Barking like a dog, raw knuckles and other firefighting methods

The long, white-knuckle overnight drive, the wrong turns, the near-death passing-out experience outside Hoyfmeyr… If you considered all the complexities of Gavin’s drive down from Jo’burg to PE, you wouldn’t blame him if he lit up a cigarette the minute he descended Colchester hill and realised he was home and dry, back in the Bay.
You wouldn’t begrudge him that well-deserved ciggie, but somehow, throughout the eight-hour drive that ended up taking eleven and a half, Gav never even once considered lighting up. He wasn’t a smoker, see. Never had been.
It was more an aversion to lighters than tobacco smoke, actually.
And the source of that aversion can be traced to Gavin’s childhood in Ben Kamma in Port Elizabeth’s wooded, westernmost suburbs.
When the young Gavin turned six in the late Seventies, his family’s two-bedroom home was in fact the last house in PE. When he hopped over the vibracrete wall after his half-day of sub-A schoolgoing, it was right into the virgin bush of the undeveloped wilds. The Wild West! Baakens River crabs the size of hubcaps, dark, mysterious eucalyptus forests and, in the distance, the Lady’s Slipper looming over it all, blue and ominous, like a witch’s castle in some scary fairytale.
There were two last houses in PE, because Gavin’s family had neighbours, an Afrikaans couple from Oudtshoorn. They were the only two houses in the new development at the top end of Walker Drive.
Now Gavin was an only child, and he loved his parents dearly, especially his mother Pam. His father Nick worked long hours at the government garage, so little Gav spent most of his afternoons after school with Pam watching the beginnings of SABC TV.
On SABC, Gavin’s favourite programme was a show called Here’s Boomer, about a heroic mongrel dog named Boomer. It was Here’s Boomer that caused all the trouble.
An episode that caught Gavin’s imagination for all the wrong reasons was the one where Boomer saved a family from a runaway forest fire. Basically he came and woke them up by barking a lot, just as the blaze was about to surround their mountain log cabin.
Most of Boomer’s heroics involved alerting the humans with a lot of barking. And they always seemed to understand what his barking meant.
But what Gav enjoyed most about that episode was the powerful footage of the outrageous forest fire. Sheets of flame. Entire mountainsides on fire! Trees exploding from the sheer heat! Helicopters dropping water bombs!
Somehow, that episode of Here’s Boomer awakened the pyromaniac in Gavin, and he decided to set fire to the forest behind his house.
In those days everyone smoked. Gav stole his mom’s cigarette lighter, hopped the vibracrete and set about trying to light the nearest patch of grass.
After ten minutes of flicking his mom’s Bic, he had not yet managed to generate any kind of blaze. But the neighbour from Oudtshoorn had spotted him.
“Hey! What the hell are you doing? Are you trying to burn down the forest?”
It was the first time a strange adult had ever raised his voice at him. All he could think of to say was, “I’m cold.”
“Well then tell your mom to give you a bladdy jersey,” the man bellowed, then grabbed him by the ear and dragged him off home, where he was presented to Pam, a sobbing, snotty mess.
“I found him next door trying to start a fire. He says he’s cold.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Pam. “Thanks for bringing him home.”
The man did not seem satisfied. “What kind of a mother are you?” he asked. “You sit at home all day and you still can’t even look after your lightie. If he was my lightie I’d give him a bladdy hiding. And give him a jersey for God’s sake. Check how he’s shaking!”
That evening was the first time Gavin saw his mother crying.
He earned a clip behind his ear too. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life,” Pam wailed, as Gain chewed his knuckles in shame. “Did you hear what he said? I was absolutely mortified.”
Gavin dearly loved Pam, his mother and TV-watching companion. So when she said, “And don’t let me ever catch you playing with my lighter again,” he was inclined to listen.
That’s why, despite a harrowing drive down to PE from Jo’burg, Gavin Bull was not smoking a cigarette as he passed Algorax and took the Settlers Way turn-off. Instead, he chewed on top knuckle of his left hand.