Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 17
Note: Quite a bit of what is written in these sections I’ve written in earlier blogs; but where possible I’ve tried to include new data or written it from a different angle. As I’ve been writing these blogs for over three years, I’m sure that many of you will not have read my earlier blogs. You might like to look at some of them if a section interests you.
Part 2
1956–1966
The transition from the “wild west” town of Walvis Bay surrounded by the Namib Desert on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean on the other, to the relative peace and calm of my birthplace – Weybridge in Surrey, England – was quite dramatic. Life was cheap in Walvis Bay, a £50 fine for murder was the going rate. Fights among the fishermen were nightly events. The fishermen also delighted in beating up seamen visiting the bars in the town. I was grateful to be playing rugby for the town on the same side as these monstrously big and strong men who hauled seine nets full of pilchards for a living. Our team was feared throughout the country, and I was probably the only “Englishman” who ever played for them.
My grandmother, descended from Scottish aristocracy, still lived in Weybridge although the family home, Hall Place, had been sold many years before and was now surrounded by a clutch of smaller houses on the six-acre estate. The fifteen-room mansion was rather like a chicken in the midst of its chicks. My grandmother (fondly known as Gaga) found a room for me in the residential hotel where she now lived. She kindly took care of me financially until I found a job. Britain was beginning to enjoy some post-war economic expansion, and this was accompanied by the population explosion in the UK known as the Baby Boomer Generation.
My first priority was to join a good rugby club and I signed on for Richmond located down the road from Twickenham, the acknowledged number one stadium for the sport worldwide. I mentioned to some of the players that I was looking for work and one of the First team forwards who also played for England asked if I minded hard manual labor and getting my hands dirty. After the rough and tumble of Namibia, I was game for anything. It turned out he was a director of the huge construction company, Cementation, which specialized in pile driving. This involved drilling deep holes into soft soil or clay, reaching bedrock and sinking concrete piles onto the rock creating a firm foundation for a building. Much of London is built on clay and Cementation based its headquarters in the city. I was told that I might have to work on a contract on the Scottish islands of the Hebrides at some stage.
It was indeed tough and dirty work. My job was to assist on the “pump.” This was a massive round steel object, hollow in the middle with a flap at the bottom. It was dropped over and over into a hole, collecting the clay or soil inside it. Every few feet a steel casing which fitted over the pump had to be knocked down into the hole, so that eventually concrete would be poured into it to form one of many piles that connected the building to the firmness of bedrock.
When a new section of casing was to be knocked into the hole, a large steel bar was slotted into holes on either side of the pump, protruding out on both sides of the pump so that when it dropped down again the steel bar would hit the top of the casing knocking it into the hole. My job was to hold the steel bar at one end to stop it slipping out of the slot in the pump. It was primitive but effective.
On my first day on the job, the foreman called me aside and pointed to an older guy working nearby. “Notice anything about him?” the foreman asked. I looked closely and saw that he was missing a hand. The foreman didn’t need to explain any further. He nodded and simply said “Better keep your attention on the job then.” Holding the steel bar in place wasn’t easy but I managed it quite well, probably out of the sheer terror of losing a hand.
Cementation had the sensible idea of paying a bonus for any piles sunk in excess of the weekly quota. As a result, the men worked like demons and were well paid. After about four months of toiling away in the middle of winter in the mud and snow, I did hurt my hand. Fortunately, it was only a sprain from trying to hold the steel bar from slipping out of the pump. I was told that when I came back, they would send me to the Hebrides where I could make a packet of money. Faced with giving up my rugby and also awaiting the arrival of my pal from Namibia, Alan Louw, I decided to stay in London and look for another job.
Talking about going from the sublime to the ridiculous! Pile driving may have been cold, wet and muddy but it did at least keep me fit. Because my hand was still troubling me, I looked for something less arduous and secured a position as a night watchman. This was possibly the most inactive job available. Once or twice a night I would do the rounds, initially of the Hector Powe department store in Bond Street, then in between I would sleep in one of the change rooms. This was slightly unnerving as I would wake up to see a couple of naked female dummies (as they were known in Britain) staring at me accusingly. How could I possibly invade the female change rooms?
I was then sent to the British European Airways (BEA) maintenance hangar at Heathrow airport. BEA was the forerunner of British Airways (BA). It was a vast, austere building with aircraft in all stages of repair. I found a couch in an upstairs office in between rounds and continued my somnambulant career in between clocking in at various clocking points every few hours. An artist with a growing reputation and the Honourable Something or Other, whose only other job was fundraising for charities, were strange companions for this incredibly boring occupation.
Fed up with twiddling my thumbs during the interminable night hours when we were supposed to be wide awake, I took a job in a restaurant in South Kensington as their storekeeper and occasional waiter. It was livelier but I still missed the hard physical toil of pile driving.
High society family friends of my parents put me in touch with their daughter who was married to a farmer who was also Master of the Surrey Hounds. In other words, he was a top dog in the fox hunting fraternity. Even though beautiful little foxes are a real pest to farmers and even to houses with outside rubbish bins, the idea of hunting them was distasteful to me – rather like the leopards and cheetahs back in Africa who were also hunted for their killing of sheep and goats. I was surprised to find that he was a friendly, gentle and courteous man when we discussed my job over tea and scones. However, just like my rugby-playing boss with the pile driving job, the moment I started work, which entailed hedging and ditching, I was never invited into their home again!
published 1812, National Gallery of Art. NGA 878 (Wikimedia Commons)
I reported to the farm foreman with the delightfully rural name of Mr. Meadows. We got on well and he even offered me lodging and meals with him and his family. The job was fascinating. The ancient craft of hedging and ditching goes back hundreds of years in England. It entails trimming the hedges around the fields to very specific proportions as well as digging or cleaning the ditches to even more exact measurements. This was to ensure that the water would drain in one direction and not form pools in the midst of the ditch. He gave me about 200 yards to tidy up and rather cynically suggested that as a novice it would take me three months at least. Imagine his horror when I finished the job in two weeks, with all the measurements exactly right. He struggled to find me other work except for mucking out the pigsty every day. And I thought that smelling of fish and chips was bad!
Having already bought my canoe for a planned trip on the waterways of Europe when my friend Alan Louw arrived from Namibia, I would put it in the nearby River Arun and paddle to Arundel Castle some miles away. In a bizarre occurrence, I had taken a bus to the nearby town to watch a movie. When I returned on the bus that evening, a policeman stepped up to me. He asked me where I had been, where I was staying and “was I working in the area? I was surprised and confused but answered his questions. I then asked him what it was all about. He gave me the usual vague answer that they were just making general enquiries. I realized that I was a possible suspect but had no idea what I was suspected of doing. I decided to phone my cousin Vera Atkins who would know what I should do next. Mr. Meadows did not have a telephone at his home (1950s, remember) so the following day I went down the road to a house with a phone and knocked on the door. A young girl of about twelve answered the door. I asked if it were possible for me to use their phone. I would pay for it, of course. At that moment her mother called out to her daughter “Who is it?” and the daughter replied calmly, “It’s that man who’s been exposing himself to children. Wants to use the phone.” Moments later a rather shocked woman in her thirties rushed to the door. I was equally shattered but stammered that the police had already spoken to me and they seemed satisfied I was not the suspect. The woman looked me up and down suspiciously and refused to let me in to use the phone. I was completely mortified and left. That evening when I returned to the household, Mr. Meadows greeted me and said that he had heard I was questioned by the police but not to worry, they caught the culprit that morning, exposing himself again. I told him about my attempt to make a phone call and he promised to set the matter straight with the lady and her daughter. So much for the peace and quiet of rural England!
The farm had no more work for me, so I returned to London. Alan had arrived from Namibia and was working in a London coffee bar. We started to plan our canoe trip across Europe. The only map we could find was an out-of-print book on the waterways of Europe published before the war with one copy held by the Royal Geographical Society in a building next to the Albert Hall. We visited the Society and a charming lady explained that we could look at the book but could not buy it or copy it. We looked at the rivers and canals across Europe and decided that we could actually start in Paris and theoretically travel by water as far as Yugoslavia, but we needed a copy of the book. We thanked the lady and left wondering what to do next. Alan had an idea. We should go back to the Society. I was to distract the lady while he used his camera to photograph the relevant pages. A few days later we returned to the Society and told the same lady that Alan would make notes from the book and do rough sketches of the maps. Meanwhile, I said that I understood they were exhibiting rare items from the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Having toured the museum in Cairo as a child, I was still fascinated by Egyptology and had heard that the tomb of Tutankhamen was included in collection. This was the star attraction at the museum that I visited as a ten-year-old. I told the lady that I wanted to see it again from the perspective of an adult. She was delighted and took me there personally. Meanwhile Alan had reopened the waterways book in the room a floor below us. He found to his dismay that there was not enough light to take decent photos. Undaunted, Alan saw that the sun was shining brightly, so he hopped out of the window and climbed down the drainpipe to a small lawn. He quickly photographed the pages we wanted and climbed back up the drainpipe. Mission accomplished!
A few weeks later we bought tickets to Jersey in the Channel Islands, only sixteen miles from the French coast. We did have some hope of canoeing across to France but were warned that it was far too dangerous. So we reverted to Plan B. which we hoped would get us there. [See next Blog!]
Our anticipation of the trip was enormous in much the same way as my rising excitement over the prospect of the launching of ExoBrain, to change forever and better, the world of electronic communication, as we know it!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.