BEDFORD: A GOOD TOWN

Bedford, in the Eastern Cape, had the feel of a good town. I arrived there at about two on a balmy afternoon and decided to stick around. The houses were old and ramshackle, many made from corrugated iron, but they looked cared for. If they were painted the colours chosen were tasteful: soft yellows, light greens. Anyone who wants to see the other end of the scale might try Secunda: ultraviolet purple roofs with hot pink guttering comes to mind. The gardens were slightly wild, but they showed creativity and imagination. I saw arched trellises covered in vines, clusters of purple grapes, leafy arbours. There wasn't a garden gnome or a planted, brightly painted wagon wheel in sight. At the local tennis club vines climbed the fences surrounding the courts. Attractive moms in white tennis oufits floated balls back and forth. I heard happy shouts and laughter. A sign on a wrought iron gate said, 'Small Children! Please Close The Gate To The Tennis Courts.'

I parked outside a Pep store with 1899 in bold relief on its dirty Dutch Gable facade. I get confused by the categorisation of all our race groups but I think the small brown people lolling on the steps were Koi? Or San? Isn't there a Koi-san, from a mixing of the two groups? They all greeted me and looked warily at Spud. I drove around and looked at the churches. I found a modern NG Kerk, with its rather brutal inverted V of a roof hunched close to the ground, like a shell protecting it from the sky. Then I found a lovely old Anglican church. I was so taken with it I parked in the grassy grounds, beside a row of tall whispering Yellowwoods, and tramped around for a while taking photos.

Then, out of the blue, the Uno refused to start. I checked my records and found I'd done exactly 6013 km from the time I'd set out from Durban until the time I'd last filled up in Fort Beaufort. In all this time the Uno had rattled along without a hiccup, and now - dead.

I waited beneath the gently swaying Yellowwoods until two young coloured boys came strolling through the grass. I offered them five Rand each and they pushed me onto the level main road. We made slow progress past the 'Coffee Corner', with its cracked concrete porch festooned with dangling cats and zodiac signs and pixies fashioned from burnished metal. The cats had semi-precious stones for eyes. A dissipated gay looking character in a sordid white string vest lolled in the doorway. He had his arms raised, grasping the doorjamb above him. As I crept past he eyed me speculatively. I found his presence reassuring though. If the town put up with him it meant the people here were surely tolerant and open minded. Pretty Koi girls passing on the pavement covered their mouths and giggled delightedly at Spud. He was thrust halfway out of his window, paws planted on the outside of the door, enjoying the novelty of this slow moving scenery.

We made it to the garage. A small, red faced man in the front office asked me to swing the Uno into the dim workshop at the back. A beefy oke wandered over and buried himself in the bonnet. He had blonde locks curling down to his shoulders, and massive forearms. Within minutes he had identified the problem.
'What you have got here,' he said - or at least this is what I understood him to say, in his peculiarly high pitched voice - 'is a non-firing thing, which normally causes the spark plug to fire, but not any more. Or the other thing that transmits the signal - one of these two things is befokked.'

Fok. It was impossible for him to tell which of the two things it was. Two other mechanics who wandered over were equally stumped. The small red faced man was called from the front office. He had a whippet stoop and crafty alchoholic eyes in a wizened face. A gold chain glinting in the V of his collar. He introduced himself as Richard and made a theatrical call on his cellphone to Fort Beaufort. 'Hell! Can't you make a price for me? Ya, that sounds better. Is that the lowest you can go? R319 and R497? That's cost, hey? Ya, send them both. We'll send back the one we don't need. Excellent! Excellent!'

The part could only be sent in the morning. I allowed this to sink in as Spud trotted to a corner of the workshop and raised his leg against the tyre of a red Nissan truck. Three coloured guys who stood smoking beside the truck, wearing oil blackened overalls, hooted and yelled 'Nay! Nay! Nay!' and ran from him, laughing nervously.
'Ya manne! Hy gaan jou vreet!' the beefy mechanic called good naturedly. Spud followed the commotion with ears cocked. I saw Richard in the meantime surreptitiously checking out the contents of the Uno. There was my Cannon on the dashboard, alongside my thick hardback Readers Digest Guide To South Africa (1981 edition). On the backseat was my laptop and in the hatchback section all of my camping gear. He'd watched me with a shrewd appraising eye as I'd put a bowl of water down for Spud. I think he had me pegged: daft twit of leisure; should be able to foot bill.


I followed him to the showroom in the front of the shop. Here I met his kugel-tannie wife, who managed the books. She was all gold chains and lekker laquered hair and cheaply perfumed folds in a floral dress. She had a bossy bright manner, and I could imagine her managing church cake bakes with a rather totalitarian hand. Richard sucked on his Camel and peered through twirling smoke with slitted eyes. There was no camping ground in the town, and the guest houses wouldn't take me with Spud. He couldn't take me, because of his fierce Boerbulls. Sarel, the beefy mechanic, had Rottweillers.
'Hell man, everyone has dogs in Bedford,' Richard mused.
The last thing I wanted was to spend the night in someone's house. I told them anywhere with a patch of ground to put my tent up was ok with me.'
'What about the church grounds?' Richard's wife asked. 'If we can find Father Andrew we can ask him. He's got the key to that outside toilet he can use.'
'But I don't really need a toilet,' I said.
'You don't need a toilet? But then where ... ' Her features hardened, leaving me feeling like I'd just farted in church.

It was now around four, on a Friday afternoon. While we were standing in the showroom, with its wide glass doors open to the street, two men in their fifties drifted in from the Spar across the road. They looked like farmers, with knee length socks on stringy brown legs. They became involved in the debate. Then the son of one of the farmers drifted in with his wife. Sarel wandered in from the back, and Sarel's beefy thighed son arrived in his rugby togs. I was introduced to everyone, and after a few minutes of chuckling and mutual ribbing - Richard's wife dominating proceedings with a brassy cackle - they all clustered around in a pensive knot to discuss the problem of Krisstoffel and Spud. This is what we had become: Krisstoffel and Spud.

'You know what? I reckon Diane can take them,' Richard said through his Camel smoke. Everyone instantly agreed. 'Let's go find her,' Richard said to me.

Spud trotted behind us as we crossed the street to the Spar. Lo and behold, there was Diane, loading her Spar packets into the back of a pockmarked blue Bantam backie. Diane was the barmaid at the local golf club pub. She was tall and slim and attractive in a slightly haggard sort of way. When she spoke her voice was deep and husky. 'No problem.' She smiled wryly at Spud and then at me. 'As long as the two of you don't mind being locked in when I leave.'
I was smitten.

The golf club had a small room at the back with a bed in it - very basic, but then after twelve days of camping I had very basic needs. It was quickly agreed upon. Richard would give me a ride to the club in an hour's time, when he finished work. In the meantime Spud and I were free to wander around the town. We had become quite an attraction on Main Street. The young Koi girls covered their mouths and giggled openly at me, overcome by the sight of a grown white man in shorts trailing a leashless dog behind him. The tennis moms bustled in and out of the Spar, their thighs glowing pink beneath their swishing skirts following their earlier exertions. I saw a few of them looking over at me and then turning to discuss this anomoly amongst themselves. I'd had two Stouts during the day's drive, but I needed further fortifying. I found a small drankwinkel and bought a Stout from a coloured woman who gave me a knowing wink when she served me. Then I strolled down a back street lined with houses and tried to surreptitiously down it. A middle aged woman came towards me walking a brown and white terrier. It became so enraged at the sight of Spud she had to bend down to restrain it. She was so friendly and apologetic though, while I stood there clutching my quart like a lout, that I became entirely convinced: Bedford was a good town.

Back at the workshop I was feeling garrulous. Sarel told me, 'Hell man, you'll like the golf club. It's where the decent people in this town go. There's only two places to go: the club, and X on the other side of town. The larnies - or the ones who think they're larny! - go to X. You're gonna have a lekker piss-up, Im telling you!'

On the drive through with Richard and his wife my garrulousness dried up, but it revived when I saw the clubhouse. It was a flat, wide building with doors that opened onto a wide lawn like a putting green. Beyond the lawn the tree studded course swept down and away and merged with a plain that ended in the distant Winterberge range. Directly behind the clubhouse the steep slopes of Kagga mountain rose - deep green with dense bushveld, ribbed with canyons and gullies. Add to this the balmy, clear evening sky, the pack of kids converging on Spud (who had run to join them on the lawn), the relaxed hubbub coming from the crowd of twenty or so people evident through the open doors as I approached ... it was going to be a good night.