Return Ticket

The cabin address system above my head clicked loudly and hissed for a second or two. ‘Ah shit,’ it said, in an exasperated voice before falling silent again. Only moments before it had told us to fasten our seatbelts. Now it announced, ‘This is your captain speaking. Would all able bodied men please disembark and assist the ground crew.’

I was seventeen years old and had just left school. There were only 12 of us on the plane and I wondered whether I fitted the category of an able bodied man. Looking around me I figured that I did and joined the handful of men making their way down the steeply sloping fuselage to the rear door. Once outside, the problem was immediately apparent. The truck that had refuelled the plane while we stood around under the nearby mango trees was blocking our path and refusing to start. The grandly titled ‘ground crew’ who we had been called upon to assist was a gnarled old man with a battered hat, tattered clothing and bare feet. He was shoving for all he was worth at the back of the truck. The rest of us joined in the shoving, but there were pools of muddy water everywhere and we could not get a good footing. The truck stubbornly refused to budge. Soon we were joined by the captain with a new tactic. This time we tried lifting the tail of the plane and wrestling it round until it was facing away from the offending truck. It worked and we all filed back on board. My first suit, which I’d worn for only five hours, was ruined. Air travel was so uncommon in those days that everybody dressed up in their finery despite the cramped conditions, heat and mud.

We were in Tabora in central Tanganyika (Tanzania) on the third fuel stop of the day. Two and a half hours later we landed in Nairobi for the first of three night stops on the four day journey to England. In crumpled, mud-spattered suits we checked in that night to the sumptuous, old-world, elegance of the Norfolk Hotel. The entire journey to England was punctuated by contrasting scenes of outrageous luxury and the down-to-earth realities of 1950s Africa.

After vomiting our way from Nairobi via Juba and Khartoum to Wadi Halfa, we spent the second night in style on a lovely old houseboat moored on the palm-fringed bank of the Nile. The plane was a BOAC Vickers Viking. Being unpressurised it flew at low altitude and bounced around like a leaf in a whirlwind for hour after interminable hour. Nobody was spared the airsickness bags that day.

In the 1950s it was common for parents in the colonies who could afford it to send their children to England when they had finished their schooling. Some went to further their education, some to ingest a little culture, some to travel around Europe, some to get a job, some to do nothing except hang around Earls Court Road in London. Most of us did all of those things in one order or another. The enormous cost of getting to England ensured that once there we did not return home until we had finished whatever it was we went for. For that reason most of us stayed for four or five years before returning home.

The days of mass air travel were still some way off and most went by ship, but for us in the heart of the continent there was a bit of a dilemma. To catch a ship to England we had to travel 2,000 miles in the opposite direction by train, arriving six days later in Cape Town to catch a ship. My parents weighed the costs and decided to send me by air. That’s how I came to be passing a pleasant evening on the Nile at Wadi Halfa.

Unknown to me, some very serious scheduling negotiations took place in the sumptuous lounge of the house-boat that night. The negotiations between the two BOAC pilots and some of their esteemed passengers resulted in our flight being re-scheduled to take off at first light rather than the more genteel 9.30 printed on our travel schedules. Having vomited all the way from Kenya to Sudan on the second day, nobody wanted to puke his way from Egypt to Europe on the third day.

We all gathered at the airstrip the following morning in the cool, pink of dawn only to discover there was another problem. There were no ground staff whatsoever. Once again the able bodied men were pressed into service loading the plane under the watchful eyes of the pilots. However, the dawn take-off had its desired effect and we flew low-level across the desert all the way to the Mediterranean coast without the use of a single paper bag. At Marsa Matruh, the site of a wartime airfield on the north coast, Africa took a final kick at us before we disappeared over the waters of the Mediterranean. The plane was unable to turn in the soft sand beside the runway and had to be manhandled round by the able bodied men and half a dozen press-ganged Arab goat herders.

Arriving at our last night stop, Valetta in Malta, our pilot, who had obviously flown fighters during the war, became effusive on the public address system. This very airstrip, he told us as we touched down, was the one from which the three fighter planes Faith, Hope and Charity had operated in the second world war. They had done such a good job defending the island from the encircling Axis forces that the whole island had been awarded the George Cross for bravery. At the end of the little lecture everybody clapped dutifully and peered out of the windows at the barren, boulder-strewn landscape. Nobody plucked up enough courage to question whether it had all been worth it.

The final day of our journey took us via Marseilles and Paris to England. At Heathrow, then called 'London Airport', the plane drew up on a grass apron in front of a clutch of wartime Nissan huts - ours was the only plane. Disembarking passengers were separated from those who had come to meet them by a little rope cordon across the grass. Despite its modesty, Heathrow was by far the most sophisticated airport we had seen on our long journey - the little rope cordon saw to that. Of course, there were no customs or immigration formalities when we arrived; we all came from the same Empire and had only left British territory once in the whole journey and that was to cross France on the last day.

Most of us from the colonies arrived in England straight from school aged seventeen or eighteen. We were totally reliant, financially, on our parents but, by the time we came to leave four or five years later, we had cut loose from parental reliance and were supporting ourselves through holiday jobs and even full time employment in some cases. I was in England in the mid to late 50s when there were more jobs in England than there were people to do them. Unlike now, finding well paid employment was relatively easy and there was no way in those circumstances that any of us could go cap in hand to Daddy for the return fare by sea or air. We had to find our own way home or earn sufficient to buy a ticket. All sorts of schemes were dreamed up for getting home, although most involved working on ships - particularly for the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders - Africans had more options.

In my last year at college, my fifth in England, I bought into a syndicate of students who owned a little car. She was an eight horsepower, sit-up-and-beg, Y Model Ford, called Fluffy. She was at least fifteen years older than any of us who owned her. But she had worn well and had recently completed a gruelling journey round Europe without serious mishap, a feat which had bestowed on her a certain aura of invincibility, at least in the eyes of her owners. I was then actively working on schemes for getting home to Africa and began seriously considering Fluffy as an option. I mentioned it to Simon, another syndicate member from Durban who was also thinking of how to get home. Simon jumped at the idea and told me he had thought of it himself but was not confident enough about his mechanical ability. My job in the Fluffy owning syndicate was to keep her running and I was pretty good at that.

It was an utterly crazy idea, of course. If we had tried very hard it would have been difficult to find a more unsuitable vehicle for such a long and arduous journey. Fluffy was more than 25 years old - nobody really knew. That model was first built in England in 1931 and to this day they retain the extraordinary distinction of being the only car ever to have been sold new for less than one hundred pounds. She had a tiny, eight horsepower, side-valve engine, two transverse leaf springs and narrow, wire-spoke wheels. I think we managed to convince ourselves that it was worth a try by the somewhat flawed philosophy that we would take her as far as she would go, abandon her when she died, and proceed by whatever means we could find at the point of parting. We estimated that whatever happened, and even if we had to walk, we would need about two hundred pounds each to fund the journey - less than a quarter of the cost of an air or sea fare and, more importantly, within our capacity to earn it fairly quickly.

I took Fluffy away and spent the summer preparing her for the journey ahead and worked night shift in a pea canning factory to earn the travel money. And when the rehabilitation process was completed I arranged to meet Simon back in Gloucester where many of our old friends were gathering for a send-off party. Fluffy was proudly parked at the main entrance for all to admire. She looked very mean by this time with spotlights, fuel cans strapped to the mudguards and spare springs lashed to the bumpers. She was painted grey and black with a white roof and had 'Fluffy' painted in flowing script on her doors and back. Her two back windows, which did not open, were plastered with transfer stickers from resort towns all over Europe procured on her previous trips and testifying to her extraordinary ability or luck.

The lunchtime send off party ended in the early evening and amid great ceremony we set off on the first leg of our journey home. It was not an auspicious first leg. Simon was driving when we headed out onto the A4 on a gloomy, wet, December evening. I was a bit apprehensive about him driving in those conditions because he was as blind as a bat at the best of times. But he insisted it would be all right and, of course, he was longing to test Fluffy's performance after her long re-fit.

Fluffy had rod operated brakes that were lethal in wet conditions. Modern hydraulic brakes allow the foot pressure on the brake pedal to be equally spread to all four wheels. Rod operated brakes are quite different - the braking force transferred from the pedal to each wheel is dependent on the length of the adjustable rod connecting the pedal to the wheel brake. Owners spent many hours lying on their backs under their Y Model Fords tinkering with the length of the rods to equalise the braking force on all four wheels.

There was an additional hazard - Fluffy's windscreen wipers worked off a vacuum from the carburettor manifold. If you put your foot down on the accelerator they stopped working completely, and if you took your foot off the accelerator they slurped into desultory action. We therefore progressed in a series of fits and starts, accelerating and decelerating to keep the windscreen clear of the muck being thrown up by other cars. And as if that wasn’t enough, the front right-hand headlight mounted on top of the mudguard had the habit of vibrating round through 180 degrees until it was pointing straight back into the driver’s eyes.

Twice on that short journey Simon left his braking too late because he couldn’t see ahead through the muddy windscreen or because he was dazzled by the wayward headlight. On both occasions Fluffy spun round like a top in the middle of the road miraculously avoiding oncoming vehicles, trees and bridges.

In London that night there was another send off party. I didn’t experience much of that party because I was lying on my back in the drain outside the Knightsbridge house adjusting the length of the braking rods. Inside the house, I’m told, the assembled company spent some time wondering what chance we had of reaching Dover let alone South Africa. Well, they need not have worried, we made it in the end after many trials and tribulations - but that's another story.