For M-R
“The donkey bag of life is full of scraps.”
—Nasreddin Hodja
The first, not counting baby snaps,
depicts me holding a suitcase,
adventure on my toddler's face,
As though I were setting out, perhaps,
to quit my birthplace: Caledon Baths
Hotel; it burned down in 1945,
but that was after, switching paths,
my father joined the SAAF.
From there on, there’s a large schism,
nine years redacted, or more, old
Nobodaddy’s counterpointed rhythm
disrupting memory’s dusty store:
I’m off in the veld, then, far away
under the Great Karoo's big sky,
with boys potting platannas in a vlei.
It was the nineteen fifties! Should I cry?
Climbing a koppie to a raptor’s perch
my brother and I got two nestlings
and raised them on the kitchen porch.
No need for mom's controlling things,
once grown, our "falconets" flew free,
weaving their web of goshawk ways
and dining in a town hall tree
on municipal pigeons many days.
They were a metaphor; I winged away,
opportunity knocking, and being now
sixteen, to take a job with the GPO/HPK
. . . in Kimberley. O sybaritic city! How
anticlimactic your Big Hole’s puddle!
In an unguarded adolescent muddle,
I splashed out on a new jacket at John Orr’s.
I’d seldom seen such fancy stores!
Twenty pounds less ten bob,
a month I got, that's to the shilling,
working in the old Mint Building.
My modus vivendi was scarcely snob:
I settled for starters at Huis Albertyn
(a government hostel), then shifted
to a nearby family's, called Colyn,
—of whom my memory's drifted.
With Charlie’s Hudson Hornet handy
we drove in search of ginger squares
(think ginger wine plus ginger brandy)
and flirted riskily with girls in pairs,
visiting rugby players' intended prey;
the sportsmen drank the night away.
She won me with “Who’s Sorry Now?”
And we faked a tango, God knows how!
At the Psychical Society, I didn’t hypnotize,
and in the Liberal Party couldn’t dent
my country‘s brass-and-iron firmament.
Luck’s best, they say, and mine was fine,
so I should no doubt admit content,
and there are neither lies in that nor blame
and we are all bamboozled in our time
and none but miss some fancied finish line.
Driving back from (synecdoche’s allure)
Virginia via the Hottentots-Holland Range
in a chatty Zimbabwean’s Uber Subaru,
I was, Wikipedia jibed, the local cynosure;
characters who’d never given me much due
would no doubt have found it strange
that such as I should one day be—
faut de mieux—a Caledon celebrity.
The mayor (if one there be), we teased
should hold a welcoming ceremony
and offer me the town’s gilt key!
S/he didn’t, naturally. We were displeased
too: in the old Caledon Baths Hotel's refound
site, the springs still gushed their trickle,
but a Reno-style casino grabbed the ground
now--and games of chance are . . . fickle.
Done my resurrected natal sphere,
we ended up that sunny summer’s day
on the casino’s stoep, with Windhoek beer,
reluctant to explore more, or perhaps fear
-ing some new fake memory’s false sway,
then dined at the handy local Wimpy:
the cheeseburger special for you, ma mie,
baked hake with tartar sauce for me.
Notes: SAAF = South African Air Force. The platannas shot by the boys were clawed frogs or toads, Xenopus laevis. A koppie is a small hill, and the young birds the poet and his brother stole were likely Pale Chanting Goshawks, Melierax canorus. GPO/HPK = General Post Office / Hoofposkantoor. In South Africa, a stoep is a verandah.
Built in 1897 to take advantage of the seven hot and cold ferruginous springs there, Caledon Baths, depicted above, was in its way a world-class spa hotel: the Prince of Wales and the famous English music hall song-and-dance man Sir George Robey, known in his day as the “Prime Minister of Mirth,” were among its guests. The hotel had its own dairy and piggery; masseurs and masseuses were in attendance. In 1940, room and full board, with use of the mineral baths and other facilities, cost between £4 and £5 a week (roughly U.S.$16 to $20 then). Sorrel, daffodils, and star-of-Bethlehem studded the edges of the wheat fields; “every bit of uncultivated ground is a miniature flower garden” (“The Caledon Baths: A Visitor’s Impressions,” South African Medical Journal, November 23, 1940, 443). The writer's father, Basil Dreyer, was its manager before he went off to fight the Deutsche Afrika Korps in the Libyan desert--the youngest hotel manager in South Africa, he liked to say.
The Caledon Baths Hotel in its heyday
Comments