6
Thinking about escape
And then, quite anticlimactically, my first stint on the Border was over and I boarded the Flossie for the three-hour flight back to AFB Waterkloof in Pretoria. I had only been there for about three months, but I had already seen and experienced much more than any young man would be exposed to under normal circumstances.
Waiting in the arrivals hall that Thursday evening were my mom and dad. But, tanned as I was, and with my wildly long hair bleached bright blond by the Ovamboland sun, and my sunburnt cheeks bloated from excessive consumption of G&T, they both looked directly at me but walked past me twice.
‘Mom, Dad, it’s me!’ I exclaimed as they threatened to pass me by a third time and I removed the military-issue brown floppy hat from my head to dispel all doubt.
My mom turned towards the sound of my voice, and then, seeing where it came from, her eyes immediately grew to the size of saucers and she burst into tears, folding me into those graceful arms of her and squeezing me so tight that I thought I’d break.
‘What have those bastards done to him?’ she hissed at my dad over my shoulder. ‘He’s just a child.’
In a concerted effort to avoid an incident, my dad and I guided my mom from the arrivals hall to the privacy of their car. All the way during the 45-minute journey back to the Wonderboom farm, my mom never took her eyes off me. She seemed to examine every pore, every strand of hair and every freckle to make sure they were all still there.
The intensity of her attention was quite disconcerting. Her mouth kept opening, as if to ask a question, but then would close again without her saying anything. She stared intently into my eyes, looking, I think, for something recognisable, something familiar.
Now that I have children of my own I realise that she was probably trying to see inside my head, to see if she could spot the damage she suspected was hidden there. If she could identify it, she probably thought she could do something to heal the wounds and the shattered innocence and make me whole again, like I’d been when I’d left for the Border just three months before.
As my mother was busy inspecting me, I had a vague sense that perhaps something fundamental had changed in me, but I couldn’t yet put my finger on what exactly. On reaching the farm I made a cursory attempt to probe the actual cause of the shift in my alignment but found that my concentration quickly waned. I was far more comfortable dealing with the mundane, everyday things that a returning soldier might pursue, such as where to party the night away, who to do it with and whether there was petrol in my car.
So, I called up the Boytjie from Benoni and told him I was home for a day or two. He and a group of friends were going to the Grand Wazoo that evening and he suggested that I join them.
My mom had prepared a special welcome-home meal for me and was noticeably irritated when I wolfed down the exquisitely cooked rump steak and trimmings, dived into the shower and emerged a short while later ready for an extended night on the town.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘Out,’ I replied.
‘Where are you going out to?’
‘To a club.’
‘Who are you going with?’
‘Friends.’
‘When will you be home?’
‘Later.’
Miffed, she turned to my dad and whispered, ‘Please ask him to give us details. You know how dangerous it is for young people travelling alone at night around Pretoria lately!’
My dad just stood up, wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tightly.
Two days after leaving Ondangwa, I boarded a British Airways Boeing 747 at Jan Smuts Airport (now OR Tambo International Airport), bound for London.
One of the positives about ops tours of a mostly predetermined time span was that my entire monthly overhead ceased and I could comfortably live on the R3 per day danger allowance that I drew at the AFB Ondangwa paymaster’s office every week or so. This was more than enough to keep me in drinks and cigarettes while on operational duty.
It also meant that my full salary was banked back home and that I could calculate the exact amount I’d have available upon my return from the tour. Before leaving for the Border, I had handed a travel agent friend my passport and my building society savings book and asked her to book me on a European skiing holiday and to arrange all the necessary visas and traveller’s cheques.
The day after my homecoming, I popped into her office and she gave me my itinerary. I was to leave the next evening. I would stay in London for four days in a nice hotel in South Kensington while the other 15-odd members of our touring party assembled at the same hotel from around the globe. Four days later we would fly to Munich and then travel by coach into the Stubaital, a picturesque valley in Austria, where we would spend two and a half weeks at a hotel in Neustift-im-Stubaital, skiing the days away.
At the end of the Neustift stay, we would coach back to Munich and fly to Amsterdam for three days before I returned to Johannesburg via London. The total price of the trip, excluding my spending money, was the princely sum of R1 470.
I calculated that my next ops tour would start just three days after I returned to South Africa, so the timing was inch-perfect.
I didn’t sleep a wink on the flight and, like a real country bumpkin, sampled everything I could. The drinks were on the house too. Arriving in London on a typically murky, cloudy and rainy Sunday morning did nothing to dampen either my exuberance or my energy, and I set about exploring the city, on my own, just minutes after checking into my hotel.
My first port of call was to surprise an old friend, Jeremy Lyons, who had moved to London a few years previously and was working as a manager for McDonald’s, his mother had told me. I’d walked no more than 500 metres from my hotel and there, right in front of me, was McDonald’s. I couldn’t believe my luck.
In the restaurant, I went up to the first available assistant, a tall, dreadlocked Caribbean woman.
‘Is Jeremy Lyons here?’ I asked.
‘Jeremy who, mon?’ she responded in a smooth and husky West Indian lilt.
‘Jeremy Lyons, he’s the manager here,’ I said authoritatively.
‘No brother, Jackie Scuttlebone is the manager here. Are you sure you have the right place, mon?’ she asked doubtfully.
‘Yes, his mother told me just two days ago that he is the manager at McDonald’s in London!’
‘There are 27 McDonald’s branches in London, mon!’ she replied. ‘Which one is he in?’
‘One of the others,’ I said sheepishly and quickly left the restaurant.
Back at the hotel, I hooked up with one of the other members of our tour. I was keen to see an X-rated movie, something South Africans who’d never travelled internationally before had only heard about in hushed conversations in all-male company. We went to see Mad Max, starring a very young Mel Gibson. But the only sex scene, if you could even call it that, and which I naturally associated with the X-rating, was a second or two of sodomy filmed from a great distance. However, the gratuitous violence in the post-apocalyptic world of Mad Max began with the opening scene and was still going at full tilt when the credits rolled at the end of the film. Violence was the last thing that I had travelled 15 000 kilometres to encounter.
Our group grew larger as new members arrived and we booked tickets for the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, which was banned in South Africa at the time as being ‘scandalous blasphemy’ of the worst kind. One of the new arrivals was Angie, who was from somewhere on the Gold Coast of Australia. She immediately attracted the close scrutiny and attention of every fellow in the group as she was built like a Playboy model (I didn’t know what that meant, but the other, less-hillbilly guys explained).