And as we reached the various hills that Latimer had marked for us so carefully on his map, we saw that he had been right. The engine laboured up the inclines, slowing to such a speed, that, had we been permitted, we could have walked alongside it without losing any ground. As it was, with one guard lounging listlessly at either exit, we fought with one another to get closer to the slits of open window, praying for a downhill slope that might bring speed enough to pass through a momentary blast of hot and heavy air and afford our sweat-streaked faces some small breath of comfort.
‘Wonder if they made it,’ Billy yelled back suddenly, raising his voice to be heard over the constant rickety racket of the train in motion, but in doing so, fracturing the isolation of somnolent silence that the rest of us had unconsciously embraced. At one time or another over the long and changeless hours, his thought must have occurred to every one of us. He turned his head away from the window out of which at that moment he could almost have counted the separate blades of spiny grass in every clump we passed. Mac stood up and yawning, tried to stretch.
‘Mmnn?’
‘Bastard Taylor and his frigging aircrew.’
‘Must’ve. Be bloody easy here.’
‘Fuck it, Mac. Watch what you’re doin’,’ Clarie started up, wildly irritated in the sweltering confinement by Mac’s flailing arms. ‘Where’d you think they’ll be, then, by now?’
‘Hopefully on some boat. Out of Dakar maybe. Lucky sods,’ Mick muttered. ‘Should never’ve let them have our stuff. Fraser? Reckon you could’ve made it easy here, couldn’t you?’
‘Don’t look too inviting, though. Desert goes on for frigging miles. ‘S hard out there,’ Big Sam said, almost to himself.
Fraser, leaning his head back against the wall, did not open his eyes to answer. ‘Let’s hope they’ve bloody made it and aren’t sitting out there, lost, dying of dehydration in the heat. Wouldn’t’ve wanted much to try that twice.’
We slept where we sat, giving over to exhaustion, only to be jerked awake again by the brunt of every stilted lurch and shudder of the train, as, struggling, it fought to make a halting progress across the rough terrain. However, the uncomfortable monotony and the heat-inflicted aggravations of the journey were at least made more bearable by the regular stops that we were granted to be fed. At designated stations, we fell out of the train onto the platforms to be greeted by hoards of clamorous locals who rushed around us, thrusting at us spicy-smelling couscous, fried bananas and baked peanuts in the hope that we would buy them. Having no money, we were herded past them along the platform to some table, where a couple of weary-looking soldiers would slop a spoonful or two of rice into a tin and let us have some water.
The station at Timbuktu, when we finally reached it, was no different. It was bustling with business, though we were quickly hustled through the crowds of importunate and persistent sellers to waiting trucks. We managed just the briefest glimpse of a low and rambling town, where light stone buildings crumbled in the heat and where roofs of corrugated iron glinted, dazzling back its brightness to the sun. They whisked us through it and out into the desert beyond, our destination a much larger camp made up of row on row of concrete buildings, surrounded by a rusty-looking fence, which lay half a mile or so from the town.
Stiff and aching, we shambled down from the trucks and were immediately accosted by a gaunt, weasel-faced officer who barked at us in French a command, as far as we could tell, to follow. He led us along a labyrinth of dusty pathways before ushering us impatiently into a small, grey structure, not much bigger than a hut, which turned out to be the Commandant’s office.
Barely glancing up from his desk as we crammed ourselves into the space before it, the Commandant, a heavily moustached Frenchman, asked for our captain to step forward. He tried it first in French and finding that not one among us moved, he looked up properly and repeated his request in a slow but perfect English. Wetting his pencil with his tongue and addressing Captain Edwards only, he proceeded to take down all our names and that of the Sithonia, laboriously writing each one down and appealing to the skipper from time to time for clarification with regard to spelling. This done, apparently to his satisfaction, he folded his hands together slowly and, placing them on the paper that lay before him, he tipped backwards slightly on his chair. He was a man of about my father’s age, silver-haired and broad-bodied, but it was his eyes that attracted my attention as soon as he sat back. Set wide apart due to the broad nature of his brow, their grey lucidity reflected a prepossessing intelligence, a bright curiosity that somehow implied both sensitivity and candour.
As I watched, he took time to let them wander over the limbs and faces of the dishevelled group of skeletal figures who vaguely swayed in front of him, and as the appalling nature of our condition gradually dawned upon him, his face darkened, furrowing with what appeared to be sincere and grievous sorrow. Finally, looking back up at the captain, he cleared his throat.
‘Captain Edwards. I hope that you will not be here for long. I am confident that our Governor General, and I hope, the administration of all French West Africa, will soon see sense and join the Allies. I will then be pleased to inform you of the orders for your release.’ He paused, long enough to watch the loosening effect these words had on our strained and tightly watchful faces. ‘Until that time, I am afraid that you are prisoners here and I want you to understand, I am very sorry for it.’ Shaking his head slowly, he let out a sigh of heavy resignation and dropped his gaze for a moment to his hands and to the sheet of paper that bore our names beneath them.
He then snapped up to his feet so quickly that his chair screaked sharply across the floor, making me flinch. He began to bellow in rapid French at the weasel-faced officer who had brought us in and who had, up until this point, been lolling carelessly against the door frame.
At his superior’s sudden change of tone, the weasel started quickly to attention, and nodding abruptly several times at what I assumed were a series of specific commands regarding our incarceration, he opened the door and, jerking his head irritably at Fraser who stood nearest to him, began to lead us out.
As I was one of the last to turn and leave the office, the Commandant got the chance to look at me more closely and as a result, when I reached the door, he let out a cry of furious exasperation. Pointing angrily at my shoeless feet, he suddenly roared from behind me at his officer who was by now ten yards in front, ‘Et allez chercher des souliers pour ce gars: il va pieds nus!’
The weasel marched resentfully in front of us to the far side of the camp, to the stores where an ageing native soldier, oblivious to his officer’s scowls, took his time in fetching each of us a blanket and a towel. As he handed the carefully folded items over, his thin, high voice piped time and time again, what he must have been taught by some English-speaking joker was some kind of mantra of encouragement. ‘Welcome to Timbuktu,’ he chirped, nodding cheerily and grinning wide his toothless gums, ‘last place on earth.’
The weasel, scarcely able to contain his impatience at the man’s slow, deliberate pace, hurried us away, striding ahead as we bunched dilatorily behind him, a further aggravation that jerked him to a standstill every twenty yards or so to roll his eyes with exaggerated irritation. Our accommodation, it seemed, was in another far distant corner of the camp and, sore-bodied, still suffering from the effects of three solid days crammed together on the train, we struggled reluctantly behind him, wilting with the effort in the unremitting heat.
Eventually, he stopped and flung the door open on an enormous, long, grey hut whose tiny windows were little more than air vents spaced at regular intervals just below the roof line. Inside, as our eyes gradually grew accustomed to the murky darkness of the cavernous interior, we discovered line on line of metal beds, so tightly packed together that there seemed scarcely space enough for a man to stand by his own bedside. At the far end of the room, beyond the beds, there were several wooden tables and around them, clearly having lunch, crowded a noisy gathering of m
en. All of them were dressed as we were and all, it turned out, were the survivors of other torpedoed ships and prisoners from the armed forces who had been taken in the area.
Having shown us to our beds, the weasel, waving a dismissive arm in the direction of the queue for macaroni, left us to it and so, dumping our belongings, ever hungry, we made our way up to the top end of the room. As we approached, Billy, with a sudden cry, pointed to a small cluster of men already eating at one of the tables we had to pass to join the back end of the line.
‘Well, well, well.’ He stopped in front of them and, smirking complacently, folded his arms. ‘Would you look at just who we got here. If it ain’t Flight Lieutenant Taylor and his troop of merry men!’
Hearing his name, Taylor looked up quickly from his tin, his fork poised midway to his mouth and, recognising Billy and then the skipper, he put it down again and stood up. Smiling sheepishly, he paused and then started round the table to offer Captain Edwards his outstretched hand.
‘You didn’t make it then?’ the skipper said, taking the hand and shaking it.
‘Didn’t really get the chance,’ Taylor admitted flatly. ‘Opportunity never came. Too heavily guarded most of the time.’ He put his hands upon his hips and shook his head. ‘Sorry,’ he shrugged ruefully.
‘Too heavily guarded?’ Billy snorted, looking towards Mac and Cunningham in front of him for sly support. ‘Call two sleepy Senegalese at either end of the carriage heavily guarded? Hey, Mick… Mick! For once, you got it right. Should never’ve let ’em have the friggin’ map for all the use they bloody made of it.’
‘Three guards we had,’ Taylor eyed him coolly, ‘and there’s only six of us. Seems they guard prisoners from the armed forces a bit more closely. You are civilians, after all.’ Disarmed by the deliberate moderation in Taylor’s voice but suspecting him of that insolent brand of superiority with which some servicemen occasionally regard others, Billy’s eyes narrowed and he dropped his contemptuous smile.
‘So where’s our stuff? All that stuff that we collected?’
Taylor addressed his answer to Captain Edwards. ‘Shared it out. Thought it best. Fifty-one of us eat and sleep in here – all of us, always bloody hungry.’
‘Sixty-six of us now,’ said Fraser dryly, as he put a hand up to the captain’s arm to guide him on towards the lunch queue. Billy was still muttering about how there were hardly any guards in here now and how it couldn’t have been that bloody difficult, train went so slow, to have even tried to make a break for it, when I left him at the serving table and went off gratefully to try to find a seat.
Taylor’s explanation for failing to attempt escape did lose some credibility in light of the fact that, as far as we could see, we were all to be fairly loosely guarded from the outset. The camp was huge and several other accommodation blocks, almost as big as ours, were already full. The French guards, few in number, and their West African counterparts, seemed overstretched and as incapable as the rest of us of shaking off the shiftlessness induced by the aggravating temperatures. They were plagued by the same torments as their prisoners: boredom, broiling heat, and the all-consuming constancy of pernicious hunger. Consequently, they shirked their duties where they could and troubled to monitor our movements scarcely at all if they were able to avoid it.
For the sake of form, they kept us to a perfunctory schedule. Two of them arrived in our hut with one of the cooks and the pans of macaroni at dawn, and after breakfast, they would accompany us listlessly along the half-mile trail down to the primitive and very public shower block. Without ever bothering to count us either in or out, they would take us then beyond the fence where, seeking out some sliver of shade, they sat back to rest, while we stood about, enervated by the brash morning sun and vaguely poking at the undergrowth, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for the call to come for lunch so that we could return, exhausted, to the cool and darkness of our hut for macaroni and brief but coveted respite.
The afternoon hours, which mirrored almost exactly those of the morning, crawled by as agonisingly slowly, and as those hours stole into days and the days crept towards becoming weeks, it began to seem impossible that the time would ever end.
One morning, though, having been called up as usual for our ablutions and been among the crowd who started out, I realised within a hundred yards that I had forgotten my towel, and so I returned to the dormitory to get it. Having picked it up, I reached the door to set off again, only to find Mick and Tomas with Big Sam and the third mate of the Oronsay outside, fighting over one another to get back in.
‘Hey, Cub, just stand out here for a minute for us, will you?’ Mick hissed, grabbing me by the arm and pulling me back as I made to pass them. ‘Shout if you see anyone coming.’
The four of them disappeared into the dormitory, shoving each other and snorting to suppress their laughter. Uncertain of quite what to do but unwilling to lay them open to getting caught in whatever clearly illicit activity they were engaged, I hung about indecisively, scuffing at the small stones in the dust and finally opting to lean back against the wall with as much nonchalance as I could muster. No one came and eventually Mick’s head appeared around the side of the door, which he seemed to be struggling to hold open with the back of his left shoulder. He glanced at me and then checking furtively right and left, shoved the door more fully open.
‘Here, Cub, cop hold of these, would you?’ He thrust a pile of folded blankets into my arms before disappearing momentarily to come out again with the other three all similarly encumbered.
‘C’mon!’ he grinned in explanation, jerking his head to beckon me after them as Big Sam, followed by the other two, began to creep his way along the side wall of the building. ‘We’re gonna sell ’em!’
‘You can’t sell these,’ I cried, a bit too loudly, for all four of them turned to shush me fiercely. ‘They’ll have your bloody guts for garters!’ I said, lowering my voice.
‘They’ll never know,’ Mick replied, pressing himself up against the wall and pausing to look back at me. ‘Or at least not before it’s too late to stop us.’
‘Of course they’ll bloody know. Be bleedin’ obvious there’s blankets missing as soon as they inspect the dorm.’
‘Nah. We cut ’em exactly in two halves. Laid the other half back on all the beds we took ’em off. You’d never know, looking at ’em.’
‘They’ll know tonight when it’s bloody cold.’
We’d reached the end of the wall and bunching up again, the four of them crouched down and over one another to scan the open space between ours and the next row of accommodation blocks. Tomas nodded and the third mate of the Oronsay, a bloke called Jed who Mick apparently knew from home, suddenly bolted, sprinting wildly across the open alley to fling himself down by the side of the next long, low building twenty yards away. We all held our breath as we watched, dreading, half expecting to hear at any moment a barked command to stop. Despite myself, my heart began to pound within my chest as the thrill of the escapade took hold.
‘C’mon, Cub,’ Mick coaxed. ‘We’re gonna sell ’em and then we’re gonna go and eat! Think of it. Real meat, bread, wine. Pastry mebbe. There’s no harm in it. And anyway, you gotta come with us now,’ he whispered finally, putting an end to my objections by raising an errant eyebrow at me as he prepared to make the dash himself, ‘’cause I cut up the blanket on your bed too.’ And with that, he shot away.
Old and badly maintained, the six-foot fence around the compound was an ineffectual deterrent. Many of the rusted, sun-worn stakes that held it up had buckled, creasing up the browned and brittle mesh between them, so that it was possible in some places to walk it down, crushing it with minimum effort onto the ground. Jed had already discovered a discreet and crooked stretch behind the guard’s ablution block that proved easy to trample underfoot, and from there, the town, it turned out, was less than half a mile away.
We crept towards it, sliding in between the low, stone buildings, keeping to the crumbling walls and corrugated
doorways, and darting from one dusty side street to the next, aware that our clothes, emblazoned with the white, tell-tale patches of the prisoner, announced our standing at the very first glance. We need not have worried. As we approached the centre of the town, we paled gratefully into insignificance amid the tumultuous chaos that clearly throbbed at the heart of its daily life.
Unnoticed and unchallenged, we jostled our way down the crowded, bustling thoroughfares that led towards the railway station, with Mick assuring us as we battled on, hugging our blankets to our chests, that he’d noticed, on our arrival, a busy, thriving marketplace close by it.
He was right and it was heaving. Stalls upon stalls, so closely packed together there was barely room to get in among them, were piled high with local produce, as the vendor’s voices rose in shrill and constant contest to undercut their neighbour’s millet and maize, rice, cassava. Craftsmen, crying out for custom as they worked, bent low over their silver filigree, their intricately embossed leatherwork and carved enamels. With one sly eye kept all the while on the close-quartered competition, they called across each other’s stalls in their efforts to best one another in quality and price. Frantic flies swarmed to drying, shrivelled hunks of meat that swung head-high alongside swathes of brightly coloured fabrics, while on the ground, chickens in makeshift cages scrabbled their futile protest and goats, loose and bleating, skittered about among the pots and pans and baskets laid out for display.
The air was pungent, thick with the stench of heat and human interaction, though the beguiling smell of baking bread from somewhere, waxing and waning on the hot and heavy air, went some way to relieving it. My every nerve end, deadened by long and lonely isolation, reverberated with the general hubbub, though, as I stood, hesitating on the periphery, some small part of me could not help but marvel at the persistent optimism in so vital a society. People thronged from all directions: shouting and laughing, arguing, pushing, bartering, all engaged in one form or another of frenetic and vociferous activity and all caught up in the endless, inexhaustible motion of the necessity of their own existence.
Making Shore Page 25
