My history master punted me as the star student of my final year at Pretoria Boys High. But he was a better rugby coach than a history teacher. Though I loved the subject, and still do, I was lazy and indifferent about all exams, and scared, and I got only a C, so he didn’t score from me.
Why am I slipping into rugby metaphors? I was lousy at the game, never doing better than a couple of matches in the under-16 Bs, getting my ears crunched in the front row. In cricket, my bowling, batting and fielding were embarrassing. I managed to make the house teams occasionally, in swimming and tennis.
All these things mattered terribly to sense of self, especially to a schoolboy boarder in (white) South Africa, who couldn’t escape compulsory regular team activity in everything from long distance running to cadets. How fortunate we were, most boys starved of good facilities would say today. I know what they mean.
All my boarding school days, from the age of six and a half, in physical things I would try to adjust, to fit in, somewhere in the middle, so as not to be noticed. I didn’t have the spirit to be a rebel and give myself a hard time, nor the sense of opportunity and space, nor the stamina to defy norms, to lose myself in books or music or films.
Sometimes I would break out, into writing and editing, acting and singing. At age ten, I filled an exercise book with a handwritten story about a boy in Australia, my grandmother’s birthplace, which I fantasized into detailed narrative. In my final years, in primary school, later in high school, I edited the school magazines. At prep school, Waterkloof House, called Ruddles, age 10 or 11, I would grab a stick and a cape and leap on to the school hall stage, and muster a few boys to join me in a swashbuckling impromptu play that sometimes amused the wandering snotty, scuffed-kneed khaki masses on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I loved English literature classes, even grammar ones, where our Welsh teacher would make us repeatedly chant our relative pronouns – ‘who, whom, which and that’ – with desktop-banging accompaniment that had the class erupting in a war dance.
The only prizes I ever won were for elocution. I took featured parts in prep school plays. After one full dress performance in which I acted my heart out in front of parents and special guests, one of the mothers sailed up to my mother and exclaimed: ‘My dear, you should send him to RADA.’
‘Bloody stupid woman,’ said my mother to me later, with the vehemence and self-absorbed bitterness of a not long divorced wife, abandoned to a lower status, ‘How does she think I could afford RADA!’
At high school I sang my heart out in the female leads of several Gilbert and Sullivans. As (1) Iolanthe, one of the most difficult singing roles, I was always scared of going horribly flat as I launched into the sudden key-changing aria: ‘My lord, a suppliant at your feet, I kneel…’ And I braced myself for the sudden skid, assailing the ears of an assembly hall full of parents as I screeched off the true note. Some Pretoria Girls High pianist or violinist in the orchestra pit – for whom I, the deprived if not depraved single-sex school boarder, had developed a secret crush, behind my disguise of skirt, stockings and sandals – would try to pound or to bow me back on key.
As Patience, the sweet innocent abroad among the Wildean lampoon figures, I would launch into a song that risked serious audience wince each time the high-note ‘I’ was sung: ‘For I am bright, and I am gay, while they sit sighing night and day.’
It was when they tried to force me into the fourth successive G&S female starring role that I pretended my voice was breaking, to break the mould of gender type-casting. Oddly enough, though I quite liked the feel of nylon tights over and between my legs, it was not me, among my brothers, but my elder brother David – cricket team colours, head prefect, Wits and London University tennis champion, harris-tweeded maths genius – who later, in the flowering of San Francisco 1960s and 1970s culture, became a cross-dresser. In this he was by no means furtive or gay, or camp, but a proud campaigner for men wearing ‘skerts.’And high heels and lipstick, and soft blouses…He talked up his ideas nationwide, as a guest on Johnny Carson and then on the Phil Donahue show.
As a first-year BA student I joined the dramatic society at Witwatersrand University, hoping they would overlook my big ears and gawky body language and let me indulge my love of declaiming, like Olivier in Henry V, Richard III and Hamlet, or Richard Burton in Under Milk Wood, or Dylan Thomas himself in his poetry readings ‘…woodenly booming along like a carved bee’ – each and all of whom I had on 78s or LPs, played over and over for years.
But the only speaking part I ever got was as a courtier in ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, that pre-Shakespearean murder-fest. My only line, as I came upon a stage littered with writhing poisoned bodies, was: ‘O sad disaster! How comes this?’
Never was actor faced with a line easier to bring the house down in roars of laughter, or more difficult to declaim in convincingly tragic mode. Gritting my teeth, I tried a new way every night, until I gave up, and settled for comic relief.
That was the end of my theatre career, but that play and another marked the beginning of a fellow bit-parter’s career, an actress named Janet Suzman.
Those were the plays that I could peek through the curtains and feast my eyes on a petite, slim-waisted, blue-eyed, wide-smiling girl with her warm brown hair in swirls on her forehead, in a slightly shimmering blue-grey shirt-waist dress sewn with pearl droplets, and soft flat shoes, showing the audience to their seats.
Between those two plays Eve Steinhardt, as it happens Janet’s best friend, became mine, mine, all mine, and she still is, after almost 60 years, three sons and ten grandchildren – and a busy career of her own that has taken her around the developing world, me often following, over decades. As a pioneer 1960s feminist, she would indulge me now, talking of her as ‘mine’.
--------------
Dad on the scooter, Mom looking at him, in Sophiatown 1956.
As a boy I was always the middling one, between an older and a younger brother, each of whom were more achieving than me at school, in class and in sport. My mother, in her eighties before she died, in a rush of warmth for the long-exiled son returned, paid me the double-edged compliment: ‘You were always my favourite – you never gave any trouble.’
I was the observer, the adjuster. From my schoolroom and student days, through my working life, I stayed able to dream, to get to know and to feel strongly about many, many things, without trying to find a place to shoulder my way in to be noticed, or take the lead; nor to make use of my awareness, beyond writing about those things; to keep a soft focus on reality, to keep expectation alive. But fatally, like my golf swing, even when I had hit the target, punched the sweet spot, not to follow through fully. But mine remained the joy of learning and of knowing, to make patterns for myself out of histories and events in many places, to take sides, and to express my feelings in rants, raves and rhetoric.
In the early 1980s I wrote a cover story for a London-based magazine about Turkey which an American journalist praised in a special telex message as ‘a textbook example of objective journalism’. It was sincerely meant, but awkwardly received, because objective journalism is one thing I don’t believe exists. As Colin Legum once said to me in an interview for my newspaper, and which we made the headline: ‘There’s no such thing…’
In 1976 I came back with a report for an earlier London-based newsmagazine about Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel which my editor Jim Higgins talked up to our publisher, Salim el-Lozi, as a good piece for the cover. Jim came back to act out Lozi’s reaction in delighted detail. Lozi, a well-known Middle East journalist, and hardboiled news broker, was sceptical. ‘Zat man Hall’, he said in his Lebanese-French-Arabic accent, with a dismissive wave, ‘he is…Amateur!’
A few years later, in those raging civil war days, Lozi’s body was found, dumped in the bush alongside a Beirut road. His hands and forearms had been dipped in acid, up to the elbows. He had been seen a couple of days earlier, being stopped at a Syrian-manned roadblock. He had offended the occupiers once too often.
And I lived on as…Amateur. It’s a title I have earned, by avoiding two qualities most working people are proud of, but which can get in the way of living, learning and knowing. They are: being driven by ambition, and being proudly professional.
My working life as a journalist stretched over more than 50 years, based in seven cities, including Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Delhi, Bombay, Mogadishu and Addis Ababa, and roaming in many more countries, as a reporter, feature writer, development correspondent and press officer, UN information officer, and magazine editor. I was, over the years, an indifferent daily news reporter, and news editor, poor daily news subeditor, good feature and leader writer, very good newsmagazine production editor, editor and publisher.
-------------
My social, cultural, political education got properly under way when I was given an airmail subscription to The Observer, when I was 17. It arrived in Johannesburg from London each week about a week late, but eagerly received and pored through. Ah those days, fecund with culture, pregnant with change, presided over by establishment liberals under David Astor, of Kenneth Tynan on theatre, of Look Back in Anger, and the coming Royal Court, of Jacquetta Hawkes, Harold Nicolson
By Dad Tony Hall
(1) There is a phtograph of Dad as Iolanthe looking quite vivacious. I wish I had a scanner.
Why am I slipping into rugby metaphors? I was lousy at the game, never doing better than a couple of matches in the under-16 Bs, getting my ears crunched in the front row. In cricket, my bowling, batting and fielding were embarrassing. I managed to make the house teams occasionally, in swimming and tennis.
All these things mattered terribly to sense of self, especially to a schoolboy boarder in (white) South Africa, who couldn’t escape compulsory regular team activity in everything from long distance running to cadets. How fortunate we were, most boys starved of good facilities would say today. I know what they mean.
All my boarding school days, from the age of six and a half, in physical things I would try to adjust, to fit in, somewhere in the middle, so as not to be noticed. I didn’t have the spirit to be a rebel and give myself a hard time, nor the sense of opportunity and space, nor the stamina to defy norms, to lose myself in books or music or films.
Sometimes I would break out, into writing and editing, acting and singing. At age ten, I filled an exercise book with a handwritten story about a boy in Australia, my grandmother’s birthplace, which I fantasized into detailed narrative. In my final years, in primary school, later in high school, I edited the school magazines. At prep school, Waterkloof House, called Ruddles, age 10 or 11, I would grab a stick and a cape and leap on to the school hall stage, and muster a few boys to join me in a swashbuckling impromptu play that sometimes amused the wandering snotty, scuffed-kneed khaki masses on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I loved English literature classes, even grammar ones, where our Welsh teacher would make us repeatedly chant our relative pronouns – ‘who, whom, which and that’ – with desktop-banging accompaniment that had the class erupting in a war dance.
The only prizes I ever won were for elocution. I took featured parts in prep school plays. After one full dress performance in which I acted my heart out in front of parents and special guests, one of the mothers sailed up to my mother and exclaimed: ‘My dear, you should send him to RADA.’
‘Bloody stupid woman,’ said my mother to me later, with the vehemence and self-absorbed bitterness of a not long divorced wife, abandoned to a lower status, ‘How does she think I could afford RADA!’
At high school I sang my heart out in the female leads of several Gilbert and Sullivans. As (1) Iolanthe, one of the most difficult singing roles, I was always scared of going horribly flat as I launched into the sudden key-changing aria: ‘My lord, a suppliant at your feet, I kneel…’ And I braced myself for the sudden skid, assailing the ears of an assembly hall full of parents as I screeched off the true note. Some Pretoria Girls High pianist or violinist in the orchestra pit – for whom I, the deprived if not depraved single-sex school boarder, had developed a secret crush, behind my disguise of skirt, stockings and sandals – would try to pound or to bow me back on key.
As Patience, the sweet innocent abroad among the Wildean lampoon figures, I would launch into a song that risked serious audience wince each time the high-note ‘I’ was sung: ‘For I am bright, and I am gay, while they sit sighing night and day.’
It was when they tried to force me into the fourth successive G&S female starring role that I pretended my voice was breaking, to break the mould of gender type-casting. Oddly enough, though I quite liked the feel of nylon tights over and between my legs, it was not me, among my brothers, but my elder brother David – cricket team colours, head prefect, Wits and London University tennis champion, harris-tweeded maths genius – who later, in the flowering of San Francisco 1960s and 1970s culture, became a cross-dresser. In this he was by no means furtive or gay, or camp, but a proud campaigner for men wearing ‘skerts.’And high heels and lipstick, and soft blouses…He talked up his ideas nationwide, as a guest on Johnny Carson and then on the Phil Donahue show.
As a first-year BA student I joined the dramatic society at Witwatersrand University, hoping they would overlook my big ears and gawky body language and let me indulge my love of declaiming, like Olivier in Henry V, Richard III and Hamlet, or Richard Burton in Under Milk Wood, or Dylan Thomas himself in his poetry readings ‘…woodenly booming along like a carved bee’ – each and all of whom I had on 78s or LPs, played over and over for years.
But the only speaking part I ever got was as a courtier in ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, that pre-Shakespearean murder-fest. My only line, as I came upon a stage littered with writhing poisoned bodies, was: ‘O sad disaster! How comes this?’
Never was actor faced with a line easier to bring the house down in roars of laughter, or more difficult to declaim in convincingly tragic mode. Gritting my teeth, I tried a new way every night, until I gave up, and settled for comic relief.
That was the end of my theatre career, but that play and another marked the beginning of a fellow bit-parter’s career, an actress named Janet Suzman.
Those were the plays that I could peek through the curtains and feast my eyes on a petite, slim-waisted, blue-eyed, wide-smiling girl with her warm brown hair in swirls on her forehead, in a slightly shimmering blue-grey shirt-waist dress sewn with pearl droplets, and soft flat shoes, showing the audience to their seats.
Between those two plays Eve Steinhardt, as it happens Janet’s best friend, became mine, mine, all mine, and she still is, after almost 60 years, three sons and ten grandchildren – and a busy career of her own that has taken her around the developing world, me often following, over decades. As a pioneer 1960s feminist, she would indulge me now, talking of her as ‘mine’.
--------------
As a boy I was always the middling one, between an older and a younger brother, each of whom were more achieving than me at school, in class and in sport. My mother, in her eighties before she died, in a rush of warmth for the long-exiled son returned, paid me the double-edged compliment: ‘You were always my favourite – you never gave any trouble.’
I was the observer, the adjuster. From my schoolroom and student days, through my working life, I stayed able to dream, to get to know and to feel strongly about many, many things, without trying to find a place to shoulder my way in to be noticed, or take the lead; nor to make use of my awareness, beyond writing about those things; to keep a soft focus on reality, to keep expectation alive. But fatally, like my golf swing, even when I had hit the target, punched the sweet spot, not to follow through fully. But mine remained the joy of learning and of knowing, to make patterns for myself out of histories and events in many places, to take sides, and to express my feelings in rants, raves and rhetoric.
In the early 1980s I wrote a cover story for a London-based magazine about Turkey which an American journalist praised in a special telex message as ‘a textbook example of objective journalism’. It was sincerely meant, but awkwardly received, because objective journalism is one thing I don’t believe exists. As Colin Legum once said to me in an interview for my newspaper, and which we made the headline: ‘There’s no such thing…’
In 1976 I came back with a report for an earlier London-based newsmagazine about Anwar Sadat’s visit to Israel which my editor Jim Higgins talked up to our publisher, Salim el-Lozi, as a good piece for the cover. Jim came back to act out Lozi’s reaction in delighted detail. Lozi, a well-known Middle East journalist, and hardboiled news broker, was sceptical. ‘Zat man Hall’, he said in his Lebanese-French-Arabic accent, with a dismissive wave, ‘he is…Amateur!’
A few years later, in those raging civil war days, Lozi’s body was found, dumped in the bush alongside a Beirut road. His hands and forearms had been dipped in acid, up to the elbows. He had been seen a couple of days earlier, being stopped at a Syrian-manned roadblock. He had offended the occupiers once too often.
And I lived on as…Amateur. It’s a title I have earned, by avoiding two qualities most working people are proud of, but which can get in the way of living, learning and knowing. They are: being driven by ambition, and being proudly professional.
My working life as a journalist stretched over more than 50 years, based in seven cities, including Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Delhi, Bombay, Mogadishu and Addis Ababa, and roaming in many more countries, as a reporter, feature writer, development correspondent and press officer, UN information officer, and magazine editor. I was, over the years, an indifferent daily news reporter, and news editor, poor daily news subeditor, good feature and leader writer, very good newsmagazine production editor, editor and publisher.
-------------
My social, cultural, political education got properly under way when I was given an airmail subscription to The Observer, when I was 17. It arrived in Johannesburg from London each week about a week late, but eagerly received and pored through. Ah those days, fecund with culture, pregnant with change, presided over by establishment liberals under David Astor, of Kenneth Tynan on theatre, of Look Back in Anger, and the coming Royal Court, of Jacquetta Hawkes, Harold Nicolson
By Dad Tony Hall
(1) There is a phtograph of Dad as Iolanthe looking quite vivacious. I wish I had a scanner.
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