Winter of a pukka sahib’s discontent
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
At least reporters got a response
By the sort of contradiction that modern technology often inflicts upon us, the personal computer most “print” journalist use to transmit their copy is, essentially, impersonal.
They simply send a story through the international ether. Sometimes its receipt is acknowledged, sometimes not.
The post office cable, the old-fashioned telex message, was an umbilical cord. It even has its own idiom.
Cable-ese we called it. Because the cost of press telegrams was calculated by the word, and that cost obviously ballooned with distance, prefixes were used. Un- meant no or not; pro- for or to; et, and; ex-, from; and con-, with. Soonest meant as soon as possible.
It was a shorthand that sms experts might consider looking at today.
This genre of language produced one classic story of the Reuters man dispatched by his London office to Zanzibar after the 1964 revolution. A week passed with no word from him. The foreign editor sent a cable: “Why unnews?” he demanded.
Not much was happening on the spice island after a spate of killings and arrests, so the reporter sent a message back. “Unnews, good news,” it said.
The response from the foreign editor came the same afternoon. Short and sharp. “Unnews, unjob,” he cabled.
A threat like that would have sent most journalists to their typewriters to dash off the first “situationer” piece that came to mind. This correspondent, however, was made of sterner stuff. “That makes you forty-love,” he replied.
The need to keep down cabling costs led to some wonderful invention. Another Fleet Street friend spent three weeks in Addis Ababa during a similar lull in news. Eventually, he sent the foreign editor a two-word cable: “Nunc dimittis.” Which translated, as choirboys past and present know, means “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace . . .”
Quick as a flash, the foreign editor replied with another biblical reference: “Matthew 24.6.”
My friend reached for the hotel Gideon’s, looked up the reference, then rang for bar service. Matthew 24.6 held no comfort for a restless soul.
It read: “But the time is not yet.”
Often, service messages could take on a certain ambiguity. More so if the receiving party chose to read them that way.
Eric Robins, a veteran Time correspondent, was declared a prohibited immigrant in the former Rhodesia after Ian Smith’s UDI. He and I were staying at the same hotel in Lusaka when he received the notification. Earlier, Eric had written a profile of Sir Roy Welensky for the magazine. Welensky was the first and last premier of the doomed Central African Federation, a former professional boxer and a florid personality.
At three o’clock in the morning Zambia time, hours before publication of his piece, Robins was dragged from his bed by a porter monitoring the hotel telex machine.
It was a message from his New York office. “How old Welensky?” it said.
Eric was infuriated. He knew Roy Welensky’s date of birth had to be in a hundred files in the Time library and that the person editing his article could easily have looked it up.
So he sent this message back: “Old Welensky fine,” it said. “How you?”
From One man’s Africa
Boy whiz who found meaning in a bomb
Fifty years ago this month, Frederick John Harris planted a powerful bomb in the whites-only concourse of Johannesburg’s Park station which killed one elderly woman and injured 22 other commuters.
So 77-year-old Ethyl Rhys became the first civilian to die in the resistance campaign. And, nine months later, Harris himself became the only white man executed for political activities.
Chairman of Sanroc, the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, John Harris telephoned the railway police to warn them the bomb was primed to detonate at rush hour that afternoon. He claimed the policeman he spoke to laughed and put the phone down.
But, ironically, it was a member of the railway police who was responsible for Harris’s arrest. Just before the bomb exploded, he had noticed a man frantically trying to start a small car near the station entrance. His offer of help seemed to send the man into a greater panic. Suspicious, the policeman made a note of the vehicle’s registration number.
At the time of the atrocity, the mood around South Africa was strangely muted. The Rivonia trialists had been sentenced exactly a month earlier, casting gloom over black opponents of apartheid.
The Spear of the Nation, Umkhonto weSizwe, was effectively blunted. Poqo, the military wing of the Pan-Africanist Congress, had been crushed the previous year, mainly through police informers.
Encouraged by its Pogo tactics, the security police decided that infiltration was the way to go. Also in 1963, a group of frustrated liberals had established an underground organisation they called the African Resistance Movement (ARM). Most of the members were white – academics, lawyers and journalists.
And most of them were arrested in July, 1964, on the evidence of Gerhard Ludi, a police spy who infiltrated newspapers.
John Harris, a teacher, was also an ARM member. He came incensed when fellow members were arrested. He knew where the group kept the explosives it had used against soft targets like electricity pylons. And he had been taught how to make a bomb.
The force of that explosion rattled the windows of our newspaper office, six blocks away. Three of us rushed to the station.
The huge glassed edifice was filled with smoke. The damage was immense. A child’s toy handbag lay in a smear of blood. Police were spreading sawdust over what looked like a human hand.
The area around the bench under which the bomb had been placed was cordoned off. There the smell of burned flesh was even stronger. Several of the injured, including Ethyl Rhys’s grand-daughter, were being treated in the railway canteen.
Three ARM detainees were escorted in by security police. They appeared shocked and dishevelled. One had bruises on his face. Another was a balding, middle-aged man. A policeman asked him roughly, “Well, what do you think of it?”
“I’m just as horrified as you are,” the detainee replied. “I don’t know why you brought me here.” There was no doubt Harris’s action would add years to whatever sentence that man faced.
I had met John Harris as chairman of Sanroc. His appearance belied any link with athletics or, for that matter, murder and subversion. He had a large moon face on narrow shoulders. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy and was, in fact, well-known while a schoolboy. For years he took part in a national radio quiz show as a member of a team called the “Quiz Kids” and was one of the brightest.
During his trial, his defence team highlighted that achievement, as though it might make Harris less of a monster in the public eye. That defence, indeed, was not dissimilar to the defence in the Oscar Pistorious case: A terrible mistake. “I did not mean to shoot my girlfriend.” “I expected the police to defuse my bomb.”
The case, three months after his arrest, took place in the same building as the Rivonia Trial, but in Pretoria’s main Supreme Court.
High in the roof was a four-bladed fan, swinging precariously on a buckled shaft. That week, it hung like a sword of Damocles over John Harris as he sat in the witness box, sallow and red-eyed.
Harris was perched on a typist’s chair, but he might just as well have been stretched full-length on a psychiatrist’s couch.
Where Oscar Pistorious has endured a month of inspection in a mental hospital, Harris’s examination happened right there in court. From a table a few feet away, two state doctors watched him intently throughout his evidence. Across the courtroom, a third psychiatrist crouched over a foolscap pad, writing furiously.
For three days, they recorded and classified his moods, his response to the many questions, the way he gesticulated when he spoke.
Harris’s lawyer asked if he had cause to seek medical help before the day of the station explosion.
Harris nodded extravagantly. “Ja,” he said. “I went to see my doctor. That was in June. I was having headaches and not feeling well generally.”
But in answer to the next question, he said: “I’ve had memory lapses, but I’ve been entirely in my sound and sober senses.”
He insisted: “There has never been any need for me to get a doctor’s opinion on my mental state. There’s nothing wrong with me. Nothing.”
He was asked how he felt:
About the bomb: ”It was the main thing in my life . . . such a good idea, so beautiful . . .”
His emotions after placing the bomb: “I felt as if I was sitting in a glass ball . . . like an amoeba under a microscope. I’ve had the feeling of being part of the world before, but this time I felt a tremendous understanding of the world.”
Schooldays: “Right up to Standard 9 I was called the fat boy. Like the fat boy in the William books. I tried to get thin, but it didn’t work.”
Himself: “I’m lazy, selfish, inconsiderate . . . Sometimes I felt I wasn’t getting ahead. It worried me and I was taking a course on how to be more positive . . . “
Marriage: “I never really felt responsible. I don’t think even the arrival of the child gave me a feeling of responsibility . . . I had a happy relationship with my wife. I hope she was happy with me.”
The trial: “They (his attorneys) told me if I stuck to the truth, I wouldn’t be convicted of murder because I had not intended to kill anyone . . . (Wearily) Now I just want to get away from everything.”
The defence psychiatrist’s conclusion was that Harris had a fluctuating cyclothymic personality of manic depressive psychosis. He suffered from grandiose fantasies and delusions. He could not have acted otherwise on the day of the bombing.
The state psychiatrist dismissed that evidence. Harris was sane. He acted as any normal man would have.
Harris appealed against his sentence. When the appeal was turned down, his wife Ann made a plea for clemency to the then Minister of Justice, John Vorster.
I interviewed her in Pretoria. She was staying with the parents of Peter Hain, later to become a British Labour Party minister. She seemed entirely overtaken by events and torn between the foolishness of her husband’s action and the thought that people seemed not to believe it was all a horrible misunderstanding.
Their son, barely a year old, gurgled in a playpen, blissfully unaware of the drama that was to change his life.
In the early hours of the morning John Harris was hanged, I drove to Pretoria and walked through a labyrinth of warders’ cottages to the massive wooden door of the old jail where executions were still carried out.
I don’t know what I expected to see – what mood there might be to write about. Perhaps an official might emerge, afterwards, and nail a notice of execution to the door.
Someone did emerge, but out of the darkness next to me. It was the brother of a death cell warder, who proceeded to give me a graphic description of the process being carried out behind the jail walls.
The newspapers, my informant said, would claim (and they did) that Harris had sung freedom songs on the way to the gallows. But that was impossible, because he would be so heavily sedated he would almost have to be carried to the scaffold.
“And relatives of the whites,’ he added, “are asked to bring their bathing trunks.” It made less of a mess, you see.
Such callousness by the Prisons Department should have shocked me, but didn’t.
A judge’s registrar once told me of a case in Grahamstown where a young black man found guilty on a minor felony escaped while awaiting sentence, killing an orderly. He was later traced and found guilty of murder.
One the eve of the execution, a prisons official going through the man’s file discovered that his first sentence of six strokes had never been administered.
So they caned him in the afternoon and hanged him in the morning.
Sunday Times, July 20, 2014.
ANC is cutting off its nose . . .
Leader of the Freedom Front, Pieter Mulder, suggests Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation speech shows the ANC’s “gas is out of the bottle”. Certainly the man himself looks deflated. And ill.
And what activity has there been since that dull, repetitive speech? Not much.
Former Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan who, towards the end of his tenure did at least accept the need for an economy drive, has been energetic in his new job of cleaning up local governments. This last week, his department fired four Limpopo mayors and charged East London councillors who pocketed six million rands intended for Mandela memorial services.
But there is no indication yet how the Government plans to garner all the funds it would need for its development plan, including a whole new ministry with all those attendant officials. It’s interesting to note that the Nats could manage with 16 ministries. The ANC requires 35.
The Minister of Rural Development has come up with a ridiculous scheme by which farmers would give half their land to their workers. Even Julius “I want it all” Malema must know that is impossible.
One of Zuma’s stated aims during his second term is to see the creation of a million new jobs in the agricultural field. Financial experts shake their heads, citing the growing mechanisation in farming generally; a process that is likely to speed up if there are more strikes in the industry.
However, there is a way to at least make a start if only the ANC government would recognise it.
In the past 20 years, the State has appropriated white farms in all the provinces by the “willing seller” scheme. Other farms are on offer but somehow still awaiting payment by the Land Bank.
In its relatively short life, Israel has been able to transform the barren land it was allocated after World War II. To a large extent, it has achieved this through its kibbutz system. These communally run settlements, in which children are collectively reared, played a crucial role in the development of the country. In the process, many thousands of young Israelis and foreign volunteers have been trained in diverse skills – agricultural, industrial, even ecological.
Although there has been a recent movement to the greater comfort of Israel’s cities, the 270 kibbutzim still account for 40 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.
Would that not be a viable way of employing and training some of the millions of South African youngsters currently out of jobs? By creating collective farms on all that vacant land, with the assistance of Israeli experts?
It would indeed. If only the ANC could forget the past. Forget that Israel helped the Nat government develop the atomic (though not the nuclear) bomb in the late eighties.
That must be the sticking point, for it is inconceivable that somebody in government would not have considered the kibbutz route before now.
Extract from John Ryan’s “Spy story” (Amazon.com, Kindle direct publishing
Otto Steiger, commander of U 160, stared out through binoculars at the small bay where the submarine’s dinghy was headed. Overhead, the Milky Way blazed with a billion stars.
Anyone with a less jaundiced eye might have been enthralled at the sight. But Steiger had other things on his mind.
Immediately, he was worried that the dinghy might be too visible from the shore in that starlight. And, from behind the hills, the moon would soon be up. He would much have preferred cloud cover. He worried also that the contact vehicle had not yet arrived. Above all, he worried about the war and his own plight.
Below Otto Steiger, as he stood at the top of the conning tower, was the emblem he and his crew had decided on when the vessel was commissioned more than two years earlier. It was supposed to be a rabbit’s foot, a symbol of luck, but the member of the engine room crew who had volunteered to paint it had overstated his artistic talents. So, instead, what he eventually achieved looked rather like an overweight lily or, some thought, a leek.
Yet, up to now, the emblem had brought a fair deal of luck to U 160. The fact that it was still intact after two years and some months, particularly in the seas off Africa, spoke for itself. But that had been the time when the war was running in Germany’s favour, as detailed in regular bulletins from naval headquarters to the U-boat fleet. Since then, the bulletins had dried up, younger and younger men were being conscripted into the services, and Steiger was enough of a realist to know what all of that indicated. During his last furlough, just a month earlier, he had heard that the German navy was losing submarines at the rate of twenty a month.
Whether or not the information was right, it sent a chill up Steiger’s spine. He just hoped luck would not abandon him and his crew in this outlandish part of the world.
How had the mighty fallen! Steiger remembered the day he had been offered a transfer from destroyers to the elite submarine corps. It was hardly an offer, more an order he could not refuse, but the role of the submarine in modern naval warfare had been so romanticised that he was elated at the chance.
Of course, they never told you the truth about submarines. They never told you how precarious it was to command a vessel not much more than half the length of a football pitch in combat against ships of much greater size, speed and strike power.
They never told you – or maybe they never knew, those admirals, those toffee-nosed relics of World War I – the dangers of diving in the Indian Ocean. These waters were so clear that you could not hide from the bombs and depth charges of enemy aircraft. Yet, deep down, they concealed rocks and coral sharp enough to penetrate any submarine’s inner hull. And, when the weather turned around, they could produce waves that made the North Atlantic look like a millpond.
Instead, what naval bosses tried to instil in you was an entirely false sense of security in the one facility the submarine had that the other naval craft did not – the ability to submerge and thus, allegedly, become invisible.
In reality, submarines spent most of the time on the surface, plodding along on their diesel engines at the pace of tramp steamers, pitching and rolling, forcing the crew to grab at any possible appendage in the interior structure of the vessel to stay upright.
They never told you, although they surely did know, those old admirals, what it would be like sharing such cramped quarters with fifty other males, breathing the same polluted air, day after day, week after week, bumping against one another in the narrow gangways. Sardine cans, the other naval men had begun to call submarines, and they weren’t far out.
As Otto Steiger scanned the coast around the river mouth, he caught a flash of headlights from the contact area and signalled back with the Aldis lamp. So the dinghy should be back within the hour, with the jerry cans of water they desperately needed and possibly some fresh meat and fruit, bananas or paw paws.
Exactly what the contact could supply didn’t really matter. In the end, it would all taste of diesel fumes.
John Ryan 