And so, I rewrite the story. Even if you
have read the deleted version, this is better. It needs a bit of editing but I
pushed my creative writing almost to my limits. (And that is saying a lot.) It
helps if you know your films. I move
back and forwards in time.
Weird, but very funny…
***
But the time we
were 11 years old, our little balls were dropping, hair appeared under our
arms, our voices got gruffer and the alpha male hormones injected the feeling
of pure aggression. It had to be relieved.
At Blakistan Junior School
we did participate in a rather rag tag game of rugby at every break period.
With only 20 minutes of playing time there was no such thing as changing sides.
The rivalry was fierce. This was brains against brutes, some with limited
mental capacity beyond recognising the shape of a rugby ball and which
direction it should be going. A bit like that scene in Forrest Gump.
As usual I was
in the middle, a B streamer, but at this moment in time, (Standard 4, 1969), in
my class we had a budding super star – Keith Stack. He was our Captain. It was
never questioned. I hero worshipped him. Strangely he always had time for a
screw ball such as me. I wasn’t surprised that he went on to become a doctor.
It was in his nature.
Back to that
fateful day. The line up was always the same. A stream against B plus C stream.
Numbers were both irreverent and irrelevant. A referee was neither at hand and
nor necessary. These extremely savage games were played on one of the football
pitches with a ball provided by one of the kids.
For some strange
reason I joined in. Suffering from malnutrition and weighing not more than a
half a dozen eggs I desperately should be consuming, I tended to hang around in
some form of defensive position. This was of course strategically very clever.
Our team usually
kept the clever-clevers well in their half fighting for their honour, so most
of the time I spent lolling around alone doing not a lot besides listening to
my empty grumbling tummy.
Then one day -
something went terribly wrong. Our marauding lions made a mistake and suddenly
a terrifying site came down the right wing. The kid must have been almost twice
my height and certainly triple my body weight. His pounding feet made the earth
tremble as if a herd of elephants were charging at me. I think his name was
Eliot or something like that. (I think he went on to MP.) He was Jewish and
didn’t look very gentlemanly as he bore down on this gentle half gentile
standing in his way.
Suddenly an
amazing thing happened. I went back to the future. My memory brought up in
graphic detail Quinton Tarintino’s film Inglourious
Basterds and the character called the ‘Bear Jew’ (Eli
Roth). He is the one who dashed out NAZI officers’ brains out with a baseball
bat.
But I wasn’t a
NAZI - just a nasty gnat in his way.
As this awful
apparition approached, my brain struggling to return to the present through the
mists of time; it picked up an order from my leader - Captain Keith Stack.
“Stop him! Karl
– Hold the line.”
I now had other
problems almost beyond my control. My adrenal gland had decided to work
overtime and I had a desperate urge to wee and poo simultaneously. But this
most terrible of hormones was now playing more tricks with my mind because
everything slowed down. Just like that film The Matrix. I am sure
everyone has experienced this phenomenon some time in their lives. What I
dislike about it is that it is always connected to flight or fight and never
when you have met someone nice and having a great time. (Does that mean there
is an opposite hormone to adrenalin but it hasn’t been discovered yet? It would
sure come in handy to speed up nasty times like learning Afrikaans.)
So with the
whole scenario running at about one frame per second, I contemplated on my
orders. The first bit even I could reluctantly understand, but the bit about
‘Hold the line.’? What was that all about? Somehow I didn’t think that we
should all go off fishing.
Click, click,
click… the picture kept running through
the projector to be screened in my confused cortex, as jerky step by jerky
step, the monster approached. I didn’t have long and I was inextricably being
dragged to the present. So I went mentally online to the
freedictionary.com/hold+the+line. The options did not bode well. Obviously I
soon sort of clocked between the various nouns, verbs, adjectives and all the
other rubbish that makes up the technical side of the English language. But
some awful definitions came apparent, and I quote from the bits my frightened
brain now saw in terrifying black and white - complete with the scantily clad
girl on the left advertising her underwear. As far as I could gather this was a
collection of euphemisms to contemplate euthanasia.
These seemed to
fill the criteria -
- To keep from
falling or moving, such as being glued to the spot in mortal fear.
- To keep from
departing or getting away from big bad monsters.
- To avoid
letting out or expelling urine or faeces.
- To have as a
responsible position or a privilege as by hanging around doing nothing at all
besides picking one’s nose, scratching at an itchy anus and yawning in the
proximity of a try line.
- To maintain
occupation of by force or coercion whilst being brutally murdered.
- To stop the
movement or progress of terrible monsters hell bent on brutally murdering you.
Actually, the
list goes on and on and the more I rapidly scanned the explanations, the more I
realised I either had to do a runner or die a terrible, violent death.
I was running
out of time. But there, under idioms I found it –
-
Hold the line - To maintain the existing position or state of affairs:
How stupid is
that explanation? I just wanted to carry on picking at my nose and scratching
my itchy brown eye whilst yawning with boredom, and then again, through the
quantum physics of the universe, a voice called –
“Karl… Tenent linea –
Tenent linea! Prohibuimus eum!”
Now he sounded
like the Roman General, Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the armies of
the North, as when they were fighting Germanian troops. It was alright for him. His army were all in the
north of the playing field leaving the south being guarded by little me! And,
why the hell was he telling me this in Latin? Keith might be practising the
language for a future career as a doctor but I didn’t have the slightest
inclination of being his first patient. As much as I liked the bloke, I was not
that enthusiastic to see his signature posthumously on my certificate.
Slowly my mind
returned to the present but briefly paused and I instinctively reached for my
trusty FN with Mk11 Zulu flying grenade. That will stop the bastard. Alarmingly it wasn’t there and as the
imminent confrontation bore down, the film frame started speeding up and I
suddenly realised it would still be another nine years before I was kitted out
to the teeth – if I survived this contact with the enemy – here and now.
I returned to
the present and at the age of 11 I knew my coffin would be so small that even
my father might pay for it rather than a used mielie sack for 50 cents. Or even
worse, my teammates might dismember me and toss the bits to the circling
vultures. I was, for yet once again in my short and miserable life – well and
truly up shit creek without a paddle.
With the option
well closed by returning from the future of shooting the rampaging creature, I
thought out an option of appealing to our common Jewish blood –
“I will give you
all my pocket money for a month if you desist.”
Obviously 10
cents was a poor bribe and was ignored. The huge Bear Jew, now being chased by
our demented and desperate wild dogs, had moved up a gear and was pounding down
through the wastelands of our half with serious and deadly determination. I was
running out of time and alternatives.
I was now forced
to crunch some serious megabytes of options through my cerebral cortex. I
recalled a bit from one of the weird books I had delved into belonging to my
historian step-mums collection – this one by a really clever bloke, Oliver
Goldsmith (1730 - 1774), Irish-born British novelist, playwright, and poet,
For he who
fights and runs away
May live to
fight another day;
But he who is
in battle slain
Can never
rise and fight again.
In my present
predicament I rather fancied the former two lines. As for the fighting bit, I
had a yellow belt in the ancient martial arts disciple of Legitquick.
And once more Maximus Decimus
Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, aka, Captain Keith Stack called out in desperation –
“Karl…Hold the line, Hold the line.”
My Captain had
spoken. Okay - this was an animal crash just waiting to happen. I, the giggling
emaciated cowardly heyena was just desperate to run away. I was facing a one
ton Rhino with a rugby ball mounted on a seriously big horn, legging it in full
kill charge mode. Its beady eyes were now greedily seeing the exact point where
he could give B + C the ultimate humiliation of scoring a try.
I didn’t have a
clue what I supposed to do. I had no instruction on how to tackle apparitions you
only see in your worst nightmares. But the captain expected me to do my duty.
So I just kicked started my tiny engine, let out a huge fart to increase
acceleration, closed my eyes and ran full tilt into him.
This wasn’t
bravery, this was pure stupidity.
The kids watched
with horror as I flew away into the sky like the last flightless dodo heading
for immortal extinction. So powerful was the ricochet I was close to have been
converted. (Not to any religion, but over the goal post’s crossbar.)
I awoke to bells
ringing. I thought I had died, had been converted and gone to heaven. The
worried face of Captain Keith Stack was above me. The bells were actually end
of break time.
“Karl, are you
okay?”
I wasn’t really
sure where I was. I sat up a bit groggy.
“Did he score?”
Keith’s face
broke into a big grin of relief.
“Karl, you
bounced off him with such force, he placed a foot outside the boundary line. He
was out. You held the line.”
My little heart
burst with pride along with a rather aching head. It turns out I was
unconscious for nearly two minutes and the kids were starting to panic.
Of course, these
days I should have been sent to hospital and checked in the head for any long
term damage or concussion. Since it was generally acknowledged that I spent
most my time chirping nonsense all through lessons, the teacher would hardly
notice that my speech was slurred and I kept banging into the desks for a few
days.
Captain Keith
Stack decided to ban me from playing for at least a week, till what little
sense I had had returned. Then I took up my usual position of wandering around,
picking my nose and scratching at my hole - but with one small difference. I
now kept a wary eye out for nasty scary things wanting to kill me. I had made a
decision that would keep me alive during the war years and ultimately lead to
one of the funniest quotes from The Gokwe Kid –
‘Gooks! Run for
your lives.’
