Teenage Memories

Quitting school at fifteen, I side-stepped the self-promoting pains of so-called puberty,

signing on with the GPO/HPK.* Taught

Morse Code, sending and receiving

twenty-one words a minute,

I'd barely tapped out one actual telegram when Postmaster Blignaut offered me

a transfer—far away, my dream:

Vrystaat! † No way that I'd refuse! I never touched a Morse key again.

And soon in Kimberley, walking distance

to the whilom diamondiferous Big Hole,

I pursued my education, read Heine

and Carlyle's French Revolution, learned to love Little Richard and Beethoven,

saw Fry'sThe Lady's Not for Burning,

still a recent London hit, signed on with the Liberal Party of South Africa ‡

when seventeen—eighteen was the minimum age, but how could they refuse me,

there being only one other member

in all the 143,973 square miles of the Northern Province, an area smaller than Montana,

but bigger than Germany.

We held our Liberal Party meetings

at my fellow member's parental house,

planning our country's future. A charter

subscriber to the Peking Review § in 1958,

though never for a moment under Mao's spell,

I watched James Dean in Rebel

without a Cause—mine, fighting apartheid:

by eighteen, I long claimed the adult state!

By then I'd switched to life insurance, moved to Cape Town, romance, pamphleteering, too much to drink, the ongoing venture of free love—oh, all of the above!

Moral: Don’t infantilize your marmots. They won't thank you for it.

* GPO/HPK: General Post Office / Hoof Poskantoor. In South Africa in that era, the GPO ran the telephone and telegraph system, hence my instruction in the Morse Code. †Vrystaat! exclamation, see https://dsae.co.za/entry/vrystaat/e07791.

‡ The Liberal Party was then and for years afterward the only nonracial political party in South Africa.

§ The first issue of the Peking Review (Beijing Zhoubao) came out on March 4, 1958, and in Kimberley I vainly scrutinized its pages for some sort of guidance. I don’t recall finding any. The postman delivered the magazine to me, no problem there—although this was apartheid South Africa and Dr. Verwoerd was prime minister. It was, however, full of impenetrable jargon. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Bouvoir, Michel Foucault, Alain Badiou, and Jean-Luc Godard all got Maoism catastrophicaly wrong;  France’s future president François Mitterrand, who visited China in 1961, denied that there was a famine going on there—which there was, the worst, as it happened, in the history of the world.

Friday, March 28, 2025