In 1976 I was in Durban with Mr Roberts’ team and had been for some six months. I loved it there and already had a ticket for the Gold Ring at Greyville to attend the Durban July. Imagine my chagrin when just days before the race, the memo turned up which instructed me to immediately join Mr Morley at Potchefstroom. To leave the balmy Durban weather behind to go and endure the freezing weather in Potch was almost more than I could bear.
I met him outside the branch, where he revealed that he had arrived the previous day and had spent the night in a crummy hotel across from the bank. He definitely did not enjoy his stay because his bed had had only two thin blankets and he was shivering with the cold. No trouble to him, he placed the little mat next to the bed between his blankets and had a more comfortable night after that. He then decided we should try the more modern Elgro Hotel, even though it was more expensive. We installed ourselves there up on the second floor and found it perfect.
The audit progressed. Uncle Barney Barnard was branch manager, a proper character originally from Namibia, rough as a rasp but a very good manager despite. He wasn’t one to kowtow to a mere auditor and insisted on calling him Bush from the outset. Bush simply loved him. Here was a man after his own heart. They could argue and insult one another and no harm would come of it. As was expected the audit went well and Barney invited us round to his house for a braai. Bush insisted we take his car but handed me the keys when we got to the house so I could drive us back to the hotel as he expected “trouble”. Barney took him off to a comfortable chair, plonked a glass and a bottle of whisky next to Bush and a bottle of brandy next to his own chair and said something like, “Ou Bushy, nou gaan ek en jy DRINK!” I joined Barney’s sons and some other guests at the fire and kept my beer intake as modest as possible.
It was pretty late when Bush finally decided we should head back to our hotel. When I got out to his car, I discovered that Bush had preceded me and was sitting unsteadily behind the wheel. I reminded him that I was supposed to be driving and he answered, “I’m too p……d to get out now, gimme the keys, I’ll drive”. Now remember, I was only a junior clerk and Bush, my Boss and a Senior Internal Auditor – I did not have the temerity then, to argue with him. (That came much later!) So off we went, zigzagging down the suburban street in first gear. Running a red robot which he definitely didn’t see, we ended up in the main street, still in first but veering alarmingly now into the oncoming lane. I took to steering from my side to keep us going straight but he resisted my efforts strenuously, with the result that we pursued a snaky course down the street and we went through all robots, no matter what the colour. After a while he suddenly said, “Where are we?” ‘In the Main Street’ I replied, ‘Look, there’s the bank’. “Man b….r the street, what effing TOWN are we in ?” We were really lucky that it was late and there were no other cars or cops around. We made it to the Elgro without hitting anything – another one of those miracles he seemed to earn every so often.
As we got to the lift, the door opened and there stood an old guy, also three sheets to the wind, who had just arrived from the ladies’ bar on the first floor. He recognized a kindred spirit in Bush and invited him into the lift by saying, “Kom kyk hier ou pal” and by thumbing the red alarm button, set off a clanging racket up in the rafters somewhere. Bush was thrilled and also had a go. More jangling. I decided that I wasn’t travelling by lift and walked to my room up the stairs. All the way up and for quite some time afterwards, I could hear the bell clanging as those two “schoolboys” carried on with their merry prank.
I slept fitfully that night, firmly believing that we would be asked to vacate our rooms and leave the hotel the next day. We weren’t and that was my first introduction to a REAL auditor, human frailties and all. My version of a kind of super bank clerk who could wipe you out with a green pen at 100 yards while leaping tall buildings with a single bound, existed only in my mind.
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