Shadows & Lies

by Marjorie Eccles

  A few months previously, I had come across her looking over the sad little layette Mrs Crowther had put together, and which I had brought with me when I came out. She was turning over the tiny hand-stitched garments, the knitted jackets and bootees, the linen caps, folding the lacy, crotcheted shawl and the long, beautifully embroidered gown in which all the Crowthers, including Lyddie herself, had been christened.

  “Oh, Lyddie.” How I wished she wouldn’t torture herself like this – with what she must accept by now could never be.

  She said nothing, but she looked across at me with a blinding smile, her eyes shining.

  Again!

  But this time, it was going to be all right. She knew it was. She felt so well, not even a trace of morning sickness. And indeed, she looked radiant. Her skin glowed as it used to in the damp British air, her hair took on its old shine and bounce, and the sunny optimism of her nature was once more to the fore. She could scarcely wait until January, when the baby would be born, and asserted confidently that the fighting would all be over by then, as if her present happy state endowed her with divine knowledge. She was, of course, advised to rest as much as possible. “I’m sure I shall become so fat and awkward, I shall feel disinclined to move much in any case,” she assured Lyall comfortably, but even when the days became warmer and the baby grew inside her, she seemed to find it impossible to keep still. “But I promise I won’t ride.”

  “I should hope not – but I would feel happier if you’d go somewhere safe – or better still, go back home.”

  But Lyddie was adamant that since Mafeking was where Lyall was, Mafeking was where she would stay. She was not being very wise, perhaps, but when has common sense ever had anything to do with love?

  The war actually arrived quite literally for us with a bang – or series of bangs. We were awakened the very morning after Dr Fox and his daughter had been installed in the convent by what could only be the noise of gunfire echoing across the plain. The boy Amos ran in gabbling excitedly that the Boers had crossed the border and were approaching Mafeking, setting fire to every farm or native kraal they came across on the way: the gunfire we had heard was from our own troops firing on the enemy from an armoured train which was patrolling the line as far as it could get in both directions. That we were showing such spirit in fighting back was cheering news. Everyone assured everyone else that the Dutch would never take the town. For the moment, we might be effectively cut off from communications with the outside world, but never mind, pigeons had been sent off to Kimberley to inform them of our plight. In any case, help and support was expected any day. Colonel Plumer was patrolling the Limpopo with the Rhodesian Regiment and would soon march south with a flying column to meet reinforcements coming north.

  I was working most of the time at the convent – running errands for the nuns, advising the girls to pray for victory, helping wherever they had need of help. There were no war casualties as yet, only the usual stream of patients with anything from minor accidents and illnesses, to fevers. The idea of myself selflessly nursing the sick and wounded had very much appealed to me. I wasn’t qualified, but I could soon learn. Mother Superior brought me up short by gently reminding me of St Theresa of Avila’s words: ‘We don’t need any more saints here, but rather plenty of strong arms for scrubbing’. She added that perhaps I’d be better employed in using any spare time helping Lyddie and a group of other women to roll bandages and stitch cartridge belts which were, like everything else, in short supply. Chastened, I swallowed my disappointment and did as I was bid.

  “Can you ride a bicycle, Louisa?” I asked, finding the little girl all ready and waiting for me when I arrived at the convent the morning after she and her father had arrived, having promised to take her with me when I went down to the Chinese market garden to arrange for vegetables to be sent to the convent. These were to supplement the food we had been allotted for the many more mouths we now had to feed: women and children, crowded together in the tented laager, or camp, which the mayor had created to give them a measure of safety. Wagons had been drawn up as shelter and bombproof trenches erected around the tents. Swelling their numbers were those bitterly disappointed families who had been turned back when actually on their way to safety.

  Louisa looked surprised that I needed to ask such a question. “Oh yes, I can ride.”

  “Then we’ll ask if you may borrow Sister Mary Columba’s.” This was a ramshackle old machine, and manifestly too big for such a small girl, but I was soon made aware that a trifle like that wouldn’t defeat her, after a wobbly demonstration which seemed to satisfy the nuns. I could see they were very much taken with Louisa, even smiling indulgently at the breeches and cotton bush shirt she swore she’d been allowed to wear all the time at Orchard Farm. The poor child, when she arrived, had been stuffed like a sausage into a too tight frock that was in any case too warm for the day, and she was obviously more comfortable now. With her hair bundled up under a slouch hat, she could have been one of the boys of her own age who had been recruited as scouts to relay messages – and indeed, as we rode through the town, with the sporadic gunfire from the armoured train still continuing in the background, she watched them enviously as they pelted all over the place, hot, sweating and full of importance, furiously pedalling their bicycles between one command post and another.

  “I’m going to ask if I can do that,” she announced as we rode up through the shady avenue of peach trees that led up to the fields of vegetables cultivated by the pigtailed Chinese who owned the market garden. It was enclosed by a little orchard and kept watered by a conduit from the Malopo; a cool splash of water came from a little fountain in an enclosed courtyard they had built, where they gave us green tea to drink while negotiations went ahead for the extra supplies of potatoes and onions needed for the influx of people into the laager. The little yellow men drove a hard bargain while insisting that they were giving me a good price because it was on behalf of the nuns, but they gave Louisa a couple of luscious peaches to take away with her.

  We had just set off back when we heard a sudden sharp burst of shelling, much nearer than that which had been going on intermittently all morning. It was so sudden and unexpected that for a moment we didn’t realise that the noise of it had come from somewhere in the direction of the women’s laager.

  The convent, the Victoria hospital, and the women’s laager, too, had indeed been hit, yet by a miracle no one was hurt. “Well, doesn’t that just show!” exclaimed Sister Mary Columba. “If God hadn’t wanted us to survive, He wouldn’t have given us the brains to invent mud brick.” It was the first indication we had that the construction of Mafeking’s buildings would be a positive asset for which we should learn to be extremely grateful: when a shell hit a building, as it had hit the convent, as often as not it passed clean through the mud bricks and out at the other side.

  Perhaps because we were in reality very afraid, everyone tried to appear nonchalant, those first days. We made fun of the damage that was done, and great play was made on the cowardice of the enemy for shelling the hospital and directing their fire on women and children. Mr Whale, the editor of our local newspaper, who was possessed of a sardonic wit and refused to be intimidated by mere Dutchmen, posted a casualty list outside his office: ‘Killed, one hen; wounded, one yellow dog; smashed, one hotel window.’

  But we were less inclined to laugh when the next day the Dutch seized the waterworks on the edge of the town and cut off the water supply. This could have spelt disaster and certain capitulation, had we not had many practical engineers in the town. Within hours, work had begun on drilling for water to supplement the tanks already in the town. The railway engineers trundled out machines for drilling and a great sigh of relief went up when, after the first well-shaft was sunk, only fifty feet below the hard, unforgiving rock upon which Mafeking stood, sweet, fresh water came gushing up. A second and a third had the same results. Whatever other privations we were likely to suffer, a shortage of water was unlikely to be one of them.
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  Scrubbing floors and stitching the stiff canvas for the cartridge belts, our fingers were soon very sore and raw. For once, I sympathised with Caroline Douglas when she moaned that she could no longer hold a needle. She was one of those women who had been on the train which had been turned back, and since the married quarters she and Thomas had occupied had now been taken by someone else, and the idea of sleeping in a tent in the women’s laager brought on an attack of hysterics, the sisters had eventually found a tiny room in the convent where she could stay.

  The more I saw of Caroline, the more I sympathised with her husband. Rather than being grateful to the nuns for their hospitality, she complained continually: she was not well, she couldn’t eat the mealie porridge and the sausages at breakfast because the thought of it made her sick; she had blisters on her hands from stitching the cartridge belts; could she please have another blanket on her bed, for the nights were very cold?

  “Dear Caroline, you’d better get used to the mealie porridge – and the horsemeat sausages – like the rest of us, or starve,” Lyddie told her drily.

  “Horsemeat? Oh, I never could!”

  “You could, if you were hungry enough,” I said, less kindly. “Try offering it up, like the nuns do.”

  We had already begun to eat a certain amount of horsemeat in lieu of beef and mutton. Grass was a commodity always in short supply in these parts and by now most of that within the enclosure had been nibbled down by the few cattle which had been allowed to be brought in; they would soon grow thin and become dry if they couldn’t be driven out to seek sweet grass elsewhere. Horses, on the other hand, who also needed grass, we had more than a sufficiency of. Eating them killed two birds with one stone, though of course the very idea of eating horses was anathema to any Britisher. But those who were shot first tended to be sinewy old nags who’d had their day.

  No wonder Thomas Douglas was always so unsmiling, I thought, listening to Caroline’s complaints. The gossip about his wife and Roger Marriott had grown to such an extent that he must have been blind and deaf not to know of it – and I doubted whether he was the sort of man who would – or could – ignore such conduct in his wife. Perhaps that was why he had been glad of the excuse to pack her off to the Cape – and how mortified he must have been to see her back. I knew, from the languishing way she spoke of Marriott, that the affair was by no means over.

  It was getting on for Christmas – and still relief didn’t arrive. Intelligence reports circulated like wildfire; every day we had news of troops on their way but they never somehow got as far as Mafeking.

  “Hugh, what are the Boers thinking of? They could surely have taken us by now. There are so many of them to our few that if they stormed us we’d surely have no chance.”

  “For the same reason that B-P isn’t rushing out to attack them. They’re obeying orders to avoid loss of their own men,” replied Hugh, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, unshaven since the beginning of the siege.

  I put my arms around him and kissed him, and saw a flame leap in his eyes. Then he put me gently aside. “Not now, Hannah. The men are expecting me back.”

  An unspoken feeling was growing that we might perhaps not be able to last out as long as we had been told. We were being continually shelled now, a nerve-racking bombardment that made the nights as disturbed as the day. The Boers had a massive range of artillery with which they intended to make short work of our resistance; their general, Cronje, fearless and one of their most able commanders, evidently expecting to pulverise us into submission, was boasting he would wipe out every man, woman, child and beast in Mafeking. I began to believe this might not turn out to be an idle boast, or that we should be so worn down and short of sleep we should find capitulation the better option. Some hoped the Boers would get fed up and go away, but this unlikely prospect was one no one took seriously, especially after the arrival of an even bigger, long-range gun, a massive ninety-six pounder, so heavy it had to be pulled by sixteen oxen. It was positioned more than seven miles away, yet its range was such that the enormously heavy missiles had no difficulty in reaching the town. They made a terrible noise as they flew over our heads and burst, throwing great hot pieces of heavy metal for hundred of yards. A warning bell was rung in the town square when it was seen from the look-out tower to be loaded. If we were lucky, by the time the shell landed we had been able to take cover under upturned wagons or dugouts. But not everyone escaped. The injuries and mutilations inflicted by this big gun were horrific beyond words – arms and legs were regularly blown off and thrown into trees, on to roofs or far distant streets; it wasn’t uncommon for insides and blood to be splattered everywhere. We became accustomed to treating children at the hospital for burns when they vied with each other, in spite of warnings, to find the biggest piece of shrapnel, and picked up pieces of still-hot metal as souvenirs.

  The Boers didn’t have it all their own way, though: daring raids on the enemy, sometimes with fixed bayonets, were ordered by B-P to clear out their advance positions. In one of these Roger Marriott was killed.

  As retaliation, the nights were made hideous with smoke and flame as great shells came thundering through the dark, causing the doors and windows to rattle as they flew past. During the day, we learned to keep out of the streets as much as possible – or to run like billyo for shelter when a burst of machine gun fire rushed past our ears, sounding like the clattering wings of a plague of locusts. The silence when ambulances drove by and carts came past covered by blankets quickly became a fact of life.

  The only respite we had was on Sundays, the day B-P decreed should be set aside for entertainments such as cricket matches, concerts, sales of work and competitions, as a morale-building antidote to the strain we all lived under, being the only day we were not troubled by the Boers. It was against their religion to kill on the Sabbath.

  I watched Hugh’s face grow older and thinner, the crease between his brows become permanent. We hadn’t shared a bed since the siege began; when he could get home for a good night’s rest, I slept on the sofa, so as not to disturb him by the restless sleep that had become habitual with me, though I doubt whether anything would have wakened him: as soon as his head touched the pillow, he slept as if pole-axed. I wished he would take a leaf from his admired commander’s book: no one could accuse Baden-Powell of not being wholly absorbed in the struggle we were involved in, but at the same time, he understood the necessity of at least a pretence at living life normally, and the importance of keeping up morale. Nil desperandum was his repeatedly encouraging watchword. We shall beat Johnny Boer yet. Never let it be said that we Britishers didn’t keep the flag flying. Nil desperandum.

  Caroline Douglas took the news of Roger Marriott’s death so badly it made me feel I’d maybe been too hard on her, in belittling their affair as simply a passing infatuation, or the determination of a spoiled young woman not to be thwarted in what she desired. We all mourned the loss of a gallant officer – for Roger had been brave, no doubt of that – but Caroline was inconsolable. “I wish it had been me,” she said, time after time. “Perhaps it will be, soon,” she would add, as another shell whizzed by. I was sorry for her, but to tell the truth, I couldn’t help feeling she was enjoying the drama and, by the time several weeks had elapsed and she was showing no signs of even trying to overcome her grief, and had several times expressed the wish to follow Marriott to the grave, I was not the only one who lost patience with her.

  “These bandages need to be rolled,” Sister Evangelist told her crisply, handing her a pile of sheets torn into strips, “and they’ve been disinfected, so try not to weep all over them, my dear.”

  But Lyddie said generously, out of her own happiness, “Poor Caroline. We must all look after her.”

  Lyall had persuaded Mother Superior to let Lyddie stay in the convent for the last few weeks before her confinement, now that Dr Fox was in permanent residence there and would be on hand to keep an eye on her. Both he and Dr Smythe were cautiously optimistic, as the birth drew nea
rer, and there were no signs of her losing the child.

  All hands were needed now to help with the nursing, and I was at last allowed to help as I wished in caring not only for the wounded, but the increasing numbers of sick children and others who were brought in suffering from malnutrition, dysentery and other problems associated with poor and inadequate food. Inevitably, this applied mostly to the children in the location. The tribes were not able to hunt for their usual food, the Dutch were shooting and stealing their cattle, mealie-meal was scarce and they did not have the money to buy other food, which had become far too expensive.

  The boys acting as very useful message-carriers between one defence post and another undeniably had one of the most dangerous tasks, dodging bullets and flying shrapnel in the thick of an attack, but children were learning to grow up fast in Mafeking, and every person was need to play their part, even Louisa, who took food to her brothers in the trenches. The Cadets were formed into a well disciplined band, drilled and given a uniform like a junior army, and one of their number held the rank of sergeant. Louisa watched them, green with envy, and her father, seeing this, allowed her to help him. Soon she was never far from his side when he attended to the sick. Despite the horrific nature of the injuries inflicted by the shelling, she didn’t faint at the sight of blood, or when she passed the dressings for an amputated limb, nor did she gag at the stench of a gangrened wound. She heard the screams of the wounded as they tore off their agonising bandages, and didn’t flinch at the sight of mangled flesh. There were many who expressed the view that it was shocking for such a young girl to be allowed to witness such sights, but the patients loved her and Dr Fox calmly allowed her to continue. I, for one, believed he was right. Like many of the other children, Louisa had grown up overnight.