Ndumiso Ngcobo wants you to keep it down
My English teacher in Standard 8 at Inkamana High School in Vryheid was an Afrikaner sexagenarian called Meneer Vos. He was an incorrigible Anglophile who always sported a tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, a smoking pipe in his hand, slicked-back hair à la Michael Caine in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and a permanent pack of mints in his pocket.
He was also the jumpiest human being I had encountered at that point in my life.
He’d be at the blackboard, writing out the Latin roots of English words, when someone would inadvertently drop their copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the wooden floor, with a loud bang. All hell would break loose. “Mama mia! Santa Maria!” he would shriek in an exaggerated Italian accent. The Italian was gleaned during his time as a soldier stationed in what he referred to as “North Africa” during World War 2, when he interacted with a lot of Italian POWs.
Teenagers being teenagers, we soon figured out that we could rattle his nerves by making loud banging noises. So when, one afternoon, he made disparaging remarks about the sexual morality of the main character in RL Peteni’s 1976 novel Hill of Fools
(KwaZidenge), we created a co-ordinated chorus of banging desk lids. Poor Meneer Vos fled screaming. Victory was ours.
The high-fives were interrupted by our principal, Sister Dorothea Derse. Uh-oh! We’re in the dwang now, we thought. Instead, Sister Dorothea sat calmly in front of the class and explained to us that when soldiers go to war they experience incredible violence and afterwards return with some psychological damage. One of the symptoms was the inability to handle loud bangs, she explained. So would we please refrain from deliberately banging our desks.
Of course, giving that sort of information to a bunch of 14- to 16year-olds is not unlike handing a pack of Mandrax dealers from the Bluff a stash of AK-47s and asking them not to shoot at rival gangs.
Karma is a force laden with irony, it would seem. Fast-forward 32 years and my tolerance for loud noises is now as low as the Theewaterskloof Dam water levels in the Western Cape. And the universe is also not without a sense of irony, because it conspired to bequeath to me a bunch of kids. To quote Meneer Vos, Mama mia! Santa Maria! These children are going to be the death of me!
I have just emerged from the Easter holiday break. I am blind, deaf and as dizzy as Gillespie. For starters, not one of these spawns of Lucifer seems to adhere to the human norm of being asleep at night and awake during the day. I’m convinced that I’ve produced vampires.
The other day I was woken by the sound of a Mayan virgin pleading for her life at the sacrificial altar. As it turns out, the most recent entrant into puberty was playing alleged music from a speaker. I don’t remember which band he was listening to, so I’ll go with the descriptive name Beheaded Goats with Pronounced Lisps. After I made him switch it off I became aware of another ruckus, emanating from the lounge. I’ve since discovered it was a Fifa 18 PlayStation match. Judging from the noise, there was crowd trouble.
Nowadays, if my bed mate has one of her nights where her snores sound like a pack of lions dragging the carcass of a 900kg buffalo bull across the open plains of the Serengeti, I can hardly sleep a wink. I wake crankier than Madame Speaker accosted by the Red Berets during a parliamentary Q&A session. In fact, any repetitive noise catapults my blood pressure sky high, whether it’s a creaking door, a dripping gutter or finger-snapping. Don’t get me started on barking dogs. Or mating cats. Or crowing roosters.
But here’s the ultimate irony. Writing about how sensitive you are to sounds inevitably heightens the auditory nerves. As I finish this column, my ears are being assaulted by something called Bunsen Is a Beast on Nickelodeon, courtesy of the 10year-old. It is exponentially more annoying than The Smurfs.
Disclaimer: Fear not. No children, spouses, dogs or cockerels were harmed during the writing of this column.
I have just emerged from the Easter holiday break. I am blind, deaf and as dizzy as Gillespie