Blurb
A rare true story of Good Fortune.
When two starry-eyed twins growing up in apartheid South Africa see a Boeing 707 at Cape Town airport in the 1960s, it's love at first sight. There's just one problem: how on earth will they fulfill their crazy dream of working in aviation one day. Coloured boys are hardly allowed to dine in the same places as white people, let alone dream of flying aeroplanes.
After a disastrous start to French at high school, they discover an unlikely aptitude for language. With a stroke of good fortune, a series of unexpected events unfold and their once ordinary lives are changed forever as they jet off to Paris.
A book that will make you laugh and cry and believe that dreams do indeed come true.
About the author
Robert Gentle spent his childhood years in Cape Town, his teens in Zambia and his early adult years in France.. He has a 30-year career in financial journalism, PR and corporate training, is fluent in French and is the author of two business books. These days he writes full-time, and still hopes to sell a movie script to Hollywood one day.
Extract
With only a week to go before our return flight to Zambia, we set out on our scholarship hunt. In hindsight, we hadn’t thought this through properly and left it far too late. We painstakingly paged through the telephone directory and located the names and addresses of the main foreign embassies.
Our shortlist was just that – short – and consisted of only a handful of embassies. As had been the case in Zambia five years earlier when we were hunting for undergraduate scholarships, the countries we were counting on most were the United States and England.
We got up early and borrowed the car for the day. Mom and Dad wished us good luck. Armed with our high-school graduation certificates and university grades, we drove to the centre of Cape Town to begin our search. Our short stay hadn’t allowed us the leisure of writing to request appointments, so we were compelled to opt for the direct approach.
We knocked on embassy doors and spoke to scholarship officials. Our sales pitch went something like this: “Hi. We’re about to graduate in mechanical engineering in the next few months and we’d love to go overseas to specialise in aeronautical engineering. We understand that your government awards postgraduate scholarships to deserving South African citizens.
Do we qualify?”
The answers came in various shades of ‘Yes, but’. Yes, but not for two people from the same family. Yes, but not a full scholarship. Yes, but you’re too late for this year. I had a strange sense of déjà vu. We had received the same responses five years earlier in Lusaka during our first scholarship hunt.
Once again, we found ourselves all out of options. And once again, we were about to learn that the absence of alternatives clears the mind wonderfully. Shortly after lunch, we found ourselves sitting on the steps of the University of Cape Town, taking in the magnificent view of the ocean in the distance and contemplating our next move. We sat in silence. Time stood still.
We surrendered to the situation. Suddenly, in that clear mental space, the universe threw us a lifeline. Or, more precisely, it gave us a smack on the head.
“Never mind the Americans or the British,” I said. “Why don’t we try the French?”
If ever there was a duh! moment, this was it. In all our years of learning French, we had never even remotely considered France as a possibility. French had merely been something we enjoyed – a hobby, really; something we did for its own sake. There had never been an ulterior motive. Michael stared wide-eyed at me.
The utter obviousness of it all struck him like a lightning bolt.
“Of course!” He quickly looked at his watch. “We’d better hurry. They probably close at three.”
The French Consulate was in the centre of town, a fifteenminute drive away. We sped there, located the building and rode up in the lift to the right floor. We squared our shoulders, put on our best smiles and walked confidently inside. There were two women at reception: a kindly middle-aged one and a breezy, younger one. They looked very French.
“Bonjour!” we both said cheerfully.
“Bonjour,” they replied, somewhat startled to encounter two locals speaking French.
Then we gave our sales pitch about graduating soon and why we were looking for a postgraduate scholarship. All in French.
Their eyes went wide. Their jaws dropped. They looked at each other in disbelief, then back at us.
“But you speak French already!”
“And without an accent!”
“Thank you. We learnt it years ago. At high school.”
“And where was that?”
“In Zambia.”
The next few minutes saw a rapid Q&A as the two women tried to fill in the gaps in our story. Then they suddenly realised they hadn’t introduced themselves.
“I’m Madame Rugay,” said the older lady. “And this is—”
“Bibi,” said the younger one, flashing a pretty smile. “Just call me Bibi.”
We shook hands across the counter as we formally introduced ourselves.
“I’m Michael. This is my brother Robert. And, as you can see, we’re twins.”
“And identical, too …”
We chatted a little more before Madame Rugay got down to business.
“You’ll want to see the cultural attaché. He handles scholarships. I’ll tell him you’re here.”
She walked across to an office, opened the door after a soft knock and stuck her head in. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but it must have been persuasive because moments later the cultural attaché stepped out, clearly curious. He was a slightly portly man with a kindly demeanour. He looked rather dapper and wore a bowtie.
“Come in, come in,” he said in French. It went without saying that the interview would take place in French. “Do sit down.”
We introduced ourselves and answered obvious questions about where we came from, where we had learnt French and why we were looking for a scholarship.
“What do you want to study?”
“Aeronautical engineering.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Virtually everyone who comes in here wants to go and look at paintings in the Louvre.” There was just the slightest hint of disdain in his voice. Clearly, intellectual snobbery was a French thing too.
“So, you reckon you can handle technical French?”
“I think we can,” I said.
“You won’t mind if I give you a short test, then?”
“No, not at all.”
He got up and walked across to a bookshelf lined with academic books. He selected one and returned to his desk.
After handing us each a pen and a sheet of paper, he leafed through the book, stopped at a page and started reading. It was a passage on aerodynamics – more specifically how lift, weight, thrust and drag interact to keep an aircraft in stable equilibrium in the air. Afterwards, he took our papers and had a look. We could tell by his nodding that we’d done well.
Michael had nailed the entire passage. I think I dropped an accent somewhere.
“Excellent, excellent,” he said, beaming from ear to ear and rubbing his hands in glee, as if he had unearthed some precious find. “Now if you’ll just fill in these forms …”
It was plain sailing from there. We chatted about this and that, and then, when the interview was over, he shook hands with us and accompanied us to the door.
“Go back to Zambia and finish your studies,” he said. Then, with a conspiratorial wink, he added, “And don’t worry about a thing.”
The Scholarship Kids is published by Melinda Ferguson Books, an imprint of NB Publishers, and retails at R290.