Then, the town had fitted most of its residents like a worn but comfortable shoe.

Two phalanxes of roads marched as Roman legions down either side of a central park to converge a few blocks before they reached the old iron bridge straddling the river that gave the town its name.

Had such Romans continued for another twenty miles beyond that bridge, they would have encountered some of the most fabulous scenery on God’s earth, a vast wilderness where green hills plunged into spectacular valleys.

But Rome never ventured further south in Africa than Egypt. Its sole association with Umtata was, by proxy, a modest Roman Catholic church and convent.

Then, in the time of Daniel O’Brien’s boyhood, high-ceilinged houses pointed gables at the sky. It was a place of trees and shrubs and lawns. Expansive gardens, masked by inscrutable hedges, fronted on wide avenues. Space and quiet were the watchwords.

One exception was Saturday morning, market day, when most of the blacks who lived in their “locations” would come to town to shop.

Town was an understatement, for Umtata, parochial though it had been, could boast an Anglican cathedral. Thus, officially, it was a city, befitting its status as the capital of the Transkei, a territory redolent of British colonialism and the Kaffir Wars.

However, if a small town is a place where most residents know one another, and where some people may feel stifled by that proximity, then Umtata had been such a place.

The cathedral was imposing. An elegant cut-stone basilica dominated a complex adjoining the Rec and two public schools, one junior and one senior, on the road that eventually led past the general hospital to East London and a more structured civilisation a hundred and fifty miles away.

Immediately below the Rec was the Bunga, seat of the United Transkeian Territories General Council, where Daniel’s father had worked as senior agricultural officer in a cold office behind the debating chamber. It was a domed building supported by Doric columns.

The Rec (for recreation ground) and colonial town hall were other focal points of Umtata activity. Sports days, cricket and rugby matches were held at the Rec; concerts, plays and meetings in the town hall; fetes and bazaars at both. The town hall could have been called the city hall but never was.

Two of the main streets, York Road and Owen Street, ran down parallel from the cathedral and the Bunga. Downtown Umtata was concentrated around the eight blocks they comprised.

York Road housed the major shops. Owen Street embraced legal firms, doctors’ surgeries, the magistrates’ courts, public library, a newspaper office, the Metro Theatre and the O’Brien home – right at the river end.

Umtata’s hotels, four licensed and two private, were in side streets off York and Owen. All had names that belied their level of seediness – the Savoy, Royal, Imperial, Windsor, Clarendon and Grosvenor, after a British East Indiaman wrecked on the nearby Pondoland coast in 1782.

Below the house where the O’Brien family lived were the local pound and stock sale pens. This was where the young Danny O’Brien once witnessed birth for the first time, or second if you counted his own. A Friesland cow produced a calf with all the blood and gore the boy would have expected from the termination of life, rather than the start of one.

Opposite the pound was a smallholder called Ewing who grew peaches and vegetables and guarded them with fences of prickly pear and salt guns tripwired at strategic points.

Beyond was a general dealer named Maker, who lathe-turned wooden tops for the community’s youngsters, and a blacksmith shop owned by one of the O’Briens’ neighbours, Bill Langton, where shoes were fitted to police horses.

Just across the river was a “mixed” suburb. Most of its residents proudly acknowledged being coloured, mulatto but not black, descendants of the Khoisan, or Bushmen, who originally inhabited the Transkei.

Now Daniel drove into town trying to reconcile the small community he had grown up in with the third world sprawl it had become.

The central business district teemed with humanity. Informal commerce had replaced the stiffly regulated norms of yesteryear. Hawkers plied their trade from sinking pavements, selling all manner of merchandise – clothing, shoes, vegetables, fresh meat, curios, cheap plastic toys, kitchen utensils, patent medicines and the purportedly life-saving tinctures of sangomas.

Pedestrians were forced to spill over into the traffic lanes, adding to the congestion of buses and taxis, shabby cars and bicycles.

Now, Daniel’s old house advertised itself as the Nursing Council. However, it seemed even more dilapidated than under the previous owner who had been a backyard mechanic. The lawn behind the house, which once served as a sports field for the little boys in Owen Street, was clotted with weeds.

He parked his Toyota Land Cruiser at the bottom of the street, crossed to the traffic islands and walked slowly up the block, drawing on his memory as he passed every house.

Miss Kay Bell, who had taught the young Danny and his brother Patrick piano, would have been bemused to discover that her tiny cottage had become the headquarters of Lucky’s Guns. She rented the cottage from spinster sisters, the Misses Hill, who had a larger house on the property. They were a fragile couple who seemed to leave no imprint on life as they moved through it. For years, Danny believed the phrase, as old as the hills, referred to Doreen and Irene Hill. Where they had lived was now a transport company.

Jack Dewes, the district surgeon, had had a surgery two doors away from the O’Brien home. Young male tribal initiates, the Abhakweta, would queue up in his front yard to be circumcised, then surround the part with leaves and hop away in agony. Aptly, according to a sign, the surgery belonged to a herbalist.

The Langton residence, diagonally opposite, had become the branch office of the East London Daily Dispatch, the newspaper on which Daniel had begun his career. Three properties beyond the Langtons had been the home of Fritz and Margaret Buhl. Daniel counted to three, looked, then looked again.

And was taken aback at the sight of a modern structure, jerry-built of unplastered blocks.

The Buhls’s old house was gone. So was the garden cottage, rebuilt after that traumatic night, although both had been there when last he had passed through the town.

Strangely, the wrought-iron gate had been retained, although now rusted and broken. Daniel remembered the bent figure with a grey crew-cut who so often had leaned on that gate, looking out wistfully at a hostile world beyond. Fritz Buhl in his later years.

The changes to Owen Street were part of a process Daniel had begun to see on earlier visits. In York Road, many of the old shops had been torn down and or left to degenerate.

Urban blight was pandemic. The town hall was almost derelict, its gardens the haunt of “portrait” photographers and vendors of cheap watches.

These changes to the town Daniel knew were severe but he had witnessed the first of them.The biggest happened in the early Sixties when the apartheid government began to put in place its silly plan of balkanising South Africa to counter the threat of what was unavoidable ­- eventual rule by a black majority.

The idea was to create separate, autonomous states where blacks could be confined away from cities and white urban areas. Self-government was the carrot offered to those prepared to be leaders of these homelands. Because the Transkei already possessed a self-governing system, it became the initial Bantustan guinea pig and Umtata for a while was the fastest-growing centre in the country.

Meanwhile, another process began: the dispossession of hundreds of white traders whose stores had served to open up the hinterland. The process failed to recognise that the new Transkei budget would not run to financing enough black traders to replace these rugged frontiersmen.

Thus began a rapid decline in services and standards and many locals found themselves with no ready outlet for their maize harvests and wool clips.

And with the resultant impact on agriculture, the towns and villages themselves began to suffer. Corruption was heaped on mismanagement, as one crooked regime after another sought the utmost personal gain from the money the central government was throwing at its bastard step-child.

Now, sanity had begun to return with the release from jail of Nelson Mandela who was born not a hundred miles away. The Transkei and other Bantustans would achieve the dubious distinction of being the first states in the history of Africa to have their independent status revoked.

Still, Daniel’s trip from Durban had confirmed that the wounds of the apartheid exercise would take a long while to heal. And, he thought sadly, while the changes were inevitable, the process never should have been allowed to happen at the expense of a whole culture.

Soon, phantoms of that culture were to accost him at almost every turn. Daniel’s quest was to find out what had happened to two of them – the friend who had died in that fire and the German spy who killed him.

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DAYS, I’ve noticed before, seldom bode well when you begin them by missing a plane.
Missing, in this instance, should not imply the physical departure of aforesaid aircraft for it is there, large as life on Madras airport’s apron, pilot most likely gulping down his motion-sickness tablets.
But the assistant airline manager remains adamant. Check-in time is two hours before, not dam’ twenty minutes.
We tell him: blame the dam’ New Delhi fog. It got us here late, if eight –thirty in the morning may ever be so construed. Why, anyway, does Indian Airways out of New Delhi fly at sparrow? Certainly not to escape the fog, I say.
Loud altercation. Then, from our side, attempts at craven pleading. If we miss this connection, we point out, we’ll be stuck in Colombo for a week. Only one weekly flight to Johannesburg from there. Second prize, two weeks in Colombo.
We adjourn to a private office for the deputy airline manager to hear our case. He listens, eyes hooded like a judge, then announces that the argument is academic anyway. The Madras-Colombo flight has just left, winging southwards even as we speak.
Huge anger, only some of it theatrical. But it succeeds in invoking the Airline Manager himself. He arrives, kicking rumps in his wake, bearing profuse apologies and offers to stay overnight at company expense. Also propaganda about Madras being the real jewel in the Indian crown. Forget the Taj Mahal, the Pink City: Inspect out modern slums, view our Waterworks.
The man means well but his presentation falls apart after we mention the problems with the Colombo link. When we suggest the airline’s obligation in the matter should stretch to a swift charter flight, the Manager disappears. Not to be encountered again.
Back to town and the tour operators. There is a slim chance that some of us can go Air India to Harare, thence Johannesburg, though flights are wait-listed. My own situation is less severe since I intended to be in London anyway in three days.
At minimal extra cost, approximating one leg, I can fly there from Mumbai via Kuwait, tomorrow.
Night in Mumbai, mooching around the terminal. All the decent hotels are full, suggesting a convention of snake-charmers or up-market beggars.
Mumbai airport seethes with low-flying aircraft and lower-flying luggage. See Mumbai and duck! Killing time, dodging suitcases tossed hand to hand among sundry labourers, I recall one of my own.
It is in a locker at Johannesburg airport, lodged there on my way to India a week ago. The plan was that I should return to South Africa on the Saturday (tomorrow), meet up with my wife and accompany her to London the next day (Sunday), swopping cases in transit. To wit, one with all matter of winter woollies – in the airport locker – for one now in hand, containing pukka sahib cotton goods and other soiled clothing.
This original arrangement was rooted less in logistics than economics (see “leg” in a previous paragraph) for usually I try to fly sparingly, if at all.
First light, I broach the Mumbai airport kiosks. A Kashmir cardigan would be ideal. Size smaller, with a little loss of warmth around the wrists, it could double as a present for my wife. Not a Kashmir cardigan in the place, nor cardigan or jacket of any kind. Eventually, I am forced to settle for a Mumbai T-shirt with graphic views of the harbour.
The plane for London is late. Not surprisingly, for it has come from Auckland and Sydney. It is also dry! The dam’ Aussies have drunk all the beer! And no prospect of relief at Kuwait; you can lose a hand for tippling in that place.
Twelve hours of agony. And the movie is last week’s, Johannesburg-Colombo. More shock-horror. The skipper announces that it’s snowing at Heathrow and 16 degrees below.
Thank goodness for British reserve. Anyone wearing shirt-sleeves over a Mumbai T-shirt in brass monkey weather at Kennedy or La Guardia would be a public spectacle, laughed to scorn. I pass through Heathrow, Customs and all, without one comment although I read a few thoughts. They say: man’s been at the duty-free liquor, out of his skull, probably lost his overcoat down the loo.
Even the skinheads and soccer thugs on the Underground display only mild, but happily mute, astonishment. At Russell Square, my stop, the shops are long closed. I make my hotel a sprint ahead of terminal exposure and withdraw to room service and the television.
Next morning, Sunday, I review the situation. A search through my luggage produces a pocket mackintosh I forgot I had packed against the Indian monsoons that never eventuated. Anything would be better than nothing. And maybe something will be open in Leicester Square or Piccadilly.
Then suddenly the awful prospect dawns of being apprehended around Soho in a plastic raincoat, Sunday morning or not. (“But, officer, I was only looking for something to warm me up!” “I’m sure you were, sir, kindly step this way.”)
Downstairs, the bellhop informs me he knows of a clothing place that will be open at Notting Hill Gate. Much safer. Dash there, find it and – for 20 pounds – a foam topcoat that transforms me immediately into the Michelin Man.
Halfway back to Russell Square, I realise that I have left the plastic raincoat on the shop counter. Oh, well. I trust it will go to some deserving voyeur.
Time Wounds All Heels column