I awoke in Barberton Hospital with a man in a white coat shining a torch into my eyes. My head was ringing as though voices came from the other end of a long tunnel. “Well, thank God for that, he’s regained consciousness,” I heard him say.
“Thank you, Jesus,” I heard my mother say in a weepy voice. I looked around to see her seated at the side of the bed. She looked pale and worried. My granpa was also there, sitting at the opposite side of the bed. I tried to talk but found it impossible and my jaw hurt like billy-o. My mouth tasted of blood and, running my swollen tongue around my palate, I realized that several teeth were missing.
The doctor spoke to me. “Now, son, I want you to tell me how many fingers I’m holding up in front of you.” He held up two and I held up two fingers. “Again.” He held up four fingers and I too held up four. He repeated this with several combinations before he finally said, “Well, he doesn’t appear to have concussion. We’ll have to X-ray the jaw, I think it’s probably broken.” He turned to my mother and granpa. “We’ll be taking him into theater almost immediately, we may need to wire his jaw. He’ll be sedated when he comes out so there isn’t any point in your staying.”
They both rose and my mother leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “We’ll see you tomorrow morning, darling. You be a brave boy, now!” My granpa touched me lightly on the shoulder. “There’s a good lad,” he said.
I watched them leave the emergency ward, where I appeared to be the only emergency; the other three beds were unoccupied. My jaw ached a great deal and while I think I may have been crying, I only recall being terribly concerned for Doc.
It turned out my jaw had been broken. They wired the top jaw to the bottom one in the closed mouth position, so I was unable to talk. I couldn’t inquire about him. Adults decide what they want kids to know and all my mother would say when she came to visit was “You’ve had a terrible shock, darling, you mustn’t think about what happened.”
In fact, that was all I could think about. I managed to communicate to a junior nurse called Marie, who had taken to calling me her little skattebol, that I wanted paper and a pencil. She brought a pad and a pencil and I wrote, “What’s happened to Professor Von Vollensteen?” She read the note and her eyes grew large.
“Ag no, man! Sister says we can’t tell you nothing.” She held out her hand for the pad and pencil but I quickly tucked it under the quilt. I felt less vulnerable with the pad and pencil beside me. I tore a single sheet from the small pad and, placing it on the cabinet beside my bed, I leaned over and wrote, “My name is not skattebol, it is PEEKAY.” I didn’t much like the endearment as I didn’t see myself as a fluffy ball, which is a name you give to really small kids. I handed it to her. She read it slowly, then walked to the end of the bed.
“That’s not what it says here,” Marie said, looking down at the chart that hung from the foot of the bed. “Don’t you know your proper name then?” she teased. “Sis, man! I never heard of a name like Peekay. Where’d you get a silly name like that?” She took a sharp breath. “Anyway, it’s a rotten name for a hero who tackled a German spy when he was trying to escape.” She moved her spotty face close to mine. “It says in the paper you even maybe going to get a medal!” She drew back suddenly, alarmed that she’d told me too much. “Don’t you tell Sister I told you, you hear.” She brought a finger up to her lips. “I promise I’ll call you Peekay if you promise to stay stom.” I nodded my head, though I wondered how she thought I could tell anyone. The tears began to roll down my cheeks. They came because of the news about Doc. I could hear his voice when the officer had handed him the piece of paper. “The stupidity. Already the stupidity begins again.”
“Don’t cry, Peekay,” Marie said, distressed. “I don’t really think Peekay is a silly name,” she said gently. “Who showed you how to write so good? I went to school up to fourteen and even I can’t write so good as you.”
After three days alone in the ward I was moved onto the verandah, where there were eight beds all occupied. Except for the fact that I still couldn’t talk, I was much better. I had walked into the ward with the sister and with the exception of two old men who were asleep, all the others had applauded and said things like “Well done, son!” One man said that I was a proper patriot. As soon as Sister left the ward I wrote on a piece of paper, “What happened to Professor Von Vollensteen?” I jumped out of bed and took it over to the bed nearest me and gave it to the man in it. He read it and handed it back to me.
“You mean the German spy? Sorry, son, we’re not supposed to tell you”—he winked at the others—“we got strict orders.”
My mother came to the hospital in the mornings when Pastor Mulvery was able to bring her. She sat with me while he went around the hospital to witness for the Lord. But first he came in to see me, and he’d flash his lightning smile that prevented his two front teeth from escaping and hold my hand in his damp, warm grasp. In his soft voice he said, “We’re all praying that this terrible ordeal will make you accept Jesus into your heart.” Then he knelt beside the bed and my mother also knelt on the other side and Pastor Mulvery would pray aloud.
“Lord, we are gathered here in Your precious name to pray for this poor child. In his terrible affliction, show him the path to salvation.”
“Hallelujah, praise the Lord,” my mother would answer. And so it would go every morning.
Not long after I first met Doc, we were sitting on our rock on the hill behind the rose garden and I asked him why I was a sinner and condemned to eternal hellfire unless I was born again.
He sat for a long time looking over the valley and then he said, “Peekay, God is too busy making the sun come up and go down and watching so the moon floats just right in the sky to be concerned with such rubbish. Only man wants always God should be there to condemn this one and save that one. Always it is man who wants to make heaven and hell. God is too busy training the bees to make honey and every morning opening up all the new flowers for business.” He paused and smiled. “In Mexico there is a cactus that even sometimes you would think God forgets. But this is not so. On a full moon in the desert every one hundred years He remembers and He opens up a single flower to bloom. And if you should be there and you see this beautiful cactus blossom painted silver by the moon, this, Peekay, is heaven.” He looked at me, his deep blue eyes sharp and penetrating. “This is the faith in God the cactus has.” We had sat for a while before he spoke again. “It is better just to get on with the business of living and maybe, if God likes the way you do things, He may let you flower for a day or a night. But don’t go pestering and begging and telling Him all your stupid little sins; that way you will spoil His day. Absoloodle.”
I still sometimes got a bit scared about going to hell and I used to think quite a lot about being born again. But my heart didn’t want to open up and receive the Lord. All the people I knew who had opened up their hearts struck me as a pretty pathetic lot, not bad, not good, just nothing. I couldn’t afford to be just nothing when I was aiming to be the welterweight champion of the world. I decided I liked Doc’s God a lot more than my mother’s and Pastor Mulvery’s and Pik Botha’s.
Pastor Mulvery got up from beside the hospital bed and gave me a flash smile and said that Jesus loved me anyway. Then he trotted off with the Bible under one arm and a handful of tracts to visit all the other patients and my mother stayed with me.
After I got the pad I wrote her a long note asking her about Doc. She took it and without reading it asked, “Is this about the professor?” Her lips were drawn tight as I nodded. Then she scrunched the note in her hand. “I don’t want you ever to mention his name again, do you hear? He is an evil man who used you to cover up the terrible things he was doing and then he nearly killed you.” There were sudden tears in her eyes. “The doctor says, if he had caught you on the other side of the head he would have killed you! You’ve been through a terrible experience and I’ve prayed and prayed the Lord will make you forget it so you are not scarred for life.”
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br /> “No! No!” I forced myself to say. What came out was two squeaks from the back of my throat that forced their way past my clamped mouth. They were blaming Doc for what had happened to me and I was the only one who knew the truth and I couldn’t help him. It was my fault anyway. If I hadn’t put the bottle of Johnnie Walker in his sugar bag this never would have happened.
“You poor little mite,” my mother said, “you’ve been through a terrible time. We’ll never talk about it again. Mrs. Boxall from the library has asked to come and see you but the doctor and I have agreed that you’re not well enough to have visitors.” She opened her bag and withdrew a green school report card. “Now I have some good news for you. You came first in your class. Your granpa and I are very proud of you. They’ve put you up another two classes. You’re going to be in with the ten-year-olds. Fancy that, seven and in with the ten-year-olds!” She handed the report card to me and I took it and tore it into four pieces. For a long time my mother said nothing, looking down at the pieces of green cardboard. Finally she gave a deep sigh. I hated her sighs because they made me feel terribly guilty. “The Lord has blessed you with a good brain. I pray every day that you will take Him into your heart and use your fine mind to glorify His precious name.” She gathered the pieces up and dropped them into her handbag, giving me a sort of squiffy smile. “I’m sure it can be mended. You are just not your old cheerful self at present, are you?” But her eyes weren’t smiling as she spoke.
That afternoon I wrote a note to Mrs. Boxall. All it said was, “Please come! In the afternoon,” and I signed it. I also wrote a note for Marie asking her if she would take the note to Mrs. Boxall at the Barberton public library. Marie had switched to night duty and came on at six p.m. with our dinner. I handed her the note. She read it and quickly hid it in the pocket of her white starched junior nurse’s uniform.
“I’ll only do it if it’s got nothing to do with that spy,” she whispered as she put my tray down in front of me. I handed her the second note. She gave me a suspicious look. “I got to read it first before I say I’ll do it.” She read the note and seemed assured by its contents. “I’ve got my day off tomorrow, I’ll do it then.” She seated herself on the side of the bed and, taking up a teaspoon, she filled it with pumpkin and put it through the hole in the corner of my mouth. I had lost four top and bottom teeth on the same side where the sergeant’s boot had landed, and Marie called it my feeding hole.
I spent the rest of the evening writing for Mrs. Boxall a long, detailed description of what had happened. Doc, when I presented him with my botanical notes, would always stress that a botanist is concerned with detail. “Observation is what makes a scientist,” he said. And so I wrote it all down just the way it happened, even the swearwords, and then I hid the three sheets of paper in my pillowslip. Mrs. Boxall came the very next afternoon. In her bag she carried a new William book by Richmal Crompton, a book called Flowers from the Banks of the Zambesi and three copies of National Geographic. “You are such a precocious child, Peekay, I hope they suit your catholic taste.” Like Doc, Mrs. Boxall never talked down to me. With the result that I didn’t always understand her and wondered what the Catholics might have to do with my taste.
I withdrew my notes from inside the pillow and handed them to Mrs. Boxall. “Well now, what have we here?” she said, taking the three pages and reaching into her bag for her glasses. She read for a long time before looking up at me. “Remarkable! You are a remarkable child. This comes just in time. A military court is being convened next week and things are looking pretty grim for our professor. The whole jolly town is up in arms about him. People are seeing Jerries in their chamberpots.” She chuckled at her own joke. The Germans were nicknamed Jerries, which was also slang for chamberpots. “I tried to see him in prison but those dreadful Boers said only authorized people could see him. I’ve started a petition in the library but so far I only have twelve signatures and three of them are Boers and we all know where their sympathies lie. That dreadful little man, Georgie Hankin, has threatened to say some perfectly ghastly things about me in the Goldfields News.” She paused, dug once more into her string bag and withdrew a copy of the Goldfields News. Taking up almost half the front page was Doc’s picture of me sitting on the rock. Above the picture in huge black letters it said, THE BOY HE TRIED TO KILL! Just above the headline and below the masthead was written Special Spy Edition. Under the picture the caption read “Like Abraham’s biblical sacrifice of Isaac, the innocent boy waits on the rock.” No doubt the editor, Georgie Hankin, saw this as his finest professional hour.
The reason Mrs. Boxall hadn’t been able to visit me was because Dr. Simpson, in resisting Georgie and his photographer’s attempts to see me, had banned all visitors. She was surprised that I hadn’t seen the earlier paper and promised to bring it the following afternoon.
The essence of the story reported in the News was that the provost officer and his sergeant had waited most of the afternoon for Doc to arrive. When he appeared with a small boy in tow, he was in a disheveled state and it was obvious to the two military policemen that he had been drinking. The sergeant, on the orders of the officer, escorted him back to his cottage to allow him to clean up. Whereupon, when his back was turned, Doc attacked the sergeant with a heavy metal-topped walking stick and attempted to run for the hills. It was pointed out that Doc knew the hills well and would be able to conceal himself indefinitely in one of the hundreds of disused mine shafts. He would then make his way across the mountains to Lourenço Marques, the nearest neutral territory.
The story had gone on to say that the sergeant was stunned from the blows he had received and Doc would have made good his escape had it not been for me, who had bravely tackled him. Hearing my scream, the officer had rushed down the path just in time to see Doc take a vicious kick at my head. The officer arrested the suspected spy at the point of his pistol.
The editorial went on to point out that Doc was a noted photographer, and that under the guise of photographing cactus he had undoubtedly taken pictures of likely enemy landing places and established landmarks, as well as mine shafts for storing food and weapons for enemy spies infiltrating South Africa from Portuguese territory. Fortuitously, inside the expensive German Leica camera the spy had used that very afternoon was exposed film of a hole in the mountainside, with the ore tailings dug from the mine heaped directly outside the shaft, making it an ideal defensive position. In Doc’s notepad had been found a compass bearing and exact location of the disused mine. There had also been several pictures of a succulent, which proved how cunning and careful to cover up Doc had been.
The picture was, of course, the site where we had found Senecio serpens, the blue chalksticks. Doc, as he had taught me to do, always established the location of a find, the direction of the prevailing winds, by studying the bush and plants in the immediate area, the soil conditions and the surrounding rock types.
To the rumor-happy folk of Barberton it was all very feasible and few of them paused long enough to examine the evidence. Mrs. Boxall said people were going around saying, “Once a Jerry, always a Jerry!” “Goodness, Peekay, I’d suspect my dear old father before I’d suspect the professor. He doesn’t have a patriotic bone in his body unless it’s for Africa and has something to do with cactus.” She folded my notes carefully and placed them in her handbag. “Chin up, old chap, we’ve got all the evidence we need to get our mutual friend out of trouble. I’ll get back tomorrow with the news.” She was gone, her sensible shoes clattering on the polished cement floor, her back straight as a ramrod and her bobbed head held high.
For the first time in a week I felt happy. Mrs. Boxall was not the sort to be trifled with and I had confidence that she’d sort things out. She was Doc’s friend and mine as well and as Doc had so often said, “This woman, she is not a fool, Peekay.”
But I didn’t see Mrs. Boxall the next day. Somehow my mother had heard of her visit and had seen Dr. Simpson, who brought down a ban on visitors again. I had begun to ma
ke semi-intelligent sounds through my wired jaw and Marie, after a few trial sessions, had little trouble understanding me. She said she had a little brother who was a bit wonky in the head and I sounded a lot like him. It was nice to talk to someone again and it was Marie who told me about my mother’s visit to Dr. Simpson. I was once again cut off without any news. Marie also told me that I would be going home on Tuesday and she was quite sad about it. She was fifteen and came from a farm in the valley. She lived in the nurses’ home and only got one weekend a month off to go home. She wasn’t very pretty or very clever and she had pimples, which she called her terrible spots, so she didn’t have any friends. I told her I was her friend.
On the Monday evening she came into the ward and put a large brown paper bag on the bed. She brought a finger to her lips, signaling for me to say nothing. “Mrs. Boxall brought it to the nurses’ home. She says it’s the latest on you know what,” she whispered, thrilled to be a part of the conspiracy but also frightened.
I looked into the paper bag, which, at first glance, seemed to contain nothing but bananas, but under the bananas was a tightly folded newspaper and a letter. After lights-out I stuffed both into my pajama jacket and walked down the corridor to the lavatories. The letter was written in Mrs. Boxall’s neat librarian’s hand.
Dear Peekay,
Much news from the war zone. I have been to see Mr. Andrews. He is the lawyer who comes into the library and only takes out books on birds. He read your notes and he said, “By Jove! This places a different complexion on everything.” He seemed very hopeful he could get to the military judge when he arrives from Pretoria next Wednesday. He agrees with me your notes are excellent. “Too good,” he said. “Who will believe a seven-year-old can express himself in such detail?”
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