New Heavens

by Boris Senior

  The farm was basic, without electricity. We made do with Primus stoves for cooking, and the kerosene lamps at night lent a cozy atmosphere to the rondavel. Meals were simple. A profusion of salads, vegetables, and white cheese made by my mother by hanging cloth bags of sour cream on a tree, from which we could see the whey dripping. My mother loved the simplicity of life at the farm and refused to introduce modern gadgets. Even our water was drawn from the dam nearby and carried to the rondavels.

  Our relatives eventually decided that life on a farm in South Africa was not for them and left Doornbosfontein for the city. My father arranged with various tenant farmers to live in and run the farm. They lived in the big house with their families while we kept the rondavels for weekends and vacations. The farmers were mostly Afrikaans, many down on their luck from drinking, and were a continual source of trouble. The black workers were more-permanent residents at the farm and lived in a village they had built at one end of the farm. They were entirely independent, provided they gave us one-third of whatever crops they grew on the land near the village. They had their own hierarchy, and their church nearby was on our land, its exterior walls gaily decorated in African fashion. I remember the great respect tinged with some fear we children accorded their old headman Oom Paul with his one blind eye.

  In the early 1930s, my father, always a keen Zionist, offered Doornbosfontein as a training farm for prospective migrants to Palestine, and there were groups of young men living there studying agriculture as part of the Hechalutz movement. It was doubtless strange for the Afrikaner farmers in the area to visit the large central rondavel, which had been turned into a dining room and lecture hall, to see the slogans about the Promised Land posted on the walls in Hebrew. Not a few of the kibbutzniks in Israel today must remember their months of training in farming at Doornbosfontein. Years later, to all our regret, the farm was sold and has since become a large cattle ranch.

  Hilton

  When I was twelve years old, I was sent to Hilton College, a boarding school 700 kilometers from Johannesburg. The train journey took a night and half a day with carriages for girls going to schools in the same area. We were all homesick and excited, and after nightfall we visited the girls’ carriages. In time, the school authorities understood what was going on during the overnight journey, and they locked the corridor leading to the girls’ carriages. That did not stop us, for we climbed out of our windows and made our way by crawling along outside the carriages to enter the girls’ side. The train was all the while hurtling through the night at high speed.

  In the morning the train continued to speed through the flat Transvaal landscape halting momentarily at dry “dorps,” where barefoot black youths, mucous dribbling from their noses, stood in the cold near the tracks with their hands stretched out begging. When the train pulled into the station at Hilton Road after lunch the following day, we traveled by car through the forests and had our first sight of the beautiful school, situated in its own estate of thousands of acres of forest and mountains with wide rivers coursing through it. The buildings were in the Cape Dutch style, snow-white with black roofs and gables at the ends of the buildings surrounded by well-tended lawns.

  Each dormitory had twenty beds, not one of which had even a shelf or night cupboard for one’s own personal belongings next to it, creating a feeling of impersonality for us. The dormitories with their iron bedsteads looked like soldiers’ barracks. Showers were communal, first thing in the morning and in the afternoon after sport. No hot water was available in the showers probably because of belief that cold showers reduce libido. It was strange to be in the shower room early on a winter morning, freezing and crowded with boys who ran one by one into the shower, gasping loudly and rubbing themselves furiously as the cold water streamed onto their sleepy bodies. Hot baths were allowed for ten minutes twice a week, strictly according to a timetable listing names and times of bathing.

  Daily routine meant rising at 0630, and after a compulsory ice-cold shower, standing in line to get a mug of cocoa and one slice of bread and jam before chapel for the morning service. As it is an Anglican school, Jews and Roman Catholics were exempted from chapel and went to the library to await the end of the service.

  On that first day, still wearing my Hilton tie, I removed my jacket and took a walk around the school. As I passed in front of the main building, a teacher beckoned me over to him and said coldly, “I think it might be preferable if you were not to walk around the school without your jacket.” That was my first encounter with the school establishment. All the hopes and expectations of the great adventure of becoming a schoolboy at Hilton gave way in an instant to a sense of feeling an outcast in a stiff and hostile environment. In general, the atmosphere at the school was suffused with a certain coldness, which probably came from the rigid English public-school rules and customs. In the first few days of my stay at Hilton, I was very homesick and had a desolate feeling when something reminded me of my home and its warmth and coziness.

  Discipline at Hilton was strict in all respects, and punishment was meted out for all transgressions. More serious overstepping of the rules meant corporal punishment. The prefects enjoyed various privileges and were allowed to cane any boy who overstepped rules. In short, discipline at the school was harsh, but there were rewards for those boys who obeyed the draconian rules.

  One of the features of Hilton was the practice of being referred to only by your surname. First names were used by one’s closest friends only. If there was more than one boy with the same name, you were given a title, which would be for example Smith Major, Minor, or Tertius. This practice is followed at English public schools, and it created for me an atmosphere of coldness and impersonality. Another rigorously followed custom of the English public school at Hilton was fagging. Any boy who had been at the school for two years became an “old poop,” which entitled him to employ any of the “new poops” to fetch and carry for him, to brush his blazer and polish his shoes.

  Morning chapel was followed by study in the classrooms, after which we had breakfast in the large dining hall. The walls were covered in wooden panels, each dedicated to the various generations of families. I noted that many of the panels contained names ranging from grandfather to father and then to son, with the dates of attendance at Hilton, in some cases extending for nearly a hundred years. Apart from the two teachers of Afrikaans, the masters were all graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, and the influence of the British Empire, at that time the paramount power in the world, pervaded the school environment. In addition to the regular syllabus, there was an emphasis on classical subjects such as Latin, which I studied for five years, and classical Greek.

  Some minor anti-Semitism existed among the boys, but it never amounted to more than a remark. The teachers never showed a hint of it. Whether by chance or by intent, there were only a handful of Jewish boys at Hilton.

  Food was wholesome and good, preceded by grace at long tables. Seating was always unchanged, each house or dormitory at its own separate table. Care was taken to ensure that whenever pork or bacon was served for meals, other meat was available for the seven or eight Jewish boys among the 230 boys at the school. Apart from the fact that we did not eat any meat originating from a pig, and did not go to chapel, there was no difference between the pupils, and no discrimination of any kind. Knowing what existed in much of “enlightened” Europe at that time, South Africa can be viewed only, though admittedly from the standpoint of a white citizen, as a haven of decency.

  Probably the complete lack of bias between the members of the white population had its roots in the need for solidarity among the whites in face of the perceived danger of being overwhelmed by the large black majority in South Africa.

  In Johannesburg, the pleasant environment for white South Africans in the 1940s belied the tensions resulting from the laws of apartheid as the whites were to a great extent shielded from the iniquities of the laws. Certainly, the fact that I was so protected from what happened in my own society during
my youth was a contributory factor to the shock I experienced when I learned after the war about the death camps of Nazi Germany, for I had experienced virtually no anti-Semitism.

  There is also a curious affinity between the Afrikaners and the Jews. Many of them see a parallel between the rebirth of Israel with its struggle for survival and their own efforts to exist as a tiny minority in a sea of blacks. There are also traces of the Calvinist belief among the original Huguenot and old Dutch settlers that their mission was to Christianize and uplift the indigenous peoples in southern Africa.

  When I left Hilton by train for the last time, I felt satisfaction at leaving school. However, the great expectations of facing the next hurdle of life were tinged with some uneasiness at leaving the safe cocoon of our protected school routine. Though we were all attached to Hilton, it was a relief to be freed of the strict discipline. I still recall the deep comradeship, which can come only from shared experiences and from living together throughout long months.

  CHAPTER THREE

  War

  WINGS PARADE

  THE news of the fall of France in June 1940 reached me one late afternoon on a gray, depressing day. After reading so much about the Allied armies and the great French commanding generals Weygand and Gamelin, I was shocked by their humiliating defeat. I began to fear that we were lost and that our seemingly known and secure world would henceforth be run by Hitler and his henchmen. It felt like the beginning of the end of life as we knew it.

  After finishing school, all I wanted to do was to join the South African Air Force, learn to fly, and get into a fighter squadron as quickly as possible. In South Africa in World War II, there was no conscription, but until age twenty-one, parental permission was required for volunteers. As my older brother Leon was already in the air force, I agreed to my parents’ request to wait for one year before joining up, and I began studies at the university in Johannesburg.

  In the midst of the war and with climactic events happening daily in the various theaters of war, I found it well-nigh impossible to do anything but think about the war. Only with difficulty was I able to wait my turn to enlist. With the war dominating my thoughts and everything I did, campus life seemed tame, and as most of us felt the same, we took part in campus life only half-heartedly.

  Leon was a flight instructor, and he realized that I was serious about joining the air force. Leon arranged for me to be taken up with one of his associates at the flying school. Probably on Leon’s instructions, he put the Hawker Hart biplane through its paces in aerobatics to frighten me off flying. The fully aerobatic biplane enabled the instructor to throw it around the sky and fly it inverted; of course, it had the opposite effect for I couldn’t wait to start flying.

  After passing exhaustive medical examinations, I went to the Lyttleton base of the South African Air Force for aptitude tests. I failed the aptitude test as a pilot, and after refusing under any circumstances to relinquish my dream of piloting by agreeing to become an air gunner or navigator, I realized that I had to find some other way of getting on a pilot’s course. I had heard that it was possible to join the Chinese Air Force of General Chiang Kai-shek, so I paid a visit to the Chinese consulate in Johannesburg. They were polite but said that I would have to make my own way to the provisional capital in Chungking to offer my services. In the middle of the war this was clearly not feasible, so I went to Rhodesia to try to gain acceptance by the Royal Air Force, Rhodesia being a British colony.

  Upon arrival in Salisbury, I went to the RAF recruiting center only to be told that South Africans were not accepted and that the only option for me was to return and join the South African Air Force.

  At my wits end, I next went to see the Belgian consul in Salisbury to try to get accepted to the Belgian Air Force, for pilots from the Belgian Congo were training with the South African Air Force. The Belgian consul informed me that they, too, did not accept anyone from South Africa. Sad and disheartened I decided to return to Johannesburg and to apply to enlist as a navigator.

  I boarded the train back to Johannesburg just before dusk and went to the dining car for dinner. By chance, my partner at the table was a personable young Greek Air Force lieutenant, who proudly wore a brand new pair of wings, which he had gained after completing his flying training in Rhodesia. Over dinner, he patiently answered my questions about his flying course. Realizing that he was far from his home and feeling lonely, I invited him to spend time with us in Johannesburg before he continued to the Middle East to join a Greek Air Force squadron. His name was George Lagodimus, and we promised to meet again when the war was over. Our next meeting turned out to be one neither of us could have foreseen.

  Eventually, the South African Air Force, perhaps impressed by my persistence, relented when I reappeared, and they accepted me for pilot training. The initial training was at Lyttleton, a cold and deserted-looking camp in the Transvaal veld near Pretoria. Our welcome was not encouraging for it was the habit of the cadets to shout “Go home!” as soon as a bunch of new recruits appeared.

  The discipline at the initial training base was harsh. The commander of the base was a colonel. He had a large black dog that wore a major’s crown on his collar, and we had to salute the dog every time we passed him. We all took this quirk in good humor, having been told that when saluting an officer we were saluting not the wearer of the rank but the King’s commission.

  There were a mixed bunch of would-be pilots in our course: Afrikaners, Englishmen, and a few Jews. Food on the base was plentiful, but the timing of some meals was strange for when we got up in the early morning at 0430, we were often served either steak or mutton chops and mashed potatoes, a little hard to cope with at that time of day. There was much drinking by the cadets at the bar of Polly’s hotel in Pretoria, making our way back to the camp in the early hours of the morning.

  In time we were sent on a gliding course. The first time I saw the elementary instruction glider, I was surprised to see that it consisted of a bulky wing with a fuselage, which was an open-frame construction without any covering. It looked to me as though it was a cut-down model made to show us how it was constructed. The instructor was puzzled when I quite innocently asked when we would see the real glider.

  We were strapped into this contraption and towed along at high speed by a cable attached to a winch. We released ourselves from the cable at 800 feet. We were encouraged to sing when up in the air in order to help us relax, and it was amusing to hear a pupil singing gaily high above us.

  The next step in pursuit of my wings was at the elementary flying school, near the small town of Potchefstroom in the Transvaal, to complete seventy-five hours on the yellow de Havilland Tiger Moth biplanes. They were fairly difficult aircraft to fly accurately and were therefore good for training. The flights in these fully aerobatic trainers with their two open cockpits in tandem for the instructor and the pupil were exhilarating. They were old but reliable airplanes and even some of the maneuvers, which demanded that I be suspended upside down with my head and part of my upper body hanging out in the slipstream, did not worry me. The Tiger Moths were constructed of aluminum tubing covered in fabric, which even at that time seemed old-fashioned.

  My instructor was named Cohen, and a friend in the course ahead of me who was also Cohen’s pupil complained bitterly about his behavior. Was this coincidence, or was someone arranging for the “Jew boys” to be lumped together? Whatever the reason, we both attained our wings despite our instructor. Cohen was awful. Whether his nerves were shot from a tour of operations in a squadron in North Africa or from instructing I don’t know. He screamed and swore at his pupils, and would get so enraged when we made mistakes that he would sometimes undo his harness and stand up in the front cockpit with his control column in his fist threatening to brain us. One of the senior pupil pilots, who had also had the misfortune to be assigned to him, had secretly bent the pins in Cohen’s parachute and planned to do a slow roll when he got out of his harness, hoping to get rid of him for good. Of course,
he chickened out.

  Cohen did not exactly encourage his pupils, but I managed to be assigned to another instructor who was a relief after him. After my dual time of seven and a half hours of circuits and bumps, the instructor removed his stick and said, “Off you go now. You are going to be all right.”

  Though it was an achievement, a landmark in my life, my first solo was a bit of an anticlimax for I felt no great anxiety when I was left on my own. I just flew the Tiger Moth as I had been taught to do, and the aircraft responded as expected. The great joy came to me in the solo flights that followed later, and I was delighted to be up in the sky alone.

  Shortly after that we began aerobatics, and I quickly learned that the Tiger is a most difficult aircraft in which to perform a good slow roll. It was not easy to stop the nose straying to the left or right of its initial position and to keep exactly the same height. All aerobatics are wisely preceded by 360-degree steep turns to ensure that the area is free of other aircraft. On my first attempt to do solo aerobatics, I remained inverted during one of the maneuvers for too long. My engine cut and I was hard put to get it restarted again. Fortunately, I succeeded. In general, aerobatics, which included loops, slow rolls, and the much-easier barrel rolls, stall turns, and rolls off the top, were a great pleasure. Aerobatics teaches you how to maintain complete command of your craft in any attitude and gives confidence in your ability to handle the airplane.