Here are mine.
I used the first of my lives when I was aged about six living in Cape Town. We had a boarded up area at the one end of our bath and this was a convenient place for our Governess to stand my brother Michael and I when she undressed us. As usual she ran the bathwater in while she was doing this and this time she made a huge error that could have been fatal for me. She had not turned the cold tap on so there was just boiling water in the bath when she put me in feet first. Alerted by my scream she pulled me out in the nick of time and for a few weeks it looked as though I was wearing a pair of short, pink socks where the water had burnt both feet to just above my ankles. Had my whole body been submerge it is unlikely that I would have survived to tell my story.
When I was a teenager I got tuberculosis at a time when the cure was nothing like it is today. It was not uncommon for both children and grown ups to die from it. I was in bed for six months and I also had a spell in the T.B. hospital at Noupoort that was in the arid Karroo because the medical boffins believed that the dry climate there was best for people with their lungs being destroyed by the disease.
I had recently recovered from T.B. with the help of my second life when I embarked on the greatest journey of my life – crisscrossing Africa hitch-hiking alone from Cape Town to Tunis. I had just left South Africa when I got a lift with a guy in a little, old M.G. There can’t be many cars more unsuitable for river crossings because they are so low. He and his friend were both driving virtually identical vehicles and I was in the front one when we came to this river in Rhodesia that became Zimbabwe, which was in flood.
The bridge was almost completely under water, but this did not deter the driver I was with. We spent the next 15 minutes or so wondering when we were going to be swept away as the little car battled against the current with the river running right through it across the floor from one side to the other.
This is what the bridge looked like when the two of us crossed it in this MG. Miraculously my third life came to the rescue and we made it. We had to wait two days for my driver’s friend to join us. He had done the sensible thing and only crossed when the river had gone down sufficiently for this to be safe.
I tested the vulnerability of my lives once more on my year long safari through Africa. It’s hard to imagine that I could have been so stupid as to buy a dugout canoe from one of the locals on the Congo River and then paddle down it for miles when I could not swim. Not that swimming would have helped me if I had gone over in a river that is reputed to be the deepest in the world and runs for the most part through nothing but jungle. But at 22 you have no fear.
My canoe was one of these This
was my route across Africa
As I rounded a bend my canoe got washed broadside up against a pile of water hyacinth. It was inches from being filled by the strong flowing current when my fourth life came to the rescue and I floated free once more.
When I camped at night beside the Congo River there were so many mosquitoes that they were touching each other on the outside of my net, so I usually got a few inside it before I went to sleep. And although I was taking quinine regularly to ward off malaria it was inevitable that I would still get it as I was being forced to sleep amongst such a concentration of the little bugs.
Had I got it while I was still travelling down that huge river none of my remaining lives would have saved me. As it turned out it only caught up with me days later after I had ended my canoeing at Brazzaville in the Congo and travelled some way up the West Coast into the tiny Spanish protectorate of Equatorial Guinea that achieved independence in 1968. When you get malaria you certainly know you have got as you have never ending nightmares and other unpleasant symptoms. Luckily my fifth life saved me this time and I end up in a tiny Catholic Mission hospital and three days later I was cured for free, and on my way again.
In England where I had gone to become a journalist I nearly came to grief in a little bubble car. It was mad of me to buy one because I am over 6ft tall, but it was all I could afford at the time. The driver has absolutely no protection at all in these vehicles because all he has in front of him is a paper thin metal door.
I so nearly had my chips in this tiny car as I was driving into a cutting in a very hilly area. A car approached from the opposite direction going like a bat out of hell. It was travelling so fast that it shot up the embankment and did a wall of death ride past the left hand side of my bubble car and back onto the road. All its windows on the one side were smashed by the reflector posts on the edge of the road. When it stopped a short distant behind me two men got out. They were extremely agitated. One kept repeating: “I told him not to drive so fast. I told him not to drive so fast.”
It turned out that the driver was trying out the car with a view to buying it and the dealer was with him. So that was the sixth life I had survived.
I returned to South Africa to join The Star newspaper in Johannesburg and that’s when I bought a Toyota van because my wife Gayle and I used to go on camping trips with Gayle’s two children, Mandy and Sally from her previous marriage, and this was an ideal vehicle for such outings.
On a visit to Cape Town to see my mother I was driving down a slight slope in one of the suburbs when a drunk African ran across the road right in front of me without any warning. In the collision my entire windscreen disintegrated into hundreds of tiny, sharp bits of glass one of which got me in the right eye. Fortunately I never hit anything else as I brought the vehicle to a stop
without being able to see much of what I was doing.
Our family doctor was wonderful. He organised for me to see an eye specialist who put 10 stitches in my eyeball very soon after the accident which had a lot to do with the success of the operation. It was so well done that more than 70 years later I can still see out of that eye without glasses. But I could so easily have lost not only an eye but my life if I had crashed into another vehicle or one of the many buildings in the area. I was never able to find out what happened to that unfortunate pedestrian. My seventh life had saved me.
I nearly forgot this narrow escape.. Having left journalism where I was a prize winning investigative journalist and columnist on the Sunday Times in Johannesburg I had started a new career as a self employed Private Eye. This was one of my first jobs without the backing of a large newspaper behind me.
I had arranged to meet a woman in Springs who was going to help with my inquiries.
Dusk was just settling in when I parked my car on the grass verge opposite a house where we were supposed to meet. Without any warning a man whipped open my driver’s side door and said angrily “We’ve been waiting for you.” He then starting hitting me on the head with a spanner he had taken out of the back of his trousers.
As I felt about to pass out I grabbed his hand with the spanner in it and he let it go when I bit him. From then onwards all he was interested in was getting his spanner back. As I had no fight left in me I gave it to him and he stuck back into his trousers and walked off.
I managed to drive round the block into an open gate and the people there called an ambulance. I was taken to a hospital in Springs and they contacted my wife Gayle. She arrived while I was having my face stitched up and as she passed a couple of hospital orderlies she heard one of them say to the other one: “Do you think he’ll live man?” I ended up with two black eyes and a wide, black V of dead blood under my skin down the front of my chest. After a couple of weeks I had fully recovered. I had to use my eighth life this time.
I suppose I can’t complain if I have used nearly all my lives in getting to the age of 92. My ninth life went about a year ago when I was walking past a line of parked cars in the Harbour Bay Mall car park in Cape Town. Suddenly a woman backed her car out as if she was at the start of a race. I fell backwards and some how managed to avoid being run over as she straightened up her car and roared across the car park into a small yard where she crashed head on into a wall. The woman Renee Hobbis, who was aged about 60 claimed afterwards that she had a “bad sugar problem.” She was the only occupant of the car and was not injured in the accident. The pictures below show my only visible injury and what happened to Renee’s car when she crashed into a wall.
I spent the next half hour or so lying in the car park being attended to by paramedics with Hailey, a little shop assistant from the nearby Pick n Pay supermarket holding my hand. The paramedics wanted to take me to hospital, but after about half an hour I felt well enough to drive to my home about 15 kilometers away. I had a delayed action sore leg, some other aches and pains as well as a graze on the top of my head which took ages to heal.
A lot depends on the kind of life you lead as to whether or not you use as many as nine lives before you go. I put mine on the line far too often and if I hadn’t been like a cat I would have certainly gone long ago.
Do you think, now that I have no lives left, I will reach 100 or perhaps more? I certainly don’t want to test my luck unduly, so I’ve given up the idea of paddling alone down the Amazon, the largest river in the world.
