The Journey of My Life

I was born in Cape Town, a distinction I share with a few million others, I guess! I was born in 1943. That narrows it down a bit. I was born near Mostert's Mill. That reduces the num­ber still further. But really what makes me unique is not where or when I was born, but what I have done since.

Our births are accidents really, but the trajectories of our lives are the result of all the decisions we make from moment to moment, or don't make, as the case may be.

And so all the decisions I have made over the past 64 years have landed me here in Pretoria, with a wife called Catherine and a daughter called Caitlin. Along the way to Pretoria from Cape Town I have collected memories, skills, knowledge, an ex-wife and two older children. Not to mention a crowd of friends, some of whom are friends to this day.

The journey has been an interesting one, at least to me. And maybe if I share it with some others they might find something of interest in it also.

Like most people I have had ups and downs, moments of great elation and many too of sadness and grief. But through it all I have grown, and been enriched beyond words.

The reason for my being born in Cape Town rather than in the then Transkei where my father was a teacher, was Hitler. He overshadowed my life from the start and in some ways still does. Much of my life's journey has been shaped by his mad racial ideology and the need to oppose it, to find some way around it.

How Hitler came to have such a central role in my life was that my father volunteered to serve in the South African Naval Forces during Hitler's war, and was posted to that outcrop of rock in Table Bay known as Robben Island, infamous in recent centuries as a dumping place for people deemed by the authorities of the day to be undesirable, not fit for human society. My father's posting was to firstly train young women sailors known as SWANS and secondly to defend the South African coastal waters from the depradations of Hitler's U-Boats. He was responsible for the anti-submarine defence of the South Atlantic, a post headquartered on the Island.