Look At All The Fire Folk! Part 2

Tending the fire for the evening's bath water: the fire heated up the drum in which water was stored

The boys themselves had a story to tell that night. Just the week before, Gerald had had an encounter with the fire in the furnace that was lit to heat the drum, from which we drew our bath water every night. If not too many people bathed at night, the water managed to stay hot enough that we could wash the breakfast dishes in the morning without having to relight the fire. Lighting the fire was a great treat in our every day at Lynn Avis.

Gerald was not renowned for his patience, but his advanced pyromaniacal tendencies were justly famous. Highly intolerant of the time the fire was taking to take hold in the furnace, despite his best efforts in that regard with respect to twigs and newspapers and leaves, he finally succumbed to temptation and flung an entire cup-full of paraffin into the furnace. When this too did not immediately alight, he decided to discover the reasons why not for himself, and he duly stuck his head directly into the mouth of the furnace.

Nils took over the story at this point, recording, “We heard a loud ‘WHUMP’, which we realised later emanated from within the furnace as the paraffin finally, and fully, blew into flame."

“Then, there was silence. For a long, long time. Next, we heard a long, drawn-out groan. Then silence again. Followed by another, longer, more high-pitched moan.” Nils sniggered at the recollection.

“Initially, when we heard the commotion, we just thought Gerald had fallen out of a tree again, and thought nothing of it. Obviously, he was winded, which accounted for the silence. When the groaning began, we laughed, thinking him well-served by his carelessness. But then when we heard him begin moaning, we finally realised that something more serious was amiss, and we all came running from various parts of the farm to discover him lying on the ground near the furnace, his face absolutely pitch black, feeling very sorry for himself indeed.” At which loud guffawing broke out amongst the mass of boys at the fire-place, apart from Gerald, who simply smiled in a long-suffering way. 

Despite a dramatically blackened face, Gerald had only burnt his eyebrows off, given himself a major fright, and  panicked his mother – who had to be called from tea at a neighbouring farm –  into  near hysterics. The doctor in town, however, was by now used to having to treat the “bleeders” of the family, which bleeding almost invariably happened on Christmas Day itself. In fact, for three years in a row, the Ixopo doctor was called from Christmas dinner to stitch up one of the boys, but at least they seemed to take it in turns. On one particular occasion, Piers was delighted we had already unwrapped the presents so that he could use his new camera to take before and after pictures of the wound. On that particular occasion, Lloyd was hanging upside down from a branch of a tree that he had scrambled up into. Which was all very good and well, except the branch broke and like Jack in the story, he came tumbling after, having broken his crown. 

Spot the boy in the tree

The doctor expressed the hope, shared by all, that the experience might frighten Gerald’s pyromaniac tendencies underground for the nonce. Certainly, for that particular afternoon, he steered clear of fire, and lay on the couch with his mother hovering protectively nearby.  However, no-one was very hopeful in that regard long-term, given his relish of fire-beating and all things to do with fire.   

With grandchildren like that around, it was not difficult to locate at least some of the source of grandpa’s anxieties. Yet again, in an almost contrary fashion, grandpa was, at the same time, a great engineer of boy activities, sending them off, for instance, into the pigeon house, armed with knobkerries, to hunt rats down. He’d stand outside, chortling, and calling others to join him as audience, hopeful that one of the boys would thwack another over the head in the confined space. He took almost as great a pleasure in the anticipation of something to laugh at as he did in the event itself, and could even make a wonderful story, much retold and embellished with the re-telling thereof, regardless of whether something happened or not, when he undertook to set up such situations. In fact, it was almost funnier when nothing transpired, despite his best efforts.

Grandpa’s had begun his machinations as a young boy, with him hiding some small half-dead snake he once found in amongst the chicken feed, eagerly anticipating the great startlement with which the snake was discovered by the unsuspecting birds, which had come running from all corners of the yard to receive their unexpected treat. He laughed with the tears streaming down his face, some sixty years later, recalling anew how an old chicken had fallen over backwards in her fright, her legs nonetheless still peddling away in fresh air, the poor bird thinking it was gaining great ground on the unfortunate, hen-pecked snake which it could have in fact, been lying on top of. He wheezed and wiped his eyes and graphically indicated the old bird’s peddling legs with his hands, together with the proximity of the confused snake, and his laughter was always absolutely infectious, completely contagious, in fact.

We couldn’t help but ask what happened to the snake, and were told it slithered away finally with a very disgruntled look in its kinked back. And as to the poor old hen, well, we were led to believe she finally managed to right herself, no thanks to grandpa who was prone on the ground next to her, laughing his head off!

Grandpa took an immense delight in the absurdities of human and animal behaviour. It wasn’t so much that he was a practical joker as a setter-up of situations in which folly could occur. A keen observer of all that fell into his eyes’ ambit - which was anything that could be seen provided one was still and quiet and open to whatever occurred - he was particularly fond of observing the inevitable follies that generally accompany life in a human body, surrounded as we are by objects on which to trip, by people with whom we can get into fisticuffs, and the odd assortment of accidents and mishaps that simply will occur.

He particularly relished placing young men into situations where youthful strength and impulsiveness combined to bring troubles down upon their head, despite knowing full well grandpa’s intentions in this regard. The heady combination of a brain that didn’t quite know how to sequence its body together and an instinct that was altogether at odds with said brain was an unpredictable and therefore delightful mixture to him.

Grandpa in front of his pigeon coops; he bred and raced racing pigeons and rats were a sworn enemy and menace

He employed a huge variety of terms to describe the hilarious contortions the body assumed when disaster struck, talking now of someone who went ass about face, or whose body went tip over toes, while his arms, legs and elbows were described as going every which way, or his body as taking upon itself to court every point of the compass, north, south, west and east.   

His was a very African laugh, a Zulu laugh, a whole body laugh. His shoulders shaking, his eyes closed, he would laugh internally, his belly jiggling, until, his eyes weeping, he’d wipe them, shaking his head from side to side, slowly, as if to say, “Isn’t life absurd? But what can you do but laugh?” 

A great ridiculer of the ridiculous, his mockery was tempered by his very humanity, by his compassion for life’s victims. Since it was never personal in its full and entirely unsubtle appreciation of the ludicrousness of the human condition, it was difficult to resent his laughter, or, if so, not for long. For, at the same time, he was a man who accorded you dignity as a person, such  that you never felt affronted or personally mocked, rather, it was a case that, if your body let you down, well then, laugh, and let the entire world laugh with you.

It was, indeed, a very African laugh.

Playing the prankster was not unique within grandpa’s family; he was an inheritor of a rich tradition of madcap adventurers. His daughter, my mum, recalled some of the stories of that her grandfather – grandpa’s father – had told her when she was young.

My great-grandfather, Rex Gerald Camp, a magistrate and superb shot despite only having one eye

“Your grandfather, Rex Gerald, was one of eight children - Arthur, Clement, Gwendolyn or Queenie, Rex Gerald – that is, your great-grandpa, Cora, Mannikin – you know, I don’t remember his real name, Lorna and Jack. Their mother, Mary-Ann Camp (nee Doyle), was half Irish and half Dutch, and their father, John Camp, was English.

“Rex always loved the bush and hunting, and growing up in the country, when it really was frontier country, he could totally indulge his passion. He was a superb shot and started learning his hunting skills early. One of the ideas he had to practise hunting was to tie a pumpkin onto the ankle of his younger sister Cora and to then practise spearing the ‘animal’ or pumpkin with his Zulu throwing spear. The problem was that the spear glanced off the pumpkin and pierced her calf. 

“I have only just thought that the pumpkin should have been peeled!” she interrupted herself to say. “Anyhow,” mum continued, “Clement courted one of the younger children's governesses, and Jack, who must have been a real little swine, used to spy on them. Jack told me once that Clement gave him sixpence to go away. ‘I took it, but I still spied on them’ he told me!” she smiled.

“In later years,” she continued, “Clement, who was very serious, was reading the newspaper, and Rex crept up and set it on fire. Clement, who had the fiery Camp or Doyle temper, leapt up, and chased Rex, who being nimbler, rapidly climbed a tree. Clement found an axe and proceeded to chop it down. When my Grandfather told me this story, I thought it hilarious. He glared at me and said, ‘I could have been very seriously hurt’”.

Another of grandpa's favourite stories was of their friendly house0-snake in the fern. 

“Just the other morning,” grandpa said, “two men had come to fix the telephone.

“The ruddy telephone,” interrupted grandma. It’s as much off as it is on, these days,” she clucked to herself.

“We were out, but due back soon, and Hilda accordingly ushered them into the house and offered them tea. They gratefully accepted, and, sitting at the dining room table, chatted quietly amongst themselves.

“Now, as you may know, for a while now we have been adopted by a small green house-snake –”

“A lovely little creature,” interposed grandma,

“– that chose to make its home for a while amongst our hanging fern.”

“It’s the exact colour of the fern,” said grandma admiringly, “you can hardly tell them apart.” 

“Now one of the men suddenly remarked upon discerning the outline of the snake amongst the ferns. The second man was quietly effusive in his admiration of how life-like she looked."  They apparently continued on in this manner for a while, while the snake, fern-like, quiet, perfectly content, looked back at them. Curious, finally, as to who these visitors were, she stretched out her neck and flicking out her tongue the better with which to taste the morning air, moved towards them.   

“They told me afterwards they never knew they could move that fast! Hilda, coming down the passage with the tray of tea, witnessed them colliding in the doorway, both of them trying to get through it at the same time. One of them was tall and fat, while the other one was short and thin and after a few false starts, with first this one making it through and then the other, the larger man just trampled the other over and shot out the door first. Hilda laughed at their discomfiture, and tried to show them the snake was perfectly harmless but they could not be persuaded to await our return inside the house; instead, they took their tea outside on the verandah and that’s where we found them when we came home,” grandpa said, chuckling. “And didn’t we have the devil of a time persuading them to come into the house?”     

“At least the telephone is working again,” said grandma.

Later that night, in front of the fire, grandpa, and dad, as was their wont, debated the issues surrounding the beginnings of life, with each side deeply respecting the other’s opinion. Grandpa always started the conversation with a question.

“So, Arne, do you think it is possible for there to be other life out there?”

Grandpa, a lapsed Catholic, who liked to consider himself an atheist, but could never find it in himself to deny the story of Jesus - though he had trouble believing in his divinity - found it strangely comforting to think of intelligent races other than his own in this strange pluriverse of ours.

For him, the worship of Nature (always with a capital N) came naturally. From the earliest age, he had collected motley and myriad examples of life. Whether it was bees or snakes, insects or birds, whatever could be caught and kept, was caught and kept by him. He even found a sympathetic headmaster, once, who let him build his own snake pit – in which grand endeavour other boys were also granted permission to help him.    

As a mathematician, and a man deeply schooled in the rigours of logic, dad always looked to the statistics involved and found them overwhelming to the idea of a second planet even remotely like Earth. No matter which way you looked at it, he found the existence of Life, at all, to be the true miracle. For him, the divine spark at the middle of it all, had to be God – not that he ever expressed it formally – you just knew that’s what he knew. But since that was unprovable, there was no point going into it, at all. So he didn’t. Science and faith are very different things after all, and he always said it was pointless trying to prove a belief so he never recruited logic to argue for the existence of things spiritual. Within the domain of the spiritual, logic is required for better understanding, deployed there as well as within scientific thought, but since you cannot prove or disprove the existence of God, but can only either believe or not believe he never ventured there at all.

My father as a young man

Grandpa, once Nature, or Science, or God, got things going, was a Darwinist to the very core of his being. He had been to the Galapagos Islands, and in his wanderings through the islands, found everywhere the Miracle of Nature and evidence of Charles Darwin’s notion of “adaptive radiation”, in how each species, in each place, adapted to the environment found thereon.

Accordingly, he was the only person I ever knew who had actually read The Origin of the Species, beginning to end, and who would frequently dip into it for enjoyment, often spending more time looking into the near distance with joy, digesting what he’d just read, than in actually reading it. He took a profound delight in and almost worshipful attitude towards the myriad and wonderful things of this earth.    

Grandma, she of little words, participated in grandpa’s appreciation of the natural world and would always point out the beauty of a thing, flowers in particular. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she’d say, lovingly cupping the whorls of a flower in her fingers. She couldn’t articulate her feelings, so looked to grandpa, admiringly, for the words with which to express an idea. But she had such a way with arranging flowers, they always looked as if, given a choice in the matter, they would choose to stand in the veld in just the exact same attitudes they took in a vase. Hers were big strong hands, with large knuckles, yet she’d arrange flowers, both fresh, and dried in great big books, weighted down by piles of newspapers and bricks, with a surgeon’s precision and an artist’s sensibility.     

Grandma had only half a thumb on the right hand. As a young woman, one day she had idly run her thumb along the bottom edge of a chair and a nail had embedded itself under the fleshy part of her thumbnail. In those days before antibiotics, it led to out-of-control blood poisoning. The only recourse was to amputate the tip, so they took it off clean at the joint, leaving behind a stump that resembled a heart, with the two domes facing east and west. She always marvelled at how wonderfully the surgery was done, particularly given how it never fully incapacitated her since she was left with some kind of a thumb after all on her writing hand. However, she would cluck (her form of swearing) at crochet work, where full dexterity of the thumb is required.

She had otherwise so compensated for her handicap that her lack of a thumb never impeded her, but it did make  her movements when baking or flower-arranging appear just that little bit awkward and lending an undeserved gawkiness to her otherwise fluid movements. I was quite old before she suddenly really noticed it, or rather, fully comprehended its lack for the first time, astounded I had not discovered it before, it was so obvious really. Grandma didn’t mind children fondling the two domes, turning the thumb over in their hands. She said it was always the children who noticed it, never the grownups. She found it quite fascinating that children of about six and seven would become immediately aware of it, almost zone on it while adults were often totally oblivious to it, even after years of close friendship. She felt that children are alert to the unusual, whereas adults suppress extraneous information as they process people more rapidly, but often less reliably, particularly with regard to the unique.  

Grandma would always sit very still, listening carefully to the arguments on such nights, nodding her head at some of what was said, sitting in the armchair that leaned back slightly, an empty gin-and-tonic glass at the side table beside her, her one drink of the evening, but she liked her drink every evening, one of the very few times she was ever found just sitting. She sat also for the TV, but that was a grand occasion, and akin to worship. The little black-and-white TV, with the invariably fuzzy reception, which ran on an old car battery, was a thing of absolute joy and wonder to her. She, who grew up with a mother who taught herself to play the piano, and played it on a nightly basis, while everyone would cluster around and sing along, or sometimes dance, would say of the television, “Isn’t it just marvellous what they do these days?” shaking her head, very slowly, from side to side.

Grandma with her mother, who taught herself to play the piano, my mother and my brother Nils

Entertainment, not of your own making, brought direct into your very own living room, well, now that was a miracle, all right! But for all the grandchildren, the real miracle of these story-telling evenings always was how wonderful and compelling one’s own entertainment could be, unforgettable, unforgotten.

Always, grandpa would ask the same question with regard to other life. Always, dad would answer as to the sheer improbability of us being there in the room, at all.  

Grandpa would delineate the long chain of events that happened once life began. He would talk of the fossil history, conceding to dad any discussions regarding the Big Bang, or what the fossil record really indicated. Dad would then gesture to him, his whole hand making an almost dismissive gesture, waving him to go on, go on with his argument.

Grandpa would then go on and on, drawing the listeners into the story of life on this world, as they sat there in the semi-dark, the glow of the fire always central to their vision, and as they stared they saw worlds arise, fall, break apart and depart, all as the flames licked the logs and the coals shifted and sighed and fell into dust.   

He would talk so long and so fluently, it would lull like the babble of a stream, and all would fall into a reverie, his listeners seduced into silence, with everyone forgetting it had started as a conversation, or would think that, maybe, that was that  – the argument so watertight, nothing more could be said.

Silence would fall.

Someone would move, a chair would creak and then the listener settle back into silence, a foot was scratched here, a dog whimpered in its sleep there, replete with happiness, her long snake neck snuggled in under the chin of a boy. The darkness and the warmth was all-encompassing, all was still. The gas light was turned down low for story-telling time and no candles burned wildly or guttered, needing attention.

Finally, just when everyone thought that dad would never answer, that there was no argument that could counter grandpa’s, that he, like everyone else, was out-smarted, out-thought and out-talked, they would begin making small dormouse movements preparatory to speaking, so then dad would clear his throat long and elaborately, and say, “Err -” 

Then nothing.

Once again, a smaller throat clear, and another false start, “Err – um …” 

Silence would descend again, like a thick black curtain, and the listeners would urgently wish to say something, shriek, or giggle insanely – the solemnity was much like church, and the waiting taxing.

All this time, grandpa would be listening very intently, waiting. His silence was sufficiently unusual so as to dampen all other pretensions to talk. Not that anyone felt particularly qualified, but, at the same time, all felt that something, just something, anything, had to be said.

Yet again, an “Err-um” would be uttered, followed shortly thereafter by a “Well, dad –”

By this stage, the solemnity was beginning to be replaced by slight feelings of irritability, and then finally, the false starts would be over, dad would overcome his inertia, launch himself out of the starting blocks, and begin, and having begun, the stuttering start was soon forgotten. He needed more than the usual span of  time to marshal his thoughts, which was why he never spoke up much within the family – by the time he was about to answer anything, someone else would have plugged the gap, and he’d be left there open-mouthed more times than not. Sometimes they’d become aware of it, and mostly not, so he’d lapse back into listening again.

At times, he’d persist, but it was maybe only after the third or fourth such attempt to join the conversation that others would finally become aware of the problem and then there’d be a great shout of laughter as the situation was rectified. He never spoke much, but whatever he said was always pithy and pertinent. Only in a more formal setting, where his opinion was deferred to, was he asked to have his full say, and it was always worth listening to.

Unexpectedly, he did not debate the sequence of events delineated with such passion by grandpa, but set off on a different tack entirely, talking about the pre-conditions of that very first carbon chain creation.

From then on, he’d argue, the sequence had an inevitability, almost even an inexorability to it – life having begun, its very unpredictability was certain. It was the first spark that was the most significant, and the least likely. As Darwin himself wrote, it was “that mystery of mysteries - the first appearance of new beings on this earth.”

He would talk of chain upon intricate chain, a chain of chance, of a myriad possibilities fanning out in every conceivable and inconceivable direction and the absolute improbability of all of it happening just so, just such that the possibility exists that ones such as we are born today. From the Big Bang on, which in itself is simply a theory or, more profoundly, just taken from the beginnings of the Earth to the present day (of which more is known and therefore calculable), the computations involved played games with the mind.

Grandpa would interrupt at this point and play the numbers game again, and ask dad to repeat the equations, but this time, bumping up the probability of anything happening to begin with. But, once dad added up chance upon chance upon chance, you still ended up with impossible series of odds, an improbably minute chance of anything ever happening at all.

Furthermore, dad felt that to reduce the argument to a single statistical measure was to ignore, in a very profound and non-trivial manner, the logic that should be brought to bear on any question of the origins of humankind and the birth of the universe. Certainly, given that it is known that a particular sequence of events occurred at least once, here on earth, why, there is no doubt that life is possible. As to whether it is probable that it occur a second time, well, that wasn’t a simple matter of calculating the odds by saying, well, the abundance of such elements in planets is such, and we possibly have so many types of earth-like planets, given what is known about the universe currently, hence at a guesstimate, the odds of other life as calculated to be x in y.

Instead, he felt the odds were, essentially, incalculable. It wasn’t just that no-one has any final idea of the size of the universe, or whether it is finite or infinite, or even whether we need to take the possibility of the pluriverse into account. But even with continual observation and discovery, the universe just keeps on confounding expectations. Dad never bothered with these odds, it was more the fact that each sequence in the chain of chance, from the very beginning on, had such a variety of different possible outcomes, and yet, at each juncture an absolutely specific outcome was required, and so on, all the way down. The improbability of an exact sequences of series occurring a second time in precisely the same order made, to him, the idea of another earth-like planet unlikely.

Mum, grandma, the azalea bush in full bloom on this, our beautiful earth (rain gauge in foreground)

“But then again,” dad would argue, “it also depends on what kind of question you pose, dad. Are you asking about some kind of life out there, or life like this earth?”

“Well, Arne,” said grandpa, “I suppose I am asking both questions. I don’t expect to find another earth, but another planet supporting life with a higher-order of intelligence – is that possible?” 

“Some kind of rudimentary life is certainly highly possible,” he answered. “Doesn’t the biological record indicate that, there, where you expect to find no life, is life?”

“Indeed,” replied grandpa. “In the heat of a volcanic spewing, deep in acid vents from ocean floors, in the midst of the coldest ice field – in all these uninhabitable zones, all kinds of miniscule life-forms are found. The amazing variations amongst the tiniest microscopic forms and the very variety of life itself are profoundly moving.” 

“Some kind of life on some kind of planet, dad, that is indeed possible,” dad answered. “But another earth-like planet I consider highly unlikely.”

“How unlikely?”

“For all intents and purposes, improbable,” he said, very seriously, and then chuckling lightly, added, “Of course, the great thing about statistics is that you never have to say you’re certain!”  

  

But what dad posited was the sheer uniqueness of the earth. He would ask, what are the odds of another water world, with a nearby moon to harness its tides, a blue planet spinning at a slight tilt, enough for seasonal variation but with temperate zones abundant with life?  That he considered to be an impossibly possible proposition.

Alternatively, the question he said you could ask was the odds of another planet containing beings of higher-order intelligence, capable of thought and able to reach out to their nearby stars and beyond – that question was on an entirely different plane (if not planet) altogether.  

However, though the odds against another earth were improbably high, the odds against another planet with intelligent life were also extremely high, very possibly just as impossible. Furthermore, cold logic indicated to him that just because we inhabited a universe or even pluriverse with an immensity of stars and a smattering of planets – which planets were necessary for life, evidence of such other planets was not a sufficient condition for other life.

“I could be wrong,” he’d add, “I may very well be extremely wrong. I would even go so far as to say I would be delighted to be wrong. However, outside the realm of science fiction, space travel from such an immeasurably far planet to the earth is very possibly impossible, so even if there is other life out there, we on earth very probably will never have a clue about it at all.” 

At which, Grandpa would ask, subdued by the hard logic of dad’s argument, “What is the purpose then of life on earth then, at all?”

What, indeed?

For Part 3, click here