From Spy story (Amazon-Kindle)

                                                                      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.