Hemispheres , livre ebook

Troubador Publishing Ltd - Robert Dewar

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

197 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Hemispheres (a sequel to Mallaig Road, published January 2022) charts the story of Alexander Maclean's adult life, and spans a period of more than forty years, from 1976 to 2021. Alexander, born in British colonial Africa and brought up in the South Africa of the 1960s, spends half a lifetime striving to flee his demons. Ever restless, he travels back and forth between South Africa, the United Kingdom, Europe and the Far East, as he battles to escape the grip of alcoholism. In the process, however, Alexander has some extraordinary adventures, and several near miraculous escapes from death.This contemporary morality tale is above all the story of Alexander's triumph over alcoholism, and of his deliverance from his demons. In a land far from Africa, Alexander at last finds enduring peace, love and contentment.

Sujets

Afrique du Sud

South Africa

Republic of South Africa

Informations

Publié par	Troubador Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	28 octobre 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781803133973
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	3 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 Robert Dewar

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador
Unit E2 Airfield Business Park,
Harrison Road, Market Harborough,
Leicestershire. LE16 7UL
Tel: 0116 2792299
Email: books@troubador.co.uk
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781803133973

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

In recollection of the kindness of strangers.

For an account of Alexander Maclean’s early years,
read Mallaig Road .

Contents
The Boy Who Walked Alone
The Community
The RMS Windsor Castle
Hillbrow, Johannesburg
An Encounter in Leicester Square
The Church in London
University and Growing Up
Going Sailing
Frances and The Golden Bell
The Novitiate
A Death in the Family
The Friary Arms
Paris
Fame and Fortune
The End of a Love Affair
A Move to Malta
Maltese Excursions
A Summertime Liason
Gozo
A Funeral and a Bush Camp
The Kwando River
Running Away Again
Gunfire
On Tour
Violence
The Drakensberg
An Amputation
A Return to London
Cannes and Beyond
Life Unravels
Harrow and Oxford
The Far Side of the World
Johnny Chen
A Kaohsiung Tour
The Chiltern Hills
Deliverance
Vicky
Intimacy
Tragedy
The Family Reunited
Changes
The West Highlands
Solitude
Winter
Loss and Renewal
A Note to the Reader

Chapter One
The Boy Who Walked Alone
During his years at high school, Alexander Maclean learned to value the solitary walks he took, and to escape often to the world of his free ranging imagination.
Alexander’s family lived where the city’s northern suburbs merged with countryside. However, this countryside did not comprise a landscape of pretty woodlands and rolling fields. This peri-urban South African countryside incorporated for the most part uncultivated scrubland, and veld grassland with few trees, and those few were mostly wattle, Scots pine and blue gum, with only an occasional indigenous acacia still standing.
But to feed his need for solitude, Alexander sometimes walked home alone from school in the afternoons. He crossed a tiny stream, whose clean flowing water was channeled between steep banks of red earth, then walked across a wide tract of open veld , and finally (skirting one of the last remaining commercial market gardens in the district still in operation), he reached the fringes of their suburb. White cumulus clouds ambled slowly across the inverted bowl of the azure Highveld sky, and the sun (so much warmer than any sun ever known over the British Isles, which is where Alexander’s forebears came from) shone down on him, and the red dirt and rocky quartzite ground were intensely familiar. He felt a sense of wellbeing, of belonging.
There was almost no animal wildlife left in that region fringing the suburbs, but once, Alexander came across a scattering of porcupine quills on the ground. The birds were plentiful, and sometimes Alexander saw a small creature belonging to the rodent family. Once in a while he would see a snake (only very rarely was it of a venomous species, such as a rinkhals , mamba or puff adder; usually the creatures fell in the category of what Alexander knew as “mole snakes” or “grass snakes”), but such sightings were rare, although Alexander was very light footed and quiet when he walked. He would see many colourfully marked insects, all larger by far than are seen in northern Europe. They looked as if they had been brightly painted, or equipped with antlers or horns, by their fanciful Maker.
Alexander enjoyed the solitude. It was during these early walks when he was still a school boy that he learned how much he needed sometimes to be alone, far from the sight or sound of his own kind, if he was to sustain happiness.
Alexander’s family returned to the Mother City after he had graduated from high school. He was far, far happier now, living on the Cape Peninsula with its dramatic, mountainous topography, the mountain slopes clad in dark pine forests, and never far away was the boundless shining sea with its infinite horizons. There was more wildlife to be seen. Troops of baboons were common; less so were the small, timid antelopes that Alexander sometimes saw. The sunbirds flitted and hovered in small flocks. They were brightly decorated, tiny shining creatures full of iridescent colour as they sipped nectar from the proteas and other wild flowers on the slopes of the mountains.
During this nineteen-seventies era, when he went walking during the week, Alexander only very rarely saw any other people in the mountains. He learned to feel close to God in these mountains. The mountains taught Alexander his first theology.
Alexander knew where the perennial springs were to be found in the mountains, where sundews, small carnivorous plants that grew amidst the mossy surrounds of these springs, lured tiny insects to their sticky haired leaves and trapped and digested them. When he spent a day in the mountains, Alexander rarely took water with him, not even during the baking summertime. He took only a collapsible tin mug, with which he drank at these springs; water so pure and refreshing it was a blessing.
Sometimes Alexander would walk the length of Long Beach, a distance of more than four miles, beginning his walk at Kommetjie, the small village far down the Peninsula on the cold Atlantic Ocean shore. There were then no housing developments nearby; the village was tiny, with a ramshackle hotel where Alexander’s uncle sometimes took him for a beer. Walking that wild strand, with its white sand gleaming in the sunshine, and the incoming Atlantic breakers crashing in the surf, Alexander felt a sublime peace envelope him, for he only rarely saw another human being once he had left Kommetjie behind him.
Alexander had learned that he felt most at peace in surroundings where Man was incidental, not central, to creation. He was to seek out such regions throughout his life. In later years, Alexander was to walk – most often alone and without a rifle – in one of southern Africa’s most unspoiled wilderness regions, far from towns or people. There were then still great herds of elephants and buffalo in that part of Africa. There were herds of antelope and zebra also; groups of giraffes, and a wealth of bird life. There were many small mammals too, and snakes were not uncommon. Alexander used to walk in open leather sandals, and one day as his right foot was about to come down, he heard a “hsshhh… ” from the ground before him and he leapt backwards off his left foot, and there lay a puff adder, fat and lazy and with a diamond patterned back, sunning itself on the sandy path. A puff adder’s venom is cytotoxic. The wound its bite leaves will suffer necrosis, and leave you disfigured for life.
When Alexander got up early enough (and most mornings he got up very early, before the dawn), he would find hippos grazing ashore, before they retreated to the river for the day to seek both safety and the cool of the waters. At night Alexander would often hear the long sawing roar of a leopard not far away. Once, on his way back to the lodge in the late afternoon, having been out walking alone all day, Alexander had to crouch beneath a stand of jackal berry trees atop a vast termite mound, as he watched a column of elephants containing mature adults, adolescents and babies, walking by no more than fifty yards from him. Some of the outlier bulls were much nearer. The dust raised by the passing elephants hung pale gold in the still air, illuminated seemingly from within by the westering sun. Alexander felt a frisson of excitement, allied with a suffusing joy. He lost count of the elephants’ numbers after he had tallied over three hundred of the great beasts. He had very rarely felt so intensely alive. The scents and aromas of the bush were powerful in his nostrils; the sound of the birds calling was a cacophony of noise; the warm air caressed his bare forearms and bare legs; he could taste the aromatic air as he drew it into his lungs.
When Alexander walked alone in the wilderness, all his senses alert, his shadow on the sandy ground a mere pool of shade at his feet, lengthening suddenly towards the day’s end, he would experience his life as an epiphany, for at such times he was wholly identified with all creation. He could justly claim (looking back in later life) to have known something of what that first Eden must have felt like for the first man.

Chapter Two
The Community
Alexander, who was known to family and friends as Sandy, had been sickly as a child (he had suffered from asthma, and he had been prone to colds and flu), and he had a sensitive, artistic, introspective nature. He learned early in life to escape a reality that