Zambia World Wide

S' amazin' innit? One day you're sheltering from rain with the bone-shattering velocity of a WW1 carbine and the next you're 7000 miles away, watching the warm sun go down behind baobab trees and feeling the power of the day's rays still rising from the puzzlingly red earth beneath your feet; the whole transforming experience accompanied by a chorus of crickets and gawd-knows-what other insect life, chirruping their bloodthirsty welcome to Africa.

A mundane experience for Old Africa Hands, but, to a tyro post-colonialist whose only understanding of the Land of Livingstone began and ended with a Western SMT red bus trip to the explorer's Scottish birthplace in Blantyre, it was truly bowel-gripping. And if I could be imbued with such geographical romance, whilst standing in the shabby veranda of Longacres hostel, what other wonderment would await me when the next day commenced and this foreign, yet oddly familiar, country came to life?

Young men tend to take whatever Life throws at them more or less in their stride. After all, being cool was (is) what's most important. So, confronting complete nightfall at 6pm in summer and encountering frenzied negroes, wearing dark clothes and furiously riding unilluminated, ancient, black bikes down dimly lit, narrowly tarmaced strips of road flanked by perilously deep, unfenced ditches, was a matter of no concern to this Scots lad - apart from encouraging me to scurry back to the relative safety of the single storey hostel, without venturing too far into my new surroundings.

Bryson, the surliest, most inadequate meeter and greeter of any government service in the world, had driven me, at some personal cost (to me), around a single corner from the colonial airport to my temporary accommodation and dumped me and my ridiculous baggage, unceremoniously on the entrance apron. I found out later that they gave him two hours overtime pay for his pickup duties, so, naturally, he regarded it as a matter of honour to short change the time devoted to the subject of his snide attentions and whizz off to superior revenue-generating opportunities elsewhere.

Therefore, instead of a friendly, informative, half-hour tour of Lusaka, with, perhaps, a welcoming beer at the Ridgeway hotel and a casual briefing on what to expect from my new employers, I was brusquely uplifted from the airport, shaken down for cash, then abruptly abandoned to wander, the long night long, the institutionalised corridors of a construction that so very closely resembled the sombre, dripping, grey blocks of the mocked up Albanian prison from The Ipcress File.

No matter. I was used to being, how shall I put it, contained within such establishments. We novices from the provinces routinely were housed in crammed hostel (although 'hostile' would be more like the proper description) environments, once winkled from our caves, scrubbed clean of woad and delivered to the Civil Service in London. I had been fresh from maternal overload in Glasgow (I'm being circumspect, since she remains stubbornly extant and may read this, but excessive control and unwarranted & very nosey interference was more like her style. Still is), so it was a bit of a shock. My misfortune was to be placed in the London Hostels Association's very own Dotheboys Hall, located behind Finchley Road Tube, in a homely building whose attractive, suburban architecture belied its sinister interior.

There, in the impure air of the metropolis, I was confronted by many new experiences. Like the quotidian frustration of adjacency to so many (out-of-reach-on-£8-a-week wages) nubile female shop staff from the nearby John Lewis store. Like chaste and not inexpensive confinement in a shabby, malodorous sub-monastery room, shared with six (other) dedicated onanists, each enthusiastically plying his disgusting trade every evening. Like, and this was worst of all, shrill control by an omnipresent, Mrs. Squeers trained, grotesquely obese, Ozzie, near-female warden, who specialised in offering half a fried egg as the protein part of the breakfast menu.

It continually frustrated me that her gigantic, wobbly girth probably was the visible result of the eager consumption of my (and a hundred others) stolen half egg. However, when confronted by a 30 stone female, who could casually crack your skull with one mighty blow of her meaty, muscled fist (and it has been my deep misfortune to meet many of them over a mis--shapen career), I have always found it sensible to remain silent and suffer, without complaint, whichever injustice is being visited upon me at the time. But we're in East Lusaka now, not North London, so forgive the longwinded background detail to explain why being parachuted into the depressing austerity of Longacres Government Hostel was not a new experience.

As usual, I was ravenous, once awakened from a short nap of several hours; and, predictably, food had been served to the now invisible inmates much earlier in the evening, so no sustenance remained for the ill-advised latecomer, into which category I firmly fell. The hinterland beyond Longacres had no late night convenience stores in 1965 (and I'll bet my pension that it still hasn't), but, in any case, I wasn't about to run the gauntlet of the black-clad mob of homicidal black-hued pedallers once again, nor expose myself to the rabid wildlife that stalked the suburbs of Lusaka in search of the unwary, about which I had been warned by the howling exaggerations of the returning expats on the plane journey over.

In any case, I was refreshed and too excited to sleep, but had only the deserted communal facilities at my disposal. Since these consisted only of a few ancient, unspeakably stained, easy chairs, partnered in antiquity by scratched and battered, government-issue coffee tables (sans any coffee, unless you chose to suck the table top) it was easy to plump for wandering the corridors in search of amusement; or, if not that, then some nourishment. Neither was available, nor any human contact.

I'm sure that there is more fun and caloric reward available in a madrasa in the Tora Bora mountain ranges, than there was in this mid-60's African suburban gaol. At the very least, there you may meet a wild-eyed Taliban warrior with a cheery line in Islamic putdowns and an offer to admire his Kalashnikov, but at least the possibility of an hospitable chapati. Not so in the Hostel from Hell. If any Lonely Planet compilers are reading this, my advice is to delete any reference to Longacres as a visitable pleasure palace.

And so the longest and hungriest night of my callow life was spent hunched miserably in my government cot: no television, no radio, no company and no hope, the silence broken only by my noisily rumbling stomach and the chattering cicadas. I began to fantasise lasciviously about the indigestible and frankly disgusting fare that BUA reluctantly had provided all of the way across the various oceans and the African continent. Believe me, for a Scots Lad, then possessing a libido with the potency of a small nuclear device, only truly powerful forces could generate such a huge re-direction of effort from the usual evening activity. Acute food deprivation was such a force.

The fortnight-long night passed eventually and I repacked the traveller's kit, of scratchy woollen knickers, 13-gauge, sturdy Scottish knitwear, twill shirts, tweed trousers and brushed winceyette pyjamas, that my mother had insisted were absolutely de rigueur pioneer wear in the tropics, paused momentarily to look longingly at the still empty buffet counter and trudged wearily to the entrance to Cell Block Longacres, to await collection by the Chauffeur de Hades and his raddled companion Morris, the shooting brake.

And there he was, resplendent in capped, epauletted & beautifully creased uniform whites and highly polished footwear. Full of apathy, but empty of bonhomie, wallet contents or any vestige of human kindness, he nevertheless was quivering with the joy of delivering the news that he was to transport me to Lusaka railway station to embark for my ultimate destination, Customs & Excise HQ in Livingstone; 300 miles further south and an unpalatable 18 hours of travel i.e. a damn sight longer than the flight time from Gatwick.

Even to an immigrant enthusiast, eager for adventure and the experience of being a part of a newly formed infrastructure which would help provide the engine room for the impetus necessary to launch a brand new country into the brotherhood of independent nations (at the tender age of 19, you naively believe all the hopeless puffery that the Crown Agents used to dream up to attract applications), the thrill of it all was beginning to pall somewhat.

True, sitting steerage atop a quartet of throbbing Rolls-Royce aero engines, whilst being forced to impersonate an airborne sardine all the way across Europe and Africa; then, in sequence, being robbed by a future colleague, starved and incarcerated in solitary confinement before being sentenced to the prospect of an endless rail journey to gawd-knows-where, can have that effect on a chap. Putting the best face possible on it, it wasn't the most stimulating of starts to my new life in my land of opportunity.

But, dammit, the morning air was fresh and exotically aromatic and the temperature, even at 5-30 am, was already inviting. All around were unfamiliar flora brightly and abundantly on show, framing new sights, like the enormous, knackered-looking, rolling stock of Central African Road Services, coughing themselves into action, the better to pollute a pure, new day. Even so, it was all so much more stimulating than starting a day's labour by trudging through damp, crowded streets to the station, then sharing a heavily graffitoed Tube with a thousand other melancholy, grey commuters.

And there was a further attraction. Bryson assured me that there definitely would be a well-stocked buffet car on the train. He was callously bending the truth, of course, but I didn't know that then and his dissembling at least had the benefit of encouraging my recently flattened spirits to perk up a bit. Hell, there might even be bacon butty in my immediate future or, possibly, that, plus an inviting young female for company in my carriage.

If only he'd remembered to pass on the envelope of subsistence expenses cash that had been allocated for my journey, my happiness quotient might have moved up to sub-average. Unfortunately and equally unsurprisingly, that part of his delivery instructions had accidentally slipped his venal mind; something else about which I was unaware, until I was called to account for them by the audit department at headquarters.

Things could only improve, could they not? Bring on Day 2. This starving and abandoned Scots Lad was (almost) ready for it.

COPYRIGHT: GERRY HODES 2011

Episode #4: The Scots Lad en Training