A BRIDGE TOO FAR
An Autobiography
By Bryan Britton
A BRIDGE TOO FAR – My folks were building a house in the Germiston suburb of Gerd view in the year that I turned five. We lived in Amamzintoti on the Natal South Coast where my father worked at the local Escom Power Station. He had however landed a new job with Metropolitan Vickers, the British supplier of mining headgear equipment.
This company serviced many of the colonial and post-colonial mining operations in Africa and required my father to carry out engineering inspections on headgear and winding equipment on mines from the Congo through Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Lesotho to the then burgeoning Witwatersrand and Free State goldfields in South Africa.
Over the next fifteen years he would witness the flight of colonial engineering expertise and capital from sub–Saharan Africa and the appalling decline in adherence to disciplines of health, safety and efficiency as each country shrugged off the yoke of colonialism and then attempted to embrace democracy and black self-determination.
We moved into our fancy new accommodation at the end of 1955. Through my parent’s extreme hard work and attention to detail the family boasted one of the
most desirable properties in the neighborhood. The modern house was surrounded by a fairy-tale garden containing tons of imported Palindaba Rock especially trucked in from Pretoria.
The attractive rockeries framed three koi ponds complete with waterfalls, water lilies, hanging fuscias and elephant ear plants. Access to the back garden was over a narrow bridge which crossed the exotic ponds. Manicured lawns were framed by herbaceous borders and rare shrubs were interposed with flowering plants. The overall effect was stunning, and the property was regularly entered in the Annual Germiston Garden Show. The property usually ranked either number two or three in the list of most beautiful gardens in the city.
The following January I started Grade One at the SunnyRidge English Medium School, a fifteen-minute walk from our house in Gerdview.
I am the first son of Desmond, a sportsman from Kimberly, who at the very tender age of eighteen elected to go up North to fight the Germans in World War Two. After the war he gained Eastern Transvaal colors for baseball and cricket and was a first league player at badminton, tennis and squash. Later in his life he became a single figure golfer.
His father, Henry, was an amiable South African from Kimberly who married a very strict and austere lady from Britain called Lillian Bell. Henry met with an untimely death from a burst appendix and the young Desmond was, as a result, brought up single-handedly by his ever-fierce mother. Desmond had a younger sister called Valerie who lived with her husband Mervyn Atteberry in Port Elizabeth.
My mother, Constance, was an auburn-haired beauty who traced her roots back to Ireland and Germany. Her brother, Ronald, had been killed in an air crash in World War Two putting an end to his promising amateur boxing career.
My maternal grandfather was a jovial and good-natured individual of German extraction bearing the surname Hosmer. He was a boxing trainer of some repute and had trained Johnny Holt to a South African Bantamweight Title in 1934. My maternal grandmother was a darling with a cheerful disposition who hailed originally from the Emerald Isle and my earliest memory of her is of a kind and fun-loving person.
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A BRIDGE TOO FAR
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