RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

82 | denis beckett
in the free State dorp of Zastron, where my car had seized three
weeks previously. Gael and children flew on to Johannesburg. I
was getting long in the tooth to stand on country roads with a
raised thumb. Motorists who look benignly upon an 18-year-old
hitch-hiker look differently upon one of 35; they assume a bum
or a meths-drinker or a jailbird or all three. New cars and smart
cars and safe-looking middle-class families left me in dust and
I got to Zastron by courtesy of jalopies.
This was altruistic lift-giving, ignoring your passenger until
he says “I’ll get out here, thanks”; purer than my brand, which
cross-examines the hitcher in the hope of gleaning insights.
I was also left wondering how often someone who on friday
won his industry’s main award spent Saturday hitching to a
backyard mechanic’s repair of his broken car.
One of the dumber ways I sought to rectify the cash scarcity
was columnising. for a while I was doing a weekly column for
Beeld and a monthly for the Sunday Times and a fortnightly
for the Sowetan. My logic was to allay advertisers’ fears by
appearing acceptable, though I confess also to a temptation to
sound off. In Frontline itself I was cautious about sounding off.
(Well, I thought so, not all readers agreed).
The columns meant recognition of a sort although not such
as to bowl the bank manager over. Some people could write
columns in half a day or even an hour, but I couldn’t and still
can’t. When I finally quit the Sunday Times, the editor and
assistant editor, Tertius Myburgh and fleur de Villiers, took me
to a slap-up lunch at Harridans to persuade me to stay on. I was
half persuaded but then I calculated that the lunch bill came
to three times as much as the new-and-improved rate they
were offering for what usually took a 12-hour day to write, and
revolted.
Moreover these columns were problematic in that as I saw
it my job in Beeld was to tell afrikaners why they ought to
drop apartheid and my job in the Sowetan was to tell blacks
why afrikaners were nervous about dropping apartheid. This
caused Percy Qoboza, by now editor of City Press, to guffaw his