AND so I had found my way to Johannesburg’s concrete jungle. In those days, Hillbrow was a perfectly acceptable and reasonably safe place to live in 1972. It was only in later years that it became the haunt of drug lords and the crime capital of Africa. Even so, it didn’t appeal to me.
I was not alone in my hatred of the place. Deidre, whose room was immediately below mine, felt much the same way as I did.
She was a secretary in the central business area of Johannesburg and an emigrée from England for much the same reason as I was. I had lost my fiancé to a premature heart attack; she had lost both her parents in a car crash. A new country, a new life-style, a whole new ballpark to play in – this was what we both needed.
I bought a car, which left me penniless, but it was one step towards adventure.
We retained our sanity by pouring over travel brochures and planning adventures. I had ambitious ideas about financing my travels by writing magazine articles and taking photographs, but I would have to do something exciting first, in order to have something to write about. That was the catch. Finding excitement cost money and neither Deidre nor I had any.
But I had a seventy-five per cent pay increase and lots of sunshine, in exchange for foggy England under a Labour government. So I settled down to make something out of it.
At least I loved my job!
In Johannesburg I was still a ‘sales engineer’ as I had been in England, but the similarity remained only in the handle.
The mother company in England had had a set system for processing all paperwork, from enquiries through to system commissioning and lots of people, all doing their own things, with some sort of certainty of success. But they had also had the foresight to realise that far-flung parts of the empire might not have all these facilities and had taught me the rudiments of draughting and printed circuit assembly – which was a very good thing, as I found myself doing both those jobs at one time or anotherand a lot more besides. It was challenging, rewarding and, above all, fun!
But what I loved most about the job was the company of the irrepressible, near-genius-level lunatics who made up the electronics department.
John, Terry, Gavin and Peter; poor Basil, who tried in vain to keep us in order and old Len, who let us keep him amused until he reached retirement age.
We worked hard in that office, though the fact was not always immediately apparent to the eye of ‘management’ in the person of Richard. The trouble was that Richard invariably popped his head round the door when a ‘think tank’ was in full swing and he wasn’t a Goon Show fan either.
We were all addicted to the Milligan–Sellers–Secombe humour and we found considerable therapeutic effect in looking at our problems through the eyes of their nutty characters.
So Richard would walk into our hard-working office and find us discussing the problem of picking up a voice signal against the background noise of the dropping of railway lines from an overhead crane. He wouldn’t know, of course, what we were discussing, because the sound effects were deafening, our silly voices unintelligible, and the only visual impact would be of Terry’s hands describing the contours of the lady crane-driver.
When I squeaked to the assembled lunatics that I needed a negative noise generator, Richard rolled his eyes heavenward and crept out. Gavin promptly designed one, and it was so successful that our think-tanks were thereafter left in peace. Basil did point out that the noise-cancelling microphone had already been invented, but nobody ever told Richard, so the combined genius of the office idiots was allowed to take the credit!
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