Zambia World Wide

It was a day for feeling envious, starting with dressing in my wholly inappropriate grey flannel long sleeved shirt, tie and scratchy gabardine trousers, whilst all my mess mates tripped lightly through the kitchen in pristine cotton whites from top to toe. Shorts, open-necked shirts, knee high socks, they all gleamed, the result of hard work by our house servant, with the greatest reflections coming from their black leather footwear, which compared with overwhelming superiority to my scuffed Hush Puppies. Day 1 in my new job in Livingstone Customs and my sartorial morale was lower than a cobra’s meat and two veg. Luckily, I retained the arrogance of youth, which has carried me (to this day) through Life, whenever talent, intelligence or skill would have been preferable, but were, regrettably, missing.

And so I presented myself before the High Heid Yin of Zambia Customs wearing the outfit of a librarian from a particularly scruffy council facility in a suburb of Rochdale. Luckily, my embarrassment was assuaged somewhat when I observed that the Deputy Controller was garbed in a saggy suit, the quality of which was exceeded by that of any product from the incompetent workshop of John Collier the fifty shilling tailor. I guess they had a forty shilling department that disposed of suitings rejected by their proletariat punters, but, happily, I had never discovered its location. This guy, clearly, had.

Nevertheless, I paid respect to his rank as he indoctrinated me into the Service in the kindly and respectful manner that was John Capeling’s house style. Peering a little wearily, through metal framed spectacles, into the gloom that pervaded his office, he politely welcomed me to the country and expressed his personal pleasure at my choice of new career. I was too naïve to recognise rehearsed political politesse and, in any case, desired an early departure so that I could scratch myself into some form of comfort, so I merely acknowledged his little speech and accepted my first assignment: Livingstone Post Office.

I guess that I was vaguely aware that HM Customs had a Royal Mail presence back home, but my entire Customs & Excise career to date had been spent rummaging smelly cargo ships and, quite often, being vigorously rummaged in return, by giant, pistol-toting Eastern Europeans with something to conceal. I had no idea that scrutinising postal orders was also part of the job. Yet, notwithstanding, here I was: The Officer, Livingstone Central Post Office. How happy would have been my mother, had she known. She had always wanted me to aspire to the role of Postal & Telegraph Officer, GPO, George Square, Glasgow, not realising that I would have applied to be a turd shoveller in The Vladivostok People’s Bog, to put myself beyond her stifling influence.

As I turned to exit JC’s murky lair, he passed me a large folder and impressed the need to pay careful attention to it. Thinking it was some form of training manual, I started immediately to scrutinise it with some relief, followed speedily by incomprehension. Labelled tersely as ‘Charlatans’, this tome identified a group of individuals who fulfilled the local GP role, but with their own unique medicine cabinet; you know, eye of toad, ear of spider, testicle of customs official,  that sort of thing. Suddenly, Bulgarians with bloodstained Lugers became a nostalgic memory, but I didn’t have time to sigh, as I had to report to the quaintly titled Subsistence Officer, who demanded paperwork for travel expenses never passed to me by the robber baron git Bryson. Like Denis Waterman in Minder, I’m no grass, but, as Greyfriars sage Hurree Jamset Ram Singh might have said, the greatfulness of the temptation to drop the greedy sod in it was very terrific indeed.

Nonetheless, I stayed true to my Glaswegian street urchin principles and lied that my inability to provide receipts for the expenses I had never seen was due to having my wallet lifted on the train. Amazingly, the excuse was accepted. In my evil little brain, however, the careful registration of a grudge was made and, in situations that require retribution, generally I’ll wait as long as it takes for a chance to repay. My long-suffering wife records these events as a clear indication of just how nasty the workings of my deformed mind are (no doubt to support her case in any subsequent divorce proceedings) and she informs me that the longest I have waited is eighteen years. Her disdain is not for the length of time involved, nor any action taken to ensure cancellation of the original transgression, but the untrammelled and noisy delight I express when it happens. Not any sort of Christian attitude, says she, with careless disregard for my cloudy religious origins. My mother may have been correct about the perils of marrying out, after all. Stepping out into the crystal clear, sun-filled Livingstonian day, however, I felt pleased to be on the threshold of normality. Not that I knew where the Post Office was, of course, nor what I would find when I located it, but these were small difficulties. Watch out Charlatans, I thought, Gerry shortly will be on your case; just as soon as a dictionary is found that can define the title, that is.

Like Captain Customs, I burst through the doors to the sorting office, to find a sort of sepulchral calm throughout the large shed that housed it. This was because no-one was doing any work: not the postal workers or the customs team (Team? Hah! Two desks, one clerkess and a Zambian trainee). I scrutinised the walls carefully and no charlatans were hanging upside down, whilst a stripped-to-the-waist Bombardier Billy Wells character lashed them with a cat o’ nine tails. Although tres disappointing, the inactivity meant that I could devote some time to reading the dull government literature available to me and, given the paucity of any guidance whatsoever, even I was able to master the regulatory framework within an hour. I speedily realised that, by and large, I could mainly make it up as I went along, a standard I have adopted for every function I’ve undertaken throughout my subsequent career in retail. Try it. It works.

My predecessor had been one of the Federal officers who had decamped a few miles south to pre-UDI Rhodesia (bet he regrets that decision now, as he considers what value pension rights managed by the poisonous, self-serving Mugabe regime might be worth). He had also been working a personal go-slow for several months, whilst the regime change took place. I discovered later that much of the Zambia public service structure had suffered from the same malaise, from Police to Public Works Department, with the remaining processes being managed by often over-promoted ex-Feds and political appointees from UNIP, supported by junior staff who had remained and hastily recruited expats on short term contracts. The whole bag of tricks needed to be shaken down really quickly with minimal ministerial interference. In other words, it represented an impossible dream in a post-colonial world,where common sense and faith in the virtues of solid hard work and selfless contribution were in rare supply and desperation to self-advance and/or make obscene amounts of dosh were not.

As a schoolboy scientist, my minuscule IQ and determination to destroy the school lab with unauthorised experimentation with explosive ingredients, meant that the Nobel Award Committee never were going to be exercised by anything emanating from my brain, but even I remembered that Nature abhors a vacuum. Livingstone PO was exactly that and I hurriedly proceeded to fill it. ‘Deep Joy’ would have trilled Professor Stanley Unwin and more accurate he emphatically could not be.

With the aforementioned Hoover impersonation and, just to keep faith with clichés, more than a touch of blissful ignorance, parcels started to fly out of the moribund storage unit that, until May 24th 1965, had been Livingstone Post Office. Customised, part customised or wholly uncustomised, the whole constipated situation began to relieve itself of the parcel blockage and my tiny gang of incompetents were able to commence planning the attack I intended for the feathery denizens of the C world. Alas, I was recalled from my desk to the HQ complex, with a demand for immediacy and speedy  alacrity. Naturally, given my track record for being bollocked by bosses, I assumed that some mark had been exceeded and, twelve days into my first assignment, my card was about to be tagged.

What could have caused the insistence to return to HQ so speedily, I pondered? As is usual in my life, there were always good reasons for being disciplined, harangued or just slapped hard. In this instance, I might not have been so very wise to add my name and address to the customs docket we attached to parcels going to nurses at the local hospital. Well, if only innocuous domicile details were appended, that might not have been so bad, but my personal inclination to include lurid descriptions of the sexual adventures that the nurses might enjoy, should they wish to respond, might have been less sensible. (By the way, two nurses’ dormitories had already replied positively, although I had not had a chance to take it any further, so the approach was not necessarily flawed, except, perhaps, in career development terms.) But some sensitive soul might have been offended. Might!

Or the stand-up pushing match I had had with a mouthy Asian jeweller who objected to supplying an import licence for a gold bar that had negligently been sent through the uninsured postal system. Over 45 years, I often have reflected that I should have pocketed that item and sent it back to my Dad as a paperweight. I know the daft bugger would have used it as required for the next three years, at which point, using reverse alchemy, I could have turned it into an Austin-Healey 3000; but such an act was moral anathema to me…………then. Again, the truculence of my reaction to being called a Euromoron by an obnoxious dick, who had learned his English from Spike Milligan, might have been excusable, had I not expressed a sincere desire to invade his internal workings with enthusiasm and a new piece of kit with which we had been issued: the vicious, gleaming Inspectoscope.

I've no clue as to why one of these horrid implements had come to the post office, since it was an invaluable, but deeply invasive, machine that must have been developed in the same medical facility that innovated colonoscopy equipment. It enabled the sadistic user to inspect for hidden jewels or drugs via the insertion of a long, flexible chromed microscope device directly into the fundament of an unfortunate suspect. Great for airport inspections and drunken Xmas parties: less appropriate alongside the string, brown paper and sticky tape of the sorting office. Brandishing this shiny weapon determinedly, however, had successfully persuaded him to back down and disappear, clutching his rear in anticipated discomfort.

Whether the threat of visiting partial disembowelment on a member of the public had been entirely within the service code of Zambia Customs & Excise, was probably going to be another matter for others to consider. So I slowly made my way to HQ turning over acceptable excuses should my recent behaviour be questioned. As I slowly ascended the steps to the office, I knew there were none. At best, I was going to be a passenger home on the VC10 next Thursday: at worst I was going to be apprenticed to the jeweller as a houseboy.

Cautiously putting my head around the Deputy Controller’s door I was amazed to be gestured in with a beam and palpable warmth. With a personality like mine, such a situation is rare and confusing and it took some acting skill to conceal my puzzlement. Turned out that the local Chamber of Commerce had contacted him to express their pleasure at the laxative effect of my first week’s activity and had asked him to pass on their gratitude.

Given the disciplinary problems I was going to cause him over the next three years, I should have asked for a signed ‘Get Out of Jail' card to keep pinned to the inside of my shirt like Maverick’s $1000 bill, but my slowsilver mind let me down, not for the first time, or the last. So I gibbered out my relieved reaction to the compliment and started to leave, but he stopped me in mid-escape, with a request for an additional service.

For a minute I thought I was to be the first victim of the bowel de-flowerer, but, again, his grim smile told me differently. In the end, all he wanted was for me to await the imminent arrival of another short term expat and acquaint him with Livingstone, the HQ and the Post Office, using his personal government-issued Land-Rover as a taxi. With a single bound I was free and sitting in his outer office alongside the surly crone that was his PA. Relief beyond belief.

Let me try to describe this hairy, dried-out, mean-mouthed, raddled, wire-haired hag to you. Oops, job already done. She had instantly shown her distaste for lairy Scots lads on our first acquaintance, by affecting not to be able to understand me at all. Racism, I call it, but I’m sure she would have deployed a different interpretation and, based on my subsequent relationships with women of all shapes, sizes, ages and intellects, she probably had it bang on (I can be generous now, because, probably being dead, she'll never read this).

Whatever, we both knew that we could never be better than instinctive enemies, without there being any justifiable reason for the position. Stand on me, it wasn’t the first time that that has happened, nor the last. There are some odd people around is how I see it, because I know that I’m a highly personable human. Ask Mum (but not the missus).

We sat there, Sourpuss and I, her typing away with her talons and I trying to read upside down personnel files out of the corner of my eye, when something approaching a scene from Jesus Christ Superstar occurred. Not the crucifixion, they were saving that for me, but the one where He is lowered into the proscenium arch by wire, spectacularly lit and supported by delightful cherubs. Harps strummed, ethereal music drenched the office and a choral harmony completed the heavenly ambience: Roger Browning was with us and, verily, we did worship him from first acquaintanceship, His beauty to observe.

He strode among us tall (okay, I’ll admit that, next to your average Glaswegian, a crouching dwarf has height advantage) and tanned, with perfect teeth, so white they were like an advert for Tippex.  Not only that, when he turned his dazzling smile and full concentration onto a female victim, she was lost forever in his eyes and her sexual fantasies. Even the old bag appeared to be summoning up the necessary juices to have a last crack at a level of satisfaction that had not been visited on her for half a century, if ever.

Dream on, witch features, obviously an entire emergent nation of excited, trembling women were going to be awaiting Roger’s welcome grasp and I was determined to be his faithful follower. It was like a scene from Don Quixote, with me cast as a thick, faithful, corpulent, sexually frustrated Sancho Panza. Not exactly an edifying ambition, but I knew my best opportunity to cast off my burdensome nineteen years of virginity had just walked into the room and if I had to use a more elegant swordsman’s cast-offs to achieve it, I cared not for pride or hygiene.

The Bronzed Sun God had arrived and all was going to be well in the Land of Love & Livingstone, but what The Charlatans were going to make of it, I would have to discover later, hopefully from some distance away.

Copyright Gerry Hodes April 2012

Episode #7: The Scots Lad: Lassitude in Livingstone