According to the World Health Organisation,
someone born in South Africa in the early sixties, (e.g. me), could expect to
live forty seven years.
Unaware of this
somewhat disturbing statistic, but with seeming instinctive brilliance, I moved
to New Zealand at the age of forty six, where life expectancy is about ninety
five. Scandinavians are apparently tracking
very near the one hundred mark, but the extra years didn’t seem worth the
extreme climate and learning a language with little circles above the A’s and
all the O’s crossed out. My hope is that
I have a reasonable chance of beating the system with just the bad hair I already
have and a fake Kiwi accent that I am working on by watching a lot of day-time
TV.
It’s not that I am paranoid, just that I
was present during all of life’s attempts to end mine prematurely and I do
wonder how I made it this far. In fact I
am continually surprised to see fully mature specimens of the male persuasion
thronging the planet. I am sure any one
of them selected at random would be able to reel off a dozen or so accounts of
running/falling/climbing/jumping into/off/ through a glass door/river/gorge/tree-house. Not to mention external forces like fire,
water, ice, their brother’s chemistry set, their father’s drinks cabinet or
their mother’s car.
Naturally, every boy’s memory of events
past tends to be somewhat unreliable, with stories of near-death experiences taking
on seemingly fantastic proportions in the re-telling. One theory is that this is in preparation for
being able to recount interesting boyhood stories to one’s grandchildren, but
in my own experience I think the accounts of what actually happened are
modified immediately to avoid having your life terminated by your parents when
they find out what you did.
This also explains why everyone knows it is
dangerous to run with scissors, and yet no-one has ever been injured doing so
or has ever heard of anyone who has.
It’s because you know that if you stabbed yourself while running with
scissors your mom will kill you, so instead you invent a story where a boy you
have never seen before (and will never see again) attempted to sever your
femoral artery with a blackboard compass during double geometry.
In speaking to my father, I have learned
that my close brushes with extinction began long before 1962. Himself a veteran of beating the system, he recalls
that as a boy he would play a game involving cutting loops of rubber from a
motorcar inner tube and shooting them into the overhead power-lines where they
would become stuck, to be shot down by other boys with their loops of rubber -
the idea presumably being to see who could dislodge the most loops. I am surprised that Sony has not formulated a
version of this game for their Playstation as the concept sounds riveting.
You can imagine the scene - a
dusty street somewhere in the suburbs of Johannesburg, everything in black and
white with the corners of the buildings yellowing and cracked (the way they
always are in photos of that time), and all the cars with no inner tubes of
course.
My father and the rest of the flannel
shorts brigade have managed to get all their loops stuck in the power
lines. Someone suggests throwing their
shoes up to dislodge a batch so the game can continue but my father points out
that none of them have had any shoes since the war. By this stage a small crowd has gathered and
a minor scuffle breaks out when someone volunteers his sister’s doll in a bid
to get the game going again.
I guess it is just in the nature of boys
not to give up and being the carrier of the stupidly heroic gene in our family,
my father offers to climb the pole and manually release the loops. I guess there is something to be said for a
country where wood is plentiful but that country is not South Africa. The math goes something like this: bare feet
plus metal pole plus 380 volts of three-phase power at an elevation of one mile
up in the sky equals a whole new way to entertain the street.
In a move that was to become a regular in
the arsenal of survival tips for later generations my father landed on his head
and was therefore un-injured by the fall apart from sustaining a broken arm, no
doubt from the whip-lash effect. Being
left-handed and therefore fairly useless anyway, he hardly noticed the
impairment but apparently my grandmother did start wondering why the jerseys
she knitted for him from then on had one odd-shaped sleeve...
