Memory Project: W Martin Contractor

What prompted my father to move to Southern Rhodesia in 1956 was the news that good money was to be made from carting gravel for the construction of the country’s expanding road network. He went ahead on his own and my mother followed a few months later with us children. He probably chose Gwelo for its central geographical position.

He worked for about a year before acquiring a 5-ton Bedford tip truck and going into the transport business. He drove the truck and, being a mechanic, did his own maintenance and repairs. He called himself W Martin Contractor and my mother kept the books. I still have her Cash Book, Ledger, Journal and Analysis, and it appears that the business lasted from April 1957 to October 1959. In those two and a half years he was away from home much of the time, spending a week to two weeks in the bush before coming back for a weekend.

He must have done quite well at first, because he bought a second truck and employed a native driver. However, he had joined the gold rush a little late and by 1959 most of the roads had been built. When the work dried up he sold his trucks and took a job at Afrox before moving to the CMED, where he worked on Gwelo Municipality’s trucks and earth moving equipment. Then he tried going it alone once more.

This enterprise involved buying second hand cars, doing them up and selling them at a suitable profit. I can remember one type of car that he overhauled and refurbished, there having been three of them. It was the Citroen 11 CV, a stylish and sporty looking car with a long bonnet, headlamps on stalks, running boards and a boot that was moulded to fit over the spare wheel. The bonnet was hinged down the middle and opened like a pair of wings, and the gear lever protruded from the dash and was moved in and out to change gear.

I sometimes helped him to bleed the brakes and clutch by getting behind the wheel and pumping the pedal until he called out from under the vehicle to hold it down while he released the trapped air.

This business did not flourish, and by the end of 1962 the future for whites in Rhodesia was looking increasingly uncertain. In 1963 my father packed his suitcase and boarded a train back to South Africa in search of work. He first went to East London and stayed with ex-Rhodesian friends, Ivan and Madge Kernick. Unable to find a decent job he served a short stint as a battery salesman and then headed for Cape Town.

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Beyond Redemption

The war in Ukraine has confirmed my belief that as members of the human race we will never be able to suppress our brutish tendencies and that civilization is merely a veneer that hides our true nature.

 

About a year ago I wrote a 30-page story entitled Vermin Control, in which The Creative Force decides to exterminate all of humanity by making them smaller and smaller until they are shrunk out of existence. Henry, the protagonist, meets the Creative Force, which reveals itself to him in the guise of Gudd and Sutton. He pleads with them to stop the process but fails to dissuade them.

In this extract they give their reasons for deciding to wipe our verminous species off the face of the earth.

“Instead of learning how to resolve conflict through peaceful means, humans concentrated on using science and technology to invent increasingly lethal military hardware. When the Second World War broke out it became clear to Gudd and I that the human brain was now hard wired to choose force above negotiation and compromise when in dispute with those perceived as the enemy. When you used Science to invent and produce the Atom bomb as the ultimate weapon of mass destruction we were forced to acknowledge that the species was set on a course leading to self-annihilation.”

“But after the horrors of the two wars we did try to reform,” Henry said without conviction. “Surely the establishment of the United Nations Organisation was a step in the right direction?”

“You know how ineffectual that enterprise has been. Since its establishment that organisation has been helpless in preventing the Cold War, the Arms Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well as a long list of other deadly conflicts around the world that includes several genocides.”

“I think that’s enough about their predisposition to pick a quarrel and resort to violence. Cut to 1980.”

“Right. I know you can’t wait to hit him with 2020, Gudd.” Sutton swirled the ice in his glass and took another drink. “By 1980 the nations of the world were as far from being united as when the UN got going after the Second World War. Not only that; we were dismayed to see that utopian socialist ideas were being abandoned as a ruthless form of Capitalism took hold in the West and was spreading fast. It was clear to us that the Communist countries would soon succumb to the materialism and selfish individualism of the Western economic system. And all the while you were making great strides in Science towards the development of ever more lethal ways of killing one another.  We could not but conclude that as a species you were well on the way to a final conflagration terminating in your own demise. That’s why we decided to pull the plug and leave you to it.”

“I can’t honestly disagree with you and put up a defence. But what caused you to change your minds when you revisited us 40 years later? Why can’t you leave us alone to die out as a failed evolutionary experiment?”

Henry was looking at Gudd, who appeared more than willing to put this representative of Homo sapiens in the picture.

“When we left in 1980 it was with a sense of disappointment and betrayal that felt something like humiliation. On our return we were shocked at the degradation that has taken place over four decades. Disappointment turned to loathing and then rage.”

“Rage? I thought you said you had given up on us? Were you secretly hoping we might have been mending our ways?”

“Not at all. We knew you were incapable of intellectual and moral improvement, and even though you were further down the road of mental and spiritual decline, we weren’t all that surprised. What shocked us was what you were doing to the planet. We had hoped to find that war and disease had already begun to reduce your numbers. Instead, the population had proliferated from four and a half billion to nearly eight billion, and that was in spite of the almost certain probability the new additions would be born into miserable squalor. It was as if you had never heard of birth control. You had chosen to disregard the increasing burden being placed on a finite planet already struggling to sustain your insatiable needs. You continued to grow out of control like a metastasizing cancer.”

“A metastasizing cancer?” said Henry. “That’s an appropriate metaphor. I suppose what you are saying is that a cancer will continue to grow until it has killed its host?”

“That is how we see it, Henry. To save the host we are going to have to zap the cancer.”

The full story, which is set in Pearly Beach, is available as a Word document for free on request. Email blindoldtoppie at gmail. 

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.

Down and Out

 

Half a century ago, at the age of 21, I travelled around the UK and Europe for a year. Because I arrived without any money, I had to take temporary menial jobs to finance my stay. I worked on building sites as a labourer, was a window cleaner for a while, and even spent time as a lavatory attendant in Amsterdam in order to pay my way from one place to another. At times I was obliged to live rough, like sleeping on railway benches or in cheap hostels frequented by individuals who were down on their luck.

About a year after returning to South Africa, a fellow traveller sent me a book with this inscription in it: ‘Hello there. I wonder, doesn’t this strike a familiar note?’ The book was Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell and it did indeed resonate with memories of roughing it in Britain and on the Continent.

It is now fifty years later. A week ago I was sitting in my car outside Blue Bottle Liquors, when a man approached me. He looked exhausted and dehydrated, as if he had been wandering in the desert for a week without a hat. He said he wanted to buy a rooidoppie but was R5 short. Could I help?

As I handed over the coin, I asked him what a rooidoppie was. He said it was a plastic bottle of wine with a red screw top. When he emerged from the bottle store with his purchase I watched him make his way down the street to a narrow alley and he disappeared from sight.

It was then that I remembered the Orwell book and its depiction of Salvation Army refuges, squalid doss houses and grimy city streets. I tried to imagine the kind of life endured by the man I had just helped to buy a bottle of booze. What condition would I be in, I wondered, if I had fallen on hard times and was homeless? I concluded that by now I would most certainly be feeding the worms.

To view my longer work as an author, you can find me on Smashwords here.