Every year during the Mallorcan winter—so, South African summer—my mum and I would travel back to South Africa. December, January, maybe February. I don’t remember the exact dates, but I remember the anticipation. I looked forward to those holidays like mad.
They always meant one thing above all: fishing. Not that my love of it started there. That spark had been lit on a childhood trip to Mozambique, when I’d hooked a fish off a bridge and snapped my rod in two. But this story isn’t about Bruce, or Mozambique, or childhood obsession. It’s about Port Alfred.
We were going to visit Francis and Arthur Rouse, old friends of my parents from Waverley. Arthur was an ex-airline pilot, and he and Francis had moved to Port Alfred, a little village on the east coast between Port Elizabeth and East London.
Niels had a Volkswagen Kombi at the time—a proper passion wagon—and a lovely Labrador named Wellington. We all piled in: my mum, Niels, myself, and Wellington. The trip down took about fourteen hours. South Africa was experiencing fuel rationing at the time, so we carried black market 44-gallon drums in the back, because the petrol stations were closed over weekends. It felt rebellious and grown-up and thrilling.
There were new things: cartons of Liqui-Fruit had just hit the South African market, and I couldn’t get enough of them. Youngberry flavour, specifically. Unforgettable.
Francis and Arthur lived on a hill, in a house that overlooked the Kowie River. Arthur had a boat moored on the river and an old Land Rover for surf fishing. The anticipation of that trip still buzzes in my memory. It was all magic.
We watched the 8 o’clock news in the evenings, alternating nights between English and Afrikaans. Francis would spoil me with Stoney Ginger Beer. The next morning, we were up before dawn— I was soaked in the thrill of what was coming.
We loaded Arthur’s Land Rover with fishing gear and drove down to the river where he kept his boat. On the way upriver, just as the first light of morning hit the water, Arthur cast a throw net for live mullet and dropped them into the live well. A few kilometres upstream, he stopped the boat and we drived in a likely looking bend in the river. He hooked one of the mullet through the dorsal fin, cast it out with a float, and handed me the rod.
We waited in silence. Still water. Still air. And then—action.
The float twitched.
“There’s something after your bait,” Arthur whispered.
The float bobbed once… twice… and then disappeared beneath the surface.
My line screamed into the dawn.
It was chaos. I fought that fish for what felt like forever—probably five minutes. Then, finally, we got it to the net. A shad—a silvery, muscular beauty, maybe 6 or 7 lbs. Excellent eating, too. It felt like catching the moon.
Each morning was like that. We set traps for crabs on the way upriver—massive dark green beasts, six inches across the shell with pincers that could take a finger off. Not really my thing, taste-wise, at age nine, but just knowing they were there made the day more electric.
And then there were the dunes. Arthur would deflate the Land Rover’s tyres for better grip, and we’d head off along that endless stretch of coastline—beaches and sand dunes as far as you could see. Francis collected shells and whatever else the tide had left behind in the lagoon pools between the dunes. One day, I found a Stone Age arrowhead in one of them. It felt magical.
Another day, Niels pulled a throw net full of king prawns out of the river. That night, we had a feast.
Eventually, the holiday ended. It was time to head back to Johannesburg. Niels packed a wet sack full of live crabs to take home. On the way, we stopped to visit some family friends—the Andersons. Eric Anderson was the Danish consul in East London. He and his wife, Ruth, had a weekend house up in Hogsback, in the Winterberg mountains.
Hogsback was cold, high, and steeped in rural South African folklore.
One of those stories was about the Tokoloshe—a mischievous, goblin-like creature believed to steal souls in the night. Many people in the area slept with their beds raised on bricks to stop it the apparently diminutive Tokoloshe from reaching them.
And here’s where it gets... unfortunate.
In his wisdom, Niels decided it wasn’t a good idea to leave a sack of live crabs in the Kombi overnight. So he brought it into the guest room—and shoved it under his bed which of course wasn't on bricks.
Then, early the next morning, we left completely forgetting about the sack of crabs.
Larer that day, the poor maid was sent in to tidy the room. Instead, she discovered a sack full of enormous, aggressive, still-alive crabs, hissing and clacking in the shadows under the bed.
And just like that, the legend of the Tokoloshe was permanently upgraded.
That trip—Port Alfred, the river, the dunes, the fishing, the arrowhead—that trip became a sacred mental archive. A place I would return to later in life when anxiety overtook me. Lying in bed, unable to sleep, I’d try to call back the calm of that morning on the river. The thrill of the float dipping. The silence. The motion. The fight.
It didn’t always work.
But it always helped.