Two Feet - Reviews

...here's a review of TWO FEET -- great to digest what readers are thinking out there. 

Amazon.com reviewed Two Feet: Random Thoughts and Random Travels

 TWO FEET - Old Africa 

The Author has a way of drawing you into the emotion and stark hardship of an Africa that is fast disappearing - while the beauty of the freedom his childhood cant be missed so cant the reality of the hardship of growing up without his father. This book makes you almost smell the African bush and the delight of a child running free but with the responsibility of an early adulthood thrust upon young shoulders. An enviable childhood in some aspects but with the haunting echo of a lost father.I kept wanting to see the book in picture frame - the dust, the buck,the Mentor of the old Swazi, the early morning mist in the valley with the old bicycle on the broken road - would be the most beautiful film to record lost times.

P.S -- the kind folk at Google Adsense have added a few advertisements on this page -- feel feel to browse!!!

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The Bone Traders -- Bare Feet

BARE FOOT AND BROKE!!!

...many years ago, as a farm kid, walking with bare feet was the norm in South Africa, as it was, I'm sure, in most parts of the world. As a child you felt connected to the soil -- it wasn't the fashion, it wasn't the "IN" thing to be doing. Shoes, somehow, were for the weak-hearted -- we played barefoot rugby until the invention of the rugby boot...we ran cross-country bare footed and managed to dodge the thorns and the sharp stones. We sprinted the 100 metres bare-footed -- Zola Budd comes to mind.
Hot sand between your toes and that damn thorn embedded an inch deep in the sole of your foot - it was the norm.
Is this still happening now out there?? Do kids, who can afford a pair of shoes, still walk the path with bare feet? Or is there a Health and Safety warning against this? Probably -- from what I read and see, those little things that made growing up with pride are rapidly being taken away from today's children -- Hell -- even playgrounds are protected now! You can't stand here, you can't do this...are catapults really banned??
I'm not suggesting we ALL walk around with bare feet -- that would kill the shoe industry...but are children losing contact with the soil, the earth that feeds us, when not allowed to walk bare footed? Just a thought.
Why do I write this? We start our journey on this planet when young -- maybe being allowed to connect with it, one to one, so to speak, is a good way to align the inner GPS.
That's my thinking. Feel free to correct me.

....read TWO FEET -- there's a few chapters about this. Give it a read -- perhaps it will remind you of what growing up was all about!!!

Many thanks

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Two Feet - free chapter to read

...here's a quick chapter from the novel, Two Feet -- it is a little inconclusive but I wanted to leave it like that...let the imagination take-over. Please add your comments...here or on the dodgy website that I'm struggling to re-fresh -- any feedback and ideas will be greatly appreciated. Marketing is not one of my strongest points.

Enjoy!!!!

STOKING THE FIRE

I stand beneath the Pawpaw tree amongst the spider webs, and I continue to imagine.

The Indian doctor from Calcutta leant over my dying father. He was using his stethoscope to listen to the mutterings of the haggis. The doctor no longer smelt of Chanel number five from Paris. That had run its course some time ago. Now the doctor carried the musky scent of stale perspiration and nicotine.

The Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria kept her distance as always. A slight breeze caused the curtain to shift over the window beside her. The water stains on the ceiling had increased. Madagascar had now met the Seychelles. Were they at peace?

“Your breathing is better. It is not as irregular,” the doctor finally said, removing the stethoscope from his ears. He fidgeted with the biro pens in his pocket. “I do not want to be an optimist here. Cancer is a chameleon. It can be as difficult and as temperamental as...”

“Trying to build a garage,” offered the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria. The breath that followed her sentence was almost explosive.

My father settled his eyes on her as the doctor spun on his heels.

“What?”

She inhaled. She had taken the plunge. She had found her moment. “The doctor,” she told my dying father, “is trying to build a garage for his car.”

“There is no need to tell a patient this, Nurse. Please go and find something else to do.”

“Perhaps you can help him?”

“Enough of this nonsense,” The doctor said. “Please leave.”

She kept her eyes on my father. She was biting her lower lip, and her small hands were tightly clenched.

You saw this in her, father. You realised her intent, her need to have said what she had. Had she not been the only one to have crossed the line and made you the soup? Had she not been the only one to blow life into a dying ember? She has always been with reason, with cause.

“What is the matter with the garage?”

You keep your eyes on the Nurse. Even her toes are clenched against the hardness of the waxed, concrete floor.

“There is no garage.”

The Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria exhaled. “You can build one together.”

The Indian doctor from Calcutta takes a step closer to the Nurse. “What is the matter with you? This is an ill, a seriously ill patient! Go away. Away!”

“Wait!”

There is strength in the timbre of your voice, and it startles the doctor.

“I can, at least, take a look.”

“There is nothing to take a look at. It will take weeks for the concrete blocks to be delivered. This is all very, very stupid and I apologise.”

You lift yourself off the bed, dying father. You stand. The Indian doctor from Calcutta, steps back a pace, unaccustomed to seeing you erect. He has forgotten how tall you are.

“You have mud?”

The Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, stifles her joy through clasped hands. The whiteness of her large eyes shone bright over the temple of her fingers.

“Mud makes bricks,” you, Father, tell the doctor.

I step away into the sun and stand amongst the radish plants. The soil is moist beneath my bare feet. The rhythm of the borehole is incessant and calming. Soon the radish bulbs will go to market.

I'm going to leave you now, dying father.

You will mix the mud, and you will build the doctor’s garage. The doctor from Calcutta will anoint his hands alongside you in the African soil and as the two of you sip a gin and tonic after the day’s work at sunset, he will see the residue of life beneath his fingernails and, perhaps, together, you will look out onto the road and dream of the journey ahead.

At some point, you will journey down that road in an imported, chicken-shit free motor vehicle and head toward the undulating horizon. Perhaps the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, will come along for part of the ride like a Bollywood starlet. This remains in the ether, Father.

That is what I will continue imagining for now.

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Two Feet -- a free chapter

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....here's a short chapter from the novella, Two Feet -- it is an imaginary scenario of where I decided my father must be, or must have gone, when he went walkabout. Sometimes placing a "hole" in your past with an imaginary plug allows you to get on with your future. That's my thinking, anyway!

Hope you enjoy, and as always, please feel free to comment:

A new island was appearing alongside the map of Madagascar on the ceiling of my dying father’s room in the African hospital. It was to the North - East of Madagascar, almost where the Islands of the Seychelles are.

 The appearance of this new stain of an island was the consequence of the late afternoon rains: a wonderful, ear pounding rain that was supported by orchestral thunder, and distant giraffe-like striding bolts of fork lightning. The day’s heat was cleaved apart to allow a fresh smell to rise off the soil. Rivulets of red water quickly gathered and hurried down the pathways, chasing laughing children and panicking insects.

Chickens huddled under the tree in the hospital square, and waiting patients viewed the water as it poured off the roof above the porch with little emotion as their thoughts were elsewhere.

The Indian doctor, from Calcutta, stood on the porch of his general Dealer store and smoked a cigarette and glared at the rain, as it would delay the truck from the co-op bearing, he hoped, letters from India or Birmingham, England and the vitamin drip for the dying white man.

A nurse shook rainwater from her shoes outside my father’s room, and clucked like an irritated guinea fowl and walked on with a soggy sound.

My father heard none of this.

The pain, on this day, was as constant as a working blacksmith’s hammer on an anvil.

He had closed his eyes to seeing and his ears to sound.

After the rain had passed and as the soil drank its last, the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, came into the room. As always, she hesitated at the door. She had food on a metal tray for my father and two capsules of painkillers. The plate of food was covered with a dishcloth to keep off the flies, and the two capsules were in the top of a plastic soda water bottle. There was a knife and fork and a glass of water on the tray.

From the safety of the doorway, the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, studied the inert form of my father. She realised at that moment, that my father was not only losing weight but also height. His body was growing back into its pain as if the blacksmith was hammering his head toward his feet. The iron cast bed was getting longer.

“Hello,” she whispered from the doorway.

My father shifted his head and opened his eyes, the fragility of her voice being enough to invade the resonance of the blacksmith’s anvil.

“You must eat,” she chirped and put the tray on the bedside table, the movement causing the painkillers to roll about in the plastic soda water cap. “Two pills every four hours. Sorry,” she said.

“Sorry”, my father knew, was often the African way of saying “please”, so he shuffled his body and sat up in the bed.

He did not want the food only the capsules. He did not say this, but because he reached for the capsules first, the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria presumed this.

“You must eat the food first!” The strength of her own voice surprised the nurse from Abuja, Nigeria. She raised her thin hands to her mouth as if to stifle any further words that may come tumbling out, but this gesture brought her eyes up to an angle to look deep into my father’s eyes. This, of course, was the moment she had been avoiding for some time.

The Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria, in the failing light, saw something in my father’s eyes that made her turn around, and run out of the room.

Some days later, the Nurse from Abuja, Nigeria would tell the Indian doctor’s wife, who was not from Calcutta that she had seen the fire in my father’s eyes.

But my father would never know this was said as he began to eat his food, and as the island of Seychelles grew by a rusty coloured fraction on the ceiling above him in his hospital room somewhere in Africa.

*****

Mabuza once told me that if there are holes in the road you often travel, stop and fill them in, for this will help the man travelling behind you.

*****