Zambia World Wide

Gerry!’, ‘GERRY!’, ‘GERRY!!!’. ‘Wake up, for Gawd’s Sake!!!!’.

Thus it was that, in the middle of one starry night in early 1966, warm and cosy amidst the burrowing bedbugs of a dilapidated PWD mattress that had been cynically redistributed to the Lusaka Customs Mess, following probable decades of abuse by political prisoners of the Federation KGB, I was dragged back into reluctant consciousness from a scented, lovely place. A location full of lascivious, large-chested females, Irn-Bru, Scotch pies, Empire biscuits & Nardini's ice cream.

The brutal dream intruder was Browning, consumed with agitation and urgency. ‘I need your car. I want it NOW’ said the priapic swordsman of Brecknock Road, in a no-nonsense tone that combined sexual frustration with acute desperation.

Turned out that, returning with his latest conquest in his fancy-schmancy Vauxhall VX4-90, en route to deceive yet another unsuspecting, cuckolded husband, Roger had swapped driving awareness for carnal thrill-seeking. This caused him to fail to notice the illuminations, klaxon-wailing and general hugeness of a giant goods locomotive, as it traversed the ungated crossing in front of him. His companion must have been a hell of a fellatrice, but there could only be one climax to this collision and it was not to Browning that it came.

Post the steely mating of his auto with the train, his magnificent mobile bordello was a total write-off. He, with the usual luck of the committed amoral, escaped without injury. His paramour, happily, for him, was disengaged from his tackle at the time of impact, but was left a bloodied mass of glass cuts and multi-coloured contusions. There she was an hour later, still not sufficiently sober, I noted, to have sufficient decorum to not sit next to him on the edge of my bed, whilst I nakedly returned to some form of awakedness.

Now I was on the horns of a dilemma. My Pogo 203 was not a new car, nor a fancy one, but it had reclining seats and, probably, dozens of expatriate females had given themselves up to lubricious exercise within its confines, in the seven years since its manufacture. My problem was that, however eagerly anticipated, I had not yet been a participant in any such sexual shenanigans and, in any case, I had just had the thing expensively valeted.

Was I willing to risk the probability of having Browning's DNA liberally spread over the coarse vinyl seat covering, then favoured by Peugeot, BEFORE enjoying an opportunity to splash my own? On the other hand, how much did I fancy returning a maverick female, covered in fresh bruises and mysterious stains, to her disgruntled, possibly muscular, partner, in the middle of the night?

After a nano-second’s thought, my moral compass i.e an instinct for self-protection, kicked in. Browning could have the Pogo and I would suppress any questions about intra-journey vehicular activities. Nonetheless, I had my suspicions that, once again, I was going to live an exotic sex life, wholly vicariously. Sigh.

Apart from sharing my car and Dettol with the Mess Don Juan, the year had started well, despite the increasing levels of privation that the Rhodesian UDI was inflicting on Zambia and its customs officers in particular. For example, petrol rationing was an inhibitor to socialising, but pooling coupons generally provided a way around most travel difficulties.

An even better solution had been to persuade the authorities that the bunch of drunken civil servants, with whom I had the privilege to be part, were essential users, their duties to perform, and for  them to issue exemption permits. Unfortunately, Paddy McCormack, our rambunctious boss, roared into Celtic condemnation and had them rescinded.