by Giles Foden
“You mean to give the impression that we’re cowering behind kopjes?” demanded Mott, on the day after the ceasefire had expired. “That the British Empire is on its knees behind an anthill?”
“Well, we are overstretched…” came Nevinson’s rejoinder.
“Certainly not! It’s a question of tactics.”
“But Major, the report will be in cipher.”
“Ciphers can be broken.”
“Oh well, cut it if you must.”
That afternoon, irritated by the Major’s intransigence, Nevinson determined that he would get himself his own African runner, independent of Mott’s man. He let it be known to the loafers who hung around outside the Royal that he would interview candidates at the cottage the following day.
When morning came, he went out before breakfast to find a line of some twenty Africans waiting for him. Wearing crumpled hats or wrapped in blankets (Ladysmith mornings could be misty, in spite of the heat to come), most seemed to him too old to make the run, or had a look about them which made him suspect that they would dump the letters.
He had almost got to the end of the line when a bony young kaffir with a melancholy face presented himself.
“What’s your name?” Nevinson asked him.
“Wellington Maseku.”
“Wellington? Well, I hope you’re as brave as the general because this is a dangerous business. You realize what it entails?”
“Yes, nkosi.”
“That if you are caught the Boers might shoot you?”
“I understand.”
“Good. I would like you to leave tonight. Your destination is Maritzburg—or, failing that, the nearest British outpost you can find. They will, in all likelihood, give you a packet of letters to return to me. Do you follow?”
“Yes, nkosi.”
“Right. Come back tonight at seven o’clock and I will give you some food for your journey, and the first part of your payment.”
Having watched the boy go off, Nevinson retired inside the cottage. He felt weary and a little bilious, a condition that did not improve the breakfast of coffee, dry bread and an old rind of Dutch cheese that was all the larder could offer him. There were also a tin of corned beef and a box of biscuits, but he decided that he ought to save those for the boy, as they would travel better than bread and cheese.
Making the rounds of his informants later that day, he found weariness everywhere. Expectation of early relief had fallen off, and sorties—the only real excitement, unless shell-dodging could be called excitement—were an increasing rarity. Townsfolk and soldiers both were so oppressed by the vagaries of bombardment that even life-saving work had become a tedious chore.
Nevinson visited Green Horse Valley in the course of his tour, and watched Tom Barnes and his chum digging shelter trenches, throwing all their frustration and boredom into every strike of spade and pickaxe. But they had evidently had a more eventful breakfast than he, if the large shell crater in the middle of the work area was anything to go by. Tom and Bob Ashmead told Nevinson the tale over a cup of tea—“Fancy a brew, sir? We ain’t got no milk, but we’ve got the leaves, the means of the boiling, and the cups to go with it.”
…They told it to him, and he wrote it up: how Tom went off to find his mess-tin, and Bob leaned on the safety rail the carpenters had erected around a newly dug trench, thinking, as he had put it, ‘I would have myself a smoke’. As he was searching his pockets for tobacco, a shell hummed over. Before he could dive into the trench, the railing—hit further along—gave way and he fell into the hole. Tom was no less lucky. Once the bombardment had ceased, he came to their tent, to find it rent and tumbled over, raked by shrapnel. The mess-tin he had been on his way to find had been squashed flat. The occasion was only lightened by the sight of Lieutenant Norris who, in the midst of taking his customary morning bath, had suffered an upset. A shell had struck a tree, bounced off a rock without exploding and, rolling into the camp, turned over the bathtub with him inside it.
Said Bob: “You should have seen ‘im there, standing by his tent naked as the day he was born, holding the metal bathtub in his two hands and staring at the dent in it.”
The dent in it…wrote Nevinson in his journal that evening. It had begun to rain, and the tin roof above him was pitter-pattering with the noise of it. How strange it was, the way these stories possessed him…no, not just him, but all of them in Ladysmith, as if in each individual death or hairsbreadth escape, everyone was given a foretaste of their own demise, or of some extravagant piece of personal history on which they would be able to look back and say, ‘I was there, this happened’. But which of us—Nevinson wrote the words down, and felt a black tremor in his soul—will be here at the end? It was a drama with all the makings of a Greek tragedy, yet it was already dragging on too long for the modern stage.
His train of thought was interrupted by a knock at the door. He went to answer it, and was almost surprised to see standing there the young African boy he had commissioned that morning. He hadn’t really forgotten that he had told him to come back but—between shell and the story of shell, shell and the image of shell—it had half slipped his mind.
“I am here, nkosi.”
“Good, good. Hang on there a moment.” Nevinson looked at him in the doorway, dripping with rain. “Actually, you had better come in.”
The boy took a step forward, and stood there mutely in the hall.
“I’ll just go and get the packet,” Nevinson said. “I suppose I had better wrap it in view of the weather. In fact, it might be better if you go early in the morning, once things have dried out; otherwise the wet might show your tracks. Or you’ll trip on the wires. You know about the wires?”
“Yes, nkosi.”
“Up to you.”
“The morning is when I will go. Before sunrise.”
“Right. Come through.”
The boy followed him into the kitchen. Moving his journal aside, Nevinson took out his pocket knife and cut a piece out of the oilskin cloth that covered the table. Then he fetched the cardboard package of reports and letters (he had collected several on his rounds that afternoon, including one from Tom Barnes) and tied the oilskin around it. This he then gave to the boy, who stood there immobile for a moment, as if puzzled, and then tucked the oilskin packet between his black chest and his rag of shirt.
“I’ve got you some food, as I promised,” Nevinson said, and retrieved the tin of bully beef and the packet of biscuits from the depleted larder. The boy stuffed them into his trouser pockets.
“And here’s the money.” He handed him £20 in Bank of England notes. “You’ll get the rest when you come back. All right then? You’re not going to run off? I’ll catch up with you if you do, believe me.”
“Don’t worry. You can trust me very well. You will see my face again.”
Nevinson led him through to the front door. “Well, good luck then.”
“Thank you, nkosi,” the boy said.
On a sudden impulse, Nevinson held out his hand. Wellington took it and they shook, then the boy turned round and trudged off into the clouded moonlight, his feet slushing through the mud that the evening rain had brought. As the thin figure disappeared, Nevinson realized how cold the boy’s hand had been: it was as if it had left an icy imprint upon his own palm.
It didn’t surprise him, as he was turning to come back inside, to hear a shell burst: they were generally now given a few at bedtime, to make sure no one slept too soundly. He stopped and waited for it to fall—somewhere near the Town Hall, he reckoned, or maybe the Royal Hotel.
On going up to bed later that night, he looked in on Steevens, who had been rather out of sorts the last few days. But the Mail–man was asleep. Nevinson stood by the open door for a second, listening to his colleague’s regular breathing.
The morrow saw a fuller bombardment, during which all sat down to be shelled. Running for shelter, Nevinson saw a shell burst and a great splash of red suddenly appear on the window of Major Mott’s
office. With the bombs still falling all around, he rushed inside, expecting to find struck down the man who had struck him out so often. Then—as he looked from side to side—he felt ashamed that such a thought, at such a time, could have passed through his mind. But as it turned out, it didn’t matter. The ruined office was empty, and the ‘blood’ was only a pot of red copying ink that had been thrown off the upturned table and dashed against the window.
So that day the censor escaped the unconscious wish of the correspondents—although as he had been on the lavatory at the time, it didn’t really count as a hair’s-breadth escape. Some did escape by such a measure. That night, a shell entered the room in which Bobby Greenacre, the town scamp, was sleeping. His father rushed through smoke and masonry dust into the room, to find the boy absolutely unhurt.
It seemed, however, that the Boers were intent on a sequel. Bella Kiernan went round in the morning to congratulate the parents on this lucky escape, only to see Bobby’s pet rabbit cut in half by a shell splinter as she left.
It was a sign of the deteriorating food supplies that even this mess of fur and flesh was taken to his tent by a soldier for stew—and had Bella known that the soldier was Trooper Barnes, it might have given her pause in her precipitous imaginings of some kind of life with him.
Or perhaps not. Hunger, until now an uncommon experience in Ladysmith (among whites at any rate), created a certain moral latitude. Walking past Star’s Bakery that afternoon, and seeing Mrs Star kneading dough in the window, gave Bella an intense desire for freshly baked bread. She stood watching Mrs Star’s hands working the dough in the wide tray, folding the white paste over and over, stood smelling the scent of baking bread coming out of the vent above the door—and could not resist going inside.
“Can I help you?” said Mrs Star, rubbing her hands over the tray, so that the pieces of dough fell back inside.
“I was hoping to buy a loaf.”
“You and the rest of town. Have you got a coupon?” The woman’s face, dry and red below her linen cap, could not be described as a generous one.
“I haven’t. I was just hoping…”
“Miss Kiernan—you know very well that I can’t sell anything nowadays without receiving a coupon. Not a crumb.”
“I’ve got the money. I’ll pay you double.”
Mrs Star rubbed her hands again, turning the remaining bits of dough into little cylinders. Bella watched them drop on to the main mass of white paste, attaching themselves to it in such a way that they stuck up like little bits of hair. Suddenly she didn’t feel so keen upon the bread—there was also the sickly smell that one sometimes found in bakeries—but Mrs Star had decided that here was a bargain worth making.
“Thricefold. Three times.”
“That’s ridiculous,” said Bella. But the initiative had already passed to the vendor. Bella felt herself reaching for her purse. She put out the coins on the counter. Mrs Star fetched a long iron spatula, and pulled a loaf out of the oven. The deal was done.
On the way home, Bella held the warm, wrapped bundle against her, and felt better for it, in spite of the extortionate price. She went into the kitchen immediately, unwrapped the loaf from its paper, and cut a slice. It was still warm. There was no butter in the larder (that was now five bob a pound), but there was some pear preserve from Grimble’s orchard; she spread it on the slice, and lifted it to her lips.
She had taken only one bite when her father came into the kitchen.
“What have we got here?” he said.
“Just having a snack.” Her mouth was full, and the words came out all jumbled.
“And where did you get that loaf?” He pointed at the offending article, where it sat on the table—crumbs, bread knife and wrapping papers lying around, giving it the appearance of something out of a painting.
“Star’s,” said Bella, reddening.
“We’ve got no coupons…I suppose they made you pay over the odds?”
Bella nodded.
“How much?”
She whispered the sum. He walked over and, taking her by the shoulders, shook her.
“Just because there’s a siege on, it doesn’t mean we can go out spending money like lords. All these officers—they’re not paying their bills too swiftly, you know.”
Bella swallowed, and freed herself from his grasp. “Father! It wasn’t that much!”
And then she burst into tears. He looked ashamed then, standing there with his hands at his sides.
“Ah, come on now, come on, I’m sorry…” He reached out for her and took her in his arms, gently this time, patting her back.
Leo Kiernan briefly held his daughter in his arms, allowing her sobs to subside, absorbing them in his own body. Then he released her.
“All right now?”
“Yes.” Bella looked at the half-eaten crescent of bread on the table, smeared with amber-coloured preserve.
Her father smiled. “You might as well finish it up then. I’d better get back to the bar. It’s quiet tonight. Why don’t you go to bed?”
Bella did eat the rest of the slice, but it tasted bad, and made her stomach feel sour; so sour, in fact, that she vomited later on in the evening—an experience which made the whole enterprise seem all the more pointless, foolish and unpleasant. Still, she wouldn’t have thought anything of it except that when Jane ate some of the bread the next day, she too was sick. It had evidently been spoiled.
The Kiernan family were not the only inhabitants of Ladysmith worrying about food. The rumour that those at Intombi Camp were eating better than those in town (untrue, as it happened) had made the neutral camp an all the more attractive destination to those not committed to the defence of the town; a faction which (as it also happened) included many who had shouted loudly at the public meeting against self-imposed exile. Flight to Intombi was now a possibility of which many non-combatants availed themselves. There were so many wounded to be conveyed there after the ceasefire had ended, and so many civilians whose patriotism had wilted, that Joubert (to his credit) had now agreed to let a train go out twice weekly. It was one of the conditions of civilian sojourn at Intombi that able-bodied people should help care for the wounded. Many were panic-stricken, however, so Bella could not see how they would perform their duties. British prisoners of war and injured Boers were also being sent there from Joubert’s camp, so all in all it was said to be quite a colourful location, with a queer fraternization between the two sides.
Some were calling this place ‘Fort Funk’. It was a description that might actually have been applied to Ladysmith itself: everything was now mortgaged to fear in the town. Rumour was the interest attached to this debt of fear, and it was rising at a rate which would have pleased a banker: Buller’s army was on its way, it had left Durban, it was at Frere, it was not, it would be here tomorrow—all of this exacerbated by the refusal of the military powers to release any proper information.
It was on account of this that Nevinson, Steevens and MacDonald, and the many other correspondents immured in Ladysmith, established a newspaper or, more properly, ‘news sheet’ under the title The Ladysmith Lyre. As Steevens wrote in the prospectus for this new venture, the purpose of the Lyre was ‘to supply a long-felt want. What you want in a besieged town, cut off from the world, is news which you can absolutely rely on as false. The rumours that pass from tongue to tongue may, for all we know, be occasionally true. Our news we guarantee to be false. In the collection and preparation of falsehoods we shall spare no effort and no expense. It is enough for us that Ladysmith wants stories; it shall have them’.
Fourteen
“I’ve got a story for you,” said Foster. “Funny thing that happened in our battery the other day. I wasn’t there but I had it from Reynolds Sharp.”
“Go on then.”
“Our lads…” Foster kept bursting into laughter. “Our lads…were manning the trenches and one of them vaulted—over the parapet and…impaled himself on his own bayonet.”
“No!” said
Tom, disbelievingly.
“On God’s honour. It went right into his arse up to the hilt. The sick orderly reported it as ‘Bayonet passed through port cheek of backside’!”
Their laughter could be heard across the other side of the square—until a deeper sound covered it.
“Sounds like thunder,” said Tom, as his chuckles subsided.
“It’s shells, you dullard,” Foster countered. “Maybe Buller is nearer than we think.”
“Definitely thunder.”
The two of them kept up this discussion as they approached the Royal, where they had an appointment with the Kiernan sisters—kept it up until a 40-pound shell from a 6-inch gun settled it, falling about twenty yards in front of them, and killing a mounted orderly from the 5th Lancers. Foster and Tom were thrown to the ground, the latter’s temple being scratched by a fragment of shrapnel.
Tom looked up. He could feel blood trickling down on his face. Through the smoke, he could see the orderly’s lance quivering where it had stuck into its owner’s back, having been driven into the air by the force of the explosion. It was a disgusting sight.
He heard Foster’s voice beside him. “Are you all right?”
Tom scrambled to his feet, holding his sleeve to his bleeding temple, which was also burning hot. “Just a scratch, I think.”
Foster came close and inspected it. “You’ll be all right. It’s more of a scorch really.”
“Look, there it is.” Tom pointed at a shard of metal lying on the ground near by, and reached down to pick it up.
“Don’t!” cried Foster, but it was too late.
“Ow!” yelped Tom and instantly dropped the fragment, which was still stove-hot. Now he had a badly blistered thumb to add to his wound.