You may recall my thigh-slapping account of how I was never invited back to look after my poetry professor’s house after a goshawk flattened her precious seedlings, rendering her planting plans for her secret garden moot. Well, strap in readers, because that was just half of the tale.

And just to add to the hilarity, the second part of the story involves a piece of technology that was later to scupper another housesitting gig, in another city, at a later time. It’s almost as if someone was trying to tell me something.

So, if you recall, this house I was sitting belonged to a professor of English Literature, who we called ‘Prof’. She lived alone in a little cottage, not unlike Corner Cottage in age and design; the interior was absolutely stuffed with books, while the garden was a concordia discors of traditional English roses and other flora freighted with literary significance.

But being of advancing years and living alone — and in ’80s South Africa to boot — security was a consideration for Prof, and tangled rosebushes will only deter the determined burglar for so long. So she installed a sophisticated electronic alarm system, with sensors on every window and door and a very large, megaphone-like speaker tucked under the eaves of the verandah. (Can you see where this is going?)

On every departure from the house during my house-sitting stint, I would dutifully check all windows and doors, gingerly key in the code, and blunder with undignified haste to escape as loud beeps counted down toward armageddon. More than once this process failed, resulting in that brain-scrambling sonic assault ringing out as I tried to unlock the door and silence the racket — before starting all over again.

And so it came to pass that I returned one Sunday night from my campus study where I had been preparing for the coming week’s tutorials, and arrived at the cottage front door to find that absurd horn-shaped speaker sitting on the boards of the verandah like a squat rocket ready for a moonshot. A garden chair had been dragged to where some villain had clambered up and, standing on tip-toe, wrenched the speaker from its mounting under the eaves. A few wires hung down; large holes showed where the bolts had been.

It was immediately obvious what had happened — ingenious thieves had disabled the alarm system and had robbed the Prof’s cottage! Not considering that they may still have been robbing the cottage, I went in and found nothing disturbed — but a bedroom window had been pried open, so that was a definite clue, I deduced.

Now, when I say I called the police (which I did), that isn’t the same as calling the upholders of law and order in, say, Australia. The police were regarded with some trepidation in ’80s South Africa. No doubt some were dedicated, hard-working and honest, but all we saw was the security cops putting down township protests with all the brutality of a culture facing an existential threat.

We had learned to dislike those blue-grey combat fatigues, black boots, stout truncheons. The sight of their pale yellow vans would sober you up in an instant. I half expected to receive a bit of a tuning-up myself when two konstabels arrived that night. But of course, they were not the security cops — they were just bobbies on call of a Sunday night.

And they were pretty good, I will grudgingly admit. They concurred with my theory of the crime and I watched in fascination as they dusted the alarm horn and chair with fingerprint powder, checked under the jimmied window for footprints, and took my statement with evident gravity.

Next day I called the security company which dispatched a technician from Port Elizabeth, a mere 120 km away. Finally all was set right and I took myself off to the English Department for a cup of tea. And there I learnt what the entire campus knew but I had failed to hear (these were pre-smartphone days): the alarm had not been disabled by nefarious criminals. It had been the next-door neighbour, a professor of physics, who had become tired of the alarm going off and wailing into the night, and had taken matters into his own hands.

Yes, some ne’er-do-well had tried to break in, but presumably scarpered when the alarm bellowed forth. It was the good physicist who had caused the real damage. Later, on returning to the cottage, I could hear the physicist’s raised cartoon-Germanic plaint carrying over the fence in the still of the evening. “Called the police! He called the bloody police! Alarm howling night after night and now the police visit me!”

He was clearly incensed — but all he had to do to prevent that would have been to leave a nice note. Manners, eh?

This professor of physics was legendary among the student population for his outrageous actions. Once, it was said, he attempted to capture footage of a laser beam end-on using a very expensive high-speed video camera. He had not considered the effects of the beam on the corporeal matter of the camera itself, and its costly innards were frazzled. No doubt an apocryphal tale, but where there’s smoke . . .

Suffice to say, my sweet Prof also suffered some frazzled wiring as a result of my tender care of her home. She was very kind about it, but I can imagine her repeating some colourful Shakespearean curses when she contemplated the bill for my stay.

As a footnote, I remember clearly that while this drama was unfolding, the news was full of the Tiananmen Square massacre. The two events are still entwined in my mind: maybe it was the feelings aroused by those coppers’ blue boiler suits. But the real bravery of fellow students on the other side of the world put my travails into perspective — I had run into the long arms of the law as soon as I thought I was a victim of crime, but my only oppressor was an eccentric neighbour.

It just goes to show, doesn’t it? Liberal principles are easy to hold when they’re untested.