by Guy Butler
‘Grandfather.’
He pointed to a page full of pictures of the Royal Wedding, in the Sunday Times.
‘They say she’ll go on a Royal Tour of the Commonwealth before long. She’s a lekker pop all right.’
‘In the old days she would have come here too.’
He looked at me as much as to say ‘Bog!’.
‘It’s true. King George didn’t only visit us in Italy. After the war he visited us here, in South Africa. The Royal V isit; with the Queen his wife, and the two princesses. One, Elizabeth, is the mother of the lucky Charles. They travelled all over. To help Smuts win the 1948 election.’
‘Ha ha!’ Dobson’s laugh was not hollow, it was a vacuum.
‘As a matter of fact our Brigadier, Bobby Palmer, saw quite a lot of King George VI. After the war he was put in charge of the safety of His Majesty during the Royal Tour of South Africa. Ja. I saw him afterwards, and did he have some wonderful stories to tell?! The best one …’
But the soldier was not interested in King George VI; he was interested in Charles and Di. And as for Dobson, he was looking hard at a flock of Angoras outside the window. So I had to keep my best story to myself.
About nine that night the train pulled into the deserted station of a small dorp: six intersecting rows of street lights, the neon sign of a Masonic Hotel going on and off like a slow pulse, and, further on, the blue light of the police station. Dobson had met up with friends, and was playing bridge in another compartment. The soldier was in the saloon, drinking beer with fellow conscripts.
The engine noises had softened to a mere distant hiss. The silence of the veld came over the stationary train like a tidal wave and sunk it deep into the ocean of night: it lay on the floor of the dark air like the Waratah lies on the floor of the sea near East London.
Now that there was no danger of grit in the eyes, I lowered the window, leant out, and looked up and down the platform. Not a soul.
Nowhere. Limbo.
And then Bobby Palmer’s story came back – about the Blue Train and the Royal Visit.
Imagine them, that royal family, Father with bad circulation and a stutter, Mother all charm and duty, and those two rather horsey, sweet girls, with all those handsome self-effacing aides, like Captain Peter Townsend; and weeks of meeting mayors and leading citizens, from the Non-U Cape to the Parvenu Reef. Imagine – to have to pretend to listen to countless school choirs, day after day! They needed times of quiet, healing quiet, like this cool Karoo night.
So it is arranged that the Blue Train will stop at certain stations where there are no receiving parties, no ceremonies to dress up for, no briefing about the odd old VC or MBE, no build-up of expectations: no curious public crowding the platforms, pushing against the railings, fathers with damp babies straddling their necks; village beaux with their trousers creased like sabres, hoping to catch the eye of the Princesses; but, failing them, that of the girl they fancied in the hockey team.
The empty stillness of these stations is enjoyed by His Majesty, who takes a brisk constitutional up and down the concrete platform, alone, relishing the night air, the space, the silence, the peace.
These unscheduled stops are arranged to take place before midnight.
Stationmasters are kept ignorant until the very last minute.
Dampie de Kok, the stationmaster, has just got back from his annual holiday in the western Transvaal, and hasn’t yet got down to reading his official mail. He looks up from his schedules and is startled to see the King of England walk past his office, unattended, like a man without a friend in the world. He rubs his eyes to make sure. There’s no doubt, it’s the man whose face has been in all the papers, except Die Transvaler, for weeks. Dampie is a good Cape Nationalist and knows what decent manners and the laws of hospitality require. He knows, for instance, that it is not the business of a stationmaster to welcome a king to any place, no matter how small. Someone must have made an incorrect entry in the mayor’s diary.
In the Masonic Hotel the proprietor, Hymie Kantor, has for the last half-hour been dropping dosing-time hints to the remnants of the post-rugby match party. They remain oblivious, and will do so, until Frikkie van Vuuren has finished his scrum by scrum, kick by kick, try by try, account of the fourth international test in Britain in Nineteen-Twenty voetsak, when he scored two tries. He is only about halfway through the game, when the phone rings. Hymie turns round to answer, with one ear as it were.
Frikkie is in full spate. ‘ … And so I dummied the left side, ducked in the middle and did a hellse hand-off right side, and got through their forwards. Then a short punt over their threequarters, and, truesgod, I caught it myself. Then no holding me; I scored my second try – in front of about a quarter of a million people. The roar of such a crowd! Twickenham! Ah now, that was rugby. The royal family was there too. I shook the King’s hand.’
Hymie cries:
‘Meneer van Vuuren, the royal family is waiting for you, now.’
‘What?’
‘They’re on the station, man. Dampie de Kok says King George is walking up and down the platform, asking for Frikkie van Vuuren.’
‘Jirre!’ cries Frikkie, grabbing the phone.
‘Watse nonsens …’, he shouts.
‘Meneer, die Vader weet, hy’s hier. George is hier, man.’
A few minutes later his Majesty’s steady patrol is stopped by Dampie. ‘Your Majesty, I am Albertus de Kok, Stationmaster. This is our Worship, the Mayor, Mr Frederik van Vuuren, MPC.’
Frikkie has always been at his best in a crisis. He may be without a tie, his white flannels are beer-stained and his ancient Springbok blazer is noticeably frayed. But without hesitation he apologises for his failure to meet the train on time in order to express the welcome and good wishes of his absent citizenry.
The citizenry is not entirely absent, however: Frikkie’s audience has trailed after him from the Masonic, and they look really terrible; so terrible that Dampie de Kok takes speedy and decisive action to keep them off the platform. He gets back to the barrier just in time to stem the tide. He demands to see their by-special-invitation platform tickets.
Frikkie continues his speech of welcome to His Majesty. It is not the fault of the citizens, who are, for a small town in the country, very well educated and polite. He can’t think whose fault it is, but he suspects it is the new secretary at the Town Hall. Well, Your Majesty, you have daughters yourself, and you must know what young girls are like. Well – yes – sometimes they get forgetful, you know. Perhaps her engagement to one of the richest farmers in the district has confused her. He assures His Majesty that he will look into the matter.
His Majesty nods his head and smiles. Frikkie has no more words.
Suddenly, a vast veld silence takes possession of them all. What now? Nothing has been prepared; no speeches; no mutual support of fellow councillors; no reassuring bastions of coffee, rusks and koeksisters manned by the oudstryders of the Vroue-federasie; no equally nervous MPs from the surrounding districts; niks, man, niks. Because it is night, there’s nothing in the whole town that he can point out, except the on-off neon light of the Masonic Hotel. If only it were daylight, he could point to the new water towers, and perhaps to the Rooigrasrand where Scheepers knocked hell out of the Coldstream Guards. Well, no, perhaps not; where the Coldstream Guards almost captured Scheepers. But it was all darkness. Night had removed his domain.
‘I like your long South African station platforms’, says George.
‘Beg yours?’
‘Long platforms – for walking; stretching the legs. Exercise you know.’
‘Ah yes, Your Majesty. I’m a sportsman myself’, with a little flourish of his blazer like a torreador drawing attention to his cloak.
‘Shall we walk then?’
So they start walking up and down, briskly. It is soon clear that George is in better training than Frikkie, who has put on a little weight since his Twickenham days. He also tends to take a dangerous stagger from time to time,
more particularly when negotiating the 180 degree turn at the end of each length. The conversation is nil.
Courteously pausing to allow his companion to recover his breath, His Majesty, as one man in authority to another, starts a conversation about local government and civic customs in their respective lands.
‘Am I right in believing that you have town councillors?’
‘Yes, Your Majesty.What you call aldermen, not so?’
The King, smiling appreciatively, says:
‘Yes. And our aldermen elect the mayor from their number.’
‘We also’, responds Frikkie, beaming. Things are easing up.
‘Do they have robes of office and regalia?’
‘Robes of office, yes; but reg … reg what?’
‘Regalia. For instance, our mayors have a chain of office which hangs over their robes, from their shoulders.’
‘Oh yes, Your Majesty’, says Frikkie, beaming, ‘we keep those for use on special occasions.’
11
The Jerboas of El Adem
Doctor, all schoolmasters are a little crazy, so you needn’t rub it in. All the best masters I had were crazy. Ask any of the old boys of Ladycole High who was their best teacher, and they’ll all say Daddy Laird. And why? Because he’d forget himself in a sort of dream, just like we boys could. He could teach poetry so that the tears came into his eyes. And ours. And not only poetry, but bees. Yes, bees. Okay, okay, he was English master, and bees are biology; but the biology master couldn’t even make the sex life of a saucer of broadbeans interesting. You know, how they grow in damp blotting paper? Laird kept bees, and I learnt more biology from him than anyone. ‘Bees in the bonnet’, we’d say, ‘like bats in the belfry’. But we didn’t mean it. Daddy Laird was the sanest old nut that ever turned Karoo kids into human beings. And he died happy, Doc, aged eighty-two, and in bed.
So I’m naturally puzzled – upset – Doctor, by what’s happened to me. What’s so bad about my little bit of craziness that the Principal says I ought to talk to you about it whenever we meet in the bar? What’s the difference between Daddy Laird’s hobby and my keeping rats? Okay, okay. You can make some pretty flip Rorschach responses: bees equals honey, rats equals bubonic plague. That’s where half my trouble starts – people have these stock responses, they can’t get beyond clichés. For instance: you say ‘bee’, and they will think only of honey, not sting, nor of other bees that produce no honey at all. You say ‘rat’ – and none will think of all the harmless rat species that never come near man, but go about their business, quietly, in the wide open spaces, generation after generation. Doctor, there are species of rats, the experts say, that give man the widest possible berth.
So I have first to get over this stupid prejudice against certain rodents. It’s so discouraging: only a few kids in my classes ever take any interest in my gerbils and jerboas. Yes gerbils, with a g; and jerboas with a j. People, Doctor, they’ve got no logic. Some will even keep white mice as pets, and hamsters, and rabbits, and other rodents, and I once got them spellbound with the family lifestyle of the porcupine; all rodents. But gerbils and jerboas? No.
You’ve never heard of a gerbil or a jerboa? So few people have. Well, I had to go through three years of war in the desert to learn about the jerboa. You ask: What have gerbils and jerboas got in common, apart from being small rodents? Point one: the first four letter of each word make the same sound, ‘jer’; point two, they both look like small scale kangaroos: long hind legs, small front legs, almost like little hands. Pretty too. And jump, Doctor! None of your belly-to-earth slimy movements of ordinary rats – lovely light little chaps that can jump a metre without difficulty. I see a glimmer of interest in your eye. You did the pole vault once? Well, they don’t need any pole to jump twenty times their own height.Wait until you meet one alive, Doc.
I first heard about jerboas long before I saw them in – well – circumstances about which I won’t bother you now. No, if you don’t mind – please, it’s only hay fever – I’ll be okay in a second or two … Sorry … Yes, Doc, maybe next time … Next week? Same time? OK, thanks Doctor.
Yes, I was about to tell you how I heard of the jerboas before I met them. I hope you don’t mind the suitcase. Books – references, you know. Here’s my scrap book – it was in the Rand Daily Mail during the last World War. Before your time of course, you’d have been in Standard Eight, I suppose? About 1941, perhaps ’42. The crack British Seventh Armoured Division gave themselves the nickname the Desert Rats. Read here: – ‘an inspired choice of emblem for a quick-moving, surprise-dealing formation’. Most of them had ridden on horses before they’d got modernised into tanks, and they kept the reckless dash of cavalry. Now, there can’t be much wrong with a rat when such a fine body of men adopts a rat as emblem, can there? As their divisional flash they wore a khaki square with a scarlet jerboa on it. But the poor devils’ tanks carried cannon like peashooters compared with Rommel’s jobs. Just compare these photographs. Hell, the awful punishment they took at Sidi Rezegh and Alma Haifa. Look at the photographs, Doc. Look. Terrible, Doctor. Yes. Terrible. I mean terrible. You agree?
But spirit, Doctor, spirit. That’s something else I never quite got in the SAAF. Why? Because, well, I wasn’t in it quite long enough. They had esprit, the Desert Rats had esprit. ‘First in, first out’ was their boast. Okay, okay. In class my boys don’t mind me talking about Desert Rats in the Western Desert Campaign, but when I switch from those brave, human rats in tanks to the little jerboas, their eyes wander to the windows.
What, you ask, is the difference between jerboas and gerbils? Well, the little chap of the Western Desert is called jaculus jaculus, described by this authority, page 104, – here we are – as ‘one of the most gentle and charming of animals’. I agree Doc, I must agree. I have made a special study of jaculus jaculus and could be called South Africa’s world authority on the species. Look, here’s my full bibliography on it: books, articles, references in poetry, even in Arabic, and fiction, even in American, and photographs. Look.
But I have to confess, well, I have only seen a live jerboa during one brief period in my life and then in circumstances which I won’t mention – if you don’t mind – just yet. Please. No, I’m okay. Give me a second or two, that’s all – Yes, perhaps another brandy and coke would be nice. Thanks. Cheers.
Yes, well, jaculus jaculus. Look – they have pale, sandy-coloured fur which blends perfectly with the desert, large ears, large eyes, and a long tail with a black and white tuft at its tip.There is heated debate among jerbologists about the function of the tail: two factions, Doc: those who say it is a signalling device for jerboa morse code; and those who say it’s for balance, as in the kangaroo and also certain extinct dinosaurs. But, Doctor, I ask you, why must it be either/or? Why not both/and? Why? But I digress. What distinguishes the jerboa from ordinary rats is his hind legs, not his tail. Let me quote again. Do you mind? Let’s see. Page 207. Here we are:
‘The Dipodidae are characterised by their remarkable adaptations for jumping. The hind legs are at least four times longer than the front legs.’
Just think of that! Imagine a human being like that, Doctor! Four times!
‘Jumping is probably an adaptation for escape from predators in open country. When moving rapidly, jerboas leap and spring with their hind legs, covering up to three metres in a single bound.’
Yes, Doctor, but nowhere in the literature can I find any detailed reference to the height which they can jump in a single bound. This so-called authority talks vaguely of ‘jumping almost a metre from a standing position’. But in my most unforgettable experience of a jerboa he jumped – well – the height of – believe it or not, this bar counter – but, no, I’ll be all right, Doctor … Sorry … Hay fever … Dammit, dammit, dammit … Next week? Same time? OK Doc.
‘Evening Doc … Can we leave jaculus jaculus for a bit, if you don’t mind? And talk about gerbils instead. Are they related to the springhares? you ask. A good question, because t
here are superficial resemblances in appearance and habits – but not in scale, certainly not in scale. Well, I mean, a springhare is big enough to remind one of the kangaroos, isn’t it? Gerbils might look like dwarf springhares, but no, they’re not. Not, Doctor, definitely not. You know springhares, don’t you? You’ve hunted them? Fine! Now we’ve got a good common datum line. Common ground, Doc.
Doctor, thousands upon thousands of gerbils, imagine, – soon, after sunset, they’ll be coming out of their burrows, over millions of square miles of southern Africa – alive, Doctor, with their large eyes and ears, living in terror of owls, and leaping and loping on their long, long legs in search of their food. I think I’m safe in calling them Tatera brantsii. But I mustn’t get too technical, must l? But, Doctor, – well, I have my doubts about much of present gerbiloid taxonomy. It doesn’t allow sufficiently for evolution. A generation for humans is about twenty-five years, but for gerbils it’s only one year, or much less. So that they can adapt twenty-five times faster than human beings. So, rapid mutations in gerbils and jerboas may throw a flood of light on human evolution. You’ll get my point, I’m sure. You do? Good!
Anyway, one or two of my little papers on gerbils were published in The Elephant’s Child, the journal of the Friends of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown, and inspired some interesting queries and correspondence. This encouraged me to reactivate my MSc project on ‘The Jerboas of El Adem’. Yes, El Adem. Yes, in the Western Desert. I have a suspicion, Doctor, that some of this hay fever trouble springs from the frustration I am encountering with getting backing for a necessary research trip to this place in the Western Desert called El Adem. Adem with an e.
Why El Adem? Everybody asks me, Why El Adem? I admit El Adem is no sort of a place at all, but that is where the raw material, the data base, for this study happens to be. No other jerboas will do, Doctor; because they are the jerboas on which my original research was done: not much research, I must admit, but intense, as much as a young fighter pilot can cram into a month, between sorties. I started work the very first night I got to El Adem and continued until a month later, when I was shot down over the Med. Yes, Doctor, I baled out, was picked up by an Italian fishing boat and was bundled into the bag. Not nice. Terrible. Well, yes, just terrible … Another? But my turn to pay … cheers, Doc, cheers.