A Matter of Time

by Alex Capus

  Not long afterwards something scandalous and unprecedented occurred. Roly-poly Samblakira, who seemed to have gone to sleep in a squatting position long ago, rose in a single flowing, undulating movement, padded along the wall to the door and disappeared into Hermann Wendt’s living and sleeping quarters. Young Wendt feigned inattention. The other men frowned and also pretended not to notice but kept a surreptitious watch on the doorway. Ten minutes went by, then fifteen, but the woman didn’t reappear. Everyone got the message. The two Bantu were the first to leave. They packed up their board game, thanked Wendt for his hospitality, and bade him a studiously casual goodnight. The next to get up was old Tellmann. He rose with a groan, ruffled the fur on his cheetah’s neck, and, avoiding Wendt’s eye, wished him a good night’s rest. Wendt nodded, absently stirring the fire’s dying embers. When Tellmann’s footsteps had died away he looked straight at Riiter and Mkenge in turn. ‘Well,’ his expression seemed to convey, ‘got anything to say to me, the two of you?’ Mkenge lowered his eyes politely and proceeded to clean his right thumbnail with the tip of his spear, but Riiter returned Wendt’s gaze. The following unspoken dialogue took place between them:

  ‘You know perfectly well what I ought to say to you.’

  ‘You aren’t entitled to say anything at all.’

  ‘You’re a bastard, that’s what I ought to say.’

  ‘I’m a man, Anton. At least I’m not a hypocrite.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I know what you dream of when you’re lying all alone in your hut. I see you leering at those native girls’ haunches every day.’

  ‘Looking one can’t help. Doing and not doing, one can.’

  ‘Then take a good look at what I’m doing and not doing, Anton. My door isn’t locked, see?’

  ‘That doesn’t make it any better.’

  ‘I’m nice to the woman. She likes being with me.’

  ‘She’s got a family, Hermann. She may even be married. You’ll get her pregnant and leave her behind with a child when we go back to Papenburg.’

  ‘Who knows? At least I don’t take a different one every day, the way those soldiers do. It’s good for me and good for the woman, and it’s hygienic.’

  ‘You talk as if it was a personal necessity.’

  ‘She comes to me of her own free will. It isn’t as if Corporal Schaffler has to march her here at gunpoint. She isn’t a slave, she can take off whenever she likes’

  ‘That’s enough!’

  ‘Any other woman would be flogged on the spot if she ran away.’

  Anton Riiter could find no answer to that: young Wendt had defeated him. It was time to go. He got up and buttoned his jacket. Mkenge also rose and accompanied him to the gap in the thorn-bush hedge that led out on to the path. Before they left the circle of light, they both looked back at the campfire.

  ‘Goodnight, Hermann,’ said Riiter.

  ‘Goodnight,’ Wendt replied. He jumped up, took the paraffin lamp from its hook and called:

  ‘Hang on, I’ll walk a bit of the way with you.’

  7

  The Epicentre of Human Civilization

  Geoffrey and amy Spicer-Simson were deliriously happy to be back in London after four long years. They moved into the same furnished room in the modest hotel just off Russell Square where they had stayed before they left for Africa, and where Spicer-Simson would not have far to travel to get to the Admiralty in Whitehall. They dumped their luggage and went for a walk, eager to re-explore the familiar city they had missed for so long. Their first and most agreeable impression was one of universal moderation. It was late in May and the sun was nearing its zenith, but there was always a cool breeze and you hardly perspired at all. The streets of the vast metropolis were thronged with pedestrians and its department stores and covered markets could become really congested, but you never stuck fast in a milling mass of pushing, shoving, jostling humanity, as inevitably happened in any village market in Africa. In the parks, horse chestnut trees had burst into pink and white blossom and stretches of lush green grass were enlivened by red and yellow roses, yet the prevailing colours were muted pastel shades. When the sun came out after a downpour the air was filled with greenish-golden light and the glorious scent of damp cobblestones and horse dung, but it was never redolent of the stupefying spices found throughout the tropics. It also rejoiced the Spicer-Simsons that they were not constantly bitten by mosquitoes, that there were no hyenas in Hyde Park, that you did not have to beware of crocodiles on the banks of the Thames, and that, if you stopped under a street light to retie a shoelace, you weren’t buffeted in the face by moths the size of a grown man’s fist.

  In the afternoon, having donned the blue barathea uniform he hadn’t

  worn for four years, Spicer-Simson strolled with Amy to the West End, the heart of the empire to which he felt he belonged with every fibre of his being - and this despite the distressing professional rebuffs hed been obliged to endure in His Majesty’s service. That evening they made their way into the hinterland of theatres large and small, cabarets and popular music halls. Spicer-Simson, who had a pronounced sense of drama, found the new cinemas a great novelty. There hadn’t been a single picture palace in London when he departed for Africa; now there were 266 of them. He never tired of going to the cinema. Just as enthralled by Greek tragedies as he was by cowboy films, historical dramas and love stories, he soon became a regular patron of the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road and the Windmill Theatre in Soho.

  Spicer-Simson and Amy agreed that London had, by and large, remained true to itself. The chimes of Big Ben still sounded as melancholy and majestic. On cold days the wind still whipped clouds of black coal smoke from the chimneys and wafted it down into the narrow, ill-lit streets. The changing of the guard outside Buckingham Palace still took place at half past eleven every day, pubs still charged the same price for a pint of Guinness, and women were still denied the vote. Then there were the familiar, long-missed foodstuffs: Marmite, Gentleman’s Relish, Golden Syrup. But one thing had changed with a vengeance: there were very few horse-drawn carriages in the streets and many more automobiles, and the horse buses had been replaced by double-decker motor buses. Government offices had replaced their portraits of King Edward VII with those of his son George V, and a huge statue of Queen Victoria, the present king’s grandmother, now stood in front of Buckingham Palace. An airfield had been established in the northern suburb of Hendon, with the result that an aeroplane - or sometimes two or three - came droning over the city nearly every day. The Central Line had been extended from Bank to Liverpool Street and prices had risen considerably in the luxury stores in Oxford Street, where the couple could at last stock up on new underclothes.

  Spicer-Simson’s disembarkation leave ended on the Friday of his second week back in England. Early that morning his landlady pushed

  a buff envelope under his door. Adorned with the Admiralty insignia, it contained his marching orders. He was instructed to report for duty on Monday, 1 June 1914, as second-in-command of HMS Harrier based at Ramsgate, at the eastern extremity of the Thames Estuary.

  The Harrier was a coastal patrol vessel whose principal task was to seize trawlers engaged in smuggling cigarettes and brandy. This was not the sublime, heroically beautiful life’s work for which mankind would honour his name in perpetuity. Nevertheless, he now bestrode a thoroughly shipshape vessel fifty metres long, weighing 1500 tons and mounting eight guns. Although he wasn’t her captain, a hundred and fifty men had to salute him. No longer puttering along a mouldy jungle river looking out for submerged mangrove roots, he was performing his duties off the white cliffs of Dover and guarding the coasts of Great Britain, motherland of the world’s mightiest empire. That was a considerable improvement in itself.

  The Harrier’s voyages were not particularly exciting. During the week she cruised two or three miles offshore, sometimes northwards as far as Hull, sometimes westwards as far as Portsmouth, occasionally - and fruitlessly - checking a trawler’
s hold or a yachtsman’s cabin for contraband. On Friday nights she always returned to Ramsgate, where SpicerSimson caught a train to London to spend the weekend with Amy, who would be faithfully awaiting him there.

  It can’t be said that the couple enjoyed an active social life. Curiously enough, none of the Royal Navy’s 400,000 members seemed to want to make friends with them. Shortly after they returned home they paid a visit to Geoffrey’s parents in Fleetwood, Lancashire, and they also met up with his brother Theodore, a medallion sculptor of international repute, who displayed surprisingly little interest in Geoffrey’s naval career. Thereafter the Spicer-Simsons would have been just as lonely as they had been on the Yangtse or in the delta of the Gambia River. By a fortunate coincidence, however, Amy discovered that a childhood friend of hers named Shirley, who had also grown up in Victoria, British Columbia, was now living with her husband in a hotel room at the other end of the passage. It transpired that the two women had even more things in

  common. They both worshipped Enrico Caruso and both suffered from bouts of low blood pressure, and Shirley had also spent years in Africa because her doctor husband, Hother McCormick Hanschell, had supervised the yellow fever campaign in the Gold Coast. They introduced their husbands, who promptly took to each other. Geoffrey developed a great liking for the taciturn but amiable Hanschell, perhaps because he had no direct connection with the Royal Navy but worked as a surgeon at The Seamens Hospital in the Royal Albert Docks. Conversely, Hanschell liked Geoffrey because his incorrigible megalomania made such a pleasant contrast to the apathetic expectations of death entertained by the terminally ill sailors he had to deal with day and night. This was how the two couples came to spend their weekends a quatre. They went for walks in Hyde Park, hired a rowing boat on the Serpentine, spent whole afternoons in tearooms or went to the cinema together. On one occasion Geoffrey invited them all to visit the Egyptian section of the British Museum, where he delivered a lecture on Egyptology and recounted anecdotes from the days when he had allegedly directed archaeological digs in the Valley of the Kings.

  On the third Saturday in June, when the Spicer-Simsons and the Hanschells were strolling peacefully down Regent Street, the pavement just ahead of them was obstructed by two middle-aged, obviously upperclass ladies who were holding a big placard inscribed in bold capitals with the words ‘WOMEN’S VOTE NOW!’ Having blown shrill pea whistles until they were satisfied that they had captured the attention of the entire street, they removed some fist-sized stones from their capacious handbags and hurled them in quick succession at the windows of a menswear shop. The first stone bounced off a cast-iron strut, the second shattered the window on the left of the plate glass door, the third the window on the right, the fourth the door itself. But before the fifth stone could be thrown, two police constables appeared out of nowhere, truncheons drawn, and clubbed the women until they both lay stunned and bleeding on the pavement. Then, picking them up by their wrists and ankles, they tossed them into the back of a police van, tossed the placard and handbags in after them, and drove off. The whole incident had lasted no more

  than a minute. All that remained were two small smears of blood where the women had been lying.

  Spicer-Simson was speechless with horror. He bent down and examined the traces of blood, straightened up and took a couple of steps to left and right, then came to a halt and stared at his friends and his wife in consternation.

  ‘Suffragettes,’ said Hanschell.

  ‘They’re campaigning for votes for women,’ said Shirley Hanschell.

  ‘Come on, Geoffrey,’ said Amy, taking her husband’s arm.

  ‘But they were ladies,’ he said. ‘Since when do London bobbies use their truncheons on ladies?’

  ‘Since quite a while,’ said Hanschell. ‘Opinions are hardening. Last week two suffragettes blew up the Coronation Chair in Westminster Abbey, hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘But they were ladies,’ Spicer-Simson repeated.

  ‘One of them slashed the Duke of Wellington’s portrait in the Royal Academy recently,’ said Hanschell, ‘and two months ago another of them set off a bomb in St. Martin-in-the-Fields.’

  ‘Because of votes for women?’

  ‘Because of votes for women,’ said Hanschell. ‘They smash windows, set fire to letterboxes and vandalize golf courses with acid.’

  ‘And then they get bludgeoned senseless?’

  ‘Bludgeoned and put in jail. They’re sentenced to long terms of imprisonment, like infanticides or poisoners. When they go on hunger strike they’re force-fed. Four wardresses pin them down on their beds while a fifth dribbles nutritious vegetable broth into them through a tube inserted in their nose. The broth gets into their air passages and causes pneumonia, so force-feeding is continued rectally - an utterly pointless procedure from the medical aspect and extremely dangerous. When a prisoner’s condition deteriorates to such an extent that there are fears for her survival, she’s temporarily released under the so-called “Cat and Mouse Act” and remains at liberty until she’s better. Then the police take her back into custody and return her to prison until she falls sick again or completes her sentence.’

  ‘And all this for the sake of womens suffrage?’

  Spicer-Simson was naturally aware that suffragettes existed because he had followed political developments in the newspapers from an early age, albeit with detached interest. Being an officer of the Crown, he realized that politics were important because they represented a continuation of war by other means, but politicians and their doings he considered thoroughly squalid, rather loathsome, and unworthy of a naval officers attention. Where universal suffrage was concerned, he tended to feel that its main effect would be to double the size of the electorate and achieve little else. In his and Amy’s case, he couldn’t conceive that they would ever, being a married couple, hold divergent political views. Votes for women would create no shift in the political balance of power; it was unnecessary for that very reason and would only entail more government expenditure.

  But on that third Saturday in June, having been haunted by a mental picture of those two battered women for the rest of the day, Geoffrey Spicer-Simson underwent a change of heart. Although he was quite indifferent to the political implications of the battle of the sexes, a gentleman could not but take sides with the weaker party. It was at odds with his sense of fair play that policemen should beat up two utterly unathletic middle-aged ladies, and it offended his naval officer’s sense of honour that men in uniform should subject defenceless female prisoners to the most unspeakable acts of violence - not in decadent old China or barbaric Africa but in the heart of the British Empire, the epicentre of human civilization. Ashamed for Amy’s sake, he felt an urge to support and protect her in this matter, so he found it neither surprising nor unwelcome when she broached the subject that night, as they were lying in bed after turning the light out.

  ‘Geoffrey,’ she said.

  ‘What, dearest?’

  ‘Shirley Hanschell wants to go out on Monday. She’d like me to go with her.’

  ‘Where to, dearest?’

  ‘A meeting.’

  ‘A meeting?’

  A womens meeting, Geoffrey.’

  I see.

  Any objections?’

  ‘Why should I object, dearest?’

  ‘Sweet of you to say so. I thought I might go out more often from now on. You aren’t here during the week in any case.’

  ‘Of course you may.’

  ‘I’m at a loose end otherwise. There’s so little housework to do here, it doesn’t fill my day.’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Besides, I’ve enough cardigans for the moment.’

  And that was how, in the summer of 1914, Amy Spicer-Simson came to join the suffragettes. History does not relate whether she planted any bombs, vandalized any golf courses with acid or lobbed any tomatoes at members of the royal family, but it seems unlikely. What is more than possible, however, is that she duplicated leaflets in secluded cel
lars by night and distributed them in the streets by day, and that she ran off, skirts flapping, when the police turned up. When Geoffrey came home at weekends her eyes shone as she recounted her exploits of the previous week, and he listened to her reports with grave attention.

  But then, at Sarajevo on 28 June, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife Sophie were assassinated by a nineteenyear-old Serbian student named Gavrilo Princip, and all talk of votes for women was shelved for the next four years.

  8

  Giraffes' Necks and Telegraph Poles

  the three papenburgers knew nothing of all this. At sunrise every morning they made their way down to the yard, where the Gotzen was steadily taking shape. Anton Riiter began his working day by dismissing the sentries who had been on duty overnight and spreading out his plans on a table set up in the shade of the ship. Tellmann stirred the embers in the smithy furnace and put on more wood. Meanwhile, young Wendt unlocked the storage sheds and, as soon as Corporal Schaffler had delivered the native labourers to the site, issued them with the tools they would need during the day.

  Work was proceeding well and fast. The yard was fragrant with the scent of the wood fires in which rivets were heated until they glowed red, and the clang of pneumatic riveting hammers re-echoed from the surrounding hills. At around nine every morning two Masai emerged from the bush driving an ox. They slaughtered, butchered and roasted the beast on the lakeshore, and at noon Riiter, Wendt and Tellmann sat down companionably on the sand with their workers and devoured it. After work the trio foregathered in Wendts beer garden.

  Two months had gone by since that scandalous night when Samblakira had officially slept in Wendt’s hut for the first time. Neither Riiter nor Tellmann had ever raised the matter, but both had shunned the communal suppers for three days running. On the fourth evening Wendt ended this unspoken boycott as they were making their way home after work.