Beyond the Baldness: An inpirational story of beating the odds twice

By Mark Pilgrim

Mark Pilgrim had wanted to be on radio since he was thirteen years old, yet it always seemed like an unobtainable dream. It took a life-threatening illness to motivate him to pursue his passion. At the age of eighteen his radio dream was on the back burner. Mark had just completed the first year of a B.Com degree at university and had secured a bursary to complete his studies. Things were looking good. Then the blow fell: he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. After surgery and throughout months of chemotherapy his initial despair was transformed into determination. He found the inner strength to fight the illness, change his career direction, and to make his lifelong dream a reality. Beyond the Baldness is a personal account of Mark's journey of determination, following every opportunity to audition for radio and television. From the humble beginnings of living in a trailer park, today Mark is one of South Africa's best-known and most recognisable personalities, having deejayed on South Africa's biggest radio stations and hosted some of the most memorable television shows like Big Brother and SA's biggest ever game show The Power of 10. His voice is also used in countless radio and television commercials. As a motivational speaker, Mark spends a lot of his time engaging with delegates at conferences, chatting about his experience with cancer as well as the sudden heart attack he had at the age of 38. His positive approach to life is inspirational and it will encourage everyone who reads this book to chase their dreams!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780620656665

Book preview

The Beginning

Life starts with your earliest memory.

I don’t remember the ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ signalling my path towards the doctor who was ready to turn me upside down and give me a spanking.

I do, however, remember my mum chasing me around a coffee table when I was crawling around on all fours. I remember the simple life of growing up in a trailer – yes, the type that gets destroyed by tornadoes in Kansas, except that in England we called them Mobile Homes. I remember shooting my mum with a pellet gun and her pursuing me around the garden and trying to thrash me with a kettle cord. How we laughed about that – albeit only a few weeks later.

I remember falling in love, owning my first car – a Beetle which had a piece of string dangling out of the window and stretching to its engine, which I yanked on as a makeshift accelerator cable. I remember the moment I found out that I was going to be on radio, my dream since I was a small boy.

I remember being the dedicated bachelor boy who vowed never to get married – until I met Nicole who melted my heart in an instant. I remember the moment my daughters were born. I think I cried more than my wife did.

All in all, I have so many fond memories of times gone by.

There are, of course, things I sometimes wish not to remember. Like the moment my mum burst into tears as she struggled to tell her eighteen-year-old son that he had Stage 3 testicular cancer which had spread throughout his body. The surgery and the months of chemotherapy that followed. The day my mum died and I became an instant father to my eight-year-old brother. The day the pain in my chest became unbearable and my heart decided to quit on me.

Life is made of memories, both good and bad. The trick is to try to make the good ones count more than the bad.

Childhood

Mention Halloween and witches or ghosts immediately come to mind. Imagine living in a village named after it! I did, in a small place called Allhallows in Kent. It’s literally named after the ‘Eve of Halloween’. It was, and probably still is, a sleepy little village where nothing much happens. I used to play on the platform of an old disused train station, where I peered through the gaps in boarded-up windows and doors to see what was behind them. It was during one of those adventures as a seven-year-old that I tripped and fell, chipping a front tooth in the process. Every day when I brush my teeth I see the chip and the ‘ghost town’ flashes fleetingly into my mind.

The trailer we lived in was not out of place in this British version of a hillbilly hole. But in England we didn’t call them trailers, they were ‘mobile homes’. The truth is, though, no matter how much of a poky hole it was, it was my home and I loved it. My ‘room’ consisted of a single bed with just enough space to walk in alongside it. On stormy nights, the trailer rocked gently in the wind and that’s how I drifted off to sleep.

I remember being a little perplexed at Christmas, wondering how Santa Claus was going to visit us since we didn’t have a chimney. My mum assured me that he had a plan and he certainly must have, because every Christmas he left me a present or two under the tree. I became so obsessed with the idea of Santa Claus that when I was eight years old I decided to write to him to express my appreciation of his generosity. I addressed a letter to the North Pole, and lo (ho ho) and behold, I actually got a reply a few weeks later. After all these years I still have the postcard. Thank you British Post for sending postcards back to kids who believed in the white-bearded gent. It’s doubtful that would happen in South Africa. I can’t seem to get local correspondence here, let alone something from the North Pole.

My mum, Jean Rosenthal, was a Jewish South African and it was a chance meeting at the docks in Simonstown that resulted in my being brought up neither Jewish nor South African.

Back in 1967 my dad was a sailor in the British Royal Navy and his naval vessel docked in Simonstown. My mum and her girlfriends happened to be on the docks that day and saw my dad in his pristine white uniform with a hint of all the tattoos underneath. Mum and Dad hit it off. I’m not going into any detail here because the thought of my parents shagging is just repulsive. He must have been quite the charmer though, because she moved to England a few months later and that’s how my journey began.

I remember my mum laughed a lot. It wasn’t a hearty infectious laugh, but it was a sincere laugh. Possibly it’s from her that I got my inclination always to see the lighter side of things. It’s one of the things I really miss about my diminutive mother. Whenever I do something stupid I think about how she would have enjoyed hearing about it – and how much she would have laughed.

I made an ass of myself outside a News Café in Johannesburg one Friday afternoon a few years ago. After driving my Mercedes Benz SLK two-seater convertible for about three years, I was hosting a makeover show on SABC2 called ‘Face 2 Face’ and with it came a sponsored Ford Focus with my branding all over it. How cool did I feel when I happened to find an open parking space right in front of the trendy News Café.

I got out and walked into the News Café with a bit of a swagger. With all the branding on the car, there was absolutely no doubt as to who I was. But it wasn’t that cool when I returned to my car because as I approached my Ford Focus and opened the door and got in I realised I had got into the back seat. I wasn’t used to having four doors. To try to minimise looking like an idiot in front of Joburg’s trendy elite, I pretended to rummage around in the back for something before climbing out and getting into the driver’s seat. I tried hard to save face, but I don’t think it really worked. I know how much my mum would have laughed about that story.

I don’t have many recollections of my parents together, but I gathered that they fought a lot because they separated when I was a few months old.

Most of my early memories revolve around my mum and me fending for ourselves. We’d been in England for only a few years and my mum didn’t have a great job. Not that I knew what she did, I just knew we didn’t have much money. In a primitive form of pre-paid electricity, our flat had a meter that you fed coins into. I remember more than a few nights when we didn’t have money to put in the meter. Dinner would be a peanut butter sandwich by candlelight.

I have other memories too. I remember lying in my cot, looking up and seeing a huge spider on the ceiling. I couldn’t get out of the cot because of the railings, and because I didn’t know how to talk I couldn’t tell my mum what was scaring me. I screamed, but mother dearest must have thought I was just having a ‘moment’ because it took what seemed like for ever before she came into the room and picked me up.

I also vividly remember sucking on a teat. No, not a boob. I was probably two or three years old and I clearly remember the thick yellow teat and sucking at it to get the milk or sometimes orange juice in the bottle it was attached to.

Another infant memory is the one I mentioned earlier of playing a game of chase around a coffee table with my mum, with me shuffling on all fours, not yet able to walk.

It’s fascinating how a part of the brain remembers that early stuff, yet I can’t remember what I did yesterday.

In an effort to save money on electricity my mum and I bathed only once a week and even then I would get into the water that she had already bathed in. The water was lukewarm and there was already a slight bath ring around the sides of the tub. It sounds so gross now, but it seemed normal to me as a child because it was all I knew. Even after we moved to South Africa I was so accustomed to bathing only once a week that I just continued to do so and my mum eventually nicknamed me Fungus. The nickname stuck with me … even after I started showering twice a day.

My stepdad John Cook came into my life when I was still a toddler. For labelling purposes I suppose he was my dad, as he was the father figure who brought me up. I always referred to him as my dad when talking to others, yet I don’t think I ever called him ‘Dad’ to his face. He was deaf in one ear and partly deaf in the other, so I would just generally mumble a word or two and, in his common English accent, he would look at me and say ‘whaa?’. Once I had his attention I could chat to him about whatever.

I always kept a little emotional distance between us, partly because whenever he and my mum argued (and they argued a lot), I was automatically included in the line of fire and he would be pissed off with me as well. After one particularly acrimonious bout of fighting I remember my mother hitting him on the head with a frying pan. The boiiing sound it made was just like what you see in cartoons. The knob on his head a few days later looked like a cartoon sketch too. I’m glad I never adopted his surname, because ‘Mark Cook’ sounds like ‘bake a cake’ in Afrikaans.

But he was generally good to my mum and me, and always provided for us. He was a blue collar worker in power stations so he didn’t earn a lot of money, yet I never thought of us as poor.

When I was eight years old they started talking about leaving England. Because my mum was South African I had heard a lot about places like Cape Town, Simonstown and Muizenberg, but they were just names and meant nothing to me. All my mum’s family still lived in South Africa. She had two brothers and two sisters, but was close to only one of the sisters, Aunty Debbie. She lived in a town called Kriel in what was then the Eastern Transvaal (now called Mpumalanga). The old apartheid government was on a recruiting drive for a number of coal power stations they were building and my stepdad was able to get a job as a boiler maker. To this day I have no idea what a boiler maker does. It sounds like a glorified tea person to me.

So early in 1979, my mum told me we were leaving England and moving to South Africa where my stepdad would have a stable job and would earn decent money as a boiler maker at Duvha power station. We were going to stay with my Aunty Debbie for a while until the company provided a house for us. The thought of emigrating wasn’t daunting at all as I simply couldn’t wrap my head around the concept.

Two things stood out for me when I first arrived in South Africa. Firstly, everywhere I looked I saw Ford Valiants with people squashed into them. I guess the Hi-Ace taxis would only be around years later. The second thing that confused me within minutes of getting into the car with my Uncle was him talking about ‘robots’. Were there actual robots that told you when to stop and go at intersections? And then he explained that in South Africa, that’s what people called traffic lights. For a nine-year-old that was clarification and disappointment all rolled into one.

My aunt and uncle had a live-in domestic worker which was a foreign concept to me. For years in the trailer park I had to clean my own bedroom, and once a week I was given household chores such as vacuuming the lounge or scrubbing the kitchen. Now, coming to South Africa, there was someone in the house every day cleaning up after me. Wow! I never became a slob, but it was nice to know I didn’t have to do daily chores any more. I felt as though I had moved from the Little House on the Prairie to Beverly Hills.

They also had a weird black wind-up phone plugged into the wall. I thought it was a toy when I first cast my eyes on it and almost shat myself when I gave it a crank and heard a voice on the other side saying: ‘Nommer asseblief, number please?’ I had seen these types of phones only in my German war comics. We were already onto push button phones in England. I slammed the receiver down and prayed the damn phone didn’t ring back.

Because school started a little earlier in England, when I came to South Africa I was placed in Standard Three, a year ahead of most of the kids my age, making me not only the youngest but one of the smallest in the class. There again, even if I had been placed a year behind in Standard Two, I still would have been the smallest. My mum was just barely five feet tall (or small) so I was never destined to be a basketball player.

After staying with Aunty Debbie for a few weeks, my stepdad began working for Babcock at Duvha power station and we were allocated a house. It wasn’t made of brick, but of some or other prefabricated board that looked like thick dry walling. The power station had put these houses up en masse in order to accommodate the influx of workers from overseas.

My bedroom was much bigger than the space I had had in the trailer so I was happy with it. The problem with the walls, though, was that they didn’t withstand much of a knock. This was put to the test when I was about ten and my mum decided she wanted to learn to drive. My stepdad bought her a 1971 VW Beetle. Short people should never be allowed to drive Beetles because the dashboard is so high and my mum couldn’t really see over it. With the car in the safety of the back garden, my mum thought she would give driving a try and started the car.

After much groaning of the gears she put it in first and the car lurched forward. In a moment of panic, with me shouting that she should hit the brakes, she took her feet off all the pedals and stuck her head under the steering wheel, screaming that she had forgotten which one the brake was. Moving forward at idling speed Herby the Beetle made a direct aim for my bedroom wall. Prefabricated walls don’t like car fenders that much and the car landed up inside the house next to my bed.

My mum never drove again after that. And I had a very strangely patched up bedroom wall.

There are other moments I remember vividly about getting used to life in South Africa. There was the first time I ever saw biltong. It was cut into cubes and when my mum offered it to me I thought it was chocolate and was excited at the prospect of munching on some just before I went to bed. I was horrified to hear it was meat.

I thought it strange that television started only at 6pm. Even though I didn’t understand Afrikaans I used to watch ‘Liewe Heksie’, ‘Heidi’ and ‘Wielie Walie’ all the time.

I made friends at Merlin Park Primary School but, being quite small, I never became part of the main circle. That would be a thread that would stay with me throughout high school and even to this day. If anyone from those days can remember me they would probably describe me as the shy quiet one, which is quite ironic considering the profession I would choose later on in life. I don’t think I was ever shy. I was just quiet and content within my own space. At my fifteen-year high school reunion a girl called Natasha, who was really popular in matric, came up to me and apologised, saying she simply didn’t remember me from school at all.

Even now, as a twenty-year veteran of the entertainment industry, I think people expect me to walk into a room and be the loudest person there. If anything, I am probably