Sibley & Dowell Book

This guy is a direct descendant of one Jacob Cloete, who came out to South Africa in 1652 with Jan Van Riebeek and the very first settlers. I know this because he was my grandfather's cousin. Reading it made me feel like I wasn't the only black sheep in the family! What a life he lived.

The thing is, he doesn't know any of this until the day before he goes to fight in the trenches in the First World War. He doesn't even know his surname is Cloete. He thinks it's Graham.

But then his dad (my grandfather's uncle) comes to him and says "Listen son. Your name's actually Cloete. I had to change it and move from England to France cos I got into shit with business."

Anyway, off he goes and fights, gets badly injured and spends a long time in hospital where he falls in love with an Irish nurse.

After the war they marry and they spend about 7 or 8 years on a little plot of land in France growing veggies and stuff.

But it slowly eats away at him. Who is he? What is the rest of his family up to down there at the bottom tip of Africa?

So he leaves, and spends the next ten years or so managing farms for family members all over South Africa. At the age of 39, he decides "Fuck this. I'm going to be a writer!"

Now he never even finished school, but he goes back to France and holes himself up somewhere for a year and writes a novel on the Great Trek in South Africa that gets banned here for about 45 years but immediately becomes a number one best seller in America! He gets catapulted into fame and spends a few years shamelessly philandering around while churning out racy novels with a dark twist set in various parts of Africa. I think by the time he died in the early 70s he'd written about 50 books.

What a guy.

I read this book at the age of 39 and decided Fuck that? Why must I be a photographer my whole life? I'm going to become a songwriter. Which is exactly what I did.