The Angel on his Shoulder...
Vacations were much shorter for medical students.
Vacations were much shorter for medical students. But Morris Hirsch and his pals went to the Kruger National Park when Ike Sher persuaded his sister Matie to lend him a car. It was an exciting trip with the Potch Devils taunting the animals. Fortunately they weren't spotted and the animals were tolerant. Morris was thrilled by the bushveld.
Once they went to Muizenberg and returned via the Garden Route. The car was owned by wealthy Benny Krausey who struggled to make the grade and used to get help from Morris. They ran over a chicken near a farm house on the outskirts of Humansdorp on the way to Port Elizabeth. They hurriedly bagged it as the bearded old farmer came rushing out of his roadside house, shouting and gesticulating, but, with a sizable paunch, to no avail.
The students enjoyed a barbecued lunch on a deserted beach at a safe distance from the scene of the crime. Hoping to save further cash they agreed to travel through the night without a hotel stop. But by 3 am. they were all exhausted and out of petrol. Petrol stations were not that plentiful in those days and certainly not open twenty-four hours a day.
They would worry about that in the morning. It was a dark moonless night. At dawn they were awakened with a start–a milk van was hooting them out of the way. They were obstructing the dirt main road of the village of Middelberg, Northern Cape. It was exciting to think they had escaped being run over during the pre-dawn hours and lucky to find themselves within close walking distance of a petrol pump.
At Margate Morris nearly drowned. Swimming out beyond the breakers, he was carried beyond the line of the beach before he realized there was a crosscurrent. He battled to swim back, then swam further out to sea to escape the rocky promontory that hid the beach from view, but made no headway.
There appeared to be no alternative but to try and ride the breakers on to the rugged shore. Tossed and tumbled by successive waves he was convinced that, that wouldn't work either. He wondered who'd be doing the post-mortem on his corpse. He'd just completed the Forensic Medicine course.
Resigned to his fate, he was suddenly thrust forward and felt the surf carry him onto the rocks, spume spitting high up the promontory. Fear now gripped him. In desperation he swam for the least incline, hoping to slide onto a smooth surface. The relief of impacting on a rock overrode his pain. He grasped for a hold but was torn back by the receding wash. The third thrust must have been the higher seventh wave, because it carried him forward to beach him.
He was exhausted and battered, but the joy of escaping death was all embracing. Giving thanks to who knew what, left him with the superstitious conviction that there would always be "an angel on his shoulder"!
The historical novel Whitewashed Jacarandas and its sequel Full of Possibilities are both available on Amazon as paperbacks and eBooks.
These books are inspired by Diana's family's experiences in small town Southern Rhodesia after WWII.
Dr. Sunny Rubenstein and his Gentile wife, Mavourneen, along with various town characters lay bare the racial arrogance of the times, paternalistic idealism, Zionist fervor and anti-Semitism, the proper place of a wife, modernization versus hard-won ways of doing things, and treatment of endemic disease versus investment in public health. It's a roller coaster read.
Excerpt from Dr. Morris Isaac Hirsch' s Unpublished Memoir: Hirsch Archives.
Photo references: Hirsch Archives.