MY JOZIE

 

Ja no well fine, as the Port Elizabethans say. I came to Jozie not as a stranger, for I have been here before. This time however I had translocated from Cape Town and as a famous horse trainer said, became a de-tribalised Capetonian. Of course Theo de Klerk meant that he had been absorbed into the English establishment with an Afrikaans name as he called himself a de-tribalised Dutchman! No doubt more about him and horses another time.

Ja, it took some time but not much. I had family here, two sons and their wives and offspring and some friends of long standing on whose doorsteps I would appear out of the blue from some outlandish part of Southern Africa.

This time I settled down to writing yet again. It is a disease that might go into recession but would re-emerge with vigour. The years were getting on but the enthusiasm and imagination would not obey.

So: after being cosseted by my friends and family I began to find new friends; the young black guys at the robots would always greet me and one day they insisted that I take one of their pamphlets. How to enlarge your penis! Gogo give that to the ou Baas! They laughed and I laughed with them. We greet one another breezily ever since although my ou Baas left this world a long time ago. Not to mention the odd longing for something he never needed a recipe for!

Then: I discovered Four Seasons art studio and a lady called Sue Prior. She looked at what I had painted and shook her head only slightly. My life changed. Not like that, like this. Am I finished? No, this needs doing. It felt as though eons had passed before a painting was considered finished by Sue. The other aspirant artists were a motley bunch but delightful and my world was enlarged.

Next was my venture into the Irish Club for members only but there were no application forms and “Sure have a drink” was the order of the day. Here I met another motley lot. Angie is the doyen of the group that gathers on a Friday evening and a Saturday at 11.30. She sits in her favourte spot and offers decisive comments when the conversation flags. People play tennis below, my dachshund, Jack runs around and makes friends, characters join us at the table in the sun.

Then there is Irene. Now Irene lives in the retirement establishment that I do and has the beginnings of multiple sclerosis but nothing fases her and she is a laugh a minute.

Standing in the queue in Pick ’n pay one day I met a strange little lady called Dana. She told me all about this place that had free coffee and coupons for pensioners. I envisioned a welfare place and she said she would come and collect me as she lived near. Well I never it turned out to be a small casino and we were given a free voucher on a Thursday and free coffee. The coffee was delicious and the staff very friendly. Now I had never been a casino gambler unlike my sister but had a go at the machines – mind you R2 a throw with tuition from Dana and won a bit, had coffee and left. This continued until I told Irene about it. She was ecstatic. She does not read and spends her time helping others not as able as she is and she took to this like a duck to water! So every Thursday I take her down to the casino, play with my free voucher, have coffee, leave and return to collect her at 4.30! Alas the casino decided to move to Cresta, a large mall and discontinued the free voucher so that was me out, however Irene still spends a lot of time there and I am her taxi.

Now she occasionally comes to the Irish Club with me on a Saturday and is already a favourite with the others who group around our table. There is PeeWee who is into motor racing and Steve who was a horse trainer and bookmakers clerk and on his beam ends so everyone is getting him to wash their cars and do their gardening to keep him going and others that come and go. He now comes and does my housework as I can paint and write and run a racing stable but housework slays me! The sad news is that while away in Mozambique PeeWee died.

One of the group is another Steve, goodlooking ou with a naughty twinkle in his eyes who tells me he is a writer and has had books published on Kindle and Create Space. I perk up. I am desperate to re-publish my novel July Fever that came out in 1980 in South Africa and was launched at the Durban July of that year as it had a background of horse racing and a go get ‘em girl with a dream and three men in her life.

I had tried hard to get a publisher with no success and Steve very kindly offered to show me how. So: much editing and re-conforming and we were becoming fast friends. This took some time and it was with delight that Steve would arrive at our table on a Saturday and kiss me hello! Wow what a long time since that happened! One thing us oldies have not forgotten is the impact of a man’s lips however platonic, but those memories need only a nudge to pop up!

I instantly recalled my hugging men who would envelop me in a hug of note – and I am telling you that not many men know how to give a really good hug! I could name odd places like Serowe where one of them resided!

Then of course there was that moment in time on the Western Delta when a certain man looked at me and said “I have always wanted . . .” The rest lives with my memories but my God the gin tasted good when I arrived in Maun some 300 ks later the next day!

Now Steve has successfully loaded July Fever onto Kindle and Create Space and you will all be able to read about Meryl, my heroine and her dream of breeding a great racehorse and the men she loves. Meryl fell in love with her first lover and she would always search for the emotion of that time with the other men in her life. My new book has a more naïve heroine, Flame, who is convinced that her first encounter with passion is forever and has a lot of living and dangers to live through before she realizes that he is not what she wants in life but there is a stronger destiny awaiting her, that of conservation.

So here I sit a Gogo, but as I read in an English magazine once when a journalist interviewed a new novelist of 85 and asked her how she managed to write about sex, she replied – “There is nothing wrong with my memory!”