1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  “That was a close business,” said Foster as they continued their journey, stepping round a group of coolies gathering up the orderly’s corpse into a blanket.

  “Well, at least it answers the question of the thunder.”

  “Wasn’t Buller, though.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Tom, blowing on his thumb. “Johnny Boer.”

  They passed under the portals of the Royal in silence, presenting Jane and Bella with a hunted, haggard look when they came through to the bar—Tom proudly clutching Foster’s handkerchief to his throbbing temple.

  “What happened?” cried Bella, running up to him.

  “I got a nick.”

  “Let me see.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I insist.”

  She lifted away the handkerchief and saw where the splinter had gashed him. “It needs bathing.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  Bella’s will prevailed and Tom was taken upstairs to be cared for, while Jane stayed behind the bar, talking to the bluejacket. The lunchtime rush had not yet begun, and it was still quiet.

  Up in the sisters’ room, Bella and Tom sat on the bed. She dabbed at the gash with a fresh handkerchief dipped in disinfectant and, true to the time-honoured form of such incidents, he winced dramatically each time she touched it.

  “Don’t be a baby.”

  “It really does hurt.”

  Bella raised her eyebrows and gave the dark-haired soldier a quizzical look. He suddenly leaned across towards her and, pausing to catch only the smallest encouragement from her gaze, kissed her on the mouth. Allowing his lips to rest upon hers for only the briefest moment, Bella drew back.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Tom explained, giving her a look that was both innocent and amusing. “It’s the concussion.” Bella’s only slightly put-on expression of affront faded away. Tom leaned forward again, but she put the flat of her hand on his tunic.

  “This is not good behaviour, Trooper Barnes. And look, you’ve dripped on the bed.”

  On the white wick bedspread was a small spot of Tom Barnes’s blood.

  “I’ll never get that out,” Bella said. “Come on, let me put a dressing on it before you make any more mess.”

  Making him hold the disinfectant-soaked cloth to his temple, she got up and went to a chest of drawers. As she was looking inside for some lint, there was a knock on the door.

  “Bella?”

  The young woman looked anxiously at Tom.

  “Bella? Are you there? It’s time you were downstairs. People are coming in.”

  “Yes, Father,” she said, in a strained voice. “I’m just on my way.”

  “Well, hurry up then. We’ve still got a business to run, war or no war.”

  They listened in silence as Mr Kiernan walked along the corridor and clumped down the great bare staircase of paternal duty.

  “That was close,” said Bella. “I thought he was going to come in. It would have put him in one of his moods.”

  “So what if he had? It’s not as if you were doing anything wrong—in fact, tending a wounded soldier is surely a sign of a good conscience.”

  “You don’t understand. I mean, he wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t approve—of a man being in my room. Come on, let me finish. I better hurry down. You follow later.”

  Once she had applied the dressing, Bella left Tom in the room, and went downstairs, to be greeted by the half-worried, half-naughty, blonde-framed expression of her sister.

  “All right?”

  Bella nodded, and picked up a couple of empty glasses.

  “I tried to put him off,” Jane whispered, looking sidelong at their father. “Where’s Tom?”

  “Coming down.”

  Tom Barnes was at that very moment making his appearance, walking down the uncarpeted, heavy-banistered stairs as unobtrusively as he could. But it was no good. Mr Kiernan saw him and, lifting up the hatch in the bar, strode over to confront him.

  “What have you been doing up there? You’re not a guest, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Tom paused, and leaned against the banister with a cocky air.

  “No, sir. Just looking.”

  “And what would you have been looking for, in God’s name, upstairs in my hotel?”

  “The hand of beauty, sir, to ease my pains.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” The Irishman’s face was getting red. “I’ve seen you before round here, haven’t I? Talking to my daughters, is that what you imply?”

  “I have paid them my compliments, sir, it is true.”

  “I suppose that’s your idea of a joke? Well, I don’t find it very amusing.”

  Tom looked at his feet on the stairway.

  “I didn’t mean to be insolent, sir, I just find myself embarrassed.”

  Bella came up and touched her father’s arm. But he ignored her, keeping his angry gaze fixed on Tom Barnes.

  “Oh! Bella, is it?”

  “Let me explain,” intervened Bella, in agitated fashion.

  “Very well then,” he said, turning to her. “Explain.”

  “Before you were here, Trooper Barnes came in with a wound. You see the dressing. It was an emergency. I put it on for him.”

  “What? Upstairs?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “I see.”

  “Mr Kiernan,” said Tom from his station. “I am sorry if you misunderstood me—my remark, I mean—I was trying to pay you a compliment on the beauty as well as the kindness of Miss Bella here. I have acted entirely with honour.”

  This show of respect mollified Mr Kiernan a little. He nodded slowly. “I should think so. You better come down.” With that he went back to the bar, and Bella walked over with Tom to where Herbert was sitting.

  “That was silly,” she said. “You shouldn’t have riled him.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was trying to say how beautiful you were.”

  “Well, don’t,” said Bella. “I’m not, anyway.”

  “You will still let me see you, won’t you?”

  She looked into his eyes and then, over his shoulder, at her father regarding them.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  That night, Bella was embarrassed about the bloodstain on her bed. Jane teased her about it and, when Bella slept, she dreamed an awful dream in which her blood and the blood of British soldiers mixed in dreadful fashion. The soldiery appeared in the figure of Tom Barnes, and the image of his body, mashed to pulp by a Boer shell, prompted her to cry aloud, waking her sister—who reached across and shook her.

  “It means you love him,” Jane mumbled through the darkness, when the dream was related; and Bella thought she might be right, and felt sick at heart as she tried to sleep again.

  In the morning she woke not to the sound of shellfire but to the glow of the Natal sunshine which, on good days, would strengthen until noon, when even the scorpions would decide that shade must be found. The sun, and the sight of the gleaming, though much depleted, rows of vegetables in the kitchen garden—as she dressed, she could see the Zulu woman gathering produce for the day’s meals—filled her with hope and excitement, erasing the previous day’s worries and the night’s ghastly dream. As she ate her breakfast, she determined that she would go over to Tom’s camp and tell him that she did want to see him after all. She asked Jane if she would come with her.

  “Are you sure it’s sensible?” queried her sister. “It might cause a bit of a stir, two young women going into an army camp.”

  “We’ll take them some food,” said Bella, thinking of Nandi among the vegetables.

  “Father won’t like it.”

  “He won’t miss a few potatoes.”

  So it was that the two Kiernan sisters, Bella carrying a basket on her arm, made their way over to Green Horse Valley. They approached the lines of white bell tents with some trepidation, inquiring after Trooper Barnes from a young, fresh-faced sentry. Sitting on a fallen tree at the perimeter, he couldn’t
have been more than seventeen.

  “Barnes? He’s one of Lieutenant Norris’s men, isn’t he? I think they are out on a job, but his tent’s in line seven. What you got in there, ladies?”

  With a twinkle in her eye, Bella lifted back the muslin covering of her basket.

  “Potatoes!” exclaimed the sentry-boy. “We haven’t seen much of them. Or of much else.”

  His face suddenly became older, craftier. “Say, I’ve got my billy here. Want some tea?”

  “I am afraid we are engaged, young man,” said Jane, with a condescending smile.

  The two sisters linked arms and began to walk off.

  “Wait!” shouted the boy. “At least give us a spud or two.”

  “We’d better,” said Bella, rolling her eyes.

  She picked a potato out of the basket and tossed it to the sentry, who—encumbered by his rifle—fluffed catching it, and then went down on his hands and knees to look for it as it rolled beneath the tree he had been sitting on. The sisters giggled, and walked on into the middle of the camp, where soldiers passed them astonished, and then lascivious looks. When they came to line seven, they stopped outside the first tent.

  “Excuse me,” said Bella, loudly. “Is there anyone in there?”

  A face, covered in shaving lather, poked out of the flaps. “Bloody hell!” said the face’s owner on seeing them.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” said Jane, sweetly. “We are looking for Trooper Barnes’s tent.”

  “Three down,” said the lather-covered man, bewildered by this female visitation.

  Tom’s tent mate was just as surprised to see them. “Well! I’m afraid he’s not here. He’s on a cutting-out expedition, see. Can I give him a message?”

  “We brought these,” said Bella, kneeling down in front of the tent and unpacking her basket.

  “That’s a boon,” said the bewhiskered soldier. “Thank you, thank you very much, ladies.”

  “Could you tell him that I called?” said Bella.

  “You must be the Bella he’s been talking about.”

  Bella blushed. “That’s right. Just tell him he would be welcome at the hotel.”

  “I will do,” said the man. “I most certainly will.”

  On the way back, the sisters met Mr Steevens, the famous correspondent, and after having introduced himself he took them up on to a bluff to watch the fighting.

  “It will be safe today, as the Boers have left off shelling the town. They are training their guns on the Green Horse’s cutting-out expedition.”

  He lent them his spyglass. Bella saw below her, careless of formation and galloping in an untidy ruck, a company of Green Horse, riding against the Boer lines. Shells were bursting around them in the pan of dust.

  “My God,” said Bella. “They are riding right into it.”

  Bella fancied she could see Tom Barnes among the riders, a little way apart along with another horseman. There were shells falling all around, like apples on a windy day. One burst between the two riders, and she gave a gasp.

  “They must be killed,” she whispered to Jane, and let the glass fall to her breast. Her stomach turned at the thought of it, and then she looked again. Only smoke, down there on the plain, grey smoke and grey dust. It was hard to tell the difference.

  “Who are you worrying about?” asked Steevens, who looked a little grey himself to Bella’s mind.

  “We thought it might be Trooper Barnes down there,” she explained.

  “Is he your beau, then?” enquired the correspondent.

  He reached over for the spyglass.

  “Oh no,” said Bella, a little too forcefully.

  “You can’t tell at this distance,” said Steevens, his eye glued to the instrument. “Who it is, I mean. Anyway, I think they’ve got through all right, whoever they are.”

  He handed the spyglass back to her. Bella looked again. The curtain of smoke and dust had lifted, and the two cavalrymen were emerging from the pall unscathed. They watched for a little longer and then, leaving Steevens on the bluff, the young women took the long road home, through Grimble’s orchard. On the way, to fill her empty basket, Bella picked some mignonette and wild roses from between the rows. She felt exhilarated. The trip to the men’s camp, the sight of battle in the spyglass, the whole siege, it was all beginning to open up inside her in an entirely unexpected way. It was quite the strangest sensation, a mood of anticipated change that affected her very nerves and fibres, its modulations humming in her toes and fingers, in her breasts and the lobes of her ears.

  Some things did not change, however. When they got back home, Father was in the kitchen, supervising the preparations for that evening’s dinner. Everyone, from General White to the lowliest guest, was to have half portions, and hearing this decree Bella felt guilty about having taken the potatoes to the camp. She went to bed fearful that her father might find out that she had done so, only to have her worries exacerbated by a frightful night of shelling.

  The Boers were obviously hoping to catch up on the day’s lost work.

  Fifteen

  In the correspondents’ cottage the following morning, the fact or otherwise of a night bombardment was disputed ground, as hotly contested as Ladysmith itself. Over breakfast, Steevens—who wasn’t feeling well—was maintaining that there had been shelling during the night.

  “Thud—thud—thud—ten or a dozen, I should say.”

  But his Australian colleague was having none of it. “You were dreaming. There was no shelling last night.”

  “There was. Say, Nevinson, shall we run a survey in the Lyre on the preponderance of imaginary shellfire in these days of strife? If MacDonald is right, I’m surely not the only one suffering from this condition.”

  Nevinson shrugged. “So far as the success of that paper goes, the more real shelling the better. When I took a few copies to some of the outlying troops last week, they were happy as sandboys. I think people will read anything if they’ve been shut up for a month under bombardment.”

  “They do lap it up, don’t they?” said Steevens. “What do you think, though? We could write a spoof about how shellfire affects the imagination.”

  “It has certainly affected yours,” said MacDonald crossly. “No shells fell last night. I’m a light sleeper, and would have woken immediately.”

  “Well, last night you must have had a thick head. There was shelling, I tell you.”

  Leaving them to their bickering, Nevinson got up from the table and went for a stroll. It was a beautiful, bright day and the outskirts of the town, with their fruit trees and syringas were rather pretty. One large orchard of pears, however, had been dreadfully devastated by shellfire. All over the ground were smashed branches and splinters of wood. Fallen pears lay among the broken pieces. Some were still whole, but most were bruised and pulpy. Sitting in the middle of it, on the trunk of an overturned tree, was the owner. Nevinson recognized him as William Grimble, the farmer who had spoken at the Town Hall meeting. He had a basket full of fruit at his feet, evidently having been collecting it up.

  “Ah, you,” he said, a little sourly, on looking up as Nevinson entered the glade. “I hope you are going to write something down about what we townsfolk are suffering here.”

  “Well, the censors don’t let me get much of that nature out. I see you’ve been under a bit of a hurricane here.”

  “Nothing compared with what has happened to my other orchard. General White, in his wisdom, has ordered it chopped up for firewood.”

  “That’s a blow.”

  “Of course it’s a blow! But what annoys me most is how pointless the whole thing is; however many shells they throw at us the rebels will never get possession of the place. If General White wasn’t such a coward, we’d get out there and give them a hiding.”

  “I’m sure he has considered that option,” said Nevinson, with a conciliatory smile. “And how many lives it would cost.”

  “This grove used to bring me in £25 a year, and the other twice as much.�
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  “Send a bill to the Boers.”

  “Send a bill to our own army more like. One hundred thousand would not compensate us for the damage British troops have wrought on this town. They have taken our houses and property and knocked them about; they have drawn Boer shells into our streets; they’re now telling me they want this fruit, my fruit, for provisions. Well, I’m going to take away as much as I can for myself. They call it martial law but to me it seems more like tyranny. I’m damn sure the Boers wouldn’t have robbed us so blindly.”

  He reached out for another half-ruined pear and dropped it into the basket. “And if we do ever get out of here, I’ll wager the compensation for it all will be but one per cent of the actual damage. I’m not convinced we will, anyway. Our so-called victories don’t seem to amount to much.”

  “Cheer up,” said Nevinson. “I’m sure Buller will be here soon, with a whole army. He said they would be in Pretoria within a month.”

  “Did he? Well, that’s true enough. Many of them are already there—as prisoners of war!”

  “Don’t you think you are being a little too pessimistic?”

  “You haven’t seen as much life as I have, young man. I think we’re going to be shut up in here for quite a while. It’s no way for a mighty nation to be carrying on a war.”

  Realizing that they weren’t going to see eye to eye on the matter, Nevinson smiled at him again, raised his hand slightly to say goodbye, and continued on his stroll. His nostrils were full of the smell of broken fruit. It made him hungry. The man could at least have offered him a pear, to see him on his journey.

  The path wound through more orchards and then broke out into a space by the river, which it then ran alongside. The Klip took a tortuous course through the town and its environs, and the bank in parts was fairly high. It was so where he was walking, falling sharply away to the water. Here and there, poking up out of rushes and marsh grass, camel thorns struggled to gain a foothold in the inhospitable soil. Many of these bankside trees were hung with the oval, basket-like nests of weaver birds. Nevinson paused awhile, watching the small birds flit in and out of the little holes that gave entrance to their curious houses. As he watched, he realized he could hear a noise: not the birds, not the sound of the running water, nor the distant rumble of gunfire, but that of a great number of human voices, in conjunction with the kind of clanking busy-ness that betokened repetitive physical labour.