Sierra Leone prior to and post-Independence in the early 1960s, seemed a place of tranquillity to Tim May, just twenty-one years old. He and his companions worked and played hard but Tim was labelled a failure in Freetown, in work and in health and as his manager Mr Enk said, ‘I’m sending you to manage Port Loko branch, you will bloody well sink or swim.’ It was the time-honoured treatment of a failure in the old Empire.
Management was a daunting prospect, especially without a knowledge of Bank accounting, but Tim faces the future with fatalistic hope. Immature and wracked by personal problems the prospect is bleak, particularly dealing with the wily, cunning mostly Lebanese customers who grubbed a living thousands of miles from their nation’s internecine wars. It is not only the customers Tim has to combat, but the climate, diseases and general ill health and his mental state, a strange fish in a foreign sea. It seemed the bugs and creatures, the customers, his fellow expatriates and most of all his real persona all combined to defeat him.
Tim though is a strong fish swimming amongst predators and escapes to fight other.
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