‘Maria,’ I said and stood there like an idiot. Despite her weak state, she stood straight and pushed out her chin as she always had. She asked me if I had brought her anything. I had to say no, and felt a fool. Why had I not brought her food or something, anything? My only excuse is that I knew nothing of the conditions in that camp, not until that day. She asked me why I had come then, so I explained about the women and said I had to go soon, but I wanted to check up on her and see how she was doing.
‘Are you treated well?’ I asked, knowing as I spoke what an insult it was to ask this ghost of a woman, who had dwindled to half her size in a matter of weeks.
‘Come with me,’ she said. She poked her head back in the tent, and spoke in her own language, perhaps telling someone to watch Jurie while she was gone. I asked after his health and she just shrugged. She walked slowly beside me and showed me around the camp, telling me everything she had been through since I saw her last.
I asked about family she had here, the reason she had come to this camp. She told me that before she arrived, there had been a fire in one of the tents which had spread to a number of others and her cousin had been caught in the fire and died of his injuries. She said that people were usually in a bad way when they arrived, as many were taken there by force and allowed to bring no provisions. Khakis burned all the Boers’ things before they left, their clothes and bedding, even their own tents which most Boers have, being used to the trekking life. And some British soldiers encouraged the local Kaffirs to loot the house first and take part in its destruction. Some came with only the clothes they stood up in and some were even forced to march barefoot all the way. Some women had been captured after days of trying to escape and came with untreated gunshot wounds.
I knew many women did not choose to enter these camps, but surely it was safer for them to come here than to stay alone out on the veldt, prey to roaming Hottentots while their husbands were away, and with no food or supplies?
Maria said this was untrue, that they had plenty of food on their farms, and knew how to use a gun and protect themselves. She believed the camps were set up to protect the men who had surrendered without a fight – the ‘Hands-uppers’ as they are called here – from Boer revenge. It was never to protect the women. ‘How can you think it is safer to come to this place?’ She gestured towards a row of tents and pulled back the flap of the first one for me. Inside, the ground was quite covered with children, lying top-to-toe like sardines. They were groaning, sleeping fitfully, some weeping and calling for their mothers. Maria said, ‘They are waiting to die.’ I asked what was wrong with them. She explained that there was a measles epidemic, and typhus too. But some were dying from exposure, from the cold nights out on the veldt in the flimsy tents. There is hardly any wood for fuel and the children freeze at night. Some had developed pneumonia and hacking coughs that killed them. Some simply died of diarrhoea.
I told her I’d seen the Boer women we’d brought refuse to go into hospital. Why would they do that, when their children were so sick? Perhaps if they did such illness as this could be prevented. I explained to her how dirty those women were and about their strange remedies.
Maria again looked at me as if I were the greatest fool on earth. ‘How can anyone keep clean in these conditions? We are given no soap with our rations, the water supply is limited and polluted and there are no bath-houses. The ground outside the latrines is fouled with s--t. Our tents are pitched on dusty ground and packed with twelve people at least. The rain beats down in the constant storms and floods the tent and we must sleep with no bedding, no beds, in the wet mud. They say some camps have only four in a tent, with ovens for baking and public baths, but we have none of that here. Almost every child who goes into that hospital comes out a corpse. The nurses may seem nice, there may be better food there, but disease is so rife here, and no one trusts the English doctor. There is one doctor here, just one, for thousands of inmates. There are funerals every day and most of the dead are little children. Some die of starvation.’
‘You are so thin,’ I said. ‘I was a fool not to bring food.’ I apologised and said I would send her some as soon as I returned to the garrison.
She told me the rations were minimal. Those women whose husbands are away fighting are treated worst of all. They are even given half-rations. ‘I’m lucky my husband is dead,’ she said grimly. ‘On Mondays I get a few pounds of Australian flour, crawling with weevils; a few ounces of coffee, which tastes mostly of acorns and maize. A few ounces of sugar which is black and tastes as if it were the scum skimmed off the sugar boiler. And half an ounce of rough salt. Twice a week I am given a pound of mutton so lean it looks like dog, half-rotten and almost inedible. There are no vegetables or fruit or eggs or decent meat. And no milk for the children or even the babies. Only the sick children receive condensed milk, and that is watered down and often sour. See. The milk shed.’
We had reached a small hut, which let off a foul smell. I did not want to enter it, but put my head through the door and saw empty churns lying on their sides on the filthy floor, crawling with black flies. The bad smell from the shed mingled with a new smell, a worse one, soon a stench as we walked on. The path was stained with black puddles and as I looked up, I saw a trench in the ground on the side of which crouched dozens of children, smiling and holding little bowls in their hands, all gazing down into the trench, which was strewn with lumps of animal intestines, covered in flies. Two men were holding a scrawny sheep stretched across the hole, and one took a big knife and slit its throat, not enough to kill it, but so the blood drained out. The children nearby jumped down and held their bowls beneath the flow, catching the blood and laughing. I thought I would vomit as I watched them stumble back to the tents with their bowls, their cheeks smeared with blood. One was lugging a whole bucketful and another carried the sheep’s head, which had been severed once the blood had slowed to a trickle.
I stared at her expression. I was right, it seemed to say, and you were wrong. You should have let me go. You should never have brought me to this place. I turned away, as I could not bear to look at that face any longer.
‘Come,’ she said simply and took my arm, led me as if I were the one who needed assistance. ‘Do you believe me now? These camps were set up to kill us all.’
I had to stop her there. ‘This is not true,’ I said. No Englishman could even think such a thing. From what I’d seen, I guessed much more likely was bad organisation, no forward thinking, a total lack of understanding of what is required to service a camp of this size.
She told me the man in charge was called Scholtz and everyone hated him, even the staff, that he was a Boer who supported the British. He was rude, rough and petty-minded. Women would rather suffer than go to him and ask for help, to endure his insults and heartless refusals. I said I would report all of this to my superiors back at my garrison. ‘If you like,’ she murmured, as if the idea of help was beyond possibility. But mostly I think she was just exhausted by our walk. We had now circled back to her tent. She stood before it, tired and wan, looking past me across the tops of the tents.
‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Someone is bothering me.’ She explained that a guard at the camp would come to her tent at all hours of the day and night, calling her to come and walk with him, even to do chores for him. He would watch her while she did them and tell her how pretty she was. ‘He brings us little bits of food, or a candle and matches, other small things we need, but never enough. He tries to put his arms about me and I tell him no. But he is getting more rough with me and wants to take me back to his tent. I keep saying no. You do believe me?’
I said of course, and asked for his name, telling her I would sort it out. I said she shouldn’t worry any more, that I would speak to this man, report him too. And that I would send her food and supplies for her son, but that if either of them were ill they must go to the hospital, please. She nodded at all of this, but again, that look in her eyes as if it were all a fiction, a story of hel
p that was a dream and would never happen. When I took my leave of her, she lifted the flap of her tent and inside, baking in the heat of that summer day, I could see a dozen bodies lying packed together. Jurie slept in the middle, his bones sticking out, so thin was he. The heat inside was suffocating, the sun beating down through the thin canvas on to that sorry scene, with no furniture, flies crawling up the hot canvas, and slops of matter emptied on the floor and beside the tent.
I begged her not to go back in there. ‘Where else can I go?’ she said and went inside.
I immediately sought out the office of the camp supervisor, Scholtz. I may be only a private, but I would have a thing or two to say to him. But I was told by a secretary that he was away from the camp on business and I’d have to make an appointment to see him. I asked him if he knew where the guard was, the one Maria told me of. He asked me what it was about and I told him an inmate had complained of his advances.
The secretary merely laughed. ‘The Boer women at this camp are of the lowest sort. It doesn’t do to take them too seriously. They mistreat their children and are obsessed with death, hanging around the sick muttering, “What a pretty deathbed it is,” and such nonsense. They stay in their tents all day and have an unhealthy aversion to fresh air and water.’
I tried to protest but was ordered to be on my way. Nobody would tell me where the guard was. His colleagues certainly closed ranks. But I will go back there, as soon as my next leave is granted. I will find him next time. He will rue the day he ever went near Maria.
I hate to upset you, dear Lottie and Liza. But I hope you can see that you should know of these matters, that England should know. I did not believe it myself until I saw it with my own eyes. Know only that I do not lie, I do not exaggerate and I trust Maria’s word. I live now at this garrison, defending it from the visiting Boers who take aim at us. I am haunted by what I have seen and what I know.
The sooner this d----d war is done with, the better. But what will happen to those in the camps after the war? With their homes burned, their livelihoods gone, their men dead or overseas, what chance for the Boers when we have left them alone at last? I am helpless to change these bigger questions, to affect anything but my own small part in it. But I swear to you both that I will do whatever it takes to make that woman’s life better, and that of her son. It is the only small thing I can do, in this desert of misery.
I will write again.
Love to you all,
Caleb
14
The Crowes come up to the big house. We received the letter from Caleb only a week ago. It is March 1901, the daffodils lift their heads and the hellebores are nodding. The Queen passed away in January, but we were already wearing black. We see them through the dining room window, Mr and Mrs Crowe, walking slowly and seriously up the drive. We run out to greet them, but Maid Edith has already shown them into the drawing room. We think they are here to pay their final respects to Father, though it has been almost a year. We know they cannot leave home easily or often. I see Lottie’s face and she knows something is wrong the moment she sees her ma look up.
‘What is it?’ she says and Mrs Crowe starts crying.
My gut twists and I think, Caleb. It is Caleb. He is dead.
Mrs Crowe passes over a slip of paper and Mr Crowe says, ‘We don’t know what to do, love.’
It is a telegram. An image appears in my mind of the telegraph boy knocking on the Crowe door, dressed in red on his red bike, warning, danger. We read it together.
MR AND MRS CROWE WHITSTABLE ENGLAND = I AM ARRESTED CHARGED WITH MURDER COURT MARTIAL PROCEEDING SOON = CALEB CROWE
All I can think is, He’s alive, he’s alive. The truth of the news does not truly hit me, just the relief that he is not dead. Lottie just stares and stares at the paper, as if it were written in Greek.
‘What does it mean?’ she asks them. ‘Have you heard anything else?’
‘No, my dear,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘That’s all we know. We got it yesterday. We tried to speak to someone at the barracks, at the East Kents, but they couldn’t tell us anything. They said to talk to the government, but we don’t know who.’
I clap to call everyone’s attention. ‘Mother will know,’ I sign. ‘She has friends, important ones. She will know what to do. Wait here. I’ll send for refreshments.’
It is morning, so Mother will be in her study writing letters or reading. On the stairs, I feel light-headed and grasp the banister to stop myself from falling. Caleb is accused of murder, arrested, charged. In prison, a trial to follow, and what next? If found guilty, death, surely; he will be put to death. Now the truth hits me. And I think, Is it to do with that woman? Is it her doing? Wild possibilities flit through my mind. I knock on Mother’s door and push it open. She turns around and frowns.
We talk over sandwiches that no one eats and tea that no one drinks. The others sign and speak at once to assist me. Mother is magnificent. ‘I help with a committee to send resources to the Boer ladies in South Africa,’ she tells them. ‘Through this, I have connections with military wives whose husbands are high up in the army. One is the sister of a general’s wife. I will write to her and ask for her help. I will also invite our local Member of Parliament around and enlist his help too. Please do not upset yourself, Mrs Crowe, Mr Crowe. First we need to find out more. Then we must engage counsel for your son. I will pay all fees relating to his defence – no, no, I won’t hear any argument. Lastly, I think someone must go out there, to see how it proceeds, to see Caleb and help him through it, if possible. What do you think?’
Everything seems more hopeful now. Mother will write letters and speak to important people. Matters are in hand. But there is one thing I want to do, one thing I must do, and if I am denied I will defy all orders. But first I must see what the Crowes have to say.
‘We want to go to him, Mrs Golding, of course we do,’ says Mr Crowe. ‘It is a father’s duty to rescue his son, or to try. But I cannot leave the oyster beds to rack and ruin and theft. There is no one left to trust it to, now we’re not in the co-operative and other men are our masters. We’re at war with the whelk trappers and the Essex dredgers, who steal our stock. I can’t let my other sons go to ruin while I try to save this one. And if my wife goes …’
‘What will become of my boys?’ Mrs Crowe says. ‘A neighbour minds them today, but I’d be gone for months to that God-forsaken place and who would tend to them? Mrs Golding, I believe that parents are meant to guide their children through life, like a ship’s pilot. I’ve always done that for all my little ones, all their lives. But this is beyond me. I just don’t know what we can do for Caleb.’
I stand up and everyone looks at me. There is one reason – the best – for why it must be me who goes, a reason I cannot reveal to anyone but Lottie. That I will seek out the Visitor of that murdered man and I will make him confess who killed him. It will prove Caleb’s innocence and he will be saved. For now, I must conjure other excuses to persuade the others. ‘I think Lottie should go. I would like to accompany her, if she agrees. We are the only ones who can go, as you must stay with your family and Mother is too poorly, you know you are, Mother. Lottie and I are strong and young and healthy and free. We already have everything ready to travel and will do all in our power to help Caleb. Besides, when they see two nice English ladies, one of whom is deaf, they will pity us and give us special treatment. I have the money and the means to finance it, from Father’s legacy. What do you say, Lottie?’
My friend claps her hands and we embrace. The parents look on, shocked, shaking their heads. Yet the logic of it will out. On considering the alternatives, there is little argument. If Father were alive, he would have gone; I would have begged to go with him, and would have been refused. Now he is dead, I am the one who assumes responsibility. Perhaps there is this one slender consolation for his loss. It is agreed. Lottie and I are going to Africa.
A week later, we have more news. Mother’s contacts have come good and Caleb’s commanding officer ha
s sent information. Caleb has been accused of killing a British soldier. He has pleaded guilty; indeed, he gave himself up. He is confined in the Frankfort garrison for now but later he will be moved to a military prison in Pretoria, where the trial will take place in a few weeks’ time. Further enquiries reveal that the dead soldier was a guard at Camp Irene. He was found shot dead in a tent and some of his belongings stolen. Caleb has offered no explanation or defence. In fact, he has not spoken a word of it since his arrest. He was not working at the camp and, as far as they know, had little association with the dead man. But we know different. It is as I feared. It is the guard involved with that woman, it must be. I knew she would be trouble. What on earth was Caleb thinking? And then I realise he wasn’t thinking, he was blind to thought where Maria was concerned. That bloody woman. We will go to him. We will find out the truth and use it for good or ill to save Caleb. I am convinced in my ability not only to help him, but rescue him. Lottie and I together will get him out of that trap and free him. And damned be that woman if she tries to cross us.
Mother is worried and does not want me to go. She has lost Father, and now I am leaving. I remind her I was to travel in any case. This is a journey to a British stronghold, somewhere we will be protected by the might of the British Army on our travels. And it is for the best cause possible. But she is my mother and does not care for causes where I am concerned. She sees too that she has no sway with me over this; I will go, blow, wind, come, wrack. She sees the fire in my eyes after months of despondency over Father, and perhaps she thinks it would be good for me to do this. Mother books our passage and Lottie and I plan and pack, ordering maps of South Africa and city plans of Pretoria and Cape Town, as well as books on the flora and fauna, the history of the Boers, the British and the Zulus and other African tribes, the peoples and their languages. We want to arrive girded with knowledge, not lumbered with ignorance. We receive a permit to travel in South Africa from Mother’s friend’s brother-in-law, the general. We are told there is martial law in South Africa and that everyone needs permission to travel. Ours is very specific, a letter to be shown to whom it may concern, that the Misses Crowe and Golding are given permission to travel from Cape Town to Pretoria for the purposes of visiting the said Miss Crowe’s brother incarcerated pending trial, and for their return to Cape Town on completion of their business.
The Visitors Page 17
