Gunship Over Angola

Although I was battling to focus and to breathe, I recognised the face of the peanut farmer who’d shot us with coarse-grained salt. It was Christo Snr. But then, as this bully with the contorted face stopped to draw breath before unleashing his fist, a supremely authoritative voice, the sweetest sound I’d ever heard, cut through the noise and said, calmly and clearly, ‘Sir, put Stephen down or I will hit you very hard on the head with my rolling pin!’

The voice belonged to Violet Mokabudi, my second mother, the keeper of our house and my saviour on many previous occasions.

‘Shut up, you black bitch!’ roared the peanut farmer.

‘Sir, I will not tell you again. Put Stephen down or I will hit you very hard with my rolling pin and also put pepper in your mouth for the bad words,’ Violet said, her voice taking on a steely edge.

Perhaps there was some intelligence and restraint left in that anger-twisted head, or perhaps he valued his own life over mine, but after a few seconds of deep contemplation Christo Snr stopped shaking me and slowly lowered me to the ground. As my feet touched the floor I broke away and dashed to safety behind Violet’s ample frame. I still remember thinking that I must have done wrong and was going to get a serious pasting from my dad when he got home, if this brute didn’t get me first.

Knowing instinctively that he was living on borrowed time if he remained at our kitchen door, Christo Snr shuffled away towards his big-winged American car.

‘Get your father to phone me, you fokken krimineel!’ he spat.

Later that evening, when my dad got home from work, as he came in the front door he asked Violet, as was his daily bantering habit, ‘What stories are we hearing today, Mrs Mokmac?’ (his nickname for her). Every day, Violet would reply with her customary ‘No people speaking today, sir’. But today was different, and she said ominously, ‘Beeeeeeeg, beeeeeeeeg trouble, sir’ before spilling the beans on the events of the afternoon.

From my secret hiding place behind the rhubarb plants near the kitchen door I sat quivering like an autumn leaf as I heard Violet tell Dad her version of what had transpired. I fully expected to hear the thunderous summons ‘Stephen, come here!’ at any moment. But it didn’t come, and I waited and waited and waited for what seemed an eternity.

Then the rhubarb leaves parted and Dad sat down on the ground right next to me. Tears immediately streamed down my petrified cheeks and I mumbled, ‘I’m sorry Dad, I’m so sorry Dad.’

I remember like it was yesterday, the utterly incredulous look that came over his face as he stood up, then bent over at the waist and lifted me into his arms like a little baby, telling me over and over again that I’d done nothing wrong while he carried me into the house and laid me on the couch with a little blanket over me because I was suddenly so cold.

We waited for my mom.

She arrived home a few minutes later, and a short time after that my dad went out, ‘to pay a visit to someone’, Mom said.

I didn’t ask any questions but Christo Snr never did lay criminal charges.

*

Our house in Viking Road was close to the short final approach of Runway 01 at AFB Swartkop. In the 1960s and 1970s, Swartkop was a particularly busy airfield, and housed Sabres, Harvards, Vampires, helicopters and transport aircraft, mainly DC-3 Dakotas and DC-4 Skymasters. Aircraft movements went on throughout the day and night. Although we as a family soon became oblivious to the noise they made, many an overnight visitor to our house complained of being unable to sleep a wink.

Over the next few years my dad established himself in a business career and was finally able to take up his lifelong dream of flying, which resulted in his qualifying for his private pilot’s licence in 1970. I flew with him at every available opportunity and was consequently affected by his passion for flying. A number of my parents’ friends were SAAF personnel, and while at school I was fortunate to get regular trips in a range of SAAF aircraft, including the C-130 Hercules, DC-3 Dakota and DC-4 Skymaster, which further fuelled my desire to become a pilot.

Our next-door neighbour, Major Peter Webb, a navigator on 24 Squadron Buccaneers, was killed in a low-level night sortie along the Natal coast in the early 1970s. This of course led my mom to question my oft-expressed dream of taking up flying as a career. I think that she would have preferred me to have taken a different career direction, but, being the woman she was, she never once told me this.

*

Jim Serobe was a tall and stately Shangaan warrior who’d worked for my grandparents on the family farm near Wonderboom Airport for more years than anyone could remember. As a young man, Jim had earned his warrior status by killing a lion with only a spear. He was justifiably proud of this.