Zambia World Wide

Paddy hadn’t finished of course, but his delivery was reaching another crescendo, raising his normal deep, gruff tones to the level of a madman’s shriek, accompanied by his ensanguined countenance, showering spittle and accompanied by a severe stutter,. ‘Yer…yer…yer…Oi'm goin’ to sen' you where t’ere ain’t no feckin’ pooblic… Ch…Ch… Ch…’.

‘Bloody hell’, thought I, screwing up my courage to hear the last few syllables and consonants of the coming location without bursting into tears. ‘I’m being condemned to two years of liver and soul destruction in the loonie asylum on the border’.

But, when they came out, the word wasn’t completed with ‘irundu’, but ‘ingola’; Chingola, a speck of mining nothingness half way up the country, on the fringes of the Copperbelt region and the Congo border.

Relief, suffused with joy, shuddered through me, like the orgasms I so eagerly pursued in my leisure time. Had the huge, hairy, maroon Celtic phizog, not a millimetre from my head, not been flecked with a vertical halo of nutter’s spittle, I could have kissed it; such was my sense of ecstatic reprieve.

At this juncture, the hitherto silent Browning, who, throughout these proceedings, had been insouciantly admiring his own reflection in the glass of one of Paddy’s paintings, snorted his amusement at hearing my fate. Big mistake. HUGE mistake.The glowering Cranium of Doom turned from one victim to another, followed by a Quasimodo lurch towards Roger. Paddy couldn’t quite deliver to Browning the same drool-accompanied pyrotechnics, with which he had generously endowed me, because The Lusaka Lothario stood several inches taller than did he, but he gave it a damn good go, using his unique management-speak successfully to substitute for height.

‘ An’ ye…ye…ye…great feckin' lummox. Ye t’ink t’ whole bleddy world revolves around ye and yer dick’. (My turn to smirk… discreetly). ‘Tribbl is, ye cannae keep the dam’ t’ing in yer shorts…an what’s more, ye cannae keep yer shorts in t’ bleddy country’. ‘Well, I have a surprise for ye too. You’re goin’ somewhere there ain’t no bleddy WIMMIN’…..Abercorn!’. Well, you would have to have a heart of stone not to burst out laughing at THAT news. At a stroke, there was the ever ready, priapic Browning, emasculated by a raving Mick.

Abercorn (now renamed Mbala) was as far north as it was possible to go. It featured impassable roads, (in 1966) no Chinese railway, a sketchy air service and a sparsely developed European population. True, anthropologists reckoned that humans had populated the region for 300,000 years, but, generally it was felt, not recently. The Hove Humper had been well and truly shafted (in which I took no pleasure of course, he was my mate after all. On the other hand, one more valet and my car would be my pristine own again). I must say, it was the only time I ever saw his preternaturally tanned features pale. Almost matched his teeth, they did.

And so we two reprobates left Paddy’s lair with our marching orders and brand new ranks: Public Enemy #1 and Pubic Enemy #1. It might have been worse, had Paddy had more imagination, Public Enema #1 would have been the least palatable fate of all, especially if he administered it.

So, after a satisfying near year, circumstances were forcing me to hail goodbye to the many delights and entertainments of Lusaka; to say toodle-oo to the unrequited love of a Scottish maiden (the latter condition assumed, but, disappointingly, not confirmed); and to bid au revoir to nubile government secretaries throughout The Ridgeway. Worse of all, it was to be fare thee well to a second income from purloined aluminium. (Given the provenance of the latter material, Paddy might just have done me a big favour. Had the Law and I come into contact on that score too, the consequences might have been even more dire).

Soon, halloo to Chingola and a brand new sequence of Scots Lad adventures. The exotic, romantic Copperbelt was beckoning and the Pogo Love Wagon and I were on our way to sample such rural pleasures as were to be available to impecunious youth. Kindly brace yourselves, girls. (Glasgow foreplay)

Copyright: Gerry Hodes: May 2015