Part 68
Yesterday, Hero and I celebrated our 56th Anniversary and it just so happened that it was also Mother’s day in the UK, so my beloved wife enjoyed a double whammy! We celebrated, within our extended bubbles, of course, lunch with our good friends Gisela and Karl-Heinz Guenter Vogel and dinner with another lovely friend Hannah Bialli.
Lunch consisted of a salmon pie and a choice of vegetable or salads, and dinner was our favorite take-away of Thai jumbo prawns with ginger and a delicious creamy trifle. Much as we would have liked to do our traditional restaurant meal together and have a giggle over the mad escapades of the past half century, our friends made it another special day. Thanks, guys!
Which got me thinking. I try not to dwell on the past, except when I’m running through the Rolodex of my mind looking for bloggable moments, but this time I’d like to dwell briefly on the world that’s held me hostage since 1936 and Hero since 1938. While I was fighting nanny and nappies, the world was heading for another cataclysmic moment, having somewhat recovered from the horrors of World War One. The rise of the Nazi movement and its banner headline of “Racial Hygiene,” was already causing massive grief in Germany. It should not be forgotten that the subject of Eugenics, loosely based on the Darwinian notion of “Survival of the Fittest” was still extremely popular in Britain and the United States.
Then World War Two emerged in 1939, and from the age of three to nine I knew that the world I lived in was encircled by an endless succession of airplanes of all shapes and sizes, with the mournful wail of air raid sirens heralding another wave of sinister craft with black crosses on their wingtips and later the truly terrifying sight of a thousand-bomber raid filling the skies from horizon to horizon as they set off to flatten another city in the already succumbing Third Reich.
Snapshots of happier moments. My Dad, who had never had a music lesson, playing “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” on our baby grand. Auntie Joy on leave from working on the world’s first radar installation, buying a Morris motor car and, never having driven in her life before setting off to visit a friend on the coast many miles away. Winning my first fight in a boxing tournament at age six. Receiving a Kukri machete knife from my uncle Nick, recently returned from Burma, and having to have my finger pierced by the knife that could never be drawn from its sheaf until it drew blood.
After the joyous and also tearful celebrations of VE-Day on the Common in Weybridge to celebrate the end of hostilities in Europe, came the sobering, and certainly frightening, dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This began the “big stick” concept of building bigger armies and more devastating weapons, which has lasted until our troubled twenty-first century. As a nine-year-old I was spared the depressing years of post-war Britain when my parents and I embarked on our year-long trek across Europe and down Africa to reach my mother’s country of birth, South Africa.
The era of jet flights, black and white television and numerous other significant technical developments took place as the world of the late 1940s and early 1950s put less attention on weapons of war and more on innovative methods of making life easier with dishwashers and many other diverse methods of replacing hard work with machines.
As a schoolboy in South Africa from 1947 to 1954, we were in a curious sort of cocoon-like existence as we enjoyed all the benefits of an overdose of sunshine, a privileged, comfortable existence with a plethora of propaganda assuring us that Apartheid was not the evil it was purported to be. I suppose it was hard for many prosperous white families at the time not to buy into the idea that separation of the races was fair to blacks as well as to whites. However, the reality of the situation was recognized by more and more of the South Africans of all races, and opposition to the government policies grew every year. However, opposition is one thing. Bringing about real change is another.
As a teenager, I was as guilty as most others, condemning the awful Apartheid laws but much more interested in sport and our glorious Springbok rugby team, who vied with New Zealand’s All Blacks for the position of number one in the world. I was at a very liberal school, Michaelhouse, that railed against the inequality of the system but was ultimately ineffectual as were most liberals in changing the determined and forceful strategies of Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd’s successes in “social engineering.” His training in psychology in Nazi Germany in the 1930s had brought echoes of racial hygiene to Africa.
After school, a year spent in the majestic desert world of Namibia gave me a time to think about life and about the world, with just a vague thought about what I could do with my life. Ideally, I just wanted to play rugby, but it was still an amateur sport in the 1950s; so it occurred to me that I should actually consider something like a job with future prospects. I also decided to return the UK in order to get to know Britain and Europe better. In the back of my mind, I had the idea that one day I might try to do some writing, but not right away.
Back in the UK, I found work as a pile-driver’s assistant, night watchman, waiter, farm laborer and bouncer in the Cat’s Whisker restaurant and nightclub. Almost by accident, I then found myself working in television, and in three years carved out a promising career but I was tempted back to South Africa by an offer to fund the making of documentaries for a London-based company. Sadly, the worsening political situation in the country caused the London company to cut all ties with me. I did find work with a local film company and was diverted from directing to writing commercials for some years before starting to write and direct documentaries. I was still trying to find my way in life in a profession I liked, but I determined to move into writing and directing full length feature films.
In 1964, I then met the Hero of my life. Her name is always a talking point as it sounds masculine, but in Greek mythology Leander drowned trying to swim across the Hellespont on a stormy night to be with his lover Hero. Distraught, she jumped into the water and drowned to be with him. My Hero and I have avoided stormy waters for 56 years but have had plenty of adventures. Hero came from an affluent family of Greek Cypriot origin. I was still struggling financially but determined to make it without handouts from Hero’s parents.
America sent troops to Vietnam in 1965 but, more importantly, Hero and I were married. We were an odd mixture of nationalities and cultures but somehow there was a huge affinity based very much on our ability to laugh and see the absurdities of so many things in life. Technically, the world was advancing in many ways. In particular, man landed on the moon and space exploration seemed to be launching into a golden age, even though it faltered for a while. Back on Earth, communication systems moved steadily forward, starting with the floppy disc, the portable cassette player, the first portable personal computer, the cell phone, the video recorder, VHS and then the breakthrough to digital.
Considering that when I was a child, making a telephone call to another country was a huge adventure and the jet engine still had to be invented, we’ve certainly come a long way. Many of the predictions by writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction became a reality, but were we, as the human race, improving our lives? I fear not.
Man has so far avoided another World War since 1945 but we have been afflicted with endless ,smaller conflicts, many of which have made little sense. We have seemed instead to have embarked on a war for the control of our minds along with the attempted breakdown of so many values that we have held dear for centuries. Ideologically there is a massive schism between left and right, or if you prefer globalism versus populism. George Orwell’s books “Animal Farm” and “1984” are frighteningly prophetic.
Nevertheless, as a young married couple intent on building a family – four children in five years – we were primarily concerned with creating a future that would allow us to provide a good education for our children, two boys and two girls, a safe home and, most importantly, a sense of values of honesty and decency. I believe we succeeded pretty well, along with making the typical mistakes that all parents seem to make, in the process. All four of our children are doing well in life and we have seven grandchildren. My filmmaking and writing career has been an exciting roller coaster ride, which I have previously covered in earlier blogs.
All of which brings us to March 2021, with the lockdown madness surrounding us, but the great glimmer of hope is the imminent funding of ExoTech for a launch in the next year or so. When chaos and confusion abound, it is vital to align with a piece of good stable data, which can keep you sane. ExoTech is such a datum, not just because I look forward to using my computer with a vastly simplified and more efficient system, but also because it will profoundly improve the lot of humankind.
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.