One of the nicest things about traveling is that you almost always run into an old acquaintance in an unexpected place. Dana Snyman's path crossed with his woodworking teacher from back in the day...
Recently, I walked into a Wimpy in the Bushveld - and there sat old Skroef at a table by the window, hunched over a hamburger and a cup of coffee.
At first, I hesitated to be sure it was him because the last time I saw him many years ago, his hair was dark, and he had a straight Beatles fringe. The hair of the old man at the table was gray and thinning.
When my eye caught his left hand, I knew it had to be Skroef: Back then, he already had only three and a half fingers on that hand.
The older you get, the more this happens to you: You are traveling somewhere or walking in a shopping mall, and then a vaguely familiar person appears before you. Sometimes you immediately know who it is; other times, you struggle to put a name to that face now bearing the signs of age.
I sat at a table diagonally behind Skroef, and when I looked down at the floor, I no longer doubted it was him: At his feet were Grasshopper shoes - light brown ones polished to a reddish shine with military brown polish. Back then, his shoes were always polished like that.
It's strange how one's memory works. Suddenly, I felt like shouting in front of all the people in the Wimpy to Skroef: "Keep going, old bull! Push on! The worm watches over everything!"
That's what Skroef once shouted at me because I drilled a hole crookedly in the bookshelf we had to make in his class.
Suddenly, I felt like shouting in front of all the people in the Wimpy to Skroef: "Keep going, old bull! Push on! The worm watches over everything!"
Another time, while he was explaining something to the class, I was absentmindedly fiddling with the bench vise at my workstation. Suddenly, he stopped and bellowed: "Snyman, I'll clamp your backside in that vise and throw the handle out the window! Understand?!"
There in the Wimpy, I suddenly got angry again about the time he hit me three times just because I dropped a chisel. He did hit me with his left arm, but it still hurt like hell.
Old Skroef wasn't allowed to hit with his right hand. Kopbeen, the principal, had apparently forbidden him after Boesman Pretorius' father complained because he had beaten Boesman's buttocks to pieces when he caught him smoking one day.
Some kids said that Skroef once "hit for the police". Back then, the court could still sentence juvenile delinquents to, for example, "six strokes with a light cane", and Skroef, with his formidable right hand, supposedly helped with that.
One thing I realise more and more: The journeys through your memory can be just as adventurous as any road trip.
I suddenly remembered all sorts of things about Skroef because woodworking teachers were somewhat different from "ordinary" teachers. Not only was their classroom set apart on the school grounds, but they were also somewhat apart from the other teachers. They didn't wear ties like the rest because a tie could get caught in a saw or something.
And ask any boy who was in school in those years: Many woodworking teachers were missing a finger or two - something that made quite an impression on you when you walked into the woodworking class as a standard six student.
Woodworking teachers almost always had a strong nickname: Hammer, Ears, Ox, Galtros, Nail, Crumbs, Boel, Mustache...
Old Skroef, I remember, also never really hung out with the other teachers in the staff room. He usually stood and chatted with old man Oosthuizen, the school's handyman (or "our factotum", as the principal always called him), during breaks and smoked a Texan Plain.
I can't think of a single time that Skroef led the morning devotion in the school's courtyard. This while every other teacher had a turn.
Most of the woodworking teachers I dealt with - including Skroef - didn't use an ordinary cane for punishment like other teachers. They used more advanced, sometimes custom-made, equipment - a plank with a name (Skroef's was called Doors), a board compass, or one of those long rulers.
Their vehicles were also different; usually a bakkie that they didn't park with the other teachers' cars. They drove right up to their classroom because a woodworking teacher usually had a project or two going to supplement his salary.
In a town like ours, the woodworking teacher held a sort of honorary position because he could work with a lathe and thus "turn" chair or table legs.
Once, Skroef also brought an old Lee-Enfield .303, a rifle used by the English soldiers in the Anglo-Boer War, to school every day for a month.
"Okay, bulls," he would say when he came into the class. "Continue with your project. I don't want any trouble, okay?"
Then he would work on the Lee-Enfield at his desk to turn it into a sleek hunting rifle while we continued with our project, a bookshelf.
Or rather, everyone except Kosie Pronk continued with a bookshelf. Kosie, who was in the orphanage and had been in standard 6 for the second year, decided to build a ship, a replica of the passenger ship the SA Vaal, roughly based on a photo he tore out of a Patrys.
Skroef didn't immediately find out about Kosie's boat because he was particularly busy. It was all the rage in those years to have a small pigeon loft on a high pole in your front yard for your fantail pigeons, and Skroef couldn't keep up with making such lofts.
Yet, in between everything, he enforced discipline and taught us the basic principles of woodworking: To plane with the grain of the wood, to chisel away from your body, and, above all - apparently the key to a bright woodworking future - to always use a B pencil and not an HB-110 like in regular classes.
One of Skroef's most formidable weapons was the unprepared test. On a good day, often after he had completed a pigeon loft or two, he would suddenly hit us with an unprepared test, with questions like: Name the characteristics of the bench hammer. Or: What are the uses of balsa wood?
And then, immediately, he would mark the tests, decide that everyone with less than 15 out of 20 would get three strokes, take Doors out of the cupboard, and light our buttocks up with his left arm.
I don't know if Skroef had a traumatic experience with a falling chisel because you could drop a hammer in his class, or a plank, or you could fall to the floor yourself - Skroef would say nothing... but the moment a chisel fell, he would immediately call out: "Whoever dropped the chisel, come here!" And then Doors would be taken out of the cupboard again.
And if the one who dropped the chisel didn't come forward, Skroef would easily make everyone in the class stand in a row and run through us all.
After I drank my cup of Wimpy coffee, I got up and went to greet Skroef. He couldn't remember me, but he was still glad someone recognised him.
We said ordinary things to each other: How time flies and, yes, how woodworking is no longer even offered as a subject in many schools these days.
Skroef now lives in a retirement home in Polokwane.
On the way back to Pretoria, I couldn't get him out of my mind. Traveling through your memory makes you look at people from your past with softer eyes, I realised.
I kept thinking about that day when Skroef found out Kosie Pronk was building a ship instead of a bookshelf. Kosie's ship was already halfway when Skroef, in those Grasshoppers of his, stopped at his workbench and exclaimed: "And what the blooming hell is going on here, Pronk?"
Then he took Kosie by the ear and Doors in hand into the storeroom at the back of the woodworking class.
If Skroef took you in there, you had to know: He was going to break Kopbeen's prohibition: He was going to hit with his right hand.
Even before we could hear the first stroke fall on Kosie's buttocks, Kosie started screaming: "I just wanted to build a little boat, Sir! I just wanted to build a little boat!"
Then the first stroke fell.
We stood there at our workbenches, dead silent, while another stroke fell, and Kosie kept screaming: "I just wanted to build a little boat, Sir! I just wanted to build a little boat!"
No more strokes fell. A few moments later, the storeroom door swung open, and Skroef and a crying Kosie came out.
"You can dismiss when the bell rings," Skroef said with a deep frown. Then he spent the rest of the period standing in the sun in front of the class, puffing on a Texan.
The next time we came to his woodworking class, Kosie Pronk's half-finished ship was waiting for him on his workbench, with a few carefully cut planks beside it. Almost like a puzzle that just needed to be completed, it lay there.
It was also important to old Skroef that Kosie finished building his wooden ship.
This article originally appeared in October 2007. Facts and details may have changed since then - feel free to let us know at digital@weg.co.za if you notice anything.
