Driving back from Kruger Park we were listening to Jessie’s music. She plays a mixed bag including some sixties n seventies favourites of mine. She also plays some Country & Western which is not my best, but Beer Never Broke My Heart is a hoot and always gives us a laugh. Long Leg, High School, Beer Never Broke My Heart I would belt out until I learned it was actually Long neck, ice cold beer never broke my heart!
Then she played a new one and my ears pricked up at the first line:
Six beers, five guys - (A Long Way - by Luke Combs)
Hey Jess, I said, That Reminds Me Of My (slightly misspent) Youth!
Pssst, I don’t really think our youth was misspent. Stephen Fry nails it when he says, Education is the sum of what students teach each other between lectures and seminars. Certainly I got my best education in high school outside the classroom from Steph, Pierre, Larry, Tuffy, Fluffy, Lloyd, Gabba and others; and often after the sun had gone down.
~~oo0oo~~
Jess took the feature pic of the sunset in front of my nose as we drove south through the vrystaat. Visible is the duct tape holding up the window, necessary as the windy-windy mechanism had gone phut. Took a long while, but I eventually found a replacement window mechanism – not easy when its a seventeen yr-old model. Seems they don’t keep all car parts for that long, I dunno why.
All I know is I remembered enough of my matric Afrikaans to know my feelings of amazement and denial were one word, ending in a question mark: liewedondersebliksemhoekanditwaarwees?
But it was waar and there we were, thirteen ou toppies laughing at each other. If you matriculated in 1972 and it’s 2022, true’s bob it’s been Ff – Fff – a NUMBER of years, no good denying it.
We were hosted by classmate Willem Lombard on his farm Waaidam where he has built an amazing spread.
~~oo0oo~~
long word – how the hell did we get so old so quickly?
waar – true, surprisingly
ou toppies – old codgers
Alternative name for 50th matric reunion? Matric Farewell
Larry visited from Ohio back in 1996. Pierre was in Harrismith; I was in Durban; Steph and Tuffy were living in Cape Town, so they won – we arranged to meet up as the Old Fab Five musketeers down in Kaapstad.
Larry Wingert had been Harrismith’s Rotary exchange student back in 1969 and had returned to South Africa twice before – once in 1976, down through Africa from Greece, mostly overland, all the way to Cape Town; and once in 1985, when he and I had done an overland trip from Maun in Botswana to Vic Falls in Zimbabwe.
Trish and I took him to Mkhuze game reserve:
– in Mkhuze –
and down to Cape Town:
– the Fab Five plus Rope – Pierre, Rope, Koos, Steph, Tuffy, Larry –
Steph took us to his Kommetjie beach house
This year 2020 Steph’s brother JP sent me pics of the magic pub in the beach house
– JP in Steph’s well-stocked pub –
and Tuffy entertained us royally at his and Lulu’s lovely home in Langebaan:
– Larry Lulu me and Tuffy –
~~~oo0oo~~~
Asked what the Fab Five was, I had to think about it. We were a gentlemanly triple-AA gang Educational Club who would meet clandestinely after dark and do creative things to broaden our minds.
The one AA was for automobiles, which we would borrow under an intricate arrangement where the actual owners were not part of the bargaining process; we would then use these automobiles to go places;
The other AA was for alcohol, which we would procure under an intricate arrangement of dispatching a third party who could legally buy the stuff, to a bottle store other than my parents’ bottle store; this we would then imbibe for the purpose of stiffening our resolve. And for laughter and the third AA:
Action! Adventure! Anything but boredom.
– the SAAB re-enactment didn’t happen – we used Tuffy’s bakkie instead – Fab Five plus Frik – Steph Frik Pierre Tuffy me Larry –
One of the founding reasons for launching the august club was we suddenly had a Yank in our midst and we were really afraid he’d go back to the metropolis of Cobleskill, upstate New York and say there was nothing to do in Harrismith. The thought mortified us. We had to DO something!
~~~oo0oo~~~
We were reminded how offended we were late one night on one of our adventures – this one not motorised – we were prowling the empty streets at night te voet – on foot.
And we spotted a policeman driving around drunk! Can you believe it!? That was OUR forte! What was HE doing driving around drunk like us!? So we indignantly phoned the copshop from a tickey box, reported him to the dame on laatnag diens and walked away feeling smug. Next thing we heard a squealing of tyres and the roaring of a Ford F150 straight six. It was him! She had obviously radio’d him and told him! Maybe they were an item!?
We started running as the cop van roared closer. It was the only thing making a noise in the whole dorp at three in the morning so we could easily hear where he was. We sprinted past the Kleinspanskool and as he came careening around the corner we dived under the raised foundations of Laboria – Alet de Witt’s big block of flats. We crawled through and out the other side, at Steph’s house. Steph & Larry went home as did Tuff, a block or two away. Pierre and I had a way to go yet, so we set off along Stuart Street – we could hear the fuzz in the grey Ford F150 with the straight six and the tralies over the windows roaring around in Warden Street. He never stood a chance of catching us. We were fleet of foot and we could u-turn within one metre!
~~~oo0oo~~~
te voet – on foot; saving fuel for the environment
** this blog is mainly after I got married in 1988; my other blog vrystaatconfessions.com is essentially pre-marriage; sometimes things don’t fit neatly into one or the other – they overlap; so occasionally I copy and paste **
Tuffy has hit the bright lights. School friend and class mate Mariette van Wyk edits a lovely magazine Atlantic Gull down in the Dryest Fairest Cape.
She got the fascinating life story (well actually, snippets of it!) of Irené John Joubert out of him recently.
Fascinating thing is, Tuffy DID this stuff, Chuck Norris acts it out. Here’s an eyewitness account of his famous plummet from a helicopter.
Here he is in those far-off days when you could see his chin and not his forehead:
Pierre duP and Tuffy
Tuffy’s older brother Etienne remembers him getting his nickname like this: In the very English environment of the Methodist church some soutie made the mistake of calling the French masculine name Irené the English feminine name ‘Irene’ in Sunday school and promptly got dondered right then and there by said Irené. And hence the nickname Tuffy was born.
I see Tuffy says he has no trouble in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Congo as “with my honest face, people just love me”. What I want to know is: How do they see his face?
Well, now that his cover is bust, his anonymity lost, learn more about Tuffy being a domkrag and then tackling an unsuspecting ox here
