Moving Moments Ch. 8 - First Flight - a Dismal Flop

Moving Moments

Chapter 8

First Flight - a Dismal Flop

1970 was my “gap year” in which I was to find myself and figure out my direction in life. Unfortunately all I found out was that I was as confused about my future at the end of that year as I had been at the beginning. Nevertheless I had got the “travel the world” bug out of my system. No doubt it had its attractions but I had tried doing it on a very limited budget and I didn’t fancy working my way around the world washing dishes in grubby restaurants to pay my bills. So on returning to Zambia from my travels in Europe I sat out the balance of 1970 in Kitwe working at a job my Dad had helped me find.

An example of  the
masterpiece of modern
technology I worked with.  

I was working in the accounting office at a private company and I could tell I was the lowest guy on the totem pole because the calculator I was allocated looked like it might have been a relic from a previous century. It added and subtracted by entering a number and then turning a lever clockwise. One then entered another number and turned the lever anticlockwise. It was a bit tedious, but did beat doing the job completely manually. Multiplication and division were for the more sophisticated types in the office. One of my duties was to help another student fill the wage packets every Friday for a couple of hundred Zambian employees. The one time we completed filling the packets and had a few cents left over. Our boss correctly said “well we don’t know how many errors you have made. We can’t afford to look like we are cheating our staff, you’d better empty all the packets and do it again”. Well, that spooked us and we then proceeded to check and recheck every pay packet. The closer we got to the Friday afternoon knock off time, the more nervous we got and the more mistakes we made. Eventually we had a couple of hundred very agitated employees demanding their money in a very threatening way while we checked and rechecked, looking for our mistake. Ultimately we found our error in the nick of time but we were a bit unnerved at the agitation of the employees. We after all, were white ex colonials and therefore a natural target of suspicion for potentially cheating them on their wages.

Who has ever heard of a Daihatsu?
Mine contributed to their
"non reputation". 

One of the rites of passage on leaving school for many of my contemporaries from Falcon and other schools, was to attend Outward Bound in the Chimanimani Mountains in Rhodesia along the Mozambique border. Outward Bound’s roots were in UK. Its ethos was to teach young men to learn how to survive in the bush and toughen us up for the real world that we were about to join. At the end of 1970 I decided to do the three week Outward Bound course on my way down to South Africa to begin my studies. I left Kitwe all packed up to the hilt in my little Daihatsu car I had bought with my earnings, with all my goods and chattels for a year’s worth of university. I made good progress until about 20 miles beyond Lusaka at which point my Daihatsu died and I was stranded. There were no cell phones in those days and one had to rely on the good will of fellow travelers to stop and offer help. I sat on the side of the road waiting for help for about four or five hours. Eventually a tow truck arrived and took me back into Lusaka. I had to check into a hotel and arranged for Al to come down and arrange to have the car towed back to Kitwe where he promised to “have a look at it”. I then hitchhiked to Salisbury in Rhodesia the next day in time to catch the bus to Outward Bound the next day. As it turned out, Al did a complete overhaul of my little Daihatsu and I sold it before anything more went wrong with it. I’m not sure how I ever said thanks to Al for doing that, but was grateful for him digging me out of that hole.

The Outward Bound bus -
a reflection of the rough tough
life we were to lead for three weeks. 

Arriving at Outward Bound was a bit like my early days at Falcon. The staff projected tough attitudes and stiff upper lip expectations from us. We were arranged into teams of eight boys and from day one we were engaged in a life and death competition to beat the other teams at all of the events and definitely not suffer the indignity of coming last overall. It was very physically active. They were going to teach us how far we could push our bodies and we were going to endure the experience. Bill Bailey was in charge. He was an ex Captain in the British Army who had fought in the Malayan insurgency. He was a tough character. He did not tolerate weaklings or complaining. I got off to a bad start with him. I had developed a long head of very unruly hair in my year away from Falcon. This would have irritated the military man in Bill Bailey from the get go. He caught me peeing on the flower bed on the first morning and then having warned me not to do that, he caught me doing it again the next morning. My year off of school and generally overindulging had also left me flabby and out of shape. Bill and his team had some work to do to get me up to speed. Fortunately my competitive spirit kicked in and I was determined to show them that I could more than keep up. We did an early morning run every day and our times were recorded. Each day I moved up in the ranks and my times improved as I got in shape.

The bush and terrain
was very rugged

Abseiling for the first time
- simultaneously thrilling and terrifying

Swing over the cess pit and climbing
the wall - all part of the challenge

Rock Climbing -  a mixed bag of
terror and torture

Our team was led by Rick, a staff member, who was ex Rhodesian SAS. He was a tough little guy. He had a massive scar going from behind his shoulder blade on his back and coming out in his front above his heart. He had been doing a patrol in the Zambezi Valley when an elephant had attacked them. His friends made it up trees but he was caught and the elephant had held him with his trunk and then knelt down and gored him all the way through with his tusk. His friends saved his life by shooting the elephant. We liked Rick and he was determined that our group was going to win the competition so we worked hard for him. Amongst other things, we had to carry a gigantic log up a hill, throw it over a waterfall, jump after it and swim it back down the hill all timed down to the millisecond.

Martin - who ended up on the rock behind
mine for our "24 hour Solo" trip. 

One of the things we had to do was to go for a solo 24 hours out in the mountains. We were dropped down out in an isolated spot by Rick who gave us our boundaries that we weren’t allowed to leave. We had limited food, a notebook to record our thoughts and nothing more than a small bivvy (bivouac) sheet to rig up a shelter. I remember finding a rock overhang and diligently got all set up for what was likely to be a lonely night. When I had finished I climbed the rock to check out my surroundings only to find that one of my team mates was about 50 yards away. We had both set up nearby to our mutual boundary and ended up as close neighbors. We were bound to silence so we enjoyed a silent wave and carried on with our lonely vigil. It was comforting to know that he was nearby. I still had my pathological fear of snakes and wondered if my rock shelter was home to any deadly ones. I didn’t fancy spending the night alone with that possibility on my mind.

Map reading and orientation
- all part of our survival skillset

Our next big activity was to be taken on a guided four day walkabout through the mountains with Rick as our guide. He showed us how to read a map set up camp and generally survive in the mountains. One of the Outward Bound strategies on these walkabouts was to give us too little food forcing us to conserve it and get by on the minimum. I vividly remember our team leader sharing out the food into equal portions so that we each got the same number of nuts and raisins as the next guy. I lost a total of fifteen pounds in my three weeks at Outward Bound. By the time we left I was a lean mean machine and was probably the fittest I have ever been in my life. 

Our team leader counting out nuts and raisins
under the eagle eye of the team. 

One of the things we got used to in the mountains was that there were streams and ponds around every corner. Water supply was never an issue, so we got pretty relaxed about even bothering to fill up our water bottles. The grand finale of Outward Bound was when we were sent out on our own as a team of eight, minus Rick for a final four day trek on a route of our choosing through the mountains. We had to plan our route and notify Rick and Bill Bailey of our plans, so they knew where we should be at any point in time. We decided that part of our trip would take us down into the Lowveld across the border into Mozambique. We hadn’t explored any of that area so far and were curious to do so. Bill Bailey must have had a good chuckle at the thought of what we were about to experience.

We followed this mountain ridge down to the lowveld
in the background - our last sighting of water
for quite a while. 

We set out and headed for the Lowveld as per our plan. As usual we didn’t bother to keep our water topped up as we knew we could find it at any time we chose. We made it down to the bottom of the mountains and into Mozambique and then realized rather late, that suddenly the water had all dried up and we were not finding streams around every corner as we had in the mountains. We had no choice but to keep walking trusting that eventually we’d find a stream or a village where they would have water. We eventually found a village and we asked them to show us where we could find water. They were very helpful and took us to a little muddy pool which was filled with green algae and all kinds of unpalatable sludge. By this time we were desperate for water, but not that desperate. We decided to tough it out and took ourselves to bed in the bush all feeling very thirsty. We had no tents or shelter just a small canvas sheet each in case it should rain. We were woken in the early hours with a mighty downpour drenching us and our sleeping bags. We were out in the open with no shelter. We tried collecting some of the rain in our pots and pans without much success and eventually sat in the rain bedraggled, thirsty and miserable. Eventually we were so desperate for water, we sent a couple of guys back to the slimy water hole and filled a couple of pots, made a fire, boiled the sludge and drank it. Not being able to see what we were drinking helped. To my knowledge we all survived ingesting the sludge without causing any major illness – amazing really. Our misery was just beginning.

This was the "raging torrent" that we took so
many pains to cross over with such great care. 

We had been thoroughly warned by Bill Bailey that we had to be aware of how quickly small streams could become raging torrents and how dangerous it could be to try and cross. We had been given very specific training in how to cross a river in flood and were carrying with us the ropes we might need. We had just survived a gigantic downpour and could see from our map that we had a reasonable size stream to cross up ahead of us. We looked up the mountain and noticed that what had been a trickle of a very high waterfall the day before had become a raging torrent pouring down the mountainside today due to the overnight thunderstorm. Our map reading told us this was the stream we had to cross. We knew we were in trouble as if we could not cross the river we were cut off from our route and would have to return the way we had come, facing another day without water. We pressed on to see how bad the river crossing might be. We found in fact a raging torrent moving very fast. We swung into action, tying a rope around the waist of our best swimmer. He dived in and swam like crazy to make it across to the other side to fasten the rope to a tree so that the rest of us would have a safety line. Pretty soon we were taking it in turns to cross the river dragging ourselves along the safety rope and trying to keep our backpacks and sleeping bags out of the water. About half way through the process one of the guys slipped off the rope and plunged into the water. By accident he put his feet down and found to all of our surprise that the raging torrent was only a couple of feet deep. With that newfound knowledge the rest of us were able to comfortably walk across the life threatening torrent with ease. We felt a bit sheepish to say the least.

Our planned route that day took us back up the mountainside. What we had not counted on was that we were in completely virgin bush. It was thick, thorny and entangling. What should have been a relatively easy scramble back up the mountain had turned into a nightmare as we forced our way uphill through impenetrable bush suffering scratches and scrapes all the way. Bill Bailey hadn’t mentioned we might hit this obstacle, but he was in the business of toughening us up. He wasn’t interested in any sob stories about thick bush and no water. We had to figure out how to survive. We ended our day at about 6pm about halfway up the mountain, having found a cave which promised shelter against any potential downpours. We climbed into our sleeping bags and slept till seven the next morning.

View of the lowveld from the top. 

 The next day we woke much refreshed and re-energized. Progress was much the same as the previous day but this time we had planned our overnight stop where we had visited before on an earlier walkabout. We knew we would find water and we began to relax. We had avoided disaster. What I hadn’t realized was that I was about to spend the most uncomfortable night of my life. I had found a nice rock overhang to take shelter under from any rain. I had taken the extra precaution of slipping my sleeping bag into a large plastic bag to give me extra rain protection. What I hadn’t considered is that water flows downhill and unless a rock overhang is completely flat water will run down it and eventually find anyone sheltering underneath it. Well a steady rain began to fall in the middle of the night and it wasn’t long before I could feel water beginning to make its way into my sleeping bag filling it up from the feet upwards towards my chest. It was completely dark and there was no remedy to my situation. I spent the rest of the night sleeping in a plastic bag of water. Never have I longed for the dawn so much as I did that night.

The next day was our final day and we were to make our way back to base. We knew where we were, having visited our overnight spot on a previous hike. So we were looking forward to an easy hike back to our base, a nice warm shower and a cooked meal. What we hadn’t foreseen was that we woke up to an intense deep fog which reduced visibility to a few yards. We could barely see the guy on the path in front of us. Suddenly we could no longer navigate by memory of the path and the mountains around us. Now we really had to read the map, orientate ourselves with the compass and make sure we wouldn’t be walking ourselves off the side of a mountain somewhere. We managed to avoid any of these sorts of disasters and by mid-morning the heat had burned off the fog and we could see where we were going and base camp was in our sights. We nearly died of a heart attack as we made our way home. Bill Bailey appeared from behind a rock to check up on us and see how we were doing. He was full of surprises that guy. 

On our second last day at Outward Bound we had our final morning run. It was a race and part of our final marks for our team competition. I couldn’t let my side down. I had steadily improved in my fitness level and on the final run I came in somewhere in the top half of a group of super fit guys, so felt duly satisfied. I had survived all of the rigors they had tested us with and my final run was just the cherry on the top. My memory tells me that our team won the competition that year but perhaps we came second. I just know that I felt very good about myself and my team. Bill Bailey had succeeded in toughening me up and reversing some of the physical decline I had allowed myself to slip into after a year out of the disciplined life of Falcon College. My running prowess was now to be tested in a most interesting way as I headed to university at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) in Johannesburg.  

The winning team - Rob on right in back row.
 By the end of three weeks of blood sweat and tears we were a tightly knit band of brothers. 

I arrived at my residence which was called Ernest Oppenheimer Hall (EOH) to be greeted by a welcoming committee of senior residents. They very quickly showed us our rooms and then we had to report for an orientation meeting as to how things were going to be for us as newcomers who needed to be properly “initiated”. Initiation was to last for four weeks and during it we were to be subjected to all manner of indignities and humiliations. Having said that initiation actually fulfilled a very valuable role of building friendship and camaraderie amongst our fellow sufferers. It also helped us to meet a bunch of girls from the girl’s residences who we would have had no way of meeting in any other way.

Ernest Oppenheimer Hall - my home at Wits for six months in 1971

 An obligatory part of initiation was a daily early morning training run. We were never told what the purpose was but I had an inside track on that and my friend Doug Fraser and I had a scheme up our sleeves. Doug Fraser was a friend from Luanshya, another copper mining town not too far from Kitwe. He was in second year at Wits and happened to be staying in EOH. He had been through initiation the year before so he knew the ropes and he had an idea for scamming the system. What he told me, but none of the other first years knew, was that three of the training runs were going to be timed, and, based on their average time to complete the distance, the first year’s would be handicapped as to how fast we ran. There would be a grand finale race at the end of our initiation which would be run like a horse race. Seniors in the residence would “bid on and buy” the various first years who would then run in the race based on their handicap and the winner would take the prize money at the end. Doug primed me that during the training runs I should come in stone last each time. I would cough, wheeze and walk. By the end of the month everyone would know that Rob Cornish was a useless runner. Bear in mind that I was fresh out of Outward Bound and had never been fitter in my life. So, as instructed I acted the lame duck for a month, thereby earning the easiest handicap and the right to start the final race about five minutes ahead of the next group of “slow” runners. Doug made sure that he bid on and bought me. On the day of the grand finale race at the starting gun I took off like a bat out of hell and ran my heart out. I never even saw another runner, I just breezed in in first place and Doug and I walked away with the prize money.

After  three weeks at Outward
Bound I was a running machine

When the end of initiation did come, we ended up going out with the senior’s organizing committee to toast us all having made it through. Of course it turned into quite a party. I vividly remember the chairman of the committee whose name was Johan. We decided to mix him up a drink which would “thank him” for all the effort he had put into initiating us. The drink was a large beer glass filled with a variety of spirits and was bright green in color. Johan was challenged to stand up on a table and drink it down in one shot, which he duly did. He manfully performed his task, smiled, put the drink down and collapsed in a heap on the table much to our delight.

Having completed initiation we were now expected to get down to the serious business of learning. I was rusty from not having been at school for a year. I was not very motivated. I was suffering from a restlessness which was eating at me. I was beginning to wrestle with mathematics and a variety of other things, none of which turned my crank one iota. At university one can always find folks to party with and I found myself spending more time doing that than sitting at my desk. I began to fall behind and not too much later the Dean of the residence called me in and tore a strip off me, pointing out that, based on my school marks,  I should be excelling, not failing as I was. I promised to do better, but nothing seemed to lift me out of the malaise I had settled into. Life was starting to get serious and I was finding I did not have the internal wherewithal to live up to it. At one point towards our mid- year break I noticed that the local Methodist church was running a mission week and I decided to pop down and see what it was about. Something in me was stirring, but I didn’t know what. The preacher really tugged at my heartstrings and the next thing I found myself downstairs in the church basement being “counselled” about following Jesus. This was not part of my plan and I fled that place hoping I’d never hear from them again. I seemed to have fallen into a deep despair. I remember the mid-year mathematics exam. I sat down to write the exam, wrote my name on the top of the page and then just couldn’t face doing it. I got up and walked out. I somehow scored 4% on that exam. I guess the marker liked the handwriting of my name.

University of Witwatersrand - Main Campus

By the mid-year break I returned to Zambia for a month of vacation. I knew that I would never be able to pass my year at Wits. I told Dad that I didn’t want to carry on and that I couldn’t see myself ever being an engineer. Dad had no sympathy. His response was “you are going to finish this year”. I agreed to go back and try. When I got back to EOH I tried for a couple of weeks and then I just made the decision that I knew in my heart was true and that was that I was not going to be able to complete the year. I decided to drop out and find something else to do. I found a job at a residential hotel in Roodepoort, the town of my birth, which offered me board and lodging in return for working in their pub each evening. This suited me down to the ground. I then found a day job working for a small accounting firm in Johannesburg, which paid me enough to save some money each month. I didn’t tell anyone from my family what I had done. I pretended to still be at university. Neville, who was now qualified and working in Johannesburg continued to send me monthly allowance on behalf of Mom and Dad and I did nothing to discourage him.

This new phase of my life proved to be interesting and I went through a fast learning curve. The hotel was run by Willie Smith an ex professional boxer. I learnt about the daily regulars who would come into the pub after work and play dominoes or just drink until closing time. Willie showed me how to pour the cheap brandy into a brandy and coke and charge for the expensive brandy that had been ordered. On more than one occasion Willie Smith threw out a couple of troublemakers using his tough man boxing skills. He was a force to be reckoned with. I would give the waiters free drinks and they would give me “zolls”, a stick of dagga or marijuana as it was known in those days. I tried smoking dagga a few times but for some reason it never seemed to have any impact on me. I must have been doing it wrong. I think the Lord was protecting me because I could have easily been sucked into the drug culture world of the day.

Accounting had more appeal to me than Engineering

At the accounting firm, I found that I enjoyed the work I did. The orderliness of the numbers appealed to me. There was an interesting group of young guys working there. They seemed to spend most of their weekends at their girlfriend’s farm near Hartebeespoort Dam. There were three or four Afrikaans sisters, living on the farm, and soon I was invited out there to meet the other sisters. It wasn’t long before I hit it off with the third daughter, Edna, who was a tender 15 years old to my nineteen. So I became part of the weekly gang to go out and visit the farm. In those days Afrikaners and English people didn’t hit it off too well, so this arrangement was a bit unusual. I was still living and looking like a hippie. I had beads around my neck and a mop of long unruly hair. The old Afrikaans grandfather would spend the weekends scowling at me as I flirted with Edna. He would beckon me over and reach into his pocket and pull out fifty cents and then in Afrikaans he would say “go and get a haircut”. I used to think this was hilarious and I think eventually he quite enjoyed having me around. He couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Afrikaans but we had reached an understanding.

One weekend on my way to the farm in my little Anglia, the car broke down. I managed to get a tow to the farm, but was then stuck with no way of getting the car home and to civilization. I was forced to call Nev and ask him to come and tow me home. Nev, to his credit came and hooked me up to his car and proceeded to tow me the hour or so back to his house averaging about 70 mph it seemed as I steered and worked the brakes on the Anglia to keep it from riding into the back of his car. Nev somehow managed to restrain his curiosity until we got to his place, but then I had to come clean and explain how I happened to be out at the farm, and my current work and living arrangements. I knew the time would have had to have come, but had done my best to avoid the moment of truth.

Anglia's - not all that beautiful, but
were Ford's workhorse of the day. 

Once the news was out some decisions needed to be made about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I had felt comfortable with the accounting work I had been doing and reasoned that getting a business/accounting degree would be a good way to deal with my lack of specific direction  as it was general enough to give me lots of choices down the line. I returned to Zambia over the Christmas break, having pulled the plug on Willie Smith, the accounting firm, Edna and the grumpy old Afrikaaner granddad. I applied to the University of Natal, Durban campus (UND), where Al was doing Civil Engineering, to do a B.Com and was accepted. Phil Hodgson was also at UND. I think my folks were just glad that I was still going to university and they probably figured that having Al and Phil around would be a stabilizing influence on me. I wasn’t very proud of having frittered away two years of my life post Falcon. My feeling of “lostness” was still there in the background but I felt relieved to be off of the engineering hook – that had been a big mistake, and I was ready to knuckle down and do the necessary to get my business degree. I had managed to save enough money for a year’s worth of fees plus a bit, I felt bad that Mom and Dad had been keeping me for two years since Falcon College, so I told them that from here on I would pay my own way. They accepted that offer quite gladly and I was set for the next part of my “finding myself” adventure.