Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘What? Doors not locked and bolted after dark?’ Mike asked.

  ‘We’ve decided we can’t live like that,’ Bobby said crisply. ‘Besides, the dogs will warn us in plenty of time.’

  ‘If they’re not poisoned,’ Mike said, almost to himself. ‘Mother, please be careful, it’s not the end yet by any means.’

  ‘Perhaps if it’s a nice day tomorrow, a picnic?’ his mother suggested brightly, ignoring his remark. ‘We’ll see if the two of you feel up to it. Now come along, lunch is ready and you know how Wanjohi sulks when he thinks his soup is getting cold.’

  ‘The cook,’ Sam explained, taking my hand.

  The rules for the weekend having been established, Bobby Finger entered the house.

  After a lunch of vegetable soup, salad and cold roast beef, followed by a splendid apple pie and fresh cream, Sam showed me the garden, which was largely of her making. ‘Mum plays a lot of tennis and so the garden has always been mine, though heaven knows who’ll keep an eye on it when I go to horticultural college next year.’

  My heart skipped a beat; Mike had told me about Sam going over to England to study horticulture. It was too early to process the thought of meeting her over there. ‘I know a bit about vegetables and fruit, though not much about flowers,’ I ventured instead.

  She looked surprised. ‘Were you a farmer once? Most men know nothing about the things they eat,’ she observed.

  I laughed. ‘Well, a farmer in a manner of speaking, I suppose.’ I pointed to the flame trees; sunbirds of every description, like bright jewels in the marvellous Kenyan sunlight, were flocking to the crimson blossoms for their nectar. Beyond the trees the peaks of Mount Kenya could be seen in the faraway distance. ‘Sunbirds, how lovely they look,’ I remarked.

  ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, you haven’t answered my question,’ Sam said in a firm voice.

  I turned to look at her. She stood, shapely legs slightly apart, her hands on her hips with a questioning look on her pretty face.

  ‘What question?’ I said, pretending not to remember.

  ‘The farmer-in-a-manner-of-speaking question,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh, that, yes, well, when I was a little brat we worked in the vegetable gardens and orchards.’

  We’d reached a wooden garden seat under an arbour covered with a vine of big hanging violet trusses that looked quite magnificent. ‘Sit!’ Sam commanded sternly, pointing to the seat. I did as I was told. Standing over me with her hands still on her hips, she sighed. ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, if we are going to get to know each other properly then you have to answer my questions. I’m a naturally curious person and, besides, avoiding questions is being mysterious and means you’ll be forcing me to jump to conclusions, which may not be fair to you!’ She paused, looking serious. ‘And that’s not fair to me! You’re hiding something, I just know it.’

  I sniffed. ‘Not much perfume, what’s the name of the vine?’ I pointed above my head.

  ‘Petrea,’ she said, then waited for my reply to her previous statement.

  ‘Don’t you think some things are best left unexplained?’

  I replied. ‘I thought it was everyone’s prerogative to hide the parts we don’t like about our past.’

  ‘No, you’re not allowed to!’ she said emphatically. ‘That’s why Kenya is in such a mess! I mean the whites. Everyone is hiding something. You know what they call Kenya?’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Outsiders, people from other places.’

  ‘No, I don’t believe I do. Is it something unpleasant?’

  ‘A place in the sun for shady people!’ Sam didn’t laugh or even smile, as I expected she might.

  I clucked my tongue. ‘Sam, your brother is perhaps the least shady person I’ve ever met. Your mother doesn’t exactly beat about the bush or appear to be remotely duplicitous. If talking about the war this weekend is forbidden, it would seem your father is a pretty forthright type as well. As for Miss Sam Finger . . . well, just observe her interrogating me, demanding the unvarnished truth or else misconstruction may ensue and future relationships may be adversely affected!’ I was finding her directness both disarming and slightly alarming and was using my ‘among clever people’ Johannesburg-taught conversational language in an effort to keep Sam’s forthright manner at arm’s length.

  ‘You’re right, I’m being a stickybeak,’ she apologised. ‘It’s just . . . well, Tom,’ she seemed to think for a moment, as if she couldn’t find the word she needed, then she shrugged and added ingenuously, ‘talking over lunch and here, you seem different and I’m, well . . . curious.’

  ‘I take it a stickybeak is someone who is overcurious to the point of being rude?’ A hurt expression crossed her face and so I immediately added, ‘Well, you’re not being rude, Sam, but you’re correct, I don’t much like talking about my past.’

  Sam looked relieved and moved suddenly to sit beside me. Quite unselfconsciously she reached out and took my hand in her own and brought it to her lips and kissed it. ‘I’m sorry, Tom, I’m being a nosey parker. You were an orphan, weren’t you? Mike told me.’ She released my hand and I must say I wish she hadn’t, there was something about her touch that felt wonderfully inclusive.

  ‘Ja, a vegetable-growing orphan . . . also fruit, ask me anything you like about a cabbage, carrot, tomato, avocado pear, pawpaw, orange or granadilla!’ I joked.

  ‘Granadilla?’

  ‘Passionfruit.’

  She looked up at the arbour, thinking. ‘Okay then, what’s the Latin name for cabbage?’ she challenged, giving me a cheeky grin.

  I was well past the Cs in Meneer Van Niekerk’s ‘To thine own self be true’ Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Brassica oleracea, but don’t ask me about granadilla,’ I laughed.

  ‘Smart-arse!’ she exclaimed, punching me playfully in the chest. Suddenly she looked serious, her blue eyes fixed directly on me, head tilted slightly to one side. ‘Tom, the orphanage, it can’t have been much fun, I know it’s private, but will you —?’

  ‘It wasn’t too bad, I had a little dog, a fox terrier named Tinker, and a friend, a big Zulu named Mattress,’ I heard myself interrupting her. Then, in the nick of time I caught myself. She was getting much too close for comfort. I rose from the garden seat, anticipating that Sam’s next question to me would be about Tinker and Mattress. She was so gorgeous, open, ingenuous and spontaneous that I felt suddenly overwhelmed and emotionally cornered. I’d spent my life avoiding direct questions about myself. I was a world expert at parrying and deflecting intrusions into my past life. These days I relied upon hiding behind clever words and my seemingly laconic humour. ‘Use words to defend yourself, Tom, clever, witty words, self-deprecating words, they are your new camouflage,’ I said to myself. Sam simply ignored all the do-not-pass-beyond-this-point signs, oblivious of the minefields that might lie beyond. Now, suddenly no witty, parrying words would come, no clever jousting, only a clumsy and obvious scurrying for cover. ‘You know, I’ve never seen coffee growing, Sam. Do you think we could go for a walk?’ I asked.

  Sam rose and glanced at her wristwatch. ‘Sure, it’s only three-thirty, I’ll call the dogs and get a shotgun.’ She saw my reaction. ‘Sometimes if we’re lucky there are guinea fowl,’ she explained, then added, ‘you have to hang them for four days until they’re gamey, a bit whiffy. But then Wanjohi makes them into a wonderful casserole.’

  But I knew that the prospect of finding guinea fowl scratching among the neat, weedless rows of coffee bushes wasn’t why we were taking a shotgun along. I also knew that Sam Finger was someone I desperately wanted to get to know a whole heap better, even if I was finding her manner somewhat overpowering. Tom Fitzsaxby, the world-famous camouflage expert, was head over heels in love and taking a right belting from a slip of a girl who, seemingly, had never had anything in her life she wished to hide from the world.

  ‘I haven’t forgotten about Tinker and Mattress – was that really your friend’s name?’ Sam said, clearly warning me that I hadn’t
won, that she hadn’t forgotten what I’d revealed to her in an unguarded moment. Then, like a schoolgirl, she skipped away across the lawn towards the house to fetch the twin-barrel twelve-bore from the locked cabinet in her father’s study.

  In the weeks that followed I would use every leave pass I could cajole, beg or connive to obtain in order to get down to see Sam at Makindi. Being with Sam Finger was like waking up to a sun-splashed morning after a wild stormy night, which, I know, is a pretty corny analogy, but there you go . . . everything was suddenly washed clean. Happiness, when you achieve it, is not a complicated emotion. But, then again, keeping one’s life simple seems to be about the hardest task there is for humans to achieve, and happiness has simplicity as a major ingredient. Sam had definitely perfected the art of simplicity and loving, a process that required a lot of spontaneous laughter without the need for her to forgo her natural curiosity, strength and intelligence. I can tell you one thing was for sure, I was a goner – hook, line and sinker, finish and klaar.

  Each time we met we would talk about the emergency but in a quite specific way. Sam had the knack of getting me to talk about my secondment to the Kenya Regiment and what had happened between visits to Makindi. She didn’t believe in burying things, and she was aware that I was, almost on a daily basis, exposed to the interrogation of captured prisoners or suspected Mau Mau. I’d also undergone a training course in the methods of the pseudo gangs which, like Mike, I had found a pretty harrowing experience. In this case I had been prevented from talking to her as the pseudo gangster training was considered classified material. She’d wait until we were blissfully on our own, then smiling, big blue eyes fixed on me, head tilted slightly to one side, she’d demand, ‘Out with it, Tom Fitzsaxby.’

  ‘What?’ I’d reply, knowing exactly what she required from me, and also aware that any obfuscation would not be tolerated.

  ‘All the awful stuff that’s going to fester if you leave it inside,’ she’d say. I was never conscious that she did this for vicarious reasons. Sam was constantly exposed to the rhetoric of Mau Mau where the whites were never at fault. Like her brother, Mike, she was Kenyan-born and raised by a Kikuyu nanny, and they spent much of their childhood among tribal children, farm workers and house servants. Unlike her English settler parents, Jock Finger, small-time coffee farmer constantly preoccupied with coffee prices on the world market, and Bobby, a tennis-champion mother, who were away from home most afternoons when the children returned from school, Sam could understand both sides without being an apologist for either. While her parents’ attitude to the blacks, like that of most whites in Kenya, was patronising, paternalistic and muted by a great sense of racial superiority, Sam didn’t have a racist bone in her body. She actively craved a peaceful Kenya where everyone received the same opportunities and prospered equally according to their ability and efforts. In this desire she was probably an impossible dreamer. In Africa the downtrodden, cheated, beaten and enslaved are always the majority.

  The week Sam and I finally consummated our love for each other began in much the same way, with Sam wanting me to talk about the past week so that we could then get on with the simple and lovely business of just being in love. We’d driven to a favourite spot known as Ol Donyo Sabuk, a small mountain overlooking rolling green plains. Sam had chosen a place for our picnic, below several small waterfalls. She’d spread a blanket some way away so that we could hear ourselves talk. Sam, if she had any faults, loved to talk. But then, it seems to me most women do. They seem able to talk about their feelings and anxieties with perfect strangers of their own sex and resolve them in concert, so to speak. I wasn’t one of your great natural-born talkers, more a listener and lately a sometime witty replier (if that’s a word), but definitely not given to spontaneous pronouncements or to exposing my emotions. Camouflage works two ways, with lots of words or very few. I guess, right from the beginning, not a lot of talking was expected from me. Until I went to boarding school in Johannesburg, the longest conversations I’d been involved in were directed to a constantly wagging tail and a pair of pricked-up ears and a Zulu with great big platform feet. Tinker and Mattress were both very good listeners. Then, of course, there was Gawie Grobler at the big rock, discussing shit-square news and the various viewpoints of his mythical uncle in Pretoria. Sergeant Van Niekerk and Marie were also sometime conversation partners, they were the two grown-up people who didn’t involve me listening to a diatribe that would result in fresh Chinese writing on my bum. Except for Tinker and Mattress, the others usually did most of the talking. Gawie in particular was a natural-born talker, so that it had come as no surprise to me that he’d studied law at Stellenbosch University. I felt sure that some day he’d become a famous lawyer.

  I prepared myself to talk with Sam about the week I’d just experienced, although in my mind it wasn’t all that different to the one preceding it. After a while you harden up, you can take more and force yourself to think about it less. Sam, by demanding my weekly verbal expurgation, was untying the knot that ties and binds so tightly around the neck of that invisible bag in which you deposit your conscience, when you become adjusted to what is basically unjustifiable and immoral.

  ‘Sam, what can I say? The screening and interrogation is constant and the system so terribly unfair. Tens of thousands of young Kikuyu men from the slums of Nairobi are being arrested. They are herded into temporary barbed-wire enclosures like beasts, the military and police using rifle butts and sjamboks. There they face the gikunia.’

  ‘Gikunia, that means a hooded man?’ Sam said.

  ‘Ja, that’s it exactly. Each of the arrested men passes by a dozen or so hooded Africans standing at the entrance to this barbed-wire corral, that is, people with full-length cotton sacks over their heads and bodies with eye holes cut out of them. The hooded man or woman is purported to be a loyal Kikuyu who simply shakes or nods his or her head when an arrested man passes. A nod and he is handed a red card, a shake, white. Red means he’s a Mau Mau and white, clean. Red means Langata Prison Camp for interrogation, ill-treatment and torture, white means he’s sent to the Kikuyu reserve to basically starve. It’s as arbitrary as that! How can that possibly be just? The gikunia are forced to come up with a decent quota of victims or else they are thought to be Mau Mau themselves.’

  Sam nodded. ‘Operation Anvil, everyone’s saying how successful it is.’ She sighed, then added softly, ‘Cry, the Beloved Country,’ quoting the title of Alan Paton’s famous South African novel.

  ‘It’s the scale of the operation. Effectively Anvil has rounded up 50 000 men, women and children living in the slums of Nairobi, 20 000 of whom have been given red cards and despatched to Langata, the other 30 000 sent to the hopelessly overcrowded reserves, their homes ransacked and their lives completely destroyed.’

  ‘How can the authorities process 20 000 suspects?’ Sam asked, incredulous.

  ‘Well, of course they can’t!’ I shouted indignantly. ‘White officers simply go by appearance, if a man looks “suspicious”, you know, the way he stands, the whites of his eyes, his demeanour, a sideways glance, anything, he is branded Mau Mau. Based on the assumption that more than half the Kikuyu have taken the Mau Mau oath they must, by definition, get some of it right. But it’s not moral and it’s not just! Arbitrary justice was last practised by the Nazi SS in Poland and Russia and the British fought a war to eliminate it!’ I was getting very worked up. I forced myself to calm down and went on to explain to Sam that because my army brief said that I was a lawyer on secondment I was permitted to witness one of the last mass trials where the prisoners were all said to be confessed guerillas.

  ‘There was no defence lawyer present other than a policeman and an army officer who read out the indictments,’ I explained. ‘No formal plea was entered on behalf of the prisoners. It seemed to me any pretence of a properly conducted trial had been abandoned. The hanging judge, unable to pronounce the difficult African names, allowed the black clerk to read them out. He didn’t even gavel each
name and make the hanging pronouncement. He waited until they’d all been called out, whereupon he simply slammed his gavel down and condemned them all forthwith to be hanged by the neck until dead . . . at the public gallows! Then he announced an adjournment for lunch.’

  ‘Oh, Tom, how awful,’ Sam said quietly, looking down at her hands resting in her lap.

  But I hadn’t finished. ‘Sam, do you realise that in the last three years more than 1000 Kikuyu have been publicly hanged? In the entire history of the British Empire there have never been this number of civil executions performed in public!’

  Sam suddenly burst into tears. ‘Oh, Tom, what shall we all become?’ she wept. ‘I am so ashamed, so terribly, terribly ashamed!’

  I took her in my arms. ‘Sam! Darling, darling Sam, I really shouldn’t talk to you about these matters. I apologise, I really do, it isn’t fair.’

  Sam pulled away from me. ‘Oh, Tom, but you must! You can’t keep all this awful stuff to yourself. It’s turned my brother into a sad and ashamed person. He used to be such a happy one. I know he’ll never be the same again!’ Tears streamed from her wonderful blue eyes and down her freckled cheeks. ‘Tom, I simply couldn’t bear it if the sadness happened to you,’ she sobbed.

  I reached out for her. ‘Come here, silly,’ I said, trying hard to smile. ‘How can I ever become unhappy with you in my life?’ I kissed her on the forehead and then drew her head to my chest. How could I tell this lovely creature that the sadness had first come to me at the age of seven when my friend Mattress was murdered and it had never left me even for one day?

  Seated on the picnic rug I held Sam, rocking her gently as if she were a distressed child. After a while she drew away from me and knuckled the tears from her eyes and rose and walked towards the highest of the waterfalls. I watched as she stood facing me, standing within the misted spray, her head raised into it, the sunlight, fractured by the falling water, forming a rainbow above her head. Her light summer dress was soon soaked, showing her lovely figure through the wet cotton. It was if she was cleansing herself, washing away the shame she felt for this lovely country. She lifted her arms and turning slightly she drew her wet hair away from her face and I saw the gorgeous curve of her breasts. Then she walked back and stood over me. ‘Tom, please make love to me,’ she said.