Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 28
Part 2 continued
1956–1966
During the time I was employed by Alpha there was no television in South Africa, so all the commercials were screened in cinemas before the movies. Many of the commercials were one minute long, rather than the thirty-second length preferred by TV. I discovered that I could quickly come up with an original idea but the discipline of the one-minute timing plus the need to keep the production costs down took a while longer. I had to reject a number of my best ideas because they were simply too expensive to make. The days of massive budgets for TV commercials were still some years away.
Nevertheless, I quickly acquired a reputation for creative ideas amongst my fellow scriptwriters as well as the teams that made the commercials. I began to feel that I would after all move my career forward again, after the initial disappointments following my return to South Africa. Having a job with regular hours from Monday to Friday, leaving the weekend free, allowed me to go back to my love of rugby. I turned up for practice with Wanderers, a famous old Johannesburg club reputed to be one of the biggest sports clubs in the world. As I had not played a game of rugby for nearly three years, I was not greeted with much enthusiasm by the club which had seven teams. I was selected for the 7th team, but I considered their thinking was reasonable. Despite having played 1st XV or 2nd XV for some good teams in Namibia and Britain, I had to prove myself all over again. Somewhat to my own surprise I found myself in the 1sr XV in just six weeks. I even joined the hockey section and played in their third team on a Sunday after playing rugby on the Saturday.
To be honest I was lucky to make the first team. Their captain, Chick Henderson, who had been at school at Michaelhouse before me, played international rugby for Scotland before returning to South Africa and captaining both Wanderers and Transvaal Province. He had to go to Britain on business and I took his place in the first team. Out of the fifteen members of the team, only three including myself had not won a Provincial or Springbok cap (the South African International team rated variously at number one or two in the world). We went on to win the top championship in Transvaal club rugby, the Pirates Grand Challenge cup. At this level I was playing each week both with and against some of the top players in the world. Frankly, my three years absence from the game had affected my fitness and although I continued to play in the first, I had lost that edge that previously I had hoped would take me to play international or at least provincial rugby.
My life had seemingly settled down and I was delighted to be participating in both my favorite sport and my favorite career – albeit, as a writer and not a director in the movie industry.
Imagine my horror when I was called into Ronnie Brantford’s office and told to pack my bags. I asked what I had done wrong. Ronnie, obviously very embarrassed, told me I had done nothing wrong. The nephew of the owner, Bill Boxer, had asked his uncle for a job. Bill calmly decided that as I was the last to be employed in the scriptwriting team, I should make way for his nephew. It had nothing to do with my talent as a writer. The other writers were also shocked and offered me their commiserations, but the decision stood. Once again, I was out of the movie industry!
My good school friend Derek Lucas made a suggestion. As a teenager he had borrowed some money from his uncle and bought farmland in an area called Muldersdrift on the banks of the Crocodile River. Derek (or Derrie as we called him) had a good job with a company called Chemserve in the city, dealing mostly in fertilizers. He suggested that I move into the farmhouse (which he had built almost entirely himself from the age of 16) and then begin the process of turning the property into a real farm. Once it was up and running, he would leave his job and join me. I had often secretly wished I could live on a farm and perhaps do some farming in my spare time. I was so thoroughly pissed with the movie industry for my unfair dismissal, it seemed like a really good idea. By the way, Bill Boxer’s nephew lasted about six months as a scriptwriter before being fired for having little idea of what it was all about!
So, I became a farmer. Derrie had very limited funds. I received no salary, but he bought all my groceries and I had a roof over my head. We discussed what we should produce on the farm and eventually discovered that there was a shortage of onions on the market for the early part of the season. Derrie researched this and found that a species of onion called Texas Giants grew quicker than all the others, so we decided to plant about four acres of them and catch the market early. We were both playing for Wanderers first team at that stage. Derrie was a huge man, perfectly proportioned and 6 feet, 5 inches tall, putting my rather average physique to shame.
Next, we had to plough the land that had not been farmed for about twenty years. So, we needed a tractor and a plough. Derrie’s mother June was a long-established flower farmer also based in Muldersdrift. She could lend her plough to her son but not a tractor. A new tractor was out of our reach, but Derrie put out feelers amongst his fertilizer customers and came up with the news that a farm outside the small town of Ermelo, 170 miles to the east, was offering a John Deere tractor for £100. This was a ridiculously good price so there had to be something wrong with it. Derrie phoned the farmer who assured him that the only fault with the vehicle was that it had rust in the fuel tank. The farmer had two other tractors in good condition and just wanted to get rid of it.
So how did we get it to Muldersdrift? The only realistic solution was to drive it. So, I hitchhiked to Ermelo, a rich farming district that specialized in potatoes, paid the farmer and set off for Muldersdrift. The farmer warned me that the engine would stop every 20 or 30 miles until the rust was cleared from the fuel tank. However, it would restart if I cleaned out the carburetor every time it stopped. The sale was concluded just after lunch. I decided to set out and see if I could make it to the next little town, Bethal, before dark.
The Transvaal Province is famous for its thunderstorms and vicious lightning strikes. In the 1960s the weather was remarkably consistent. Most afternoons in summertime, storm clouds would gather throughout the day culminating in a spectacular show of electrical force around 4 pm. I figured that I could reach Bethal before that time, provided that cleaning out the carburetor was as simple as he claimed. It wasn’t (of course) and I struggled along at about 30 miles an hour, stopping as predicted every twenty miles or so to wrestle with the carburetor and pour more petrol in the tank. A few miles outside Bethal the heavens opened up and apart from drenching rain, lightning flashed closer and closer. I had been told that as the tractor had rubber tires, I was relatively safe, but it was quite terrifying perched on the tractor seat with my head and torso well above the level of the tractor itself.
At any rate I managed to get to Bethal and find its one and only tiny hotel. I parked outside and crawled into the establishment, dripping wet. The owner, a man probably in his seventies, looked at me in horror. “What happened? You got a hole in the roof of your car?”
I explained that most tractors are roofless. He shook his head and remarked that I was insane to drive such a vehicle in a storm. I agreed and asked for a room. He cackled and said, “Maybe we should put you in the swimming pool!” He then shouted for his son Solly. The son, aged about 45, appeared rather bleary-eyed. I suspect he had been drinking or maybe just sleeping. The father, Max, told him to put me in room 3 and bring me a couple of spare towels. I carried some dry clothing and toiletries in a large plastic grocery bag and squelched after Solly, hoping that I hadn’t completely flooded the reception area.
It proved to be a weird evening. I showered, dried, put on my dry clothes and a bit later returned to the reception area, where Max and Solly were shouting at each other. The father had a real gift with words and his insults aimed at his son were the stuff of legend. Solly’s only real defense was a very loud voice. They reluctantly broke off and stared at me.
“Suppose you want supper?” the old man asked me. I nodded, momentarily speechless from the verbal bombardment between father and son. Solly then escorted me to the dining room where I was clearly the only customer. Fearing the worst, I sat at a table with a faded but colorful plastic tablecloth. I looked around. The hotel must have been at least 50 to 70 years old with decor to match. I began to wonder if a severe dose of food poisoning would follow and put me out of my misery.
It was a set five-course menu and to my amazement it was quite delicious. The portions were very generous, and I supplemented the food with an excellent South African Cabernet Sauvignon. As I wandered back through reception, old Max grinned at me. “Grub’s not bad hey? Had the same chef for forty years. Getting a bit long in the tooth now but he still produces the goods. Africans make brilliant chefs if you train ’em right … join us for liqueur now.”
Without waiting for a reply, he yelled for Solly again. “Hey Sol, bring us the bottle of Grand Marnier I opened last night and three glasses.”
And so we sat and sipped the fiery liqueur for the next couple of hours. Max turned out to be a wonderful storyteller and regaled me with stories of his youth in Poland and the growth of anti-Semitism which resulted in his parents fleeing to South Africa. From time to time he would growl at Solly and tell him to do various chores around the hotel. I realized too that their shouting matches were all part of a game they played. They were probably bored out of their minds. The hotel had seen better days and they had few customers now but the old man had clearly made money earlier and simply enjoyed his memories as well as harassing Solly, who turned out to be a simple soul, unfazed by his dad’s insults.
Back in the saddle again, I left early hoping to outrun the almost daily storms. The dirt in the fuel tank seemed to grow worse and on occasions I would only travel about ten miles before having to do the clean-out. In order to get to Muldersdrift I had to crawl through Jo’burg’s western suburbs. The traffic was horrendous and I suffered endless insults from drivers annoyed at finding a slow-moving tractor ahead of them. The storm hit me again as I cleared the city’s suburb and took the road leading to the tiny village of Muldersdrift, with Derrie’s farm off to the right of the main road. Arriving soaking wet again, I was greeted by an anxious Derrie who had realized that driving a damaged tractor in the early summer months could not have been a joy ride!
The next few weeks were pure pleasure. We got the fuel tank on the tractor replaced and our John Deere became an indestructible force on the farm. We took it in turns to plough the fields allocated for the Texas Giants and then, feeling almost biblical, I filled a wicker basket with the onion seeds and walked along the fields throwing the seeds into the furrows created by the plough. The weather was balmy and the thunderstorms obediently stuck to their 4 pm schedule almost every day. In our region, the summer sun would dry everything out on the surface during the day with some of the previous day’s rain permeating the soil. Then the storm would bring another deluge and some forty minutes later the sun would reappear and dry out the surface again. Perfect for our onions, we thought.
Meanwhile, Derrie asked me to build a dam across the Crocodile River to create a pool of water, with an overflow allowing the modest little river to continue to flow downstream. It wasn’t strictly legal, but no one ever questioned it. It tested my strength to the limit as I carried large boulders from other parts of the river to create the dam. I then blocked off parts of the dam wall with plastic sheets, poured cement in between the boulders, let it dry and then removed the plastic. Primitive but it worked.
In the same way as I used my imagination and a dollop of common sense, so has Peter Warren on an infinitely larger scale unlocked the secret of flawed computer technology to allow ExoTech to grow exponentially and truthfully by the day!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.