Jeffery Kempson
Mopani trees occur in tropical southern Africa. They have distinctive leaves that resemble butterfly wings. Within the belt of Mopani trees in northern Botswana, there lived three beautiful blonde, blue eyed girls who dramatically affected my flying life.
The first girl lived on a houseboat at Shakawe, on the Okavango panhandle in north western Botswana. I landed there while operating a scheduled flight for one of the earlier versions of Air Botswana.
In physical beauty, this lady on a scale of 1 to 10, was an 11. She was well spoken, with beautifully-modulated cadences and a captivatingly musical laugh.
In the evenings she ran the bar at the fishing camp, where I would spend happy hours wooing her with hopefully amusing repartee. This was rewarded with numerous star-spangled nights aboard her quaint but comfortable houseboat.
One memorable afternoon we boarded a tourist boat and set off down river between picturesque avenues of papyrus, to picnic on a sand bank.
Many sand banks were already occupied by basking crocodiles, so we kept going. About thirty minutes later we nosed onto a large crocodile-free sandbank on the inside meander of the river. We pulled the bow ashore, opened a bottle of wine, and ate freshly prepared sandwiches.
Later we slipped off our swimming costumes and made memorable love.
The afternoon was fading as we packed the picnic box and towels back into the boat. She climbed aboard and made her way aft as I pushed us off the sandbank. The boat suddenly broke free of the grip of the sand and I fell flat on my face .
I watched the current carry the boat out of reach. She laughed and pulled the outboard’s starting rope. Nothing. She pulled it again, and again.
The current took the boat ever faster down river from the fishing camp.
I shouted to her to connect the fuel pipe to the spare fuel tank.
As she did this, the boat drifted around the bend in the river, and I realised this was now a really seriously situation.
Then I heard the engine start, but it died after a few moments. I shouted to her to press the rubber priming bulb, but I don’t know whether she heard me. Then after what seemed like an eternity, I heard the boat’s engine start – and keep running. I felt a great surge of relief.
I looked for hungry crocodiles but happily saw none, as the boat approached against the current. I waded out and hauled myself aboard. We had both been more frightened than we cared to admit.
Some weeks later, I noticed a young girl in the blonde’s company, together with a handsome young male stranger sitting separately in the bar area. Later, as the lady and I strolled to her houseboat, this chap sprang out from behind a bush and bade us each, by name, good night.
I muttered a thanks. After boarding the houseboat I asked my lady friend who the fellow and the young girl were
‘My husband and daughter.’
It transpired that the estranged husband was trying for a reconciliation. The houseboat did not rock that night.
A week later, I was at Maun with an Aero Commander 500B, which I was to fly to Kasane for a two-night stop. Back then, there was almost no phone connection with many of the outlying locations. Communication was principally through side band radios, on a schedule set by the game lodges.
I found the other pilot, who was due to fly to Shakawe for a two-night stop, and told him that I wanted to do his flight. As I was the Chief Pilot, and also a director of the company, he did not demur, particularly as both involved stays at pleasant riverside locations, with beer at staff-rates for pilots.
Bearing in mind the old adage that “Faint heart never won fair lady” I had, with some trepidation, decided to present the Shakawe blonde with the option of remaining with her estranged husband and daughter, or coming to live happily ever after with me in northern Joburg.
It was an awkward few days. But on the second morning I took off from Shakawe with the blonde by my side and her daughter in the cabin.
As we climbed away over the fishing camp, she said; “He’ll be down there, drinking and crying.”
Her words were sobering . I reduced the power and started to turn back. She put a hand on my knee and said, “Don’t go back. I’ve already left him, so if you don’t take us away now, we’ll just have to leave some other way.”
I pushed the throttles back up and turned back on track.
One of the passengers asked, ‘Are we going back?’
“No.” I replied, “I thought I saw an elephant, but it’s gone.” Mollified he relaxed in his seat.
The thought of the husband and father weeping in the riverside bar, as the sound of my engines carried his wife and daughter away, has burdened me ever since.
Her mother lived in Francistown, so I dropped her there for a few of days while I continued scheduled flying.
Then I collected her and flew the late afternoon schedule to Selebe Phikwe, then onto Gaborone.
Half an hour after leaving Selebe Phikwe the sun set and I turned on the red instrument lights, which back then were the norm to preserve the pilot’s night vision. I closed the curtain between the cabin and the cockpit. Then I wound out the trailing HF aerial to make the half hourly Ops normal calls to Jan Smuts. In those days most of Botswana lay within the Johannesburg FIR.
Sometime later, I tuned the radio to a Rhodesian music station, then handed a headset to my girlfriend. None of our autopilots worked, so we hand flew everywhere, which was not a hardship in an inherently stable plane.
The cockpit grew a little chilly, so I switched on the Janitrol heater in the nose and was gratified that it didn’t explode on this first winter ignition, flooding the windscreen with burning avgas. Then I selected a temperature that would dissuade passengers from opening the curtain to request a heating change.
A little later, with her hand on my thigh, my new girlfriend became amorous.
Just then the radio started playing the Shirley Bassey hit “Never Never Never.” I sang softly along to the music and thought that it doesn’t get any better than this. It’s been worth all the flight tuition fees, passing the Commercial Pilot exams, the stringent flight tests, and medical examinations.
Sometime later, as I began the decent, my beautiful new princess shifted position, and began to arouse me in earnest.
I set up a long final approach towards the extended centre line of the runway and switched on the landing lights to pick up the reflectors along the runway edges.
Gaborone gave me a direct approach to the runway.
I urged my girlfriend to hurry, she giggled. I took flaps, selected gear, and slowed to the minimum approach speed. I stroked her hair, and sometime later moved my right hand to close the throttles, flared, and touched down smoothly. Clearing the runway, I realised I’d forgotten to wind in the trailing HF aerial, which now adorned the airport’s boundary fence. It was worth it.
We set up home in a house north west of Johannesburg, anticipating the construction of Lanseria Airport, then later moved to a cottage in Rivonia. I could spend a week or more at home. I took up photography and learnt about f-stops, shutter speeds and the like, and became fairly proficient. I turned a bedroom into a dark room, developed the black and white negatives, used an enlarger and made prints. Some I merged into “Photo Shop” type renditions with moderate success.
I only took pictures of my ultra-photogenic new girlfriend and aeroplanes. Until one day she declared that she was tired of smiling into a camera, and also fed up with the smell of photographic chemicals in the house. So I quit photography.
Dining out with her could be a mixed blessing. Walking into a busy northern suburbs restaurant often caused a lull in conversation, as husbands and boyfriends gawked, and their wives and girlfriends sometimes glowered at my partner, the smiling femme fatale.
We lived together for nearly three years, and were very happy at times, though my long and frequent flying absences put an inevitable strain on our relationship, not helped when I bought the growing daughter a bicycle and electric train for her birthday.
I thought that professional pilots constituted a higher life form, and that any sensible girl would be happy and proud to welcome her man home after transiting the dangerous sky. Apparently, she did not share my view.
We parted amicably, and she kept the car I bought her, and the furniture which I was still paying off. We later tried a couple of reconciliations, which didn’t really work out.
In retrospect I was too proud – and a little immature in my view that a professional aviator must be a prestigious catch.
A few years on I saw a picture of her now grown-up daughter on the back of the Sunday Times. She had become a beautiful model. It could not have been otherwise.
Many years later, I flew a charter flight to Victoria Falls, and one afternoon, while sitting on a bench under a large fig tree in the grounds of the Victoria Falls Hotel, a man sat down beside me, and said, “Hello Jeff.”
My blood froze; “Hello,” I replied. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m a salesman for a tyre company in Port Elizabeth, I’ve achieved my annual sales quota and won a prize of flights and three nights at Vic Falls.”
After a long and uncomfortable silence he said, “That morning, when I heard your plane’s engine note change, I thought you were bringing my wife and daughter back. So I walked out the bar, but then you turned and flew away. That felt like the end of my life!”
We both cried. As the sun set, we finished discussing how the blonde had ultimately blighted both our lives.
We stood up, shook hands, and he walked away. In the intervening years I had heard that he was a good man. Our shared misery had been cathartic, and as I descended the stairs towards the breakfast room the following morning, I felt a lightness of being, perhaps occasioned by a large karmic debt having been paid.
They say that “all’s fair in love and war.’ I disagree. The indelible stain of guilt lives with me. My only defence is that she was irresistibly beautiful. I never saw him again.
The night I left her, I loaded my suitcases into the car, then drove around aimlessly, in a state of abject misery for several hours. Sometime after midnight, I roused the staff of a Honeydew motel and booked in for the remainder of the night.
In the morning, I drove to Rand Airport, boarded one of our aircraft fresh from maintenance, and flew away, to Gaborone. There to stay and run our operation, Esquire Botswana Airways.
These days I exercise at a Park Walk in Johannesburg. On the way there, I drive past the motel that I had booked into that bleak night, so many years ago. I avert my gaze to quell memories just a tear away.