WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Cpl PETE HEBDEN

ECE TECH
M & G Pln
REME Workshops 

What happened to some of the 
Old Pals who served with us?

Fortunately some of those we remember
from 47 Regt. Royal Artillery and the 
REME Workshops, stationed in 
Napier Barracks, Dortmund 
about 1957 - 1966 (or thereabouts) 
have found us, and
their stories are presented here.
Old Pals list
I cant give a date but approx 2 months after Renate & I started 'dancing' the RSM of the Regiment summoned me to his office & asked me if I would like to buy myself out of the Army. It took me about 10 secs to get over my surprise & say yes. I did not enquire as to why I should be offered something I had previously believed was impossible for an X class tradesman, & the RSM did not enlighten me.

The next day I was bundled into a truck and ended up 200 km away in a tank regiment. For the next 2 months I drove back to Dortmund every weekend where Renate helped me to sell Naafi cigarettes on the black market until I had enough to buy my freedom.

So at age 24 I ended up working in Newcastle on the LEO computer (tubes only, transistors were just making their appearance). Renate joined me & we spent about a year in England before joining IBM in Germany I started out well in computers but made the mistake of joining IBM.
HOW CAN JOINING THE #1 COMPUTER Co BE A MISTAKE? YOU ASK.
The problem arose because instead of putting me into computers, which I assumed would happen because of my background, they sent me on a basic course for punched card machines, keypunches, sorters, tabulators etc. Later when I arrived in San Francisco to help in the sexual revolution, having left Renate behind in Germany, the only employment background of use seemed to be my experience with keypunches etc, so I started working for a leasing Co. which proved to be a dead end job, & as the years drifted by my chances of getting into something more advanced became remote.

This was in the period between 1964 - 1970 when data processing underwent very rapid changes. The 1401 was replaced by 360 & then the desktop etc. During this period the Company moved me to LA, then NYNY . While in NY I lived mostly in the West Village & spent a lot of time in the Bleeker St Tavern. I also spent weekends on a friend's farm near Hobart. Don't know how valid my claim is but I believe I was one of the first maniacs to regularly ride a 10 speed around Manhattan.

After several years in NY working for the same IBM eqpt leasing Co as a service engineer, I returned to England to visit my parents & stayed there doing the same work for about 1 year in London. When a lady friend in NY telephoned & offered me a place to stay I got on the next plane.

So at age 35 I was back in USA, to find a recession in full swing. The only job available was as a security guard, so I spent the next few weeks patrolling the aisles of a Harlem Supermarket. Ever since that experience, even to this day I make a special effort to smile & acknowledge the existence of every security guard I meet. With the job market still at bottom I decided to try going into business for myself as a gypsy cab owner driver. Unlike Geoff (Moxon), whose close encounter with poverty forced him into sales, which turned out to be a very fortunate career changing event, my gypsy cab experience was also brutal but did not lead to fame & fortune.

After a few weeks of enduring abuse from fares who seemed to think traffic jams were an excuse to take their frustrations out on me I sold my business (i.e. 1 old Chevy hand painted yellow) to a Puerto Rican.

Fortunately for me a few days later I received a call from San Francisco offering me a job as a service engineer, so I departed the Big Apple A.S.A.P.

The next 5 years were very pleasant; I was at the end of a beeper as a solo engineer in the Monterey Pacific Grove, Salinas, area which is about 100 miles south of SF. The salary, which I received by mail was the same as in NY & I was rarely required to go to the office in SF. The area was mostly rural with great beaches , & the workload so light I spent lots of time running in the sand dunes with my beeper to occasionally bring me back to earth. Eventually I got a real-estate license & combined sales with my regular job.


NEXT EPISODE - CLUB MED TAHITI REAWAKENS A TEENAGE DREAM

Having read The Moon & Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham in my early teens at Grammar school, I had always dreamt of living on a tropical island like the painter Gauguin.

In the summer of '77, a few months before my 40th birthday, I decided to vacation with Club Med, Tahiti. My first sight of a tropical island was pure magic, as we arrived by boat just as dawn was breaking over the isle of Moorea. I have been addicted to falling in love most of my adult life, but this was love at first sight of a whole different kind.

A club med vacation is hardly a true back-to-nature experience, but as soon as I returned to California I started to make plans for a move to a pacific island. French Polynesia was my first choice but because of the difficulty of getting a permanent visa I decided on Maui.

After 2 days on Maui I discovered a remote beach at the end of a dirt road with a few Hippies camping out, living on food stamps & enjoying a carefree life. They made me welcome & I quickly began to appreciate living without the usual bills to pay. When my Honda arrived from California I laid claim to a small section at the end of the beach which was separate from the main 1/2 mile of beach, being cut off by natural lava rock walls. So now I had my own private beach, on which I built a raised platform with a queen sized bed. On moonlight nights I would watch the waves break on the reef & foam up the beach to within a few inches of my bed.

My normal routine now became gather firewood, start fire & when down to coals start breakfast of bulgur wheat, tuna & young cactus leaves. While breakfast was cooking I would run on the beach for 1/2 hr. After breakfast snorkel for a couple of hrs & then check out the beach for tasty unaccompanied female tourists. I met some very nice ladies from all over the world, & sometimes they would spend most of their vacation with me. If the beach was empty I would drive into town & play tennis on the public courts. I lived on the beach for the next 2 years until a Japanese outfit built a golf course & generally ruined the neighborhood.

Having spent the last 2 yrs without phone, electricity, TV, taxes or bank account, I was determined to keep things as simple as possible. The Big island of Hawaii had & still has a lot more empty space & a lot less people than Maui, so that was my next step, where I had the good fortune via a land swap to get a small u shaped valley about 1/4 mile wide by 1/2 mile long with a stream running through it. Even more fortunate was the long abandoned shell of a rock crusher. Any wood & most of its metal fittings had long since rotted away, but a few months work & we ( an Australian lady was now sharing my life) had a very liveable house with outdoor shower, solar panel for lights & a few other luxuries. Life was now not as simple & free as on Maui, but it was a far cry from working for the man every night & day.

Life took its usual course & we had 2 children, visited her parents in OZ every year for 2-3 months & continued to live in our little valley.


NEXT EPISODE - SINGLE ONCE MORE, & A NEW LIFE IN BALI
We were on our annual OZ vacation when after 10 years together Sue, my wife, announced she was not going to return to Hawaii. I discovered later that she had a trust fund which no doubt made her decision easier. Needless to say it took me years to get over the loss of my children, & as a way to get the craziness out of my head I was contemplating to move to Bali (I had already visited twice before & liked the Balinese people).

The move to Bali was precipitated by 4 armed men with dogs bursting through the walls of my house & disturbing my afternoon nap (the walls were mostly screen). Hawaii was in the middle of a war on drugs (MaryJ) & it appeared I was about to become collateral damage. So shortly thereafter I emplaned for the Isle of the Gods.

Realizing my money would not last & as a way to get busy & drive the demons from my head I started making a catalog of goods for export to US & EU. After about 1 year I went to UK with a suitcase full of costume jewelry; which I eventually ended up selling most of from a London market stall. Having made some contacts I returned to my rented house ($500 pa) in Bali with the idea of acting as a purchasing agent & commenced sending samples back to UK.

Six months later I had Rp 500 ($ 0.25c) in my pocket, no ticket home & nowhere to call home anyway, & to make matters worse in 3 more days I had to get a visa extension.

Fortunately I ran into Samba, a German friend who, upon hearing my story, very generously lent me $30. This was enough to get a visa for another 2 months & enough to eat fried rice from roadside stalls for another week. A few days later I went to the fax office to send a fax to my only remaining client , & the fax would not go through. I was on the point of saying try again when another employee called me over to the fax machine on his desk. He indicated a meter-long stream of paper which was still spewing forth. It was a huge order for bustier, full sequin dresses & various other sequined garments.

Something I discovered much later makes this story even more amazing - the samples had been lying ignored, still in their shipping boxes in Steve's flat where they were discovered by the anorexic daughter of a big London fashion house he was trying to get rid of before his Norweigen girlfriend came over for Xmas. These things are the latest thing she said, 'Maddona wears them, I can get lots of orders for these things', and she did.

The rest of the story is fairly straightforward. 75% of the order was made by one shop. I became close friends with the owner, brought in lots more orders & we agreed to get married & become one business. She runs the shop & I manage the factory we had built after the first year together. We are a small family business with about 40 employees, plus approximately another 60 piece workers who hand sew the sequins on to various garments.

I mostly seem to have been swept along by a chaotic universe, frequently managing to stay afloat by sheer luck as much as by effort & foresight.



BALI

P.s. I will try to describe Bali; my main difficulty is that I have been here so long that the differences between here & US & Canada no longer strike me like they used to do when I first arrived.

Bali is a tropical island with a still active central Volcano, & is known as the jewel of Asia & has for many years been one of the worlds top tourist destinations, with many uncrowded beaches, terraced rice fields & generally spectacular scenery. Accommodation ranges from 5* hotels to $5/night Losmen operated by local owners.

The main tourist area is centred around the main city of Denpasar (approx 1 million population) & consists of Sanur, Kuta-Legian & Nusa Dua. Sanur & Nusa Dua have most of the 5* hotels, golf courses etc while Kuta-Legian has 1000’s of small shops & 100's of restaurants, bars, & several discos. The restaurants range from top gourmet (I only eat in them when someone else is paying) to roadside carts with a wok serving fried rice or noodles which I used to patronise when I first settled in Bali.

If your knowledge of Bali is based on the Bali Hi movie I regret to inform you that the native girls no longer parade around with breasts swaying in the breeze, although some grandmothers in the small villages where life has not changed much in the last few hundred years still follow the old customs. Other than that the only bare breasts to be seen belong to OZ & European tourists on Kuta beach.

The most interesting thing about Bali for me was the contrast between the US & Asian way of living, eating, thinking etc.

Re retirement & the fear of becoming an old fart. I am 68 , a few years older than Geoff & John, & am probably already an OF. Fortunately I am comparatively wealthy & in any case the Asians seem to have more respect for white hair than Westerners. I have been 90% retired for the last 3-4 years & don't miss work at all. Fortunately I was able to train a very smart Chinese girl to take over the running of the Firm which has left me with lots of time to do the things I enjoy, such as working out, keeping track of my stocks in Singapore via the net, & reading.(mostly crime or SF, Grisham,Cruz Smith,Crichton & James Lee Burke are some of my favourites.

I have been having trouble with finishing my rough sketch autobiography, can't call it a CV, who would give me a job after reading my story? Back to my original train of thought, I am all alone in the house for the next few days, wife in Japan, maids have returned to their village for Galungan (Balinese equivalent of Xmas with lots of religious ceremonies). Now seems like a good time to finish my story, or maybe I should just confess I have not paid taxes for the last 28 years & leave it at that.

Here's a link to our products:-

http://www.geocities.com/simon_of_bali/


regards,
Peter
March, 2006


Photo: Pete Hebden















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