Africa

Destination Cape Town, 80 Years Later

July 6, 2024 /

It’s always a strange feeling, filling the last few days before a long trip, a kind of void which gets filled with things that don’t really need to be done, and some that definitely do. A kind of hiatus where there’s a heap of tasks which wait to be done but can’t yet be tackled. We fly out on July 15th; friends and family are all but seen, places visited, jobs completed, boxes ticked. It will be on us like an avalanche soon, but for now, a timeless vacuum regularly taps our shoulder with a bony hand.

There’s been a bit of a medical issue, not, as it turns out, overly serious, but one which causes pain and restricts walking. It hurts to walk any distance, a real bummer for both of us, but particularly me, and something which may become an unwanted theme of this next trip. Fingers are, as ever, crossed, and the Micawber in us believes that it’ll all be fine. Maybe I should try and remember that I’m not a kid any more, even though my mind insists that I am. I sound like my Dad.

Let’s see what needs doing outside.

Raindrops glisten, hanging from twigs and branches like miniature lightbulbs, somehow capturing light from an invisible sun. An improbable multitude of snails cling to those same branches, snails of all sizes from swirled pimples to creatures plump enough to serve with garlic butter. The closer you look, the more of the little devils you see.

I pull strands of wild strawberry from the clumps of aubretia and alyssum for what seems the umpteenth time in the last fortnight and a familiar unpleasant smell hits my nostrils: that bloody tailless black cat has been dumping its stinking waste in my garden again. Summer persists with its stubborn refusal to get going, teasing with a few warm days at the end of June before heralding July with more grey skies and chilly days. And rain. Slow drizzle, fast drizzle, drifting hazy moisture punctuated by the occasional proper downpour. As dreary non-starter summers go, this one is chasing an Oscar nomination.

Driven indoors by more of the same, I gather up paperwork, an iPad and a calculator and set about paying bills and putting affairs in order. “Putting affairs in order” – sounds like an explorer heading into the unknown or a rich kid off on the Grand Tour. Halfway across the room I drop the biro which somersaults and cartwheels across the room solely to find the most awkward spot from which to retrieve it. I stoop to pick it up, yet somehow the body does that inflexible thing that only happens beyond a certain age and I miss the damned thing at the first attempt. Cursing, I bend over again – and realise that on both occasions I’ve inadvertently let out a kind of grunt, as if the body will only bend if it’s given an animalistic soundtrack. I swear at the pen. Like that’s gonna help. I sound like my Dad.

Bills paid, departure date given to people who need to know it, we run through the travel list. Again. Flights booked. Check. Kenya entry forms obtained. Check. Safari booked and deposit paid. Check. Kenya rail tickets sorted. Check. Still need to get American dollars and Kenyan foofoos. That can wait till next week, no sense in having bundles of cash in the house unnecessarily. We’ve done this list over and over yet we keep being drawn back to it.

Red pins are in the map on the wall, red means next trip, white means we’ve been there, done that, probably got several T shirts. The trail of red pins leads north and east from Nairobi, zigzagging then through six more countries before coming to rest near the bottom of the continent, close to those words which sound just a little bit magical…..Cape Town. 

“Don’t wait to be called up, Stan” said Ken to his younger brother, “Hitler ain’t gonna be stopped for a while yet. Go and volunteer for the Navy, Stan, otherwise some bellicose bastard will send you to the front line and before you know it your name’s inserted into a ‘lost in action’ letter from the War Office to Mum and Dad”.

“The Navy? Why the Navy?”

“Isn’t it obvious? Sail the seas, see far off lands, get fed decent grub every single day – better food than you get here at home – and put a few thousand miles between yourself and Jerry. Better to be on the ocean than six feet under the ground when Hitler’s day of reckoning comes, believe you me”.

Stan looked up at his older brother with respect, maybe a dash of awe. And volunteered for the Navy. 

Within weeks the young scrawny lad from Derby was on the other side of the world, a signalman, or “bunting tosser” as they were affectionately known, on board HMS Glasgow, rolling over the waves and, just as Ken had predicted, enjoying meals more wholesome and filling than he had ever enjoyed back in St Giles’s Road.

Stan’s first experience of shore leave, his first taste of freedom in a foreign land, found him gazing in disbelief at where he was. No longer killing time in downtown Derby or diving into air raid shelters when the sirens sounded, instead pinching himself that this ordinary skinny teenager who had never before left the UK, was now walking through the streets of an unfamiliar land, chatting with people who spoke a twisted form of English and, most unbelievable of all, looking up at the stunning, breathtaking sight of Table Mountain.

Stanley was, of course, my father. Over the years, and particularly in his later years, he would speak at length of the sense of wonder in his 18-year-old self in 1944, unfathomably finding himself plucked from the terraced streets of his home town and teleported to the enchanting, mysterious world which was Cape Town. The look in my Dad’s eye as he talked, losing himself in those distant yet crystal clear memories, with a wonderment still there 70 years on, left such an impression.

And so it is majorly fitting that we will be ending our next adventure in that same place, studying with a similar awe the sights of Cape Town, gazing up at Table Mountain, just as my teenaged father did exactly 80 years ago. 

I wish he was here to know that I am going to somewhere which was for him a lifelong memory. If he was, he’d probably be asking me to see if that lovely girl he met on shore leave is still there…

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