Zambia World Wide

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.