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PART 2: A TOSSPOT IN ENGLAND AND AFRICA
Non-fiction by Keith Skellern


At the end of my last narrative I was just finishing my career as a boiler cleaner, which was none too soon, so I will continue from there.

Normal Work

As I was doing a sandwich course at Uni, this involved doing two years study, one years work experience in ‘Industry’ and the final year back studying at Uni. For some unknown reason, I found myself working at a firm whose name I’ve forgotten that made widgets. (I’ve also forgotten what sort of widgets). In a place called Treforest about a thirty-minute bus ride north of Cardiff.

I used to travel through a small village called Ynysybwl, on my way to work. This seemed to me to be the very epitome of the Welsh language and culture. Here was a village without a vowel in its name. For any of you interested in visiting and I wouldn't particularly recommend it, unless you're in the vicinity, it’s pronounced very approximately ‘Unissubull’.

I did eventually get my degree in the fourth year, a Second Class Honours degree in Industrial Economics, for what it was worth. I left university, not exactly clutching my precious degree. It meant so much to me that I didn’t even bother attending the graduation ceremony, so they posted it to me, to be clutched at a later date.

I applied for a few jobs using my qualification, with no success. I went for one job with Tutty driving me there. I think it was with Pilkington’s Glass. I was wearing my one and only suit, which was a black corduroy job (more suited to Discos than job interviews) and my hair was a tad on the long side, ‘styled’ in a sort of Beatle’s cut.

Neither of which seemed to appeal to the interviewer and this, coupled with the fact that Tutty was parked under his window. With his feet sticking through the window of his beat-up Morris Minor, with the Rolling Stones blaring out of his speaker, did not augur well for my chances of success.

His first question was “Do you play a musical instrument?” I answered in the negative and queried why he had thus inquired. To which he wittily riposted “Oh! I just thought that with your hair, you might play first violin in an orchestra.”

It didn’t take a nuclear physicist to realise that this guy was taking the proverbial out of yours truly. It did not come as a complete surprise to get a letter a few days later, stating that although they greatly appreciated my expression of interest, unfortunately I had been unsuccessful.

A few more attempts with different Multinationals had the same result, even though I had cleaned my act up a little. By this time I was working as a labourer at a ‘Bleach Works’. I scored this little number through Tutty, who had a mate whose father owned the said ‘Bleach Works’.

 We were both on the same shift; alternating eight-hour shifts (day, afternoon and night) five days a week. Although we worked in different parts of the factory. Tutty by dint of his association with the boss’s son got a very cushy job, watching little iddy biddy cotton balls coming out of a drier and picking out any that did not meet his expert approval.

In the meantime, I got shafted with the rough end of the pineapple with a job, which I will describe in excruciating detail, as is my wont.

My first job entailed feeding skeins of rayon on to a short conveyor belt (about 4ft long) to a blade that jumped up and down and cut the rayon into half-inch lengths. This was an horribly noisy contraption and ear-protection was not provided in those dim, dark, distant times.

 I soon discovered that by being too efficient, I could overfeed it, causing it to become blocked. This meant that the foreman had to partially take it to pieces to unblock it. This took about twenty minutes and did not endear me to him. Doing this, two or three times a shift for a week or so really gave him the screaming irrits. So he took me off that after a couple of weeks. I thought I was being smart, but this proved to be the first of many bad career moves!

 When the raw material came into the factory. It came in bales of different quality, nice stuff for making cotton wool for medicinal purposes, good stuff for making sheets etc. average stuff for tea-towels and the like and crappy stuff for making dish-cloths and dhotis for our less wealthy brethren on the sub-continent.

For my younger readers. This was back in the early seventies, way before globalisation was invented and such work was undertaken in the UK. When ‘Made in Hong Kong’ and ‘Made in Japan’ were synonymous with shoddy, second-rate trash. Made in China, India, South Korea and Taiwan were unheard of.

Nowadays, the reverse applies, why buy a goombah from Australia, the USA or Europe? When you can get one made in China, at least as good for a third of the price?

Does anybody remember the ‘Domino Theory’? The red hordes were going to come rampaging down from China, swamping Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia and the Philippines and descending on white, virginal Australia. Somebody forgot that the Viets hate the Chinese as much as the Yanks, the Cambodians hate the Viets and so on.

The main thing they forgot though, was that the human race in general, is a grasping, money-grubbing mob of creature-comfort loving morons. This led to them flooding the West with el-cheapo stuff instead of communist propaganda and militant invasions, and who can say that they’re wrong?

Bye-bye Communism, hello rabid Islamo-Fascist, Jihadisti. Everyone needs a common enemy; it keeps us from blaming ourselves. Bring on the Zoroastrians, everybody can beat the bejasus out of them.

To get back to me, and let’s face it I’m the most important person in this neck of the woods, primarily because I’m writing this stuff. If you want to be the star, write your own garbage!

So where was I?

Yeah! The Bleach Works, the different categories of cotton came into the factory and were dropped into something-called ‘Kiers’ or something like that. These were horribly big, pot like things, after the cotton went in they were filled with boiling hot water and bleach. If you look at your bottle of ‘Domestos’ in the ‘bathroom’, you will notice that it is called ‘Industrial Strength’.

This is absolute bullpuckie; industrial strength bleach dissolves rats, cats and people. After cooking the cotton up for a couple of hours, it’s then rinsed repeatedly, to get rid of whatever remains of the rats, cats and people.

The whole shebang was then hoisted across on a gantry and placed in position for the next process, which was where I came in. It was my job to grab handfuls of the stuff from inside the kier and fling it onto a short conveyor belt, which carried it along to a vertical, nailed conveyor belt, which dropped it off into a 30ft by 3ft ‘bath’, where it was dragged along in some sort of cleansing gunk by elliptical ‘forks’ until it was fit for normal human beings to handle.

I never did find out what happened to it after that, I couldn’t have given a flying fornication, to be honest, (An attitude that has given your average limey in general and me in particular, a reputation for hard-working reliability.)

After careful observation of the foreman, I detected that the belt could be speeded up or slowed down. Whenever he had departed after observing my efforts, to go for a smoke and a yak with his mates. I used to hop down and slow it down; eventually he would return and put it on full-bore.

This went on for the full shift for a week or two, before we came to an unspoken compromise and left it on a medium speed. If the ‘stuff’ was good quality cotton it was a reasonable sort of a job, good exercise bending down and throwing it eight hours a day, five days a week. If it was the crappy stuff it was a real mongrel, on the first few days, my knuckles were bleeding from trying to rip this dish cloth material apart.

After a few weeks, I developed callouses on my knuckles, manual labourers get callouses on the inside of their hands, not me Bro.

When I used to go to discos, which I did fairly frequently in those days, the second thing the girls noticed about me were my knuckles, I think they thought it was because they dragged along the ground after I had consumed ten or so pints of Double Diamond Pale Ale.

I know that I have captured your attention with that last paragraph, go on admit it, you were about to fall asleep with yet another description of life in a factory in mid-twentieth century England. You are now thinking what was the first thing the girls noticed. Was it the bulge in his trousers? The Beatles Haircut? His fluid but sensual movement about the dance floor?

No! Alas and alack it was the dandruff. In those days every disco was lit by ultra-violet lights (usually reflected off spinning balls, not mine, the ones in the ceiling). As you may or may not know, ultra violet has the effect of making white clothing look brilliant, bluish white, it also has the effect of making otherwise pallid skin look like the wearer (of the skin) has a tropical suntan.

This was great for the dolly birds, wearing their short white mini-skirts, but in my case was a minor disaster. Wearing a black, collar-less, corduroy jacket may look cool in the sober light of day.

However, under ultra violet light it emphasises the dandruff and can have the effect of a person, stumbling down Mt Everest after a particularly violent white out. Especially, when the stumbling is brought about by the consumption of ten or so pints of Double Diamond.

This dandruff effect also affected the way I danced, when the Dutch courage allowed this. I had to try to keep my head as stationary as possible, in order to avoid looking like one of those kitsch hemi-spherical ‘whatsits’ that you shake over a Christmassy scene.

With an immovable head and feet, the only movement possible is a frenzied jerk of the pelvis and a gentle swaying of the arms and hands (definitely not the shoulders), I leave that to your imagination).

This form of dancing appears to have an incredible effect on the bladder/bowel control of most females. For some reason beyond the ken of your average male i.e. me. They grab their handbags and nearest female friend, and head off in the general direction of the ‘bathroom’. Usually marked rather tweely, ‘Setters’ as opposed to ‘Pointers’.

Enough of this frivolity, where was I? The Bleach Works, I have heaps more amusing little anecdotes from this particular period of my eventful life, but I’ll give them a miss for the time being.

I did eventually get a job using my qualifications, if you can describe doing clerical work in the Rates Department of the Cardiff City Hall, as being suitable work for an intellectual of my ability. You have to remember that Albie Einstein was working in the Patents Office in Koblenz when he chanced on his theory of relativity, or was he on a double-decker bus in Battersea when his thoughts turned to double helixes, but who cares to ruminate on such esoteric matters?

Luckily for me and unfortunately for the Rates Office, it was situated about a two-minute walk from the Student Union Bar at UWIST. I still had a few friends there and around 12:30 every day, I would repair to the said bar and slutch down a pint or three of Double Diamond.

 To my way of thinking, this did not seem to impair my ability to complete my work in the afternoon.
For some strange reason, when I appeared at work the next morning, my previous afternoons work had reappeared on my desk covered in red ink.

 Now I am not and never have been completely stupid, so I deduced correctly (as it happened), that I may have made an error or two. It took most of the morning to correct said errors, before I repaired back to the aforementioned bar in the afternoon.

This went on for about three months and I was never upbraided or counseled. My fellow workers were all God-fearing, hymn singing Methodists and really enjoyed having a beer-swilling atheist in their midst. It was a challenge to them, to make me change my dastardly ways and also added a bit of spice to their otherwise mundane existence. I even let them talk me into going to a bible-reading class once and once was enough.

At the end of my time in this astonishingly forgiving and civilised environment, I received two very thick letters, which were to change my life. The first came from the Royal Airforce asking me to attend a course at the RAF base in Loughborough, enclosing train tickets and information on how to become an officer in the RAF. Very tempting that!

Two days later I received a letter from the South African Embassy in London. Stating that I had I had been accepted as a qualified immigrant to SA, with a boat ticket from Southampton to Cape Town on the SA Oranje and paid accommodation until I found suitable employment.

My dream at that stage was still to travel the world. I had already planned to spend two years in SA, two in Aus, two in NZ and two in Canada. I intended to go to any and all nearby countries and settle in the best.

It took me less than two seconds to accept this rather generous offer and I can’t remember what I did with the letter from the RAF. Within a month, I was bidding farewell to my Dad and Brother in Law at New Mills station, on my way to Southampton. I remember that they asked me if there was anything I needed. I realised that I didn’t own a watch and they both offered theirs, I took my Dad’s and set off on the big adventure.

I had to change trains at one of the larger stations in London, Waterloo I think and having a couple of hours to wait for the connection. I did the obvious thing and headed for the nearest pub, I got about an hours drinking in before they closed for the afternoon. Sat there sipping my last pint for about twenty minutes before being told to “Piss off you long haired lout”.

I took this as a subtle hint that my presence was no longer welcome and that the barman was bidding me farewell. Swinging London Hah!

This rather rude comment did however strike a chord. I remembered reading somewhere that the South Africans were not overly fond of long hair. With this thought in mind, I repaired to the nearest shop with a red and white pole outside to get a haircut.

For those of you who are in the slightest bit interested, the red represents blood and the white bandages. This has nothing to do with Sweeney Todd  ‘The Demon Barber’ and his gruesome, gourmet sausages in Nineteenth Century London. Rather the fact that the barbers in those days were quite adept at performing surgery, amputations, brain surgery and the like.

To get back to my haircut, I was not overly impressed with the result; I did however have my first and last professional shave. Hot towel on the old fizzog, cutthroat razor stroppping, after-shave, the whole works. I would have felt like a new man, but I’m not that way inclined.

When I say that it was my last professional shave, I tell a slight untruth. I did pay for a shave in the Phillipines, but it is not an experience that I would recommend. Having your facial hair ripped out by the roots by some guy wielding a blunt razor is not highly enjoyable, even if it was cheap.

 Back to London, I made the connection with plenty of time to spare and arrived in Southampton to join my ship to the Republic of South Africa (RSA).  It was named the SS Oranje, which I translated, as The Steamship Orange. It looked like a very reasonable sort of a ship to my unpracticed eye, which proved to be the case.

It wasn’t a luxury liner but had everything for your basic needs. That included a bunk in a four berth cabin, I don’t remember any of my fellow berthees, so they must have been OK. The food and service were good enough for my plebian tastes. I was never invited to the Captain’s table but forgave him for his oversight.

There was a swimming pool and lounge chairs for enjoying the sun, which actually shone and there were enough bars to keep a bloke happy at night. There was also entertainment, bingo, and Olde Time dancing for the Olde Timers and a Disco for the young studs and studesses.

It’s amazing how the sea air, sunshine, and the balmy tropical evenings, added to a skinfull of grog, can lightly turn a young man’s fancies to thoughts of love.
I was lucky enough to meet a young lady traveling with her parents, back to Lusaka in Zambia, after a brief sojourn in Blighty. Her father was an air-traffic controller and a raging alcoholic, who spent the whole two weeks smashed out of his skull; this suited his wife down to the ground (or plimsole line). She spent the trip dallying with an acquaintance of mine named Davis, who will appear later in this narrative at Victoria Falls.

This left their seventeen-year-old, daughter alone for much of the evening and night looking for a suitable swain and as there was a distinct shortage of suitable swains on board, having a choice of no swains or a swinish swain, she chose me. I couldn’t describe it as love at first sight, I was too much like her father and she was too much like her mother. Which ‘in theory’, should have made a perfect match. It didn’t with either couple.

There were a lot of good people on board, including Davis, a newly married Scottish couple “Wee” Jock and his wife, (more of him later) a Maternal Scottish lady, who sat next to me at meals and tried to keep me on the straight and narrow.

 The best of the lot was an African guy called Leapeetswe Khama, he was a graduate from Oxford, traveling with his wife and young son aged about 1 year old I’d guess.

After talking to him for a few days, I found out that he was the nephew of Seretse Khama, the number one man in Botswana and that Peachy, as he was nicknamed, was the chief of a hundred thousand strong tribe there. He was a really nice guy and after a few more days, his son would come up to me and say the only words he knew in English. He’d point upwards and say ‘Sky’ and then point out over the rail and solemnly intone, ‘Sea’’. These seemed to me to be fairly astute observations for one so young.

AFRICA AT LAST

CAPE TOWN

After two weeks at sea we arrived in Cape Town, it really is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, especially when you arrive at dawn by ship and the cloud (tablecloth) over Table Mountain is tinged a lovely pink colour.

 I passed through immigration fairly quickly as all my papers were in order and the SA government was keen to attract qualified people, only white ones of course.

I got free transport to my hotel, which had been pre-booked and pre-paid by the Government. It was nothing particularly flash but clean and comfortable, and the guy who escorted me told me I had two days to relax and adjust and then had to report to my ‘liaison officer’.

I spent the first day looking around and it really was a great city. On the second day I went to see Peachy, I knew he was staying at the President Hotel a five star joint. The only place in Cape Town that allowed Black Guests to mingle with White Guests.

I met him on the terrace outside and we had a couple of beers, he was really pissed off because the customs officials refused to release his car, a brand new BMW. They couldn’t believe that a black man could afford a car like that. They made him write for proof of purchase in Oxford.

He couldn’t afford to stay at the hotel for very long and didn’t want to put up with the shit of staying there. So he moved out to one of the ‘Townships’, where the majority of the Non-White workforce were forced to live. I never saw him after that.

I suppose I should have jumped up and down, but what good would that have done? I tried to find him but couldn’t. So being the shallow git that I am, I shrugged it off.

When I first met my ‘Liaison Officer’ he gave me a list of a few jobs to try for. Most of them were unsuitable, but I went for a couple of interviews for them. After a week I was still unemployed but waiting for replies. My friendly liaison man said “If you don’t find a job here in a week we’ll send you to Jo’burg”, “Oh no! Please don’t send me to Jo’burg”. I had talked to some people who had been there and they had told me it was the pits compared to Cape Town.

One of my last chances to stay there was a job as a personal assistant to the sales director of Elvinco Plastics.  I turned up for the interview and he kept me waiting for over two hours. He then told me that the job had already gone to someone else, but he would interview me anyway.

I had a general talk with him for about an hour, telling him how to solve all of SA’s problems, a bit of a cheek that, coming from someone who had just stepped off the boat. For some reason I impressed him and when he found out that I had studied Cost Accountancy at University, he immediately asked me if I was interested in becoming a cost accountant at their sister company making zippers. I thought “hell; I’ve only studied it for two hours a week for three years.” I may even have said that out loud.

It didn’t matter; he took me to see his youngest brother, who was the managing director of Lysta Zips, I talked to them both for another half hour and was then asked to leave the room, while they had a talk about me. I have no idea what was said, but it must have been good, because ten minutes later they called me back in and told me the job was mine, if I wanted it. It took me all of .0005 of a nanosecond to accept it and say, “when can I start. How does tomorrow sound”.

They gave me a few days to find somewhere to live. I ended up in a lodging house run by a couple of middle-aged English migrants. There were a few other boarders, all young English guys straight out from old Blighty. These included ‘Chalkie’ White, Big Bill and Wee Jock.

 This was the same Wee Jock that had been on my table on the good ship SS Oranje with his wife. She had stayed with him for two days and then done a bunk with a bloke she met on board. It happens I guess!

A NECESSARY POLITICAL INTERRUPTION

To give my readers an idea of what the polical situation was in in SA in 1971, I unfortunately have to give you an overview of the situation there, mainly so you will understand what I am trying to convey in the rest of this narrative. This is only a thumbnail sketch and should be treated as such.

In SA there were two main groups of white settlers, the Afrikaaners who were of Dutch heritage and arrived at the Cape of Good Hope, four hundred plus years before. The other mob were the British, who arrived a few years later. Together, they formed about a fifth of the population of approximately 20,000,000.

Most of the rest of the population consists of tribal Africans, predominantly Zulus and Xhosas but with a lot of smaller tribes. Collectively, these were known as the Bantu, which I think approximates to the 'People'.

The Afrikaaners assumed political power in 1948 and proceeded to introduce Apartheid (Separate Development). This meant that the different tribes were confined to different Bantustans (Homelands) and needed passes to travel and work in the rest of SA. Bantus were needed to work in the north of the country as labourers in the mines and domestics, but were contracted and had to return to their homelands, in most cases.

In Cape Town and the Cape Province there was a mingling of the races and according to most accounts, the tribes had not traveled so far south at the time of white settlement. The original inhabitants were the bushmen.

The resulting mixture of races, combined with an influx of Malays and Indians has led to what used to be called 'The Coloureds'. Prior to the introduction of Apartheid they were allowed to vote in the Cape. Subsequently they were disenfranchised and had to move away from white areas into 'Townships' on the outskirts of the towns and cities.

As I stated before, this is only a very shallow interpretation and anyone wishing to know more, should read some of the excellent material available.


Back to being my usual facetious self.

I started work on the Monday and it took me a while to get used to the complexities of the public transport system. I worked in Paarden Island, an industrial Estate and had to catch a bus to work. In Cape Town there were three types of ‘Double Decker’ buses. One had a yellowish sign on the front signifying ‘Net Blankes’ i.e. ‘Whites Only’, another had a black and white sign ‘Net Nie Blankes’ i.e. ‘Non Whites Only’ and the third had a sort of illegible red sign that meant ‘Whites downstairs Non Whites upstairs’.

To be fair to the Capetonians, nobody took a lot of notice of the third category and although most abided by the rules. It seemed stupid to Whiteys to stand downstairs, when there were heaps of seats upstairs and vice versa for our coloured brethren.

The really ridiculous part was when we left the buses and trains. We would all be mingling together, me and a few tens of Whites and hundreds of Coloureds; (most Blankes traveled by car). When we came to cross the railway, at the crossing were two separate footbridges, one for the Blankes and one for the Nie Blankes, so we would separate, cross the railway and then re-mingle.

 The employees of South African Railways (SAR) strictly enforced this edict and any transgression was treated very seriously. I did it once and was warned never to do it again or I would feel the full weight of the state.

On the subject of SAR there were only two possible occupations open to the uneducated white Afrikaaners, one was the SAR and the other was the SAP, the South African Police. Both of them were only open to Afrikaans speaking whites and as most English speakers never bothered to learn Afrikaans, this inevitably led to the vast majority (i.e. 99%) of SAR and SAP employees being delightful, fun-loving Boer’s.

In Cape Town in 1971, the Cape Coloureds took great delight in calling me Keith Skelm or Keith the Thief and rolling around laughing. This took place at Lysta mainly to my face; I took this badinage with a stiff upper-lip rather than a stiff uppercut. Mainly because I was incapable of understanding Afrikaans.

It wasn’t until later that an Afrikaaner speaking friend (which was a bit of an oxymoron for an Englishman in the RSA in those days) explained to me the significance of these jibes; i.e. skelm is Afrikaans for thief or rogue.

  Another amusing little jape among the Afrikaaners was calling the English speakers ‘Soutykoks’, one foot in South Africa and the other in England while their cocks dangled in the ocean. Heh! Witty bastards those Boers.

Apart from apartheid, Cape Town was and still is an incredibly beautiful city. At the time I was there, it was a juncture for Poms (a pejorative, Australian term for the English, much the same as Limeys in the USA) such as myself travelling from England to Australia and young Aussies (Skips) doing the reverse.

 This was before boring air travel became popular and cheap and most people still traveled by ship. It took two weeks to get from Southampton to Cape Town and a further two weeks to get to Fremantle in WA.

This inevitably meant that there was an ever-changing transient population of Poms and Skips in their late teens and early twenties. This made for a very joyful, hedonistic experience with more than its fair share of parties, for departures, arrivals and any other excuse.

All this was helped along by the fact that there was no TV at that time, the radio was strictly censored and boring, as was the press. All this meant that the only place for enjoyment was the Pub.

My local was called the Century Hotel, which had a piano man to amuse the clientele. Another was the Elizabeth, which was a very popular meeting place for travelers and didn’t need any entertainment, as it was always packed to the rafters.

One quiet Thursday night at the Century, I was having a few Lion Lagers with Big Bill, Chalkie and Wee Jock, when a complete stranger tapped me on the shoulder and out of the blue, dared me to do a ‘streak’ with him. I told him to get lost, but he persisted and came up with a plan to walk thirty yards from the bar, strip off, run back to the bar and skull a bottle of Lion, the winner being the first to finish.

 My so-called friends egged me on, so I thought why not? I must admit that I cheated a little, by discarding some of my clothes before the start of the race, but in my defence, so did he! Anyway, I won the ‘race’ but didn’t get any recompense for doing so.

The next night being a Friday, the place was packed because it was a ‘Talent Night’ the first prize being a Magnum of Champagne. There were a few pathetic singers, stand up comics, jugglers and the like. The piano man decided to liven things up by announcing that there was a famous streaker in the audience who should show off his wares.

This time I was with, not only Bill, Chalkie and Jock but also Mick, Hoppy, Ken and a couple of others. They all got together and said I was a chicken-shit if I didn’t do it and offered me five Rand each, to strip off down to my boots and jog from the bar around the piano and back to the bar.

It was an offer that I couldn’t refuse, being half-tanked anyway. They formed a shield around me while I got my gear off. I waited until the next act had finished and then burst forth, skipping gaily through the tables around the grand piano and back to the bar where I hastily dressed.

 The acts were then brought forward and judged on the applause of the audience, my applause was deafening, so the piano man gave me the magnum.

I went back to the bar and collected some of the money from my mates, some had already been spent on Lion Lagers and the rest quickly went the same way. I then had to visit the toilet as my teeth were awash and when I returned, the Magnum had disappeared, as had Chalkie and a girl he had just met.

 He did return the empty bottle sometime early on Sunday, but never did thank me the swine. That was only the start of my streaking career, but I’ll give it a break for now.

To get back to Lysta Zips, it was a reasonably large factory, not humungously large, but it was four storeys high with a reception area, a receiving area for deliveries and an office on the ground floor. On the first floor were weaving machines and dyeing machines for the cloth parts of the zip.

The machines for stamping out the metallic (and forming the nylon) bits and making the final zips were on the second floor. The third floor had the main office and Soren’s (the managing director) office and also an office for old man Elvin-Jenco, the patriarch of the family. In the twenty months I worked there I don’t think I saw him once.

The old man was the main buyer and kept the costs of the metal to himself as well as his salary, Soren’s salary and a few other odds and sods like rent, this made accurate costing of zips a bit haphazard. Being an inventive sort of a soul, I got around this by using algebra so the bosses could put their own figures in for X, Y, and Z.

Soren was the Sales Manager as well as being the Managing Director and the first thing he told me was that he wanted an accurate cost of every order he received and he wanted it the same day. I told him that it was a big ask and I’d need at least four months to do it. He said “make it three’ and it eventually took me 12-15.

The first thing I had to do was win the trust of the two production managers, one in charge of the weaving and dyeing and the other looking after the metal part and final assembly. This was easy to say and a tad on the hard side to achieve.

Here were two middle-aged expatriate managers, used to having everything their own way and along comes a young git asking questions. They were not happy chappies, but when they realised they could feed me any load of bullpuckie and it kept the bosses happy, they were satisfied.

You have to remember that, believe it or not, there was an era in the not too distant past when there were no computers, unbelievable, but true. I had to come up with a system that calculated fixed costs such as overheads being staff salaries, depreciation, light, rent and all the other little doodads I could conjure up. Plus variable costs like materials, wages, down time and transportation and all the rest of those.

I ended up creating a manual system that covered two sheets of finely written A3 Paper. I could be asked to cost an order of two dozen size 5, nickel silver zips with an open end and a blooby puller on khaki coloured 1 inch wide heavy duty cotton, 6 feet long for use in manufacturing tent flaps.

 No bleeding problem Soren! just add in X x .003, Y x .0032 and Z x .0026 and add that to R2.74 and there’s your cost per zipper.

I realise that self praise is no recommendation, but I have to say that it was a thing of beauty, nobody else could understand it and if I had a lot of Lion Lagers the night before, I had a few difficulties myself. This little masterpiece took me about 15 months to construct. To this day I don’t know if Soren took a blind bit of notice of it and probably showed it to his competitors and then made up a price from the top of his head.

About the time I finished it, the old man brought in a ‘for real’ cost accountant, who became my immediate boss. He was a silly old sod, who didn’t know his bumhole from his elbow, but he did have one important attribute, he was a Mason.

 The Masons must have been very strong in SA or Denmark (where the Elvin-Jensens originated) He was as useless as the proverbial teats on a bull. I tried to explain my system but as it could have been the Iliad in the original Greek as far he was concerned, he wisely ignored it completely.

For the next six months he let me get on with the costing, while he studied mysterious tracts from his Masonic ‘bible’. When I worked in the ‘Herald & Weekly Times’ in Melbourne a few years later I heard them referred to as the ‘Goat Riders in the Sky’, work that one out for yourself, I can’t.

A couple of other things I remember about Lysta, one was the receptionist, a lovely young coloured girl who really took a shine to me. She always used to tell me that I smelled like a brewery, whenever I breathed over her in the morning. As I invariably did, exuding undying love, along with my unlovely breath..

She invited me to a barbecue (in SA this is known as a braifleisch, which is roughly translated as ‘burnt flesh’, a very poetic language Afrikaans) with her family and friends. Later she told me that her father was worried that they might get in trouble with the SAP, so regretfully took back the invitation. Life is full of such disappointments.

The other was a coloured friend of mine, he was a very light colour and depending on my suntan was often lighter than me. He told me that if he went to Jo’burg the SAP thought he was white and he could go to any place he wanted to. I asked him why he didn’t stay there, but he said that he was always worried up there and besides he preferred Cape Town for the social life and the coloured girls. (Read the above bit about politics)

The last time I saw him, all his hair had been shaved off. When I asked him why, he told me that he had been riding his bike pissed as the proverbial judge. He had fallen off his bike in front of a SAP and had been shaved and put in the slammer for a couple of days.

All in all I enjoyed my time at Lysta, my fellow workers were mainly friendly and I got on well with my co-workers, the managers including my ‘goat-riding’ boss. Soren was an easy-going type, who treated everybody as fairly as the politics allowed. I would have stayed there longer but they decided to move from their premises in Paarden Island to another industrial estate to the north west of the city.

 It would have been too hard to get there from where I lived, so I bade them a fond farewell and left for Australia a couple of weeks later.

Before this occurred however, I had a ball outside work. After staying in the boarding house for a couple of months, me, Chalkie, Big Bill and Wee Jock moved into a house in Camps Bay with a couple of likely lads called Mick and Hoppy. These two were inseparable; they had arrived together from London and were both offset printers. They were Cockneys and sharp as tacks a right pair of dodgy rascals.

They were a mad pair of soccer players and spent most weekends during the season playing for Camps Bay Soccer Club. I mention this as a lead up to my second (no third) streaking feat.

This involved a streak at the clubhouse one Sunday afternoon and included Hoppy, Debbie and me. Debbie was a ‘sister’ of Hoppy and Mick and came from the same part of London. They were fairly protective of her, but Debbie had a mind and body of her own and let them know it.

The three of us got stripped off at one end of the hall down to our boots and then took a leisurely jog through the tables to the men’s toilet at the other end. As Debbie was rather well endowed, all the guys in the hall were watching her progress ‘boobs akimbo’ and Hoppy was hung like a horse, so all the women had eyes only for him . I was really only there making up the numbers.


Most other weekends Wee Jock; Bill, Chalkie and I went down to Muizenberg, down the coast towards Cape Point. Jock’s cousin lived down there and had a home built catamaran. We used to load it on to his trailer and then set off for the bay about twenty minutes away. It was only big enough for three people so we had to take it in turns. Pete being the skipper was always at the helm and the other two spent their time hauling on sheets and cleats and throwing themselves from one side to the other.

We entered a few races but never did anything in the way of winning, although we did finish a few. One time it was a bit rough and there were four of us aboard instead of three, as we needed a bit of added weight I guess.

After a few minutes, Pete was yelling at us to stay with the boat when (not if) we capsized. I was thinking “Hell! I’ve only got a certificate for swimming a width of breast stroke at Marple Baths, and that was ten years ago” I’m not leaving this lovely catamaran. We didn’t actually sink and got back to shore.

We packed up and went back to Pete’s place and got stonkered on an oversized flagon of cheap red wine. This was not because we had just escaped death, but because we always did it on Sunday afternoons. The next Sunday we were back again, you can’t teach idiots.

Another Sunday (there seems to be something amiss with the Sabbath and me). Chalkie, Bill, Jock and yours truly decided to climb Table Mountain, it was a nice day, the birds were singing and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. We’d all been there more than a year and never set foot on the greatest mountain in the whole wide world. Most people go up on the cable car, take a few photos and come back the same way.

Not us, I can’t remember who’s idea it was, probably Chalkie he was the maddest mongrel amongst us. We set off and after about half an hour came across a terrified, bunch of coloured teenagers hurtling in the general direction of downwards.

We couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell us, so we carried on upwards. We turned a corner and came across a tribe of baboons led by a great big sucker.

 Chalkie grabbed a handy rock and stick and approached him threateningly. The big mongrel took one look at Chalkie, his backside turned redder and he ran off, along with the rest of his tribe. One for the Chalkie!

We carried on upwards, it was getting steeper and steeper and we were reduced to scrabbling on all fours, trying to find a way up. The cable car criss-crossing way above us, none of us had thought to read a book or a brochure on the hazards of climbing it.

The mist started descending, not to be disheartened we struggled ever upwards, after all this was Table Mountain not Everest. We eventually made it to the top and the cloud had really descended, the freezing cold rain was coming at us horizontally, trying to blow us over the edge.

Contrary to popular belief the top of Table Mountain is not flat; it is in fact a mass of crevasses, ravines and potholes. Not the sort of place you particularly want to be wandering around, when you can’t see your nose in front of your face. We eventually found a ledge below the rim that was out of the wind and snuggled together for warmth.

Snuggling together for warmth is not highly recommended for four heterosexual men, either. You can get a trifle tired of a cold hand grasping the only warm part of your anatomy i.e. your bollocks. Singing to keep your spirits up is also not the greatest of ideas. After several choruses of “Jesus wants me for a Sunbeam” the others were threatening to throw me over the edge.

To make matters worse, the cloud lifted occasionally to give us a tantalising glimpse of the lights of Cape Town, night having well and truly fallen by this time. We could almost smell the place where we should have been throwing back bottles of wine.

As we settled back, after throwing imprecations to the heavens and any other bloody thing, we saw in the medium distance the lights atop the cable car station.

Walking in Indian file, holding each other’s belts, with Jock in the lead followed by Bill, Chalkie and myself bringing up the rear. This was in case Jock, being the smallest fell down a ravine, Big Bill was the least likely to plunge after him and partly because I couldn’t see a thing, through my befogged glasses and not because I had suddenly become enamoured of Chalkie’s rear end. We wended our way thus, very slowly to the cable station.

We arrived without incident and knocked on the door of the station attendant, expecting a warm welcome and an even warmer cup of soup and a place to sleep on the floor. Instead, the door opened a crack and a suspicious voice asked something in Afrikaans. When we replied in English he said “What do you want then?” a reasonable sort of question in most circumstances, but just before midnight on a cold, wet night on the top of Table Mountain?

He was of course an employee of the SAR and consequently, not overly-endowed with the milk of human kindness. He told us we could sleep in the station itself, which was completely open to the wind, if not the rain and told us we had to depart, quick smart, on the first car in the morning.

We did think of arguing with him and telling him that, as we were enjoying ourselves so much, we’d wait until the tenth one, but wisely refrained from doing so. In the morning I rang Soren, to tell him I was stuck up Table Mountain and wouldn’t be coming in that day. I don’t think he ever believed me.

I suppose I might as well add in at this point, my final experience as a streaker. It occurred on a Sunday evening (when else?) at the place we used to drink wine on a Sunday (Clifton Hotel, seems to ring a bell, but I wouldn’t swear to that). Anyway, I was drinking a glass or two at the bar when a personable, young, Pommy Male approached me.

Being a sociable git at that stage of my life, I said Hi! How are you? He then said that he had heard on the grapevine that I was a renowned streaker around those parts. Upon hearing this, my ‘friends’, sensing a challenge and the possibility of a few free rounds were all ears. I asked him what he was proposing and he said “What about the two of us doing a double-decker streak.”

Intrigued by the possibilities of a first ever double-decker in SA. There having already been two other streakers earlier on in the evening, (it was becoming passe, that’s with an acute, but I don’t know how to do one). We then tossed a coin as to who should be on the bottom and who should be upper deck (so to speak).

I can’t remember if I won or lost the toss but I ended upstairs. We both stripped off surrounded by our ‘friends’ and then burst through into the assembled crowd of piss-artists. It only took me a mere matter of seconds to realise that the pub was a mock-up of an olde, English pub, complete with olde English beams.

 I managed to duck under the first two, but the third one on the way back, was a particularly low one and to avoid being ‘beamed’, I leaned too far forward and my bottom deck fell over, depositing me on a table of empty glasses.
I ended up stark bollock naked in the middle of a heap of broken glass, having lost my specs and with a fountain of blood (slight exaggeration) spurting from my wrist.

My friends got a bit worried about the blood and quickly grabbed my specs and got me clothed and out of the joint before the SAP turned up. That was the end of an illustrious streaking career that had begun so ignominiously and ended in a similar vein (if you’ll pardon the pun).

MY VISIT TO OTHER PARTS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

Just before Christmas 1972 we had a months break from work and Chalkie and I decided to see a bit more of Southern Africa. Chalkie had a co-worker called Steve who was driving back to his home in Rhodesia to sell his car; if you bought a car in Rhodesia, that was the only place you could legally sell it. Steve asked us to come along to share the expenses. We jumped at the chance and without a great deal of planning, as usual, set off up the East Coast of SA.

Steve and Chalkie shared the driving and as a non-driver, it was my job to change the tapes in the Ghetto Blaster and hold it up on the seat to keep them awake on long stretches.

On the first day, after driving through a small forest called Knysna, an interesting little stretch of road, we encountered a road hazard that is possibly unique to Africa. We were barreling along when Steve slammed the anchors on; he was very good at that and an excellent driver, as we were to find out the next day. On this particular day the reason for the braking was a dirty great pile of steaming elephant shit in the middle of the road. We never caught sight of it but it must been one humungous pachyderm.

We stayed overnight at Port Elizabeth, but I don’t remember much about it, in fact I don’t remember anything about it. The next day we set off for Durban and encountered another African driving hazard, this was a battered old truck, pulling up suddenly at a crossroad in the middle of nowhere to turn right. There was no other traffic in sight in any direction, but the driver obviously wanted to make absolutely sure.

He stopped about seventy yards in front of and we were doing about 80mph. Steve was driving, luckily, and slammed the anchors on, as was his wont, we went into a skid trying to get between the truck and a metal pole marking the crossroads. Chalkie was screaming “We’ll all be killed” in the passenger seat and I was frozen in the backseat with the Ghetto Blaster balancing on the back of the drivers seat, waiting for death.

 Steve was chicaning all over the road and managed to squeeze between the two, scraping some of the paintwork off the car he had looked after so carefully, to sell in Rhodesia.The truck with its African driver took off serenely without a backward glance, to wherever he was destined.

When we had recovered, we went back to check on and marvel at the skidmarks we’d left. On the way back to the car, Chalkie kicked the ‘metal’ pole, which bent over, as it was made of rubber. The air became full of expressions of rage from Steve, who was not only cursing the African race in general but South Africans in particular. This little incident went some way to explaining the white’s attitude to the natives.

We passed through East London which is possibly a very nice little City, but we didn’t do it justice and went through it rather quickly. Durban is a different sort of place though, it’s a very colourful place with a large Zulu population and as a British dominated place and a popular tourist centre, in my opinion it is second only to Cape Town. We stayed there for a couple of days, which was too short a time and enjoyed it.

We then traveled further north to Swaziland, my only real recollection of there, was stopping to take a photo of some rondavels (round huts) on a hillside, Steve told is it was a tribal village, ruled over by a local chief. Whatever it was, as soon as we stopped and Chalkie produced his camera, a whole mob of young women started running towards us, tearing their blouses open to reveal nubile young breasts.

Chalkie was getting a tad on the nervous side and took a lousy photo and Steve thought it might be a good idea to depart when a bunch of youths came running carrying spears and knobkerries. Who was I to argue, being ignorant of local customs, I thought it was a great opportunity to meet the locals. Steve was getting rather insistent, so I gave the girls all my loose change and a couple of Rand. This did not meet with the universal approval I had anticipated. Obviously inflation was starting to creep into Swaziland.

With Steve telling me I was a f*#@*g idiot and a soutykok, kaffir lover, we headed towards Mozambique. I didn’t take umbrage at his remarks, as he was partially correct on all three points and besides it was his car and everyone who has you by the short and curlies, is entitled to his own point of view.

We crossed the border without any problems and headed for Lorenzo Marques. I wanted to visit the renowned ‘red light’ district but was over-ruled by my 'clean living' companions, so we stayed a short way outside. I found Mozambique a delightful breath of fresh air after stuffy SA.

For instance, one place we stopped for lunch was a sort of truck stop, African style. The tables were long trestles made of bamboo with bamboo seats. Banana leaves to keep out the sun covered the whole area.

 Everybody sat together Blacks, Whites and Brindles sharing the same food and drinking bottles of the local brew. They were all talking a mixture of Portuguese, Swahili and English and who knows what else.

This was the same throughout Mozambique; we stayed at a place called Zafora on the beach. Rented a ‘rondavel’ and after hiring goggles, flippers, snorkels and spears we headed out to check out the coral reefs and marine life.

My swimming ability had not improved any in the last six months and having to discard my specs to wear goggles, limited my view of the spectacular reef to a sort of grey murk. I almost got swept away into the middle of the Indian Ocean, by a mild rip that was lurking there, just for me.

After my first attempt at emulating Jacques Cousteau, I decided that snorkeling was not really my barrow and stuck to the beach. While my compatriots were happily indulging in their watery pursuits, I was sucking on the local brew and watching the far more interesting locals indulging in their everyday pursuits.

At Zafora, this included unloading Arab Dhows of their cargoes of gourds filled with whatever exotica are imported in Arab gourds. And the local fishermen disgorging whatever exotic fish get entangled in fishermen’s nets. After a few days of this exotically interesting activity. We headed further north to Beira, which sounds like an exotic spy but isn’t.

From Beira we turned west to Rhodesia and it’s capital, Salisbury. This is where we parted company with Steve, I don’t think his family was particularly impressed with Chalkie and me.

 This was hardly surprising, as they had been resident in Rhodesia for a couple of generations and didn’t really empathise with a couple of longhaired ‘hippies’. I don’t know how they went after Ian Smith was given the heave-ho, after Harold Mac or Harold Wilson or whomsoever, deposed him with sanctions.
They also imposed Robert the Mug on Zimbabwe and changed all the names. But all of this came later and is irrelevant to this narrative.

At this time Rhodesia was a prosperous and relatively happy place with distinct colonial overtones, where every white family lived in a large bungalow and had at least three servants.

Nowadays not only those servants, but also the labourers on the land are unemployed. Actually this is not strictly true; the Mug gave the White’s farms to the labourers, who didn’t really know what to do with them so they sat around doing nothing.

 Some would say that this was also true of the old colonists. Anyway at the last count inflation was running at 7,000pa, but that was this morning, it could be 13,000% by now. There could perhaps, be something said for benevolent colonialism.

To get back to the past, we did go out with Steve to Lake MacIlwaine in the family boat, where the ‘Hanging Rocks’ and the fishing suitably impressed us, although we didn’t catch anything. Steve also spied some rhinos at the lake’s edge, so Chalkie went ashore to get a photograph.

He sped back rather rapidly, thinking he was being chased and over the years I’ve studied the photo carefully, but never been able to recognise the rhinos.  Cunning, big sonsa those rhino when it comes to camouflage, although admittedly it was a Kodak 125mm camera.

We left Steve to enjoy his Christmas with his family and headed for Victoria Falls. We were seriously considering going to Wankie National Park, not only to see the wildlife but with a name like that, how could you not visit it. We did however, not visit it that is, probably because the bus we were on was going to Victoria Falls, not Wankie.

When we got to the Falls we checked out the Victoria Falls Hotel, but it was a shade too expensive and even if we had tried to get a room there, they wouldn’t have let us in anyway. So we ended up at a camping ground close by. On the first night there, whom should we meet? But my old mate Davis from the good ship Oranje.

This called for a celebration, so after a re-enactment of that historical scene of the previous century. This was the one where I shook Davis’ hand at the edge of the Falls and paraphrased those immortal words, beloved of every English schoolboy “Mr. Livingstone/Davis, I presume”. Ah! Such a moment overwhelmed even our first view of the majesty of the Falls; there was always a chance of a second view but never such a re-enactment.

Chalkie and me decided to walk over the bridge between Rhodesia and Zambia (Welcome to Zambia, The Friendly Country) according to the sign. We just wanted to see the Falls from the Zambian side. We approached a border post a hundred yards from the sign and explained our plan to the guards. They responded in a really friendly manner by pointing their rifles at us and politely telling us to “f*@k off back to Rhodesia”. We took this ever so subtle hint, thanked them profusely and took our leave.

After this, we repaired to the Hotel for a few beers, Elephant Lager if my memory serves me correctly. They allowed us to drink at the Hotel provided we paid their exorbitant prices and stayed well hidden from their other guests. We had just missed the Christmas celebrations but were there for the New Year’s bash.

We all got smashed and shortly after midnight, I left Chalkie and Davis and went back to the campsite.  Meanwhile, the two mad buggers had found a shunting engine and managed to start it, with the intention of taking it across the bridge to Zambia, (I forgot to mention that there was a rail link between the two countries).

They started out of the siding and were heading in the general direction of the bridge, whooping and yelling Happy New Year. Luckily for them they came to a set of points and couldn’t move them, otherwise they would have been shot up by the Zambians or starved to death in a Zambian Gaol.

After that little episode and after everybody sobered up. We took our leave of Davis and headed for Bulawayo, another of those towns, which do not bring back any particular memories.
From there we caught a train back to Cape Town going through Botswana, I would have liked to get off to try to find Peachy from the SA Oranje, but decided against it, as it’s a large country and I had no idea where he was.

A few months after this, in June 1973 or thereabouts, it was time to depart SA and head for Australia. On my last day I was celebrating with a lot of friends and I was introduced to Paul Crease, a friend of a mutual friend, who was sailing on the same ship.

This is where I have to bid you farewell, until you read " A TOSSPOT IN AUSTRALASIA"

Keith Skellern
Kskel5@hotmail.com

Reviews and comments requested

Posted 01/22/2008