Zambia World Wide

In 1955, our number came up in the great Glasgow Corporation lottery that was the Gorbals clearance project. Amidst much muttering, my parents dragged my sister and me to view sparkling, semi-detached council houses, newly thrown up en masse in locales previously unheard of by the scruffy denizens of our decrepit slum citadel: Castlemilk,Drumchapel, Possilpark etc.

They were built without regard for humans. Sure, they contained facilities of which the great unwashed had hitherto only dreamt: bathrooms, inside toilets, plurality of bedrooms, small, neat patches of grass front & rear and, often, even central heating. Familiar community components, unaccountably, were missing: like shops, cinemas, pubs and the various centres that people require to enable them to mix and meet other humanoids. The odd church, surgery or school could never properly serve that function, but that fact somehow escaped the thought processes of the planners. Or, if it did, they thought ‘stuff ‘em, they’re all drunks anyway, let’s save them from themselves’.

To these new dwellings, the City Fathers moved an assortment of tribal Gorbalese: mostly deprived, whether aspirational working class or not, usually down at heel, often socially retarded, financially illiterate or dehumanised by reason of family breakdown; or all of the foregoing. Whatever, they were re-housed, then mainly left to their own devices and a long and tortuous bus ride away from all that was familiar to them.

The Corporation bosses themselves generally were ensconced in their own comfortable, amenity-rich, suburban villas, far away from the vast, sterile estates they were creating for their inferiors. There they could bask smugly in their own rosy glow of self-evident achievement in improving the lives of their voters. Except it wasn’t really progress at all.

What happened was that existence in these Gulags became wretched and, within ten years huge cracks appeared in the fabric of almost everything: particularly the properties themselves, which, if not jerry-built, were hurry-built and often proved incapable of long-term protection against the ravages of Scottish meteorology: or the daily assaults by hordes of feral offspring, left to fabricate their own amusement, in the absence of formal leisure alternatives, restraining parents or respected authority.

I am aware that that much of the foregoing is highly challengeable and, possibly, excessively simplistic, but who wants several pages of carefully researched social demography inserted into an episode of the Scots Lad in Zambia? Not even the eponymous SL himself, so forgive my iconoclastic tendencies and here is the point I’m labouring to make: my mother kept us out of Apache-land, by, probably, using her powers of inherited witchcraft to predict the woeful future for such estates and then demand of Glasgow Corporation that they offer her family alternative housing. Which they did. Wise decision chaps, she’s really scary.

And that’s how we ended up in a low high-rise, allegedly luxury, development in a south-western suburb of the city; still firmly working class, but well away from alien items like grass and thoroughly peppered with all the established essentials for community life that were missing from the new estates. Plus we had a balcony and constant hot water, a bath to contain it and radiators hot enough to fry an egg upon, due to them being incapable of regulation.

I’m hard on the old mater, mainly because she bloody-well deserves it, but that burst of unaccustomed perspicacity, I’ll always acknowledge, with gratitude.

But there’s another reason for this endless introduction and here’s the link: even in suburban Cardonald, there were pubs on every corner & every other shopfront; and, in my Glasgow of the 1950’s, sufficient thirsty artisans, labourers and feckless males around to keep them throbbing profitably. Not exactly like Livingstone 1965, I confess, but excessive alcohol consumption was certainly a common denominator.

Especially on a Friday, my return from school after 4pm usually involved picking my way through comatose drunks lying prone on the pavement, tip-toeing around fresh pools of vomit and taking the role of thrilled observer, as two (or more) grown men beat the snot out of each other, high on drink and low in intelligence.

So I grew up with a healthy disrespect for drinking and wary of its attendant impact on sensible behaviour, even though I frequently tested the boundaries of that philosophy with episodes of my own erratic conduct.

Not that I didn’t understand why so much consumption of Lion or Castle lager, Castle Pilsner and Scottish wine took place in Livingstone, in fairness, mostly after hours. A month in the place more or less exhausted all possible social opportunities and my two month milestone was fast approaching. I was bored and frequent dips into unsobriety didn’t make me less so.

Generally, Jews, even we lapsed ones, are more abstemious than Gentiles anyway. Partly, this is because the dietary laws associated with the religion demand that each and every food & drink item on the orthodox menu has been prayed over by an appropriate jobsworth, then labelled to prove that the process has been undertaken. In truth, it’s a bit of an income-generating racket, but, then again, isn’t all religious ritual? At least this one is business, not personal.

Palwin Bin # 7 is the brand of alleged ‘wine’ which accompanies the feasting and fasting that goes on prior to the major festival of Passover and, in my family circle at least, it was the only permitted alcoholic beverage. My first taste of this so-called treat was an encouragement to lifelong sobriety, reminiscent, as it was, of unwashed feet and burnt entrails. My guess is that many others of the faith decided there and then to embrace a teetotal life forever. Actually on reflection, it might well have been another cunning ploy by my mother, in pursuit of maintaining my liver purity.

Whatever, spending every evening in the tropics propping up a bar in the Livingstone Club, surrounded by steamed expatriates, was not my idea of a stimulating leisure activity, hence my boredom. Now I can hear the enquiry forming in my readers’ head i.e. ‘what happened to the life of unalloyed licentiousness that was breathlessly predicted at the end of the previous episode on the arrival of Bronzed Browning, The Sex God?'. Good question. What did happen?

The answer is both sad and simple. Since his arrival and using his penis as a sort of quivering divining rod, he had spent every spare minute (mostly successfully) pursuing anything in possession of a duo of X chromosomes and a vagina, which, in Livingstone, usually meant women of the married variety. And, since they were often in ossified relationships that had placed them in an abandoned, subordinate position to rugby, carousing with other males or wandering, heavily armed, through the nearby bush in pursuit of hastening the end of various hapless species of wildlife, his strike rate was almost as high as the availability of willing partners in adultery. Until the occasion, that is, when the chief of local police, a role that had not yet been Zambianised, strode confidently into the Club, 6-chamber Webley on his hip and not at all pleased to see Browning’s tongue conducting an intimate examination of the cop's frustrated missus’ tonsils.

Next day, Roger hurriedly transferred to examining import invoices in Lusaka and the collective sigh of as yet unserviced Livingstonian females became a low moaning sound that easily could have been mistaken for a Muezzin’s call to Islamic prayer, had we had any Believers in town. I had been (temporarily) abandoned by my idol. And I still was bored.

I said, in an earlier episode, that I didn’t make enough of my time in Livingstone and that is certainly true. For example, I should have made sure that I spent time exploring the bush, but I was a working class Glasgow boy. My idea of a thrilling safari was to visit, in disobedience of my mother’s strict instruction, one of the sprawling housing estates that featured in the early passages of this episode. Stand on me, there were sufficient horrors throughout those places to make the parched topography of the Livingstone hinterland look like a corner of Disneyland by comparison. Nope, I definitely was losing the keen edge to the sense of adventure I had felt only a few weeks previously.

There were reasons for that; several of them, actually. Firstly, once sorted, career-wise it was a dull life in the post office. True, my crudely lurid appeals, added to postal items addressed to residents of the hospital staff, had drawn a result in the form of a cheerily concave, freckly redhead, who appeared to be attracted to my coarse courting style. I think that, not for the last time in my career with women, I was a bit of a project for her. Other than that, the routine of humping parcels onto a table for examination and mischievously provoking irritation in importers who failed to show proper respect soon became less than thrilling.

Secondly, off-duty, I was perpetually house-bound. Neither my new paramour nor I owned a car and our menu d’amour relied on begging lifts from others, usually to The Falls, or consisted of necking vigorously on one of our government issue single beds, with which we had been issued by the Public Works Department, in a fruitless search for signs of mammaries (in her). If this occurred in the Customs Mess, it meant she had to endure the Walk of Pre-Shame past the lowing inebriates who were my mess-mates, en route to my room. Once there, the twanging bed springs and breathless shrieks from Tommy and his insatiable partner next door were always superior entertainment to anything I could offer whilst in actual juxtaposition.

If we ended up in her carbolic-scented quarters, the two foot, six inch width of the bed meant that it was always safer to lie still and primly hold hands, lest one of us ended up in the orthopaedic ward. Clearly, if I was going to move forward in my apprentice Lothario role, I badly needed my own transport, preferably a van with a mattress in the rear space. And being more or less permanently broke didn’t help.

At the same time, and not on my own, I was becoming increasingly ill at ease regarding the treatment of our house servant. This guy was the powerhouse of all domestic activity in the Mess. He laid out breakfast, cleaned everything, every day, processed all the laundry that five males and one simpering female generated and ironed all of us into immaculateness. He prepared a lunch for everyone and still had time to do some gardening, before preparing the dinner for six, with whatever food Tommy had purchased. For all of this labour, we paid him £8 a month and provided smelly, un-electrified, toilet-less accommodation within the grounds, which he packed out with numerous kids and family members. Peter Rachman would have been proud of our mean-ness.

All right, so I was a child of 60’s Britain i.e. politically naïve and excessively thirsty for change from an endless succession of smug, corrupt, Tory incompetents and not yet experienced enough in Life to realise that all political colourings are more or less the same: a sort of shitty brown hue. In fact, most of us secondees were like that and, admittedly, biased towards the rise of the working classes, but a blind man on a galloping horse could see that what was going on in Livingstone Customs Mess was unjust exploitation of the labour force. Even in 1965, £8 a month could not be regarded as a proper living wage. Gentle requests to Tommy for an improvement in this pay level only brought us into confrontation with Afrikaaner oaths and, once, near physical affray, avoided only by his sensible realisation that five roinecks probably could best a fiery Jaapie, whatever BS his bitter Boer grand-dad had fed him.

As a result, we managed to negotiate a single pound increase for the subject of the argument, who more than paid for it with the subsequent increase in abuse he suffered in exchanges with the Customs Mess gangmaster. It was a tiny victory of sorts, however and we pretended that some level of justice had been achieved. I certainly clocked it up as a win for us neo-Socialists, simultaneously understanding a little better why the Empire had become Paradise Lost.

Truth to be told, Tommy wasn’t inherently a bad guy or much of an out & out racist. Simply put, we saw the house servant from different standpoints: we incomers KNEW that the benefit we were enjoying, as a result of his work, was a rare and temporary luxury; Shagger simply saw it as another exploitative birthright of the white man in Africa.

Still the focus of our attention seemed pathetically pleased with his extra quid, but, thereafter and as might be expected, the atmosphere in the mess became a little more strained. The need for my own four wheels became even more urgent, therefore, but there I was, still automobile-less in Livingstone, still brimful of the unrestrained hormones that course through your average nineteen-year-old and still thoroughly cheesed off with the two main channels of what we called a social life: visits to the quaintly named bioscope to see films that we’d already seen prior to leaving the UK; or frequent trips to the Victoria Falls. These, though magnificent, I rapidly viewed from every angle, except down looking up. There had to be more to Life.

Fortuitously, however, a welcome upswing in my finances occurred as a result of overtime earned terrorising the hapless travellers on the incoming train from Bulawayo, a role which previously had been covered by the libidinous Browning, before his fall from grace. It was money for old rope, really. We would swagger on to the train at the Falls, wander up and down staring at the goggle-eyed passengers attempting to give the impression that we knew what we were doing, seeking really to snuggle down with any decent-looking females for the short trip across the border. None of them were disembarking at Livingstone, so there was no point in trying to form a relationship and I can’t ever recall pinning down a smuggler. Really, we were there as a form of reinforcement for the immigration boys, who had a proper job to do, if they’d only known how to do it.

Still, it brought in enough extra dough for the purchase of an ancient, knackered Ford Prefect that I managed to acquire for £30 from a big fat lad on a farm on the outskirts of town. I didn't want to think too deeply about to which uses he had put it, but it was full of bird feathers and the passenger seat back was broken. Who cared? I had wheels at last and a car with a reclining seat too, yet. Passion wagon or what? Of course I soon learned that prospective lovers objected to spending the journey to wherever, prostrate by my upright side. I guess they considered the environment romantically unsubtle, but I managed to find a pipe-smoking, near female with a welding gun who sorted out the seat back for a fiver. I was on the road at last.

The independence that my little automobile brought to my life was immense and the impact on my sagging spirits matched my feeling of freedom. There was nowhere to go, of course, other than the big, noisy, watery thing about 15 miles out of town, but now I could get there under my own steam; plus I qualified for the all-important window decal that allowed me to cross the border without having to encounter bureaucracy.

Not that the old Ford could be trusted to venture much beyond that, mainly due to the fact that the car featured a vacuum system of windscreen wipers. When driving through the Falls rainforest area and encountering a hill, Prefect drivers had a choice: ascend the incline or have forward vision, but not both. This was because Ford accountants had encouraged the engineers to use engine power to work the wipers, not via a separate motor as in other makers’ cars, so a Ford engine under labour had no spare energy for clearing the screen, which certainly added to the adventure of the overall drive somewhat, especially for nervous passengers.

So there I was: settled in Livingstone. Not exactly over-fulfilled, it’s true, but free from reliance on others’ wheeled charity, a freckly, barely horny when pissed, nurse by my side and enough cash to fund a frugal existence. Relative contentment beckoned, at which point, the Great Impostor in the Sky intervened and a command to transfer to Lusaka was received by the overjoyed crone PA to John Capeling, which she relayed to me with what I considered to be an excess of vindictive enthusiasm for my upcoming disappearance. ‘It’s Thursday’, she trilled, ‘report to Collector McCormack in Lusaka on Monday’.

Excitement mixed with trepidation licked at my still unsullied loins. On the one hand, the capital city beckoned and surely it would prove to be a hotbed of disgusting vice and other filthy activities, into which I could contentedly immerse myself. On the other, I had yet to transport there and it certainly would take a more threatening weapon than a big stick with a nail through the end of it to persuade me to make the endless, dusty journey by RR train again.

Then the thought struck me that I was worrying needlessly; I had my own conveyance for the 300 mile journey through wild bush, mountain ranges and unsettled territory. No matter that a flock of unidentifiable avians still had many of their mortal remains contained within it, or that rainfall was a deadly enemy or that the seating had been maintained by the questionable welding skill of a pioneer man-woman: it could be done and I would do it.

To the slight relief of us both, the ginger Florence Nightingale was released unbroken, my maternally selected, scratchy, Arctic wardrobe was donated to a pathetically grateful houseboy and I was almost ready for round two of my mismatched battle with Zambia Customs and Excise and Central Africa.

Lusaka and, particularly, its unsuspecting womenfolk, here I come! The Scots Lad Rules, OK?

Copyright Gerry Hodes: April 2013