Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Bunking school, but learning a new beat
Karoostew
IWAS a terror of a truant. In 1969, in Standard 7 (Grade 9), we’d moved to Cape Town and I to a new school, Sea Point Boys High. I didn’t take to it much.
That September I stopped going for three weeks. I’d climb into my school uniform and catch the bus from Milnerton North to central Cape Town, where I should have caught another bus to Sea Point.
Things didn’t quite pan out that way. At the old Cape Town station was a row of lockers. I’d go into the gents’ loo and hoik my jeans and T- shirt out of my school case, where it was impersonating my school books, and stuff my school clothes into the bag. I’d put a 20 cent coin in a locker door and stash my stuff for the day.
They caught me three weeks later and back to school I went. The following January, now living in a flat in Mouille Point, I didn’t go to school on the first day of the first term. They caught up with me in August.
They’d presumed that Jackman had gone to another school. Never presume (life lesson number one).
What does a 15-year-old do until it’s time to get the bus home? There were movie houses with morning shows. I saw Oliver!, That’s The Way It Is and loads of others, using my “pocket money” intended for the school tuck shop.
I’d try to get into the adults only movies. Once, a white-haired old dear at the counter asked me how old I was. She was 65 if she was a day. “I’m 18,” I said, pulling myself up to my full 1.63m.
“So am I, dear,” she said, and wafted me away.
And there were the docks. It was a fair walk but I had all morning. Nobody stopped you as you wandered along the quayside staring at the cargo ships and the occasional passenger liner, imagining what it must be like to go to the places they’d go to. I saw the Europa, the France, countless white P&O liners with their yellow funnels and a pair of ships called the Northern Star and Southern Cross.
My interest piqued, I worked out that low down on the Heerengracht were shipping company offices.
All you had to do was tell the nice lady at the counter that you wanted permission to board the France, Southern Cross, whichever, and she’d fill out a little slip. You presented it at the gangplank and up you scurried. I’d stroll along corridors, up stairs, into lounges and cinemas, libraries and dining rooms. If a purser asked me where I was going, I’d flash my permission slip. But it hardly ever happened – they thought I was some passenger’s kid.
I once broke off a little piece of a finger nail and tucked it away where it would be likely to remain unseen. I imagined that a small part of me would be off to exotic parts of the world. One day I’d go back to my dockside world, when I found myself, against the odds, working at the Cape Times.
Most of the staff didn’t know my secret, because I kept it mostly to myself, but my editor Tony Heard knew it, as did shipping editor George Young and deputy editor Ronnie Norval. They knew that Jackman did not have a matric. My conviction that I should be a journalist was immense, but that is one mighty handicap to have.
It shouldn’t have happened, but somehow I had got my foot in the door. I had met, by chance, shipping editor George Young, then in his late 50s, and told him of my ambition. As it happened, his assistant, an elderly fellow who spent his weekday mornings updating the shipping log, was leaving within days, and if I liked, George said, I could take over.
So, at 21, in I walked one morning to be shown a desk adjacent to George’s in a row of small woodpanelled offices just off the newsroom. Within a week I offered to do a story, just a minor one. In the mornings, George would pick me up in his green Ford Escort and we’d head to the docks to spend a morning, like truants, boarding ships to find the stories of the men who fared the giant seas.
He was a great mentor. The years have flown and all of that is still a part of me and the writer I slowly grew into, and the best, the absolute best, thing about it is that I can mentor the young ones coming into the business of writing – because if I have learnt how to write I know where I learnt it.
I finally did get that matric, by the way, and found myself in full-time employment, but I know this: if there is any wisdom in the older me, it comes as much from those times of bunking school than it does from any more formal training.