ONE

 

Of all the years of Daniel O’Brien’s early childhood, the sixth was the first to make a substantial deposit in his memory bank.

For one thing, it was the time of a total eclipse of the sun.

On that day, his family piled into his father’s almost brand-new Ford V8 and drove out to Glendon Halt.

Glendon Halt was just a whistle-stop about five miles out of town, where the railway line to East London passed close to the national road going in the same direction. A few more miles distant, the landscape gave way to mud-hut villages and kraals built on the hills that rolled towards the Bashee depression and the Great Kei River.

Glendon Halt was flat enough eventually to become Umtata’s first aerodrome. But in 1940 it was a nothing place, an open stretch of veld with the train line cutting through it, though for some reason it had become a favourite destination among the white population for Sunday afternoon drives.

Fathers would park their cars facing the road. People would open their doors, greet one another, and simply sit back and watch. Some would take along their Sunday afternoon tea.

What did they watch? Well, the alleged object of the exercise was to observe out-of-town traffic going either west towards East London or back into Umtata and thus possibly on to Durban. So starved for entertainment was the community. Or so it seemed to Danny at the time.

Years later, however, it struck him that these curious afternoon excursions may have been no more than a device by wives to keep their husbands out of the Umtata Club which, with the golf club, had the only bar open on a Sunday.

But the day of the eclipse was exciting. Most families had brought picnic baskets. The sun, as yet, was warm. Earlier that week, father Jim O’Brien, Digger to his friends, had exposed a black-and-white film to the sun and taken it to Dangerfield’s the chemist to be developed. Now he distributed lengths of it among the family and any others without protection for their eyes.

One of these was Billy Miller, who had arrived from town on an oversized bike with a pair of field glasses around his neck.

‘Whoa, Billy!’ said Digger. ‘Where d’you think you’re going with those?’

‘I brought them to see the ak-lipse, Mr O’Brien,’ said Billy.

‘Then it would be the last thing you would see,’ Digger said, prising the binoculars from the lad’s grasp. ‘The sun would burn your eyes to little bits of coal. Here you go, take one of these strips. Make sure you look through it. And does your mom know you’ve got your dad’s glasses?’

Billy’s expression told him she didn’t.

‘Okay then,’ said Danny’s father, ‘I’ll keep them in our car and drop them off at your home later.’

Billy Miller was Danny’s oldest friend. The two had been born within days of each other, in the same nursing home. Townsfolk said of Billy’s father, Dougie, that he was his own man, meaning that in most things his actions were unpredictable. If that was so, Billy Miller was his own boy and it did not help that his father was not around then to exert discipline, eccentric though that brand could be. A few weeks earlier, in an unusual act of conformity, Dougie Miller had joined the Kaffrarian Rifles and was swiftly posted to North Africa.

Just before the total eclipse, the birds fell silent and dogs that had accompanied their owners began to howl. The darkness that followed was not the blackness of night but was tinged with a green iridescence. And from out of that darkness, a strong wind arose. Some of the younger children wailed. Young Danny was imbued with a feeling he had never experienced, nor could understand. It was as though his personal galaxy had begun shifting.

An inner sense said, if the routine that night should follow day could be thrown off course, what else could be in store for a boy starting out in the world? Particularly since that world was already beset by war.

 

For war was the overwhelming concern.  Although hostilities had begun in the last part of the previous year, their impact was really felt with the beginning of a local recruitment drive and the launch of a War Fund.

Hundreds of young white Transkeians responded and soon disappeared to the nearest call-up centres, leaving behind relatives proud but anguished. Neville White, who lived in the O’Briens’ street, returned on a weekend furlough before being posted Up North.

While waiting for a train back to Pretoria, Neville was persuaded by the Owen Street youngsters to parade in full regalia. He stood in his bedroom, straight as a poker in khaki uniform and heavy brown boots, red tabs on his shoulders to show he was prepared to fight, not only for South Africa but for the entire realm of King George.

Neville was just turned eighteen. It was the last time the children saw him.

July 25 of that year was Digger O’Brien’s forty-eighth birthday. Danny and his mother went to the post office at the top of York Road to collect a parcel from his father’s brother in Devon.

Railway buses usually left from outside the station. But this time one was parked right outside the post office, encircled by a small crowd of onlookers, mostly black. A pile of leather suitcases stood alongside the luggage compartment.

Several policemen pushed their way through the crowd with six young men in tow. The men were pale and fair but wore dark suits and grim expressions. Three had dog collars like Dean Stewart.

Their demeanour was as grey as the day, for clouds had covered the sun like a lesser eclipse. When they climbed the steps at the front door of the bus, all turned and gave a stiff salute with their right hand.

Inside the bus, they began to sing, stridently, in a foreign language

‘What’s happening, mom?’ Danny asked loudly.

‘Shush, my boy!’ his mother said. ‘It’s just some people being sent away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they’re Germans.’

‘What have they done?’

‘I don’t know,’ said his mother. ‘But we can’t have them here. Not while the war’s on.’

Digger O’Brien, whose office was barely a block away, heard the singing and told Danny later it was the Horst Wessel Lied, the traditional marching song of the Nazi Party. He explained that people who were Germans were being rounded up around the country. Those priests and young novices, who came from a Lutheran seminary, would be kept in a camp near Pretoria until the war was over.

‘But why can’t they just stay where they are?’ Danny asked.

‘Because,’ his father said, ‘we don’t know what they’d do there. It’s better to have them somewhere where we can keep an eye on them.’

Danny rushed off to tell his brother, Patrick, and their friend, Howard Langton. The two were kicking a rugby ball around the O’Briens’ back lawn.

Howard, who was a Catholic, had heard the news already.

‘Anyhow, they’re letting Father Roganmauser stay,’ he said. ‘Even though he speaks German too.’

‘Why?’ Danny asked.

‘Because he’s Swiss, so he’s not a real German. And he’s a man of God.’

‘But aren’t those other priests men of God too?’

‘Not if they salute bloody Hitler,’ Patrick said.

It was very confusing. Another neighbour, just up the road, was Fritz Buhl, who ran the Ford garage. Although he had a South African wife, the boys knew he had been born in Germany because he had told them so and had the accent to prove it.

Fritz Buhl was overseas just then but Danny wondered what would happen to him when he came back to Umtata. Would they send him to the camp in Pretoria too? And what about his wife, Margaret?

Howard and Patrick said there were tons of other Germans around the Transkei, though they and their fathers, and maybe their grandfathers, had never set foot in Germany. The older boys had learned about these Germans in their history lessons. Almost a century before, after the Crimean War, several thousand German volunteers had been given land in British Kaffraria as a reward for serving with the British Army. Many of these settlers had trekked into the Transkei.

Their descendants were families like the Weisses, the Deutschmans, Pucherts, Snellings, Schultzs, Schneiders. Patrick and Howard reeled off the names. So what would happen to all of those people now?

Herman Weisse was another of Danny’s friends. He ran the hardware store his father had opened in York Road a long time before. He gave Danny nails and off-cuts of wood and sometimes let him help behind the counter.

Herman was a cheerful man who joked a lot. What would he think about being sent to a camp in Pretoria? What sort of camp was it, anyway? Quite a few people had what they called “camps” on the Wild Coast, mainly huts like the blacks lived in or shacks without electricity or running water. Was the camp in Pretoria like one of those?

No, said Howard. Most likely it would be a whole lot of tents, or maybe the government had taken over a jail for the Germans.

Danny would have liked to ask Dean Stewart what he thought of priests being sent away like criminals, or giving Nazi salutes. The dean was always easy to talk to. Not much taller than a nine-year-old, he was a hunchback who looked like the person on the Punch magazine covers or a gnome in a book of fairy tales.

But Dean Stewart was not an easy man to find. His parish extended through almost the whole of the Transkei and he was often away.

Danny would have asked the same question of his father but then he recalled that his father had a thing about Father Roganmauser. Perhaps it was because Father Roganmauser was German-speaking, but he called him Father Roman-Noser. It was all very strange.

Before supper, Danny went down to the river with Billy Miller.

It was mid-winter and the water was low, the willows and sneezewood trees brown and bent. With their catapults, the boys shot stones at a can drifting down to the bridge.

Danny asked Billy what he thought about the German priests. Billy took aim with such ferocity that his stone thudded deep into the mud of the other bank. ‘My dad,’ he declared, ‘says the only good Jerry is a dead Jerry.’

Later, lying in bed in the front room he shared with his brother, Danny studied as he did every evening the figures and faces formed by the knots and annual rings in the pine ceiling. The largest looked like one of Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads; another, further along, like a Cavalier. Still another had ears like Mickey Mouse and a nose like Goofy.

But that night, all of them were solemn and forbidding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                      FOUR

 The new Ford looked less than spruce as it laboured to scale the heights of the Kei cuttings, the pass between Umtata and East London.

Its newness, anyway, had been dulled since Digger, despite protests by Patrick and Danny, decided to stick to whimsy and call the car Old Bill. All his previous cars had been called Old Bill. This would be Old Bill Mark 4.

The summer sun at noon seared the surrounding hills and boosted the temperature in the valleys to that of a medium oven. The boys lay back on the rear seat and wished time away.

Two white-coated figures occupied the front section. One was Clifford  Makewane, Digger’s official driver. The other was their mother.

Iris O’Brien was dressed as she did for any motoring excursion that exceeded ten miles. Along with a dustcoat that covered her figure to mid-ankle, she wore white cotton gloves and a large scarf to protect her coiffure.

It was not typical attire for Transkei motoring, but Iris insisted that was the way they did things around Kimberley where she had grown up and where the fine dust generated by diamond excavations was more pervasive than anything the Transkei roads might throw her way.

Clifford’s white coat was regulation wear for trips around the territory in pursuit of his boss’s agricultural duties. East London was beyond that perimeter, and Iris O’Brien had suggested he wear something more comfortable. But Clifford declined. He believed, if white coats were to be worn on this journey, he should be inside one of them.

The three O’Briens were bound for East London on holiday. Digger’s commitment to the training course at Roberts Heights for two weeks had made it possible. School was in recess until after Christmas. Danny’s father had persuaded the Department of Native Affairs that, since he was being co-opted into His Majesty’s Service, Clifford should drive his family to their holiday destination.

The arrangement suited Clifford, who had relatives just outside East London and was due some leave himself.

They stopped for lunch, sandwiches and tea, before the assault on the cuttings. Just behind them, the Great Kei River snaked under a narrow rail-road bridge. For Danny it was always a relief to cross that bridge. He harboured a fear that the front wheels of the car would one day become trapped in the rail tracks and its occupants forced to follow the line to a point in some dark tunnel where they would meet a train head-on.

Old Bill tackled the pass reluctantly. Iris O’Brien, who had no head for heights, would say, ‘Careful around the curves, Clifford,’ and Clifford would answer, ‘Yes, madam,’ and pretend to slow down.

But soon afterwards the road improved, smoothing out into a tarmac surface as the coast came into sight. In mid-afternoon, the temperature fell too, moderated by a wind off the sea.

On a good day, the 150-mile journey could take four hours, or six on a bad one when rain obscured the potholes and turned dust on the windscreen into mud.

This was a good day. Clifford parked the Ford in one of a row of garages behind the Woodholme Hotel where the O’Briens usually stayed, and left to find a bus to the black townships.

The car would remain in the garage for the duration. Iris had taken her driver’s test the previous year, before Digger went overseas. But although she passed it, she did not drive. Arthur Klette, the auctioneer, was also Umtata’s official examiner. With unusual malice, he had made Iris reverse down the single lane of the old iron bridge. This so traumatised her that she vowed never to drive a car again.

For the two boys, holidays in Umtata could be monotonous. East London, by contrast, was a marvellous place. The esplanade extended from the harbour pier to an eerie promontory called Bat’s Cave, with shades of pirates and buried treasure. In between were a swimming pool, an aquarium and tearooms dispensing varieties of milkshake.

The bulk of the days was spent either on the beach or taking swimming lessons at the Orient Baths from Miss Nanni, a blonde instructress with the thighs of a front row rugby forward. Like Father Roganmauser, she was Swiss. Danny had never before thought of Swiss people being able to swim, what with all those Alps around, but Miss Nanni did so expertly.

There was a great deal more to do in the city itself. The shopping complex along Oxford Street stretched for more than a mile. They were grand stores, too, with a selection of goods Transkeians could only drool over.

One of the department stores, Garlicks, had an escalator with treads like the tracks of a Sherman tank, except they were made of wood.

Three cinemas up town showed the latest films and there was a café bio featuring a continuous performance of Tom Mix, Roy Rogers and Gene Autrey movies. Their mother called it a fleapit but allowed them to go anyway.

But the war was far more evident in East London than in Umtata. The Woodholme was at the end of the Orient Beach with an oblique view over the breakwater and the busy harbour where vessels of all sizes plied in and out. Looking seawards from their first floor window, Danny recalled with a chill the warning in the Territorial News about the vulnerability of the South African coastline.

Nights were particularly frightening. They had to draw the heavy drapes in their bedroom before turning on lights because a blackout was in force. Cars and buses along the Esplanade had their headlights taped down to a small square, emitting a niggardly beam. Traffic past the hotel was a procession of dark phantoms with slits for eyes.

The ships the boys could see in the roadstead during the day became invisible at night, ghostly reminders of U-boats and torpedoes.

When the rains came, and they took the bus to window-shop in the city centre, its windscreen wipers seemed to echo the slogan above the driver’s head: “Don’t talk about ships, don’t talk about ships, don’t talk about ships or shipping!”

The city centre was crammed with people in uniform and alive with excited chatter. Aircraft from the flying school at nearby Grahamstown would pass overhead, eliciting cheers and an extravagant waving of arms from those below.

The Orient beach became a point of relaxation and recreation for athletic young men, many of who would soon be going into action in Abyssinia against Benito Mussolini’s Italian forces. They were strangely cheerful. Iris O’Brien said that was because they at least would have a chance to see something of the world.

Less animated were the naval ratings manning the gun battery on Signal Hill, above the entrance to the harbour on the Buffalo River. Off duty, they mooched around the esplanade in pairs, sullen as bears. One, who seemed very friendly with Miss Nanni, told them he hadn’t joined the navy to spend his time in a blockhouse.

‘I may as well be behind a counter in a bloody bank,’ he said. ‘And I’d be earning more money.’

However, his opportunity for some excitement came sooner than he and his mates might have expected. Early one morning, a Portuguese freighter bound for Lourenco Marques in the neighbouring Portuguese province of Mozambique tried to sneak past without acknowledging a call from the naval battery to identify herself.

As the freighter sailed on, the duty officer gave the order for a warning shot to be fired across her bows. The single round from the battery gun struck the bridge and almost demolished the whole superstructure.

Patrick and Danny were in the harbour when the vessel was escorted in, under arrest, by tugs. The captain was led down the gangway to an army car, his white hair on end as though the shell had passed clear through it.

The Portuguese authorities claimed the navy had over-reacted by nearly destroying the freighter. In response, the officer commanding the Eastern Cape forces revealed for the first time that the German battleship Graf Spee was in the vicinity the previous November and had sunk a tanker off Inhambane in Mozambique.

Danny and his brother took the news with slack jaws. When Clifford Makewane arrived at the weekend to take them home, they left with less reluctance than was usual after a holiday in East London.

But the spectre of the dreaded Graf Spee did not fade entirely once the Ford had crossed the Kei River and headed up the roller coaster road into the olive hills beyond.

Home, after all, was only a day’s panzer drive from the Wild Coast, around whose rocky coves and deserted beaches might lurk any number of warships and submarines.