by R. A. Lang
Against All Odds
One Man’s Story of a Life
He Should Not Have Survived
R.A. Lang
Author’s Note
Dear reader,
I just wanted to share my life experiences with the rest of the world to describe the real world. The real world is something that has to be felt and experienced, rather than seen on television, the Internet or read in newspapers.
For legal reasons, I have not mentioned any companies, projects, or people’s names throughout my story, or the name of the Caribbean island. They, if they read my story, will know whom they are. The good guys’ names are real by personal requests, the bad guys’ names have been changed.
I sincerely hope you enjoy what you are about to read and the journey I am about to take you on, spanning over twenty-four countries. You’ll be shocked, horrified and amused, but nevertheless, what I have recorded is factual and exactly how events took place. Some drastic events from chapter 20 onwards!
Lawrence Koster has written a screenplay from chapter 20 for a two hour Hollywood movie due to events I should not have survived, but as you will read, I am not the type to give up easily. Enjoy … and thank you!
“Anyone can read a map, but it’s the choice of which path one follows that makes the difference.” R. A. Lang 2014.
Acknowledgements
Ward G in Morriston Hospital, Swansea for their Pancreatic Centre of Excellence that saved my life in May 2012, which allowed me to publish my memoirs.
Sonja, her mother Trudy and father Hans, Myrthe, Pete, Fluer, Koos, Rob & Marion, Eugene, Baard and René from the Café Koepoort in Delft, Holland for all their inspirational support and friendship while I worked in Holland. We’ll be friends forever.
Jo and Richard, proprietors of the Pilot, Mumbles, Swansea, for their warm welcome and excellent selection of real ales, in addition to their own ales. They inspired me to complete my memoirs after many years left dormant.
Susan and Chris of the Bella Wine Bar, Boutique and Café, Qawra, Malta for their support and encouragement while I rewrote my manuscript adding more detail to the previously published version by Friesen Press.
Tracy, owner of Soul Solutions Spa, Qawra, Malta, for her revitalising holistic therapy and reflexology, which replenished my energy to continue working.
Mark and Vanessa of Images snack bar and restaurant, Qawra, Malta for their traditional British cuisine and live sports channels making a home from home for all British and other European visitors.
Contents
Title Page
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 – How It Began
Chapter 2 – South Africa
Chapter 3 – Back to Wales
Chapter 4 – Islamic Republic of Iran
Chapter 5 – Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
Chapter 6 – Phuket Fishing Tournament
Chapter 7 – First Time in Venezuela
Chapter 8 – Help from Swansea
Chapter 9 – Pakistan
Chapter 10 – Second Time in Venezuela
Chapter 11 – First Time in Qatar
Chapter 12 – Third Time in Venezuela
Chapter 13 – Libya to Nigeria
Chapter 14 – France
Chapter 15 – Tunisia
Chapter 16 – South Korea, China, Japan, Singapore, Indonesia, Dubai, Qatar
Chapter 17 – Thailand
Chapter 18 – Malaysia
Chapter 19 – Second Time in Qatar
Chapter 20 – Ghana, Togo, Benin and Nigeria
Chapter 21 – Caribbean
Chapter 22 – Kazakhstan
Chapter 23 – Back to the Caribbean
Chapter 24 – Return to Nigeria
Chapter 25 – Hospitalised
Chapter 26 – The Netherlands
Chapter 27 – Kurdistan
Chapter 28 – Malta
Copyright
Chapter 1
How It Began
It all began in 1978, when I moved back to Wales at the age of sixteen to complete my apprenticeship as a plater in a heavy engineering fabrication shop. The fabrication shop was called Bercon Engineering, and it was located in a small, Welsh village called Penclawdd, which was better known for its cockle factories than its fabrication shops.
There were still remnants of foundations where anti-aircraft guns had helped defend the steel works in Llanelli just across the estuary during the Second World War.
Penclawdd wasn’t the easiest place to work for someone who had completely lost his Welsh accent after seven years living outside London, in Hindhead, Surrey. My accent caused quite a bit of hostility, which was eventually overcome. I’d travel the twenty-five minute trip every day on a little moped. This was fine in the summer months, but during the cold winter months my hands and knees would be numb by the time I arrived.
My apprenticeship was to last for four years, and I had to spend every Wednesday in the West Glamorgan Institute for Higher Education for the theoretical part. Because my apprenticeship was long before the days of health and safety codes, the workshop left a lot to be desired. There weren’t any machine guards, eye shields, or any other safety measures installed.
The only thing we could do was complain to our union representative when we needed to pay our dues on Friday nights once a month. The union representative would eventually visit the office, but nothing was ever done to improve things.
As an apprentice, the usual jokes were played on me, and I was rather gullible for the first couple of years. I needed to arrive earlier in the mornings than the tradesmen so I could go outside to the red diesel tank and fill twenty-two litre cans. I would use those to refuel the old-fashioned, very unhealthy, diesel salamander heaters in the workshop. These were dangerous, and they often blew back in my face when I lit them.
We’d all huddle around the heaters, holding our damp coveralls near the heat to dry them as much as we could before wearing them. Our gloves would often be wet from the day before, and also frozen in the winter. Meanwhile, I got burnt regularly when I picked up hot steel without realising my gloves had holes in them.
They didn’t like to issue new gloves until the old pair was in a really bad condition. The same went for respirators and face-masks. I often become ill when welding galvanised steel because I couldn’t avoid breathing in the zinc fumes from inside my welding head shield. We called it chemical flu.
We didn’t have any welding curtains or screens either, so we regularly experienced ‘arc eye’ symptoms. Arc eye occurred when the powerful, ultraviolet light entered the corner of passing workers’ eyes as another worker was striking an arc to start welding.
The light caused the membranes protecting the surface of the eyes to dissolve, exposing thousands of nerve endings. It felt like grains of sand in the eyes until the membrane had time to grow back, which sometimes took a couple of days.
Sometimes, the arc eye symptoms were so bad that I couldn’t open my eyes, which meant going to work the next day was impossible, so I’d have to lose a day’s pay. It helped to put slices of cold cucumber over my affected eyes and stay in a dark room, out of any sunlight.
I suffered many accidents, mostly caused by my own clumsiness and sometimes the clumsiness of others.
Our office secretary hated the sight of blood. When I needed to report an accident and ask to go to hospital, I had to enter her office with my smashed fingertip or broken thumb behind my back so she wouldn’t faint.
I visited Singleton Hospital, Swansea, regularly to have sparks and fillings removed from my eyes. The other workers underwent the same procedures.
Creating patterns to cut out the necessary steel shapes was a natural skill I developed, and I was soon given more and
more complicated fabrications to do, which I enjoyed.
I became fluent in parallel line development, triangulation, and the common central sphere, and sometimes I used all three methods to develop the more complex patterns. Soon, word got around so I started to get job offers from other fabrication shops in West Glamorgan. Nevertheless, I was comfortable continuing on in the sweatshop until I had at least completed my apprenticeship.
For the first two years, everything seemed to progress in a normal way. I got filthy at the fabrication shop by day, and I played with cars by night, like most of my friends at that age.
I also enjoyed underage drinking at the bottom of the lane near our house in the Woodman Inn in Blackpill, and playing the motorbike touch game while riding through the streets of Mumbles at high speed, all the while trying to avoid getting caught by the police.
In March of 1981, things took a dramatic change for the worse. Something happened that changed the rest of my life.
I had been meddling with an old vacuum cleaner motor in our old, wooden garage, which had been left standing after my father had built a new garage near the entrance of our drive. The old garage was just for me, and I enjoyed pottering around in it. I had built up quite a comprehensive collection of tools by that time, and a friend of mine spent a lot of time with me repairing cars for extra income. Each week, I’d collect my pay and go into John Hall Tools on the Kingsway in Swansea to buy another tool.
I decided I needed something to sharpen tools with, so I got hold of a nine inch grinding disk, which was made in Germany. We used them in the fabrication shop to grind steel. Not once did I take a moment to consider the motor speed of the old vacuum cleaner with regards to the safe working speed limit of the grinding disk I was mounting on it.
On March 30, 1981, my father returned home with our young Rottweiler after taking her to dog training class at nine o’clock in the evening. By a quarter past nine, my father lay dead on the living room carpet, surrounded by a huge pool of blood. He asked to see the machine working, so I went into the kitchen, plugged it into the wall socket, and switched the motor on.
With 240 volts running up my arms from my fingers touching the bare terminals, and the disk running at twenty thousand ramps per minute, the disk was uncontrollable. It was similar to a gyroscope, keeping the motor too ridged to move or throw.
After what seemed like only a few seconds, there was a loud bang, a sting in the corner of my left eye, and a torrent of blood shooting out from my father’s chest. He stood there, clutching his heart with both hands for one or two seconds before collapsing into the entrance of the living room.
Though I was stunned, I went to see to my father, but there wasn’t anything that could be done for him. He was lying face down on the living room carpet, and when my mother tried to turn him over, we could see that the carpet below his chest was totally saturated in a pool of blood. The blood seeped about two feet from his body.
I remember my mother keeping her cool. She dialled 999 and calmly asked for an ambulance before giving them our address and other relevant information. I picked up a flashlight and waited at the top of the drive so the ambulance could see where to stop without wasting time looking for the house name.
It only felt like three or four minutes before the sounds of sirens grew closer. I was surprised to see two of them. I hadn’t heard my mother request a second ambulance for me. I hurried back to the house with the paramedics and showed them where my father lay motionless.
By the look on the first paramedic’s face, it was clear what he was thinking. He slowly shook his head from side to side. The other paramedic moved me back into the kitchen where he had better light to attend to me.
The slight sting I had felt when the accident happened was from fragments of the broken grinding disk penetrating deep into the skin at the corner of my eye, just missing my tear duct.
After what had happened to my father, I wasn’t aware of the blood running down the front of my face, nor did it matter. I watched as my father was strapped to a stretcher and taken to the first ambulance. Shortly after I had been temporarily dressed, I was taken to the second.
In those days, Swansea Hospital had a casualty area, and it was just a few minutes down the Mumbles Road.
My father and I were taken to separate rooms, so I couldn’t see anything that was being done to him. I was waiting to be treated, and a nurse was sitting near me, quietly by the wall.
After what felt like hours, but was probably just minutes, my sister came in, looked at me, leaned in close to my face, and said, “Dad’s dead.” Just two words, which I will keep hearing for the rest of my life.
I tried to jump up and see for myself, but the nurse prevented me from doing so. A couple of other nurses rushed in to hold me down, which added to my stress, frustration and helplessness.
After a while, I was taken to a treatment room where as many fragments as possible were removed from my eye before they stitched it up. My father’s brother had arrived by that time, together with police officers who wanted a statement while I was being treated. A nurse asked the police to leave because it was not an appropriate time. I was a mess and on a lot of tranquillisers, medication that I ended up taking every night for the following two years. It took several more years for the rest of the fragments to work their way out from my eye area.
The funeral was held in Bishopston Church, which was very close to my father’s birthplace. It was one of the biggest funerals held at the church because my father knew many people through his job, and people came from all over the United Kingdom to pay their respects, including my workmates.
Just two weeks after the funeral, I was advised to return back to work in order to occupy my mind with other thoughts. I was required to use the very same grinding disks that had killed my father just three weeks before. In fact, everything I saw that revolved reminded me of the disk that exploded, and this continued for several more months.
I kept my mind occupied with as many distractions as possible. I continued to work in the fabrication shop by day and spent all my spare time working in the garage at the top of the garden until very late at night making wrought iron work. My daily working hours averaged twelve to sixteen and sometimes longer, but at the age of eighteen, this wasn’t a bad thing.
My mother would wake up and see the garage light was still on so she’d cut the power for a few seconds as a signal that enough was enough. I enjoyed making gates, railings, balustrading etc. for people, plus it was an additional source of income.
I’d make time to take our Rottweiler for walks across the long beach at Oxwich Bay, around Clyne Valley or Clyne Gardens or anywhere else where she could run freely without the danger from passing traffic, but she mostly walked close to my side. She always insisted on sitting in the front seat of my car when we’d drive somewhere. If the seat was already occupied, she’d force her way to the front until she was sitting upright on their lap with her head out of the window.
Eventually, I completed my four year apprenticeship and settled into a life of work, but I was far from satisfied. I knew there had to be more to my life than a set routine, and I began thinking about ways to change things. My father had never been happy with my chosen career, even embarrassed by it, so I decided to change my career to better suit his wishes.
I had heard about a new course at my local college, Welding Inspection, so I immediately enrolled for the September start. While taking the course, I signed up for another course: Radiograph Interpretation of Welded Joints.
The two courses complemented each other and took up four evenings per week. I attended them after working in the fabrication shop during the day. I figured taking the two courses were the easiest way to change my career path and the choice later paid off.
Whilst attending my night classes, I met a great mix of fellow Welshmen, each with the same enthusiasm to improve their knowledge and gain a better understanding of inspection techniques, which would hopefully enhance their career chances.
> It was at these classes I made a new friend, Dai, who arranged a job for me with the engineering company he worked for in Port Talbot. That turned out to be a great move and I made many new friends from Neath, Port Talbot and the Welsh valleys. We’d be assigned new build, repair and maintenance tasks in the local Port Talbot and other steel works, which we all enjoyed doing.
Until I joined the company, the welding shop comprised mainly welders, fabricators and riggers with a main bias towards civil engineering works. As I was the first plater to work there, the company was able to take on different kinds of contracts, which involved the fabrication of piping, as I was able to develop the patterns for it. This also became a new interest for the rest of the workers, who were all keen to help whenever the need arose, and we all had a great team spirit.
Nobody seemed to complain about the varying conditions we worked in, as we’d receive additional money for the conditions which we had to endure. Some of the conditions included working outside in the pouring rain and working chest deep in oil in the cellars of the steel works. Some of the conditions allowed us to go home as soon as the job was complete, which was especially favourable during the summer months.
On such occasions, I’d hurry home, clean up and go down to Oxwich Bay to help out with a friend’s water ski school. On some of the warm summer evenings, we’d choose to sleep on the beach to avoid the morning rush and traffic jams returning back early to continue with the ski school.
On my birthday in July of 1984 I was busy opening my usual birthday cards when I heard the postman make his daily delivery through the letterbox. I picked up the letters and found one addressed to myself. When I opened the letter, it wasn’t a birthday greeting at all, but a letter that could better be described as shock and horror.