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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perceptions of countries, nations, often go awry. You build up impressions until they become a house of cards and, when one card turns up false, the whole house may come tumbling down.

Perceptions of Africa, this most enigmatic of all places, are particularly friable.

Take the case of Lesotho and Botswana which gained independence in the same week way back in 1966. Conventional wisdom (in that awful phrase) had no doubt which of the former British protectorates was most likely to succeed.

Lesotho, formerly Basutoland, had the highest literary rate of all Africa. Tribally, it was monolithic. Thus, freedom and democracy should have sprouted like weeds.

On the other hand Botswana, formerly Bechuanaland, was among the 20 poorest countries in the world. Much animosity existed among its far-flung tribes. There was bound to be conflict.

While Botswana has become one of three African states rated genuinely democratic, the Basotho people had to live through 26 years of oppressive one-party or military domination.

Other failed truisms lie in ruins elsewhere, such as one which said the Zambians would never overthrow their patriarch, Kenneth Kaunda. Another claimed Zaireans were too volatile to tolerate for long a money-grabbing tyrant like Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu reigned for 32 years before prostate cancer brought him down.

The other evening, the talk turned to Malawi. Several of our number had been there. They reminisced about “the warm heart of Africa”, as the brochures call it, and spoke about the courtesy of the people, of benign attitudes and eagerness to serve, of – well, just the mood of relaxation and absolute lack of tension.

An expatriate from Central Africa, who lived for a long time in Zambia and could remember Malawi when it was Nyasaland, said it was accepted when he was a civil servant that the Nyasas made the best “houseboys” of all. He didn’t mean that to sound patronising. But they were diligent and, well, just nice  people. Uncomplicated.

Listening, I recalled – but did not recount – an experience some years before.

I had spent some days on Lake Malawi. It is, by any standards, a marvellous place to be. But the next day I was due to catch a flight from Lilongwe, the capital.

Driving out of Monkey Bay, I missed the turnoff to Dedza. I stopped an old fisherman with a basket of carp. He said he knew a road I could take – over the escarpment. It so happened, he said, that his home was on the same route.

When I dropped him off, the fisherman pointed vaguely towards a rough track ahead. “There’s Lilongwe,” he said.

Very soon, I was enveloped in forest. People came fleetingly into view. It was a Saturday afternoon. Many squatted around cases of the local bottled beer the Malawians call “greens”.

The track got worse, and higher; the forest thicker. The atmosphere was like one of those early Ingmar Bergman films shot in the wilds of Finland.

On the brow of a hill, I came upon a crowd, their attention on something up ahead. But they were listening rather than watching.

Several hundred metres further on, the hill became a plateau with a few mud huts. In the foreground were two figures dressed in masks, like the abakweta initiates of the Transkei, and traditional skirts. They seemed to be simulating a spear dance.

One of my cameras, with a long lens, was on the front seat. I stopped, got out and picked it up. Even as I began to focus, the two figures turned in my direction and started to run at me.

Cautiously, I climbed back into the car and drove off. Slowly, then faster, as the two continued their pursuit. One threw a spear.

Many kilometres on, the track joined a trunk road to Lilongwe. I arrived after nightfall and booked into my hotel.

That evening, in the restaurant, I asked the head waiter what the encounter was all about. He couldn’t say because he wasn’t from the mountain area but called one of his staff who was.

The younger waiter said there must have been a recent death in that village. The two men were probably siblings of the deceased and, in tribal tradition, were feigning a spear dance in his honour. Nobody else, by tradition, was supposed to see them – which accounted for the crowd just over the hill, out of sight but not sound.

That was also why they had chased me.

“And if they had caught me?” I asked. “If my car had stalled?”

“Then,” said the young waiter, “they would have been obliged to kill you.”

From One Man’s Africa.

THIRTY-FOUR

 The scene beggared belief. Margaret Buhl didn’t know whether to cry or run away. The cottage was a smouldering ruin and her garden awash in water and people.

The irony was that Margaret had been to the Catholic Church she rarely attended. She had gone to ask Father Roganmauser to pray for her and for Fritz, in that prisoner-of-war camp where God only knew what he was going through. After the service, the priest had done so.

And now this. It was as though all the bad things that had happened to her in the past four years were reaching a climax in some mad conspiracy that would destroy her, physically and mentally.

Torches were flashing in a kaleidoscope of beams. Having swamped the cottage with water, the firemen were now intent on sponging it all up.

She approached the man who was giving the orders and realised that, under the helmet, it was Jimmy Millard.

‘What happened, Jimmy?’ she asked. ‘What has happened to my cottage?’ And then Margaret Buhl broke down.

Jimmy Millard sat her down on a dry spot on the kitchen steps. ‘Moses is dead,’ he said gently. ‘It looks as if he may have had an accident with the Primus. Knocked it over.’

‘Oh, Moses, Moses!’ said Margaret. She closed her eyes and put her hands to her head. She was silent for a long while and then she said, ‘But Moses was so steady! He didn’t drink! It’s hard to believe he would have been careless like this! ’

She stood up. ‘Something must have happened to him,’ she said.

‘Margaret,’ Jimmy Millard said. ‘Jock Brown is around. He also thinks there could be something odd. He wants to ask you about some papers we found.’

‘Papers?’ Margaret said. ‘Papers found where?’

The sergeant emerged from the shadow of the main house and handed her a cardboard file. In it she could see foolscap pages, typewritten. Some were sodden but most were dry.

‘What on earth are these?’ she asked.

‘Digger O’Brien says they’re confidential documents,’ said Jock Brown. ‘Documents stolen months ago from the NRV office.’

‘The NRV? So what were they doing here?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ said Jock.

‘But this is madness!’ said Margaret Buhl. ‘Why should they be here? Nobody here has anything to do with the NRV! Except Moses worked for Mr O’Brien, of course. Maybe he found the documents in the car, or something.’

‘Did you ever see a file like this in the cottage?’

‘I never went into the cottage after Moses moved in,’ said Margaret Buhl. ‘That was his private place.’ She looked across at the scorched walls, the smoking beams, and began weeping again.

Jock Brown walked across Owen Street to the O’Briens’ house. Digger had taken his sons home, away from the stark drama and the stench that fires always caused and attempts to put them out made worse.

Both boys had been distraught. They were in bed on the side verandah but certainly not asleep. The two men sat in the lounge while Iris went off to make tea.

‘What do you think, Jock?’ asked Digger.

‘I don’t know, but I think it’s a set-up,’ said the sergeant. ‘Or was an attempt at a set-up.’

Digger O’Brien nodded. ‘I think Moses was killed by an intruder,’ he said. ‘I know he wouldn’t have had those documents. And if Margaret had them, if she stole them, why did they land up outside the kitchen door?’

‘Unless Moses found them in the main house,’ said Jock Brown, ‘and was killed because of that. You once asked him to look out for anything suspicious around Mrs Buhl’s house. Remember?’

‘Yes, but killed by whom?’ Digger asked. ‘Margaret Buhl?’

‘No, not Margaret. She says she was at church and she knows we can easily check up on that. But if the intruder killed Moses over the papers, why didn’t he take them away with him? Assuming it’s a him.’

‘It has to be a him,’ said Digger.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he added. ‘I think the intruder was intending to plant those documents in Margaret Buhl’s house and then alert us somehow. Maybe by way of an anonymous letter.

‘I think it was the same person who took Margaret’s truck to Port St Johns. Perhaps not for the first time either. Of course!’ said Digger, as a thought came to him. ‘He wouldn’t have known that we knew it wasn’t Margaret Buhl down in Port St Johns!’

‘Thanks to the youngsters,’ said Jock Brown. ‘So he was looking to complete the frame-up by planting the documents he’d stolen earlier in Margaret’s house!’

‘So who is this person?’ Digger asked. ‘Ossie McComb? The dean says he saw him driving the truck. You think Ossie would be able to do that?’

‘Well, that’s the question. But we’re judging him on our perception of him,’ said Jock Brown. ‘Drunk by seven o’clock and unreliable in general. What if all of that’s a front?’

‘All right,’ Digger O’Brien said. ‘Then we must do two things. Ossie says he arrived from the Cape four years or so ago, and took the job at Buhl’s garage some time later. Let’s check that out. I can probably do it through the military. Find out exactly where he came from and when.

‘Also, we still have to put him face to face with Dean Stewart who says he saw him in Libode yesterday morning. Driving the Buhls’ truck. But, as I told you this afternoon, the dean’s going off to Butterworth early tomorrow and won’t be back until, probably, Tuesday. So that’s as much as we can do right now, as far as Ossie’s concerned.’

‘We’ll just have to watch to see he doesn’t scarper,’ said Jock Brown. ‘I’ll put one of my blokes on to that. Unless you want to give the job to Danny and his pals.’

Brown laughed but O’Brien looked grave.

Digger was thinking about his sons, particularly Danny, thinking that Danny wouldn’t be up to spying on anyone for a while. Earlier, when he told the boys about Moses, they had said nothing. But Danny’s frame was racked as though struck by a small earthquake, when he had turned them away, managed to coax them back to their home.

Digger O’Brien had experienced grief and seen it often in others. Death in the trenches of France had been constant. Every day, you almost expected to lose another friend; eventually, you became reluctant to make new ones.

However, how to deal with grief in two young boys was something else entirely.

Danny was sick that night as Iris had predicted. So his parents decided the boys should stay home from school that Monday and their father took the morning off. Patrick picked at his breakfast but Danny refused to eat. He stayed in his bed on the verandah, staring up at the corrugated iron roof.

Eventually, Digger walked Patrick through and sat him down on the other bed, opposite Danny. ‘I want to talk about Moses,’ he told his sons.

‘Moses was our friend,’ he said. ‘In many ways, he became part of the family. But now he’s gone, and we have to accept that. It will be hard, because we’ll miss him, but we have to get over it.’

Danny spoke, almost for the first time in some hours. ‘But Moses was so special, Dad,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t like other – ’

‘Like other what, Danny?’ asked Digger. ‘Like other blacks?’ Danny nodded.

‘No, Danny,’ his father said. ‘You’re wrong. Moses was special. But all people are special. We’re all born equally. The only thing that makes us different is our background, the opportunities we’ve had or haven’t had. Moses was lucky. He had a fair amount of education. He had good friends like you and Patrick.

‘He often told me how lucky he felt, how happy he was here among us. And he was happy right up to the end. What a good day he had yesterday! He scored two goals and was cheered like a hero. He must have felt on top of the world.

‘That’s what he’ll be thinking of now,’ Digger added. ‘Up there, looking down. But do you know what would make him sad? Seeing you two sad. And you, Danny, you must ask. Are you grieving for Moses, or for yourself? Because Moses certainly doesn’t want you to grieve for him.’

He could see his younger son thinking about it all but Patrick said, ‘Dad, we’re not only sad because Moses is dead. We’re sad because we might have been able to prevent it.’

‘How?’

‘On the way back from the soccer game, Moses said he’d finished with the latest Argosy and did we want to go to the cottage to fetch it. We told him we couldn’t. But if we had gone, maybe he’d be alive now. Maybe somehow the accident wouldn’t have happened.’

‘No, Patrick,’ Digger O’Brien said. ‘That was two hours earlier. It wouldn’t have mattered.’

But then he thought: My God, what if? What if the timing had been different? What if the boys had gone to the cottage, had encountered the intruder and been trapped in the same furnace?

 

 

 

 

 

THIRTY-FOUR

 

The scene beggared belief. Margaret Buhl didn’t know whether to cry or run away. The cottage was a smouldering ruin and her garden awash in water and people.

The irony was that Margaret had been to the Catholic Church she rarely attended. She had gone to ask Father Roganmauser to pray for her and for Fritz, in that prisoner-of-war camp where God only knew what he was going through. After the service, the priest had done so.

And now this. It was as though all the bad things that had happened to her in the past four years were reaching a climax in some mad conspiracy that would destroy her, physically and mentally.

Torches were flashing in a kaleidoscope of beams. Having swamped the cottage with water, the firemen were now intent on sponging it all up.

She approached the man who was giving the orders and realised that, under the helmet, it was Jimmy Millard.

‘What happened, Jimmy?’ she asked. ‘What has happened to my cottage?’ And then Margaret Buhl broke down.

Jimmy Millard sat her down on a dry spot on the kitchen steps. ‘Moses is dead,’ he said gently. ‘It looks as if he may have had an accident with the Primus. Knocked it over.’

‘Oh, Moses, Moses!’ said Margaret. She closed her eyes and put her hands to her head. She was silent for a long while and then she said, ‘But Moses was so steady! He didn’t drink! It’s hard to believe he would have been careless like this! ’

She stood up. ‘Something must have happened to him,’ she said.

‘Margaret,’ Jimmy Millard said. ‘Jock Brown is around. He also thinks there could be something odd. He wants to ask you about some papers we found.’

‘Papers?’ Margaret said. ‘Papers found where?’

The sergeant emerged from the shadow of the main house and handed her a cardboard file. In it she could see foolscap pages, typewritten. Some were sodden but most were dry.

‘What on earth are these?’ she asked.

‘Digger O’Brien says they’re confidential documents,’ said Jock Brown. ‘Documents stolen months ago from the NRV office.’

‘The NRV? So what were they doing here?’

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out,’ said Jock.

‘But this is madness!’ said Margaret Buhl. ‘Why should they be here? Nobody here has anything to do with the NRV! Except Moses worked for Mr O’Brien, of course. Maybe he found the documents in the car, or something.’

‘Did you ever see a file like this in the cottage?’

‘I never went into the cottage after Moses moved in,’ said Margaret Buhl. ‘That was his private place.’ She looked across at the scorched walls, the smoking beams, and began weeping again.

Jock Brown walked across Owen Street to the O’Briens’ house. Digger had taken his sons home, away from the stark drama and the stench that fires always caused and attempts to put them out made worse.

Both boys had been distraught. They were in bed on the side verandah but certainly not asleep. The two men sat in the lounge while Iris went off to make tea.

‘What do you think, Jock?’ asked Digger.

‘I don’t know, but I think it’s a set-up,’ said the sergeant. ‘Or was an attempt at a set-up.’

Digger O’Brien nodded. ‘I think Moses was killed by an intruder,’ he said. ‘I know he wouldn’t have had those documents. And if Margaret had them, if she stole them, why did they land up outside the kitchen door?’

‘Unless Moses found them in the main house,’ said Jock Brown, ‘and was killed because of that. You once asked him to look out for anything suspicious around Mrs Buhl’s house. Remember?’

‘Yes, but killed by whom?’ Digger asked. ‘Margaret Buhl?’

‘No, not Margaret. She says she was at church and she knows we can easily check up on that. But if the intruder killed Moses over the papers, why didn’t he take them away with him? Assuming it’s a him.’

‘It has to be a him,’ said Digger.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he added. ‘I think the intruder was intending to plant those documents in Margaret Buhl’s house and then alert us somehow. Maybe by way of an anonymous letter.

‘I think it was the same person who took Margaret’s truck to Port St Johns. Perhaps not for the first time either. Of course!’ said Digger, as a thought came to him. ‘He wouldn’t have known that we knew it wasn’t Margaret Buhl down in Port St Johns!’

‘Thanks to the youngsters,’ said Jock Brown. ‘So he was looking to complete the frame-up by planting the documents he’d stolen earlier in Margaret’s house!’

‘So who is this person?’ Digger asked. ‘Ossie McComb? The dean says he saw him driving the truck. You think Ossie would be able to do that?’

‘Well, that’s the question. But we’re judging him on our perception of him,’ said Jock Brown. ‘Drunk by seven o’clock and unreliable in general. What if all of that’s a front?’

‘All right,’ Digger O’Brien said. ‘Then we must do two things. Ossie says he arrived from the Cape four years or so ago, and took the job at Buhl’s garage some time later. Let’s check that out. I can probably do it through the military. Find out exactly where he came from and when.

‘Also, we still have to put him face to face with Dean Stewart who says he saw him in Libode yesterday morning. Driving the Buhls’ truck. But, as I told you this afternoon, the dean’s going off to Butterworth early tomorrow and won’t be back until, probably, Tuesday. So that’s as much as we can do right now, as far as Ossie’s concerned.’

‘We’ll just have to watch to see he doesn’t scarper,’ said Jock Brown. ‘I’ll put one of my blokes on to that. Unless you want to give the job to Danny and his pals.’

Brown laughed but O’Brien looked grave.

Digger was thinking about his sons, particularly Danny, thinking that Danny wouldn’t be up to spying on anyone for a while. Earlier, when he told the boys about Moses, they had said nothing. But Danny’s frame was racked as though struck by a small earthquake, when he had turned them away, managed to coax them back to their home.

Digger O’Brien had experienced grief and seen it often in others. Death in the trenches of France had been constant. Every day, you almost expected to lose another friend; eventually, you became reluctant to make new ones.

However, how to deal with grief in two young boys was something else entirely.

Danny was sick that night as Iris had predicted. So his parents decided the boys should stay home from school that Monday and their father took the morning off. Patrick picked at his breakfast but Danny refused to eat. He stayed in his bed on the verandah, staring up at the corrugated iron roof.

Eventually, Digger walked Patrick through and sat him down on the other bed, opposite Danny. ‘I want to talk about Moses,’ he told his sons.

‘Moses was our friend,’ he said. ‘In many ways, he became part of the family. But now he’s gone, and we have to accept that. It will be hard, because we’ll miss him, but we have to get over it.’

Danny spoke, almost for the first time in some hours. ‘But Moses was so special, Dad,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t like other – ’

‘Like other what, Danny?’ asked Digger. ‘Like other blacks?’ Danny nodded.

‘No, Danny,’ his father said. ‘You’re wrong. Moses was special. But all people are special. We’re all born equally. The only thing that makes us different is our background, the opportunities we’ve had or haven’t had. Moses was lucky. He had a fair amount of education. He had good friends like you and Patrick.

‘He often told me how lucky he felt, how happy he was here among us. And he was happy right up to the end. What a good day he had yesterday! He scored two goals and was cheered like a hero. He must have felt on top of the world.

‘That’s what he’ll be thinking of now,’ Digger added. ‘Up there, looking down. But do you know what would make him sad? Seeing you two sad. And you, Danny, you must ask. Are you grieving for Moses, or for yourself? Because Moses certainly doesn’t want you to grieve for him.’

He could see his younger son thinking about it all but Patrick said, ‘Dad, we’re not only sad because Moses is dead. We’re sad because we might have been able to prevent it.’

‘How?’

‘On the way back from the soccer game, Moses said he’d finished with the latest Argosy and did we want to go to the cottage to fetch it. We told him we couldn’t. But if we had gone, maybe he’d be alive now. Maybe somehow the accident wouldn’t have happened.’

‘No, Patrick,’ Digger O’Brien said. ‘That was two hours earlier. It wouldn’t have mattered.’

But then he thought: My God, what if? What if the timing had been different? What if the boys had gone to the cottage, had encountered the intruder and been trapped in the same furnace?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jan Christian Smuts was South Africa’s war-time Prime Minister and a Field-Marshal in his own right.

Although he was one of a group of visionaries who in 1920 conceived the idea of a League of Nations to monitor global peace, wars were what Jan Smuts knew best.

The Second World War was his fourth. Jannie Smuts had been a general in both Boer Wars, on the Boers’ side, and had led Allied operations against the Germans in East Africa in the First World War.

His record was not without blemish. As Minister of the Interior, before the First World War, he was ruthless in his attempts to put down Mahatma Gandhi’s passive resistance campaign in Natal and the Transvaal; as Minister of Mines, he was heavily criticised for setting

the armed forces against South Africa’s miners in their disputes over working conditions in 1913 and 1914.

Three years into this war, however, South Africa desperately needed someone to look up to, and Smuts was the obvious one to hand.

The campaign was beginning to lose its glamour. After the first flush of success by the South African forces against the Italians in East Africa and Abyssinia, the pendulum began to swing the other way. Late in 1941, South Africa’s Fifth Infantry Brigade had taken a battering from Rommel’s Afrika Korps in the Western Desert. More than two hundred South Africans were killed, several hundred wounded and many captured.

Six months afterwards came Tobruk, where the fatalities were even heavier. More than thirteen thousand South African volunteers were taken prisoner. Most ended up in German concentration camps.

For several Transkei families, the battles at Sidi Rezegh and Tobruk were acutely tragic. Among the many young men reported “missing, presumed dead” was Neville White, the O’Briens’ neighbour who had been so proud of his red combat tabs.

The curtains in the front room of the Whites’ house were drawn for days while neighbours, including Iris, kept up a supply of meals to Neville’s father, mother and two sisters.

One of those who came to console the family was Father Roganmauser, even though the Whites were Anglican.

Digger O’Brien was about to park the Ford outside the O’Briens’ home. He spotted the priest’s battered Chev behind him, making for the Whites’ house. Hurriedly, he continued down, turned into the driveway and closed the gate. Father Roganmauser was the most menacing of all the Transkei’s bad drivers.

On one occasion, Jimmy Millard had been travelling along the Port St Johns road when he saw Father Roganmauser approaching. Jimmy turned and drove into the nearest field. The Chev followed, ploughed through the rows of maize and, with unerring accuracy, dinged the front of Jimmy’s truck. After which Father Roganmauser got out and asked Jimmy if he would mind calling around at the cathedral to check the geyser.

Despite himself, Digger O’Brien was forced to review his opinion of the Catholic priest after that visit to the White family.

In fact, Digger himself had been baptised as a Catholic, had grown up and been a member of the choir in a Catholic church in Cheapside, London. Then he and his elder brother had heard that the Church of England in the area was offering choirboys more money and they switched religions.

Nor did the tally of local casualties stop with Tobruk. Every week, the Territorial News ran a list of Eastern Cape men missing, believed dead or captured, a column that continued to grow considerably longer than another alongside it listing reports from the various fronts in which South Africans were mentioned in dispatches.

There was conflict on the home front too. One of the reasons Jannie Smuts had elected to have recruitment for the armed forces on a volunteer basis was because of the outcry after his administration declared war against Germany.

The white population was divided on the war issue. Conscription almost certainly would have led to civil unrest. As it was, the second year of South Africa’s involvement caused an outbreak of fighting around the Johannesburg City Hall that continued for two days.

Responsible for much of the dissent was the Ossewa Brandwag, a body of Nazi sympathisers who modelled themselves on the Nazi Storm Troopers. Although the OB was declared an illegal organisation after the Johannesburg violence, it continued to work underground, plotting subversion.

On Christmas Eve, 1941, a story had broken in Transvaal newspapers which shocked the nation. Robey Leibbrandt, South Africa’s light-heavyweight boxing champion who had represented his country at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, was arrested on charges of high treason.

Leibbrandt met Hitler at the Games but even before that had been impressed with his ideology of National Socialism. The boxer had returned illegally to his home country earlier that year after undergoing training in sabotage and espionage in Germany. He was put ashore on the west coast from a sailing yacht and immediately began to recruit other Nazi sympathisers for an audacious conspiracy called Operation Weissdorn.

The plot sought to overthrow the Smuts coalition government, assassinate Smuts and, with German military backing, establish a National Socialist republic in South Africa. It failed, largely because the war authorities received inside information about Robey Leibbrandt’s presence in the country and his activities. After a long trial, Leibbrandt was sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment by the Smuts government. Jan Smuts feared there would be a huge backlash if Leibbrandt were to hang.

This inter-group tension among white South Africans had some ironic consequences. One of the O’Briens’ Kimberley cousins, Ernest Wright, was assaulted by a bunch of OB thugs late one night on a platform at Johannesburg’s Park Station because he happened to be wearing a uniform.

Ernest was beaten so badly that he spent two months in hospital and later was declared unfit for active service. Weeks after his discharge, he was assaulted once more on the same platform – this time by a bunch of pro-war zealots because he was in civvies.

Finally, Umtata’s civic leaders decided to hold a memorial service for Neville White and other young men who plainly now would not be coming home.

It was an ecumenical event outside St John’s Cathedral. Dean Stewart conducted the ceremony. Father Roganmauser echoed the dean’s sentiments about a senseless loss of young lives. A minister from the Dutch Reformed Church was also there, since two of those missing believed dead were DRC congregants.

From the cathedral bell tower, a bugler from the Umtata High School cadet band played the Last Post and Reveille. The dean quoted poet Laurence Binyon’s requiem from the Great War:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old

     Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

     At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.”

And got it wrong.

Digger O’Brien was careful to have his NRV men in position before the arrival of the more practised Native Military Corps and the school cadet band. The parade down York Road to the market square was led by the school’s drum major, Georgie Wood, tossing his mace high. A troop of Boy Scouts brought up the rear.

Patrick had wanted to join the scouts but his father flatly refused. He said there was nothing the scoutmaster, Arthur Davies, could teach anyone about anything.

After the service, Digger approached Dean Stewart to whisper in his ear.

‘It’s “grow not old”, Mr Dean,’ he said. ‘Not “not grow old”.’

‘Ah,’ said the dean. ‘Sorry about that, Digger. But then you’ve had more experience with these things.’

‘Yes,’ said Danny’s father, ‘but then I’ve heard lots of people with experience get it wrong too. It just sounds better the right way. I’m sure the poet preferred it like that.’

Dean Stewart was an eloquent man who liked to punctuate his own sermons with poetry. ‘That’s very true,’ he told Digger. ‘I won’t make the mistake again. And I fear we’ll have plenty of opportunities in the near future to get it right!’

As the year wore on, some Umtata families began to get word of relatives captured at Tobruk and Sidi Rezegh.

Whatever letters were allowed through the Italian and German censors were cryptic, sometimes ticking off statements on a prepared form, usually venturing not much more than that the writer was in good health.

One evening, however, Digger told Iris O’Brien that the Dudleys had just received a strange letter from their son, Robert, who was being held in Stalag VII, a prisoner-of-war camp near Moosburg in Germany.

George Dudley was another NRV volunteer. He said Robert’s letter was more expansive than previous letters from him but contained certain references they could not understand. ‘Robert says they wouldn’t believe who else is in the camp with him and the other Transkei chaps,’ said Digger. ‘Then, later, he asks how the family’s Ford is going.’

‘That is odd,’ Danny’s mother said. ‘Don’t the Dudleys still have that old Buick?’

Information about conditions in the prisoner-of-war camps could become distorted by the time it reached the level of the local junior school.

Trevor Clark, a new boy at the school whose mother had moved the family down from Johannesburg and taken a job in the public library, told his classmates how the Germans were using Allied prisoners to make babies for the Nazi cause.

They would suspend the prisoner and a German woman, face to face and close to each other, on contraptions like the horizontal bars in the school gym and prod the prisoner in the bottom with a bayonet until the baby was made.

As amusing, but not apocryphal, was a story Pat Lawlor was told in a letter from his son, Andrew, in Cairo.

The camp where Andrew Lawlor was billeted was surrounded by a fence. Latrines were open ditches along one perimeter. Local Egyptian farmers had been given permission by the camp commander to collect the excrement to use as manure.

One morning the young man had gone out to ablute. As he began to crouch, one of the farmers thrust a spade through the fence. Afterwards he withdrew the spade and scuttled away.

‘Andy turned around to check the result of his efforts, as one does,’ his father said, ‘and there was nothing. Nothing at all. He says he even looked in his turn-ups!’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cadet journalists would ask why they were required to learn shorthand. Was it really that important?

Yes and no, I would say. Shorthand could be a good servant but a bad master. If you used it with your mind in neutral, which really was the danger, you could easily miss the significance of what you were taking down. It was a skill that needed to be used with mental alertness.

Not having been through a cadet course, I never learned shorthand. The closest I came was a kind of speedwriting, mostly of my own manufacture.

Only once was I almost caught in the breach. It was when I was working on the Western Morning News and Evening Herald in Plymouth, England.

I had applied for the reporting job from London and went down a day before the final interview. I discovered which pub the local journalists frequently, found a few there and introduced myself.

“South African?” said one. “How’s your shorthand?”  Non-existent, I said.

“Well,” he said. “The editor always tests applicants by asking the shorthand form for two words. ‘Hospital’ and ‘ambulance’. Nothing else.”

There and then, they taught me how to scribble the two words and the next morning it all went as planned. Except that the editor then asked me my shorthand speed.

“Speed?” I said. “Yes, how many words a minute?” he said.

I had no idea what the average shorthand speed was but had to say something. “About one-twenty words a minute,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he said. “A hundred and twenty? That’s very good!”

Some weeks later, the printers of the Kellogg’s cereal boxes began a nation-wide strike. It spread to the printers of provincial newspapers. A few of the smaller publications never recovered.

But our editor had a plan. He called me into his office. “We can’t use our presses because of the silly strike, but I want to produce three editions of the Morning News on our roneo machines.

“We’ll obviously get news from our own reporters but the agencies are also  affected by the strike. Now, you are far and away the best shorthand writer we have. So I want you to monitor the BBC radio news and give us the contents of every broadcast.”

Dark gloom! The next few weeks were hell. But somehow I got through them with a hugely tested memory and improvisation. When the strike ended, the editor said he was extremely grateful. So was I.

Still, my ordeal brought me several new friends, mainly from the group who knew about my shorthand disability. Another was a Welshman, John Summers, the only other reporter not from Devon. John and I had something else in common. The previous year I had worked for some months behind the bar at the Taff’s Well Inn, near Cardiff. He was from Swansea.

I had an old Fordson van, and on our time off the two of us would sight-see. On one occasion, we heard that author John Steinbeck was in Kingsbridge. “Let’s go and interview him,” said John.

We pooled our money, brought a large and expensive bunch of flowers, and found the cottage where the Steinbecks were staying. We knocked on the front door and John Steinbeck opened it.

“We brought these for your wife,” we said. “Thank you very much,” said Steinbeck and promptly closed the door.

One of John Summers’s ambitions was to sail the Atlantic. I was planning to emigrate to Canada at some stage anyway. We located a yacht for sale that had made the trip several times and began preparations.

First, we needed to be conditioned to open water. When we weren’t working, we would hire a runabout and putter around Plymouth Sound among the ships. Getting bolder, we drove to Salcombe and hired a sailing dinghy from a firm owned by the Queen’s Yachtsman, Uffa Fox.

We set out and, in the middle of the bay, hoisted the sail. The dinghy almost overturned. Fox himself raced out in a runabout and yelled, “Put down the bloody centreboard!”

John’s  Atlantic ambition cooled after that but he had another: to write a book (faction, fiction based on fact) about Dylan Thomas, and the poet’s tragic life. He found it deplorable that someone with that talent should have died so young and alone in New York, alcohol addicted and penniless.

On our trips around, John Summers would recite Thomas’s poems at length, in his own Welsh accent, in particular the poem about death: “Do not go gentle into that good night”  . . . “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Later that year, I left Plymouth and returned to London. For a while, John and I kept in touch. He moved to the Sunday Telegraph and covered the Aberfan mining disaster in 1966. He personally filed a writ to the High Court on behalf of the survivors and bereaved, and eventually had the money in the relief fund unlocked.

After I came back to Africa, the contact was broken.

But this week I traced John Summers on Google. He had continued to have an eventful life. He wrote a novel about Aberfan called “Edge of Violence” which Treasury lawyers tried to ban. He interviewed Winston Churchill in the last year of his life.

He became a full-time writer and travelled the world via Australia and Canada. He wrote about his travels, a novel about growing up in Wales during the Depression, another entitled “Rag Parade”.

Also, fulfilling that second ambition, a book called “Dylan” which was a mixture of events in Thomas’s life and his own.

And, ironically and tragically, when John Summers died in 2008, there was a mirror image of Dylan Thomas in that too. He had become embroiled with the Swansea council over the release of his second wife’s will. He was forced to leave the marital home and move into a council flat.

After a demand for £6,000 in back taxes on that home, he wrote to his friend Harry Greene. “I’ve come to the end of my life, Harry . . . Every penny I possessed — gone. House gone. Everything gone.”

When Greene received the letter, he immediately alerted Swansea police, who broke into John Summers’s flat and found him already dead, apparently of natural causes.

Whether my friend John went “gentle into that good night”, or whether he “raged against the dying of the light”, only he could know.

 

 

A week for banquets, two in as many nights, requiring frantic relaundering of my only dress shirt. Does anybody have more than one? Other than waiters, toastmasters and Anglo American chairmen?

Speaking of toastmasters, there was a good Master of Ceremonies at the first do. The head of the group throwing this particular bunfight was from the Free State so the MC had a ready tale about Free Staters. Similarly, he was able to identity in light vein with the guest speaker, who was from Washington; and finished by telling an ethnic joke involving the co-sponsor.

It was a decided improvement on the average black-tie evening, with overworked and often unrelated anecdotes.

In the matter of after-dinner speaking, we follow the Americans. We believe for a speech to be acceptable it must be started – and often ended – with a funny story.

Mr Jones, whose field is making conduits for waste products, will begin by saying that drains always remind him of the story of Pat and Mike who become marooned on a desert island and encounter a passing mermaid.

The polite laughter that greets this totally irrelevant piece of fiction then encourages Mr Jones to embark on his speech, proper, which invariably will begin with “I shall not take up much of your time tonight” and end, 50 minutes later, with “but I have taken up too much of your time already”.

British speakers, good British speakers, seldom feel the need to tell funny stories. Bad ones trot out the old chestnut about the Christian in the Colosseum who talks a succession of lions out of having him for dinner. (“I merely told them they’d have to make a speech afterwards.”) But the aim in public-speaking in Britain is to entertain one’s audience by quality of language and delivery, rather than cloak-room narratives.

Personally, I tend to follow the British. On occasions when I am dragged, kicking and screaming, to a podium, I seldom attempt to tell jokes. That may take aback people who expect I might, as the writer of an allegedly humorous column.

Not that I do much to entertain by language and delivery. But experience has taught me that as a raconteur of funny stories, I should have stood in bed.

It happens even when I try to tell a story in the pub. Either I am bound to get the punchline wrong or else, more usually, I find I am interrupted before I can even get that far. People have an uncanny knack for upstaging me that way.

What occurred in the club the other day is typical. I was telling the rest of the group a story about a man on a train who reads page one and two of his newspaper, then crumples it up and throws it out of the window. He does the same with pages three and four and the rest of the paper, crumpling up every page and throwing them out of the window.

A woman sitting opposite says, “Excuse me, why did you do that?”

“Do what?” says the man.

“You tore up your newspaper and threw the pages out of the window.”

“Well,” says the man, “it keeps the tigers away.”

At that point, the member who had won the previous night’s weekly draw walked in. Immediately, attention was shifted in that direction and the clamour grew for him to buy a round. In the melee, I was forgotten.

By everyone but Dick. Courteous to a fault, is old Dick.

“Sorry, John,” he said. “You were telling us . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “So then the woman says, “’But there are no tigers around here!”

“’That’s right,’” says the man. “’Very effective, isn’t it?’”

Dick looked pensively into his glass. “I see,” he said. “H’mm.”

My wife told me a story some weeks ago, which she’d heard from someone in her department, about a family of worms – a mother worm, father worm and little worm – who, for a reason undisclosed, were obliged to cross a motorway.

When they got safely to the other side, the little worm exclaimed, “And now there are four of us.”

Why, my wife wanted to know from me, was that little worm’s arithmetic awry?  I couldn’t tell her. “Because,” she said with an air of triumph, “little worms can’t count.”

The story bothered me. To an extent that it kept me awake a good deal of that night.

I woke my wife too. “That worms story of yours,” I said. “You sure you got the punchline right?”

“Of course,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

I couldn’t leave it there. Somewhere, I felt, the story had become adulterated, had come to lose something vital in translation. No one could have thought up a joke so outstandingly unfunny.

I examined the components. The worms; one small, two large. The motorway. Why a motorway? Now there are four of us, the little worm had said. Any significance in the number four? Why should they be worms anyway?

And then, suddenly, it came to me. Of course! They weren’t worms at all. They were snakes. Mother snake, father snake and little snake. And the little snake had got his arithmetic all wrong  – because he was no adder!

    I decided to wait until morning to tell my wife. “Nonsense!” she said. “They were worms. I heard that part quite clearly.”

A woman at the next table on the first night told the worms version, and her companions fell about laughing.

I decided not to put them right. If there’s anything worse in company than a mis-told joke, it’s the wise guy you tells you it is.

Time Wounds All Heels column