Zambia World Wide

We had to recruit a volunteer, from one of the crowd of locals who, as previously described, had magically appeared to grin at our discomfiture, to return us to base. The memory of four lusty young males having to be riparian chauffeured by a single, emaciated, elderly African has stayed with me for five decades and my head is hanging in shame as I recount it now.

I departed back to the city soon after that experience and, apart from a holiday weekend in Kariba, spent with Browning in the Peugeot, where I found myself evicted from my own car at 3am, because he had managed to locate some witless female on the beach and entice her back to our vehicular bedroom for upholstery staining activity (MY bloody upholstery), I never returned for longer than it took to cross the border.

Back in Lusaka, I had a few cash generating wrinkles going on as well, developed through friends I had made outside of the Civil Service. For example, Tony Coetzee, a Cape Coloured refugee from apartheid, who was a true genius with aluminium, enabled both of us to generate a comfortable supplemental income from roof racks and sports car luggage brackets he miraculously fashioned from expensive materials nicked from his window frame employer.

Actually, ‘genius’ isn’t sufficiently complimentary. He was a God of Non-Ferrous Metal. Indeed, he probably could have produced a three-breasted female form, had I requested it, but she still wouldn’t have been as hard hearted as the aforementioned Sheila (See? Still bitter, half a century later. Blame my mother).

Anyway, I was the salesman and marketing department and he the stealthy manufacturing base. It was very lucrative, while it lasted, but the Gods of Disapproval, who seem to have followed me around like a dirty great black cloud for much of my life, made sure that it didn’t.

Although mainly it came to an end by my own poor behaviour, it partly was Browning’s fault. The Lord of Carnality had become restless, once he had deflowered, dehumanised and/or degenerated the vast majority of the available distaff population of the city, married or single. One of his ex’s, however, foolishly had introduced him to the girls of the Zambia Airways ground staff, of which there wasn’t sufficient number to keep him interested for long.

Through them, though, he discovered an entire new cadre of would-be partners, employed by Air Rhodesia. Ploughing that particular furrow, necessitated flying down with them to Salisbury for their legendary UDI sex party weekends; which resulted, too often, in him being missing without permission on a Monday morning and, thereafter, not much use until Wednesday pm.

We tried our best to cover for our over-sexed, deviant friend, but hell, we had never even been invited to participate in that aspect of the southern revolution, so to speak, so, inevitably, the wrath of Paddy eventually descended, at light speed, upon Browning’s raddled bod.

Simultaneously, I had provoked an altercation with a smarmy little tubby toad of a European Police inspector, who lost a race to me along the Ridgeway, then pulled me over and booked me for speeding. In my humble opinion, he did so out of sheer spite and pique at being outgunned by an elderly Pogo and a mouthy Scots lunk.