"Did you got a licence?"
There's a knack to taking a corner at speed - if you're a boy on a bicycle. I learned that lesson the hard way. You need to ensure that your foot opposite the kerb is down so that the other pedal is up. Otherwise, it will clip the kerb, causing you to bounce off the saddle and bob up and down on the crossbar, causing colourful contusions on your cobblers as you career across the road.
There's also a knack to tightening the nut that keeps the saddle horizontal, but more of that anon.
All of this is by way of introduction to the last day of our Easter school holidays in 1969. I was patiently trying to get my younger brother to learn the cornering lesson the hard way when a police van pulled up.
"Why isn't you boys in school?"
The voice emerged from the narrow gap between a peaked cap and a V-shaped tangle of black chest hairs protruding from a safari suit.
"We don't attend a government school," I said. "Our term begins tomorrow."
I thought I'd made it pretty clear, but I had to repeat myself before he grasped it. Unwilling to lose face, my interrogator gave my bike the once-over. Having satisfied himself that I had a valid licence disk (yes, we needed one back then) and that my brakes were in working order, he turned his attention to my brother's bike.
Now for some perverse reason (about which I'd prefer not to speculate), my brother opted not to tighten the nut underneath his saddle. No sooner had the burly boy in blue taken the weight off his feet than he slid off the saddle, bounced off the back wheel, and split the seat of his safari suit as he came down to earth with a bump.
To this day, people claim that the epicentre of the earth tremor that rattled crockery that day was just to the north of the Ascot Racecourse, so who am I to disabuse them?
A fortnight later, my friends and I were playing one of our Timeless Tests in the local park, with both teams packed with Pollocks. In the middle of an over, another "little man in a big hat" (as my granny used to call petty officials) interrupted play to inform us that the "klonkie" wasn't allowed to play there because the park was reserved for whites only. It took me a while to realise that he was referring to Geoff, the son of a caddie at the Milnerton Golf Club, who was one of our most talented team-mates.
Without a moment's hesitation, I pulled up the stumps and led both teams across Otto du Plessis Drive to an open field next to the lagoon, where the only legal restrictions were self-imposed: if you hit the ball on to the road or into the water, you were out. We never returned to the inappropriately named Unitas Park.
A few years later, on Republic Day, our boyhood heroes staged a walk-off at Newlands in protest at the apartheid government's interference in sport, but their protest was short-lived. Unlike us, they returned to play at the segregated ground, but it was to prove a sticky wicket.
I can recall only one other encounter with a policeman as a child. A friend and I found an envelope full of .22 bullets in an open field. How they got there didn't bother us. We lived by the dictum "Finders Keepers". Not having pistols, we decided to make do with a hammer. I gently placed a bullet on a brick, took careful aim at our tool shed, and then hit the casing as hard as I could. The report was far louder than either of us had anticipated. For a few minutes, neither of us could hear the other swearing, such was the ringing in our ears. But Mom had heard us and rushed outside to spoil our fun.
Later that day, Dad took us both to visit a local police officer. Dad handed over the bullets, explaining where we'd found them and what we'd done with them. The policeman took us into his garage, where there was an old railway sleeper. He loaded one of the bullets into a pistol and aimed at the wood from close range. Once again, there was a deafening report.
Once we'd regained our sense of hearing, the policeman handed me a piece of wire and asked me to push it as far as I could into the hole made by the bullet. It went in about a foot. Then he asked me to feel how hard the wood was. Then he asked me to feel how soft my stomach was. Then he asked me if I'd got the point.
I certainly had, but I also realised that there were two people in that garage who no longer had any right to mock the police for being stupid.
There's also a knack to tightening the nut that keeps the saddle horizontal, but more of that anon.
All of this is by way of introduction to the last day of our Easter school holidays in 1969. I was patiently trying to get my younger brother to learn the cornering lesson the hard way when a police van pulled up.
"Why isn't you boys in school?"
The voice emerged from the narrow gap between a peaked cap and a V-shaped tangle of black chest hairs protruding from a safari suit.
"We don't attend a government school," I said. "Our term begins tomorrow."
I thought I'd made it pretty clear, but I had to repeat myself before he grasped it. Unwilling to lose face, my interrogator gave my bike the once-over. Having satisfied himself that I had a valid licence disk (yes, we needed one back then) and that my brakes were in working order, he turned his attention to my brother's bike.
Now for some perverse reason (about which I'd prefer not to speculate), my brother opted not to tighten the nut underneath his saddle. No sooner had the burly boy in blue taken the weight off his feet than he slid off the saddle, bounced off the back wheel, and split the seat of his safari suit as he came down to earth with a bump.
To this day, people claim that the epicentre of the earth tremor that rattled crockery that day was just to the north of the Ascot Racecourse, so who am I to disabuse them?
Without a moment's hesitation, I pulled up the stumps and led both teams across Otto du Plessis Drive to an open field next to the lagoon, where the only legal restrictions were self-imposed: if you hit the ball on to the road or into the water, you were out. We never returned to the inappropriately named Unitas Park.
A few years later, on Republic Day, our boyhood heroes staged a walk-off at Newlands in protest at the apartheid government's interference in sport, but their protest was short-lived. Unlike us, they returned to play at the segregated ground, but it was to prove a sticky wicket.
I can recall only one other encounter with a policeman as a child. A friend and I found an envelope full of .22 bullets in an open field. How they got there didn't bother us. We lived by the dictum "Finders Keepers". Not having pistols, we decided to make do with a hammer. I gently placed a bullet on a brick, took careful aim at our tool shed, and then hit the casing as hard as I could. The report was far louder than either of us had anticipated. For a few minutes, neither of us could hear the other swearing, such was the ringing in our ears. But Mom had heard us and rushed outside to spoil our fun.
Later that day, Dad took us both to visit a local police officer. Dad handed over the bullets, explaining where we'd found them and what we'd done with them. The policeman took us into his garage, where there was an old railway sleeper. He loaded one of the bullets into a pistol and aimed at the wood from close range. Once again, there was a deafening report.
Once we'd regained our sense of hearing, the policeman handed me a piece of wire and asked me to push it as far as I could into the hole made by the bullet. It went in about a foot. Then he asked me to feel how hard the wood was. Then he asked me to feel how soft my stomach was. Then he asked me if I'd got the point.
I certainly had, but I also realised that there were two people in that garage who no longer had any right to mock the police for being stupid.
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