkled. It was unmistakable. I saw it, even aged nine.
I was thrilled to find out many years later that after his time at Ajax Rep had been transferred to Bastia, the Corsican club, who played in the French league. It was an unusual career-move, to say the least, although one vindicated when Bastia reached the final of the UEFA Cup final in 1978, where they were convincingly beaten by PSV Eindhoven 3-0.
Names and colours did it for me, nick-names maybe, not deeds or achievements. My identification was that of a child’s – basic – because I was seeing life for the first time.
Closer to home there were nicknames, particularly for the cricketers I watched at the Wanderers whenever I could, sitting on the Eastern stands, close to the old scoreboard, from where we casually flicked bottle-tops onto the heads of passers-by down below.
“Spook” Hanley and his mop of ghost-like blonde hair, “Dopey” de Vaal, “Dassie” Biggs, nicknamed because of two prominent, rock rabbit-like front teeth. And let’s not forget Anton “Yogi” Ferreira, the burly Northerns and Warwickshire all-rounder, who was said to resemble the cartoon character, Yogi Bear.
Sometimes there were abbreviations or foreshortenings. Fotheringham, he of the lazy cover-drive, was called “Fothers.” Clive Rice became “Ricey.” Rice was forever in combat with his perpetually unravelling long sleeves. He liked his sleeve folded at his elbow, but in his long run to the crease the sleeve always unravelled. It took his walk to the top of his mark to roll it up again and, now at the ready, he charged in with purpose, before rocking back, cradle-like, in that characteristic Rice-like motion prior to delivery.
His bowling action – he wasn’t a big man – was biomechanically perfect and aggressive, as he was. Even as a boy in the stands, you sensed Rice’s snarl.
Vintcent van der Bijl was plain old “Vince” or sometimes, “Big Vince.” In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Vince was a medium-fast bowler not to be trifled with. His mastery of length was such that there was no disconnect – or there seemed no disconnect – between what he wanted to do and what he did.
He was bald, and very tall and wide, with tufts of hair fluttering about the ears. He wore a baggy pullover and trundled, almost mincing, to the crease on big boots somehow caterpillar-like, because his run-up was made of an infinity of small steps.
He never broke into a stride, never seemed to gather any pace, so it was difficult to explain how he did what he did. It came about from what seemed like an eternal loping, a kind of rolling to the crease that gained momentum and critical mass the longer it lasted.
Van der Bijl was the antithesis of athleticism. Still, with his height-generating bounce, he got the ball – magic word coming up – to “nibble”. He was chillingly effective.
Charles Fortune, radio commentator and doyen of the microphone, was there to pronounce upon it all. He pronounced Van der Bijl, as the way the English do – with a crisp “a” sound, rather than the flatter “u” sound.
Charles was always mildly critical of the time it took Van der Bijl to bowl an over. He was often mildly critical of what he saw as disrespect to the English language, engaging in a long joust with the phrasing and grammar of items on the news. Charles would have used to verb “nibble” with undisguised relish.
Charles made his way to South Africa from England in the mid-1930s and became a school-master and science teacher at St Andrews in Grahamstown (or Makhanda as it is now called) for many years. Later, he became the voice of cricket on the South African Broadcasting Corporation’s English Service, and we’ll include a snippet or two of his commentary for you here, just so you can enjoy and re-live it if you’re already familiar with his voice.
In it he speaks about a whippet wandering onto the Wanderers during a Currie Cup game in the early 1980s [around 34 minutes in Sound Cloud link] and the whippet being led back across the boundary ropes by “Big Vince.” It is vintage Fortune: wistful and tolerantly amused, always on the look-out for something interesting or unusual.
He spoke the language with feeling and emotion, but he wasn’t above a flurry of verbal showboating. He loved to describe the gathering cumulus clouds and the swim of the breeze through the blue-gums at the back of the wooden Wanderers stands.
He was attentive to the natural world, he said, because he wanted cricket to be inclusive. By describing the natural world, he argued, he encouraged housewives to know the game.
For many white South Africans of a certain generation he was the soundtrack of summer, the aural backdrop against which we lived our strangely complacent, sleepwalking lives. Here he is again, describing the build-up of clouds from his vantage point in the press box at the Wanderers.
[Another Fortune snippet here: the one occurring at about eight minutes and describing clouds etc. or the willy-willy description?]
In his book on his one and only Test for the Springboks against the British Lions at Loftus Versfeld in 1974, Dugald MacDonald wrote that Gerhard Viviers, the Afrikaans radio commentator, “invented Springbok rugby”. The phrase has stayed with me because, while not objectively true, it is figuratively accurate – and perceptively wise.
What Dugald means is that Viviers conjured Springbok rugby into being by creating a new vocabulary for it. In so doing, he gave it life. Fortune did something similar for cricket. He unconsciously used cricket as a vehicle for offering us a vision of the world. In these narrow terms, he was a consummate artist.
Sometimes Fortune’s vocabulary amounted to nothing more than adjusting things. For example, Charles didn’t like the idea of the Transvaal opener being called Jimmy Cook. James Cook was more regal than Jimmy, so Charles simply called Cook James, as in the captain in the South Pacific.
Eddie Barlow, which, as a name, was good enough for most of us, wasn’t good enough for the class-conscious Charles. So he called Eddie Barlow, “Edgar John”, as though Eddie was an overgrown schoolboy or one of Robin Hood’s merry band.
In this way, Fortune minted his rhetorical fortune. Charles was world-creating. And he created the world – in some small part – in his image, with his bias, with his desire.
If, as a schoolboy growing up in Johannesburg in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you didn’t have at least a passable Charles Fortune impersonation at your disposal, you were a lost soul, forced to wander in the social wilderness.
The corridors of my high school in Highlands North were full of Fortune impersonators. It is different to convey to younger generations just how influential he was. And how loved.
If the times can be said to be condensed into a voice, say in the way that we associate Winston Churchill’s voice with the Second World War, or Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk’s voice with the transition to South African democracy, Fortune’s voice was the voice of English-speaking white South Africa in a moment of cultural defensiveness. By turns he was vigilant, gently egotistical, amusing and pompous.
We might even go so far as to say that he “invented” isolation, in that he gave the period in which South African cricket was banished from world cricket, shape and colour and form. He gave it characters, which he re-named. They played of a green stage and he invented them all.
Fortune might have wanted cricket – and his commentary – to reach deep into the world, but his world was an exclusive one. It was a world slow to change. I shudder to think what he would have made of T20 cricket or The Hundred.
Listening to Fortune now, I’m struck by how frozen the world he described was. How frozen and how self-referring and finally how sad, sad because it has become a museum piece. For all our contemporary anxieties and election fears, we are better off now, facing the future with open eyes.
This is not, needless to say, how we experienced Fortune’s commentary when I was growing up and falling in love with sport in a variety of imaginative ways. I remember Monday afternoons in summer when we weren’t at the cricket, being picked up by Betty Sleigh, classmate Wendy’s mother, listening to Charles on the car radio.
Betty drove a mini into which the three or four of us in the lift scheme squeezed. We listened and discussed the game. Fortune’s commentary worked like charm. He made our carefully-constructed world – a world that fell apart in 1976 with the riots in Soweto – stable and re-assuring.
Sport itself, was stable and re-assuring, even if the sporting boycott meant that increasingly white South Africans played only amongst themselves. Maybe this accounts for why white South Africans are so crazily competitive. They had to be. For their very lives depended upon their zeal and appetite for a fight.
This world rested on wobbly foundations, however, so couldn’t be stable and re-assuring forever. Today it is a lost world, available in glimpses on Facebook and snippets in black and white elsewhere. We refer to it as we would a guilty pleasure. For that, finally, is what nostalgia is.