Changes wrought by the war affected conditions at Danny’s school.

They began with the introduction that summer of an “early morning” session, whereby pupils had two periods before breakfast and four after, finishing the school day two hours sooner than normal.

Mainly, the change was intended to give “grass widow” teachers whose husbands had enlisted more time to do their chores in the afternoon. Umtata, however, had few of those.

Miss Hornby, fresh from the teacher’s training college in Grahamstown, was one of several women teachers imported to replace males who had joined up. She was tall and thin and spinster prim. She did not believe it was proper for children to ask if they could go to the toilet. They had to ask to “leave the room”.

A boy in Danny’s class, painfully shy, forgot the proper question one day and Billy Miller, who sat next to him, had to tell the teacher, ‘Miss Hornby, Stanley’s left the room in his trousers!’

Jocky, Patrick’s Scotch terrier, was the only dog allowed in the school grounds. The headmaster, Frank “Bok” Baker, knew that Jocky had a fine appreciation of school discipline. He would follow Patrick to his desk and stay at his feet until the bell rang for break. More, he had a fine appreciation of school hours.

From Monday to Friday, Jocky would leave the house early and wait outside the Metro Theatre for the O’Brien boys to come up on their way to school. But on Saturdays and Sundays, he would lie in with the rest of the family.

The national campaign aimed at recruiting young men suddenly began, in an indirect way, to erode the size of classes in the upper standards.

Almost half the pupils at the Umtata High School and its satellite, the Umtata Primary School, were the sons and daughters of Transkei traders.

Trading stations outside towns and villages were required by law to be more than five miles distant from one another. Those closest to the outer boundaries of the Transkei were a long way from the education authority and remote from its insistence on compulsory white schooling.

Trading was very much a family occupation. Only wealthy traders could afford to hire managers. The rest expected that, at some stage, they should be able to rely on the labour of their children.

So some parents sent their children to school in relays. One year, Benjamin would appear in class, to be replaced the following year by his younger brother, Alfred. Then Alfred would have a sabbatical behind the counter of the family store and Benjamin would return, often unwillingly, to school.

The upshot of this arrangement was that some of the matriculation class boys were in the twenties, if they reached that level of education at all.

The chance to “join up” aggravated the situation. Traders’ sons who recently had left school clamoured to join the army. Thus they created vacancies at home, into which their brothers and sisters at school inevitably were drawn.

The problem revealed itself early in 1941. Bok Baker remarked on it to the whole school one morning, stressing the importance of an adequate education. But he himself was compromised, having served with the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War and still being young enough to enlist. He was waiting to hear where he was to report and for which regiment.

The principal therefore ended up making a speech in which he praised old boys of the school for their eagerness to go out and fight the Nazis.

That need, to fight, to move into a higher gear of aggression, caused Miss Gibson to suggest to the principal that the boys should learn some form of self-defence. ‘Right,’ said Bok Baker. ‘Do it.’

Miss Gibson taught English. She would not have been able to tell ju-jitsu from barn-dancing, or a boxing glove from a cricket pad. Bok ended up appealing to his students. So it happened that an instruction manual on “the gentle art of self-defence” by Canada’s world champion, Tommy Burns, which Digger O’Brien had brought back from Britain, became the text book for PT classes in the Drill Hall.

After studying it, Miss Gibson felt confident enough to demonstrate the value of the classic left jab, and how to follow it with a right cross to the jaw. Most of the boys copied her assiduously, jabbing and moving in their one-on-one bouts. But Billy Miller made nonsense of it all, attacking his opponents with a flurry of blows so intense that nobody in the junior school would go against him.

Early morning school also altered the nature of breakfast. Several of the O’Briens’ class mates who lived across the river would not have been able to go home for a meal, in the time the new arrangement allowed, so Iris O’Brien invited them to have breakfast with the family.

The O’Brien kitchen came to look like a refectory. Among those tucking in to porridge, bacon and eggs was another friend of Danny’s, Steyn Mostert, who lived way off on the other side of town.

As a teenager, Steyn’s father had fought for the Boers against the British. One of his proudest possessions was a Mauser rifle he kept in a cabinet in the sitting room. It was a finely tooled German weapon, light and portable. The carved wooden holster slotted into grooves behind the trigger guard, and thus could serve as the butt.

Sometimes, when Danny went around to Steyn’s house, the two would persuade Mr Mostert to let them handle the small-bore rifle while he told them how it was used.

Mr Mostert would demonstrate the weapon’s quick-loading magazine and show how the Boer commandos had fired the gun from the saddle, like a pistol but with much greater accuracy.

A sparkle would enter his eye as he told in Afrikaans of British troops, with their unwieldy single-shot Martini Henrys, being forced to scatter under the rapid Mauser fire.

Late in the same year, 1941, the Mostert family acquired a guest. Nick Mostert was a distant relative from the Western Transvaal where his father, Mr Mostert’s third cousin, had a smallholding.

Although fairly tall, Nick Mostert was slimmer than most Afrikaners Danny had met. He had dark hair, closely cropped, and a moustache the width of his lip.

His right leg was in a plaster cast and he walked with a crutch, made from a broomstick. Steyn took Danny aside. ‘He was in the war,’ he whispered. ‘He was a pilot in North Africa, but he had an accident.’

‘Then why isn’t he still in uniform?’ asked Danny.

‘He says it’s dangerous, if you’re in uniform, in the Transvaal. Especially if you’re an Afrikaner. Those OBs beat you up all the time.’

OBs were members of the Ossewa-Brandwag, an anti-war faction. It had the support of nearly half a million Afrikaners, many of whose relatives had opposed the British in the two Boer Wars of 1899 and 1901. They could not abide the thought that the South African government – under a former Boer commander, Jan Smuts, moreover – was now prepared to fight alongside Britain against Germany and Italy.

Nick Mostert spoke freely about the accident. The Boston bomber he was flying over the enemy positions, he said, was badly hit by ack-ack, anti-aircraft fire, from the ground. The other two crew members had been killed in the attack. Nick said he was forced to crash-land the aircraft on his return to base. The impact had broken his leg in two places.

‘I wanted to go right back and fly with this thing on,’ he added, tapping the cast. ‘I told them it was like falling off a horse. You must get up in the saddle again as soon as possible. But the group captain said the ankle had to heal properly. He said I must be patient.’

So he had come to Umtata to visit a part of his family he had never seen before. He said his brother, Jan, was already in the Tank Corps and waiting to be shipped Up North.

‘Man, he’s damn lucky,’ Nick Mostert said. ‘I can’t wait to go back there.’

Steyn’s mother, much younger than her husband, taught biology at the junior school. Mr Mostert had been a small farmer but no longer worked. Now, he and his nephew several times removed seemed to spend most of their days on the front verandah of the Mostert home, while Nick Mostert explained the finer points of flying bombers to his senior relative and Mr Mostert talked about the Boer War.

Danny noticed that Nick Mostert seemed to be extremely interested in details about that war. He was also interested in the Mauser and asked many questions about the weapon. What was its muzzle velocity? Its range? How many rounds a minute could it fire?

Some of the questions Steyn’s father was able to answer. But he shook his head at others.

As the weeks went by Danny also noticed that Mrs Mostert, who usually had a smile for everyone, began to look stern whenever Nick was in her company. Sometimes she would walk out when he entered a room.

At first, Danny thought it might be because she was afraid her husband’s relative might be damaging her polished floors with the rough crutch. But her attitude continued after Dr Ian Ross removed the plaster cast and Nick Mostert abandoned the broomstick, although he still walked with a prominent limp.

 

From John Ryan’s Spy story