My office was as bleak inside as it was on the outsideCheck it on GOOGLE Map
Long before I had ever read Charles Dickens, I spent a long six months in this "Bleak House" on the edge of the Namib Desert in South West Africa, or Namibia as it is called now. The local Ovambo people call Namibia "the land God made in anger".
I'd come to South West Africa in late 1968 after a nine-month stint in the (c)old "Vaterland". I wanted to get back to Australia but not having enough money for the whole trip, I'd taken a job in Lüderitz to be able to pay for my next leg of the trip from Cape Town to Sydney.
The "kantoor" in which I had to spend my entire day was straight out of Dickens: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who "commandeered" two other Afrikaaner women who treated the blacks, referred to as "die goed" [these things], abominably. They must have been lying awake at night worrying about the "swart gevaar" [the black danger]. What their jobs were never became clear to me. Then there were three German men who had something to do with the fuel storage down by the harbour and the hardware store behind the office. The whole lot was presided over by a thin and ageing man not very flatteringly referred to as "Lügen-Müller".
My daily routine was always the same: I'd arrive at the office, say my 'goeie more' to the Afrikaner staff, then unlock the bottom drawer of my desk, peer inside, lock it again and get on with my work which was little more than keeping a mechanised debtors ledger (on a ledger-machine straight out of the Ark), reconciling several bank accounts, attending stocktakes, and doing other boring bits and pieces of officework.
It was a completely dead-end job! After six months' servitude I had earned enough money and left for Cape Town enroute to Australia.
Tot siens! Yours truly all set to leave Lüderitz for Cape Town
The staff had always been intrigued by what was in that bottom drawer. On my last day, someone made a speech and I was given a flattering reference but still no-one was game to ask me what was in the drawer.
On my way out I handed back my keys, and I can still see them now as they rushed back inside to unlock my desk. As they peered inside, they would have seen the small sheet of paper I had left taped to the bottom of the drawer. It read, "The debit side is the one nearest the window."
