Remembering headquarters, 60 years later (2)

Continued from yesterday WE were young, liked music, frequented Bobby Bensons, kakadu, Gondola clubs. We had discos. The master record spinner, disco chief, was then a major, handsome as hell.

He did not drink but loved dancing and his memory was legendary; he knew everybody, kind of music we liked, and what would turn us on. He could change the mood of party from somber to ecstatic, to romantic, to jitterbug etc. no wonder he ended up being the Head of State after one of the coups.

We meet, if possible every day and our wives know better not to disturb such meeting. Those of us who smoke, smoke Cuban (cigars), those who drink enjoy the best. We all have roving Eyes for the beauties of this world but there is a long distance between the eye and other essential instruments which age have ravaged with grace if not tenderness.

We had white housemasters who examined us as we came back from holidays. We never suspected they may have been homosexuals but they probably were.

The examination consisted of yanking your boyhood and pulling it back and forth to see if you have any sexually transmitted diseases where the tell tale sign will be a discharge.

Imagine doing this to an eleven or twelve years old boy!! We travel together – London, Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, U.S., and the Caribbean. Sunny’s Goat and its sad demise: Sunny was the Permanent Secretary and Solicitor General of the Federation. His favourite term of address of everybody was “scallywag”. Many of us lived in Ikoyi.

There was a tree in the middle of a round drive away in his house, and a tree in the middle of the grass verge demarcating the drive way. Sunny had invited us to eat goat pepper soup on Saturday. We normally congregated at Sunny’s veranda or a nearby garden on the other side of the driveway.

Sunny and others could not always make it to the toilet, bathroom so many resorted to using the garden outside. On arrival of the goat, we told Sunny to get his mallam to cut fresh grass for the goat.

On Friday night, i.e. the eve of the feast, we saw the goat eating grass from the circular verge around the tree to which the goat was tethered. We told Sunny that his urine was so toxic he should not use that patch of green.

He called us all scallywags and we went home. On Saturday, we assembled only to hear the goat died that afternoon!! We watched one another back from our various vantage points.

Not one of us was even visited by the slightest scandal and this was perhaps due to the stringency of abuse we rained on one another. It kept us on the straight and narrows. Conversation in such a setting is boisterous, congenitally rude, loud, inspired in no small way by the effects of Bacchus.

There is no respect for persons and no subject is taboo. If you are not used to it, the heated arguments seem to be at the point of boiling over. Insults are freely thrown about and no ox escapes being gored.

Issues range on all sorts of subjects – religion – Catholicism, Baptist, Methodist, Redeemed, Anglican, Grail, our respective ages etc. We all have children who live with their spouses and children overseas; there is usually great camaraderie at reunions which were frequent.

Nearly all of us went to university abroad, knew each other at very personal level which even the hostility of wives has been unable to break. In politics we are all different, show little respect for the opinions of others.

None of us comes from a nuclear family, all of us having to deal with the problems of half-sisters and inconvenient relatives. As the conversation flows, the expertise of those around begins to shine.

Kenny was claiming to be younger than Sunny who graduated from Methodist Boys High School in 1956. Kenny used to have a Christian name as was foolishly and unnecessarily required of all Moslems. Suddenly one day, Sunny jumped up and with fingers pointing, voice quivering, he slowly moved towards Kenny. “I know you. We were at school together.

Your name was Larry. You failed Class 2 and I caught up with you. You failed Class 4 again and I left you. That was why you left in 1957. How dare you say I am older than you, you scallywag and numskull”!! Stories of what really happened when a particular event took place, the foibles of our so-called bosses at that time; the regrets then flow from the failure to have followed simple good advice.

You will hear the views of the economists, the civil servant desk officer whose task it was to deal with the issues, the General who failed to corral his troops in time with unpleasant results, the pain of being stepped over, especially in one specific case where a General had been made and unmade Chief of Army Staff three times in as many hours.

Though painful, headquarters will find a way through jibes, mockery, jokes, etc to make a painful subject funny and bearable. The repartee is fast and furious. So should it be when nearly 1000 years of experience are in one room describing one thing or another.

There is no sickness one of us has not been through so we are all medical experts! At 70, you know something about PSAs, prostrates, Sigismund tests, serum test, cilium test, one part or the other of your body no longer functions but friends will rather die than admit a demuniation of certain faculties including the robustness of our memories. We could be a tiresome lot, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation: But we soon calm down, thanking God for his blessings. •Concluded •Dr. Cole (OFR) is a former Nigeria’s Ambassador to Brazil.