Looking Back, Looking Forward

A nice, quiet holiday. That was the plan. In my mind I had it all sorted. Maybe the economy overnight flight to Cape Town might not be the height of luxury, but once I was in the Cape, it was four and five star all the way. It just didn’t turn out that way. For a start, I didn’t realise my holiday companions would mostly be Irish …

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This holiday, this £5,000 holiday, was my reward to myself after the finalisation of my divorce. It was to mark the start of my new life: drawing a line under my previous existence. Neither my parents nor my wife liked or understood my fascination with Africa. I had always wanted to go back, but my now ex-wife had vetoed a return. Africa – from Cape Town to Cairo, from Mombasa to Monrovia – was dangerous. It had been over thirty years, but I was looking forward to two weeks of calm, quiet touring and contemplation as I allowed Africa to infuse my soul and invite me back on a more permanent basis.

‘What are you doing here?’ The clipped, brusque Afrikaner accent does not, at first hearing, lend itself to a friendly tone. Especially when the speaker is already annoyed we weren’t on the fifth floor. It wasn’t our fault he’d got into a descending lift when he wanted to go up to his room. His accent contrasted with Trish’s soft Irish lilt (Trish being one of the more extrovert characters on the trip). However, whether he deserved Trish’s response is an open question.

‘Oh, these are my three husbands.’

To say the questioner looked shocked would come under the ‘sky is blue’ category of obvious statements. He went white under his tan, swallowed, and closed his mouth.

The lift juddered to a halt. The doors opened. Without even a glance in our direction, the man scuttled out. It was still not the fifth floor – the floor he had been wanting all the time – but it was mine. Having nodded a farewell to my Irish companions, I followed him. Away from the lift, the fourth-floor corridor stretched indeterminably to the left, and to the right. He had completely disappeared, so any sympathetic noises I might have made went unsaid. With a decision to make, I went to my nice, peaceful room.

What I had not taken account of, was the character of my travelling companions. Looking back, I don’t know why I should have assumed it was an English travel company. Even when I rang the 0800 number and spoke to someone with an Irish accent, I still thought I was dealing with someone who lived and worked in London. And while I was mildly surprised to be sat on the plane well apart from anyone else on my tour, it was not until after we landed I realised only Caroline and myself flew from Heathrow. The rest of the group – fourteen of them! – flew from Dublin, via Istanbul. At least their route, and their four-hour delay in Istanbul, gave the two of us a chance to draw breath before the onslaught.

The view from my hotel bedroom window in Cape Town

The insistence they had only met the day before, they had not known each other before they gathered at Dublin airport; given the constant, and very loud, chatter; given the familiar use of names, the looking out for one another as they checked in … it all seemed highly questionable to me. All this familiarity, just on the basis of a four-hour unscheduled lay-over in Türkiye? This is what I had paid for?

Apparently, it was. I struggled at that evening’s meal. How many times can you ask someone – I think it was Collette I was sat next to – to repeat what she said? We were at a local restaurant, so not only was I trying to cope with various Irish accents, but there was the South African accented English, the Afrikaans, and, of course, all the other (official or otherwise) local languages. Put simply, the place was noisy. ‘Vibrant’ is a more positive spin on the experience and, once I started to feel full and a touch more relaxed, life began to get a little easier. So much so that, when we got back to the hotel – for all I don’t drink alcohol – some time spent at the bar with my new friends was, despite my tiredness, not spurned. In the end, until she spoke her immortal line, I hadn’t noticed that it was Trish, Barney, Ben and myself who’d got into that lift with the Afrikaner.

By the end of the holiday, with the lift incident being repeated and growing in stature with every retelling, Trish had accumulated five husbands – but I have to say that Barney was the stand-out favourite (he even came home with a coaster proclaiming he was the ‘favourite husband.’) A seventy-year-old ‘toy-boy’ to a not yet forty-year-old guard (police officer in English jargon). Written down like that – and apologies, Barney, if I have your age wrong but, as you’ll realise as you read on, I have a track record on this – it looks merely odd, but how we all laughed when the white-haired grandad had to stand to acknowledge the cheers of the boat for being this famous toy-boy to the dark-haired, clear-faced, young Trish, as we crossed the lagoon on our way back from the Featherbed Nature Reserve to Knysna and our minibus.

Laughter. That is what defined this holiday for me. And, without the contribution of Trish and her friends, I don’t think there would have been so much fun. Nor did I realise how much I needed that laughter. To relax. To be. Occasionally I would catch myself of an evening, looking round at this wonderful group of people, wondering at their ability to enjoy themselves. Not that there’s anything wrong with enjoying yourself; but, for the best part of six decades, because of the – I’ll say ‘stuff,’ there is another word – I’d been through as a child, as a teenager, the control I felt I was under and how I reacted to that, relaxing was not something I did. Somehow, in some way, a part of me was always, but always, on guard.

This was indefinably different. This was a group of strangers, brought together by circumstance, by the simple act of booking a holiday, who gelled. Who got on together. There is a better word, an Irish word: the craic was good. I must admit, part of me was jealous this bunch of people were able to enjoy themselves while many of them were so much younger than me. But that’s my problem, not theirs. It is, I’m now told, part of the grieving process: counsellors talk about five stages of grief, but, after the anger, after the regret, even after starting to ‘accept’ – there’s still the regret, the grief, the anger, for the life I could have had if all the abuse, all the hurt, hadn’t happened in the first place. Never mind I might have had a better marriage; I might have had a better life. A more confident life. A life more well lived because I had worked out – been allowed to work out – what I wanted to do with it forty or fifty years ago and not be starting that process in my sixties …

Because the trouble with starting that process late, is that I make my mistakes long after others have learned from theirs. On this holiday, I was only threatened with death the once, but if I were to suggest going forward that the rule is: if you are to guess a lady’s age, go low – very low. I am not suggesting Miriam would have carried out her threat, but I hope I got the message.

The Indian Ocean - a long way down!

I mean, I knew she was joking, but I had (for the second time that holiday), over-estimated a lady’s age. A mortal sin indeed. It was on the closing stages of the walk around the nature reserve. There had been lots of rocky paths, slopes up and slopes down, with the sea never too far away. We were on a rickety, wooden walk-way, several yards behind Joan and Eva – I forget who was behind us, but they would have been too far away to intervene, or even see, if Miriam had decided to pitch me down the rocky cliff to certain death into the waters below. At the time, the fact that it would have been the warmer waters of the Indian Ocean, and not the cold Atlantic, was small comfort.

I pointed ahead: ‘I think they might ask where I’ve got to.’

‘Not if I talk to them first. I’d just wonder where you’d got to.’

‘But they know I’m walking with you.’

‘People change who they’re walking with all the time. Just a quick push, that’s all it would take.’

‘Oh, dear!’ was all I could think of to say, but I was relieved to see we were getting near the end of the walk. The restaurant, and a three-course lunch beckoned. Actually, ‘oh, dear,’ was all I really had breath to say. Miriam, whippet-thin and fit, knew how to stride out on a walk and, although I pride myself on being fit enough to cope with half a day’s walking, I had to push on in order to keep up with the lass.

It is funny – as in funny-peculiar rather than funny-ha! ha! – that I recall these ‘incidents’ more readily than the promised highlights of the tour. There was that time at the final dinner, when Maureen decided she wanted a kiss on both cheeks. I managed some air-kissing in the general direction which seemed to suffice. Air kissing? Well, I hadn’t managed to get rid of all my English reserve, not in less than two weeks.

Cape Town from the top of Table Mountain

As far as the trip highlights went, we, at the third time of asking, did cable-car our way up Table Mountain and looked at all the spectacular views (the first two occasions were vetoed due to it being too windy to be safe). I have photos to prove I was there. There was the game drive where we saw four out of ‘the big five’ in one afternoon. We stopped by the lion, rhino, elephant and Cape Buffalo: thanks to Rob and his telephoto lens, we all have great shots of these animals. I only had the camera on my phone, so the elephants would be just micro-dots on the hillside. We missed out on leopard, but that was unsurprising as they tend to be nocturnal hunters.

Am I returning to Africa? As I write this, I can look out of my window on another grey, drizzly day. A day which isn’t warm enough to be without heating, or several layers of clothing; a day which does not invite you to be outside; but also a day which cannot be bothered to be properly cold either. Despite Barney’s assurance I was a Rand millionaire (as he was an accountant before he retired, he should know); despite him picking up a brochure of properties for sale in and around Fish Hoek, and we all found at least one potential property I could afford, I don’t know. I really don’t know even though there was that evening in the bar, when Karen predicted I would be coming back to South Africa.

That’s another memory: it was the very same evening we discussed Brexit. The idea anyone outside of the UK would get so worked up about our stupidity in leaving the European project and going it alone, trying to pretend we were still a big player in world affairs, was new to me. It made sense when I realised other countries, other people, had been wanting to trade with the UK, but we had now made life more difficult for them. All this, Karen was propounding vigorously. And I was equally vigorously trying to make her see I agreed with her. Her almond-brown eyes boring into mine. An argument between two people on the same side! Crazy, but fun. Even when other people joined in and I was personally blamed for the last nine hundred years of Irish history – after all, we English still haven’t left them alone! – (thanks Rob), it was still invigorating, life-enhancing, joyous.

The photo of the train crossing the border from Zimbabwe to Botswana at sunset no longer hangs on the wall over my mantlepiece. I took the photograph in 1989, or 1990, during my first adventures in Africa. I now realise it had come to represent a looking back at an idealised past, a rose-tinted vision of what might have been. Now what hangs there is a photo of a photo of a whale bone on the beach near Arniston, a hundred miles or so from Cape Town. Someone else’s picture I wanted to buy, but couldn’t as the staff at the hotel never got round to dealing with my request. Bad news for the artist who has made nothing from the deal, but the end result cost me a lot less. Below it is another memory. This time it’s a painting of a fisherman’s cottage. Also somewhere on the Cape. There are three chickens scratching a living in the foreground and there are white clouds in a blue sky. I bought this for two hundred rand at the craft fair we visited towards the end of our trip. Two hundred rand is about eight pounds sterling. Now, when I look at it, I tend to think it could easily be a cottage by the sea south of Wicklow or just along the coast from Galway – Ireland on the brain, perhaps?

The picture of the cottages - bought in South Africa, rather than Ireland!

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the world is, despite everything, a beautiful place. Maybe, the sun will always break through the clouds, just as it has done now. And maybe, there’s a chance, even in my sixties, I can learn how to have fun. At the end of a tale, I am supposed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the new normal, the new life, but I’ve rather run out of time even if I haven’t run out of words. I’ve joined a choir and we’re off to the pub after. I still don’t drink, but I’m sure the craic will be good.