A Short Walk in the African Bush

[gamba]

There were four of us & the year was probably about 1943, two corporals & two 'ordinary people.' We had some leave to take so decided to leave our RAF camp in the Rhodesian bush & go on safari. We bought an old & very large Chevrolet similar to ones seen on newsreels in the possession of people such as John Dillinger & Al Capone. Equipped with fishing rods, a rifle & a paraffin lamp we set off to cross the country from one side to the other. After about 40 miles we were surprised to find a car wheel overtaking us. We stopped, someone got out & sure enough we had only three wheels ! Luckily we were on the outskirts of Salisbury & were able to replace the missing wheel nuts & continue. Several hours later it was apparent the engine was overheating - a leaking radiator. Again, luckily someone had chewing gum which provided a temporary repair. However we were very short of water for drinking & certainly not suffecient for refilling the radiator. This resulted in one of our number relinquishing his drinking mug so that we could all make a contribution of urine to the radiator. We continued in a somewhat smelly car for several hours until it became apparent we should tip our spare can of petrol into the tank. No spare can ! Someone had left it behind. It was getting dark & we were without food, water & petrol somewhere in the African bush.
We, my friend & I, had naturally left the organising to those with stripes on their arms - there was a lesson to be learned here !

Ultimately, one of us thought he could smell wood smoke, so two set off in search, armed with sticks against snakes & leopards. They returned in about half an hour with the news that there was a white man with a large fire & food & drink & with a group of natives nearby. We all made our way & were warmly greeted, made welcome & invited to share his food & drink. His most important question to us all was " Are any of you from Scotland " Alas, it was in the negative all round. I could see he was disappointed so volunteered, " My mother came from Scotland" " Where" said he. " Ayrshire " said I. " Where in Ayrshire "
" Dalmellington " was my answer. " Where in Dalmellington ? " I said, " the house up the hill next to the church . " What was the family name ? " said he. " Gillespie " said I. " So, your mother would be Kathy Gillespie " said he. I was flabbergasted, " How could you have known my mother ? " - " We played together as children, in fact, I was Best Man at your parents wedding" said he.

So there you are then, get lost in the African bush, in the middle of the night, miles from anywhere & there's no knowing who you may meet up with !!

[PatrickOD]

Great story, gamba. Trust the Scots - though your man almost sounds Irish. My father was in the RAF in 1943 - but he never told me any stories, and I didn't get to know him well enough to ask him.

[amateur51]

An excellent story, very nicely told gamba! I was in the palm of your hand - many thanks

[amateur51]

An excellent story, very nicely told gamba! I was in the palm of your hand - many thanks

[salymap]

Morning Gamba, another wonderful story from you! I hope they are all in print somewhere, if not they should be.

Regards, salymap

[gamba]

Hello salymap, kind of you to say so. I'm only offloading these incidents because of my age ( 88, almost 89 !). I suppose 'rambling on' is something that comes with old age, although I don't feel old.
My time in Africa was about 2 1/2 years. I was lucky. After Hawkinge & the Spitfires I volunteered to go abroad, no one knew where they were going. My destination was switched at the last moment & instead of Burma, I ended up in S. Rhodesia, a happier place then than it is now, having changed it's name to Zimbabwe.

As well as maintaining aircraft, in my spare time I learned to fly ( unofficially ), explored the bush on an old motorbike, the first BSA to have chain drive - the previous model had a belt ! Became interested in snakes, their numbers & species in different areas of the country, enough for the reptile house at the London Zoo on my return to make use of my notes & offer me two reticulated pythons as a ' thank you.' However, living at home, my mother had other views on the matter.

That's all for now - best wishes, gamba

[Mahlerei]

A related story of remarkable coincidence. My grandfather was a doctor in the old Bechuanaland Protectorate from about 1929 to 1957 and one of his many dUties was to deliver babies in surrounding villages. It was not unknown for him to go even fUrther afield, as far as a place called Plumtree, just inside the border with Rhodesia. around 1978, my parents were living in Johannesburg and were looking for a gardener. One of the candidates was a young man whose first name was the same as my surname. Curious, my father asked him why that was. 'It's the name of the doctor who delivered me,' he replied. Needless to say he was hired :)

[umslopogaas]

I enjoyed that reminiscence, it reminded me of my own wandering past. Back in the 1980s I was employed as a tropical pest and disease control consultant and was always getting on a plane to somewhere obscure. I never got to Zimbabwe, but I did have interesting visits to Uganda and Eritrea. I've been writing it all down before it slips entirely from my memory, I'll save Eritrea for another time, but here's Uganda. I should say that this is copied from the middle of a much longer screed, leading up to it is my previous history of overseas work, which took me to the employers who sent me to Uganda, then it finishes in the hotel in Kampala prior to my return to the UK and the start of a much more ambitious project on locust control. But this bit is about cocoa problems in Uganda ...

"...The FAO [United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, who paid for this visit] programme in Uganda was led by a very tough German called ******* (given what follows, we’d better keep him anonymous), who lived in a small green tent on an island in Lake Victoria. I thought this a little odd, until it was revealed to me by a visiting British economist who had an ear for the gossip that this was so he could be with his Ugandan girlfriend. He invited me round to dinner one evening (the official residence, not the tent) and I feared the atmosphere might be a bit tense, especially as the wine flowed, but all went well, his German missus didnt seem particularly concerned: maybe she’d made arrangements of her own.

I was parked in a very drab hotel and Kampala wasnt a vibrant city that enticed the visitor out for a fine and enjoyable experience. I distinctly recall the large rubbish skip in the waste lot opposite the hotel, it was well frequented by Marabou storks. They are the most revolting animals, great flapping carrion eaters like slow-flying flamingoes, but with huge under-jaw pouches that can scoop up any organic filth from the carrion fields of Africa, and usually did. I dont know what went into that skip and I dont want to, but the storks did. It was a popular meeting place. If you were a stork.

The only saving graces of that hotel were, firstly, it had water, which was useful, because most of the city didn’t, and secondly, it did dish up meals, no-one would say they were great but at least there was food, and thirdly there was an engaging German guest to engage in a chat. We sat over the very short beer supply every evening and talked about … well, I remember that we talked a lot about cars. He had a Mercedes (unsurprisingly), but I had a Citroen (difficult to explain since I cant speak French, though not so perplexing if you knew what Rover were producing at that time. Actually, thirty years on, I seem to see just as many old Rovers as old Citroens on the roads around here, so maybe Rover weren’t so bad after all. But at the time, they had a very bad reputation).

The local liquor was called waraji, as far as I recall, it was basically vodka, lord knows from what it was distilled. Perhaps fortunately for my liver, it was also in short supply. We sat at the hotel’s bar and when the beer ran out, as it usually did, we cajoled another glass of waraji out of the barman. Oh its hell in the tropics, Carruthers, the heat the flies the natives but at least you can get a drink.

Sometimes.

Eventually ******* organised a land cruiser and off we went to the other side of Uganda, stopping on the way at Bundibugyo, the last hotel in Uganda: I’ve got a photo, if you like travelling and have photos of all the great hotels you’ve stayed in, I bet you cant find a more welcoming hovel than the Bundibugyo Motel. Yes, I can prove it photographically, the sign is both welcoming and rather worrying. I wasn’t attacked by bedbugs, but I think the driver was. I remember, again, the fantastic hygiene arrangements. Needing a wash, I demanded facilities. This was much better than Eritrea, I got hot water. The proprietress heated some water over an open fire and proudly presented it in an enamelled bowl. I found a towel and some soap, then carried it all carefully out into the back yard among the chickens. Strip off again, hang clothes in tree, chuck a discreet rock at chickens that are rather too interested in your soap. Do the usual ablutions and stroll back somewhat cleaner in time for dinner, which I seem to recall was very good. Food usually is, if you’ve waited long enough for it.

We carried on, but unfortunately at one crucial point the driver took a wrong turn. This is quite difficult to do in Uganda, because there aren’t many roads, but he managed it. So instead of arriving at Interimbundibugoffhowso … where-ever, in time for dinner, we carried on as the darkness deepened and the road got worse. Eventually it became clear that neither ******* nor the driver had the faintest idea where we were. A hut with a tilly lamp appeared at the roadside. Right said ******* to the driver, get out and ask for directions. Oh sir, I cant do that, he might kill me. The look he got from ******* suggested he was much more likely to be killed if he stayed in the car than if he got out of it, so he got out and hammered on the door. No-one killed him, we got directions and carried on and then ...

... we arrived at a mile long uphill slope, the ‘road’ was a track of two wheel ruts churned to slime and a ribbon of slush in the middle. We’ll never get up that, I thought. But the driver didnt blink. He got out, engaged four wheel drive on all wheels (this was in the days when you had to do that at the wheel hubs, they hadnt invented the controls that allowed you to engage it from inside the cab), got back in, engaged first gear in lowest ratio, took his foot off the accelerator and let in the clutch. If you do that on a vintage diesel land cruiser, it doesnt stall, it just creeps forward at about two miles per hour. And thus, without slipping, we climbed the hill. Easy really. If you know your machine …

… I remember thinking, I am a fan of British engineering and I think the Land Rover is iconic and all that and I hate having to submit to transport in this Japanese rubbish, but, hey, maybe it isnt such rubbish after all, maybe the Brits are stuck in a rut and the Japs are finding new ways. And in a decade, the Japanese destroyed the British motor industry and Rover went belly up. Its a cruel world. But I drive a Citroen. But I suspect most of the components were made in (Japan?) no, Korea ...

...we eventually pulled up at the chosen destination in time for breakfast and certainly needed it, since we’d missed dinner.

At last we found a patch of totally neglected cocoa. It was healthier than any cocoa I’ve seen before or since. I collected about three mirids, which would have been a pest if there had been about a hundred times more of them, and found I’d forgotten to bring anything to kill them. Back in my grotty hotel room in Kampala I was idly amusing myself in the evening by chasing them round with an insect pin and trying to skewer them, when the BBC World Service on my short-wave trannie suddenly announced that a swarm of locusts twenty miles square had landed in Algeria. I had been thinking that FAO had forked out three thousand quid for my services in Uganda and all they were going to get for it was three mirids, which didnt really seem like much of a pest problem. But twenty square miles of locusts, that sounded more like it. I started to think … "

There are forty four pages of this, so far, so beware, at the slightest sign of approval I will post the lot.

[Stillhomewardbound]

Marvellous story, Gamba.

This is a trait I always indulge in myself. Similarly perhaps, It is the Irish in me. Because the disapora is so wide you can be so far away, and yet just feet away from a local connection, as your story proves.

Whenever, I hear an Irish voice I will invariably inquire, 'where are you from?'. Almost always they'll say 'Ireland'.

To which I'll reinterrrogate ... 'I know that. I said where are you FROM?'

It's always worth asking the question because so often the answer throws up a connection.

[PatrickOD]

It's always worth asking the question because so often the answer throws up a connection.

You are not going to believe this, Shb, but it's as true as God!

On Sunday last I was in Finchley - I believe you know the place - and I went into a shop. The shopkeeper refused to accept a Northern Ireland banknote. I was discussing his problem when the next customer butted in on my behalf and advanced the old arguments about legal tender, sterling and part of the UK in a good English accent. To no avail.

Shortly after that my advocate followed me out and asked what part of Northern Ireland I was from. I told him and he said his late grandfather came from there. I asked what his grandfather's name was and he said Cheshire. I said I once knew Cheshires when I was a small boy, but I heard they had gone to England many years ago. I mentioned the street where I had lived at the time, and to both our amazements it was the same street that his grandfather had come from. It turned out that his grandfather was the same older boy that I knew as a five year old, and who used to let me watch him do his carpentry in his shed in the backyard.

[Stillhomewardbound]

Ah, Finchley, we'd only been in the place a few months when I was coming out of the post office with my Dad and this gentleman hailed my father and suddenly they were having a big hug and laughing. Now he was a very talented television designer originally from Belfast called Louis Logan. It turned out he had just bought an house in the area too. Indeed, the very next street.

It's always that lovely moment in a conversation ... 'You're a Mulligan, are you. Would you be anything to the Mulligans in Belturbet?' 'I would indeed!' 'The house on the hill?' 'The very same!!'

Or alternatively at this time, we recall the two gents on neighbouring stools chatting at the bar and it transpires that not only were they born in the same hospital, christened by the same priest, went to the same schools, but they also grew up in the same street.

'Bejaysus! What an amazing conicidence!!', they say to each other, meanwhile one of the other drinkers says to the Landlord, 'I see the Murphy twins are p****d again.!

I thank you!

SHB

ps. You should have seen my high dudgeon at a Co-op where they refused to accept a pound coin as being too grubby

[handsomefortune]

umslopogaas and gamba, thanks, both accounts so vivid.