The story starts not in some trendy, hip, iconic sixties place where the young hip, iconic sixties people hung out in the sixties like Chelsea or New York’s Greenwich Village or Hamburg but in Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia in central Southern Africa...now known as Harare and Zimbabwe respectively... not exactly the first place that springs to mind when you think of the swinging sixties. Those expecting an adventure story of Tarzanic proportions are in for a major disappointment. For this is but a simple tale about a bunch of guys, teenage friends, who decided to form a rock band, ‘The Chequers’, and documents their meteoric rise, not necessarily in sequence, from total obscurity to the giddy, dizzy heights of claiming third place in the Texan Cigarette sponsored ‘Rhodesian Rock Band Contest’... and beyond - but I’m jumping ahead of myself.
Somewhere in Sinoia
“One,
two three, four!” Plectrums struck electric guitar strings, three chords rang
out ‘E – A – E’. Simultaneously a bass
guitar thudded, drumsticks thumped the snare drum and cymbals crashed.
“It’s
Chequer Time”. Jack McGroarty, our singer or ‘lead vocalist’ as Jack preferred
to be called, belted out the opening line of ‘Chequer Time’ the band’s
signature tune to a depressingly sparse - almost empty town hall.
“And the Chequers are here,” continued Jack
shaking a pair of maracas in an attempt to emulate Paul Jones of ‘Manfred
Mann’ fame and enthuse the unenthusiastic audience. “To make you dance and the
blues disappear.”
We
had expected a better turn out and with some justification after spending the
previous ridiculously hot Saturday afternoon putting up posters all over
Sinoia. ‘All over’ though factually correct is somewhat misleading. Posters
‘all over’ conjures up an image of a considerable number of posters and a small
army of poster-putter-uppers. Actually there were forty hand-made posters and
five volunteer poster-putter-uppers. The five volunteers being the five members
of The Chequers rock band at the time, Lea, Hodge, Mac, Jack and me, 'me' being
Lea’s younger brother Johnny.
As I mentioned the posters were ‘all over’ Sinoia; which leaves two possibly explanations (a) the posters were incredibly large or (b) Sinioa was extremely small. The latter is correct. In 1964 Sinoia was...and possibly still is a small town situated eighty odd miles North West of Salisbury. More a street lined with shops than a town... and not a very long street at that...what was colloquially called a ‘pondoki’, which for the uninitiated means ‘a small two-bit town’.
So on that ridiculously hot Saturday afternoon between drinking copious bottles of ‘Hubbly Bubbly’ the new ‘in’ drink, my personal favourite being ‘lemon & lime’, we Sellotaped most of the forty posters to the inside of shop windows; Blue Tack had yet to be invented, and the remaining posters we pinned to telegraph poles. Including time spent persuading reluctant shop proprietors to let us stick our posters up in their shop windows, it had taken us about thirty minutes, forty max. The eighty mile drive through the bush to get there had taken longer. Far longer than the hour and twenty minutes we estimated it would take. Distance in Rhodesia was calculated at a mile a minute. Eighty miles equated to eighty minutes. Not so this particular trip to Sinioa, on this occasion the eighty miles trip took three and three quarter hours...two hundred and twenty-five minutes to be precise. Halfway there the fan-belt on our VW Combi had snapped.
The five of us got out, trooped round to the rear of the van opened the engine cover and peered in...the engine is situated at the back in the VW combi. We realized the fan-belt had snapped, half of it had caught up on the engine mounting and hung, dangling down like a limp, thin dead black snake. But how to fix it...that was a different matter.
Unlike numerous friends who enjoyed nothing more than stripping a car engine down and reassemble it, none of us were mechanically minded. We knew where the petrol, oil and water went and I guess if push came to shove we could change a tyre, but that was about the extent of our knowledge...replacing a fan-belt was way beyond us, even if we had had the foresight to carry a spare and the appropriate tools needed to replace it, which we didn’t. We stood there miles from anywhere, totally clueless, about as useful as a carpet fitter’s ladder. Thankfully salvation was at hand.
A cloud of dust came hurtling round the corner and came to a screeching halt alongside where we were standing. When the dust settled we were confronted by a bleary-eyed couple in a beaten up Chevy pickup who turned out to be an inebriated farmer and his wife.
The inebriated farmer, a hefty gorilla of a man and just as hairy as his ancestral primate, leaned across his wife and slurred out the passenger window, “So wo-o-oz up, man?” When we told him the fan-belt had snapped he said something in Afrikaans to his missus who muttering angrily climbed out the pick-up and disappeared into the bush only to reappear moments later clutching a pair of tights. She hadn’t fortuitously discovered them amongst the elephant grass or indeed stumbled across a hosiery shop in the middle of nowhere. No, the tights she begrudgingly handed over to her old man, the inebriated farmer, were her own tights, which only moments before had adorned her legs. Apparently she had been instructed by her better half to take them off and to preserve her modesty the removal of the tights was performed behind a bush.
Once in possession of his missus’ tights the inebriated farmer, showing amazing dexterity for one so large and so inebriated, managed to thread them around the pulley system and tie them off.
“I tell you, man, they don’t smell too great but they should get you to the next garage”. Then with a roar of laughter our ‘latter day St. Christopher of the Rhodesian highway’ climbed back into his pick-up, floored the accelerator and disappeared in a cloud of dust -- only to return moments later for his missus who he had left standing on the side of the road.
And the guy was right. They did get us to the next garage ...and right on past it too...and numerous other garages. Those makeshift fan-belt tights worked a treat and whizzed round the pulley system charging the battery and cooling the engine for the next month or so before finally giving up the ghost...thankfully in walking distance of a garage.
As I mentioned the posters were ‘all over’ Sinoia; which leaves two possibly explanations (a) the posters were incredibly large or (b) Sinioa was extremely small. The latter is correct. In 1964 Sinoia was...and possibly still is a small town situated eighty odd miles North West of Salisbury. More a street lined with shops than a town... and not a very long street at that...what was colloquially called a ‘pondoki’, which for the uninitiated means ‘a small two-bit town’.
So on that ridiculously hot Saturday afternoon between drinking copious bottles of ‘Hubbly Bubbly’ the new ‘in’ drink, my personal favourite being ‘lemon & lime’, we Sellotaped most of the forty posters to the inside of shop windows; Blue Tack had yet to be invented, and the remaining posters we pinned to telegraph poles. Including time spent persuading reluctant shop proprietors to let us stick our posters up in their shop windows, it had taken us about thirty minutes, forty max. The eighty mile drive through the bush to get there had taken longer. Far longer than the hour and twenty minutes we estimated it would take. Distance in Rhodesia was calculated at a mile a minute. Eighty miles equated to eighty minutes. Not so this particular trip to Sinioa, on this occasion the eighty miles trip took three and three quarter hours...two hundred and twenty-five minutes to be precise. Halfway there the fan-belt on our VW Combi had snapped.
The five of us got out, trooped round to the rear of the van opened the engine cover and peered in...the engine is situated at the back in the VW combi. We realized the fan-belt had snapped, half of it had caught up on the engine mounting and hung, dangling down like a limp, thin dead black snake. But how to fix it...that was a different matter.
Unlike numerous friends who enjoyed nothing more than stripping a car engine down and reassemble it, none of us were mechanically minded. We knew where the petrol, oil and water went and I guess if push came to shove we could change a tyre, but that was about the extent of our knowledge...replacing a fan-belt was way beyond us, even if we had had the foresight to carry a spare and the appropriate tools needed to replace it, which we didn’t. We stood there miles from anywhere, totally clueless, about as useful as a carpet fitter’s ladder. Thankfully salvation was at hand.
A cloud of dust came hurtling round the corner and came to a screeching halt alongside where we were standing. When the dust settled we were confronted by a bleary-eyed couple in a beaten up Chevy pickup who turned out to be an inebriated farmer and his wife.
The inebriated farmer, a hefty gorilla of a man and just as hairy as his ancestral primate, leaned across his wife and slurred out the passenger window, “So wo-o-oz up, man?” When we told him the fan-belt had snapped he said something in Afrikaans to his missus who muttering angrily climbed out the pick-up and disappeared into the bush only to reappear moments later clutching a pair of tights. She hadn’t fortuitously discovered them amongst the elephant grass or indeed stumbled across a hosiery shop in the middle of nowhere. No, the tights she begrudgingly handed over to her old man, the inebriated farmer, were her own tights, which only moments before had adorned her legs. Apparently she had been instructed by her better half to take them off and to preserve her modesty the removal of the tights was performed behind a bush.
Once in possession of his missus’ tights the inebriated farmer, showing amazing dexterity for one so large and so inebriated, managed to thread them around the pulley system and tie them off.
“I tell you, man, they don’t smell too great but they should get you to the next garage”. Then with a roar of laughter our ‘latter day St. Christopher of the Rhodesian highway’ climbed back into his pick-up, floored the accelerator and disappeared in a cloud of dust -- only to return moments later for his missus who he had left standing on the side of the road.
And the guy was right. They did get us to the next garage ...and right on past it too...and numerous other garages. Those makeshift fan-belt tights worked a treat and whizzed round the pulley system charging the battery and cooling the engine for the next month or so before finally giving up the ghost...thankfully in walking distance of a garage.
Two
and a half hours later we were standing in the middle of Sinoia's Main Street
admiring our handiwork. Nearly every shop window, pillar and post carried a
Chequers’ poster. Job done. With such a
promotional blitz we confidently expected a flood of teenagers turning up at
the town hall the following Saturday night.
Why
play a pondokie like Sinoia? Our thinking was simple. As nothing much ever
happened in Sinoia the teenage population, starved of youthful entertainment
would flock to our ‘session'. A session is what we called a dance. I don’t know how the term came about and I
have never heard a dance being called a ‘session’ anywhere else so like other
words such as ‘graze’ for food, ‘dooks’ for a caning, ‘skayf’ for a cigarette,
‘moons’ for a long time, a ‘span’ for very much – as in ‘thanks a span’, a
‘session’ must’ve been something peculiar to Rhodesia ...or peculiarly
Rhodesian.
Back
to the posters, handmade by Lea and I, which incorporated a chess board with
white letters on the black squares and black letters on the white and which we
regarded as lekker...(terrific/great /fab/cool / awesome). They informed the
population of the pondoki aka Sinoia that The Chequers Rock Band, one of the
country’s leading rock bands who appeared regularly on RTV (Rhodesian
Television)... not altogether true. We had appeared on RTV but only twice and
our last, most recent appearance was something of a disaster. Let me call ‘time
out’ on Sinoia for a moment and tell you why.
At the television studio we were told, I cannot remember the reason - time really is the enemy of memory - that we had to pre-record the song and later
lip-sink to the recording ‘live on air’ so to speak. However, when the
show came to be transmitted a technician failed to pipe the music into the
studio...he forgot to switch on the loudspeaker. We had been told to watch for the red light
which would be the cue for the music to start. The red light came on but no
sound of music followed. Not a single note. Nothing. Just silence. We looked at each
other not knowing what to do when some red faced okie in a white coat started
gesticulating frantically through the glass control room panel for us to start
miming. So we did, flying blind so to speak, or in this case flying deaf. Now
it is hard enough to lip-sink, guitar-sink, bass and drum-sink to a
pre-recorded track you can actually hear, but when you can’t hear anything at
all, I mean... well, to cut a long story short, our lip-sinking ended some
fifteen seconds before... or was it fifteen seconds after the recording
finished? Fifteen seconds came into the equation but either way it was a complete
fiasco.
If you’re wondering, ‘okie’ is a person, usually of the male gender.
If you’re wondering, ‘okie’ is a person, usually of the male gender.
Back to the posters which incorporated a chess board and
informed the population of the pondokki aka Sinoia that The Chequers Rock Band,
one of the country’s leading rock bands who appeared regularly on RTV would be
appearing at the Sinoia Town Hall the following Saturday Nite from 8:00 p.m.
till mid-nite. The reason we used the American spelling of ‘nite’ as opposed of our native English ‘night’
was because it contained one fewer letters. ‘Nite’ was included twice in each
poster, there were forty posters which meant by using ‘nite’ instead of
‘night’ we had saved ourselves writing out and colouring in eighty letters.
E,
A, E! We continued gyrating and shaking our mop top hairstyles to the half
dozen bemused teenagers staring up at us from the foot of the stage... Did I
say stage? Yeah, right. A dozen odd planks atop beer crates.
“There’s
Johnny on the rhythm”. E – A – E “And Hodge on lead”. E – A –E “Mac’s playing
the bass”. E – A – E “Lea’s drumming the beat”. E – A – E “And when they all
get going”. E – A – E “There’s no holding back. And who’s the singer?” E – A –
E “That’s me and mine name’s Jack”.
We
were wearing our brand new band gear. Black leather trousers and jerkins – only they weren't real leather, real leather was far too expensive so we had settled on
the cheaper fake plastic leather. The type used on car seats. The problem with
fake plastic leather when used for clothing as opposed to car seats is fake leather doesn't breathe or absorb
moister. If you spill coke, beer, coffee or any such beverage, hot or cold, on
a fake leather car seat it will find the lowest level and just sit
there until you wipe it up. I won’t be absorbed into the fabric. Fake plastic
leather is water resistant. It has water resistant molecules that
repel liquid. So, there we were in the middle of tropical Africa in a
temperature of 80 degrees plus, leaping around like demented Dervishes, dressed in fake leather suites. It was like exercising in a plastic bag.
Within half an hour we were soaked. As if we had jumped into our
local swimming pool. ‘Drain-pipe trousers’ took on the
literal meaning as sweat ran in rivulets down our fake leather drain-piped clad
legs and collected in pools around our Cuban heeled Chelsea boots. However,
sweating on Biblical proportions paled into insignificance on the 'embarrassment
scale' when set against the far more odious side effect of fake plastic leather
on human skin. Within a half an hour we started emitting a disgusting aroma
comparable to that of sweaty, fetid, old trainers worn by a worker in a
feta cheese factory... to give you some idea of the magnitude of the pong if I say we absolutely reeked it would be the understatement to trump all other understatements.
At this point I need to pause a moment, take five, and get something off my chest. I realized it was our decision to get fake black leather gear. We wanted them because they looked ‘cool’ – no pun intended. It was our fault. I get that. But even so, fifty odd years after the event, a part of me still blames the British rock group, “The Hollies”. I can’t help myself. A few weeks earlier we had seen them at the Princess Cinema on the Pathe News performing “Just One Look”. They were dressed in black leather trousers and jerkins and looked the dog’s doo-dahs...and as the words of their song predicted, “Just one look, that’s all it took, yeah”. And it did. Just one look and “Yissus, man!” We simply had to have black leather trousers and jerkins.
We had been tossing the idea of having a uniformed look for the band around for awhile but pukka band suits, the type the Beatles wore with the round collarless collars, were not only way too expensive but another Salisbury group already had them...I think it was ‘The Etonians’ or possibly ‘The Gentlemen’. Anyway, as a sort of compromise, we had taken to wearing the same style of stripy shirts...which kind of smacked of amateurism. So after seeing The Hollies we made a bee-line for an Indian tailor we knew. Leather trousers and jerkins had to be cheaper than Beatles suites, right? After all they had no arms on them, or buttons. Wrong. If anything they were more expensive. The Indian tailor suggested the cheaper alternative. So, in a roundabout way, if not for the Hollies we would have been saved the embarrassment and the confusion of wearing fake leather trousers and jerkins – yes, confusion. Because when we were leaping around the stage at some session or other and someone in the crowd shouted out, “You guys stink!” which I reluctantly admit happened on more than one occasion, it was open to conjecture what the heckler meant. Was it a critique of our musical ability or our personal hygiene? Possibly both, we never asked so I guess we’ll never know.
At this point I need to pause a moment, take five, and get something off my chest. I realized it was our decision to get fake black leather gear. We wanted them because they looked ‘cool’ – no pun intended. It was our fault. I get that. But even so, fifty odd years after the event, a part of me still blames the British rock group, “The Hollies”. I can’t help myself. A few weeks earlier we had seen them at the Princess Cinema on the Pathe News performing “Just One Look”. They were dressed in black leather trousers and jerkins and looked the dog’s doo-dahs...and as the words of their song predicted, “Just one look, that’s all it took, yeah”. And it did. Just one look and “Yissus, man!” We simply had to have black leather trousers and jerkins.
We had been tossing the idea of having a uniformed look for the band around for awhile but pukka band suits, the type the Beatles wore with the round collarless collars, were not only way too expensive but another Salisbury group already had them...I think it was ‘The Etonians’ or possibly ‘The Gentlemen’. Anyway, as a sort of compromise, we had taken to wearing the same style of stripy shirts...which kind of smacked of amateurism. So after seeing The Hollies we made a bee-line for an Indian tailor we knew. Leather trousers and jerkins had to be cheaper than Beatles suites, right? After all they had no arms on them, or buttons. Wrong. If anything they were more expensive. The Indian tailor suggested the cheaper alternative. So, in a roundabout way, if not for the Hollies we would have been saved the embarrassment and the confusion of wearing fake leather trousers and jerkins – yes, confusion. Because when we were leaping around the stage at some session or other and someone in the crowd shouted out, “You guys stink!” which I reluctantly admit happened on more than one occasion, it was open to conjecture what the heckler meant. Was it a critique of our musical ability or our personal hygiene? Possibly both, we never asked so I guess we’ll never know.
The
one consolation to the Sinoia session was we finished early. Around ten instead
of the advertised twelve mid-night. We were in the middle of the Johnny Rivers R&B
classic, “Memphis Tennessee”, minus the bass– Mac was answering the call of
nature – when an explosion rocked the building. All the lights went
out and our amplifiers stopped amplifying. After telling everyone to stay
where they were and not to move the caretaker guy who was also selling soft
drinks and packets of Willard’s Crisps from a trestle table in the corner of
the hall went off to investigate. We stood around in the darkness for what
seemed like an eternity but was probably only a couple of minutes, during which time
hushed conspiratol voices and the clinking bottles could be heard.
Finally the caretaker guy returned with the news that... “Some stupid bleedy prick’s jammed a bleedy screwdriver into the bleedy fuse box and blown the bleedy thing off the bleedy wall”, adding that there was no way ‘the bleedy thing’ could be fixed that bleedy night, “So all you oikes (everyone) might as well bugger off home”.
Finally the caretaker guy returned with the news that... “Some stupid bleedy prick’s jammed a bleedy screwdriver into the bleedy fuse box and blown the bleedy thing off the bleedy wall”, adding that there was no way ‘the bleedy thing’ could be fixed that bleedy night, “So all you oikes (everyone) might as well bugger off home”.
No sooner
had we started to pack away our gear, illuminated by cigarette lighters and
matches, than there was an angry outraged tirade from the darkened hall. The
caretaker guy, who as I mentioned was selling drinks and crisps, had discovered
his entire stock had gone walkabout. He went absolutely ballistic screaming
abuse at the handful of sniggering teenagers drifting out the hall with bulging
clinking and rustling jackets. To this day, if the guy’s still alive, I’m sure
he’s convinced the power cut had been a diversion to get him away from the
drinks table...not so.
During
the caretaker's rant it was noted that Mac still hadn't returned. A quick reccie of the gents
toilet led to the discovery that feeling your way around a urinal in the dark
was something to be avoided, but left us none the wiser as to Mac’s
whereabouts. “The lazy bastard’s skiving” was the general consensus. Mac had
been known to make himself scarce when gear was being packed away. However, on this occasion, we had been way too quick with our condemnation, for
when we lugged our gear out to the combi Mac was unearthed
hiding in the seat-well. At first we didn't realise it was Mac. It was only
when ‘the thing’, spoke that we realized it was in fact Mac, for the thing who
confronted us looked unlike the Mac who had left the bandstand ten minutes
earlier to answer nature’s call. Instead he looked like a character from out a comic strip cartoon – the one who
lights a stick of dynamite which blows up in his face and when the smoke
disperses is found to be covered in soot.
Mac recounted what had happened. He was on the way to take a leak when in the deserted corridor outside the gents he noticed a fuse box with a rubber handled screwdriver lying on the top of it.
A question popped into Mac's head. “Did the Chequers want to play for another one and a half hours to a handful of unenthusiastic teenagers who up to that point had spent most of the evening at the far end of the hall playing French cricket with a coke bottle and a tennis ball?” It was a no brainer. The answer was a resounding no. A second question followed. “Could he on behalf of the band do something about it?” Yes he could...and did. He took hold of the screwdriver, opened the fuse box and rammed it into electrical gubbins.
Mac said there was a brilliant flash and he found himself laying face down in the gent’s loo. The force of the explosion had torn the fuse box half off the wall and blown Mac backwards through the toilet door. The defunct fuse box hung there crackling and fizzing like a demented percolator and spewing out thick black acrid smoke. Mac, showing amazingly quick thinking for someone who had just blown himself up, realized he needed to put distance between himself and the crime scene. Stumbling to his feet he fell out the gent’s window and made his way groggily round to the front of the building.
He was just about to enter the darken hall when he was gripped with terror. Inches from his face a pair of eyes stared directly at him, just eyes... without any apparent sign of facial support. Glinting, evil, demonic, disembodied eyes, suspended in mid air. Mac lurched back and heart thumping peered at the ghostly gimlet orbs which unwaveringly and unnervingly met his gaze. Petrified, Mac was about to leg it when the moon came out from behind a cloud and he realized the ghostly, glinting, evil, demonic, disembodied eyes floating in mid air weren't supernatural at all. No, the eyes belonged to a face smeared with what Mac took to be camouflage blackening and was staring at him through a window inches from his face. Then Mac had one of those light bulb moments. It wasn't someone staring at him through the window; it was his own reflection in the glass. He rubbed his face and checked his hand. It was covered in sooty gunk from the exploding fuse-box. Having no means of cleaning off the sooty gunk Mac did what any self-respecting lawbreaker would do with irrefutable evidence linking him to a misdemeanor visible on his person – or in this case, plastered all over his face, he went to ground – well, actually he hide in the back of the combi, which is where we found him.
Mac recounted what had happened. He was on the way to take a leak when in the deserted corridor outside the gents he noticed a fuse box with a rubber handled screwdriver lying on the top of it.
A question popped into Mac's head. “Did the Chequers want to play for another one and a half hours to a handful of unenthusiastic teenagers who up to that point had spent most of the evening at the far end of the hall playing French cricket with a coke bottle and a tennis ball?” It was a no brainer. The answer was a resounding no. A second question followed. “Could he on behalf of the band do something about it?” Yes he could...and did. He took hold of the screwdriver, opened the fuse box and rammed it into electrical gubbins.
Mac said there was a brilliant flash and he found himself laying face down in the gent’s loo. The force of the explosion had torn the fuse box half off the wall and blown Mac backwards through the toilet door. The defunct fuse box hung there crackling and fizzing like a demented percolator and spewing out thick black acrid smoke. Mac, showing amazingly quick thinking for someone who had just blown himself up, realized he needed to put distance between himself and the crime scene. Stumbling to his feet he fell out the gent’s window and made his way groggily round to the front of the building.
He was just about to enter the darken hall when he was gripped with terror. Inches from his face a pair of eyes stared directly at him, just eyes... without any apparent sign of facial support. Glinting, evil, demonic, disembodied eyes, suspended in mid air. Mac lurched back and heart thumping peered at the ghostly gimlet orbs which unwaveringly and unnervingly met his gaze. Petrified, Mac was about to leg it when the moon came out from behind a cloud and he realized the ghostly, glinting, evil, demonic, disembodied eyes floating in mid air weren't supernatural at all. No, the eyes belonged to a face smeared with what Mac took to be camouflage blackening and was staring at him through a window inches from his face. Then Mac had one of those light bulb moments. It wasn't someone staring at him through the window; it was his own reflection in the glass. He rubbed his face and checked his hand. It was covered in sooty gunk from the exploding fuse-box. Having no means of cleaning off the sooty gunk Mac did what any self-respecting lawbreaker would do with irrefutable evidence linking him to a misdemeanor visible on his person – or in this case, plastered all over his face, he went to ground – well, actually he hide in the back of the combi, which is where we found him.
It had been one of those days, and I’m
sure Mac would agree, when fate conspired against him and decided out of sheer
bloody mindedness, to hand him the shortest of short straws, or in the case of an earlier
incident, the wrong bottle of coke.
Hours before Mac blew himself up we had stopped at a garage on the outskirts of Salisbury to fill up with gas (petrol) for the drive to Sinoia and to stock up on life’s essentials, skayfs (cigarettes), Willards crisps and bottles of cokes. Hubbly-Bubbly was already passé. Oh, the fickleness of youth. This completed, we were back on the road chatting away merrily and drinking our cokes when suddenly Mac, who was driving, started to heave violently. Between shoulder-shuddering retches he managed to swerve over to the side of the road and slam on the brakes. Almost before the Combi had skidded to a halt he was out the driver’s door and throwing up. According to Mac he had been listening to the chatter absentmindedly sipping his coke when almost subconsciously it registered that hardly any coke was coming out the bottle. Without really thinking about it he gave a good hard suck...something gave and he found his mouth full of a squishy sweet substance which he said had the consistency of ‘those yellow and pink marsh mellow thingies we bought at the swimming pool tuck shop, which came in the shape of bananas and fish’.
Confused Mac checked the bottle and there to his horror and
disgust, wedge in the neck and clogging it up was not a yellow and pink marsh
mellow thingy in the shape of a banana or fish but half of a large bloated and
decomposing maggot...which meant he had just swallowed the other half.
Incidentally the rest of us thought it was absolutely hilarious...but can you
imagine if that had happened today, when litigation has become something of a
pastime...the repercussions of finding a decomposing maggot in a bottle of
coke? “The sheer trauma of it, your honour, the mental anguish”....“the
reoccurring nightmares I suffer...the sleepless nights”, etcetera, etcetera. The psychological
fall out, real or unreal, of such an experience ...lawyers would be queuing up
to represent the case. But that’s now and then was then, 1964. After taking it
in turns to examine the bloated remains of maggot we tied a piece of string
around the neck of the bottle and hung it from the rear view mirror where it
dangled like some kind of weird car mascot cum medical specimen. After a week
or so the maggot began to ferment and started giving off a sweet sickly whiff
so we slung it out the window.
Hours before Mac blew himself up we had stopped at a garage on the outskirts of Salisbury to fill up with gas (petrol) for the drive to Sinoia and to stock up on life’s essentials, skayfs (cigarettes), Willards crisps and bottles of cokes. Hubbly-Bubbly was already passé. Oh, the fickleness of youth. This completed, we were back on the road chatting away merrily and drinking our cokes when suddenly Mac, who was driving, started to heave violently. Between shoulder-shuddering retches he managed to swerve over to the side of the road and slam on the brakes. Almost before the Combi had skidded to a halt he was out the driver’s door and throwing up. According to Mac he had been listening to the chatter absentmindedly sipping his coke when almost subconsciously it registered that hardly any coke was coming out the bottle. Without really thinking about it he gave a good hard suck...something gave and he found his mouth full of a squishy sweet substance which he said had the consistency of ‘those yellow and pink marsh mellow thingies we bought at the swimming pool tuck shop, which came in the shape of bananas and fish’.
Pink & yellow marsh-mellow fish bought at the swimming pool tuck shop
We
made the eighty three mile trek back to Salisbury vowing we’d never play Sinoia
again. It had dawned on us that the reason hardly any teenagers turned up at
our session was because there were hardly any teenagers in Sinoia. In all probability the handful of kids who
paid the 2/- entrance fee and had their hands stamped to prove they had paid
amounted to the entire teenage population of Sinoia. We learnt a lesson that
Saturday night, small towns equate to small crowds and small crowds equate to
small takings...oh yes, there was one other lesson we learnt which came in
handy on at least three occasions that I can think of. We made sure we took a
supply of screwdrivers with rubber handles with us to every session just in
case we felt the inclination to leave early.
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