by Peter Rimmer
A crowbar was inserted into the wood behind one of the nails by Harry’s grandfather and with a mighty crack a piece of wood broke off from the crate. The only new thing Harry could see was straw but as the crowbar swiftly did its work, the wood came apart, the straw was pushed aside and a white, porcelain tub was brought out of the wreckage and stood on the lawn in all its glory. At the back, at the bottom, Harry noticed there was a large pipe in the shape of a ‘U’. The other side of the crate revealed another porcelain piece with a separate white lid and to the side in a slim compartment were two round pieces of wood, one with a large hole in the middle. Then everyone went off and had tea. The biggest anti-climax in young Harry’s life was over and twice he gave his grandfather a filthy look.
For two days Harry’s grandfather was closeted in the bathroom with two black men. Out went old bricks and earth that had made the floor and in went the bowls along with piles of river sand and cement. On the second day, the ‘U’ pipe appeared out of the hole in the wall at the back of the bathroom where it looked down the trench. A new water pipe was taken in through a small hole in the wall. The water pipe from the river was changed and connected to a pipe that went up to the tank on its stilt and just before lunch, Harry heard water splashing into the tank high up on its tower. Harry was nothing short of astonished.
Just before tea, the whole family was called into the bathroom. Above the big bowl, the smaller white bowl with the lid was fixed high up on the wall with the small, outside pipe bending into the top at the side and a larger pipe leading down underneath. A chain hung from the other side on its own. Harry’s grandfather was looking very smug.
“Witness, everyone, the first pull and let go in the whole of Rhodesia other than the ones in Mr Meikle’s hotel.” And without any further ceremony, Harry watched his grandfather pull the chain and water rushed down the pipe into the bowl and flushed out the back through the ‘U’ pipe. Only then was Harry Brigandshaw truly impressed for the first time in his young life. Everyone else began to clap.
That evening on the veranda, soon after the sun had gone down, Harry perceived his grandfather to be tipsy. The whole evening turned out almost as festive as Christmas.
By the time the invention by Mr Crapper had flushed its first wares into a freshly closed French drain, James Brigandshaw arrived in Salisbury on a very tired pony.
“I say, old boy, you really do look a mess,” said Gregory Shaw before James could even unsaddle the pony of its burden. “Bit of incognito? Did that myself in Afghanistan. Must have been ’76. No, ’75. Damn tribesmen wanted to infiltrate British India. Easier of course. Put a thing that looked like a sheet over your head and off you went. Surly bunch those Afghans… Never said much so language wasn’t a problem. By the time they came up the Khyber Pass we had the guns trained on them. Always been a one for military intelligence after that. Usually gives the enemy a nasty surprise.”
“Gregory, what on earth is that uniform?”
“Ninth Bengal Lancers. Number two, of course. The number one was too tight under the armpits. Put on a bit of weight.”
“We’ll have to change that uniform.”
“Into what?” said Gregory, doubtfully.
“Mashonaland Scouts, I thought we’d call them. Colonials. All colonials who know the bush. Tommy out from England in his new ‘khaki’ uniforms will be no match for the Boers who have hunted the land all their lives, whatever the War Office wishes to think. General Sir Redvers Buller the new GOC should know. He fought with the Boers against the Zulus when the white tribes of Africa knew that to divide themselves was suicide… You give me a hand with this pony. How long have you been waiting for me?”
“Two weeks and a day. Came into Salisbury the moment the ultimatum expired. You mean, I can have my commission back?”
“Not exactly. The Scouts will all be troopers. Like the column you came in on with Sir Henry Manderville. I am going to raise them like a Boer commando where the leader gets elected by the rest of the men… You think that young brother of mine will join? Apart from Frederick Selous he probably knows the bush better than any other Englishman. He may be the black sheep of our family, running off with Em and all that, but we’ll need him in this war. And the other Rhodesians. I’m going to mount them on ponies just like this one and push right into Boer territory. Rather like those wild tribesmen were trying to do to you in India before you got on top of them. Can you imagine the information we’ll send back to military intelligence?”
“Your brother won’t join.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t like killing animals anymore, let alone people.”
“This is war.”
“You’ve forgotten one big thing, Major Brigandshaw.”
“What’s that?”
“His best friend and mentor is a Boer.”
“Don’t be silly, Tinus Oosthuizen is a British subject.”
“But he’s a Boer. Like a lot more of them here in the Cape and Natal.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. They won’t fight for Kruger. Far too well off.”
“Your nephew, young Harry, wants to join the army if he was only older. Heard him tell his mother. What was chilling was the boy asking Emily which side he should fight on, the Boers or the British? His best friend is Barend Oosthuizen, apart from a black kid called Tatenda, and Barend has sworn an oath with your niece to marry Madge when she turns sixteen. No, I don’t think Sebastian will join your Scouts. The worst kind of war is a civil war, and that’s what this one is going to be… This poor horse is whacked, old boy.”
“So am I,” said James, “Let’s get a drink before I report. The pony can stay at the water trough and have a rest.”
“You going to drink like that?”
“We’ll go to Annie’s. She won’t mind. I had a bath in a couple of rivers. You should have smelt me coming over the Limpopo. Could even smell myself, old chap.”
Annie’s shack was full. Instinctively, in the face of war, men were looking for women with whom to reproduce themselves.
Having left the pony free of its burdens, the saddle on the pole next to the hitching post, the saddlebags slung over James Brigandshaw’s shoulder, the rifle under his arm, they had walked the last half mile.
Now he looked around the whorehouse and smiled to himself. All men had the ability to appear what they were not, to lie about the truth, to give the impression they were people anyone would wish to know. But James, smiling to himself, knew better. At the end of the bar was a man masquerading as a gentleman. Talking to him was a man who James should arrest for deserting the British Army. Three semi-drunks down the long bar was the ex-administrator of the territory, back from Kimberley and looking for a job, who had been the lover of the wife of the man in the strange uniform who, even though he was too old, was going to be a scout. And to James’s total surprise, alone and drinking whisky, sat the baronet who had sold his daughter and known the bitter taste of retribution.
Jack Slater saw Gregory Shaw and, despite the strange uniform, recognised him and looked away. How strange, James thought, that husbands were always the last to know.
The cuckolded husband’s eyes were elsewhere.
“Leave him alone, Greg,” said James, restraining Gregory. “Henry has his problems.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Getting drunk, probably. And if he sees us, he’ll ask himself the same question. War does different things to different people. The young want to fight them, thinking of glory and gratitude… Probably their ancestors have bred into them that getting old is not a good thing, though they don’t know that yet. The lonely think of companionship. The men women scorn, think of medals that by some miracle will make them attractive. Some are just nasty and like to kill. That Jeremiah Shank over there saw the money before most of us saw the war. He’ll be even richer at the end of all this. He owns more horses than any man in Africa. His strong arm is Jack Jones who hopes, misguidedly, that I know nothing about him and he would like to
run away but can’t. War changes things and in change there is opportunity. And loss. Oh yes, Gregory, there is loss. Lots of loss, always loss, and still man has gone to war for as long as he can remember. Why do we do it? Who knows? A flaw in man? Is there a God, Gregory, who made us and made us with a flaw? Or is Darwin right?… We evolve and war winkles out the weak and makes the species stronger, more able to survive? Twice on this journey, alone from Johannesburg, under the stars of heaven, I thought too much of the meaning of life, and the more I thought, the number I made my brain. Once I thought my mind had left my body and gone to the stars, but then a nightjar called and brought me back, and I don’t think I will be able to do that again, and if I do I will never come back and that will be the end of my body. Can a mind live on its own? Are there millions of minds up there on their own thinking away? You see, this is what war does to me. It makes me think. And makes me nervous. Now, to your health, sir, and to the Mashonaland Scouts. Ah, here comes Henry. Do you think he will want to join the Scouts?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“Sir Henry Manderville, how are you?”
“A little drunk and a little lonely. Thank God for a familiar face.”
“Do you wish to join the Mashonaland Scouts?”
“Probably. Being among so many strange people makes me more lonely than being on my own. Is it a sign of weakness to be lonely? Or a sign of guilt? I am very lonely tonight and very glad to see you both. I have been thinking about my wife. Have a drink, gentlemen. A beer to slake the thirst and then a drink. The piano player is going to play again, and he is very good. We’ll drink to the piano player and, as the saying goes, ‘please don’t shoot him as he is the last one we have got’. Even a bad piano player is better than no piano player. Like most things in life, we never get what we want but make the best of it. No one wants this war except those foolish youngsters over there, but we’ll make the best of it. It will be another part of our lives whether we like it or not… Now, listen to that. Isn’t he terrible? Maybe we should shoot the poor man and put him out of his misery. Maybe not. Blood on the piano can dampen the spirits. Let the appalling thumping noise continue and allow me to buy my friends a drink.
“My friends! Such lovely words. Very possessive. As if you belong to me. Which you don’t. Annie tells me it is cheaper to buy the whisky by the bottle and if you get one with the top uncorked, you may get what you are paying for instead of the gut rot that tastes the same after the fourth drink. Knew a man once who swore he could identify any whisky away from the bottle. Man was a liar of course. Mr Barman!… Give us a bottle of whisky for my friends. Gregory, old son, that uniform is too bloody small for you but have a whisky. When the world goes potty, there’s only one thing a man can do. Get drunk… Isn’t that my friend Mr Shank over there? The friend who tried to put young Seb in jail? My fault of course. Always my fault. Haven’t you always found, Major Brigandshaw, that when it comes to the bottom of anything it is always your fault? And poor old Jack Slater. Now he’s no longer the top dog he drinks alone. Unfair, Gregory. Go and ask the poor man over for a drink. No. Now I remember something. Leave him alone to stew in his own juice. Do you think it is possible to stew in one’s own juice, Gregory? Ever since I sold Em to The Pirate I’ve been stewing in mine. Yes, I’ll join the Mashonaland Scouts whatever they are, just to get away from myself. First, we’ll drink the bottle. Have a party… Stupid really as no one has ever been able to run away from themselves however hard they try.”
2
November to December 1899
Karel Oosthuizen felt inside the back of his trousers and scratched his hairy arse. After a few moments of intense pleasure, he levelled his Mauser rifle down at the mining town of Kimberley and fired a random shot. At midday, even the dogs were off the streets. From a thousand yards, it was too far for him to hear the whine of the ricochet. Down the Boer line, someone else fired a shot, followed by complete silence.
“Why don’t we attack the place, man?” said Karel in the Taal to the man three yards away.
“’Cause khaki will stick a bayonet in your fat belly. They can’t get out and we can’t get in without a lot of dead burghers. We wait. Soon they run out of food and come and talk to us. I have a cousin who worked on the mine. Maybe he’s down there.”
“The whole khaki army will arrive soon and chase Piet Cronjé out of the Cape. Come, man, we got to fight this war and not scratch our arses. Tiens went off this morning. Just left. Wants to plant his mealies.”
“We’re all free men. We volunteered. Man has to plant his crops. What’s the point of having the land if we don’t plant the mealies?”
The siege of Kimberley was in its fifth week. From behind the Boer artillery, two cannons fired over their heads and both men raised their heads to watch the explosion. Satisfied with the plume of smoke, followed by the explosion, Karel rolled onto his back, got his hand inside his trousers and scratched his balls. From down in the town came a second explosion, and a shell screamed over their heads and crashed into the open ground five hundred yards behind them.
“Where’d they get ammunition?” screamed Karel. “They don’t have any more ammunition.”
“There’ve been rumours,” said the burgher on the other side. “Rhodes had his explosive people at De Beers making him shells. Looks like for once a rumour was right. Maybe we dig a trench. Nothing else to do. You miss your wife, Karel?”
“I don’t have a wife. Let’s go and make lunch on the other side of the kopje. We’ve fired at them. Nothing more till sunset. You think the British Army is really coming up to fight, Cronjé?”
“Just another rumour.”
“The last one was right. General Buller is a famous soldier. Cronjé calls himself a general, but he’s a burgher like us. Rumour has it his wife’s with him in the supply wagons. You ever heard of a war where the general has his wife to hand to cook his breakfast? Now, Kruger, he was a general, but he’s the President. Why’re we fighting this war?”
“You want to be told what to do by the British? Make you speak English, man. Tax you and send your money to England. The British win, you take your hat off to an Englishman. We win, they take their hats off to us.”
They walked back over the kopje and looked down at the crater made by the De Beers shell.
“Tomorrow, man, I’m digging me a trench,” said Karel into the silence.
“That gun could kill us,” said a man.
Karel Oosthuizen, a nephew of Tinus Oosthuizen whom he had never met, was twenty-five and already as big as his uncle. He could play the game of tossing a two hundred pound mealie sack back and forth over a flat wagon with his elder brother and laugh at the force of the sack hitting his chest. A fat smack from his flat hand could send a man clean off his feet. To keep up his strength on the farm, he ate six pounds of meat and twelve eggs every day of his life. His mother’s full-time job was feeding her husband and her seven sons, the poor woman never having had a daughter to help her with the chores. And now all her men, including the fifteen-year-old, were out on commando and she was left with ten natives to run the farm further back down the Vaal River. Thirty years before, the Oosthuizens had fought the natives for the land, and Karel worried about his mother, a woman of five foot two inches with only her tongue to keep control. When they all rode off to the call, they had thought to be back by Christmas. Smuts had suggested giving the Uitlanders the vote after five years of residence in the Transvaal. Five years was a long time. Five years would make them think like burghers. Then the war would be over and Karel could go home to the farm to look after his little mother and maybe look for a wife. The farm which his father had taken by riding around the perimeter as fast as he could in one day, was big enough for all the brothers and there was more land to be had to the north across the Limpopo where Rhodes had opened the hinterland. He was going to find himself a wife just like his mother and breed himself a family, a very large family.
He had forgotten about Sarie, Frikkie’s woman, the o
ne son in the family older than himself. Sarie was pretty in a funny kind of way but she was a poor white from the slums behind Pretoria, and Karel’s mother treated her just like a black. The two little girls had not even been entered in the front of the big family Bible that had come up on the Great Trek. They were not married, Sarie and Frikkie, Karel knew that. The great sin and Sarie were never spoken of, and Karel’s mother had never yet spoken to the poor girl, even when the girl was giving birth to the twins, not six months after coming on the farm. Sarie was a brave girl and put up with everything for the sake of the twins: they were five years old now but Sarie had had no more children: something about a breech birth and Sarie nearly dying when the twins were born, but it was never talked about. Rather like his grandfather Martinus, who had married a Scot and gone to live in Graaff-Reinet in British Cape Colony even though his father, Karel’s great-grandfather, had been on the Great Trek. There had been talk in the Transvaal branch of the large Oosthuizen family that the Scots woman taught her children English before the children learnt the Taal.
Karel’s brothers and father were with General Cronjé and his army who had gone out to block General Buller and his British generals from entering the Transvaal. There were many burghers with Cronjé and a detachment of the State artillery, the only professional soldiers in the whole Boer army. Karel had been hunting far north of the farm with three black men and when he came back with the meat, his kin had already gone out with the local commando. Karel rode off alone to war and when he reached Pretoria, they sent him down to Kimberley to lay siege to the diamond town. There were his mother and Sarie and the two girls on the farm with the blacks and all over the Transvaal it was the same and he wished the war would be over and life back to normal.
