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:

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.

Or you can change to Mainstay… cane spirit? Who drinks cane spirit any more? Seriously, do they still sell it? (They do, in fact, but I swear I have not seen it being drunk in 20 years.) Find a dusty bottle of vintage Mainstay in the veld and your mind will take you to a gleaming yacht surfing the waves, filled with tanned young people laughing and sipping it while flashing Omo-white teeth. (Or maybe that was a Peter Stuyvesant ad?) “I nearly died!” as the Omo lady said.

But far less frothy, much darker things can take you back to a place and time just as quickly. Grim car wrecks on the road side. Look down, way down the pass. The rusted wreck of an old Beetle crumpled at the front, ironically intact at the rear. Did someone in the back seat climb out and into a new life alone? Splashes of blue reveal the true hue of its former self, as it flitted from shop to beach in flashes of glinting chrome. Then, one day, let’s take a drive to … haven’t been on that pass in ages … shall we? And they all climb in. A carrier of life, to the death.

The car wreck as Karoo art. There are car graveyards in the Karoo, grimly beautiful in their tragic glory. Rust as the artist’s medium, time as the oil to guide its path on the arid canvass. The late Doug Pithey, world-conquering newspaper photographer and hobby artist, painted rusted wrecks in oils, an ironic full circle for the car as life, as death, its actual degradation on open veld and finally returning in art form.

Was the side window, now hanging askew and creaking in the Karoo breeze, once Cadillac-pink and parked at the Doll House while a waiter brought a tray with a plate of lobster mayo and chips and clamped it to the wound-down window?

A Buick’s hubcap prone in the veld. Rub it and you see the car lumber on the then narrow and winding N1, its driver straining his eyes against the lowering sun, a sudden misjudgement of speed and light, the grind of tyre on earth, dust spraying like a whale on dry land, tumbling, rolling, wheels spinning to a stop, dust settling. A sunburnt arm out of the window with its limp hand. A half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich on the passenger’s seat. An empty Babycham bottle loiters in the well below the passenger’s seat, telling a story. Who had the lady been who shared the car with him the night before the rep left the Karoo hotel for the next day’s journey into forever? And the hubcap, rolling off as if a kid had been playing with it, twirling to a stop. And still there, now.

Babycham. If you know what that is, it dates you. (Surely you don’t still get that? Oh look, you do.) Sweetly bubbly and vaguely pink, it was consumed daintily by mildly tipsy women in the “Ladies Bars” you’d find in every hotel in the old South Africa, in the days when women were presumed not to be able to handle ribald men’s talk or hold their own in a conversation about rugby. Who would simper and blush if F words were spoken in their hearing. Babycham, the drink for women married to men who’re the target of the Virginia ad campaign. The men won’t buy it.

Any more than these okes would outside of this British ad from 1986:

Ladies Bars are gone, mostly, although you may still encounter one here and there in the deeper reaches of the Platteland. Slipping inside, you may find an old “empty”, rub its time-pocked glass, and evoke a bottle of Sixties Schweppes orange or lemon with the little “bits”, or fruit cells, floating in the soft orange liquid. That small touch made the drink special, and you can still taste it, somewhere in a locked compartment in your memory. In the corner of the mind where the flavours still linger, and the aromas refuse to die. DM