1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  “Yes, and if the British hadn’t threatened the Boers, brought so many soldiers here, all this talk of war might not be around. And all these refugees. If only they wanted haircuts as well as food.”

  Bella laughed at the thought of so many people stopping off at Ladysmith to get their hair cut. Then she sat up straighter still in Torres’s chair. It wasn’t a laughing matter, the food crisis. The demand for bread at the station had forced the price up generally; it was now a shilling a loaf and, as her father had said, “Old Star is coining it.” Mr and Mrs Star, Ladysmith’s bakers—Bella could see their shop across the road from where she sat in the comfortable leather chair—were generally thought greedy by the populace. As she told Torres what her father thought of the Stars’ behaviour—‘criminal’ had been one of the words he used—a slight frown passed across the barber’s face. Bella wondered if she had been a little too confiding.

  Torres looked back at her in the glass, at her face, at her neck, at the cream-coloured, light cotton frock below. With its brown eyes, thin lips and slightly angled cheekbones, it was quite a pale, austere face that regarded him from above the jars of hair oil and the india-rubber bulbs of the perfume sprays. And becoming all the more so as, inch by inch, layer by layer, he cut off more hair, for with every lock that fell the young woman’s face seemed graver and more serious in its contours.

  Perhaps it was just that it saddened him, this particular haircut. The truth was, the dark tresses of Bella Kiernan reminded him of those of another Bella, or more properly Isabella, whom he had left behind him in Lourenço Marques. She had married another, the family choice, and he had left the city of his birth, left his parents’ rich estates, left everything, rather than have to see her every day on the arm of another man—left with sadness in his heart, and wandered, and ended up here, among the British. He had learned to cut hair on the way, from a Lithuanian Jew at Komati Poort.

  Antonio, you are dreaming again, he said to himself, remembering the time he had nipped Mrs Frinton’s ear with the scissors…and forced himself to concentrate on the overwhelming question of Bella Kiernan’s haircut.

  Because they are questions—he pruned off another tress—haircuts are questions, their outcome indeterminable and weighty. Definitely weighty, in the instance of Bella Kiernan; but it was what she had wanted, however he had tried to counsel her otherwise. How strange it was, he thought, the way that women will suddenly take drastic measures with their hair; as if, by some new coiffure, they might achieve a particular object or, in a mysterious scheme that went beyond the bounds of earth itself, change their soul utterly. He looked in the mirror again.

  Bella realized that Mr Torres hadn’t said anything for a while. She wondered what he had been thinking about. He wasn’t the gossiping type usually associated with his trade, but she liked to hear what he did have to say. His Latin dignity and style, combined with occasional flights of fancy, marked him out from the brash, pioneering bravado of most of the Ladysmith men.

  “I don’t think the Stars are the only ones growing rich from the misfortunes of others,” she announced. “I think the gold people and the diamond people in the Cape want to get their hands on the Boer fields. Father says that Sir Alfred Milner, the Cape Governor, is in cahoots with them, to get money for the Empire, and that’s why he’s so keen on war.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “What do you think will happen?”

  “I don’t know. There are certainly lots of rumours about. The town is full of wild fantasies. Mr Greenacre’s son was in here yesterday and he said he saw nearly a thousand Boers watering their horses.”

  There was silence—except for the clicking scissors—as the two of them thought about this; although, as Bella remarked to herself, Bobby Greenacre was a notorious fibber.

  As she sat there, a strange sound began to fill the silence. At first she thought it was just the scissors, but then she realized it came from outside. It slowly grew louder, the clip of horses’ hooves and the jingle of harness, and then the low murmur of a large body of men in the distance. A bugle sounded, then fife and drum, and soon the main street was filled from end to end with tramping feet. Torres stopped cutting and both turned to watch as more troops came in from the railway station, after disembarking from the armoured train with horses and supplies. He and Bella had seen it several times before that week, the arrival of rank upon rank of these seasoned men in khaki, the best the British Army could muster, but each time it was a sight to behold. The sun had begun to go down and the cavalry lances cast long shadows on the ground. Behind them came scraggy mules and long-horned oxen pulling wagons in teams of ten, driven by African boys who handled their long, leather-tongued stock-whips with astonishing skill. Then came the infantry, rifles on their shoulders, puttees round their calves, expressions both grim and grinning on their faces.

  “They look very strong, don’t they?” said Bella. “Father says they have come from India and are very skilled from fighting the difficult tribes there.”

  “Pomp and circumstance, that is what you British say, isn’t it?” Torres replied, with a chuckle. And then, correcting his levity: “But I hope they send many more, anyway. It is very frightening, all of this. My great-grandfather died in the Napoleon war, you know, that is why my father had to come to Africa. But I will tell you my story on your next haircut, Miss Kiernan, because…”—he touched her on the shoulder—“this one is finished.”

  “It looks wonderful, Mr Torres,” said Bella, turning her head to inspect. “In fact, I’m so pleased I think I will buy one of those looking-glasses you have in the window, if I may.”

  “Of course,” said the barber, smiling at her. “I will fetch you a new one from the store. I have some still in their box.”

  Once she had paid for the haircut and the new looking-glass, Bella said goodbye to Mr Torres and left the salon. At the door, she paused, deciding whether or not to put her straw hat back on. In the end, she did, betraying a slight uncertainty as to her ability to carry off the new style. This nervousness was in no small part due to the large numbers of soldiers that filled the street outside. As she walked past the shop fronts, with her mirror box under her arm, she felt the military gaze falling upon her, and kept her own eyes demurely down. All the same, in several places she had to lift up her petticoats to keep them from the dust, and this manoeuvre brought a certain amount of exhilaration to both Bella and her observers.

  Jane, her younger sister—heavier-set, less nervous, and blonde—was already behind the bar when Bella walked into the Royal Hotel. Proprietor: Leo Kiernan, their father, who had had them working as barmaids since their early teens. Now, at twenty and eighteen, they were expert at mixing all manner of drinks and their slim white wrists had grown strong pulling the tall beer levers that lined the bar like—well, she and Jane had a secret about that.

  It was certainly true that there were a lot of men in the bar of the Royal Hotel that evening, so many that the noise of their talking drowned the sound of the musical box playing in the corner. As decorously as possible, Bella made her way through: past men in uniform from the Green Horse, the Natal Carbineers, the Naval Brigade and other regiments, past men in homburg hats from the town, past farmers in corduroy suits from the outlying districts, and—at one table, as Bella noticed—the four men who had ridden by Mr Torres’s window not long earlier.

  Her father was down at one end of the bar, Jane at the other, dextrously squirting soda into a line of whisky glasses while chatting to a pleasant-looking young naval gunner. Bella lifted the hinged flap in the bar counter and went through. Looking up from the line of tumblers, with one ear still open to the blandishments of the sailor, Jane mouthed, “You’re late!”

  Bella pulled a face and took off her straw hat. She reached down below the bar for a cloth to wipe up the spillage which, even though it was still very early in the evening, had accumulated on the varnished wood. Rising, she came face to face with her father. It was one of the curiosities of the Kiernan famil
y that although Bella (as her mother had been) was dark and Jane blonde, their father was the deepest red. This being a time when genetics was a science in its infancy, and also a time when other so-called sciences (involving transmigrating souls, Ancient Egyptians and the shape of the skull) were very much abroad, it would not have been improper to assume that Leo Kiernan was not their father at all. Because he was, quite simply, very red-headed indeed. In terms of its texture, too, his hair was curious: closely, tightly curled.

  As it happened, it was hair that concerned Mr Kiernan as Bella came up from beneath the bar, not on his own account, but on his daughter’s.

  “What,” he exclaimed, “have you done to yourself? You look like a convict! Who did this? Torres?”

  “Yes,” replied Bella, boldly. “But I asked him to, and it is nothing to do with him. Or you, Father. A lady must wear her hair as she pleases.”

  “A lady? So you’re a lady now, are you?” He seemed, if anything, to be getting redder.

  “I think it’s rather fetching,” said a voice from the bar. Bella—and her father—looked up to see a stocky young trooper, clutching a shilling in his hand. He had green eyes, a biggish nose, and his fingernails were dirty.

  “What you think is not the point,” said Mr Kiernan, glowering. “Come on, what do you want?”

  “I’ll have a gin, if I may.” He smiled at Bella. “Tom Barnes, Green Horse.”

  Like your eyes, Bella said to herself.

  “I’ll deal with you later,” her father said to her, as if he knew her train of thought, “and I’ll please you, sir, not to exchange pleasantries with my staff.” Mr Kiernan pushed the gin across the bar to the soldier, and turned to his daughter, pointing at the floor. “Take that crate of empties down to the cellar. And bring up a full one while you’re about it.”

  “Don’t be hard on her, sir,” Bella heard the soldier say as she went out. He seemed a decent fellow, she thought, as she struggled down the cellar steps with the crate. Though really it would have been better if he had kept quiet.

  The fellow in question returned to his table. Tom Barnes was sitting with four war correspondents. They were quenching their thirst after a tour, having ridden down the Helpmakaar road and stopped for a breather on Pound Plateau. The journalists hadn’t had permission for the scouting expedition and now he had been assigned by the censor’s office to keep an eye on them. This was a lucky chance since it meant he got a night out. Having ignored him at first, they were now—the quartet comprising George Steevens of the Mail, Henry Nevinson of the Daily Chronicle, Donald MacDonald of the Melbourne Argus and William Maud, the Graphic’s ‘special artist’—quizzing him about the army’s readiness for the impending war. In particular, Nevinson—a bearded, elegant character—was worried that the British had pushed up too far from the Cape.

  “Look,” he said, cupping his glass with his hand. “I was up in Pretoria earlier this month. I saw it. The Boers may be ragged and disorganized but they’ve quite simply got more men than us—nearly twice as many. Twenty thousand to our ten. And we don’t know the land so well. They do, and they are full of passion too. I saw their General Joubert when I was up there, and do you know what the first thing he said to me was?”

  “What?” queried Maud, on behalf of all.

  “He said: The heart of my soul is bloody with sorrow.”

  “Typical Boer rhetoric,” sniffed MacDonald, lighting his pipe.

  “No, it’s good,” countered Maud. “I can see it as a caption.”

  “Just for effect,” said MacDonald. “You shouldn’t have been taken in.”

  “On the contrary,” exclaimed Nevinson. “He meant it. Joubert was one of the ones who desperately wanted peace. He feels about this in a way that we don’t, and that passion, conveyed to his troops if it comes to war, could prove dangerous.”

  “Passion doesn’t always win a war,” said Steevens. “Guns and food, that’s what you need.”

  “Oh come on. Passion is necessary too,” said Nevinson. “Absolutely.”

  “Not if you’re an Englishman. There is a simple argument to it. If we win, it will be through brute force and logistics. If they win, it will, as you would say, be through passion. For although I’ve only made a sketchy study of the Boer character, I have learned one thing about that race.”

  “What’s that, then?” said MacDonald.

  “That they are a people hard to arouse, but harder to subdue.”

  Tom Barnes took a drink and looked at the men around him. They all seemed a little foolish. None had yet quite got to grips with the realities of ‘the coming scrap’, as it was now known. From the tiny ration of water from the pumps, the dysentery and enteric, the hot sun beating down on your head or, if you were off duty, the breathless haze of your tent, to the white ants and flies on everything—your food, your tobacco, your writing paper, even your underclothes—it was no picnic. Not to mention the dust in your mouth and in the workings of your fob-watch, or the likelihood of getting shot at by an army of men who never showed themselves and who saw warfare in the same light that they saw hunting antelope. Stalking was the Boer way, the old hands from Majuba said, which was why all the training the British cavalry were doing—charges with lances, for God’s sake—seemed pretty pointless; and all the training the infantry had been doing—marching forward in close order, easy to pick off—totally so. He had tried to describe all this from India in a letter to Perry, his younger brother, once he’d heard that he, too, had signed up and was headed for the Cape: the sheer drudgery of a lot of soldiering—young lieutenants shouting at you or having you flogged, blisters on your feet, boils on your thighs, food not fit for dogs…

  He had the idea that Perry—two years his junior—believed that soldiering was a bit like the ferreting expeditions they had gone in for on the farm when they were younger: an adventure, a lark with a prize, a bloody one to be held up by its hind legs and presented to Ma for skinning when you got home. The fact is, you were more like rabbit on the battlefield than ferret or ferreter. That was what he had said to Lizzie, their sister, in another letter—written on board the Lindula, en route from Princes Dock, Bombay, to Durban—in a last-ditch attempt to get her to persuade Perry to think again. He couldn’t forgive himself the possibility of his younger brother being killed because Perry wanted to imitate him, as he had done all his life.

  Thought of these letters reminded him that he hadn’t written home recently, something he had done religiously in India. There was the voyage to cover, for instance, and the medical and veterinary inspections beforehand. How there had been a case of anthrax at Deolali, and B and C

  Squadrons had had to be left behind. How he himself had had to apply for two replacement horses on the way, one cast from the ship, lame in two feet, the other injured in the train from Durban to Ladysmith, having slipped on the iron floor of the truck after heavy rain.

  He looked about him at the members of the press. They were still talking about passion. It seemed to him—mindful as he was that they were scholars and he was only the son of a farmer—an inappropriate word to describe fighting. He had seen quite a bit (they’d been at Sialkot, in the Punjab), even if it was only against the curly-slippered armies of bedizened maharajas. The Indians didn’t have Mausers, as Brother Boer was known to have, just scimitars and muzzle-loading muskets. Still, he had seen them make some hot wounds in men he had liked to call friends. But passion, no: that word made him think of women. In particular it made him think of the slender, crop-haired girl at the bar. He looked down at his gin. It was half full. That could be quickly remedied.

  Bella saw the young man drain his glass, standing up in the same movement, and moved herself into a position along the bar where he’d necessarily come towards her rather than Jane or, Lord preserve us, their father. She needn’t have bothered. The trooper, his green eyes twinkling, was making a beeline for her. So, unfortunately, was Jane. Her own admirer, Gunner Foster of the Naval Brigade, had returned to his table, slightly worse f
or the wear of too many whisky-sodas—bought, Bella had said, on account of love rather than necessity.

  “I meant what I said about your hair,” said Tom to Bella, putting both his elbows on the bar. “It’s very bold.”

  “You’d better keep quiet. Our father will hear you,” said Jane, bustling up beside her.

  “Same again?” Bella asked breezily, flashing her a hard look.

  Tom looked at Jane. “You’re sisters then?” He held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Ah well, it’s nothing but the truth. You’ve both got bold hair!”

  “What’ll you have?” said Bella, her tone a little less friendly. “Another gin?”

  “I think I’ll switch to beer,” he said, nodding his head in mock seriousness. “I’ve got a bit of a dry throat. A Castle, if you please, miss.”

  Three

  The Biographer sat on the deck of the Dunottar Castle, watching them put it in. Whenever the hoists rose there was a din of ironwork gears, overlying the harsher, continual scrape of steel on stone. He was wearing a pair of black boots, and between his toecaps—his crossed feet were resting on the glossy lower bar of the balcony railings—he could see the stokers. They were black, too, stripped to the waist and sweating as they shovelled away, under the sunshine of Madeira. For the island was an Admiralty coaling station in those days.

  He reached into the pocket of his white canvas jacket and removed a square brass lighter. The smoke danced in front of his sunburned face. In spite of the grime that covered them, he could recognize some of the men working on the dock. That was Perry Barnes there, the young Warwickshire farrier, clipping horses on the quayside next to the marine office. A long line of animals were waiting for his attentions, having come down from hill pasture, to which they had been taken from the ship for grazing. He and the farrier had talked on the train to Southampton, finding common cause in their Midlands background. The Biographer watched as another horse was brought forward, and the curly-haired, good-looking Barnes took it in hand.