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Yes, Really!
Yes, Really!
Yes, Really!
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Yes, Really!

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'There are a lot of good things about getting older. When you’re young you want everyone to like you and to make an impression. When you’re old you don’t give a damn.' Kate Turkington is fearless and fun, even now in her 80s. Actually, more so! From the war-worn East End of London to raising a young family in a remote part of eastern Nigeria and then building a career as one of SA's most loved broadcasters, Kate's story is remarkable and revealing. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You will cheer. And you may well be shocked.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherTafelberg
Release dateApr 11, 2018
ISBN9780624083689
Yes, Really!
Author

Kate Turkington

Kate Turkington is one of South Africa’s best-known broadcasters, and a veteran writer and critic. Her weekly Sunday night show, Believe It Or Not, on Talk Radio 702 and 567 CapeTalk was the country's longest-running radio talk show with the same host in the same time slot when it ended in 2003. She continues to broadcast as a regular guest on travel shows and blogs for several websites, and travels almost non-stop, writing articles for international and local magazines and newspapers. Her other books include the bestselling 'Doing It with Doris' and 'There's More to Life than Surface'.

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    Book preview

    Yes, Really! - Kate Turkington

    Kate Turkington

    YES,

    REALLY!

    A LIFE

    Tafelberg

    To my family and all my fellow travellers

    You know who you are

    Prelude

    I’m in my ninth decade and can still have multiple orgasms.

    But more of that later.

    I’ve had two husbands, four children, nine grandchildren and a clutch of lovers.

    Recently, cleaning out some files, I found a bunch of old love letters. I had no idea I’d kept them – I mean, some of them are over 60 years old – but they got me to remembering and thinking about past loves, past happenings and my life so far.

    There were letters – some of them very sexually graphic – from Malcolm and Alan, the two husbands; and then, somewhat mysteriously, with a perished rubber-band around them (I don’t do pink ribbon), there were four letters together in a separate bundle.

    The first was written by a university don when I was eighteen and in my first year at university. He was a Scot, tall, blond and married. He thought I looked like Audrey Hepburn and fell helplessly in love. I flirted with him and led him on a bit, but when he finally got very serious and presented me with a gold watch, my eighteen-year-old morals (quite strong in those days of the 50s, not yet the rollicking 60s) kicked in and I refused him and the watch. His letter is morbid and morose (typically Scots after a few drams), saying his life was ruined.

    The second non-spouse letter was from another academic, one from Nottingham whom I had met on an examining trip to West Africa when I was Chief Examiner for O Level English for the West African Examinations Board in Nigeria. He wrote me a quite wonderful Shakespearian sonnet.

    I might let you read it later …

    The third letter was from a racing yachtsman who described me as ‘a fast sloop that sailed in and out of his life’. Mmm.

    The fourth love letter, however, was the most interesting of all.

    It is written on the thin blue airmail paper that was still used in the 60s and 70s and, penned in beautiful copperplate handwriting, begins:

    My Darling Kate

    I can’t live without you. I can’t sleep, pace the room at night, go drinking till all hours at the club, and never for a moment stop thinking about you …

    The letter continues in this anguished vein for three more pages.

    Finally:

    I am going to take you away from Alan and run off with you and we will be together always.

    Alex

    I have simply no idea who Alex is.

    1

    Sort of Famous

    ‘Are you famous?’ asks the wide-eyed friend of Alice, my eleven-year-old granddaughter. (I think Alice had been hyping me up.)

    ‘Sort of,’ I reply.

    And in a way, that’s true. Especially in South Africa, which has been my home since 1970.

    I have appeared variously on TV shows since the opening week of SABC television in 1976, when I did a book review on the arts programme Galaxy, and discussed for six minutes Harry’s Game, the first novel of a then unknown writer called Gerald Seymour. It was a groundbreaking thriller and Seymour became one of the genre’s best-known authors, with multiple international bestsellers to his name.

    In the early 80s I co-hosted the TV show Prime Time, also on SABC. Directed by the late great Bill Faure, it was revolutionary in terms of its presentation, its glitz and glamour, and in its array of celebrity guests. I’d already had my fair share of celebs with BBC TV during the Swinging 60s, before my family and I came to settle in South Africa, when I’d hosted a show called Kate at Eight. I had interviewed everyone from the Beatles, fashion icon Mary Quant, assorted film stars – including Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins – to, once, a talking dog (it barked, ‘I want one!’).

    I’ve seen the Queen’s knickers (yes, really), chatted with Prince Charles, and interviewed prime ministers. I interviewed Pierre Cardin, Richard Chamberlain and Sharon Stone, and many more, now either dead, fallen from grace or just burnt out.

    I was also sawn in half on live television. There were my feet on one side of the screen and my head on the other and a big wide space in between. To this I day don’t know how the magician did it.

    But it was Believe It or Not, the radio talk show I hosted, that introduced me to ideas, stories and people that I had never dreamed of. Over the course of 20 years on Sunday evenings, I spoke to prophets, poets, prisoners, pagans, pantheists, witches and wizards. I listened to charlatans, Chinese healers, archbishops, the Dalai Lama, agnostics, atheists, leaders of cults, nuns and priests. I watched faith healers at work, met people who had had near-death experiences, people who had talked to angels or seen ghosts, and those who communicated with their loved ones on ‘the other side’. It was one of South Africa’s longest-running talk shows and I conducted approximately 4 000 interviews with the famous, not so famous and totally unknown. Most guests on my show had fascinating stories to tell.

    Once I interviewed Jesus Christ – who was on the line from Southern California (where else?). He told me that there were secrets his mother had never told him. A listener immediately called in and said that obviously one of the secrets Mary had never told him was that he was stark-staring mad. However, we got along very well with one another and the next day I got an email (I still have it as a very cherished souvenir) in which he told me he had made me an honorary angel.

    Shortly before this I had been chatting with the leader of a vicious homophobic cult in Kansas. So vicious in fact, that the US government passed a law against him. I didn’t get on as well with him as I had with Jesus the Puerto Rican messiah. In fact the Kansas cult leader urged his followers to put a curse on me and my family.

    The Turkington Curse. For all I know it might still be there on the web. However, nothing happened to me or my family although, rather mysteriously, the radio station’s transmitter was struck by lightning the following day and went off air for 24 hours.

    Later in life, I turned to full-time travel writing and, like Shakespeare’s Puck, I have now girdled the world several times and continue to do so. The thing about travel writing, as I tell young eager journalists and wannabe travel writers, is that you won’t make any money but you will travel the world at somebody else’s expense.

    So … sort of famous.

    There are a lot of good things about getting older. When you’re young you want everyone to like you and you want to make an impression. When you’re old you don’t give a damn. You know who you are. You know what you’re good at and not good at, and you’re not scared to say so.

    I have experienced life to its fullest and I’ve learnt much along the way. Now I would like to share some of my experiences with you, and for you to meet a few of the people who have touched my life and impacted on my thinking in some way.

    I am inviting you to come with me on a journey, not only to some of the world’s best-known destinations, but also to some places you perhaps might never have heard of. Maybe we’ll even travel beyond this physical world to other, still unknown, realms.

    Leave your baggage at home so that you’ve space in your mind and heart to gather some new stuff.

    All the people you’re going to meet in these pages are real and all their stories are true.

    I hope they will resonate with you in one way or another, perhaps bring you some clarity, acceptance, knowledge – even power.

    There is always a story.

    So let’s begin.

    2

    Doing It

    You may not have a personal memory of the 1950s – many of you will not have been born yet, nor have grown up then, as I did – but I’m sure you can nevertheless call to mind pictures or photographs of the period, possibly in old newspapers or magazines, especially the advertisements. Housewives in frilly pinnies with syrupy smiles on their faces, waiting for their hubbies to come home from the office and holding out plates of freshly baked biscuits. Advertisements for vanishing cream and Brylcreem. Perms. Twinsets.

    We wore pull-ons or girdles to hold our tummies in (the sort of underwear that Woolies sells today, only now they’re called shapers or firmers).

    We adored British pop stars like Cliff Richard and Adam Faith and American crooners like Nat King Cole; and we danced to the inimitable Buddy Holly.

    We read novels like Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien would later be one of my university lecturers), Steinbeck’s East of Eden, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Some of these books became classics; many are still set-works in schools and universities around the world today. One of my most prized possessions is a copy of Things Fall Apart that Chinua inscribed personally for me when we met in Nigeria many years later.

    On tiny black-and-white television sets we watched American shows such as I Love Lucy, Lassie and Bonanza and, on BBC, What’s My Line? And we all perved over the young David Attenborough in Zoo Quest.

    We went to ‘the pictures’ (think ‘bioscope’ in South Africa in the same period) and saw The Seven Samurai, High Noon, Ben Hur, A Streetcar Named Desire (with the young Marlon Brando), Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo and, of course, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. Over the decades since, the 50s have been brought back to life on both small and big screens with fair regularity – in the Indiana Jones movies, for example, West Side Story, Brooklyn, The Godfather, M*A*S*H and Call the Midwife.

    Well, it was like all that in the 50s – and at the same time it wasn’t.

    Sex was a word hardly ever uttered.

    If a movie had a scene in it with a man, a woman and a bed, the British film censors decreed that if the man and woman were on the bed at the same time, the man always had to have one foot firmly on the floor.

    Sales of The Kama Sutra doubled.

    There was high moral outrage in Britain when the movie Quo Vadis, which was about a tough Roman commander and a beautiful Christian hostage, was released in 1951. Why? Because on the soundtrack the crunching of the Christian’s bones by the lions in the Roman amphitheatre was clearly heard.

    This was unacceptable and pious music was inserted instead.

    At Lincoln College, Oxford University, where Malcolm, my first husband, was a student, there was a handwritten notice (in copperplate of course) warning the gentlemen scholars that if they entertained a lady in their rooms, the bed must be put outside the door. Which was actually impossible as the rooms were situated up and down a twisting, very narrow fifteenth-century staircase. I wonder if the college authorities really believed that sex could only take place on a bed?

    But these were halcyon days to be a student. For one thing fourteen years of food rationing finally ended in Britain, at midnight on 4 July 1954, when restrictions on meat and bacon were lifted. Until then, since 1940, a few months into World War 2, people were assigned ration books, with coupons that we could exchange for food and clothes. The Germans cut off food supplies that had traditionally come in by sea so we had to manage on a lot less than we’d been used to. It seems hard to believe now but we were allowed one egg a week, 50 gm of tea, butter and cheese, 225 gm of sugar and, every four months, 450 gm of jam and 350 gm of sweets. There were no soft drinks such as Coke back then, but we did get 3 pts (1 800 ml) of milk a week, which sometimes dropped to 2 pts (1 200 ml). As the war dragged on, food became even less readily available. Bread was added to the ration and our sweets ration was halved. There was little or no petrol available either, so we walked or cycled everywhere – my family couldn’t afford a car anyway so this didn’t affect us overmuch.

    So it was by the time we were students in the early 1950s, the first generation of British working-class kids to go to university on grants and scholarships, we were in seventh heaven. We could eat what we liked, overdose on chocolate and chips if we liked, and buy all the clothes we could afford. Ration coupons had only allowed us to buy one completely new set of clothes once a year. Luckily, Doris (my mother) was a dressmaker so my sister Rita and I always had the latest fashions, even if one of my very best party dresses as a child was made out of curtain lining. No wonder I empathised with Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind when she made a dress out of the antebellum mansion’s green velvet dining room curtains.

    When I went up to university, students on the whole were happy, content and fully understood that although we were on scholarships it would be necessary to find a job every vacation in order to keep ourselves supported because the money we got from government only covered lodgings during term time, fees and books.

    A couple of years later, when Britain was riding high on the post-war economic boom, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s then prime minister (whom I was to meet some years later, in 1960, on the occasion of Nigeria’s independence), was reinforcing the message to the whole British public with his famous declaration that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’.

    Scholarships, however, were not so easy to come by. Only one per cent of the British population went to university, and it was a strict meritocracy.

    At age seventeen I was lucky enough to be interviewed in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, the county where I lived, by the county education officer, John Newsom, who was later knighted for his services to British education and had a school and several streets named after him. My A Levels had been pretty good but not brilliant; nonetheless I had been selected for a personal interview with him to see if I was university material and eligible for a county scholarship.

    I’ve always loved English literature, the poetry and majesty of words, the nuances and rhythms of language. I’d read at least four or five books a week since a young child and I still do. Sometimes more.

    Mr Newsom’s first question to me was:

    ‘Which poets do you enjoy?’

    And I was away. Two hours later our conversation had covered everything from AA Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and his Christopher Robin poems, to WH Auden, Dylan Thomas, Enid Blyton and Shakespeare.

    I remember that conversation well and the kind, clever man who was nevertheless incisively probing my mind as we laughed and shared likes and dislikes. I owe him a huge debt because he awarded me my scholarship, just as I owe a huge debt to my sister Rita, my mother Doris, and to my amazing O and A Levels English teacher, the Hon Gwen, who fostered my love of learning.

    Unbeknown to me at the time, somewhere in London Malcolm had just won a scholarship to Oxford but had postponed going up so as to complete his compulsory national service first. And somewhere in the Mountains of Mourne in Northern Ireland, Alan (my second husband) was preparing to sit for his university scholarship exam.

    Our paths were to become inextricably crossed.

    I grew up first in the East End of London. Then World War 2 happened. Rita and I were evacuated from London to the countryside along with hundreds of thousands of other urban children. In September 1939, I aged four and Rita aged six, with gas masks in brown cardboard boxes tied with string around our necks, each clutching the one small attaché case we were allowed packed with a few clothes, with brown paper parcel labels with our names on tied through a buttonhole on our pink homemade coats, were kissed goodbye by our parents at London’s St Pancras Station, put on a train with straw on the floor and literally sent into the unknown.

    I remember how at school we used to practise putting on those suffocating gas masks, which smelt of rubber, and then practising hiding under our desks for when the Nazis came.

    Rita and I had never been away from home. My sister, always the drama queen, even at six, told me we were going to the ends of the earth. I believed her.

    Much has been written since on the effects of evacuation on parents and children.

    I asked my mother much later in life how she could possibly have given up her children in this callous and heartbreaking way.

    ‘We’d seen pictures of horrifying bombing raids in China and Spain,’ was her reply. ‘The government dropped leaflets from the sky warning us what could happen to our children if the Nazis came. You were going to be raped and killed. We had no choice.’

    The statistics are astonishing. In just four days 4 000 trains transported nearly a million and a half evacuees out of London and it all went like clockwork. Not one casualty or mishap was reported. It was later that both parents and children suffered what became known as post-traumatic stress syndrome.

    I have a superb memory. This is not a boast but a fact. Any of my friends, fans or family will attest to it. But of that six months I spent as an evacuee somewhere in the damp fens of East Anglia I have no memory at all. I suppose a shrink would call it classic block-out. All I remember was the noise at the station, the weeping and wailing, the huge railway engine puffing clouds of steam and that I was quite excited to be wearing my Sunday-best coat.

    In September 2017 I was travelling in Croatia when I got a WhatsApp from my granddaughter Alice, from school in Johannesburg:

    Granny, we’re learning about evacuees in History. Do you know anything about them?

    Wow! I thought. I’m history!

    But Doris was not one to let ‘that little twerp Hitler’ break up her family or stop her in her tracks. Aided and abetted by my mother, my father Dick found a job as a welder at De Havilland’s Aircraft factory in rural Hertfordshire away from London. A rented house was found nearby, and Doris and Dick soon rescued their children from what Rita later described as ‘Cold Comfort Farm on steroids’ and we were a united family again.

    It was a good thing we had got out of London. The following September saw the beginning of the Blitz, Hitler’s attempt to annihilate London by carrying out the most savage bombing campaign the world had ever seen of that and other cities in England. The period of intense bombing continued until the following May, when Hitler finally decided to move his bombers east to get ready for Germany’s invasion of Russia.

    On 7 September 1940 and for 57 consecutive days thereafter London was bombed continuously, day or night, and thousands of innocent civilians were killed. On the last night of the Blitz alone, 11 May 1941, over 3 000 people died.

    Our small family – Doris, Dick, Grandfather, Rita and I – missed all that.

    We lived happily all together in the countryside in a small house with three bedrooms, a dining room, lounge, kitchen and bathroom. The house backed onto a wild wood where brown rabbits, nightingales and hedgehogs lived. In spring it was carpeted with bluebells, and bushes and trees burst forth – crimson rhododendron flowers and fragile white cherry blossom; in autumn we picked blackberries.

    My grandfather was a Swede from Götland, an island that sits largely in the sea between the mainland of Sweden and Lithuania, and had once been the centre and pivot of all Baltic trade and queen of the Hanseatic League. At twelve, he had run away from home and become a cabin boy on a sailing ship.

    In our teens Rita and I would find the house he had grown up in, in Ronehamn, a small village on Götland’s east coast, and talk to a rheumy-eyed, very old man who as a child had known Johann and helped him run away to sea.

    Thereafter Grandfather John Frederick Ahlquist spent most of his life on sailing ships and to his last days was suspicious of any other kind of vessel, because his were the days of ‘wooden ships and iron men’. Not, as he would grunt, like today, ‘of iron ships and wooden men’.

    He had sailed around the world many times. He’d deserted ship and trekked across the Canadian wilderness in bitter winter. He had been becalmed in the Sargasso Sea in a vast patch of the Atlantic Ocean named for its free-floating seaweed called Sargassum and stewed his boots for food. He had had his left foot prematurely shortened by a frisky shark, sailed with Joseph Conrad before the mast, and finally had his wanderings cut short by a fall from the ship’s crow’s nest during a storm while in Canada’s Gulf of St Lawrence. He somehow ended up as a patient at the Greenwich Hospital on the bank of the Thames, created in 1692 as the Royal Hospital for Seamen. We never actually did find out how the Swedish captain of a sailing ship ended up there, but it was while he was there that he met, fell in love with and married a nurse named Edith Ashburn, who nursed him back to health. Edith, my grandmother, came from a long line of Yorkshire witches. (You can read all about him, and my mother Doris, in my earlier book Doing It with Doris.)

    When Doris and Dick went out dancing or to work ‘dos’ during those war days, Rita and I would be left in Grandad’s care. Problem was that Rita, she of the ever fertile imagination, had convinced me that Grandad was a German spy, irrevocable proof being his slightly foreign accent and a small badge he wore in his lapel. While Grandad sat unsuspectingly by the fire on a winter’s night, puffing on his pipe and dreaming of rascally mates and brutal skippers, alluring South Sea maidens and dainty geisha girls, I, spurred on by Rita, would be creeping up on him to see if he was transmitting secret

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