We stayed in the Thuringerhof Hotel in Windhoek in 1978. It had a beer garden where one could take meals and a convivial pub which Bush decided to patronize one Friday night. He always paid his hotel bills in hard cash, scorning the poncey credit cards which we sissies used, so on a Friday he would draw a big wad of notes so he could settle his bill on a Saturday morning. He got into a boozy chat with another old guy at the bar and before long, they were big cobbers …… as amiable drunks often are. Talk flowed as did the whisky and as the Irish say, the craic was very good.
Well into the evening, Bush decided that he had had enough and headed back to his room. Afterwards, when telling me the story, he said that he had no recollection of taking out his wallet and stuffing it under his pillow but he did recall a visit to the loo, after which his appetite for a nightcap was stimulated. On the way back to the pub, he suddenly discovered that his hefty wallet was not in his pocket and immediately his suspicion fell on his erstwhile drinking pal for pickpocketing. Back in the pub, the boozy buddy was overjoyed to see his pal and noisily welcomed him back but Bush said he just stood there and glared at him, hoping to convince him to cease his life of crime and cause him to return his wallet, by mental force alone.
Needless to say his efforts were futile so he downed his nightcap, paid with the change in his pocket and went off unhappily to bed. He must have been a pretty sound sleeper because he STILL did not recall having placed his wallet under his pillow and went to sleep on it.
The next morning, being Saturday, he went to work while I slept late. I was woken by a frantic maid who demanded that I go with her to the “Oubaas se kamer”. When I got there, the pillow had been removed as she prepared to make the bed and there untouched, lay the fat wallet, just as he had left it. She wanted me to take custody of it to make sure she hadn’t touched anything and to hand it back to him.
When Bush got back from work, he was overjoyed when I presented him with the wallet, with everything in it, intact as he had left it. While he did not exactly kiss the maid for her honesty, he was pleased enough to hand her a R100 tip – a small fortune in 1978.
I don’t know if he ever ran into his “drinking buddy” again, who must have been puzzled by Bush’s radical change from pleasant affability to glaring hostility. And I doubt whether either ever went back into that pub again!
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