Royton Younger

By Luc Iver de Vil

A small town young man battles to find himself again after having a much older man as his superior , a sex addict, that manipulated their relationship. This is the telling of that story and his way back to rehabilitation and a life of "normalcies."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Luc Iver de Vil
• Release date: Oct 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223085546

Book preview

Chapter 1

Royton Younger, or just Roy for short. Roy was a friend, I thought, a man who had a huge influence on my life when I was still very young; I was still nine months away from my twentieth year when we met. Roy’s influence affected me for many a year, and still does to a large extent, hopefully now in a more positive way than back then. I haven’t given Roy much mention in all the little stories I have told over the years for very personal reasons, which might become clear to you as we progress through this record. It is not a history to be proud of, unless you are sitting in a pub with boasting men and have had too many drinks. Or maybe it won't be understood as an attempt at a confession, but hopefully you will read this as a reluctant admittance to my own failings as a man, as I cannot lay all the blame for my womanizing and bad behaviour on another man, even if he was the best teacher in this regard one would ever find.

Growing up for me was done in the country, my parents moving many times from one small town to another, following my dad’s career in mining; gold, diamonds, tin and other minerals I can’t remember. As a result I went to seven primary schools, but only one high school as a boarder, in Potchefstroom. Once my dad had decided that he had done enough digging, and teaching others how to do so as the principal at a miners training college he settled down as a farmer when already close to retirement age, running pigs, cattle and planting maize. My mother was a school teacher; if she wasn’t teaching at the local school in the towns we lived in she taught at home, giving extra lessons to children that struggled to keep up with the other kids at school. When my dad went farming mom taught at a small school on a neighbouring farm for the love of teaching, not for the money, for there was not much of a budget for farm school teachers.

In those days schools set a standard by which the majority of children would benefit from later on in their lives, unlike today. Now the yardstick is the ability of the new genre of educator to teach and the aptitude of the child with the least brainpower to learn, as a result very few of those that go through the country’s education system can read, write or add any better than those who never set a foot in a classroom. As a result we have the ideal modern day society that is well suited for demanding what they had not earned; at throwing stones at policemen not on strike for higher wages and less working hours, and at looting trucks that had crashed and to relieve the injured and killed of their possessions. This is done with full assistance and support from the men in blue, if and when they arrive on the scene. The smaller enterprises of yesteryear had blossomed into major industries with high employee numbers as well, being employed in the burglary, robbery and pick-a-pocket side of commerce is sought after occupations.

I met Roy back in 1970, after I got expelled from a Johannesburg based university within months of putting my foot on campus, for being thoroughly contrary. This Afrikaans medium centre of learning had only been established two years earlier in temporary prefabricated buildings without air conditioning on land owned by the breweries, and was still in the process of creating its identity as an ultra-conservative Christian institution in the second most liberal city in the land. The establishment philosophy, be it conservative or be it liberal, of being a sheep following a goat did not sit well with me, I thought of myself as a goat too. But I came second when butting heads with the old goats, their skulls were solid bone and I found myself on the street excluded from the flock that wore ties, and jackets, to the hot lecture rooms in the middle of an African summer.

The University eventually moved to its newly built modern premises in Auckland Park from Braamfontein, but that was a few years after my sojourn into its lecture rooms. When the international community forced the biggest bunch of turncoats in the country’s history to hand political power to an uneducated terrorist organisation the university changed its name, dropped the Afrikaans tongue as language, its conservatism and decent education to become a multi-lingo playground and protest centre handing out worthless degrees to those that find reading and writing as well as thinking difficult enterprises.

My dad decided that seeing that I wanted to do my own thing and say my own say about anything and everything, a trait I never fully grew out of, he withdrew his financing of my life and I was left to my own devices. So I had to find a job to keep a roof over my head, some food in my stomach, cigarettes between my lips and some liquor to settle in my head to dull my guilty feelings for squandering my dad’s care for my future.

The alternative was not to my liking, for in prison back then you could not do your own thing, say your own say or drown your thoughts. I also heard rumours that a young man in the cells became the target of lots of love from the old and hardened veterans of crime, not a prospect I fancied. Those prisons had now been turned into five star holiday resorts for those employed in the new arm of the economy for when they need a rest from breaking open doors, pointing guns and emptying other people’s pockets.

In the 1970's only a very few people knew anything about unemployment locally, so I found a job fairly easily, with a Swiss owned company, that built new power station and maintained the generators on ships, with an office in Johannesburg. Planning and looking at the future still happened in this, and neighbouring, countries then, even at governmental level and in the minds of politicians. They realised that an economy had to function if they wanted to scoop off some of the cream at the top. Not like today where the survival of an economy of a country is unimportant compared to the filling of politicians and their families Swiss bank accounts. Why care about the wellbeing and empty stomachs of the citizens?

I had had no experience at working other than counting screws, nuts and bolts during school holidays in a gold mine warehouse, and to peddle a bicycle assisting a mailman on his delivery rounds to get Xmas cards to their destination in time during one December holiday. In the process I got chased by dogs, soaked in thunder storms and threatened by boys who did not like me smiling at their girlfriends when the girls allowed me to drink some water from garden taps. One old lady gave us each a glass of homemade ginger beer and a cookie every time we dropped a letter or an account in her box, which was not all that often. I earned enough from the cycling and running from dogs to pay for a new pair of not too expensive shoes, shoes that pinched my toes and left blisters on my heels, with the soles detaching after three months of constant wear.

At the Swiss company I was appointed as a junior clerk, at the incredible salary of R100 a month, almost half of which went for board and lodging in a residential hotel in Abel Road, Berea, adjacent to the overcrowded Hillbrow, the Sodom of degrading fun and pleasure in South Africa.

The Residential Hotel was interesting, for there were a few young single girls that worked as shop assistants, or pool typists, also in residence, as well as two or three recently arrived girls from Europe still trying to find gainful employment and steady boyfriends. The girls were not averse to sharing a few beers and a night of fumbled and inexpert heavy breathing in my room. Knowledge and experience in the big field occupied by the opposite sex was still lacking in my life, but I had a keen interest in learning. There were some men, and a married couple, staying there too, but I did not pay them any heed.

For a short while my ‘across the passage’ neighbours were four young people, three men and a girl collectively known as ‘Arthur Bosco Bone’, a rock group. Two of them were American, homo-sexual, who claimed to have originated in San Francisco. They and another guy, the one called Bosco, who had gone back home after a lover’s tiff, had come to South Africa to see if it was true that third rate musicians could make it big in this country. Whenever they did get a gig to play they advertised by plastering posters all over the city claiming to have been at the Woodstock festival, although it was never confirmed if they performed on stage or were there as members of the half a million hippy audience.

When the drummer went home in a huff the two remaining members, Arthur and Bone, found a local lad, nicknamed Beat, to sit in, but made sure he was straight, they had enough problems as it was so another lover’s dispute could be ill afforded. Beat and his very pretty girlfriend, called Nicki, moved into their room too, sharing the second bed as money was a scares commodity.

Nicki did not always join them when they went job hunting and spent some time with me if I was at home, trying to teach me to control my breathing and to extend my staying up ability. She was very much into the Flower-power and Free-love movement.

After a disastrous concert in a small hall, owned by the Johannesburg City Council, the band, Arthur and Bone, complete with the South African contingent, Beat and Nicki, returned to the States to further their career in California. The Council, and the audience, did not take kindly to the band throwing tomatoes and other soft fruit from the stage, making a mess of the hall and their spectators’ clothing. I suppose overripe fruit was cheaper than flowers.

They rather skipped the country than face the bills sent to them for the cleaning up. As Arthur and Bone still had return tickets they only had to flog half their instruments to pay for tickets for Beat and Nicki, Beat had insisted that Nicki accompanied them even though he was assured that there were many pretty willing girls back in Frisco.

Getting to work in the city was not too much of a problem, for rainy and very cold days there was a bus stop right in front of the hotel (or should I rather call it a Boarding house seeing that there was no pub but it did serve two meals a day and did laundry?), which was very convenient if you still had some change in your pocket. The terminus in the city was a few blocks away from the office, so you were soaked or frozen anyway when you got to work on rainy or winter days.

Most of the time though I took the forty to fifty minute stroll to work, through Joubert Park or Johannesburg Central Railway Station, often accompanied part of the way by fellow inmates of the house. On sunny days girls also preferred the route via the park, and on the unpleasant days the railways offered a roof over your head for 250 meters, with warm but smelly air rising up from the platforms below where the trains left or found their passengers.

I never used the shortest route going up or down Nugget Hill, I don’t think many did. It was a steep and exhausting climb coming home, but going down that hill to get to work was dangerous. It was a long roll to the bottom if you tripped on a loose paving brick in a the-morning-after condition with your senses still bleary. Drivers of cars only try that route once too, small engines run out of horses when about halfway going up, and then have to be run down again with the back of the car going into the dangerous intersection at the bottom first, the driver unable to see other traffic. Brakes tended to overheat while going down, and thus becoming sluggish. No wonder many called it Fuck-it Hill.

Walking was good for hangovers with an accelerated heartbeat; it also exercised muscles and taught the lungs to work more efficiently. And it improved your vision too; you could feast your eyes on the rears and fronts of the girls also rushing to work after they had slept in a bit with their companions of the night.

At first my direct boss was a Mr Richards; an arrogant self-assured old man whose only claim to fame was that his nephew once removed was an opening batsman for the Springbok cricket team. The old man always seemed to be stooping, even when he sat down, as if trying to see his feet over his protruding belly through the thick lensed glasses he constantly wore, with a tuft of grey hair hanging over the left lens. His droopy moustache regularly appeared as if it had been dipped in gravy, or in the milk he poured over his porridge. For him I had to do all the filing, and sit with a calculator adding up the figures representing the money spent on the various sites where power stations were being built, in South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and a few other Southern African countries.

Part of my job entailed calculating the wages too, so many hours worked at so much per hour, for the engineers, a misnomer, and construction workers on the sites, generally known as 'Erectors'. I always wondered how good they were in getting their little hanging bits erected, but the girls in the office refused to share this knowledge with me, questioning my pant hanger’s ability instead. A few months later Roy taught me how to answer that question, in a practical manner.

At the head of all administration in the company was Mr Johnny Meehan, a naturalized Irishman, who went by the title of Company Secretary, a man I actually liked and respected, even though he balled me out quiet often. If it wasn't my uncombed hair or my dress code that got Mr Meehan upset, it was the language in some of the 'motivational maxims' I used to stick under the glass cover on my desk, philosophies that carried the vain of To have a good roll in the hay you have to work to earn, so you can pay.

Mr Meehan was a smallish man, obviously in the good shape a man that regularly exercised and played tennis would be, with reddish brown hair always well groomed, a wry sense of humour and a tongue that could cut through bone when sharp words were required. His Belfast accent sounded menacing and not funny then, making me wonder if he was an exiled member of the IRA.

Administration within the company was split into a number of smaller departments. The accounts department, who received and dispensed all money and kept the records of such dealings. The department was headed by the widowed Mrs Persenthall, referred to as Mrs P, with a staff of two girls, Judy and Sylvia who were both very shy, and a young effeminate guy Percy, or Master P. The shipping department was led by Mr Royton Younger, with the beautiful blonde German married lady Verona as his second in command, the delightful Swiss Ruth, also married, and crippled Ralph as clerks. And then of course there was Mr Richards and I, the Costing Department. Oh, I must not forget to mention the typing pool, three girls reporting to Mr Meehan's secretary, Anne, in an office that showed a high staff turnover, I never got to know any of those girls better than the occasional one-night stand. None of them stayed long enough for us to get properly acquainted.

Verona was a well-shaped petite built genuine blond, with her hair cut short, and sparkling blue eyes, a friendly and outgoing personality, and her German accent enhancing her attraction. She usually dressed in a way that got men’s blood pressures up and their imaginations going down, to somewhere below their belts.

Ruth on the other hand was taller and athletically build; nothing too big and nothing too small, with long light brown hair and green eyes that always seemed ready to smile, although introverted and on the quiet side. Her dress sense was less revealing than that of Verona, but it certainly did not cancel out the thought process about what was hidden underneath.

Anne was buxom, narrow wasted and wide hipped, long dark hair usually styled in a beehive, with flashing brown eyes.

Mr Meehan was a fair-minded person; he retained my services after some incidents for which he could have dismissed me out of hand, without notice been given, so I was told by Anne, after she had had a narrow escape from one of my transgressions and survived unharmed.

That incident was rather painful; an episode Mr Meehan had initiated himself, in my opinion. While doing the calculations on the cost of steel used at some of the sites I noticed that it far exceeded what was budgeted for, as per the files. I mentioned this to Richards, who told me to mind my own business and to do the adding up, that was my job. At first I left it at that, but then while calculating steel cost on a power station which was being built in Zambia I noticed the cost was almost double as to what was planned. Knowing that Richards would pay me no attention, I mentioned it to Mr Meehan, who asked me to quietly go through all the current files and pull out the amounts spent versus the budget for him. He confided that he had had a feeling that something was wrong, but did not have had the time to do some investigations himself.

It was a big job, and it was going to take me some time to go through all the files active while still taking care of my other responsibilities, and doing so without Mr Richards being aware of my probing. The best times for me to work on those figures were early in the morning before Richards got to the office, and during lunchtimes when the old man tended to go out for the hour, to sit in the park across the street on a bench and have his sandwiches, and to look at the girls.

During one lunch hour while I was taking some files from the steel cabinet, Richards walked into the office; he came back from the park early as it had started to drizzle. No point in getting wet when there were no girls to watch getting soaked too.

He gave me a very nasty look, and shouted: What the hell do you think you are doing in that cabinet?

I replied, "Getting out some files I