Just the other day, I realised with something of a shock that I’ve made my living by writing in one form or another for more than half a century. For the past 56 years, to be precise. Were I to write not another word, I’d still be living off the proceeds in the form of a Reuters pension.
I’ve been skint at times. There have been huge, unpredictable swings of fortune, but it’s been enormous fun, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. What I’ve valued most has been the independence, the minimal supervision, and the sheer exhilaration of being variously a lone reporter, correspondent, spy and novelist.
Somebody asked me how I started.
The answer: aged nine at a Cape Town boarding school, in a dormitory converted from a stable and containing bunk beds and eight boys, one of our number lying on the floor in the dark, pretending to be a corpse, another with a torch for the lighting effects and the rest of us making up a murder mystery.
I started writing plays, eventually full-scale, three-act affairs. I cringe at the thought of what they must have been like. I also made up stories, sagas broken up into episodes, and regaled my friends with them during the boring sporting events we were obliged to watch.
They were sometimes based on what little I knew of resistance heroes I’d read about in the school library, such as William Wallace, Hereward the Wake, Shaka kaSenzangakhona (Shaka Zulu) and Welsh privateer Henry Morgan.
I was very political, even then. I was immensely (and unjustifiably) proud of my UK birth and heritage, while I felt ashamed, disgusted and embarrassed by the daily humiliations and privations inflicted on others by apartheid. I remember remarking to my best pal at the time as we stood outside his parents’ posh mansion in the exclusive suburb of Bishops Court, admiring a magnificent view of Table Mountain, that all we had to do to succeed was stand still and keeping breathing. Our white skins and the old school tie would suffice to shower us both with all the privileges denied to the vast majority.
We wouldn’t have to lift a finger. It wouldn’t matter if we were stupid, lazy or incompetent. We couldn’t fail.
My plays championed the virtues of the ‘liberal’ British Empire and castigated the evils of the nationalist Afrikaners. It seems to me that when you’re young, everything is black and white, no pun intended. Judgement is easy with little knowledge and even less understanding. If only I’d read more of how the British made peace with their defeated Boer foes by selling out the political future of the vast majority of South Africans.
On being called up for compulsory military service at the age off 18, my unit’s instructor had this to say by way of introduction in his thick Afrikaans accent. ‘You know why you blokes are here? You’re here to learn to shoot the fokking kaffir, the fokking Jew and the fokking rooinek (Briton).’
At first I worked for an financial investment firm as a trainee manager, recruited on the basis - yes, right - of my white skin and old school tie. At night I took part in a student sit-in at the University of Cape Town in protest at the dismissal of a black lecturer. The white nationalist apartheid regime had warned the university that the annual grant would be cancelled if the administrators failed to rescind the appointment.
I wrote short stories, had a few published, won a prize or two.
The writing started in earnest when I joined the Argus newspaper group as a trainee reporter aged 19. I was paid 90 rands a month, about 45 UK pounds back then. I remember my first newspaper story. The news editor told me to take myself down to the Newlands cricket ground, and take a good look at the test pitch (I think England was going to play South Africa - this being just before the sports boycott took hold).
I stood sweating under the African sun and stared blankly at the pitch. I detested cricket and knew next to nothing about it. I sensed that my career as a newsman was about to end before it had properly begun.
Only then did I notice an old man on the far side of the grounds. White haired and bent with age, he was fiddling with something and, with nothing better to do, I strolled over to him, introduced myself, and asked him what he thought about the pitch.
For the next 15 minutes or so he told me everything there was to know. He was the head groundsman and had been such for almost as long as I’ve written for a living.
My first news item appeared across four columns as the front page ‘basement’ or ‘anchor’ of the four afternoon and evening editions of the Cape Argus.
That was the start.
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