Tag Archives: South Africa

BOGIES

we called our push
carts bogies

tue richer kids, from
up the street
ordered theirs, in
screw-together
streamlined
   formula one kits

mine
   my grandfather, my Mother’s
father had to make, mine
pram wheels and axels
and an old
pantry shelf he
painted purple
“the mauve monster” as
it was dubbed
     my the flash kids, the
speed aces,
the titans
   from the top of our road
as they sped past me
effortlessly

but they did not get to see
this man of few words
and (to me)
much mystery
at work, an engineering
marvel of
perfect proceas
or check the Great War
kit pinned up
high on
his cellar
workshop wall

same cellar where in 1940
as my Mother told me
her elder sisters
    returning late
had tried to sneak in
delivered,
   by a tank and
this man, their father ever
vigilant
   had caught them before
they were able to sneak
unspotted up to bed

sure they were
Hitler’s finest, having
ditched their parachutes
sneaking in
through the cellar to
take their revenge

for what he did
in his twenties to their
uncles and fathers over
his two years
on the Western Front with
the instrument of
mass death that
saved him
    back then
a genuine water-cooled point
303 Vickers medium
machine gun

without which no him no
daughters no mother
ultimately
      no me

I wonder when it was
my Mother, still a child
must have
fitst noticed it
what questions she asked
what she thought
what she knew, imagined
of that war

back to the bogies, my
purple bogie
      last memory of my life
in the North
of England back then

bogies
    such a strange war-haunted
Battle of Britain word

the skies back then full
of 109s and Heinkels and
Dorniers
      fight for survival, standing
alone against Nazism (and
new old
enemy Germany)
all for
democracy (not Empire) and
all that is good in
mankind and
noble
in the world

my Mother
became strange as she aged,
my father too in that still
clinging to
colonialism pre-
liberation South Africa

others came
      we left

my Mother so aghast
years later
    to hear who it waa exactly now
living in that house

place of her menories
(and who
     know what subtle, pervasive,
inevitable
family warfare)

source of my
purple, magnificent bogie
its maker
and his
machine gun

long time passed, younger
in years when he did than
my age now