Zambia World Wide

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.