Please God, which side is up?

William Harris

Description

"Please God, Which Side is Up?" is the memoir of an ordinary family man, who relates here snatches of his life from his invalid childhood in Scotland to training as a commando in the Royal Marines, to working as a journalist in Africa in the unsophisticated '50s and '60s; and latterly as a public relations specialist in South Africa - so that his grandchildren may know something about him and the life he has lived. It has not been an ordinary life... The author relates with sincerity - and sometimes disarming candour - his experiences and adventures as a boy dancing with the "ghosties" on Culloden Moor; serving with the elite 3 Commando Brigade in Malta; covering the chaotic, exciting and often comic events in Kenya during the Mau Mau Rebellion - or in Ian Smith's collapsing Rhodesia; and promoting the historic flight of a highly flammable hydrogen balloon over the mighty Drakensberg mountains in South Africa. This is a warm and whimsical story that will transport you to the countries and (frequently weird) situations that he encountered in his rich and interesting life. These memoirs reflect his inquisitive, often provocative, stance on life - its beauty and its people, as well as the idiocy of some of our world leaders and governments - all of it begging the rhetorical question: "Please God, which side is up?"

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Memoir

Informations

• Publié par: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Date de parution: 29 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780463652589
• Langue: English

Extrait

Please God, which side is up?
William Harris
Austin Macauley Publishers
2014-04-29
Please God, which side is up? About the Author Dedication Copyright Information © Chapter One Chapter Two Snowy the Invalid Chapter Three The “Ghosties” on the Moor Chapter Four A Fond Farewell Chapter Five Class Confrontation Chapter Six A One-armed Hero Chapter Seven A Dangerous Anthem Chapter Eight A Call to Duty – and Freedom Chapter Nine The Oyster Begins to Open Chapter Ten The “Royals” at Last Chapter Eleven Commando Chapter Twelve That First Five-Miler Chapter Thirteen Mistakes Chapter Fourteen Mischief Chapter Fifteen Marriage and Africa! Chapter Sixteen The “Tabled” Cat Chapter Seventeen Refugees and a Flying Bomb Chapter Eighteen Use the Tradesmen’s Entrance! Chapter Nineteen Blood under the Candelabra Tree Chapter Twenty Naivety and Reality Chapter Twenty-One Africanised – What Happened to Merit? Chapter Twenty-Two A Depressing Homeward Flight Chapter Twenty-Three My Moment of Truth Chapter Twenty- Four Balloon Over Africa The Voice
About the Author
Born and bred in Scotland, William Harris is a retired journalist who lives in Johannesburg, South Africa with his second wife of more than 40 years. These memoirs were inspired by friends and family urging him to ‘write down’ the experiences he sometimes recounted about his life as a child living in Scotland and later as a member of the elite 3 Commando Brigade, Royal Marines. The latter half of the book is devoted to his exciting, often frightening, experiences as a journalist in Kenya, the Belgian Congo, Rhodesia and South Africa.
PLEASE GOD, WHICH SIDE IS UP?
Dedication
For Beth who gave me her life and made sense of mine – and for my children and my grandchildren, many of whom don’t know me. Too many grandfathers complain that the family isn’t interested in their stories but, in my case, the fault is mine – I wasn’t there.
Copyright Information ©
William Harris(2014)
The right of William Harris to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781849638395 (Paperback)
ISBN 9780463652589 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2014)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd.
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LB
Printed and bound in Great Britain
Chapter One
You hoped for nothing
before you were born
so why hope for so much
when you’re dying?
Look at what you got
when you hoped for nothing
This is what I got …
“Please God, which Side is Up?” is obviously a stupid question and a ridiculous title for a book – or is it? I mean, you can answer it, can’t you? If you were to shoot a rocket from the North Pole and then shoot another one at the South Pole which one would be going “UP”?
A lot of life is just as inexplicable when you go back through the foggy forests of your memory. You can see the whole wood but the individual tree is difficult to remember – unless you marked it in some way. Are the scars on the tree or do you carry them on yourself?
My first memory is of sharing my worms with my buddy, a chap called Alex Seath. We were both about four years old at the time. I had dug up three beauties from the little midden at the back of our garden and I carefully sliced each of them in two with my mother’s butter knife.
I solemnly gave Alex half of each one and then my dad suddenly interrupted us by insisting:
‘Worms are for fishing.’
It was too late, Alex had already eaten his. He said they weren’t very nice. Apart from not showing much promise as a gourmet I’ll take any bets that Alex still doesn’t know which way is up any more than I do. But that grand enigma also presupposes – for me at least – the existence of God or “The Force” as Star Wars puts it so beautifully, and for that I am eternally grateful!
Both of my mythical rockets are supposedly going UP, although in opposite directions, and they will obviously try to avoid colliding with the asteroids, satellites and all the other junk that’s floating around up there – but in order to get where?
At the last count, there are close to nine billion human beings as directionless as the rockets. We have no idea what we have to do to get to what objective – and there’s an enormous amount of junk, mostly human, that we have to avoid. But it’s still worth debating over a glass of wine or ten – while we enjoy life and share as much love as possible on this amazingly beautiful planet that somebody (or something) created …
*****
Of Belts and Bootnecks
The rain was pelting down, drumming on the vaulted roof of Edinburgh’s Waverley railway station arcing high above as he stood silently on the platform regarding the empty train carriages lined up in front of him.
The rain was also sliding in cold rivulets down his neck from the catchment area of his curly hair but he was not really aware of the discomfort. It was a truly driech and gloomy day but he was oblivious. He was too full of anticipation. He was about to head off into England, a foreign country, and join the Royal Marines, the elite British corps of crack troops that also incorporated the Commando Brigade, the men of the Green Beret. He wanted one of those berets.
His name was Billy and he was on the brink of a new life that promised real excitement and the challenge of a manhood he had previously doubted he would ever achieve.
He was wearing a cream coloured raincoat – darkly cream coloured because it was certainly no raincoat; it was sodden, having endured a full two minutes of a typically Scottish downpour for the last hundred yards of his ungainly dash to the station, laden with a suitcase bulging from the efforts of an overly concerned mother.
His mother might well have been over enthusiastic in the packing but the raincoat was his own fault. He recalled the words of the salesman at Burton's tailors two years earlier:
‘Well now laddie, it’s no exactly what you might call rain proof , if ye ken what I mean. More like resistant like.’ A gentle pause: ‘But it’s verra smart and a bit like the one Humphrey Bogart wore in yon fillum where he was a detective.’
A highly effective sales pitch to a sixteen-year-old cadet journalist with a desperate need to improve his self image. The years between eleven and sixteen had been spent as an invalid, deprived of the exuberance and physical joy of developing youth. He had been totally demoralized which had created a deep hunger to at least appear normal; perhaps even give the impression of the hard-bitten, cynical, investigative journalist; the look would be enough he had thought at the time. Not that the military-style “trench” coat really did it for him but he had thought it did and that was a much needed comfort.
Truly it was more mirage than image, as he was wont to reluctantly concede in the privacy of his bedroom and the unforgiving reality of the night.
But on this wet and miserable Edinburgh day the world was beautiful, including the rain and his sopping military-style raincoat. Seven years earlier the world had not been beautiful, it had been terrifying …
*****
The sun was shining brightly outside the classroom but none of the thirty children noticed it. The classroom was silent, waiting. All of the eleven-year-olds were sitting very still at their worn old desks; nobody moving, nobody making any noise except for Hamish at the back of the room softly scuffing his dusty shoes.
There was no feeling of the child in this room; no giggling, no mocking, no squealing, no bright eyes, no child. It was uncanny in its unnatural stillness, a tableaux of nervous expectation.
Nobody was looking at anyone else, or anywhere else, except at Miss Mabel Marshall whose eyes were slowly roving across the faces of the children in front of her. She also seemed to be waiting; waiting for the right moment to break the tension.
It was close to the end of the class. The previous night’s homework sat neatly piled at her left hand.
Slowly and with great deliberation, Miss Marshall opened the right hand drawer of her desk and drew out the rolled up tawse, the heavy leather belt split at the end into two thick thongs roughly twelve centimetres in length. She placed it carefully on the desk.
Margaret Leach in the front row started to weep silently, two tears spilling slowly down her cheeks. Miss Marshall ignored her and read out three names.
‘Archie Brewer, Douglas Montgomery and Billy Harris come forward for punishment,’ she said in her high, thin voice. ’Your homework was sloppy, dirty and carelessly done … despite my warnings. I have told you many, many times. If you don’t listen, you must learn – the hard way.’
Archie and Doug struggled out of the ungainly, joined seat and desk contraptions that enclosed them and moved reluctantly up to the front of the class.
Billy watched them with blank eyes. His legs were rubbery and he wondered vaguely if he could stand.
‘Billy,’ Miss Marshall said sharply. ‘Come forward, now!’
He took a short, nervous gasp of breath and levered himself up with his hands, immediately conscious of the tenderness in both his hands and his wrists from the two strokes of the tawse he had taken on each just the other day, wasn’t it on Tuesday? Today was Thursday.
And it had been going on for weeks, at least twice a week, for weeks and weeks. He could not remember how many.
Archie and Doug, standing to his left, each took one stroke on either hand, doubled up in pain and crossed