a short history

THE PROTAGONIST was born at the Florence Nightingale nursing home in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, where his nursing-sister mother also happened to be matron when she wasn't popping out sons (he was the last of three). 

 

By all accounts it was a real sunshiny April evening, around 5 pm on a Friday. A Friday 13th to be specific, so you might expect him to be triskaidekaphobic. Whichever way the stars aligned they seemed to bestow on him three super-powers: a disconcertingly good memory, night vision and an early morning up-and-at-'em attitude. But as the stars bestow, so do they deny: he also  emerged both dyslexic and calculexic. 

 

What he can say, is that growing up on the veld at the outer edge of Johannesburg was one long jol, as we say here. In short, Grades 1 and 2 were spent at Bramley Primary School, Standards 1 to 5 at Bryanston Primary School and Standards 6 to 10 at Bryanston High School. It was a tight community and it's now a joke in his circle that just about anywhere he goes in the world he meets someone he knew at school. 

the salad days

(no veg please!)

David grew up on the bank of a river, on the outskirts of Johannesburg, running barefoot in the veld. This would have been the seed that led to a series of books "Stories from the Veld" – along with two madcap trips to the Okavango Delta when he was a teenager. 

 

It was a peri-urban area that, like so many others, became engulfed in the spreading city. At that time the horses of the district outnumbered the people and the press dubbed it the "mink and manure belt".

 

The Braamfonteinspruit was not the Mississippi, but the knowledge that it flowed into the Jukskei, to the Crocodile, to the Limpopo, and from there into the Indian Ocean, was a secret passage to adventure.

The Braamfonteinspruit does not strike one as a river of consequence, but it was here, within a cattie shot of the family home, that the first gold of the area was discovered by a Boer prospector way back in 1855 or ’58. (More precisely it was next to the concrete causeway across the river at the Riverclub golf course.)

Back in the day a small rural cross-roads known as Fourways was the centre of the known universe. It consisted of a petrol station and realtor (Howard and Decker). When a drive-in opened down the road the centre of gravity shifted with it. It had an auditorium. One local noted that more kids of the area lost their innocence there than any other place.

 

"Meet you at Fourways" was our "meet me in St Louis" – We will dance the hoochie koochie, I will be your tootsie wootsie.

Growing up with a mother who cooked them the "boer" way (over boiled), he grew up with a deep distrust of vegetables.

Fourways, the very small centre of the known universe for the kids of what later became Sandton. And what the place looks like now, but by the time this happened DB had relocated to Cape Town.

It also turns out he was born green and was always drawn to nature. It was by no act of planning that his two great passions – writing and the natural environment – came to dominate his adult life.