CHRIS BENNETT found quite a surprise in a recent edition of this newspaper.
AMONG the many excellent essays written for the South Coast Herald over recent years, the one on reflections of the
I was about thirty in 1970 and at the height of what, essentially, has been a very enjoyable and rewarding career as a journalist, mostly in radio and newspapers, but with the occasional dip into the delightful shallows of the magazine world and even an adventurous jump into the deep end of the murky waters of television.
Lea Jacobs in her lovely piece captured the fragile atmosphere of the time. Both the politically curious nature of our world in those days and the more complex and disturbing indication of the relatively low cost of living, were most revealing.
I used to glibly dismiss such comparisons as rather silly, even childish. No more.
Jacobs’s article reflected some interesting prices, as they usually do, but only on examining her research did I realise the weightiness of the point she was making, albeit more in jest than anger. The car prices seemed like a joke.
Around 1974 I was living in what was then a charming suburb of
I often walked down to the bottom of the hill and Commissioner Street where the SABC studios were situated, as they had been since the heady days of the likes of René Caprara and Gladys Dixon; who, indeed?
On the way down to the studios I passed a large motor firm (Barlow Motors?), with spanking new showrooms with shining widows displaying, usually parked on carpeting with a sort of funereal reverence, new cars from BMC. Or it may even have metamorphosed by then into the disastrous British Leyland, arguably the biggest failure in industrial history, comparable only with the Comrade Petrushka Ivanova People’s Tractor Parts Factory in
But I digress; one can in a column because it helps with centimetres.
One morning I pressed my youthful thirty-something nose into the plate glass and sighed, looking with ill-concealed longing at a bright red Mini. It was so, so beautiful; and so, so much money as to beyond my wildest moments of sobriety. It cost R1 900. New; out of the box, licensed and ready to go.
I fled, of course.
My salary in those days was about R234, from which there were things like rent, food, wine, laundry, wine, clothes and so on to provide, not to mention the pension (eventually screwed up) and medical aid (ditto); and don’t even think about the wine.
When I see the fiscal rape of my country today I harbour no anger, but rather a lot of sorrow and not a little shame.
Reading Lea’s column made me realise that things really were cheaper then. Nowadays we can afford little, and when I went into town the other day I noticed they had repossessed my bank.
Rumours that the new one will be in the shape of a pagoda are, I am told, completely unfounded and a scurrilous lie.
Well, they would be, wouldn’t they?
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