Sample

HOT METAL

It’s very hard to understand
Some things that happen in this land.
But do not mock the magic claimed
By native peoples you think are tamed.
They know far more than all your wit
Can ever hope to make of it.

         The old Series II Land-Rover bounced uncomfortably along the dusty laterite road, its transmission groaning with every yard of progress. Inside the sweltering cab, Peter Stafford clung to the steering wheel for dear life while John Hughes struggled to stay upright in the passenger seat.
“Bloody hell, Peter. Try to drive around the potholes, not through them for God’s sake.”
Peter grinned broadly at his companion before attempting to reply over the roar of the engine and the almost deafening rattle from the vehicle’s bodywork.
“Stop moaning about the state of the roads. This one is pretty good compared with many others in this godforsaken country. You people who only visit two or three times a year are absolutely wonderful. You all want it to be just like England. Well, I can assure you it’s not and if you had to complete eighteen-month tours of duty time after time, like most of the expatriates out here, you’d soon change your tune and be bloody grateful for small mercies. Life’s not all high salaries, servants, cheap food and booze, you know. We have important work to do. We must earn money for our companies and that’s hard work in this country, I can tell you.”
John tried to light up a smoke, but soon abandoned the attempt when his hand holding the lighted match crashed, out of control, into the cigarette breaking it off at the tipped end close to his lips.
“All right, Peter,” said John, holding his right hand up in an act of submission. “I know I’m just a moaning visitor, with no appreciation of the difficulties you professional expatriates have to deal with all day long. Now stop giving me a hard time for Christ’s sake and pull up over there so I can light my cigarette and have a pee.”
          Peter grinned at his companion again and brought the vehicle to a halt close to a clump of thorn bushes at the side of the road.
“There you are, you poor old bugger, go and water the parched land. Oh, and by the way, watch out for the snakes.”
          John got out of the vehicle and mouthed a rude word over his left shoulder before disappearing behind the thick undergrowth. A moment or two later his disembodied voice sang out from behind the bushes.
          “How long before we get to Ifun, Peter?”
          “Oh, I don’t know, maybe an hour, maybe two. It depends on the state of the road. There hasn’t been a lot of rain recently so we should be OK.”
          As John walked back to the Land-Rover buttoning the fly of his khaki slacks he said, “I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the countryside this weekend, especially Ifun with all the history and mystery that’s associated with the place. Believe it or not I’ve been to Nibana five times, staying for about a week on each occasion, but this is the first time I’ve ever been outside that smelly Federal Capital, Laguna, or your adopted home-town of Ndabi. I’m excited about our day out and very grateful to you for arranging this little excursion. Sorry about getting on your nerves, you being an experienced ‘old coaster’ and all that.”
          John offered Peter a cigarette and they both sat in the Land-Rover’s cab with the doors wide open hoping for a breeze to help cool them off. As Peter tossed the extinguished match on to the road and exhaled a huge cloud of smoke, he turned to speak to John.
          “You’ve known me long enough now to realise I’m only pulling your leg about not having ‘brown knees’. You should have seen me when I first came to this part of the world. It took me six months to settle down and get used to the way of life out here. You know how it is: we work hard and enjoy our leisure time. Trouble is, the lifestyle makes us just a little intolerant of the UK types who only visit once or twice a year. Worst of all are those people at home who have never travelled. They have no idea what it’s like to live and work in a place like this. I often feel like a complete stranger when I go back to the UK on leave.”
John nodded philosophically and the two men continued to discuss the pros and cons of living and working in Nibana; comparing it with what some people considered the advantages of being UK based and simply travelling out to the West African coast every once in a while. However, they were unable to come to any agreement on the subject because each man preferred his way of life and argued its benefits relentlessly.
          When they’d exhausted the subject and discarded their cigarette butts safely – bush fires were always a hazard – they closed the cab doors and continued their journey to Ifun.

* * *

          Peter Stafford had worked in the West African state of Nibana for over ten years and, at one time or another, had been stationed at most of the commercial centres within the country. He was an automotive engineer by training and his current position involved transport: heavy transport.
          The Nibana National Oil Distribution Company had sole rights for the distribution of petrol, diesel, kerosene and aviation spirit throughout the whole of Nibana. Peter Stafford’s job as the chief engineer of the Ndabi Central Workshops meant he worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk during the week and for one weekend in every three. Peter didn’t mind this demand on his time. He lived for his work and enjoyed every minute of it. The heavy workload also helped to take his mind off some of the more personal problems that had dogged him for some time.
          For the last three years, Peter’s wife, Anne, had spent most of her time in the UK nursing their only daughter, Alice. Before her falling ill, the whole family had thoroughly enjoyed the ‘colonial’ lifestyle in Nibana and naturally the prolonged absence of his family had caused Peter great sadness.
          Young Alice suffered from a condition known as Chronic Iron Deficiency Anaemia, one of the causes of which is an inability of the body to absorb and retain iron from normal food. The condition had slowly crept up on her until she became so weak she could no longer endure the extreme tropical conditions in Nibana for more than a few weeks at a time.
          The local doctors had been baffled by her illness and prescribed many different remedies, all of them useless. Not until the family returned to the UK on home leave did a specialist discover the problem. He immediately administered the appropriate drugs, placed Alice on a special diet and advised her parents it would be fatal for her to return to the tropics for long periods.
          After several weeks of supervised treatment the condition stabilised and the family were able to breathe a sigh of relief, safe in the knowledge that Alice would survive provided the treatment continued and she remained in the UK.
          Their daughter’s illness had been a savage blow to Peter and Anne. Both of them loved Africa and the economic freedom Peter’s salary provided. Because Nibana could be a ‘difficult’ assignment, expatriates generally earned twice as much as those people in similar positions in the UK.
          After their first tour of duty as a newly married couple, they had agreed to continue working in Nibana for at least fifteen years. This, they calculated, would enable them to set aside enough money to buy the farm in the UK where Anne’s parents had been tenants for the last thirty years. When Alice appeared on the scene three years later, she served to strengthen Peter’s resolve to earn enough money to buy the farm.
When the couple realised the seriousness of their daughter’s illness they indulged in much heart-searching discussion and finally agreed that Anne should stay at home in the UK to look after the child, while Peter continued with his work in Nibana. They both knew he would only be able to return home for three months’ leave every eighteen months; it had been a tough decision, but they faced it with the usual Stafford family stoicism.
          Separated from his loved ones for long periods, Peter threw himself into his work. What little spare time he did have, Peter devoted to visiting the Ndabi Club. It could be said that his hobbies were, primarily, his work, with drinking and socialising at the Ndabi Club coming a close second. Peter always exercised care, never letting the drink – no spirits, only local beer – interfere with his work, and certainly his employer had no worries on that score.
          Occasionally, Peter could be seen playing golf on the club’s magnificent eighteen-hole course. He played because he reckoned the sweat, which literally poured out of him all the way from the first to the eighteenth hole, purged his body and could only be good for him. His dedication to the game could be described as shallow and his skill questionable, but he persevered if only to sweat out the toxins that tended to build up in his system due to the poor quality of the local beer.
          At the beginning of each tour of duty the company demanded, and received, eighteen months of total dedication to duty from Peter, except when his tour included Christmas. Then, and only then, he would demand, and receive, two weeks off so his wife and daughter could visit him on special short-term visas. The doctors in the UK were not happy at the prospect of Alice travelling or having to endure the climate of Nibana, even for two weeks, but they realised the importance of the family being together as often as possible.
          Thus far, Peter’s wife and child had spent two Christmases in Nibana since the onset of Alice’s illness. Peter, on the other hand, had spent only one at home in the small village near Shrewsbury where his wife had been born and brought up among the sturdy farming community there.
          Peter Stafford could be summed up as a dedicated, loyal, hard-working man; young at heart despite his forty years; totally devoted to his wife and daughter, but with a weakness for beer that he quaffed in huge quantities when off duty.
          Peter’s job entailed many responsibilities. Not the least of which involved the maintenance and repair of over two hundred heavy-duty, six-wheeled prime movers and almost twice that number of six-thousand-gallon tanker-trailers. To keep this huge fleet on the somewhat treacherous and often washed out Nibanan roads, Peter controlled a staff of almost one hundred indigenous workmen, ranging from skilled fitters to ordinary labourers. The men in the workshop loved Peter and regarded him as their father. Not so the other Nibanan members of staff who worked in the sales and accounts offices. They thought him a tyrant simply because he expected the men under his control to work as tirelessly as he did every day.
          Generally speaking the workshop staff lived up to Peter’s expectations, and in return he looked after them as though they were his very own children. In his unsophisticated, clumsy way, he loved his men dearly and would create mayhem with the accounts clerks when they made a hash of the overtime payments or generally messed up the men’s salaries, as they usually did at regular intervals.
          Peter, always even-handed of course, didn’t confine his wrath to the accounts staff alone. Very often he fought the management vigorously to get the best welfare arrangements for his workshop boys and their families. These included free hospital treatment and free medicine for them all, an important benefit in a country with no National Health Service and very few doctors.
          He loved his men all right, but he would rarely display any outward sign of friendship or affection. Such a display could be mistaken for weakness, both by the Nibanans themselves and by his small circle of European friends, and that would never do. Peter liked to give the impression he was a very cold, hard man. It suited him to do so and made people think twice before involving him in their problems. He had always considered self-help to be the best kind of help anyone could receive.
          In some ways Peter was a hard man, but always very fair with his people and they appreciated his forthright nature. They fully realised that he taught them something new every day. Not only in matters of engineering and commerce, but of compassion for their fellow human beings and lessons in magnanimity, something he demonstrated every day in his position as the master of the workshop. He understood his men and they understood him, and the workshop fairly hummed with happy, contented activity.
          That Peter Stafford was the master of the workshop had never been in dispute. His men always did their best to see that the harmony he created and upheld remained unbroken. For despite his easy disposition towards them, Peter wouldn’t tolerate laziness, poor workmanship or thieving. Above all things, he hated thieving. The staff had learned long ago to avoid upsetting the chief engineer at all costs.
          On the rare occasions when Peter did lose his temper, the workshop boys would either hide in the staff shower room at the far end of the compound or dive into one of the many deep inspection pits; remaining out of sight until things had settled and tempers cooled. Peter’s sixteen-stone frame and six-foot stature were not to be sneered at, especially when on the warpath over stolen spare parts.
       Inevitably only the ‘attractive’, easy to sell parts tended to go missing from the stores. Despite the reasonable wages and the excellent welfare facilities, occasionally one or two of the men would submit to the temptation because of some family crisis that required cash as an immediate solution. Peter managed to keep the problem under control in his usual magnanimous way by lending money from his own pocket to those men with financial problems, though he would never admit to it of course. The men always repaid the debt, sometimes by only a few shillings each month. They never reneged because they knew he would never help them again if they did. 
Apart from the occasional, temporary lapses in harmony between Peter and his staff, the workshop operated efficiently and the company prospered. This placed the chief engineer and the workshop staff in a very strong position with the directors of the company. Consequently, and much to the disgust of the office staff, the workshop boys always received the largest share of the annual bonus.
Half the directors of the Nibana National Oil Distribution Company were defunct Nibanan politicians. Many had been forced out of office by the recent military coup that had somewhat curtailed their fun and games with the contents of the state treasury. After the coup the army had insisted, somewhat menacingly, that the politicians repay, by means of several very large instalments, all the money they’d stolen. It therefore grieved these directors to pay high bonuses to Peter’s men since it tended to reduce the level of dividends to which they were entitled.
The remaining directors were Nibanan businessmen who, during the brief time the civilian government had been in power, had indulged in corruption and nepotism to such a degree that almost everyone employed in the sales and accounts office was related to an ex-politician. The board of directors had tried to impose members of their extended families on Peter’s workshop, but he would have none of it and they disliked him for his forthright stance on the matter. However, since their main pre-occupation involved sucking up to the ex-politicians in the hope civilian rule would one day return to Nibana, the directors tended to leave the chief engineer in peace and this allowed him to get on with his work without too much interference.
Peter rarely worried himself about the activities of the directors. He had long since learned that the country ran on a feudal system of patronage, nepotism and tribalism. Not forgetting, of course, the awesome power that emanated from the barrel of an AK-47 assault rifle.

* * *

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