Photo by Gyorgy Bakos on Unsplash Remember the old chocolate box tins with a gaudy photo of a snow-capped Swiss mountain beyond a lake. Imagine if you could rub one, like Aladdin would his lamp, to awaken the genie within. The scene evaporates from the tin and into life, all around you. You can hear the lap of the waters on the lake’s shore, you can smell the fish being poached in a lakeside restaurant. A train rattles past just beyond the shoreline, as a bird flies overhead to disappear into a wisp of cloud.
But let’s make that somewhat less chocolate-boxy and step back 120 years or so to the scrubby Karoo veld just outside of Matjiesfontein. The rusted remains of a bully beef tin lies in the sand at your feet. You pick it up and rub it, and a scene unfolds of what was happening at the moment when Tommy Atkins – the ubiquitous soldier of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s forces, soon to mourn her death – took the last mouthful of the familiar daily can of nondescript meat, and cast the container aside. To lay there for 120 years, until you came along and picked it up.
There’d be conical white tents in rows all about, and infantry lolling and jabbering about the day’s events and the weeks ahead; thinking of home, of their Dolly Gray. Tommy Atkins had imagined, while eating his cold beef ration, that it was cockles or winkles or a prized Selsey crab, washed down with a pint of real British ale. Or his dad’s potted meat, or his mum’s meat and potato pie. Because he had his memories too, and that’s what memory gives us. Just spotting that rusted tin could evoke a world of things long forgotten, just as the chocolate box or greetings card whisks you away to somewhere from long ago, far away.
The memorabilia of period movies, and embedded in faded old magazine photos of pink Chevrolets and kids in Bobby socks and a Jukebox playing in a crowded saloon, have that same Genie Effect on us. Rub the jukebox and suddenly we’re in a 1978 Studebaker pulling up at the Doll House in Mouille Point or into a parking berth at a drive-in cinema, to have the windows wound down and waiters clamp trays on to them with burgers and fries, or to munch popcorn while the big screen flickers into life with a monochrome Pathé newsreel, in the decades before television newscasts when you got your news fix at the movies, before the main event. The crunch of popcorn may take you back to the day you first watched this:
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We see a roadside motel at Beaufort West as we cruise by on the N1 and our mind flips it to the Bates Motel and Ma cooking Norman breakfast in the spooky old house that lurks beyond. You smell the bacon and hear the crackle of the eggs in the fat. You see Norman’s odd gaze, and wonder what Ma makes of it. Best she pays attention.
An American diner in a movie whips me right back to the cafe that opened in our small town in the mid-Sixties, when we’d relish double-thick malts and Coke floats and breezy ice-cream sundaes with their sticky strawberry sauce, and American-style parfaits with their swirls of sweetened yoghurt and bright red fruits.
A jingle from long ago pops into your head. Virginia! The wine for men who enjoy being men... really. Boy have we come a long way from those patriarchal days when even the wine industry had to resort to that to tempt men to buy and drink wine. And who could forget It’s not inside, it’s on... (you know the product, even now). You bought it; we all did.