# DAD BOOK



_Edited first draft manuscript prepared for reading and proof printing._

# Choices, School and Golf

If I had to point to the age when life first begins to ask serious questions of a young person, I would point to high school. That is when choices stop feeling theoretical. Subjects are selected. Directions begin to narrow. A boy starts to sense, even if only dimly, that the decisions made in those years may shape the opportunities that come later.

By the time I reached boarding school for Standard 6 and Standard 7, I had already learned something about adapting to new places. Boarding school suited me better than some might expect. I enjoyed the order of it. I listened in class, did my work properly, and because I paid attention during lessons I usually did not have to spend endless hours studying later. That left time for other things. In my case, the other thing was golf.

When our family moved to East London, the lighthouse stood right in the middle of a golf course. That was the beginning of it. I watched golfers playing around us, and I watched the caddies searching in the rough for lost balls. At first I did the same, collecting balls where I could. Before long I found myself with a small assortment of clubs: a few irons, a driver, and a spoon. It was not much of a set, but it was enough to start.

I began hitting balls behind the lighthouse until a caddy took an interest in me. He told me he played off a six handicap, which meant nothing to me at first except that he clearly knew more than I did. We worked out an arrangement. I would start from the tenth hole and play the top nine, where I could be seen from the club, and from the next hole onward he would join me more freely. We played for one cent a hole. In the beginning he won most of those cents. Before long, I started winning some back.

That was how I learned: repetition, pride, competition, and a little money at stake. I improved quickly because I played constantly. The course was there, the hunger to get better was there, and the game itself fascinated me. Golf appealed to something in my nature. It rewarded concentration. It exposed temperament. It punished vanity. A single careless moment could undo a good stretch of play, which is a lesson that applies far beyond sport.

By the end of that year I had become good enough to enter junior tournaments. I did not yet dream in terms of trophies or prestige. I mostly liked the idea of winning new golf balls. But then I played a round that opened my eyes. On the front nine of one tournament, on the side of the course I knew best, I went round in 39, four over par. People started noticing. Fingers pointed. Heads turned. That can be a dangerous moment for a young player.

On the back nine I came apart. I knew that side of the course less well, but the real problem was not the layout. It was my own head. One poor shot led to frustration, frustration led to more mistakes, and the round slipped away. That day taught me that talent alone is never enough. If you cannot govern yourself, the gift in your hands turns against you.

Around the same period I had another golfing education, one that stayed with me for life. Gary Player came to play in East London, and I went to watch him. What struck me was not only how well he hit the ball, but how simply he thought about the game. On one hole someone tried to explain the dogleg and the route he should take. He stopped them and asked a better question: how far is it from the tee to the green, and in what direction? That was the moment I realised what mastery looked like. A true professional does not play by superstition. He plays by knowledge, distance, and disciplined intention.

Not long after that I got hold of a golfing book connected to Gary Player, and I practiced from it constantly. I tried to hook the ball, slice it, fade it, bend it around trees, and understand not just how to hit a shot but why. Golf became more than amusement. It became evidence, at least to me, that I might have been able to build something serious if I had stayed the course in school.

That is the part I still reflect on. I was doing reasonably well academically. I believe I might have earned school colours in golf. I might have become more visible in the school, perhaps even a prefect. More importantly, I would have had the two years at the end of school when young people begin to be taken seriously, when universities become possible, and when adults start to notice promise.

Those years matter. If you are gifted at sport, people see you. If you are strong in your studies, doors remain open. If you complete school, you carry a qualification that follows you into every future job interview and every difficult season that comes later. I did not understand that fully then. I understand it now.

I do not tell this part of my story as a complaint against school or against youth. I tell it because these are the first real crossroads. When you are young, you imagine that every road will somehow lead back to the same place. Life is not like that. Some decisions open the road. Others narrow it. I was about to make one of the costly ones.

# The Mistake That Cost Me Years

I left school too early. That is the plain truth of it, and I have lived long enough to know the price of that decision.

At the time, however, it did not feel like a mistake. I was still very young, only sixteen, and I had heard something that sounded promising. A man connected to the prison department told my family that if a person was a good sportsman, especially a golfer, the department would give him opportunities and time to play. To a boy who thought he was stepping toward adult life, that sounded like a sensible arrangement: earn a salary, play golf, and begin the future early.

What I did not have at that stage was proper guidance. Nobody sat me down and explained what it means to leave school before the important years are done. Nobody told me that what looks like an early start can become a lifelong handicap. So I joined the prison service and told myself I was beginning my career.

At first the work was administrative and harmless enough, but then came training college. That was my first real taste of institutional discipline as a young man. Beds had to be made correctly. Shoes had to shine. Bodies had to toughen up. I was one of the youngest there, and although I went through the motions and got fit, I was still more boy than man. I used to hitchhike long distances back to East London over weekends, driven partly by homesickness and partly by insecurity. Even then, something in me was trying to return to the life I had left behind.

Once I passed out and returned to East London, the romantic idea of the job disappeared quickly. In the prison kitchen I found myself dealing with hardened men who were stronger, older, and far more experienced than I was. On one occasion I had a serious confrontation with a convict who could easily have flattened me. I carried on, because pride and fear often stand side by side in a young man, but I knew I was in a world that had little to do with the future I had imagined.

Later I was sent out with work gangs into the prison fields, carrying a rifle and watching prisoners weed gardens and gather produce. They played games with me, the way older men will test a youngster to see whether he belongs. Someone would disappear from the line just long enough to make me panic while I counted heads again and again. Standing in the sun for hours, learning how easily a situation could turn, I began to understand that I had not chosen a profession that matched either my gifts or my hopes.

Night duty was no better. It meant long rounds in the dark, in wind and rain, moving around the prison and reporting back at intervals. Somewhere in those years I began to feel the weight of a decision made too soon. Work can strengthen a person, but the wrong work can also close him in.

The first real opening came through study. My father, because of his shift work in the lighthouse service, had taken an interest in homeopathy. That led me toward a correspondence course in botanical medicine. It was not a grand university path, but it lit something in me. I studied while working, passed the exam, and found myself with a certificate that, if nothing else, gave me a fresh sense that I might still build a life with my mind and my initiative.

The prison department did not regard that certificate as a formal ladder upward, but it did help me move into hospital work within the service. There I learned useful things. I dealt with patients, followed doctors' instructions, observed symptoms, and gained confidence in practical care. Those years were not wasted entirely. Life is rarely that simple. Even wrong turns leave you with tools. But I would still say that I was building with materials that had been salvaged from an avoidable mistake.

After about seven years, I left. By then I was a young adult with some experience, some confidence, and a strong sense that I should work for myself. I took my pension money and opened a small herbal shop. I learned quickly that business suited me. I knew how to make a shelf look fuller than it was. I knew how to reinvest rather than spend. I knew how to work long hours and travel when necessary to fetch stock. A woman named Mildred came into the shop on the very first morning and asked for work; she became part of the early story and helped the business take shape.

From there I grew. One shop led to another. I sold herbal products, consulted customers, studied the trade as I went, and put almost every cent back into stock. Seasonal opportunities helped. Good margins helped. Energy helped most of all. Before long I had expanded into a second shop and then a third. For the first time in years, it felt as though I was moving with life instead of against it.

Yet even in that period I made another costly choice. I gave my strongest shop to my father, and in doing so I surrendered the best engine of the business I had built. It slowed me down and forced me to rebuild momentum elsewhere. That, too, became part of the pattern of my life: working hard, recovering, improvising, and learning expensive lessons only after they had already been paid for.

Then came another turn. I saw the chance to travel to New Zealand, and because adventure has always had a strong claim on me, I took it. I arranged for a friend to manage matters in my absence, packed away what I owned, and left.

When I look back now, I do not say that leaving school ruined my life. Life is never a straight line, and I still found ways to work, build, and begin again. But I do say this without hesitation: leaving school early cost me years. It took away qualifications I would later wish for. It shut certain doors before I even knew they existed. Much of what I achieved afterward came through force of will and hard experience, when a wiser early decision might have given me a firmer foundation from the start.

That is why I call it the biggest mistake of my life. Not because nothing good followed it, but because so much had to be repaired afterward.

# By the Light of the Sea

I was born in Queenstown in 1952, but some of my earliest memories belong more to the sea than to the inland town where my life began. My father worked in the lighthouse service, and that meant our family was always moving from one station to another. The sea was never scenery to us. It was the edge of our daily life, the sound outside the window, the thing that decided how supplies arrived, how people lived, and how children grew up.

Some lighthouse stations were close enough to ordinary life for a child to feel that he belonged to the rest of the world. Others were isolated in a way that is difficult to explain to people who have always lived in towns. On Bird Island, off Port Elizabeth, a tug would bring food when the weather allowed it, sometimes only once a month. If the sea was rough, you waited. If something went wrong, you managed. Life in those places taught you very early that comfort was never guaranteed and that people survived by being practical.

I remember breaking the little finger on my hand while we were on Bird Island. There was no quick drive to a doctor and no convenient clinic around the corner. Instead, instructions were passed over the radio and my finger was patched up with whatever could be found, matchsticks included. That was lighthouse life in one small story: something goes wrong, you do not panic, and you make a plan with what is available.

The isolation also produced its own humour. One story that stayed in the family was about a newcomer to the station being told that, at a certain hour, he had to call the Flying Dutchman over the radio. He did exactly that, while the rest of the household listened in amusement. Eventually the joke made its way far enough that somebody on the other end had to point out that one does not, in fact, raise a ghost ship by wireless. In those outposts, people entertained themselves with stories, pranks, fishing, and whatever else made the loneliness lighter.

There was beauty in that life too. The fishing was often excellent. On some stations there were penguins and seabirds all around us. On Robben Island I remember hearing about crayfish so large that only a few could feed a whole family. Even as a child I sensed that I was seeing a South Africa that many people never would: harsh in places, generous in others, and always slightly apart from the ordinary world.

The hardest part of that childhood was not the sea. It was the moving. My father would be transferred from one lighthouse to another, and just as I had begun to settle in, make friends, and feel that I belonged, it would be time to leave again. For a child, that takes a toll. You learn how to start over, but you also learn not to hold too tightly to people, because experience tells you that goodbye is always somewhere ahead.

Eventually there came a stage when certain postings made normal schooling difficult, and boarding school became part of my life. In many ways that was another kind of training. Boarding school teaches you very quickly that no parent is standing behind you to rescue you from every mistake. If you miss a meal, you miss it. If you neglect your duties, you answer for it yourself. I was not a particularly troublesome boy, and in truth I enjoyed the independence. It taught me to look after myself, to be orderly, and to understand that discipline is not always a punishment. Sometimes it is a form of freedom.

Looking back, I can see that lighthouse life gave me two things that never left me. The first was self-reliance. When you grow up in places where the weather, the sea, and circumstance do not care about your preferences, you learn to adapt. The second was a taste for adventure. Once you have lived on remote stations, heard the sea all night, and watched adults make a life in unlikely places, ordinary caution loses some of its power over you.

That spirit would follow me for the rest of my life, sometimes to my benefit and sometimes to my cost. But before the bigger adventures came, there was school, and then there was golf. Both would matter more than I understood at the time.

# Marriage, Intimacy and the Long Haul

There are two decisions in life that, in my view, carry extraordinary weight. The first is the decision about how and when you leave school, because that choice shapes the kind of future you are equipped to enter. The second is the decision about whom you marry, because that choice shapes the atmosphere in which the rest of your life will be lived.

Marriage cannot be sustained by ceremony alone. A wedding may begin a life together, but it does not carry the marriage for the years that follow. Real marriage is built in private, in daily conduct, in trust, in patience, in the way two people speak to one another when the world is not watching. It is also built through intimacy.

I have always believed that physical closeness in marriage is not separate from love but one of the ways love is maintained. Affection, tenderness, and desire are not luxuries to be visited only in the early days. They are part of the bond itself. When a husband and wife are close in that way, there is often a sense of rest between them. The home feels softer. The strain of life is easier to carry. The relationship is not perfect, but it is alive.

One of the mistakes people make is to assume that intimacy is automatic. In the beginning, during the honeymoon phase of a relationship, closeness can seem effortless. Everything is new. Affection is easily expressed. But marriage does not stay in its first season forever. Work enters. Children may come. Financial stress appears. Personal disappointments accumulate. Familiarity can either deepen love or flatten it.

That is why thoughtfulness matters. Men and women do not always experience intimacy in the same way or at the same speed. What feels sufficient to one partner may feel rushed or incomplete to the other. A good marriage learns that closeness often begins before the bedroom. It can begin with attention, with gentleness, with a word spoken at the right time, with anticipation created through the day, and with a willingness to treat one another as treasured rather than merely available.

I do not mean that marriage must become theatrical or artificial. In fact, I believe the opposite. The point is not novelty for its own sake. The point is care. Routine can make even good things mechanical. But when affection is sincere and attentiveness is real, marriage resists that deadness. A spouse does not want to feel processed. A spouse wants to feel known.

I also believe that fidelity matters profoundly. Intimacy in marriage is not just a physical act. It is a private language of trust. When that trust is broken, something more than behaviour has been damaged. Secrecy enters. Shame enters. Even if the marriage continues, a hidden fracture has been made in the foundation. For that reason, I have never believed that infidelity is a harmless indulgence. If it must be hidden, that alone tells you something important about its nature.

The older I have become, the more I have come to respect marriage as a long discipline rather than a passing romance. Love changes shape over time. Early passion is one form of it, but loyalty is another. Shared hardship is another. Humour is another. The habit of returning to one another is another. Intimacy belongs inside that larger picture. It is not the whole of marriage, but neither is it incidental.

If I were offering advice to a younger man, I would say this: choose carefully, because you will live inside that choice for a very long time. Do not take your wife for granted. Do not assume that closeness will maintain itself. Protect the private bond between you. Speak honestly. Be kind when it would be easier to be cold. And remember that love is not only something you feel. It is also something you continue to build.

That, to me, is what makes marriage one of the great decisions of a lifetime. It is not important only because of the day you begin it. It is important because of the person you become while living it.