When dad
was faced with one of my crises situations throughout my life he
would sagely say in his vaguely odd familiar Pommy minutely infused South African accent, 'That “alles sal reg kom”'.
And the amazing thing is that despite what you were facing, it does somehow
always come right, even although you might not think so at the time.
My life
started in 1959 where I was born to Claude William Nichols and Irene Mary
Nichols in the Mary Mount Nursing home in Johannesburg, Transvaal, South Africa. I was
given the name, Rodney Stuart Nichols, the fourth ‘R’ in a row of sons spread
over sixteen years. The nursing home was run by none other than nuns and I was
apparently the only baby at that time that didn't pick up yellow jaundice
whilst there. Maybe that’s when it all started. A lifetime of things somehow
working out.
My family
and I grew up for the most part in the South African city of Germiston which is
an industrial mining city in the old Transvaal, about eight miles as the crow
flies from the city of gold, Johannesburg. I was the youngest of four brothers,
who like me all went to the local schools and where we all experienced growing
up in the stench and filth of the Driehoek to Wadeville Chemical factories.
In the
early stages of my life, we used to live in the suburb of Driehoek, where the
premium soccer team of the day, Germiston Callies, had their home ground. Our
house was in my moms name road, Irene road, a rented house that I think used to be an old hospital of
sorts in the early mining days of Simmer & Jack Gold mining, or maybe a field hospital during the Anglo Boer War. The house was white and green, single storied and had a typical green tin roof that rattled and dripped in the hi-veld rains and had a mosquito meshed in verandah or ‘stoep’ as the locals would call it
surrounding the entire two sides of the house. My oldest brother, Robert used
to ride a 350cc BSA motorbike in those days, and had a set of drums set up down
his side of the house, where he used to practice drumming to his favourite bands like, The Shadows, Cliff Richard and the early Beatles seven
singles of the day. He didn’t have much to do with me, and used to call Roger
my brother of three years older than me and myself 'the brats', and wouldn’t have
anything to do with us if he could help it.
I think that Robert used to go to Eden College for his Matric in those
days as he wasn’t cutting it at Germiston Boys High were he had done most of
his high school years. Soon after leaving high school Robert started to race
bikes at Kyalami, which was the main racing track in South Africa at the time.
I remember my dad telling me once that Robert came sixth in one of the races
against the Bosshof ? brothers who were the biking greats at the time. Robert had
three really strange friends at the time, called Timothy McGettighan, Gary Van
Der Merwe and George Taylor. The Taylor bloke was alright from what I can
remember but the other two were major dick-heads, who I suppose by today’s
standards would be called nerds or geeks, which thinking about it, was pretty much what
Robert looked like most of the time even although he wore leathers and raced
bikes for a short period of his youth. Robert was not very tall, had straight
black hair and was pretty skinny in those days which is something he used to be
really pissed off about, and I can remember him drinking a chocolate mixture
that the body builders like Charles Atlas used to drink for weight gain. I remember how he was
always in a lousy mood around me and didn’t really give me any notice whatsoever,
treating me pretty much like turd stuck to his shoe. He basically didn’t like
the sight or sound of me and used to make it perfectly clear by telling me to
piss off whenever I came into earshot.
In those
days I had to go to a government run nursery school while mom was at work all
day. Mom was a great sales lady, who always worked at Chemists or Furniture Stores in Johannesburg or Germiston town
itself. She always worked as far back as I can remember and only went
to school herself until about twelve or so, spending part of her early life in
a London Orphanage, where she was dared to fetch postage stamps from the
trunks kept in the dungeons in the dead of night. The journey was steeped in terror of the nuns, that your candle would go out, that you would meet the convent ghosts or that you would get lost. Somehow Mom was always able to get
and keep excellent jobs (considering her youth, minimal education and training) and would work her way up her
little career ladders wherever she was.
Mom used to make Robert come and pick me up from the Germiston Crèche up
by the Germiston Railway station, something he must have really hated,
but something I quite enjoyed. I remember at about four thirty or five in
the afternoons, Robert used to roar up to the gates on the BSA, where I would
be waiting alone as all the other kids and my best friend Karl Faber had by
then already been picked up. Me with my blonde curly hair standing there
anxiously in the fading cold winter light waiting in my little blue plastic anorak and red Wellington
boots. Funny how my memories of that gloomy predominantly Afrikaans spoken
crèche are always in winter somehow. I think the only good thing I got from my
two year stay there was my mate, Karl, teaching me to tie my shoelaces on top
of a brightly painted disused water pipe that served as part of the crèche’s
jungle gym. How I used to hate going there and having forced nap times when, as
all I wanted was to hang out and play marbles with my friends, instead of lying
stiffly silent on my thin blue, red or green plastic coated mat on the hard cold green
painted floor.
When Robert
used to pick me up, he would tie an open faced black AGV helmet on me and hoist me up onto the tank in front of him, where together we would
roar off down the roads, with Roberts arms either side of me, gripping the
handlebars of his BSA through the tunnel on the way home which always gave your
belly a turn, like the roller coaster rides that would come once a year to
Germiston Lake, taking us back to the dark house in the road that was mom’s
namesake. He would always enter the
property up the drive way next to the house where passing under the rows of gum
trees he would park the silver, red and yellow bike at the top of the drive in
front of the green wooden doors of the single garage, where I would climb off
of the bike’s tank wiping my wind streamed eyes and enter the house via the barn-like back kitchen door, first opening the swing fly screen that screeched loudly
whenever touched followed by the creaking solid green painted back door. Ill
kept gum trees used to surround the entire verandah side of the house, looming
over the tin roof which made the inside of the house very dark and gloomy, and
made the ground underfoot silent and soft with seasons of dead fallen pine
needles.
Inside the
house, there was a central narrow passageway that ran the length of the house
from the front door all the way to the kitchen at the end. The passage was lit
by two single naked light bulbs at either end, which needed to be on even
during the days, causing shadows to pass eerily along as you made your way down
the passage, passing the darkened rooms on either side. Rooms led off from both
sides of the passage with most of the bedrooms leading off to the left. As you
came in the front door you would pass Roberts room which was down the front of
the house and my mom and dad’s room next to his, followed by Richards’s
bedroom, a Dining Room and finally the kitchen and scullery. The other side had
a massive lounge, sparsely furnished, another sitting room with even less
furniture, an empty dining room, then my Gran West’s smoke filled bedroom and
finally Rogers and my shared bedroom right down at the end. Thinking about it,
we were probably put there to be away from the noise of Roberts drumming and
the late night adult sounds coming from the lounge and bedrooms. I remember at
the time wondering why we had been put so out of the way down there. All the
floors were uncarpeted, although Mom had put loose carpets and off-cuts in most
of the rooms, and the floors were made of aged Oregon pine which over the years had
darkened and blackened giving the house a further aura of gloom and dullness, fighting
for life against the light green textured walls and faded floral wall papers in
most of the rooms. Anybody walking down the passage could be heard immediately
as the floorboards would creak and moan, resonating with each and every
footfall as they made their way either up or down the long passage.
The house
it turned out after we had left had many strange stories about it, which only
once we had left and moved on, came out around the warmth of the fireplace years
later at my dads first owned home in Vimy Ridge in Delville which was a more
up market suburb closer to both Germiston South and Germiston High schools. One
of the strangest was when Roger would complain to mom, that she wasn’t to hold
his hand late at night as she was making him cold. Mom of course told Roger she
wouldn’t do so in future, knowing full well that she hadn't been holding his hand at night. She had to conduct some form of motherly exorcism to stop it
from happening. Many years later she told us of coming into our room late one
night to observe Roger and climbed into my bed to keep a vigil into the night.
Apparently late into the night she felt a coldness enter the room and realised that something other than herself and her two baby boys was in the room
with her. Mom bravened from her orphanaged years of collecting stamps stood up and spoke into
the coldness, asking in her prim English manner whoever it was to please stop
holding the children’s hands as they were becoming frightened, going on to say
that she knew the person meant no harm but that the children weren’t to be
disturbed any further. From that night on, Roger never complained about the
cold hands again and it seemed that mom had resolved the problem. Mom had
another experience there that only came out much later as well. She told us of
the time that whilst she was getting undressed in her room one night, somebody
playfully slapped her buttock, upon which she spun around thinking it was dad
having some fun with her only to realise that he wasn’t in the room with her.
Dad also reported that he had seen a woman in a white uniform moving into
Rogers and my bedroom late one night and on investigation found that nobody was
there, and the scariest story of all came from Gran, who said that one night
she was lying in bed, and heard somebody walk across her bedroom towards her
and sit on the end of the bed where she could clearly see the depression of someone sitting at the foot of her bed and
hear the faint sound of breathing. She told us that this had happened on several
occasions but that she never mentioned it whilst living at Irene Road for fear
of upsetting the rest of us with her experiences.
It was
around about this time of my life that my dad decided to call it quits after
having spent about five years in good old SA, and move back to England to find
a proper job. So the whole family with the exception of Robert packed up their
stuff, caught a train from Germiston to Durban and boarded the Pen Dennis
Castle, stopping over in Cape Town where dad got off to finalise some things
back in Germiston joining us a few weeks later whilst the rest of us headed
back to dad’s dads council home at 82 Hargwyne Street, Stockwell, London. The
house was one of those typical low income English homes where every house in
the street looked almost exactly the same as the one next door. Even the front
doors were all painted the same dark blue in those days. Each of the houses
shared a common wall down the side with each house being a mirror image of the
one it was attached to. The house had several levels starting with a cellar,
the ground floor, the first floor landing which led off to the master bedroom
and a further set of stairs which took you to the room at the top of the house
where Gran West used to live years before coming out with us to South Africa.
Coming in the front door you were met by a tiny entrance hall where people took
their coats and scarves off and hung them up against a wooden row of pegs up
against the side wall. The door was directly in front of the front door and
this led into the passageway of the house. To the left was the lounge and to
the right a small bedroom which served as the main bedroom of the house. Beyond
these rooms was the stairs leading up to the levels above with a smallish
cupboard under the stairs and beyond that a kitchen which eventually led onto
the back garden. The garden had a small vegetable patch running along the one
side to the back wall, which was filled with runner beans, and a few other
seasonal vegetables that Granny Nichols used for her cooking. The outhouse was next a small shed in the yard. Upstairs was
another bedroom and above that a final bedroom that was used during our stay by
Richard who was about 14 at the time. Roger and I shared the room below
Richards with my mom and dad and Granny and Granddad Nichols
lived in the room up front of the house on the ground level.
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