‘An ice-cream seller? Please explain,’ the General said, somewhat taken aback.
‘Well, sir, when I was very little, I thought the greatest job in the world was that of the guy driving the bicycle with the bin of Dairy Maid ice creams through the neighbourhood. Since that dream faded, I wanted to be a pilot.’
‘Not much ambition there,’ he muttered, more to himself than to anyone else.
‘On the contrary, sir,’ I said, and his eyebrows arched.
‘Explain?’
In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought.
‘Don’t get too comfortable in that chair, sir. I’d like to sit there some day!’
A funereal silence followed.
‘Does anyone have any questions to ask this young man?’ the General asked the other officers in the room, confirming, as if I hadn’t already known, that he was done with me.
From the left, someone asked, ‘How does a jet engine work?’
‘The air comes in the front, gets compressed and heated and shot out the back,’ I offered hopefully, while suspecting that this particular level of brevity was unlikely to win anyone over.
‘Anyone else? No? Thank you. You can go.’ This statement was made without even a hint of hesitation between the words.
I got groggily to my feet, replaced my cap, fashioned a salute, this time more like how I’d been taught to do it, then spun around so quickly that the sole of my shoe under the ball of my left foot struck a raised joint between two planks and stopped turning! There was an audible crack from the area of my ankle.
‘I say, are you all right?’ inquired General Rogers.
‘Fine… urgghh, thanks… sir!’ I gasped through tightly clenched jaws as I came close to passing out from the excruciating pain in my left leg.
Somehow, I managed to stagger from the room, blinded by embarrassment, despair, frustration and dismay. So ended possibly the shortest Pilot Selection Board interview in the history of the SAAF.
Part I
The age of innocence
1
A rebel is born
Those who have come to know me through my life are patently aware that I am not a military man at heart. I also come from a long line of non-military-minded men, the first of whom to arrive in South Africa was a rebellious-minded but principled French Huguenot called Pierre Jaubert (the a soon became an o). He hailed from La Motte-d’Aigues in Provence in the south of France and arrived at the Cape in 1688 aboard the Dutch East India Company ship Berg China.
The ancestors that I have been able to trace were all conscripts or volunteers in times of war. My great-grandfather fought on the side of the Boers in the Anglo-Boer War, and both my grandfathers served in the Second World War. Uncle Joffre, my grandfather’s brother, was a navigator on Liberators and Mosquitos during the Second World War and played a role in the Allied supply drops during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. I met him a few times as a young boy and was struck by his boundless energy, which bordered on, and sometimes exceeded, the bounds of sanity. I recall that he was married seven times and that he also crashed motor cars with some regularity. And Dad did a few months of national service in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) with the British Army.
Apart from these family members, why do I not consider myself to be a military man? Well, for one thing, I question everything, a trait that will not make you too many friends in high places in the military hierarchy anywhere in the world. I also struggle with carrying out orders that don’t have a rational expectation attached.
I was born in Chingola on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia on 3 July 1958. My dad was born in Pretoria and named Pierre after the original Huguenot ancestor. My mom was Inez (née Wilson) and she was born in Brakpan but would never admit to that fact, preferring instead to say that she was born ‘near to Johannesburg’. Dad’s family had moved to the Copperbelt immediately after the Second World War and both Grandpa and Gran worked at Nchanga copper mine in Chingola.
My mom, who was in all likelihood a direct descendant of King George IV, albeit from illegitimate lineage, was halfway through her matric year at Guinea Fowl School in Gwelo in Southern Rhodesia on the day she turned 16 in July 1950. Her parents, who’d divorced when she was only four, seem to have cared little for her, and she was shuttled off to various boarding schools after the divorce. On that day, a telegram arrived at the school, instructing her to use the small amount in the accompanying postal order to purchase a train ticket and return home to Brakpan, where her mother, who was living there with a new husband, would help her to find gainful employment.
Mom was in her final year of schooling and just months away from completing her matric, a rarity for a young woman in those days, but this seems not to have mattered to her mother. Bitterly angered and disappointed by this dismissal of her academic aspirations, and with no viable alternative, Mom caught the train from Gwelo to Bulawayo the next day.
Bulawayo was the junction where the railway line going south to Johannesburg met the one going west towards Francistown, in Bechuanaland (now Botswana). In Bulawayo, it was necessary for Mom to change from the westbound train to a southbound service for the final leg of the journey home. True to her independent nature, and to protest the anger that she felt for her parents, when she reached Bulawayo she walked boldly up to the ticket office and asked, ‘How far north does the train from Johannesburg travel?’
The three-toothed man in the ticket office replied: ‘To the edge of beyond, my sweetie!’
‘That’s good enough for me!’ she said, and promptly bought a ticket to Chingola, where the northbound line terminated.
Emerging from Chingola station late the following afternoon, she found a nearby boarding house run by a young couple, Ben and Hazel Rens. They immediately adopted her.
Mom quickly adapted to the frontier nature of the town and got a job in the assay lab at the Nchanga copper mine. Her boss, Una Joubert, had a son, Pierre, who was just finishing his own matric at Grey College in Bloemfontein. Not long afterwards, introductions were made, she and my dad became an item, and they married on 12 December 1954.
Debbie was born first, ‘prematurely’, six months later. Then there was a reasonable two-year gap before Jacqueline was born. I followed 13 months later, and Mark followed barely ten months after that. My mom had her last three kids in 23 months!
Legend has it that my dad, upon learning of my birth – my being the first boy after two daughters (somehow that was important then) – instead of going to the hospital as a new father would today, set off with his best friend, John ‘Buck’ Jones, into the bush, with the intention of hunting and dispatching a trophy buffalo/sable/roan/elephant to mark the momentous occasion of my emergence into the world.
This was not an unusual practice, as the matron of the Chingola hospital, like many people at the time, felt that fathers were an unnecessary impediment to the birthing and neonatal phases. Men were not permitted in the maternity ward, let alone the delivery room, and so disappearing into the bush for a few days with one’s mates at the birth of one’s progeny was nothing unusual.
Dad and Buck were accompanied on the hunting expedition by Peter Chibemba, the manager of our household. Before they left, the trio cleared out the local bottle store of all available stocks of brandy and beer, which they imbibed with abandon on the way to and from the hunting grounds. In their thoroughly inebriated state, they proceeded to wage war on the wildlife that inhabited the untamed border area in their quest to harvest the trophy of trophies – with no clear idea what they were looking for! Many, many rounds (of ammunition, brandy and beer) later, and with nothing to show for it but four-day stubble and extreme body odour, they came to the considered opinion that they should return to relative civilisation and make my acquaintance in person.