The Moon Landing

Fifty years ago, on July 20th 1969, I was in a military watch-tower guarding the Durban Oil Refinery. My seven-hour stint on guard duty that night saw me ensconced with my rifle and my army greatcoat in the tiny observation area, precisely straddling the hours between the landing of the Eagle and the “one small step” that defined a pivotal moment in human history.

Like many young white male teenagers in South Africa at the time, I had been conscripted into the apartheid army with the instruction that I would be playing my part in the struggle to “protect South Africa“ against – go figure – “the Africans” who posed a danger to the country. As I struggled against the odds to make sense of my youth, my country and my future, I glanced up at the moon. I experienced emotions that remain, after fifty years, indelibly etched in my consciousness. Two years ago I published a short story in which I tried to recall some of that experience. My protagonist recalls the moment:

“…he stood up in the darkened observation area. He peered in the gloom at his wrist, then looked up at the skies. 10:17pm. Durban time. He read later that the Eagle was landing at exactly the moment he looked up, and that the Americans would do the big step six and a half hours later, in the last hour before he came off duty…”

He then reports how the world was reacting at the same time he was staring, alone, from his watch-tower, at the pitted silver disk in the night sky:

“What a night. The news would filter through in bits and pieces over the next few days. With Armstrong and Aldrin dancing together up there, that very night Jimmy Page was blowing Cleveland away with his rendition of White Summer/Black Mountain Side. While Led Zeppelin genuflected onstage to the men on the moon, musicians around the world were giving voice to the summer of love, as if in celebration of Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon before the decade was out. Topping the charts around the world were gems like Honky Tonk Woman, In the Year 2525, and The Ballad of John and Yoko. Around the corner from the Durban Oil Refinery The Bats were doing their best to climb up the charts, LM radio – in the face of rigid local censorship of The Beatles and others – provided relief from across the border in Mozambique, and David Gresham breathed fresh air into Springbok radio in the face of suffocating apartheid cobwebs. Woodstock was a mere four weeks away, and…”

Did I say the young man had with him only a greatcoat and his army rifle? No, he had something else. He had smuggled into the tower a copy of The Complete Works of Shakespeare. The youngster then describes how, inspired by the antics of the man in the moon and the great works of human-kind, he reads, concentrating on the lesser-known works of Shakespeare. And he reads. And learns. And thinks. Until:

“…he had discovered, breathlessly, and joyfully, the rich gleaming treasures of the lesser works.”

The short story in question, “The Lesser Works”, is part of the collection Behind the Lines