大象传媒

This story has been submitted by Bill Spry and is added to the site with his permission.

We arrived at Accta, in the Gold Coast, (now known as Ghana). As there was no dock there we had to go ashore via 鈥渕ammy chairs鈥�...carried by local boatmen.

We were housed in what were essentially mud huts but they were surprisingly comfortable. White ants were continuously making tunnels up the inside walls, trying to get to the thatch on the roof.
I remember well my first visit to the latrines (toilets). There was a row of boxes, positioned from each other, and with a thatched roof overall.
I lifted a lid and a very smoky and hot rush of air came out. There were also thousands of bluebottles that came flying out. An African kept a small smoky fire going at one end of the boxes. The smoke was supposed to kill off the bluebottles but I think they thrived on it!
To add to my woes a lizard about twelve inches long ran along a rafter just inches from my head. They are harmless to humans but I didn鈥檛 know that at the time!
The bread we had in the Mess was grey and full of small black specks. They were the bodies of small insects who had been eating the flour and had been trapped when the bread was baked. For about the first week we picked all the black bits out, but after that we didn鈥檛 bother.
The Africans soldiers were all volunteers and they all spoke Pidgin English. They were child like in some ways and they loved to drill. There was a special way of dealing with them. Their ways were different to ours and sometimes they could be very brutal. There was no need to shout at them and they mostly tried to please.
There was an R.S.M (Regimental Sergeant Major) who used his parade ground tactics on them, shouting at them all the time. One night he went down to their lines (the huts where they lived and slept). He was found the next day with his head cut off.
When I first went to Africa I had to take a tablespoonful of quinine everyday as a treatment against malaria. If you took too much of it it made your ears ring. This was later changed to mepactine tablets which was more effective but made our skins turn slightly yellow.

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