Last Word – Harold Strachan

EVERYONE IS ASKING: WHAT HAS happened to Harold? After June (nose236) nothing.

Harold Strachan’s Last Word has been the favourite read for thousands of our regulars ever since nose26 back in 1999. The lamentable news is that at the age of 93 he has finally opted for retirement, departed his modest flat in Durban’s Berea and taken up residence in a care home. From which a message via matron emerges: “The only thing I am good at right now is lying down”.

However, the matchless scribe promises to “write the occasional piece when I feel up to it”.

The moment brings to mind an excerpt from his column in February 2018 (nose220), recounting his first solo flight in a Tiger Moth at 18, fresh out of Maritzburg College and in pilot training at SAAF No 8 Air School in World War II.

“You drive this aeroplane like a shitcart,” says Bertie. “I’m getting out. Taxi back to the fence here.”

At the fence I stop and he dumps his parachute pack on the grass, plants his fat bum upon it and lights a fag. I sit there in the Tiger and look at him. He waves me away soundlessly, telling me to voetsak. Which I do.

It seems this Tiger hates waddling around on the ground, but we’re soon at the downwind end of the field. I turn her into the wind and open the throttle wide. In a few seconds her tail is up and she’s nipping tiptoe over the tufts of grass and my ears are filled with the loud hollow drumming of it, she’s resonant as a guitar with her wood-and-fabric construction. Then abruptly the drumming stops and it’s really happening: I’m flying solo! I nudge the stick back at forty-five knots and without Bertie’s freight of flesh aboard she springs so wildly into the air that I have to push her down again and hold her just off the grass, then pull back slowly, and elegantly she sails up

to a thousand feet as if she has just risen from the hand of Noah.