I will never forget the Friday afternoon, soon after we have moved to the house in Avondale that my father acquired the aerial he intended putting up in the back yard. He had the car that day and had arranged to collect the equipment after work from the seller. Then he was to come and get both my mother and me from outside Shell House. I had a job downtown during the holidays, but needed a ride to get me home, since there were no buses. I, too, had made my way to Shell House.
My mother and I stood on the sidewalk and waited. It was way past 5pm, as had been arranged. My father was late, very late, and it would be dark in an hour or so. Where was he? We were getting impatient and anxious. Had he had an accident? It wasn’t like him to be late. We didn’t have cell phones in those days, so we had no means of checking his whereabouts. We kept peering down the road, in vain. No sign of the car at all… until… wait a minute…what on earth was that contraption coming slowly into view?! To me, it looked like a monstrous moving gantry, but, lo and behold, turned out to be my father, with 40ft. of steel aerial, in various bits, and with an enormous 3-dimensional cubic framework strapped to the top of the car. My mother and I were horrified. This was not at all what we had envisaged as an aerial. It almost dwarfed the car. It was HUGE! The local Africans passing by stopped and stared in awe at this enormous gadget tied onto the vehicle and extending beyond it at both ends. They had never seen anything like it. Neither had we.
My father, however, was thrilled. He had his aerial, and he was going to erect it over the weekend. This was a major step towards his becoming a licensed ham radio operator. He was like a schoolboy with his latest toy. My mother and I were in a state of shock, though we were relieved that my father was alive and well. We had no options now but to get into the car as my father drove us all slowly home.
Once there, John, Peter, our parents and I unloaded all the steelwork, lying it flat on the ground. My mother was probably wondering what the neighbours were going to say, especially when my father explained that the large open cube at the top would be rotating, searching for incoming signals from around the world.
To be fair, the aerial didn’t cause too much of an uproar in the neighbourhood, because it was partly screened by trees around us. The local Africans, domestic servants and gardeners from neighbouring properties, sometimes gathered to watch my father’s giant framed cube turn silently. No doubt they thought it was some kind of witchcraft in action.
Had our “movin’ movin’ movin’” come to a halt now that my father had his aerial? Would we stay here for evermore?
No, of course not. True to our theme song, we had to “keep them dogies rollin’ Rawhide!”, didn’t we?
