Winter of a pukka sahib’s discontent
DAYS, I’ve noticed before, seldom bode well when one begins 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 Chennai airport’s apron, pilot most likely still gulping down his motion-sick pills. 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 insist on flying out of New Delhi at sparrow? Certainly not to escape the fog, we say. Why doesn’t it fly the night before?
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. So forth.
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. The Chennai-Colombo flight has 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 for us to stay overnight at company expense. Also propaganda about Chennai being the real jewel in India’s crown. Forget the Taj Mahal, the Pink City: Inspect our modern slums, view our waterworks.
The man is well-meaning 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 extend 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 of seats on the Air India flight 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, up-market beggars.
Mumbai airport seethes with low-flying aircraft, lower-flying luggage. See London and die, see Mumbai and duck. Killing time, dodging suitcases tossed hand to hand among sundry labourers, I remember 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 Johannesburg on the Saturday (tomorrow), meet up with my wife and accompany her to London the next day, swopping suitcases in transit. To wit, one with all manner of winter woollies – in the airport locker – for one now in hand, containing pukka sahib cotton goods and soiled underwear.
This original arrangement was rooted less in logistics that economics. First light, I broach the Mumbai airport kiosks. A Kashmir sweater would be ideal. One size smaller and it could double as a present for my wife. Not a Kashmir sweater in the place, nor sweater 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 in 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 replenishing 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 in London.
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 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 immediately transforms me into the Michelin Man.
Halfway back to Russell Square, I remember I have left the plastic raincoat on the Notting Hill Gate shop counter. Oh, well. I trust it will go to some deserving voyeur.
Setting a minnow to catch a game fish
There we are, quayed-up so to speak, among the Hout Bay gulls. Three hundred broad-shouldered, muscle-honed specimens from the top drawer of South African deep sea angling.
And me. A minnow among leviathans.
Standing about, wiping nerve symptoms from palms, I find a public relations hand-out in the clutch of one. I read it and am startled by the small print on the last page which describes this event as “a must for anyone who has ever matched his strength and wits against the great fighters of the sea”.
Had I seen this before leaving home yesterday, I would still be there, mowing the lawn, though at 6am on a Saturday such activity might have excited the neighbours, not least before we don’t have a lawn.
I cast around for an escape route but am hemmed in on all sides by a phalanx of oil-skinned Titans, rods and foul bait to the fore, eager for the fray.
The sponsors, mine hosts, purveyors of last night’s free Italian whisky (what do you mean, Justerini isn’t Italian?) are in evidence too. One slaps another and points in my direction. The two become mirthful. Press-ganging suddenly takes on a new dimension.
So. Nothing for it but a bold face. However pale. Dread minutes pass.
When the boats arrive, all 35 of them, it is small consolation to find that ours is among the largest. Most of the rest I wouldn’t sail in my bath.
We board. I am consoled further to find at least a pair of kindred souls among our complement. They are immediately recognisable by the position they take up at the gunwales, heads well over the side. And we have yet to leave harbour.
They introduce themselves by shaking hands from a position somewhere behind their backs. One is the owner of a pizza parlour in Johannesburg, the other a wine farmer from Paarl. Nino and Theuns.
I meet the crew. Titans all, preoccupied with discussing traces and breaking strains, wind directions and, paramount, the prospect of landing the winning marlin or the tagged yellowtail worth 62 000 rands.
Our vessel moves out, motors growling like a well-trained Rottweiler. The growl says, those fighters of the deep had better watch out. For some reason, I do not feel reassured.
Up on the pulpit deck is the skipper, guiding us through the Hout Bay heads. He is a large, genial man. He is also a cigar smoker, one of which he lights as we accelerate through the first breaker.
Twenty-five grams of Marzine (my sole breakfast intake) struggle gamely on my behalf and barely win. The smoke wafts down to Nino and Theuns, who begin making goose-type noises. They both come close to abandoning ship.
The crew has set up the rods in their slots. There are seven of them, too many by four for my fancy, bristling out around the stern.
Reports start coming in on a radio from boats further out. No one is catching. How long did Hemingway’s Old Man of the Sea go without a fish? Eighty-four days? There could be hope yet.
At once, one of the lines goes with the sound of a small siren. I stumble down the gangway to watch the action. And discover, with abject horror, that I am intended to be it.
Protests are useless. The crew is insistent. Guests first and Nino and Theuns are hardly fit for that category. I am bundled into a swivel chair, harnessed up, handed the screaming rod.
To begin with, I decide big game fishing is a cinch. The angler is merely a fulcrum between a fixed point, the harness, and a moving force, the fish. All he has to do is heave and reel, heave and reel, heave and reel.
But after twenty minutes, I have the distinct feeling that the only thing still attaching arms to torso is the fabric of my windbreaker. Then the line goes limp. Reaction from the crew is as if I had dropped a vital catch in a Test match. I am slightly exonerated when they pull in the line and find the tunny has straightened the lure.
So to the cabin for liquid therapy and a stocktaking of limbs. Duty has been done, permanently, surely.
No such luck. Not an hour later, we strike a school. Five lines howl. This time we land five good-sized long-fin. The deck is awash with blood. I slip in the stuff and end up atop Nino and Theuns, by now prostrate in the bilges. We might be a scene from a Clint Eastwood movie.
For the record, our boat caught the largest fish of the day, and contest: 80 kilograms. The second day was aborted after an hour because of a gale. During that time, the biggest catch was five kilograms – about a quarter of the size of my biggest the previous day, as I shall remind by grandchildren.
There is a second national big game competition at the end of the month and another during the next. They will be at least one contestant short on each occasion.
Time Wounds All Heels column.
Speaking at this moment in time . . .
Travelling steerage on an Airbus some days ago, I was puzzled to encounter an object with a label proclaiming it to be a “motionary discomfort receptacle”.
Puzzled I was, for a while, because the thing looked just like an airsick bag and unquestionably would have been able to serve the same purpose.
It was even in the pocket behind the seat where one expects to find airsick bags, along with the last encumbent’s toffee wrappers and the airline literature, always so graphically illustrated, that shows passengers where to store their dentures before the moment of impact and how to conduct themselves in a lifebelt once the aircraft is to the bottom of the Indian Ocean.
What has happened, of course, is that obfuscation simply has taken to the air. And, indeed, why not? What better place for jet-age jargon than in a jetliner?
Not that obfuscation is a modern phenomenon. Far from it. But it certainly has never had so many apostles.
Obfuscation, as if you didn’t know, is the art – or science, since it generally seems to be employed in scientific directions – of saying what you have to say at as great a length as possible, using the most obscure terms available. (To obfuscate means to darken the mind.)
Obfuscationists come in many categories of competence. Down around the lowest rung is the person who talks about “parameters” and refers to “this moment in time”, when he means “now”. But then, as you might imagine, it’s an exacting science or art, since a person’s natural inclination is to be as direct as possible in thought and speech.
Who is to say how much midnight oil is burnt along the corridors of science, commerce and industry as departmental scribes strive to bring the highest degree of obscurity to their memoranda and reports? Or how many person-hours went into that single instruction that came with your new lawnmower telling you how to “reverse the transit screw adjuster bolt at the rear of the baseplate co-ordinating catch before depressing the upper support stay”?
As if to confirm my belief that obfuscation has gone into the air travel business, a Government notice landed on my desk yesterday about “conditions relating to the disposal or use of aviation fuel”.
In it the author outlines various regulations that apply to “power-driven, heavier than air machines deriving their lift in flight, chiefly from aerodynamic reactions on surfaces which remain fixed under given conditions of flight”.
He means aeroplanes.
These regulations, it seems, are different from others that have to do with “heavier-than-air machines supported in flight by the reactions of the air on one or more power-driven rotors on substantially vertical axles”.
He means helicopters.
The author almost lost me with one reference to “an air transport service in connection with which flights are undertaken with such a degree of frequency that they cannot reasonable be regarded as merely casual or isolated but are undertaken between points which do not vary . . .”
Of course, he’s talking about regular flights. But how clever to put it that way?
Obfuscationists get around. There is at least one in our company, witness a memo that reached me recently about a sister newspaper with “approximately four per cent more manpower than was estimated as being adequate”.
This state of affairs, the memo concluded, was “mainly due to the under-utilisation of the Leave provision”. Or, to put it another way, because some people weren’t taking their holidays.
Another example of obfuscation at its best comes from a brochure seeking applicants for the Boston Consulting Group, wherever that might be. It says: “Financial compensation for successful performance . . . is certainly likely to be sufficient to remove it as a constraint upon any reasonable standard of living.”
Which means the pay’s okay if you’re good enough
Or how about this, from a house magazine, advertising an in-company health scheme? The ad says, “The only applicants likely to be refused entry are those with multiple pre-existing medical episodes.“
Or people who get ill a lot.
Curiously, one of the great crusaders against obfuscation is the Old Thunderer, The Times of London. The newspaper frequently runs angry letters in its readers’ columns about obfuscation – like one this month from a professor at Queen’s College, Oxford.
“Sir,” it read, “would someone please inform our politicians and political writers that ‘parameter’ does not mean ‘rule’ or ‘convention’ or ‘limit’?
“Yesterday, parameters were being observed. No doubt we shall soon be having them loosened up, thinned out and boiled down.”
Excellent advice, I’m sure, if you happen to have any dealings with parameters. Personally, I wouldn’t presume to touch them with a barge-pole.
If, that is, they are capable of not being touched with a barge-pole.
John Ryan’s Time Wounds All Heals column
Extract from John Ryan’s first novel, Spy Story
FIFTEEN
In the end, it did not matter that Danny’s father was unable to make known the presence of a German U-boat in the Transkei’s coastal waters. For not too many weeks later, in the early evening, an enemy submarine sailed right into the mouth at Port St Johns, brazen as you like.
And this time there were more witnesses: people fishing on both banks of the estuary, people in the lower part of town.
Port St Johns was a small community on the Umzimvubu River. It was named after another ship that had gone down off that coast many years before – the Portuguese Sao Joao. The town centre was composed of a few general dealers, two hotels and a boatyard that built skiffs and small boats. Below was a wooden pier where coasters from Durban and East London discharged their cargo.
For a while, it seemed to the onlookers that the U-boat might be intent on sailing right into that centre to tie up at the jetty. Then some of them noticed, from beyond the river mouth at a place the locals called Ferry Point, what seemed to be a frantic signalling to the vessel by someone using a powerful torch. The submarine reversed engines until it was back in open sea, turned and disappeared.
Brian Eayrs, the owner of the Needles Hotel, headed a posse of residents to investigate the area from which the signals had come. They combed the milkwood bushes but saw no one. Eayrs called off the search and went back to the hotel to phone the police.
Sergeant Jock Brown and Digger O’Brien were on the scene early next morning. While Jock took statements from witnesses, Digger drove with Brian Eayrs to Ferry Point. High up on the side of a dune they found fresh tyre tracks. They established that none of the local vehicle owners had been in the area for some days.
Jock and Digger met for breakfast at the Needles. ‘I think we should get somebody down here who knows the different tyres,’ said Digger.
‘Ossie McComb?’
‘Ginger Southwood, rather,’ Digger said. ‘I think he’s sharper than Ossie these days.’
Ginger Southwood took a while to get there, finally arriving in his own car, an eight-horsepower Flying Standard. He had bought the vehicle the year before from Keith Heathcote, the lawyer, who needed something larger. The Flying Standard, despite its fine name, was essentially a town car. Southwood had spent some months refurbishing it.
‘Flying Standard?’ he said, prising himself out of the front seat. ‘Well, it certainly flew when I started hitting those potholes. I thought it might never come down. Jock, does the police budget run to new springs?’
‘I’m afraid it doesn’t even run to petrol,’ said Jock Brown.
They drove him up to the place where the tyre tracks were. ‘Dunlops,’ Ginger Southwood said at once. ‘I’ll tell you that for nothing. But then probably ninety per cent of the tyres in the Transkei are Dunlops.’
He knelt and spread his right hand in successive movements to gauge the rough distance between the two treads. His hands were large, with unusually prominent knuckles.
‘I should have brought a tape measure,’ said the mechanic. ‘But I would say these tracks weren’t made by a normal sedan. Something bigger, maybe a Buick or a De Soto. Or a truck. I don’t know.’
Since there was no point in trying to keep this sighting secret, Jock Hopkinson was allowed to go down to see the area for himself. The next edition of the Territorial News was almost totally devoted to the incident. “Nazi sub seen in Transkei waters!” the headline said, almost echoing what Digger had considered in the first instance. The article contained lengthy interviews with every witness Jock could lay his hands on and other residents who said they were terrified although they had seen nothing.
There were graphic descriptions of how the vessel had broken through the waves at the river mouth, of the light that suddenly began flashing dramatically in the semi-darkness.
Colonel Fyfe King called an emergency meeting of the territory’s NRV. ‘It seems we have a spy in our midst,’ he said. ‘Either someone who has been here for some time, or someone who was put ashore off that U-boat.’
‘Except that Brian Eayrs and his chaps couldn’t identify those tyre tracks,’ Digger O’Brien reminded him.
‘Yes, of course,’ said the colonel. ‘So it has to be somebody who has been here long enough to have access to a vehicle. Maybe someone then who’s familiar to us, someone who was a stranger until recently but now has been accepted into our society.’
‘Maybe it doesn’t even have to be recently,’ George Trebble said. ‘Remember Spain, sir, where the Fascists planted fifth columnists years ahead of them taking over.’
‘I think what we should all do,’ Digger said, ‘is to go back to our homes, towns and villages, or wherever, and think of anyone who comes to mind. Anyone we remember acting suspiciously, or out of character, in particular any outsider who has come into the Transkei in the past few years. Because I can’t believe our spy is a Transkeian. We know one another too well. Or most of us do anyway.’
Elsewhere, five other minds were contemplating the same issue.
‘I think it’s got to be somebody in Umtata,’ said Charles Perkins. ‘Those other towns and villages. They’re so small. Everybody knows everybody. And how many cars have they got?’
‘Unless it’s a black person,’ Steyn Mostert said. ‘Black people, we don’t know them. And my father says we can’t trust them. He says they can steal you blind.’ He thought a while longer. ‘But then blacks don’t have cars. Not too many of them. There’s that witchdoctor, Khotso, in Kokstad but that’s a long way away.’
The man who called himself Khotso, the isiSotho word for peace, had become a legend some years earlier when he arrived at Manning and Patterson’s showroom carrying a battered suitcase. He chose a blue Chrysler off the floor and paid for it in cash. The suitcase was full of five-pound notes.
‘If it’s somebody in Umtata,’ said Danny O’Brien. ‘Who is here who wasn’t here before? Who’s new? I can’t think of anybody except – ’
‘ – Steyn’s cousin,’ said Billy Miller. ‘How about him?
The other four fell silent. ‘But he was in the air force,’ Alan Dewes said. ‘And he got wounded. A spy is somebody on the other side. He lives in a secret house and he wears a disguise.’
‘Steyn, he is your cousin,’ said Charles. ‘He can’t be a spy too. Can he?’
Steyn Mostert looked as if he might be close to tears. ‘I don’t know. Sometimes he acted funny. My mother also thought he acted funny. I know. When she spoke to him she always looked cross. She told my dad he was a sponger. What’s that mean?’
‘It means a person who sucks up things like a sponge,’ Danny said. ‘But all the spies I’ve read about seem to have lots of money. They get it from their governments. They don’t go around sponging on people.’
‘Well,’ said Charles. ‘There’s one thing we can do. We can watch him, follow him. Maybe creep into his house and see if there’s a hidden wireless.’
‘You mean radio receiver,’ Billy said. ‘This could be fun. We’ll take it in turns following him. And while one of us is following him, we’ll search his house.’
‘That’s against the law,’ said Alan. ‘You can’t just go into other people’s houses like a thief. Let’s follow him and see what he does that’s suspicious.’
‘All right,’ said Billy. ‘Bags I go first then.’
At least one regular in the Grosvenor Hotel bar voiced the same opinion as Danny and his friends.
‘A spy among us?’ Ginger Southwood said. ‘What was I warning you about just the other day, George? Talking in front of strangers? And what about that stranger? What about a man who comes in, claiming to have broken his leg in a “prang” and now it seems didn’t break his leg at all?’
‘Are you sure about that, Ginger?’ asked Pondo Harrington.
‘Well, you heard me in here telling you that Ian Ross doesn’t believe he had a fracture in that leg. Or were you sitting there with your finger up your bum and your mind in neutral?’
‘That’s quite an accusation you’re making,’ said Gerald Wilson. ‘What if he just faked an injury to get out of going to the front?’
‘Also,’ George Trebble added, ‘he told us in detail what happened to him and his crew. I can’t believe he pulled that story out of thin air. But I’ve been thinking since Ginger gave us that warning.
‘And yesterday I happened to be talking in the club to Peter Moore. His two sons are in the air force, as we know. Well, one of them’s been up with Twelve Squadron, where Mostert was. Or says he was. And the lad’s getting a spot of leave soon before the squadron relocates to Cairo.
‘So I’ve arranged with Peter to bring his son around one evening when Nick Mostert’s here. Maybe a Friday. He normally pops in about six-ish on a Friday, doesn’t he?’
‘Six-ish or a bit earlier,’ Baldy the barman said.
‘Well, then,’ said George Trebble. ‘Let’s see how that little arrangement goes. See if it sets the cat among the pigeons. Either way, we should be able to know if he’s been telling the truth or stringing us along.’
Published on Amazon-Kindle (6.83 US dollars).
Extract from John Ryan’s Spy story (published on Amazon.com, Kindle direct publishing)
Moses removed his football boots and socks, pumped paraffin into the Primus from the ten-gallon tin that also served as a bedside table, lit the stove and lay back on his bed. He would make tea and then wander up to one of the Greek cafes to buy a pie for supper.
When Moses awoke, the cottage was in darkness but for the blue flame of the Primus. Yet something had awoken him. He listened and the noise came again. Someone was trying the door to Mrs Buhl’s kitchen, across the path.
Moses opened his own door. By the partial light of the pressure stove he could see someone on the kitchen steps. The person was carrying what looked like a large book or a parcel.
Alerted by the gushing noise of the Primus, the figure turned and lunged at Moses, propelling him backwards into the cottage. Moses glimpsed a white face under a cloth cap before strong hands grasped him around the throat and he realised with alarm that the man was trying to strangle him.
Moses managed to pull up one knee and lash out with his instep. There was a cry of pain and a fist struck Moses on the side of the face. But by then he was rolling away and scrambling to his feet.
Moses grabbed the stove by its base, below the hissing flame, holding it out in front of him like a torch, hoping the light might force the intruder to turn and run. However, the man lunged at him again, throwing punches, forcing Moses against his makeshift table.
Moses lost his grip on the stove and, as it fell, he heard a gurgling sound behind him. He realised with horror it was the noise of paraffin escaping from the overturned drum.
Moses tried to run for the door but found the intruder blocking his way, his arms outstretched.
Stanley Robertson, the stationmaster, said afterwards he caught sight of the blaze just as the overnight goods train from East London was pulling in. The train was two hours late as always. Stanley said the flames were so high that he thought the town hall was on fire.
The O’Briens felt the heat before they saw any evidence of it. So intense was the fire that it melted the tarmac on that side of Owen Street.
Jack Langton, Howard’s father and the former policeman, was the first person to ring up the manual telephone exchange and tell the operator to get hold of Harry Perry, the town clerk. He told Perry to rally the fire brigade and quickly. Forget about sounding the hooter, Jack said, it’s too late for that.
When Danny ran across the road and saw the source of the fire, it was as though a dark cloud entered his brain and he could not think or speak.
Patrick said to his father, ‘Moses can’t be in there, dad! Can he? He told us he’d be going up to get a pie!’
Digger O’Brien put a hand around the shoulder of both sons. They were standing on the island in Owen Street. The rafters of the cottage had started to collapse, leaving a red imprint on the black sky. Danny stared, fixated, until his father physically turned the boy’s head away.
Jimmy Millar, the wall-eyed Mr Fixit, was in charge of the firemen that night. They broke down the door of the Buhl’s cottage, releasing a blast of hot air and a smell that took Digger O’Brien back to the trenches.
Emerging from the cottage a few minutes later, Jimmy beckoned to Digger.
‘Don’t go in, because it’s a mess, but there’s a corpse,’ he said.
‘Moses?’ Digger asked.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Jimmy Millar.
Digger O’Brien went in anyway. The body, trapped between the skeleton of the bed and a red-hot paraffin tin, was charred beyond recognition. But the sight of what remained of Moses’s football boots under the bed, burned leather and metal studs, would stay with Digger forever.
John Ryan 