The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set

by Peter Rimmer

  The road to what he wanted had taken many paths after the policeman suggested he left Johannesburg before the English toffs laid a charge of assault. The two policemen that had visited his room were Afrikaners like himself and brought with them ten pounds they had raised among themselves in the Johannesburg police station. Being a badly paid and dangerous job, few of the British immigrants, even if they had fought in the British Army, sought a job in the South African police force. When the complaints had been lodged that General Oosthuizen’s son had beaten up five Englishmen in a high-class whorehouse, jubilation had run through his fellow Afrikaners on the force.

  To the Englishman with the swollen face, who had first complained to the British consul in Johannesburg, the police gave the assurance the criminality of the assault would be carefully pursued; to Barend they brought the ten pounds, a glow of admiration in their eyes and the suggestion he leave town for a while.

  Even without the rand baron who fancied Sallie, Lily White would have been allowed to re-open the Mansion House soon after the toffs’ train left Johannesburg central railway station.

  For the first time in his life, Barend found himself a hero. Ten pounds plus small change was a lot of money, more than he could have saved in a year, and he decided to take advantage of his windfall. The thought of leaving Johannesburg and the lying all day on his side with a pick cutting out a seam of gold-bearing rock was not hard. He decided to look around the country they were shortly going to call the Union of South Africa. By the time the Union was declared with General Louis Botha its first prime minister in 1910, Barend had reached the port of Cape Town and was eyeing the ships and wondering where they were going.

  Though he did not know it, as his mother had long ago stopped talking about her family to her son, his maternal grandfather had been a sea captain in the British Merchant Navy, travelling to all corners of the world for more than thirty years. The sight of all the ships in the harbour brought out the sailor hidden in Barend’s genes. After four weeks of brawling around the dockside bars, he took ship as an ordinary seaman on a boat bound for the Dutch East Indies.

  Though he had thought of the home he had last lived in with his father, he had not visited Kleinfontein, his father’s farm confiscated by the British for his treason. He had not even visited the Franschhoek Valley or the people who had rebelled with his father to join the Boer army and fight the British, many of whom had gone home after the war. Only the general, Barend’s father, had been tried for treason.

  The ship was the MV Orange, flying the Dutch flag.

  The next time Barend saw Africa it was then 1912, and the ship he had sailed on for six months, an old rust bucket of a coaster, called at the port of Walvis Bay in German South West Africa where the captain signed him off with residual pay of two pounds, ten shillings and sixpence. The ship was British as mostly ships calling around the coast of Africa sailed under the British flag. For the whole of the six-month voyage, no one on board knew he spoke English. Most of the crew were lascars from the East Indies where Dutch was the common language, a sister language to Afrikaans.

  Barend Oosthuizen was twenty-two years old and as tough as teak, his handsome face burnt to the colour of light mahogany, only the slate-green eyes testimony to his Caucasian ancestry. It is doubtful whether Madge or his mother would have recognised him.

  With the remnants of his ten pounds, hoarded against the inevitable catastrophe which had yet to come, and the proceeds of his last voyage, Barend bought two good salted horses, horses that had been bitten by the tsetse fly and had survived the sleeping sickness. Both animals were used to the shaft of the small covered wagon but only one pulled at a time, the other following behind on a long rein. Barend was going back into the African bush but first, he was going up the coast to the Portuguese territory from where he had the idea of following a great river into the hinterland. From his father, the white hunter, he had inherited the gene that pulled him back into the bush. In the wagon, with a good supply of ammunition, he carried three guns; two rifles and a twelve-bore shotgun. He was going to live off the land. Unlike his father, there was not a book to be found in the wagon, not even a Bible.

  With no great purpose in mind, he began his journey up the Skeleton Coast.

  For the first few days, he was unable to explain his euphoria. It was June and the nights were cold, with squalls of rain dashing his clean-shaven face during the day, pouring water off the rim of his big black hat with the wide brim and the pointed dome. The smell of the salt sea air was fresh but the smell of the sea had been in his nostrils for three years. The West Coast black mussels were huge, and some as wide as the palm of his hand, and cooked in their shells full of seawater sucked in by the live mollusc were delicious to eat. There were rock lobsters crawling out of the cold Atlantic to be picked up on the beach without even getting his hands wet. There were so many giant slipper oysters on the rocks at low tide he grew sick of eating them, he ate so many. And when he felt like meat, he saddled up the horse that was out of shaft that day and rode not a mile into the scrub desert to shoot a springbok, the buck so remote they had never seen a horse or a predator man with his deadly gun and had no knowledge to run away. The heart, liver and kidneys went straight on the fire, the rest of the animal, except one front leg, was cut into strips and hung along the side of the wagon to dry in the sun, soak in the salty sea mist or wash clean in the squalls of rain. There was fresh water with which to fill his water barrels when he needed it, the water springs easily found by following the tracks of the jackals that preyed on the seals that honked and swarmed on the smooth black rocks, after filling their bellies with fish from the sea. There were gulls and eagles to sound music in his ears.

  On the morning of the tenth day, within a short ride of the cross placed by Bartolomeu Dias in the fifteenth century, he woke up to find what it was. He was happy to be home. Happy to be back in Africa. With the understanding of his euphoria coursing through his mind, he twirled a dance up the sandy beach, scattering the black-backed gulls and chasing a jackal from its hunt. The big black cape that kept off the rain twirled from his body making a skirt. The black hat was thrown at a gull high in the air.

  “I’m happy,” he shouted. “I’m happy.”

  When the winter sun came out from above the mist from the sea, there was mile after mile of straight sandy beach stretching in both directions. On the day that changed his life, the Atlantic was so flat, the sea washed up the beach as if a giant had sloshed a large bucket of water up the white sand. As the slosh of water retreated it left a series of high water lines with pieces of seaweed, dead crayfish shells, mussels torn by an earlier storm from the rocks and now washed ashore, and pieces of wood, many fashioned by the hand of man, mostly long-dead men as the skeletons along the rugged coast were those of ships sailed by men, ancient and modern, Portuguese caravels to the new iron ships powered by steam generated by coal. The flotsam and jetsam fascinated Barend and many a day was spent walking the soft beach looking at what the sea had brought him ashore.

  Very often he was not conscious of seeing what he saw, discarding the obvious and ordinary like a good tracker looking for animal spoor. Sometimes he thought of Madge but mostly of the time when they were very young and innocent of life’s pain. He laughed out loud at their old jokes and remembered how happy they had been. For hours he lived again as a child as he walked the long beach, the horses left behind with the covered wagon, only the dried meat hanging from the roof vulnerable to predators.

  He had grown so used to his own company since leaving Elephant Walk eight long years ago when he was fourteen years old, he had no conscious idea of his loneliness. Loneliness was what he was, what he had become, and he hugged the feeling of self-satisfaction he had brought about without another person’s help. He was content to leave behind the baggage of other people’s minds, other people’s wars, and for a while, he forgot his hatred of the English. There was a whole week on the Skeleton Coast when he did not once take out the revenge in hi
s mind and have another look at it. With the sea and the beach, and so much easy food and water, Barend delayed, again and again, his trek inland, the journey that would take him back deep into the African bush.

  From force of habit, which went back to when he was nine years old, Barend carried a gun over his shoulder. The .375 was powerful enough to kill an elephant at one hundred yards if the shot was put through the heart. There had been rumours in Walvis Bay of desert elephant that came right down to the sea, though what they would eat was a mystery to Barend, as tufts of scrub bush that could keep a springbok alive were nothing for an elephant that needed food in tons. He had once seen a pair of lynx hunting the beach for seals with the jackals, but the cats had run away. Only once, in the dark of night, he thought he heard a lion far away in the desert but he was not sure, and the wind had been blowing from the sea taking the sound.

  Sometimes he carried the rifle at the trail to relieve the ache in his shoulder. Over his chest were two crossed straps that held the leather bags resting on his hips. Attached to the back of his belt was a metal water bottle covered in strips of khaki cloth he had bought in Walvis Bay. Had he known the bottle was British Army surplus from the Anglo-Boer War he would have died of thirst before taking a drink. In the soft leather bags at his hips was enough food for a day in case he was caught in a storm and forced to take shelter among the rocks and burrows out by the sea. The food was mostly cooked tails of rock lobster and strips of dried venison.

  The crystal rock was the size of a chicken’s egg. It sparkled in the sun and brought him back from his reverie to bend down and pick it up. It was far too heavy to have been washed in by the torpid sea where, in the shallows, the kelp was barely moving to the swell. The crystal was washed clean. The edges were flat and disappeared into each other like a deck of cards, only solid and strangely transparent. When the sun caught a flat surface as he turned the rock on the flat of his hand, the stone came alive with an inner fire. His rock was sparkling in the sun and Barend scratched his head with his free hand, wondering what had come to him out of the sea.

  He looked around the beach for something similar and picked up three more rocks of the same type, two of them smaller and one larger than the first he had found. All four of them were washed clean by the waters of the sea and sparkled in the winter sun. Barend decided they were pretty and put them in one of his bags as a keepsake.

  Checking the sun for the time, he began to retrace his steps back to the horses, his wagon, and a good night’s sleep. It had been a long day’s walk along the beach. He was tired but content in himself and by the time he heard his horses’ neigh he had forgotten the four rocks in the small leather bag on his right hip. With the wind at his back, he knew the horses had smelt him and were calling to him with anticipated pleasure. It made him smile, quicken his pace, and begin to whistle. Tomorrow he was going to trek north until he found the first river to lead him inland across the scrub. He was hoping to find the Kunene River his father had talked to him about when he was a child sitting around the campfire in the Rhodesian bush.

  There were three men in uniform sitting against the wheel of his wagon. They were chewing dried venison they had taken from the side of his wagon and all of them were smiling. Barend lowered the rifle that could kill an elephant at one hundred yards that he had pointed at the belly of the man in the middle. His horses were eating fodder laid on the sand and ignored him, the neighing coming from a culvert in the rocks where two more horses were hitched to an army wagon. Barend’s horses had never eaten such good fodder since leaving Walvis Bay. The man in the middle got up, put out his hand, and spoke in a language Barend thought to be German but which he did not understand.

  “Who are you?” Barend asked him in Afrikaans.

  “You don’t by any chance speak English?” said the German. The man’s uniform was different from the other two and Barend correctly surmised he was an officer.

  “Have I done something wrong?” asked Barend.

  “Of course not… Your horses smelt the fodder we carry in our wagon. We gave them some. I hope you don’t mind us eating your dried meat. Very good it is. I went to Oxford for a year after university in Berlin. Father wanted me to speak English so when we win the war I can be a military administrator in England. You are Afrikaner, I presume, and you don’t like the English, which is good. We must be friends. With the help of the German army, you will restore your Boer republics. My name is von Stratten, Lieutenant von Stratten, Imperial German Army. At your service.”

  “My name is Barend.”

  “You don’t have another name? Is Barend a Christian name or a surname?”

  “It is both.” For some reason, he did not wish to tell anyone who he was. The rest of him was part of his other life.

  The two soldiers kept their crouched seats against the wagon and chewed the dried meat in their mouths like cows chewing the cud. The light had begun to go as the sun sank into the South Atlantic. It would be gone with minimum fuss in a matter of minutes. From out to sea, fifty feet above the ice-cold surface of the sea, the mist, a great roll of cotton wool, was rolling into the shore. Barend went to his wagon, pulled out a sheepskin jacket and put it on. The temperature was dropping one degree Fahrenheit every thirty seconds. The white, oily fur of the sheep was warm against his skin. He had walked the beach barefoot. Barend pulled on his sheepskin boots before the blanket of fog rolled in over them, cutting their world to a few yards around the wagon. The lieutenant’s wagon and horses had disappeared in the fog. Barend’s two horses were still eating the German fodder, oblivious to fog and cold.

  “Best we make camp together,” said von Stratten. “Even an Afrikaner can get lost in the fog. I have some good German wine.”

  The idea of a good German wine banished Barend’s feeling of intrusion. He had not been drunk for a very long time. What the man meant about war and the Boer republics had roused his interest. The thought of revenge was again vivid in his mind.

  “I have a leg of springbok I shot three days ago hanging in my wagon. If you tell your men to light a fire I can make a spit. It will take some time to cook, but it will be worth the waiting.”

  “How is it you speak such good English without a Dutch accent?”

  “My mother was English.”

  “Do you like the English?” said von Stratten in alarm, annoyed he had already spoken too much.

  “I hate them.”

  “Why do you hate them, Barend?”

  “They hanged my father for treason.”

  “What did he do to make them do that?”

  “He went out with the Cape rebels during the Anglo-Boer War.”

  “And who was your father, if you do not mind me asking?”

  “General Tinus Oosthuizen.”

  “Was he?” said von Stratten. He was smiling with his lips but not with his eyes. “Then you will join me in a glass of hock and drink to a brave soldier. Your father is one of my heroes. Soon we will crush the arrogance of the English and their empire.”

  There was plenty of driftwood for the big fire between the tall rocks and the sand was dry to a depth of six inches. Only the infrequent great winter storms burst that far up the shore. The men took their lower rank to the other side of the fire to Barend and von Stratten. All of them had pulled on heavy clothing. There was no wind and the smoke from the fire rose into the fog that wrapped them in its cocoon.

  There was no sound from the outside world, only the crackle of the big fire that warmed them on one side and cooked the meat on the other. The venison was placed alongside the fire on a crude spit made from pieces of metal Barend had welded together in Walvis Bay. There was a handle that turned the thin rod and the leg of venison had the habit of staying in the same position. They regularly turned the spit round for the fire to cook the other side of the meat. When the top and bottom were to be cooked, they propped a forked stick under the leg of springbok. There was little or no fat and Barend had not bothered with a drip tray.

  After an
hour and a half of juggling the meat against the heat of the fire, Barend carved the top slices and handed them round on the end of his long hunting knife. They ate with their fingers, the red juices flowed down their chins, and everyone was smiling. The meat, sprinkled with sea salt Barend had collected from dried-up rock pools over his long journey up the beach, was better than anything any of them could remember. Watching the meat cook and smelling its flavour had made them ravenously hungry.

  Barend let the meat cook another ten minutes before he sliced again and handed round slivers of meat. They had just finished the first bottle of hock. The men were drinking schnapps out of the bottle, and one of them was drunk, dropping his slice of meat in the sand that was now damp from the fog. The man wiped off the sand as best he could and ate the meat. They all laughed, von Stratten opened another bottle of hock. They said ‘cheers’ in German and Afrikaans.

  Barend sparingly sprinkled sea salt where he had carved the last slices and put the spit right over the open coals and let the meat drip for a moment into the fire before it sealed again and began to cook. The cut crystal glass, which the German had produced from a conical container with the opening of the first bottle of hock, had been placed on a flat piece of rock where it was safe. He placed small pieces of driftwood on either side of the fire to give them warmth and light, picked up his glass from the rock and sat down on his buckskin mat that stopped the water rising through the six inches of dry sand. With his arms around his knees, and his chin resting on his knees close to where he could take a sip from the ready glass, he looked into the red coals of the fire and for a moment forgot that he was not alone. He was mellow, though far from drunk on half a bottle of good wine the German had left in a rock pool during the day to keep it cool. Even in the middle of nowhere, the man seemed to know how to look after himself, his men and his horses.