1999 - Ladysmith

by Giles Foden

  “What happened? Your face…”

  “A shell hit the hotel. I got knocked off my stool—this is just from a glass splinter—and you banged your head on a table.”

  Bella lay on the bed absorbing this information; then, realizing something was missing, sat bolt upright.

  “Where’s Janey? Is she hurt?” She threw off the bedclothes and tried to get out. Her father pressed her down.

  “It’s all right. Calm down. She’s not hurt. Not injured, anyway. She has been taken to Intombi.”

  “No. She can’t go on her own. I must go.”

  “You can’t. The Boers won’t let anyone through unless they are clearly ill.”

  As Bella considered this (had Jane got so bad that even the Boer guards on the railway line could see she was suffering?), she slowly became aware of her surroundings. All around her, on beds and on stretchers set down on the floor, lay wounded soldiers and civilians. Many were mumbling quietly to themselves. The only other noise was that of the nurses’ shoes clacking on the tiles.

  Bella looked back at her father, accusingly.

  “Why did you let her go? She can’t look after herself.”

  “A nurse has gone with her.”

  Bella’s temple started to throb. She put up her hand and felt a dressing, and underneath it a large, tender lump. She looked at her father’s florid, wounded face. There were tears running down his cheeks, into the open gash. He reached over and took her in his arms.

  “The hotel is destroyed,” he said, into her shoulder.

  Later that day, when she was strong enough to get up, Bella went with their father to see for herself. It was true. The roof was crashed in, right in the middle, and all three levels had suffered considerable damage. Much of the flooring of the bar and dining room had been ripped up and was jammed through the ceiling, boards sticking up bizarrely into the bedrooms above. Doors had been torn off their hinges, bottles, crockery and the glass of pictures reduced to powder. The only room left unscathed was the Star Room, where she saw that Father had laid out a bedroll. Everywhere else, there were fragments of metal, splinters of wood, and chunks of masonry and plaster. Her clothes and belongings, spilled from her wardrobes and drawers and flung about, had mainly been ruined. Seeing the devastation, Bella burst into tears again.

  “Come on,” said Father, putting his arm round her. “Gather up what you can. I’ve managed to get a place for you by the river, with Mrs Frinton. Her cottage has been shelled too.”

  “In those tunnels? I’m not going there. Why can’t I stay here with you?”

  “You must. It’ll be safer. There is a separate set of tunnels for women and children now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  He took her by the shoulders, and then pulled her to him. “Don’t argue. You will be protected from the bombs there, and that is the most important thing.”

  Clutching each other, they stood for a few minutes in the ruins like that, and as her father pressed her against his chest, Bella felt closer to him than she had ever before. She wept again, but these were happier tears.

  “Come on now,” he said, after a while. Seeing she had no choice, Bella climbed into her blasted room and, turning over smashed pieces of wood and brick, picked out some clothes and other belongings. All were covered with dust and soot, and she had to shake them before putting them into a battered suitcase.

  “Take some bedding too,” said her father from the doorway.

  “I won’t have room.”

  “I’ll carry it. You’ll need something for a groundsheet as well.”

  A groundsheet! The very thought of it made Bella shudder with horror.

  It was nearly dusk when they reached the Klip earthworks, though it was still light enough for Bella to see that she needn’t have bothered shaking her clothes. The area outside the entrances was a sea of mud and puddles, and out of the caves and holes peered a number of dishevelled women. Father led her towards a small yellow flame over which Mrs Frinton was attempting to coax some warmth into a billy of murky water.

  “So you are here,” said the widow. “Just in time for tea—though I am afraid it will taste horrible.”

  She took the billy off the tripod above the fire. “I’ll show you your room, as we are styling them.”

  The old woman picked up a hurricane lamp and bent down to enter one of the holes, the sides of which were shored up by fat sandbags and roughly shaped wooden posts. Bella and her father followed. Even by the meagre light, she could see that she had entered some kind of labyrinth. Steps, corridors, thresholds: the tunnel spread out into a network of side vaults and chambers, from each of which Bella could hear the voices of women and children, and here and there caught a glimpse of lamplight, or heard the clank of a bucket.

  “Here we are,” said Mrs Frinton, stooping. “You’re lucky, you got the last pallet. They’ve run out of wood now.”

  She gestured into a narrow chamber that smelt of newly turned earth. There was also a sweeter smell, like that of fields in summer. Thick wooden pillars held up the roof beams, which were made of old railway sleepers. The roof and walls were bales of hay—which accounted for the other smell.

  “Three trusses thick,” said Mrs Frinton, bouncing her little fist against one of the hay walls. “Though I won’t be surprised if they come and take it away for the horses soon.”

  Bella stepped inside, feeling her father behind her, with his bundle of bedding and tarpaulin.

  “I’d better put the groundsheet down first,” he said.

  She stood aside to let him go in and then, once he was finished, went mutely inside to put her suitcase at the foot of the roughly made slats of wood that were now her bed.

  “There’s a lamp hanging at the head,” said Mrs Frinton, from outside.

  “I’ve got a match,” said Bella’s father.

  He came through into the chamber with her, on the other side of the pallet, and bent close over the lamp, striking the match several times before he was able to light it. When it was finally done, his face and hair brightened in the glow.

  He looked at her across the pallet. “You’ll be safe here, my love. And it will be over soon. You will manage, won’t you?”

  “Of course she’ll manage,” said Mrs Frinton brusquely. “There’s lots of us managing here. The townies soon fit in. To begin with, why don’t you come up and have that cup of tea?”

  Bella followed them out, and squatted down next to the fire as Mrs Frinton put the billy back on.

  “So what are you going to do now, Mr Kiernan?” said the widow. “With the hotel bombed? It must be a blow.”

  “Yes,” said Bella’s father, quietly. “A blow. It is certainly that, though it is Jane’s situation I am most worried about.”

  “She’ll mend,” said the widow. “She’s young enough and strong enough.”

  Shivering with the cold, Bella felt distant from them both, even though she shared her father’s worries about Jane. How different he was now, in crisis, how much more thoughtful; what would it be like when things got back to normal? If they got back to normal. She heard his voice. “I suppose I’ll spend my time rebuilding what I can. And then there’s the town council. There’s still work to do there. My personal view is that we should get all you women and children out to Intombi, make a deal with the Boers. It isn’t right that you should have to live like this.”

  They talked on a little longer, and then her father got up to go. Bidding her good-bye, he told Bella that she should not come up into the town except in an emergency. “I don’t want another daughter falling ill,” he said. “Or being exposed to shellfire.”

  Thirty

  Emerging in the morning, after an uncomfortable night, Bella shook hay and earth from her hair and petticoats. Now she could get a clearer view of her surroundings. The sun was out—was getting very hot, in fact—and the pools of water outside the earthworks were quickly drying up. There were, she noticed, tunnel entrances all along the bank of the river now, far mor
e than on her previous visit, and a little further along she could see the men’s area, where among those sitting down to their breakfast she spotted the distinctive figure of the barber, Torres.

  “We’ve had a delivery.”

  Mrs Frinton’s voice. Bella turned round to see the widow removing various items from a flour sack.

  “Siege bread, tinned meat, a few potatoes, a little bit of tea…we’re all on army rations down here now. We’ve got some chickens and a cow over the other side, though, and sometimes I can get a few eggs and a drop of milk. Just bread for breakfast today, though, I’m afraid. Oh for some bacon…”

  Handing her two small, grey rolls, Mrs Frinton went down to the river’s edge to get water for the billy. Bella looked about: at women cooking or washing their clothes in tin buckets; at mothers rubbing their children’s mud-covered faces with the corners of their gowns. Many of these women, she thought, had a hunted look about them. Father was right: they should all have gone to Intombi while they had the chance.

  Mrs Frinton came back, and they began to eat their breakfast while waiting for the water to boil.

  “You will find life here depends entirely on the level of shelling,” said the widow. Bella nodded; it was obvious, after all, the same in the whole of Ladysmith.

  “I do a lot of sewing,” said Mrs Frinton brightly, as she stirred the tea leaves in the billy. “We have a circle.” The younger woman smiled in answer—deceptively, as she hated sewing, always pricking her finger.

  Useful work seemed to be on the widow’s mind, for she gestured up the bank, in the direction of the male tunnels. “The men go fishing, mostly: for eels in the river. They throw long handlines in.”

  “Eels? They eat them?”

  “Of course. They are all right, if you can find a little oil and salt to go with them.”

  Bella chewed on her roll, which tasted like cardboard, and looked down at the river. The surroundings could, she supposed, be called pretty: there was whispering bankside vegetation all around, from which starry kingfishers and dun-coloured water rats went to and fro, and the sky above was a radiant blue. But the water itself was filthy, a yellow streak. And everywhere was the smell of excrement, everywhere the greenish dollops and crusts of horse, mule and ox dung—all the livestock in Ladysmith was watered at the Klip now. She looked at her tea, convinced it had a strong smell of the stable. Maybe she was just smelling the hay on herself.

  “Is it safe, this water?”

  Mrs Frinton made an expression of helplessness. “Stiff with typhoid, probably, unless you boil it. But we have, so that’s that.”

  Bella looked at her cup again, but was saved a decision on whether to drink any more of it by the yowling, screeching sound of a shell. All of a sudden, there was a general commotion around the riverbank as everyone gathered up what they could and dashed back into the tunnels. On the way in, Bella tripped on the corner of a mattress someone had pulled out into the main gallery, and fell flat on her face in the mud.

  As a consequence, she spent the first morning of her new life curled up on her pallet. She had cleaned herself as best she could, but still felt grubby and despondent and unwilling to meet the world. She thought about Jane, trying to imagine her sister’s rosy, healthy-looking face—the face of before—as if by doing so she could bring it back. She thought about Tom Barnes, too, his dark hair and the buttons and belt on his uniform; she wondered if she would see him again soon. And she thought about her father, and the odd change that the bombing of the hotel had wrought in him. All the while she could hear the roar of shell and, if one came near, feel the walls of the shelter shift and sway. When that happened, her heart beat hard, and her breath grew short. She tried to shoo away the idea of being trapped in there, of the beams falling and then a ton of smothering earth…She dreaded to think further. Besides, hadn’t Mrs Frinton said the tunnels had been built by the best mining engineers out of the Rand, and could withstand the heaviest bombardment?

  By noon, the shelling had eased. At lunchtime, the widow came to get her, peering through the gloom.

  “You can’t stay in there the whole time. What we usually do is gather together in the main entrance, and talk. I’ve got a spare chair you can sit on.”

  Bella went out, to join her and the small group of other ladies sitting in the gallery at the opening of the tunnels.

  They had spread a tarpaulin out on the dirt, and covered it with pillows and eiderdowns. Most, as Mrs Frinton had said, were sewing; others were playing cards or reading. Lunch was potato soup with more of the grey rolls: the potatoes must have been near rotten, because the soup tasted awful. Already feeling queasy, when Bella saw a drawn and haggard woman chewing up mouthfuls of roll and then putting the wet, softened pieces into her baby’s mouth, she had to run out and be sick.

  Clamping her hand over her own mouth, Bella ran round the back of the bank into which the shelter was dug. As she was finishing, she became aware that she was being observed. A bare-chested man was standing at the back of the men’s shelter, with his foot on the blade of a spade. He waved. She recognized the tall, slender figure as that of Torres. He beckoned her over.

  “Hello,” said the Portuguese, when she reached him. “I saw you vomiting. I would have come to you but, you know, the rules…Do you have enteric?”

  “No, it’s nothing,” said Bella, embarrassed at his directness. “Just the combination of nerves and some rotten vegetables.”

  “Well, you must be careful, as there is much disease here. It’s nice to see you, although I am sorry to hear about the hotel.”

  “I suppose we must suffer like everyone,” said Bella. “It was only a matter of time, anyway. They will get all the big buildings in the end.” She realized she was blushing, partly on account of his having seen her being sick; partly because his bare chest and spade reminded her of their encounter on her previous visit. Something was different this time, she noticed. He had a tattoo on his arm.

  “What are you doing?” she said, her eyes trying to make out the legend incorporated in the tattoo.

  “You will see,” he replied, and dug down further into the soil of the bank.

  She watched him bend over the spade. When he levered up clods of earth, the muscles of his back stood out sharply.

  “Come on,” she said, a little coquettishly. “Tell me.”

  He threw down the spade and, crouching by the hole, reached into it. “It’s gardening, Ladysmith style.” Pushing and pulling at something in the ground, he eventually tugged out a large fragment of shell, a great chunk of blackened iron.

  “Oh, I see,” said Bella. She had heard that soldiers and people in the town were gathering up these things as mementoes. The poor drummer boy of the Hussars had been blinded when he tried to knock the fuse out of one of these treasures with a hammer. He was an awfully stupid and awfully unmilitary drummer boy, Major Mott had said; and a lucky one too—if the main charge had not been defective, the Major said, the boy would have been atomized.

  “Be careful,” she said, recalling the incident, and taking a step back.

  “Don’t be afraid. It is only a broken-off piece. All the detonation is gone.”

  “Still…”

  “It fell only this morning, Miss Kiernan,” said the barber, as if that were any guarantee of safety. Then, bowing, he presented it to her. “I would like you to accept it as a trophy, with my compliments.”

  Bella reached out and took the piece of metal. It was so heavy it made her hand drop with the weight.

  “I can’t carry it,” she said. “You’ll have to get me a lighter one.”

  Torres picked up his spade and, crooking his elbow, leant his tattooed arm on the handle. “I will get you a complete shell instead. A little one. What do they say? Pom-pom?”

  “That would be nice. Though I don’t know where I would put it.”

  She moved closer to him. “What’s that design on your arm?”

  He held it out. “My Ladysmith tattoo.”

  S
he took his arm and read Siege of Ladysmith, 1899, beneath a picture of a wheeled gun.

  “Who did it?”

  “I did it myself. It is one of the things we barbers know. I have been doing it for many people in the tunnels. To pass the time. I will do you one, if you like.”

  “I couldn’t,” said Bella, abashed.

  “It would be a pleasure,” Torres countered. “I…”

  He was interrupted by the whirr of a shell. Quickly taking her hand, he ran down with her to the men’s shelter. As the guns began to roar once more, Bella found herself amongst a crowd of staring menfolk. Apart from smelling strongly of sweat and tobacco, and showing more evidence of card and chess playing, the men’s gallery was much the same as her own: a cellar-like place with chairs and mattresses laid out on a tarpaulin for comfortable lounging. In the back, near the entrances to the individual tunnels, a smoky hurricane lamp gave out a sparse light. She crouched down between the barber and a wooden pillar, trying to make herself unobtrusive. But still they all just stared at her, the light from the lamp making the eyes of those in the rear shine eerily. They reminded her of the jackals and servals whose eyes could sometimes be seen at night on the edges of the town.

  “Well,” said a rough voice, “the dago has got himself a ride.”

  In a second Torres had the man by the throat and was grappling him to the ground. Other men in the gallery cheered and a space cleared around the wrestling men. A chair was tipped up, and as the two bodies turned over and over on the tarpaulin, she caught glimpses of Torres’s brown face and of the unshaven one of the other man, whose lips were drawn back over his teeth like those of a cornered animal. Bella was frightened, and shocked by how quickly it had all happened. She thought of running away, but felt she could not leave Torres, who now seemed to be getting the worst of the fight. The other man had him pinned down. He was raising his fist. She knew she must do something.

  So she cried out, as loud as she was able. The shrillness of it caught them unawares. The gallery fell suddenly silent, and the man on top of Torres—she did not recognize him, but from his heavy canvas clothes and steel helmet thought he must be one of the rough uitlander miners who had come down from Johannesburg—lowered his fist. At that instant another man in a helmet came over and pulled him off Torres, who got to his feet and dusted himself down.