Robert Kirby remembers his childhood and the part three men society politely termed ‘mentally deficient’ played in it
My first clear memories of the Durban where I was born and grew up were of the war years, the early Forties. A domestic world of absent fathers and uncles, mothers’ heads bent to static-filled wartime radio broadcasts from the BBC, white bread outlawed, hoarded eggs painted with a lacquer to keep them from going bad, strange tin blackout tubes fitted to car headlamps.
My own father had not “gone up north” to fight. Although he volunteered on several occasions, he was always turned down on medical grounds. There was something lurking in his chest and which was to kill him a few years later. He was what was known in those days as a commercial traveller and my two sisters and I saw less of him than we might have.
With all the fragment images of childhood, I realise now that my young life was graced by the inestimable peace which I saw – but did not recognise until much later in life – in three figures: Ralph Whittle, Georgie Dunn and, for some of his time, Marcus B. All three were what was politely termed “mentally deficient”. My boyhood was blessed by idiots.
We lived opposite Durban’s Berea Park, where Ralph Whittle was king and where many small boys played. A gaunt man in his forties, his brain bashed into simplicity by a car accident when he was a child, Ralph Whittle taught us how to play cricket and touch-rugby. He launched our kites, he ran messages for us. On behalf of one or two of the older boys he bought what were then illicit cigarettes. In all these activities he was an infinite enthusiast.
The happiest part of Ralph’s day began at three in the afternoon when after school we all poured into the park. There he waited with bat and tennis-ball, wickets planted at a corner of the vast playing field. His outfit never changed: khaki-drill shorts and shirt, long green socks and sandals. His hair shaved to well above his ears, his face deeply tanned. While he waited for us there were frequent inspections of his stainless steel watch.
He bowled with his tennis ball and in his spinning deliveries was the only guile I ever saw in him. We flayed at the ball, rushed our runs and Ralph Whittle stood in the sun and shouted advice. In the blue of his gaze giants of happiness ran.
He was considered by parents to be someone safe for the children. When he wasn’t organising our afternoons, he spent much time attending to his bicycle, an acquisition permitted at this fairly late stage because it was felt he had matured – in the opinion of a sister who cared for him – to a stage where he could be safe with that too. It was an ordinary high-handlebar bicycle, with fat balloon tyres, possibly the best cared-for bicycle in the world. It received meticulous greasing and polishing every day. Mounted on it, Ralph Whittle would spend his mornings touring the homes of the boys, calling in for tea and a conversation in which he was always the dominant contributor. Mothers at their irons grew used to having Ralph drop by in the long mornings. Perched on the edge of a chair with his cup of tea, he would hold forth at rattling pace on local sports news. He knew the name of every member of every school rugby and cricket team. He knew the provincial and Springbok sides, and their fortunes, by heart. And on every team and its members he had opinions which were never critical.
The mothers listened. It would go on for 20 minutes or so, like a radio serial. Then, at some hidden command, Ralph would stop his recital, put down the tea-cup and with scarcely a goodbye, pedal off to the next mother.
He was, if not a central influence, a very strong one in the lives of hundreds of Durban boys. Many years later when I was presenting the old English Service early morning radio programme, I heard of Ralph Whittle’s death. In Essenwood Road, alongside his green suzerainty, Berea Park, he was knocked off his shiny bicycle by a car. He must have been in his sixties by then. On a Saturday morning I broadcast a short tribute to him, in which I hoped that he had found a heaven filled with small boys playing cricket with a tennis ball. I received a few dozen letters from his previous charges.
Georgie Dunn had learned to float in another way. It was a fall from an avocado-pear tree that shifted Georgie into durable harmony. The backyard of his home abutted on ours, the only barrier a battered corrugated-iron fence enfiladed on each side by a row of banana trees. A convenient loose flap of the fence allowed easy passage from yard to yard.
I cannot remember ever hearing Georgie Dunn say anything. Yet he was so often there, his pale impassive face a hovering presence at the games I played with Sabela, my boyhood “umfaan”. In those days young white children had older black playmates, charged with keeping an eye on things.
As Georgie grew older he became immobile, lost even his need to wander to our side of the fence. The lasting image I have is of him sitting placid in a deck-chair, 3m from a privet hedge, in the middle of a humid, highly polished purple verandah, his mind in poised respite as he gazed with depthless eyes. His mother next to him on a wooden chair, every two minutes or so with a stark white linen handkerchief gently wiping the spittle from the corner of his mouth. Around them the smell of a giant eucalyptus tree which still splits the pavement in Overport Drive.
No physical trauma for Marcus B. He went harshly mad all on his own. His gentle parents were to try to appease both Marcus’s loss and their own with the giving of gifts which he could not understand the purpose of. Like the fine electric Hawaiian guitar on which all the neighbourhood boys liked to play. Perhaps that was the subtler reason behind the guitar and the electric trains and the lusty record player. They attracted the company, however acquisitive, that Marcus would not have had.
Soon after these times, Marcus became what was what my mother, in reporting to the family, termed “unmanageable”. He was moved to take up life in a Pietermaritzburg asylum. There, with the upsurging of latent violent behaviour, he eventually underwent prefrontal lobotomy – I believe among the first to undergo such surgery in South Africa.
Later Marcus again came into my life when, as a boarder at a Kimberley school, I would sneak off on Saturday afternoons to an abandoned military airfield in Beaconsfield. Here were a couple of rows of stripped-down wartime light bombers, metal carcasses where I again met Marcus.
After his brain surgery Marcus had again become “manageable”. He was living in a home for the mentally frail, allowed to wander on his own – on the field – not the street-side. I met him on a hot afternoon, among the bombers. His hair was incredibly fine, almost white, his gaze calm. In the imaginary bombing sorties we undertook in the old aircraft wrecks, Marcus was fool to my intrepid wartime pilot. He became my willing navigator, flight engineer, bomb-aimer. While I shoved and yanked at long-frozen control yokes and throttle levers he grimaced in concentration, mumbled my bellowed commands back at me. “Bombs away. Now, Johnson, let’s try to get this sick crate back to England.”
After I left Kimberley I never again saw Marcus, later to learn that the horror had revisited him and he had again had to be confined and restrained. I do not know if he has yet died.
I wonder why I still so often remember those three. As well I remember those Sunday mornings where on the pavement along Berea Park small Indian boys sold bright bamboo and tissue-paper kites for sixpence, kites so light and fragile you could fly them on cotton. What has kept that inscription on my memory so safely drawn? Why do I still so clearly see Georgie Dunn jerk in his deckchair and give a sudden dribbly laugh; Marcus standing among the corroding aircraft; Ralph Whittle charging up and down the touchline at the annual Durban High School/ Glenwood match?
There is no doubt they were fascinating, the way human oddities always are. But to my coevals and me they were not freaks, merely adjoining childhoods. Luckier perhaps in that theirs were complete – yet even better, inviolate.
“Mortal, guilty, but for me The entirely beautiful” – WH Auden