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x | denis beckett<br />
future prospects of peace and calm and working streetlights were<br />
a solid bet but he lacked the excitements that South africa provides<br />
in compensation -- the broadening of horizons, the crossing<br />
of gulfs, the rising of the soul as it embraces more and more<br />
of what used to be alien. africa stayed in his mind, and we corresponded.<br />
In 1999 he sent me a copy of Design magazine, of which he<br />
was editor, with an article about an experience we had shared at<br />
a newspaper named Voice, during apartheid days. When I read<br />
his article I (i) hummed “I remember It Well”, a duet about different<br />
memories of the same event, and (ii) recalled that I had<br />
written my memory of this event, somewhere.<br />
My memory nagged and itched until it remembered those<br />
WordStar disks, and I hunted them down and sent Tony my version<br />
of the Voice incident.<br />
Tony replied that this was interesting, did I have more? I sent<br />
more, and he asked for yet more, and I sent yet more, and while<br />
sending the mores, I read them, and I saw them as an answer<br />
to the “what did you do in the war” questions that my children<br />
occasionally asked and would surely ask forever. I printed a hard<br />
copy, evicted my roman Law notes from an old lever-arch file,<br />
and, dated December 28 1999, gave the file a title on white masking-tape:<br />
“cOurSe, a private history for Gael, Meave, emma and<br />
Matt”.<br />
Soon after, Tony wrote from canada that he’d like to publish<br />
my memoir, as a book, if I’d polish it up and round it off.<br />
This was a generous invitation. It was not wholly new. Tony<br />
had already published one book of mine in canada, where there<br />
was no commercial draw whatever in a story of a car breaking<br />
down in a South african semi-desert. He published it because<br />
he liked the writing. That’s what gave him his kicks. By now he<br />
was well installed in the top drawer of the world’s publication<br />
designers, with clients on every continent. for fun, he published<br />
writing he liked, and he always insisted that – with the fierce<br />
exception of one theme, of which you are going to hear more –<br />
he liked my writing.
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