Elsewhere in these essays I have stated that Mike was not only a really super boss, he was also a good friend. We worked together for quite a few years and it is thanks to his guidance and encouragement, guidance and encouragement that I was able to get my foot on the next rung in the bank. It was a rare thing for a clerk to be elevated to auditor without first returning to the branch network for further training and I despaired of it ever happening to me. Yet with Mike’s help, it did.
Sometime in the early 80’s it was decided to split the country up into regions, each with a Senior Internal Auditor in charge of a team of auditors and clerks. I had family links in the Free State so it suited me to be sorted into the Free State/Eastern Cape area, under Mike. I would travel with Mike and look after the routine of a branch. I was pleased to have a chance to work with Mike as I had heard so much about him – I found that his good reputation was not exaggerated.
I soon knew his likes and dislikes – in no particular order he liked Castle beer, Scrambled eggs, Playing the piano, Playing golf, Peanut Butter, Cigarettes and Cortina cars.
From his earliest days in the bank comes the story set in Vryburg branch. Elsewhere in these writings you’ll find mention of the manager, Piet Retief. His wife Madge (A sister of my own maternal grandmother) was a bit of a social climber who was inordinately proud of her husband’s achievements in the bank. A team of auditors turned up at the branch and Madge’s “Pietie Propaganda Machine” sprang into action right away. They had to be shown that Pietie’s team was well equipped to play its part in the social side of his job. She got together an impressive tray of tea-time delights and sent them round, expressly for the “inspectors”. The lady who told me this story, Miss Eileen van den Heever, was a junior clerk in the branch, as was Mike and the two of them chanced upon the tray which was awaiting teatime, in the kitchen. Not realizing who the snacks were for, the two famished clerks got stuck in and polished off the lot.
Time went by and came the day when the auditors had to go round to the Retief home for supper and for Madge to further impress on them the suitability of Pietie to represent the bank in a senior role. During the course of the meal, Madge casually asked if the chaps had enjoyed the snacks which she had sent over and of course, they just looked at her blankly and denied all knowledge of the goodies. WELL! The Spanish Inquisition had nothing on the investigation which took place at the branch the next morning and swiftly, De Villiers and van den Heever were revealed as the dastardly culprits. Naturally they were boiled in oil, drawn and quartered, keelhauled and thrown to the wolves as well! The annals don’t reveal how Madge overcame this blow unfortunately but I’m sure Mike and Eileen never redeemed themselves in her eyes.
I recall an occasion when Mike had to audit Louis Trichardt branch where my brother-in-law Chris Clark was accountant. My mother was visiting them at the time and between her and my sister Pat, they wanted to treat Mike to some good home cooking. I was not with him at the time, so they phoned me to find out what he liked. Mike was a very picky eater and I said as much but they just pooh-poohed my suggestion of making a large plate of scrambled eggs and a placing a bottle of peanut butter on the table and they did something elaborate instead. Luckily they also did the eggs. They even transferred some Black Cat to a more impressive cut glass jam jar, to impress him. (He had never seen peanut butter outside a Black Cat bottle and was apparently most taken with the concept!) Particularly my Mom was disappointed when Mike tackled the eggs with gusto but just fiddled around with the rest. I had warned them but they wouldn’t listen.
Once in Port Elizabeth, one of the managers gave a party expressly for Mike, although all of us and some other managers, were also invited. We were a little taken aback when the largest dish of scrambled eggs any of us had seen, was brought in. Mike tucked in with gusto and we all followed suit a bit sheepishly as there wasn’t an awful lot of anything else to eat. Still, the beer was good, the company better and Mike sat down and played the evening out on the piano.
I once teased Mike by telling him that a new restaurant had opened in Port Elizabeth, which specialized in scrambled egg. He was all agog until I revealed that it was called “Mike’s Kitchen”.
We were auditing Newton Park branch when someone mentioned that Woolworths were selling pork pies. Mike got all excited and declared that he loved pork pies, so at lunch time off we went to Woolworths and bought a few. To Mike’s chagrin, the packaging announced that the pies should be eaten cold, which completely burst his bubble and ruined his appetite. “HOW can I eat a cold pie? It’s just not normal” he complained. I have to admit that I agreed with him.
On another occasion, Mike, John Bell & his wife and I, were invited round to a manager’s house, where we were presented with a range of Chinese dishes. I love Chinese but in common with the others, I’ve never mastered or even tried to master chopsticks. John and Mike were good sports and allowed themselves to be shown the trick of eating with sticks, but Elizma (John’s wife) and I refused point blank and brusquely asked for spoons. The lady was a little crestfallen but complied and we enjoyed the rest of the meal. John & Mike manfully battled on with the chopsticks but one could see balancing single grains of rice and wrapping single noodles around sticks was not getting their bellies filled. We bid the couple goodnight and when we got back to the hotel, Elizma told the morose and hungry Mike to come to their room – she had a packet of rusks and coffee with which to sustain them.
The next day I had the lady accountant in stitches when I described those hapless chaps, “knitting” noodles with their chopsticks.
Only once did I manage to get Mike to veer away from his beloved scrambled eggs. We were busy at Southernwood Branch when we discovered a little café just around the corner where they made the most perfect bean soup. I persuaded him to just try a cup and right away he was hooked. We got our hotel to give us plain bread and butter sandwiches and bought all sorts of things like peanut butter, cheese, Bovril etc so that we could make our own sarmies. Mike loved it. Then one day, dear Margie Kirton from securities brought us a couple of beautiful, ripe avos and offered to make us open slices of bread topped with mashed avos. She brought in a huge platter with acres of open avo sandwiches and normally picky Mike got stuck in and out ate me easily and washed it all down with the bean soup. Wherever we went after that, Mike would try and get that kind of soup again but alas, lightning only strikes a place once. Need I add that our personal weather was always windy and warm at Southernwood??
More than anything else, Mike was known for his musicality. He played the piano really well and as far as I’m aware, never had any training. I don’t think he could read music so always played by ear. He was also a dab hand on the saxophone and played a bit of guitar. I used to dread having to go to managers’ homes wherever we went, because if we found a piano there, I was guaranteed a late night. It’s not that I disliked his playing; it’s just that getting a decent night’s kip was jolly important to me. He was also capable of composing catchy little songs and it’s part of his legend that he wrote the music to “Ver in die ou Kalahari”. The song is credited to Danie Pretorius on the sheet music and on the numerous record labels that featured the song but I was told that Mike composed it while Danie wrote the lyrics. I asked Mike about it on a few occasions but he seemed embarrassed to talk about it and said that Danie had been in his band in Vryburg and they used to make up little songs together for the dances for which they played. He also mentioned that “Brakke van Turffontein” with which Al Debbo had a hit, was one of theirs. Mike was no egotist and the fact that his songs were not credited to him, did not give him sleepless nights. Music was for fun and money was the stuff they gave you for working, simple as that. Still, that song is such an integral part of South African Afrikaans culture that everyone can sing it. Even old Jim Reeves had a crack at it in some very mangled Afrikaans! Most of us would be delighted to be credited with it but not Mike.
People who know me will tell you that I am a music “freak” but while that’s true, I cannot play any instrument. At a manager’s house one evening, I pointed out that there was a false note on the piano which Mike did not seem to notice and when he checked, it proved to be so. This so convinced him that I had musical ability and was capable of learning an instrument, he went out and bought a little Casio keyboard for me which I had to learn to play. I was able to pick out tunes on the machine, which one could then play back by depressing a single key but chords and such complications were simply beyond me. It saddened Mike that I was such a dunderhead because I’m sure he had visions of us playing duets wherever we went.
One day I was looking at an advert from Reader’s Digest for a set of records from the big band/swing era and Mike asked to have a look. He became quite excited as he recognized a lot of the bands and music from his younger days and wanted me to buy the set, even though it wasn’t really my type of music. No problem to Mike : He offered to buy it for me on condition that I would make tapes for him which he could use in his car. I was happy until he asked if there wasn’t a way in which I could pre-announce each track so that he knew who and what he was listening to. I did exactly that but regretted agreeing because it turned into a mammoth task with the primitive equipment I had then. Took me weeks to complete the job but Mike loved those tapes.
I must confess that I used to cajole him into going to Michael’s Record Bar in Port Elizabeth to see what there was. I knew that if I waved say an Errol Garner LP under his nose, he’d buy it like a shot – I knew by then what he liked and could tempt him into buying good jazz … which I also like. Quite a bit of my jazz LP collection was paid for by Mike.
His love of music landed him in a quandary at one small branch. It turned out that the young manager was an accomplished pianist and organist and had both instruments in his home. Mike and the manager got on like a house on fire and Mike spent a good deal of his spare time at the chap’s house, playing duets. But meanwhile, back at the branch, Mike was auditing the credit. One day he suddenly turned to me and whispered, “I think this manager has been up to something” and of course was worried as hell. Turned out that there had been a number of small but rotten lendings which had been dormant for ages but which had suddenly all been repaid on one day. Turned out the P. & L. had been used for writing the debts off and it would have hopefully enhanced his fond belief in himself as a good lender in the eyes of Local Head Office, if he showed no bad debt on his books. Criminally foolish of course and it cost him dearly but Mike, after having become pretty good buddies with the fellow, must have found it terrible to investigate him.
Something else which sometimes happened was Mike discovering dusty, disused pianos in some country hotels. One such was the Royal Hotel in Somerset East. Mike found the piano in the dining room and sat down to play it. The owner was suitably impressed and before long the piano had been moved to the pub and Mike became an overnight celebrity. The “manne” would gather round Mike, ply him with Castles and sing along happily until all hours of the night. I stayed well away but some nights before I fell asleep, I could hear rowdy merriment coming from the bar, quite some distance away from my room. I think booze sales must have gone through the roof in the time we were resident there.
Mike liked his beer – I never saw him drink anything else. He never drank excessively, especially not once he had his hands on a piano. One night in Oudtshoorn where we were staying at the Queens Hotel, he had invited Sakkie Zietsman , branch manager, back for a beer. Sakkie, while not quite teetotal was very careful with drink and one beer was his limit but on this particular night, Mike twisted his arm for a second beer. He eventually bid Mike goodnight and made his way slightly woozily out to his car. Next thing, a speeding motorbike slammed into him and flung him a few dozen feet down the street, to where he landed face first on the tar, knocking himself out. Mike meanwhile had carried on by himself in the bar but was drawn to the noise of an ambulance and a general commotion outside. He asked someone in the crowd what had happened and was told, “’n Motorfiets het een of ander bank bestuurder raakgery”. Mike was naturally horrified not to mention mortified and blamed himself for the accident. He had after all, got poor Sakkie “drunk”. Sakkie was back at work the next day but his face was just a mass of scabs from where he had scraped it on the rough street and must have been pretty bruised all over as well.
Mike was no alcoholic but he sure was a confirmed nicotine addict. He smoked a lot, especially while having an ale but came the day when he went to a doctor somewhere for a checkup, to be told that he had only about 80% of his lung capacity left and his incipient emphysema would eventually do him in. But first, I should also mention that Mike was a bit of a hypochondriac. For example, once while doing Walmer Branch, he came to my desk and whispered, “I’ve just come from the toilet and I fear I might be bleeding because I’m sure there’s blood in my urine. I’ve not flushed so would you please just go and have a look”. Off I went to peer in the loo bowl to see a pinkish coloured fluid in the bowl but of course it would look like that because the bowl itself was pink! One could just look at him and say, “Are you OK Mike ? You look a little bit pale” and sure as hell, he’d soon be feeling as awful as he believed he looked.
But I digress, Mike was very alarmed at the news and immediately decided he would give up smoking. And you, who have also smoked in your lifetime, will know that it is extremely difficult to quit the habit. Mike managed quite well at work but in the evening when he was downing a Castle, the desire to inhale some “life-giving” smoke was well nigh irresistible. He took to asking chaps in the pub for a “puff” on their cigarettes, leaving an inch of glowing ash on the fag before giving it back. He probably did more harm with those drastic inhalations than he might have with a whole pack of cigarettes. He did eventually quit but it took ages and much backsliding before he got there.
To try and dampen down the desire to smoke, Mike took to buying sweets. Where most of us would buy a couple of sticks of chewing gum or a tube of Wilsons XXX mints, he would come back from a supermarket with a whole bag full of sweets – all varieties. He preferred Beacon’s liquorice all-sorts but grabbed everything that the sweet counter had to offer. All the ladies in the vicinity of his table started becoming more and more rotund as the audit progressed because the sweet drawer always stood open and all were free to help themselves!
Mike once told us that when he was a young lad in Vryburg, he had to go to hospital for a minor procedure. Having had his schooling at the very English Queen’s College, he could speak but wasn’t very fluent in Afrikaans. So the admissions nurse was filling in the requisite forms and eventually got to the bit where she had to check if Mike had “been” that day : “Het u opelyf gehad Mnr de Villiers” she asked. Mike said he thought about it for a while and then figured “opelyf” meant “open body”. Open body must mean an operation and replied, “Nee, nog nooit in my lewe nie” He said there were several other men waiting to be checked in, including an old chap on a gurney who looked near death and they ALL burst out laughing uproariously, including the dodgy-looking old guy!
I have to touch on Mike’s sex life now. NO! NO! Relax! I’m not about to become risqué and vulgar! As you all no doubt know, Mike was a confirmed bachelor. I did hear that when he was younger, he was engaged to a girl and on the point of marrying her when his best friend cuckolded him and got her in the family way. I’ve no doubt that this feminine faithlessness was at the root of his misogamy but at least it did not prompt any misogyny in him. He liked girls and ladies and they obviously liked him right back. In the time I worked with him, he could have had the pick of several ladies who would have tied the knot like a shot, but the moment things got serious, he would bid them goodbye.
He could be embarrassingly frank about his affairs and I often had to have the decency to blush at his revelations but we won’t go into that. Suffice to say he was one of the guys and gallant and generous with his ladies.
Mike and I did not see eye to eye about cars. For me, the only decent Ford ever built was the tough little Anglia and perhaps the Consul 315 but for Mike, the Cortina was the be all and end all of cars. While I drive a Korean car now, all my working life I owned Volkswagen products – after 5 Beetles I had four Jettas. He was forever at me to just try driving his Cortina until one day I gave in and drove it down to Port Edward from Bizana. It’s really no lie that I found that car to be an awful, lumbering tank. I was used to the poise and handling of my Jettas and there was no comparison. I insulted almost everything I could find about the Cortina and Mike was shattered and dismayed. To make things worse, I refused to ever drive it again, labeling it damn dangerous. I suppose he forgave me eventually – I hope so.
Mike was far more egalitarian than say, autocratic Mr Roberts. In Welkom an incident occurred which, had it happened with Wilf, would had ensured that my head was bitten off. Mike and I had both been away for the weekend and come back to the Dagbreek Hotel on Sunday night. I hate being woken in the morning and asked the early morning coffee chap to kindly skip my room as I didn’t want coffee. Come Monday morning at 6 am and there’s a knock on my door. I leaped out of bed in a rage, ready to demolish the waiter for waking me up and there at the door stood Mike in his pyjamas. “May I borrow your razor please. I left mine behind over the weekend”. I was fuming and glared at him and snarled, “For heaven’s sake, does it look as if I SHAVE?? (In case you don’t know, I’ve had my scrappy beard since the seventies and have never shaved since then) slammed the door in his face and went back to bed. Mike scuttled ruefully away to try his luck with John Bell. I suppose it WAS crass insubordination but Mike brushed it off and apologized later for disturbing me. He often told the story, half-jokingly saying that “you should not mess with John Lyle early in the morning”.
Mike was a keen golfer and many bank clerks across the country can testify to playing rounds with him. One of his hobbies was COLLECTING golf courses. He would add a new course to his list only after playing 18 holes on it. I don’t know if his list has survived but I pored over it once and he had even collected courses in the Bahamas and the U.S.A. Pride of place went to one of the Durban courses which played best of all in his opinion – I forget which one though. Mike was intensely proud of the course at Excelsior in the Free State which was one which he had personally designed. He was on relief staff before becoming an auditor and had a lengthy spell of relief at the town, which had no course. He was chafing at the bit without his golf and in the pub in the evening, bemoaned the lack of a course to some of the locals. He discovered that a piece of land was available for the purpose and he immediately went out and started laying out his course. I have no idea if it still exists but if you are ever in that little town, playing a round, spare a thought for the course designer.
Also before his auditing career, Mike was sent to New York to gain some experience of the banking system there. On his first day, he was placed in the bill department and scheduled Bills for Collection. The schedules had cheap carbon interleaving, which had to be removed before the bills were sent out. After a while, the waste paper basket was chock full of the carbons. Mike decided to take a smoke break and thoughtlessly turfed what he thought was a quenched match into the basket. Alas, it was still alight and in a lurid burst of flame, the carbon paper caught fire. Mike instinctively thought to stamp it out with his foot but succeeded only in jamming his shoe in the wire mesh. Those blasé New Yorkers were then treated to the ridiculous sight of a “crazy” South African hopping about madly on one leg, while his other leg was firmly wedged in a blazing wastepaper basket. Mike said that the sight never even raised a smile but that some just shook their heads in disapproval. The South African yokel must have had a severely dented ego after that I should imagine.
I was courting my wife Sonja in those days. She stayed in Sedgefield with her daughter, so as was typical of him, Mike always made sure I was included in the audits of Knysna and George. I think those two branches were pretty fed up with having me around at every single audit eventually but I was as happy as can be. Mike when planning our movements, always had a system whereby if you were called upon to audit a tough branch in an unpleasant place, like say Umtata, you were rewarded with a branch on the list of pleasant places to go to e.g. Walmer, Knysna, Southernwood etc. He was however confounded when Dave Sharp joined our Eastern Cape team for a few branches. Mike phoned him and told him he would be auditing Engcobo branch but that his reward would be Knysna branch thereafter. This was after Dave’s accident and he was finding fault with everything. “Michael” he exclaimed, “my reward for doing Knysna will be Engcobo. I don’t know why everyone thinks Knysna is so wonderful – all that horrible water everywhere. I hate the town. In fact I think little of the Garden Route. Where are the gardens they always talk about?” One might be forgiven for thinking that being miserable was keeping him happy!
Mike was kind almost to a fault and went out of his way to treat us all fairly and considerately. I often wondered how he had fared as relief manager in the Free State, when considering his accommodating nature, against the recalcitrant farmers he had to deal with. But I realized he was able to stiffen his backbone if necessary when he told me the story of him relieving at Hobhouse. There he had, let’s call him Oom Koos, the borrower straight from hell. The overdraft was constantly in excess and Forms 90a (Advices of excess over limits) were a daily feature. Inevitably Local Head Office decided that enough was enough and Mike was instructed to dishonor any cheques and not allow any further excesses. He was still mulling this over when a very bluff and belligerent Oom Koos walked in and loudly demanded to see him. He warned Mike that he was about to write out a large cheque in favour of the co-op and that he had better see that it was paid. A severely intimidated Mike squeaked that he would not be able to pay the cheque unless Oom Koos deposited enough to cover it. Sure as heck, the cheque was presented and dishonoured and the co-op advised. Mike was sitting waiting with much trepidation for the inevitable clash which he knew was coming when in walked Oom Koos. “Waar’s daai donnerse de Villiers” he bellowed and stormed into the office where Mike was cowering behind his desk. Before Mike could say a thing, Oom Koos stuck out a huge hand and said, “Skud die blad ou seun. Ek sien nou jy is ‘n MAN. Ek het gedink jy’t die nie guts om my tjeks te fire nie.”
That was how Mike was – he’d bend over backwards to be fair to someone who had failed but had done so in good faith but he’d go all out to nail to irredeemable sinners who had no place in the bank. He told of one chap who was basically damn useless and must have had a long history of mediocre staff reports. Mike could really not find anything especially noteworthy in his work either and with a heavy heart gave him the blandest, most non-committal staff report he had ever written. He was quite mortified when the poor bloke exclaimed, “Dankie Meneer, dis die beste rapport wat ek nog ooit gehad het”.
Staff reports were a most unpopular aspect of an auditor’s duties – the auditors universally hated them. I can’t tell you how often those infernal reports landed on my desk because there was a perception that I could write. Writing about someone outstanding or totally wretched was easy, but obviously those extremes were rare. It was the average, even slightly mediocre people about whom sincerely uplifting praise, was damn difficult to write. Most of the time managers and accountants would be happy with their reports, no matter how ordinary but one manager we ran into had a highly vaunted (and totally unwarranted) opinion of himself. Mike gave him an above average report because the state of the branch had been excellent. However, he objected when Mike said, “Mr X is an interesting character” in the report. He said that he was not a character and objected to the word being used. My private reaction to this bit egotism is unprintable but Mike dropped the sentence. He was like that.
This is nothing to do with Mike’s time in the bank but I just have to write about it in case I forget. Mike grew up in Burgersdorp on a farm and had his schooling at Queens College in Queenstown. His half brother Ronnie Roberts, still farmed on the old farm and once when we audited Burgersdorp, I went out to the farm with Mike for lunch and met his most hospitable family. Ronnie had shot a baboon in his maize lands, not realizing it was a female with a baby and when they found the carcass, the little guy was still clinging to it and crying pitifully. So, they took it home and raised it like a human child and when I was there Bobos was a rangy teenager (still without his canine teeth) attached to a long piece of chain set in a tall tree. I thought he was quite tame and was a little shocked when I got up close and Bobos attacked and started biting me. But I soon realized his bites were just playful, so I sat down on a rock and he sat down companionably between my knees and started checking my socks and bare legs for fleas. Once done with my feet and legs, he checked my shirt, my beard and finally my hair. Having those strong but gentle little hands working me over, is the one of the most amazing experiences I have had. Once he was done, he sat down in front of me with his back to me – it was my turn to groom him, which I dutifully did while he closed his eyes and dozed. Mike and the family had been watching all this and were guffawing loudly and joking about the two “brothers” making such a good pair. I’ll never forget looking into his eyes and feeling kinship with this distant cousin of mine.
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