I had a longstanding connection with South Africa – my grandmother was South African, my father was born there and I had always been fascinated by the politics of the region – so I was very excited when I heard about it. I attended an interview in South Africa House in Trafalgar Square and was offered a contract. Penny, James and I were taken to the boat train leaving Waterloo by my father. The journey had been booked by the South African Embassy and we were going on a 3-year contract. My father took us to catch the boat train and we then sailed from Southampton on the SS Oranje, an old Union Castle ship. The contract paid for all our fares, gave us money for tips and an allowance for our effects. I took out some furniture I had made in Southampton and a Morgan 4+4 car. It was a 2-class ship which was very restricting and which cruised at its maximum speed of 22 knots and took two weeks to do the trip. We played a lot of cards and I managed to get severe sinusitis and mostly missed the crossing of the equator ceremony. At one stage we could see dolphins all around us, thousands of them.
At Southampton we boarded the SA Oranje, one of the Castle mail boats that had been re-named by it’s Africaans owners. It was a 2-class ship but we had an outside cabin with a porthole. My contract even gave us a tipping allowance. The trip took 2 weeks and we spent much of it playing cards. We arrived before dawn and as I peered out from my porthole most of my view was taken up by the huge mass of Table Mountain looming above us. The docks still had steam locomotives working away and there was a sea of black workers below us. We had had two weeks to get accustomed to leaving Britain but the reality was still quite a shock. We arrived in Cape Town in the early hours and by the time we surfaced we had docked. Table mountain dominated the view and I was also struck by the steam trains still operating in the docks. When we disembarked my new boss, Dr Dedecker was there to greet us. He took us to the hotel that had been arranged for us for the first week and then took me on to the laboratories. I was a bit shocked having to leave Penny and James but thrilled when I saw the position of my new workplace, right on the seafront in Sea Point. Just a road between my office and the beach.
After a week we moved to a house in Rondebosch owned by John Field, who was on sabbatical in Canada. One of my friends from Bowden House, fellow oceanographer Dave Cram, had also found a job in Cape Town, at the university had told us about it and that we could rent for 3 months. The first night we slept there we had a burglar enter the house. He woke me up and fortunately ran away when I disturbed him. Fortunately because often criminals were violent and raped and killed as well as burgling. John Randolph, a friend from Bristol days who we met again on the journey across and his girlfriend Lynn, came to live with us too. He bought a Landrover. Never-the-less we were quite lonely at first and Christmas seemed very strange, just the three of us in the middle of summer. We went for a walk in hot sunshine, pushing James in his buggy. Slowly we made friends through colleagues at my work and they soon became good friends, and, in fact, I still keep up with quite a number of them after all this time.
We were very excited to be in Africa but Cape Town itself was quite English. Dave Cram had heard that in Namibia – then South West Africa – you could find precious stones in the sand and suggested a trip there. and inspired us with tales of Namibia and we went on a trip with him in his Beetle with camping gear. See description. First stop en route to the Kalahari Gemsbok National Park was the Augrabies Falls where the Orange River has carved a george through the granite. On the way north from there we saw some camels and I was laughed at because I took a photo. We shared our first campsite in the park with a camel which was disconcerting but the ranger said one night a lion had got in. We saw lots of game and took lots of pictures. We did naughty things like picnicing under a tree, driving off the track to get close up to a lion, chasing ostriches and hartebeests to see how fast they can run – at least 40 mph. We then drove across the semi-desert to the Fish River Canyon. This is a slightly smaller and completely deserted version of the Grand Canyon. We pitched our tents on the camp site which was just an area of desert which had had the larger stones removed and with a ladies and gents toilet and watched the sun setting over the canyon. Next day we walked down to the river with James on our back.
I got down to work very quickly and in November organised my first cruise. Dave Cram managed to organise a small aeroplane which surveyed the surface temperature each day using the latest infra-red technology. I had a difficult relationship with my boss who gave me a fantastic project yet seemed at the same time to get me staring down the microscope and endless phytoplankton samples.
We decided to try to buy a house as Penny had inherited enough money for us to put down a deposit . We found a bungalow in University Estate, a suburb on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, which was within our budget, mainly because it was close to a coloured area (as defined by the apartheid system). Penny got some work as a receptionist at a hairdresser and James went to a creche. Dave Cram, who had a job at the University, came to live with us.
The house had belonged to an old lady since new and the garden hadn’t been touched. I quickly got stuck in and concreted the steep driveway so we could drive the car into the garage and constructed a concrete yard outside the kitchen door. Inside also was pretty rudimentary and in the kitchen I constructed a worksurface between the cooker and the fridge and a hatch between this room and the living room. The interior walls were very knobbly, almost as if they had been pebble-dashed, and in order to decorate them we had to remove the lime-wash first. As the house was built on a mountain-side the garden was filled with stones and I spent the first two years collecting these and making them into a 2 meter high wall between us and the neighbours below. The front garden had a lovely jacaranda tree and a row of agapanthus at the bottom of the retaining wall beneath the road. It was raised above the height of the house so I constructed 3 stone steps to it from the front door.
The house was situated on the slopes of Devil’s Peak, a mountain on the north side of Table Mountain and
overlooked Table Bay and Robbin Island.
One day I climbed level with the guttering and immediately knew that we should try to add another storey on the place to enable us to see the amazing views. One of the friends we had made, Piet Swart, was a civil engineer and he recommended an architect, Klaus Scheid, who we asked to take on the job. We were thrilled with his design which pinched a bit of space from the boy’s bedroom in which he put a spiral staircase.
The staircase emerged into the centre of the new floor which was one room partially divided by a wall.
The walls were whitewashed and the ceiling and floor lined with pine. There was a small balcony covered by an overhanging roof which shielded the room from the sun in the summer. The whole of the north wall was glass giving amazing views over Table Bay and there was a vertical glazed section below the apex of the roof giving views of Devil’s Peak in the other direction.
I did my own work on the place,decorating the downstairs, putting a hatch between the kitchen and the dining room and building a balcony outside the dining room.
I made a sandpit for the boys to play in and a vegetable garden which was never very successful because of the climate – hot sunshine and strong persistent winds.
Penny became pregnant for a second time a year after our arrival in Cape Town. I was keen to have my children spaced about 3 years apart as this was the interval between my siblings. Penny’s brother was similarly spaced from her but she was rather reluctant after the experience of her first birth. Fortunately the second one was completely different; fathers were allowed to be there (how can they not have been?); the clinic was small and personal rather than large and impersonal; the labour was not so long and the embryo a little smaller (only! 9 lbs 9 ozs). We worked hard to include James in the expansion of the family so he didn’t get jealous. Dougal (officially Douglas) was a much more relaxed child than his brother and we had much less trouble with sleepness nights.
In fact once he could crawl he was often found asleep in different places around the house, sometimes halfway down the new spiral staircase.
Dave Cram, who had done Oceanography at Southampton with me, lived with us for several years. He was very fond of Penny and was like a second father to James. He was not happy at the University of Cape Town and was able eventually to transfer to the Sea Fisheries where I was working.
We started off quite lonely but a couple of my colleagues, Peter Best and Garth Newman, became friends and through them our social circle increased.
Peter’s girlfriend, Maggi, took to us and introduced us to Tommy McLellum, who in turn introduced us to Keith and Emily Madders and Allen and Reina Ambor and his girlfriend Gwen Lister. The eight of us spent happy times on Clifton Beach where Allen had a house, playing one-bounce football, having braais and political discussions and eating hash cakes. Garth introduced us to Piet and Ginny Swart who took us on several expeditions to the wonderful Cederberg mountains. We also played poker dice weekly with the Newmans and Swarts and the three men became part of a low key poker school that met once a week. I’ve kept in contact with nearly all these people over the years.
Our most memorable Cederberg trip was an 8-day adventure with 10 adults and 10 children. We had donkeys to carry our food and wine and a donkeyman to look after the donkeys. We slept out in sleeping bags under the stars, drank washed and (occasionally) swam in the streams and cooked over a log fire using the wood from near each camp site. (This isn’t allowed anymore.) In the middle of the trip on 29th September 1969, after we’d got all the children off to sleep and just as we were about to retire, the ground started to jump and buckle underneath us. When it stopped we checked to see that the children, who had slept through the whole incident, were OK and then sought out the donkeyman, hoping he might give us some explanation. He was hiding under a huge boulder absolutely terrified so then we knew this was not a normal occurence. For the next few days the surrounding mountains glowed with flames at night and issued smoke in the daytime but it was only after we met another group of mountaineers that we discovered that it was a significant earthquake of magnitude 6.3 that had severely damaged the town of Tulbagh and been felt as far away as Cape Town.
My sister, Rosalind, came and stayed with us for a while. She had suffered from anorexia and was very shy and spent most of the time, to start with, shut up in her room. Penny was not a sympathetic hostess which didn’t help. We included her in many of our social activities and gradually she came out of her shell and moved into her own flat with one of her workmates. Towards the end of our stay my parents visited us and then went on to visit Dolly, my father’s mother, in Port Elizabeth. By that time my marriage was not working well. I thought Penny was having an affair but when I confronted her she denied it. My parents observed Penny going out in the afternoon on several occasions – she was meeting her lover, Allen – but didn’t want to interfere so said nothing to me even though they were shocked that she was leaving Douglas age 2 and James age 6 in on their own.
In June 1973 I was invited to give a paper on our work at a symposium on upwelling in Marseille. The presentation seemed to go down well but the Americans, who were there in force, many of whom I had wanted to meet, were more interested in impressing each other than in our original research which I found disappointing. I was mugged there on the Friday and lost all my money, my traveler’s cheques, my passport and my airline ticket. Since it was a holiday on Monday and I hadn’t even paid my hotel bill I was very worried. I went to the police, the British consul and the bank and was very forceful in each. I made a reverse charge phone call to my parents from the bank and my Father managed to get me money. I also managed to get a new airline ticket and a document to replace my passport temporarily and caught my scheduled flight to the UK. I had decided to spend a week there since I hadn’t been back in 5 years. England in June always looks at it’s best and I managed to visit my parents and some good friends. I also met Vicky, my brother Chris’ new wife for the first time. Chris was doing a spell with the British Antarctic Survey so she was getting to know the Andrews in his absence. We took her and my other brother David to Oxford. They were going to a ball together there.
I re-found my love for Britain then. In hindsight this was because I felt so unsettled with Penny.
Things at home were no better upon my return. Eventually Reina, Allen’s wife, phoned me in 1973 and told me that the affair was happening. I think I was rather short with her but things changed once it was out in the open. I decided to move out and went to stay with Tommy for several weeks, visiting the children most days. However I was obviously very upset and lonely. We shared the same group of friends I was very jealous of any social activity that included any of that group and not me. I once came face to face with Allen and Penny out together and was very tempted to smash up his nice new BMW car. When I was visiting my old home on a couple of occasions men friends called round, obviously to see Penny (who was a very attractive woman) and were very embarrassed when I opened the door – (just called round to see if Penny was OK!!). My contract at work had been extended to 5 years and I had decided to make it 6 but the end of my time there was only a few months away. I was so unhappy with the situation that I suggested to Penny something would have to give. She had always wanted to go to Australia so suggested she go there for 3 months. Alan followed her out.
I decided to advertise for lodgers whilst she was away to help pay the bills. A Rhodesian girl, Julia, and an Australian couple, Cathy and Richard Jones moved in to two of the downstairs bedrooms and I moved upstairs to the part of that space that had been Penny’s studio. After a couple of weeks I found myself fancying Cathy but I was still very surprised when she made an approach to me. I then arranged to meet up with her in the Gardens, a park in the centre of Cape Town. I was very nervous and very excited. Very quickly Richard moved out and Cathy and I became a couple. We had a wonderful time and she was also very attentive with the children who must have been at least a little phased by what was going on. One Saturday we took them down to Woodstock to kit them out with new clothes as they had been neglected for a while.
We had a wonderful 6 weeks together, both very much in love but Julia was not impressed and quickly moved out. Then, one morning, the phone rang – it was Penny wanting to be picked up from the airport. She was back 6 weeks earlier than expected and her arrival made things very awkward. I felt that I could not ask her to stay anywhere else but her home, although on hindsight I should have told her to get Allen to pick her up and that she should stick to our original arrangement and leave me be for another 6 weeks. I couldn’t ask Cathy to move out as it was her home too – nor did I want to. I prevaricated for hour after hour until Cathy decided she had had enough and left. That really finished our relationship although we did try to rekindle it. It had been so special for both of us and I don’t think either of us could believe that one incident could break it so conclusively. I left the house as Allen offered his house to me as a sort of compensation for going off with Penny. Cathy visited me there and our lovemaking was passionate yet somehow the complete trust had gone. So we went our separate ways. I asked one of the bank tellers who had georgeous eyes for a date but was unable to be excited by her.
It wasn’t long before we sold our house and moved back to the UK. I flew and Penny and the boys followed with our luggage. It had been a memorable six years and I had fallen in love with Africa, like so many Englishmen before me.