IF PEOPLE HAVE NINE LIVES LIKE CATS, HOW MANY HAVE YOU USED? HERE ARE MINE.

 Dear Cat Lovers,

            I used the first of my nine lives as a teenager when I was living in Cape Town.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 TB hospital at Nouport 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 only just recovered from TB when I embarked on the greatest trip of my life – crisscrossing Africa hitch-hiking alone from Cape Town to Tunis. I had only just left South Africa when I got a lift with a guy in a little old M.G. There can’t be many cars so unsuitable for river crossings because they are so low. He and his friend were both driving more or less identical vehicles and I was in the front one when we came to this river in Rhodesia 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 two of us crossed it in this MG. Miraculously we made it and 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 hundreds of 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            

             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 third life came to the rescue and I floated free once more.

            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 came to grief 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 fourth 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 our two children, Simon and Samantha 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 came out to the accident scene and then organised for me to see an eye specialist who put 10 stitches in my right eyeball. It was so well done that some 50 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 too find out what happened to that unfortunate person.

            On another occasion shortly after I had started a new career as a self employed private eye I was waiting to meet a woman who had agreed to help me. I was in my car parked on the grass verge in a road in Germiston just as it was getting dark when a man pulled open my driver's side door and said: "We've been waiting for you" and at the same time he began hitting me on the head with a spanner he had taken out of the back of his trousers. After the first couple of blows my head was a sea of blood. I managed to bite his hand and get the spanner off him, but by then I was feeling as though I was about to pass out. All he was interested in was getting his spanner back so I felt I no alternative other than to hand it to him. As suddenly as he had arrived he stuck it in the back of his trousers and walked off.

               I managed to drive round the block into the driveway of house where the owner called an ambulance and I was taken to the local hospital. There I was in the operating theater having my face stitched up when my wife arrived. She told me afterwards that when she passed two of the hospital's orderlies the one said to the other, "Do you think he'll live man."     

              I suppose you can’t expect to reach the age of 91 without losing one or two lives, but it all depends on what kind of life you lead. 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 I’ve got enough lives left to reach 100 or MORE?

Regards, Jon meow,meow,purr,purr.