by Ann Harries
Two days later it is mail day. Sarah receives a letter:
Dear Sarah,
I am writing this in a rush to make sure you get it in time. Great news! Miss Hobhouse sails to Cape Town tomorrow and will arrive at the end of the month. She is coming to see for herself what has happened to the devastated families. She very much hopes to be able to meet you in Bloemfontein, if she is allowed to go there. Perhaps you could introduce her to some of the children in the hospital. She will bring clothing and foodstuffs with her to dispense to the needy. She also has a bag of toys donated by well-wishers!
Yrs in haste,
Sophie
She reads these words several times. In the exhausted headache behind her eyes she feels a faint flicker of something hopeful. What a privilege if this strong woman should turn to her for help and guidance. She remembers Emily’s face from the Bruton Street meeting: the intensity of her gaze, her quiet beauty, the passion with which she spoke. Yes, her presence in the camp would draw energy out of fatigue, like forceful breath on a dying flame; she would create order out of utter chaos. But which children would be most appropriate for her to see?
Lizzie would certainly charm her. Yesterday Sarah had visited the hospital where Poppie now helped with the children. The little girl had woken up and called out for her mother in piteous tones, much to the irritation of the two refugee nurses from the Transvaal. Poppie had at once appeared with a piece of paper and a pencil and the two of them were composing a letter to Mother when Sarah arrived. For a moment the scene resembled that of any children’s hospital where nurses comfort and divert grief-stricken children. She smiled. Yes, Miss Hobhouse must meet Poppie.
Six
To Leonard Hobhouse
Kenilworth, Cape Town,
30 December 1900
Dear Leonard,
I must write something by this mail, but it will be rather vague and muddly for I am rather like a sponge continually sopping up new ideas and impressions, and am reduced to a state of mental indigestion, having had no time to think it over and sort it out. The beauty of the scenery impresses one all the time, and makes the background for everything, together with brilliant weather, light bracing air and gorgeous flowers.
The day of my arrival was a very full one – we came to anchor in Table Bay at four a.m. and shortly after that hour I was nearly knocked down by the overpowering magnificence of Table Mountain with its attendant Devil’s Peak and Lion’s Head, seen by sunrise. They are magnificent.
By five p.m. I was eating figs and apricots on a stoep and nursing an African meerkat as if I had known it always. The interval was spent in landing, myself and the Rowntrees, and trying to fit them into rooms – a very hard business for every hotel is choked. The docks are too full for the ships to get in, so we had to come off in tugs. After two and a half days I succeeded in getting my luggage, having lost all at the docks.
The first realisation of war comes on landing. The congested docks piled with forage etc – the long lines of military trucks in the streets of Cape Town – the swarms of Khaki people everywhere, sprinkled thick – the pavements crowded with idle people – prices of everything very high.
My welcome has been very warm – everyone seems to know me. Mrs Murray is a dear, but far from strong. The Harry Curreys, Sauers, Charles Moltenos and Merrimans have asked me to stay with them and I go on Thursday to the Merrimans at their farm near Stellenbosch. There are many people there whom I am told I must see. In fact, they are all anxious to keep me here till I have seen and known all of them, and seen such women here and there who have strayed from the Republics
Whether I can get up there or not, who can tell! Since we sailed so much has altered for the worse that it will be very difficult.
Your loving
Emily
Letter to Lady Hobhouse
Cape Town,
31 December 1900
Dear Aunt Mary,
There is so much to say I hardly know where to begin. As to my chance of getting north, it is far worse than when I left England, but I do not despair … All the best heads here from Sir Henry de Villiers downwards think, and I think myself, that my best plan is to go straight to Sir Alfred Milner with your note and tell him what I want to do. Meantime there is much for me to learn here.
Mr Schultz, who has all along been secretary to the committees here, tells me his latest news from Johannesburg, speaks of four thousand women and children in some sort of camp prisons up there. A good deal is learnt from officers who come to the Cape. One told a friend of mine this week that he himself helped in the burning of six hundred farms, hating and loathing it.
Mr Schultz has succeeded in getting one truck of clothing through to Bloemfontein but it is fraught with difficulty … I am told there are fifty-seven boy prisoners at Green Point prison-of-war camp, from seventeen down to nine years. The committee tried to get these freed to send them to school but only succeeded with one. He is eight years old.
Your loving niece
Emily
Orange River Colony, December 1900
The journey with the burnt-out families down to Bloemfontein takes four days and by the end of it Patch’s euphoria has ebbed a little. There is something humiliating about herding women and children in ox wagons to a concentration camp; it is not heroic work but someone has to do it. These women and children are sullen and unfriendly. ‘Daily our cup is more bitter,’ the grandmothers moan. ‘You Tommies are starving us. Where are our eggs and bread, our milk and butter?’ cry the mothers. And the children scornfully throw the rationed biscuits at targets in the veldt instead of eating them as the British Army has done. ‘We can’t eat stones!’ they shout as they hurl the klinkers, as they call them, with deadly accuracy at anthills or meerkats or a low-flying ha-de-dah flapping its prehistoric wings.
The black servants are no better, weeping and howling in their own language, keeping everyone awake, and setting off the oxen and cattle till the bellows of hungry livestock drown those of the women and children. Patch tries to adopt an indifferent pose, and in fact feels sorrier for himself than for his cargo – they’ve brought it on themselves anyway – for now that his thigh wound has healed he is left with a slight limp, invisible to most eyes, but one that interrupts his fluid saunter and makes him walk carefully. He hopes it will not detract from his appeal to Sarah. Most probably she will love him all the more, being a nursing sister. To cheer himself up he visualises their joyous reunion in Bloemfontein, which is followed by a five hundred mile ride to Cape Town on the back of a black charger, Sarah astride the saddle with him, across the Great Karoo desert and the purple mountain ranges all the way, and thence to the Island. His mother and uncle stand waiting for him at the jetty which is at last finished. Thank heaven he won’t have to be carried on a grinning convict’s back. But what will happen as he steps off the ferry and they walk, arms entwined, towards him? Will he kiss his mother on her self-cured cheek? Will Sarah be at his side? He shakes his head and frowns at the blank horizon.
When finally the flat earth begins to undulate and redden, he knows the Fountain of Flowers is near. The kaffir drivers crack their whips more energetically across the long teams of weary oxen; the mothers fall silent. Smoke hovers over a hill. The railway glints nearby. A chain of artillery, ammunition and ambulance wagons grind out from the hills: his cargo is forced to leave the road and crash among the bushes and anthills until they reach the outlying hills of the little city.
First the kaffir families must be dropped off at their camp, a collection of hastily made shacks near the railway, already overcrowded with refugees from their employers’ farms, and sticky with flies. The servants screech in sorrow; they would rather go with their mistresses into the unknown. A few young black girls are allowed to remain.
And suddenly they are in the heart of Bloemfontein, creaking and rumbling up the central main road lined with roses. His heart is in his mouth as he scans the face of every woman who passes by on the busy pavement, but none of t
hem bears the features of Sarah. There are plenty of ghosts about though, and the tin hut he can see just over the road is inhabited not only by the phantoms of Sarah and himself but also by his long illness, and the other sick troopers, and that orderly who liked to touch him. The hospital tents and marquees have all gone: the appalling thought occurs to him for the first time: what if Sarah has left? He hasn’t heard from her for a couple of months (quite a relief in a way) but the passion of her letters had convinced him that she would be there waiting for him.
They pass the army barracks in Tempe and then come to the hillside where thousands of women and children swarm among ragged bell tents. It is not his job to find homes for the families, thank goodness, so he leaves the scowling women, good riddance, and rides back to the barracks.
‘Ah!’ exclaims the superintendent as he reads the note from Captain Smithers. ‘We’ve just the job for you. Hope you like birds.’
Bird Cage, December 1900
He quickly learns that the Bloemfontein ‘Bird Cage’ is the penal area for ‘undesirables’, fenced in by barbed wire and crammed with those too headstrong to be allowed to remain in the main body of the camp: but ‘Tiger Cage’ would be more like it. Some of the women bare their teeth at him and hiss when he walks by, then laugh contemptuously. He feels as trapped as they are, for the bird cage is some distance from the main camp, and his sentry duty hours are long.
The ringleader of the headstrong women is Mrs Roos, sent here for provoking a demonstration against the meat rations. Tall and angular, with piercing blue eyes, she looks nothing like the average Boer woman Patch has come across. For a start, she never wears a kappie, choosing to adorn her head with an English-style sun hat laden with silken roses. The two garments she possesses indicate an interest in fashion, her erect posture creating a graceful flow to the fabric not often seen even in clothes unstained by filth. She speaks perfect English.
‘Private Donnelly,’ she sneers, or so it seems to him, ‘can’t something be done about the state of our tents? There are eight of us living in an unlined tent full of holes. When it rained last night we were all drenched. My children have to lie in mud. I myself spent the night in a river. Pray,’ and she lingers on this word for a second, extending it into a cruelly melodious reminder of his inferior social status, ‘find us a tent that wasn’t used during the Crimean War.’
‘There are none.’ Patch delivers these three monosyllables with a heaviness designed to crush further mockery. The humour submerged in her sarcasm is lost on him, he feels diminished.
‘I think you are mistaken,’ replies she, raising her perfectly arched eyebrows, ‘for my boys on their way to the camp school yesterday saw a wagon-load of tents being off-loaded at the ration house, and that is why I ask immediately for fear of being late.’
‘I shall not let you have another tent. They are for women who obey the camp rules.’ Patch cannot meet her eye but his voice is masterful. He wants to add, ‘And who speak respectfully to the sentries,’ but knows this will only release a stream of more unfathomable insults.
Mrs Roos bestows upon him a look of pity, then sails off. Next thing the whole fence is covered with wet blankets drying in the sun when the rules state, quite clearly, Nothing to be hung on the wires. A tent from the ration house arrives in the bird cage that afternoon. Patch looks away as Mrs Roos thanks him softly. He is beginning to realise that he has seen her somewhere before.
Then there is the problem with Mrs Potgieter. She had been sent from the main camp because she had bitten the arm of a British trooper! Scarcely credible that a respectable mother of seven who made the best melktert in the ex-republic should become a wildcat only a few weeks after arriving at the concentration camp. The reason why she had behaved so uncharacteristically lay in the latrine system which had been installed on the outskirts of the camp, far from the tents. No less than eight trench latrines with ninety-one seats next to each other had been installed for the use of the twelve hundred inhabitants. But the ungrateful inhabitants preferred to relieve themselves in the ditch even further away, many of them never having heard of the sophistications of the latrine system. The real reason, though, was the nauseating stench which emanated from the trenches as the slop buckets, which should have been removed by the town council by eleven a.m., sat festering in the sun all day discharging their unmistakeable odour. You had to fight your way through swarms of flies to get to the seats. On top of this serious deterrent to emptying your bowels or bladder, there were no separate facilities for men and women.
One day, Mrs Potgieter, who had summoned up her courage and braved her way into the latrines, was surprised by a visit from a British trooper just as she was raising her skirts and sitting down. ‘Kindly leave the latrine while I am here,’ she called to him in her best English. Ignoring this command, the Tommy proceeded to undo his flies. So outraged was she by this unseemly behaviour that she leapt up, grabbed his arm, and dug her teeth into it as hard as she could. For this reason she is now imprisoned in the bird cage, where there are no latrines at all. The women must improvise. They have no option but to use their cooking pots and pans or empty coffee or golden syrup tins, and leave them outside the tents to be collected – by Patch himself, who has to empty the contents into buckets which he must then place outside the barbed wire gate. So disgusting does he find this task that he often finds reason not to perform it, much to the indignation of the inmates.
When one night Mrs Potgieter’s daughter is ill with diarrhoea, the desperate mother has no option but to throw the endlessly recurring slops through the wire into the main camp. Some of the child’s watery faeces have spilt on the ground of the penal enclosure, a pathetic pathway to the wire fence. Patch finds the mother trying to clear up the mess the next day. He has had a bad night, dreaming that Sarah has married dead Cartwright, whose ghost taunts him with lewd barrack-room ditties. He is not in the mood for trails of excrement, nor for impertinent women.
‘Good God, woman, what are you doing?’ he finds himself exclaiming in horror. ‘Do you Boers have no pride? This time I will report this to the commandant.’
‘Good!’ she replies. ‘That is exactly what I want. I should like the commandant to know how we are situated here. I have asked you often enough for a sanitary bucket.’
In fact, Patch had several times requested sanitary buckets, as much for his own convenience as for that of the inmates, but to no avail. Perhaps if he brings in the commandant this shrew will force him to do something about it.
She does not let him down.
On the arrival of Captain Nelson, Mrs Potgieter is holding an elegant bone china cup in one hand.
‘Good morning, madam. Now what seems to be the problem?’
‘Good morning, Commandant. I’m afraid this teacup,’ and she points at the pretty thing with her free hand, ‘is the problem.’
The captain blinks. He can see it is a fine piece of china. The pattern of pink roses suggests it is probably from the kilns of Wedgwood in the Black Country from whence, as it happens, the captain hails. ‘In what way, madam?’ he enquires, testily.
‘Commandant, I regret to say that I am unable to empty my bladder into this charming vessel. It is not quite large enough. As we are not allowed latrines in this – this cage, perhaps you would prefer me to use the floor of my tent. Do I have your permission, sir?’
A slow blush spreads over the Englishman’s face. He opens his mouth to speak; closes it again; shakes his head; clears his throat. These outspoken Boer women are too much for his English reticence.
‘Perhaps a sanitary bucket is the solution, sir,’ murmurs Patch, feeling sorry for the chap.
Captain Nelson is torn between disciplining his subordinate for speaking out of turn; barking a refusal to the woman who has so embarrassed him; or giving in to her request. He is due on the golf course in ten minutes’ time. He draws himself up even straighter than his normal erect military bearing and snaps, ‘I shall order a bucket for each tent in this enclosure.’
He turns to Patch. ‘Kindly see that the buckets are removed and emptied every morning by the Native servants. It is, after all, a penal camp, not a holiday camp, you know, ha ha.’ And rushes off.
After he has left Mrs Potgieter erupts with suppressed mirth. Patch cannot resist a chortle as well. Their eyes meet: they explode with laughter. ‘I must say I don’t think I’ll ever feel the same about this poor old teacup again,’ she gasps.
Patch has to admit there is a certain liveliness about the bird cage which appears to be absent from the larger camp. But where is Sarah? In the little free time he has he wanders through the small military hospital that remains, his eyes on the alert for her crimson pelisse. There is an entirely new staff in the hospital; no one has heard of her. Most of the Army Reserve nurses have returned to Cape Town or gone back to England, he is told. The turquoise bracelet is in his pocket. If he holds it tightly enough she might appear. Coming here is beginning to seem a mistake. Perhaps he should have requested to be sent to Cape Town and have done with it.
At least there are some attractive young women in the bird cage, many of them here for consorting with soldiers in an immoral way in the main camp. Among them is a high-spirited creature who makes a point of catching his eye as he does his rounds. Although covered in mud from sleeping on the wet ground in the tent, her waist is nevertheless nipped in by stays and her breasts thrust upwards so that inviting little mounds of pink flesh rise above the low neckline of her dress. One day she beckons to Patch to enter her tent as if to point out some defect within it, as is usually the way. Once he passes through the open flaps of the tent, he finds her standing before him, her hands pertly held over her swaying hips. ‘Yes?’ Patch demands. ‘I need your help,’ she murmurs in broken English. And in a flash she raises her skirt above her head and reveals the naked lower half of her body. Patch tries to avert his eyes but finds himself unable to stop staring at the great bush of black curls that springs from between her legs. As he stands frozen before her she places her hand on her bush and begins to rub it with a slow circular motion. ‘I very much need your help,’ she says again, her eyes filming over with desire. Patch forces himself to turn his head; he fears he might ejaculate with excitement all over his khaki then and there if he tries to speak. He leaves the tent shaking all over. He has not had a woman for nearly a year.