Most people – when faced with two armed attackers in their own home would find it very hard to keep their cool.
Add this to the fact that Dick Bladen was 73 years old when he was attacked yet miraculously
managed to make an escape brings added meaning to the description: one tough old man.
Most people – when faced with two armed attackers in their own home would find it very hard to keep their cool.
Add this to the fact that Dick Bladen was 73 years old when he was attacked yet miraculously
managed to make an escape brings added meaning to the description: one tough old man.
The two attackers tied his hands behind his back and locked him in his bathroom while they rummaged
through his house.
They then piled up his bakkie with their spoils, and as they couldn’t drive, forced Bladen into the driver’s seat at gunpoint.
Guessing that he would probably be killed when they arrived at their destination, in a spur of the moment
decision he spun the steering wheel and drove off the side of a cliff! Surprisingly no one was injured and Bladen, still with his wits about him mumbled “Sorry, I must have fallen asleep.”
Whether they believed him or not, the two men trussed him up grabbed what they could carry and left him in the dirt. It took him four hours to escape his bonds and another two to walk to a nearby friend’s farm. No mean feat for an ou ballie, ek sê.
While Bladen’s autobiography starts with this incredible personal account of how he got the better of his
two attackers, it is an honest and often humorous account of his life.
Beginning with his parents, who were both some of the first British settlers to come live and farm in the Eastern Cape, to his own childhood and years of farming in the general vicinity of Grahamstown.
The autobiography is filled with humorous anecdotes of the characters he encountered throughout the course of his life.
Never boastful and often self deprecating, his writing is only confusing in that he mentions so many names of the families and people that surrounded him during his life that at times it’s hard to keep up with
who’s who.
Little snippets such as: “What other young man can say that they played Scrabble with their wife’s
headmistress?” lends the book a sense of sincerity I particularly enjoyed.
The book will hold particular meaning for the many farming families who live and farm in the general
Grahamstown and Port Alfred districts, who will all be able to empathise with the trials and tribulations that Bladen faced through his lifetime of farming.
