Like small villages our lives are often centered around a well. For many it is a well of great regrets, sadnesses. For things left unsaid or said. For lives left unled.
Maori have believe in monsters ? they call them taniwha. There is a taniwha that lives in my well of great regrets. It is the fact that I grew up in a hoe with a father who had no capacity to build a bridge towards his son.
He was, a distinguished man. A remarkable intellect, a man of great taste. He read prolifically. Listened to truly progressive music. There was no doubt as to his political morality.
But he was a man afraid. Afraid more than anything of disturbing the veneer of propriety in which he had sculpted his life. With the only exception of his undying love and trust of my mother he had no capacity to show love nor emotion.
It may be that one could never really understand the fear of becoming a disposed person ? of seeing his father leave his homeland under threat. Of seeing his family lose their possessions.
It became clear over time, throughout life that he was a man haunted by the fear of loss. By the prospect of pogrom (a pogrom of the imagination).
My father was a man of great eccentricity.
David Ogilvy, a famous advertising man for whom I once worked said that one should develop one?s eccentricities when one is young. For if you do it when you are old, they?ll think you mad.
My father was a man of famous eccentricity developed from a very young age.
From the early morning rituals of cleaning, exercise, the perfectly diced grapefruit. Always begun before dawn, he had left for work before any of the household had stirred.
Through to his later years where even the chaos of a Franklin?s store, was perfectly mapped in the laid out shopping list he used(not even Franklins themselves knew their own store that well).
Or the Sunday morning pageant of suntanning in the back lawn of our home in Senderwood. Laden with a deck of unread New Yorkers, his well worn hat and that obsessive little slip of paper on his upper lip to prevent skin cancer. Like Jacques Tati, he would don his elegant homburg and drive to work each morning in his tiny Simca. The fact is that he would never ever allow himself to enjoy the fruits of his hard labour. Certainly not by way of owning fancy things. His was a world of small cars and library books. He never allowed himself the comfort of self respect. In the words of Mencken that was simply the secure feeling that no one was as yet, suspicious.
I loved the carbolic smell of Lifebuoy that permeated the house after the ritual tanning and the tiny tub each Sunday of Bulgarian yoghurt.
For me as a young boy growing up at that time, it was as if the world stood permanently still and could never be disturbed from its perfect routines.
He would disappear into his study. For hour upon hour. Each night, each weekend. Kept company by an obscure piece of Jazz or a client (most of whom were called Sam). In the end we named our Fox Terrier Sammy so that we could irritate the visiting clients and we whistled for the dog to come.
He was an ascetic man. His last vice ended many, many years ago when he stopped smoking his pipe. After that, we really did run out of ideas of what to buy him for his birthdays.
His greatest loves was for the Turner room at the Tate Gallery. For the writings of HL Mencken and EB White. For the music of John Lewis and Bill Evans, Nina Simone and Mahalia Jackson. For the abstractions of his old art friends Ronnie Milchreest and Lionel Abrams.
But he was neither a kind nor a loving man. He could reach out to anyone except on his own terms.
At age 10 a kind teacher wrote in a school report of mine ?Just William? ? an allusion to the stories of a naughty child. And however innocent the intention behind that note might have been, the consequences were harsh and unforgiving.
As summer came around my mother and sister prepared to go on holiday. I was to stay home. Each day, I was given a set of tasks to undertake. A page to write in a n italic style which I use to this day. Each letter had to be perfect. And a series of assignments from a book on calculus. At nights in an atmosphere of terror and anger, provoked by my whimpering more often than not, he checked my work and marked my legs with a rule.
A cousin took pity and helped me each day but it left an indelible mark.
There were moments, rare fleeting ones when he would try and reach out across the divide he created. The books of my ascendancy into adulthood were his books. He took me to the Victory cinema. It was a splendid occasion ? I was 12 and we were to see Jazz on a Summers day. It is a recounting of the annual Newport festival shot in 1958. Today it is a movie I cherish. As a boy I had no capacity to recognise its beauty or comprehend the richness of its music. It must have hurt him terribly that I could show no enthusiasm for what he believed was a cornerstone masterpiece that defined so much of his life in art and music.
There is one picture of him as a young man. Striding the streets of Johannesburg, Debonair. Pipe placed firmly between his teeth. A man who knew he was destined to succeed and with the obvious clear determination to do so. There was little that he could not do if he set his mind to it.
In 1971 he, as the head of a leading firm of accountants took up computer science. He was turning 50. It was the first class of its nature at the university. He was by far the oldest man in his class and you took it for granted that he would be the best in his class, which he duly was.
And by the mid-1970?s he had determined that this promised land in which he had come to live held only the promise of fear. He could hear the Cossacks on the move once more.
In the space of three months, he had decided to leave, to give up his lucrative life, to start again in another promised land. The decision, once taken was enacted with immediate and absolute singularity of purpose.
He started ignominiously as a worker in an accounting firm in Australia where they had no understanding of his accomplishments. But by the time of his death he was known to be a leader in his field of work.
Yet still my father never reveled in any accomplishment.
I was the head of the largest advertising agency in the country. And he would still talk to my wife about having me go back to university. It was, he said, the only thing, they could not take away from you. ?They?? The Cossacks, I imagine.
At the age of 81 ? with my mother away, something finally gave way.
The master of the universe was losing his grip. Perhaps it was a series of small clots in the brain, or perhaps it was simply the pressure of having to be a master for so long.
But his end was as fitting as his life. For once again, even though he was racked by immense fears, even though his taniwha had all started to emerge from the well, he would not allow them to take control.
He spent time at the local library in research.
And on the 4th of February 2005, he went to bed one night, put a bag over his head and died in his sleep.
It is fitting really that he would die as obsessively as he lived. I would have wished for a life more ordinary with him.