‘The Life and Times of Keith Coppen’ Some Recollections from Richard Penwill

 ‘The Life and Times of Keith Coppen’

Some Recollections from Richard Penwill

Introduction

Writing about someone long gone and from long ago is a challenge. I can’t offer a character reference about Keith for some Heavenly vacant position that has been advertised in the Pearly Gates Gazette; nor can I summon up charges against him for offences against decorum. I am in no position to objectively judge him as a man or offer any comparison of him to others. At best I can only offer a very subjective view of Keith and the role that he happened to play in forming parts of my life which have left me always mindful of him and grateful to him. That’s one of the very curious things about the living and the dead; it is not only his children who carry the flame of Keith and his being but also his friends and companions and those whose lives he touched. He remains very much alive for those who remember him.  What follows are a few notes about my recollections.

Keith and I first met during the Christmas holidays of 1964. He was about 15 and I was 13. My mother had invited June Coppen and son, Keith, to tea at our house in Tzaneen. I had just left prep school and was due to attend St Alban’s College; Keith had been there for two years – since 1963 when the school started. The meeting was intended to help introduce me to my new school. I recall clearly only one thing about this meeting: Keith’s entrance. Ours was a split-level house from entrance down to sitting room. Instead of walking down the steps, Keith hopped up on to the handrail and slid down it on his buttocks to the sitting room. No respecter of occasion, he was clearly a natural and instinctive rider!

While both from Tzaneen, Keith and I were at the same school for two and a half years and I saw him only once after we left school. I knew his parents and sister, Pam, and we shared many Tzaneen friends and acquaintances in common.  He was a year ahead of me at school so we were in different classes, different sports teams and we were also in different boarding houses. He was also very much ‘one of the boys’ which I wasn’t.

I don’t remember Keith as being a quiet, unassuming man of modest temperament and sober habits. Quite the contrary.  Physically he was small and tough; he had a very big mouth, but also a big heart and very blue eyes – just like his dad.

Keith made two very important direct contributions to my life. The first, during my first year at the new school, was to show me some chords on the guitar to which one could sing.  I recall one of the songs that he taught me was “It ain’t gonna rain no more” and the first verse: 

It ain’t gonna rain no more

Chorus

It ain’t gonna rain no more, no more, 

It ain’t gonna rain no more,

How in the heck can I wash my neck?

if it ain’t gonna rain no more.

Mary had a little lamb

Its fleece was black as charcoal

Every time she stroked its back

Sparks flew out it’s a-s-hole.

Keith’s repertoire was not always bawdy and ribald; he could play and sing a very moving and impressive rendition of ‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ - in Pedi.

With a classmate and singing friend, Anthony Walmsley, a couple of years’ later I went on to found the Folk Club at the school which became something of an institution for many years at the school. Indirectly, then, Keith’s encouragement contributed to that even though he was himself into pop.

Some two years later he assembled a pop band which ‘toured a venue’ in Tzaneen. Playing lead singer (actually very much the lead shouter) and rhythm guitar himself, he recruited Brian Poole who played lead guitar, Noel ‘Senex’ Senogles on drums and Richard Penwill on piano! It was probably very amateurish but we were extremely well and kindly received, and we played on two nights to a happy audience of dancers and drinkers.

The other important contribution that Keith made to my life was to teach me to ride a motor-cycle – a Honda 50cc. He sat pillion and gave directions as I made my first efforts on the dried, red, mud back roads of Pusela outside Tzaneen. As we drove along on one occasion, I have a very vivid recollection of entering a deep and narrow rut in the dried-mud road. Sitting behind me Keith calmly said into my ear “Stay in the rut and ride it out; don’t try and steer us out of it, we won’t make it, it’s too deep.”  We rode it out and fortunately made it comfortably.

Keith’s parents also very generously lent me one of their two red 50cc Honda bikes for several weeks on which to practice and take my driving licence.  In the fulness of time, and for the next 35 years of my life, I became a daily motor-cyclist. I commuted to classes at university, to South Africa House in Trafalgar Square when I was a diplomat stationed there. (I had the only motor-bike with Diplomatic number plates that I ever saw). Thereafter on the farm in the Cape and then, as an advocate commuting to the High Court in Cape Town and finally, back in London commuting to work across Richmond Park every day. Riding a motor-cycle was to become an integral part of my life.

I don’t say that I wouldn’t have learned to ride a bike anyway but, the fact remains, it was Keith who taught me. And it is his words “stay in the rut and ride it out” that so often echoed through my mind when confronted by a dangerous situation on the road that needed a decision. Touch wood, and perhaps thanks to Keith, I ‘rode it out’ – and safely. 

There was a lovely and unlikely interlude at school on the playing fields one day of which I only heard as unfortunately I missed it. Keith and a couple of others - including Gary Smith (now also deceased) chanced upon some donkeys that had wandered on to the sports fields. Keith had the idea of catching and riding them which they then did successfully. They then held a hilarious and very exciting impromptu donkey race-meeting riding their unlikely steeds bare-back across the cricket field and back! This is was undeniably another example of Keith’s natural and instinctive urge for riding!

While we were very much in different areas and groups at school there was one memorable time when we participated in the same school play. It was, in fact, a very ambitious and major performance of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. I played Lady Macbeth; Keith played The Porter, a short scene in the play which features only the very drunken porter being roused from his sleep by knocking at the castle door and he curses and converses very cleverly and funnily in his inebriated state. I don’t imagine that Keith was a universal actor but playing ‘The Porter’ in Macbeth was the perfect role for him. He threw himself into it without the slightest inhibition and, word-perfect, with unbridled gusto he drunkenly reeled; cursed, belched, hiccupped and hugely amused his audiences every night for a week. His performances were truly exceptional. Any actor will confirm that to play a drunkard credibly is very difficult – one can so easily overdo it. Keith’s timing and sense of the drunkard trying (unsuccessfully) to behave soberly was totally credible and extremely funny.

I have no knowledge of his antics or prowess with the fairer sex apart from what he might have said which, as a rule of thumb, one could discount as bravado. I certainly don’t know with which of the Headmaster’s four lovely daughters he might have claimed acquaintance.

Keith had a highly developed appetite for fun and mischief.  At a time when caning was the commonplace method of assault on schoolboys by school masters who had been set in authority over them, I remember his boasting that he had been dealt the highest number of sixes in the school. In due course his record fell and when we compared instances, he accepted that in this department, I had eclipsed him. He was made a house prefect at the beginning of 1967, his matric year, a rank and status that required some conformity to school rules and practices which would have inhibited his caning count. While we certainly did similar things (like bunking out at night to the drive-in cinema etc.) we were never involved in any misdemeanour or mischief together as far as I remember.

In 1967, Keith’s matric year, he and two of his classmates, Dudley Hall and Pierre Avenant, were to share a milestone adventure together. Hall and Avenant were both tall, strong and athletic and played centre in the backline of the 1st XV Rugby team in which Keith was the scrum-half.  Coached by Harry Birrell, this team delivered some veritable magic on the field against very much larger and older schools. These three were a conspicuous part of this development.

However, the three of them were caught smoking together. The Headmaster (‘the boss’), Anton Murray, was obsessively against smoking; he saw it as the gateway to furtiveness and all manner of evils. He had made smoking a one-off capital offence and, logically, smokers were therefore supreme rebels. Making this incident an example to the rest of the school, he summarily expelled all three of them. 

This came as a profound and general shock to us all. It seemed to us a very harsh and unnecessarily counter-productive punishment. Many of the teachers smoked and, quite apart from the personal loss that this imposed on the boys themselves months before writing matric, at a stroke, we had been deprived of three of the 1st XV’s most valued members.  Predictably, that team’s magic undoubtedly faded.

We were naturally all proud and appreciative of our hard-hitting Rugby backs - both on and off the field. Hall was a superb cricketer as well and Avenant had, the previous year, been praised at school assembly for his heroic role in assisting the victims in a horrific accident where a bus had been rammed by the train in which he was travelling.  He had been described as a credit to his family and his school. Keith was a loud and cheerful part of the school furniture – he had been there from the very beginning.

I don’t know what happened to Dudley Hall but both Keith and Pierre died young and tragically. Keith in his helicopter in 1993 and Pierre Avenant was shot dead by his own daughter in self-defence during his final assault on her. She was excused from prosecution. Perhaps, after all, the boss had been alarmed by something real there and used the smoking offence as a pretext to sweep them all out; who knows?

I don’t recall ever seeing Keith after he left school during 1967.  I heard later that he had joined the SAAF and was piloting helicopters. The next time we met up was at Ondangwa in Northern South West Africa as it was then. This was in 1976. I was training to be a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs in Pretoria but was called up with my tank regiment to capture and fetch some Russian tanks that were due to be disembarked at Lobito for the Cubans. In the event the ships carrying the tanks turned around. Nonetheless our regiment found itself parked next door to the Air Force helicopter base awaiting orders. 

At the time I was the forward records officer for our unit and, amongst other things, I organized logistical supplies for us from Grootfontein. It so happened that alcohol was allowed us duty-free and so was cheap and plentiful. Since we were almost daily moving trucks between our outlying encampment and the main depot at Grootfontein, the Officers’ Mess at the SAAF base would ask us to organize and ship booze for them. At about 6pm one evening, I visited the Officers’ Mess at the helicopter base to introduce myself and make sure that an order had arrived intact. I chatted to some of the pilot-officers and, purely on the off-chance, I asked whether they knew one Keith Coppen? My question was greeted with great laughter and merriment – 

‘’Who doesn’t know Keith Coppen?’’ and the like. “He’s asleep, would you like to see him?” I was asked.

“Yes, please.” I replied

So it was that one of these cheerful pilots volunteered to wake up Keith. He was in his camp bed, alone in a large communal tent, sleeping off a very serious bout of drinking. He was massively surprised to waken and find an 11 years’ older version of me standing at his bedside looking down at him and greeting him in the middle of the far-reaches of the isolated bush!

“Pengwill” (as he always called me) “You are a Brown Job”, he immediately observed looking at my brown army uniform, “What are you doing here?”

Like the Porter of old in Macbeth, he cursed and stretched and roused himself staggering off his bed and, as I started to explain, he interrupted me and insisted that that we have a reunion drink together. This involved having a cocktail. This consisted of a beer mug apiece with a tot or two of each and every type of alcohol spirit in the Mess’s bar. It was clearly one of his standard party tricks. I had never drunk like this before nor did I ever do so again.  We took our cocktails outside the tents onto the white sands of the dunes, where we strolled beneath the Ivory Palms and chatted with a bright moon above. 

I vividly recall becoming increasingly unstable on my feet and found myself gliding up and down the dunes vainly trying to just stand still. (The Cubans and SWAPO had better watch out . . . we’re coming to get them!).  Keith seemed to have no difficulty standing still; at this stage our roles were reversed and it would have been me that would have been able to play the credible porter!

It was during this moonlit drinking session on the dunes that Keith spoke a bit school days and people we had known in common. I don’t recall that he expressed any grudge about his expulsion; I assume that he ‘just rode on through it’, putting it behind him and never looking back.

A man of many talents was Keith. I was deeply saddened to learn of his death but I feel grateful to have known him – and now, to recall some our shared times together.

Richard Penwill

August 2020