Rosies Boy: People and Places

By David Grieve

A LIFETIME OF TRAVELLING
From the North Atlantic to traveling through Africa

From deep sea fisherman to building gold mines in Mali to delivering furniture in Angola and living through the apartheid years in South Africa. My life has been different.
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201 Pages

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Grieve
• Release date: Nov 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781540156679

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Preface

This is a story that was never meant for publication. When I sat down many years ago to write the memories of my childhood it was for my own benefit. To try and make sense of it all. In a way it was to try and exorcise the ghosts of that time and was a difficult period of my life to record.

Years later I read the memoirs of an ex pat who had lived in South Africa during seventies, his story was completely made up with the situations he found himself in exaggerated and written to make himself come across as some kind of anti apartheid campaigner.at a time when quite honestly White South Africans and the world at large couldn’t care less about the subject.

I decided I could write a better story that would certainly reflect more truthfully what it was like to live in South Africa during those tumultuous years.

After I completed the part of the story concerning South Africa I expanded it to include my life in Scotland before deciding to leave the country. I further expanded the story to show what it has been like living here after the fall of the apartheid government.

Finally, after repeated requests from members of my family, I included not just the story of my childhood but memories of what it was like growing up in the early fifties in Scotland and before I new it I had written a memoir

Please excuse the perhaps selfish wanderings of my childhood memories. In its own way that time was the worst period of my life, and in another the happiest.

The one hope is that I don’t bore anyone with my reminiscing.

I want to give thanks to all of my family my wife Josephine, daughters Karen and Jacqueline, brothers Jamie for his encouragement and especially Oweny for his ability to pull a memory out of nowhere, as well as my nieces and nephews who have constantly encouraged me to keep writing when at times I really felt like throwing in the towel.

An especially big thank you to David Kaplan from Freelance Editors SA for the editing he carried out, always with maximum encouragement.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 The Beginning

Chapter 2 On Our Own

Chapter 3 Stepfather

Chapter 4 Anderson

Chapter 5 Townhead

Chapter 6 First Job

Chapter 7 Gone Fishing

Chapter 8 South Africa

Chapter 9 Apartheid

Chapter 10 Germiston

Chapter 11 Early Seventies

Chapter 12 Sampson

Chapter 13 Soweto Riots

Chapter 14 Rhodesia and Other Stories

Chapter 15 Working Life

Chapter 16 Characters

Chapter 17 Apartheid the Ending

Chapter 18 Mali

Chapter 19 Syama Gold Mine

Chapter 20 Another Day in Paradise

Chapter 21 Social Life

Chapter 22 Air Pathetique

Chapter 23 Gangster Paradise

Chapter 24 Namibia

Chapter 25 Angola

Chapter 26 Zimbabwe

Copyright 2016

David Grieve

Chapter 1

The Beginning

Mali West Africa 1997

The outside temperature was 45°C. Inside my tent with the air conditioning running at full blast it was icy cold but I didn’t care, my whole life revolved around the excruciatingly painful headaches I was experiencing and the vomiting, and diarrhea that accompanied them.

I was working on a a gold mine in Mali West Africa and it had all started a few days ago when I developed the flu and tried to fight it off, but it would not go away until eventually old John took me to the doctor in the clinic the mine had built in the local village of Fourou. I had been taking my anti-malaria tablets every day and never gave it a second thought, convinced it was flu caused by the extremes in temperature that we constantly experienced. Just to put you in the picture: by day we would be working in temperatures of over 45°C and at night, to be able to sleep, we would have the air conditioning on all evening. Walking out the door in the morning at about six o'clock it would then be at least 25°C. We would also keep the air-conditioner in our rooms running 24 hours a day to try and discourage the snakes and scorpions from coming in, and often, instead of going for lunch when I first arrived at the mine, I would rather go and lie down in the room where the units were set to 18°C.

The doctor, a Russian who could speak perfect French but hardly any English, saw me in his rooms at the clinic and took some blood, and while testing it himself gave me a drink of ice cold water from the fridge. My temperature had been fairly stable up till then but WOW, all of a sudden I was shivering so badly that the water was thrown out of the glass all over the floor.

I remember going outside to stand in the sun because I was so cold and even standing in over 45°C I was still shivering. That's when he told me I had a mild case of Malaria. A mild case? I would call that the understatement of the year!

For the next four days I went from extreme bouts of shivering to murderously high body temperatures, as the Malaria took its toll on me. At first the vomiting was almost nonstop but that eventually seemed to go away, though dehydration was a constant threat as my bowels and bladder emptied almost continuously with a rush and heat that was frightening and convinced me I had a bad case of Blackwater fever.

My brain seemed as if it wanted to explode, with the pressure growing and growing until I was sure the skull would crack wide open. Death must be easier than this I remember thinking one time, and ironically another time I can remember I must have been lying on my stomach because I pushed myself up, saying out loud, I won't die, I refuse to die. I know it sounds dramatic, but anyone who has had a bad case of Malaria and had to go through it without any real treatment will know what I mean.

Apart from the pain in my brain, the one thing that sticks with me were the nightmares or hallucinations; I’m not sure what they were. The one I always remember was when I was floating in color – fantastic beautiful color, with shades of hues I had never experienced before. Then I started dropping down and the colors were getting darker and I realized I was falling within my own stomach, with sharp teeth-like fangs coming out of my stomach wall trying to devour me. The deeper I fell the darker the colors and longer and bigger the fangs and more vicious they got, until all of a sudden I was awake again and had to go and lie on the floor in front of the air conditioning to try and drive my body temperature down. This hallucination seemed to repeat itself frequently over the next few days. These extremes in temperature went on for four days and as far as I know the doctor never came near me again. At that time I was sharing a tent with the site foreman Albie and he helped me with the sweating and shivering, making sure I was covered in blankets and adjusting the air conditioning to suit my needs, even though nothing could have helped me. George it seemed was always there either trying to get me to drink, bringing food from the kitchen or just doing what a good friend does; most of the time however I was on my own and would be aware of someone coming into the room to have a look, but that was all.

On the fourth day I needed to get help as I was burning up again and in my state of mind had lost all sense of time and was convinced I had been abandoned. Pulling my boots on I struggled out of the door and headed for the road, trying to get to the doctor’s clinic in Fourou. He was the person I needed now as without him I knew I was going to die. The fact that Fourou was a ten kilometer hike along a sand road through the bush never came into it: I needed help and I needed it now, and even though the security at the mine gates would never have let me out, that didn't matter – I needed help, and I was going to get it.

I remember a car pulling up next to me before I could leave the mine and it happened to be the very doctor I was looking for. Next thing I can remember was seeing the old man looking down at me and hearing the doctor telling him it's over now, the fever has gone ... and then sleep.

I have since heard of people who have had Malaria more than once and brush it off as no more than a bad flu. As far as I am concerned, they are doing the African people a disservice because this disease is the number one killer in Africa; it kills more people than Aids and Ebola and all the other dread diseases put together and it is not a nice way to die.

Over the next few days as I lay on top of my bed to weak to get out I would think of my life and the twists and turns it had taken.

Glasgow Scotland 1951

It was a mean house, mean in the sense of being poor and poverty stricken. A typical one bed room tenement house in which those living at the bottom rung of the economic ladder somehow survived. The tenement building itself was constructed from stone; not a hard, durable granite like the tenements built for the more affluent, but a soft stone that didn't weather well.

On the outside, the stone was worn away and crumbling in places from the constant wind and rain that battered the building. The original stone had been changed to black over the years from the soot and countless household fires and industrial furnaces that pumped their contamination into the Glasgow atmosphere. This poisoned not only the façade of the buildings but also the lungs of the Glaswegians of every social standing who had to breathe it in.

Because of a shortage of housing after World War II, houses that would normally have been condemned as unfit for human habitation were used far longer than they would be today. Inside the building wooden beams had been to the roof, to shore up the crumbling walls. We lived on the first floor, or landing as it is known in Glasgow.

typical tenements (2) - Copy

(A typical tenement building of the period)

Our family consisted of my granddad Owen Coogan, mother Roseanne, young brother Owen, or Oweny as we call him, and younger sister Kathleen (Kate) and myself. My mother and father were separated and we lived with my granddad. He was an Irishman who had moved to Glasgow in search of a better life. Whether he found it or not I have no idea. At any rate he met and married a local girl, Roseanne McDaid, and they had five children, four girls and a boy. My grandmother and two of her daughters had died at an early age.

This meant there was no one to look after my granddad, who was crippled as a result of a bad accident while working as a plate layer on the railways. Of the three children left my mother was the only one who was prepared to take on the task of caring for him. She was separated from my dad, who still lived in South Africa, and had moved back to Scotland to look after her father.

In the early fifties my dad came to Scotland to convince my mother to come back to South Africa. She refused, pleading with him to stop his drinking and move to Glasgow, pointing out that her father probably did not have long to live. He refused however, saying that The country is too cold for me. It may have been too cold for him but it was obviously considered warm enough for his wife and kids. And so, with this selfish decision, we were left to our miserable childhood that began after our granddad died, as I never saw my father again for another 20 years.

Inside the house there was a small entry hall that contained hooks on which to hang coats, a coal bunker and the pre-paid gas meter that took one penny coins. The coal bunker was more often empty and certainly never full, with coal dross and dust lying at the bottom. We became experts at adding water to this dross and dust: not too little, not too much, just enough for it to bind together. Compressing it with our hands and making little balls of coal dust that burned, often my mother would organize contests to see who could make the best ‘coal pie’ between us kids. Come, she would say, let’s see who’s the best at making coal pies. A fun way to get a horrible and messy job done.

From the hall there were two doors: the one on the right led into the only bedroom, the one on the left into the kitchen / living room / bedroom /  bathroom / toilet / laundry. Believe it or not, all of these functions were carried out in this single room.

Our cooking was done on a cast iron coal-fired kitchen range. Lighting was from a gas mantle that sat in the wall above the fireplace. There was no electricity in the building then. The gas mantle was often kept unlit as we couldn't afford to pay for the gas. Frequently the mantle filament was broken, with jets of blue and yellow flame shooting down. There was never enough money to replace it.

When electricity was finally installed as part of a government plan to modernize Britain, my granddad was worried that the electric light was going to cost more than the gas would as it was so bright. I don’t recall any complaints about the cost once the electricity was in so I presume that it was cheap enough for him. Thankfully there were no more flickering shadows or using candles to see in the bedroom to worry about. Perhaps its a throwback to those times but today I need to have the house lights on without wall lights or lamp standards to dull the lighting.

At night during winter we would all gather around the open fire and bask in the heat that emanated from it. As long as we kept turning, it would be possible to keep warm. We could never afford a real roaring fire and it would be a red glow more than anything else.

When he was feeling well my granddad would sit in our one good chair and tell us stories from old Ireland. As the firelight flickered on his face he would lose himself in his memories. His favorite stories would be ghost stories, often about Banshees and Leprechauns. His Leprechauns were always nasty little ‘cratures’ as he called them, out to cause harm to normal people.

There was never a pot of gold at the end of a Leprechaun rainbow, only harm and destruction, while the thought of a Banshee chasing me down the street with its evil scream and long flowing hair absolutely terrified me, as it must have with all the travelers they terrorized on the back roads of Ireland. Often he would play the fiddle and loved to sit playing Irish jigs and reels while my mother would sing along with him, an escape from their everyday dreary life I suppose?

In winter we would close the wooden shutters on the windows to keep the cold and ice out of the house, but with little success. Getting up for school in the winter was a miserable experience. Having to get dressed in the dark, putting on clothes that were still damp from the overnight cold, ice on the inside of the windows, shivering with the cold; it was not a nice way to start the day. Breakfast (if I was lucky) would be porridge, though more often than not it would be a slice of bread, often dry without butter or lard, with a cup of weak tea before leaving for school.

The kitchen was also the bathroom for the family. We would all bath in the zinc bathtub in front of the fireplace at least once a week. It took a long time to heat the water for a bath as it would have to be boiled on top of the cooking range in pots. When there was enough hot water for the first one of us, normally my sister, as she was the smallest and needed the least water, would get in the bath while the pot was put back on to boil more water. This would carry on until everyone had their bath. Even my granddad would bath there, being helped by my mother, while she Bathed who knows when or where?

Unable to get up and down stairs, my granddad used a chamber pot for his personal needs. The rest of us used the single communal toilet on the middle landing intended for all the people living on that floor. This could be anywhere up to 30 people depending on the size of each family and their visitors. There could be as many as ten people to a family in a one bed roomed house. Our family with five was probably the smallest in the building.

This, as you can imagine, often led to the toilets being blocked, with the people in the building having to make alternative arrangements. Our income was my granddad’s railway pension and five shillings a week family allowance. This was a two shillings and sixpence government grant that was given for Oweny and Kate respectively. I as the oldest child was entitled to nothing.

It's a guess on my part, but I would imagine the family's income was less than two pounds a week. For that money we could pay the rent and buy basic groceries. Even after war-time rationing of sweets was ended, it was at least a year before we would be given a penny a week pocket money. That was enough to buy four chocolate caramels and was a treat to be savored and made to last as long as possible.

We survived rather than lived, often going days without proper food, with the last few days until the pension payment seeming to stretch from one missed meal to the next. We lived on mince or stew, a quarter pound (one hundred and thirteen grams) being the usual order at the butchers, and that would be to feed all five of us.

My mother’s specialty was a margarine soup filled with pieces of bread broken up to thicken it. Although there was never enough money, my granddad always made sure he would go for his 'pint' on a Saturday afternoon, myself or my mother pushing him in his wheelchair down to his favorite bar.

Once there, space would be made for him besides the men playing dominoes. At night I would go down to help my mother push him in his wheelchair back up the hill to our house while he sat there like royalty singing at the top of his voice all the way home.

His favorite song was ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’ (‘Kathleen my Darling’ in English) and any Irish rebel song that popped into his head. Getting him up the stairs was the problem, especially when he’d had a few. With him holding onto the railing with both hands, my mother at the back trying to push him and us three kids all around trying our best to help, it was a mission to put it mildly.

He was a smoker that's for sure; or should I say he liked his tobacco, not in cigarette form but in his pipe. For hours on end he would sit there, first stripping the pipe down, cleaning the stem, then the bowl until satisfied. Reassembling the bowl and stem could take a long time until he was happy it was the way he wanted. The tobacco pouch would be brought out and he would sift through the tobacco making sure all the strands were just right.

Filling the bowl could take to my young eyes hours and hours until, with a snort of annoyance, he would empty the bowl and start all over again. I have since come to the conclusion the whole rigmarole was just to pass the time He could only afford to smoke one pipe a day and he savored the preparation as much as the smoke.

Another favorite of his was chewing tobacco. Carefully cutting the correct size he would place it in the corner of his cheek and sit there chewing away happily. If he thought my mother wasn't looking I would be