by John Harris
‘How do you know?’
‘That sergeant.’
‘Which sergeant?’
‘The one they said had disappeared. That’s where they went. He found ’em. He’ll be on his way to the Cape now.’
Willie stared, and listened as the engine whistle came again, faint as a ghost across the veldt. He sighed.
They reached Standerton by noon, hungry, footsore, hot and tired. After a drink in the station buffet, they caught the day down-train to Cape Town two hours later. Neither of them had spoken much during their long walk and they were both thoughtful as the train left.
They dropped off in Dreifontein and walked across country to Paradise and the little house where the Tiger had set Pansy up. It looked shabby and dusty and not very beautiful as they trudged towards it, but it was somewhere for them to hide.
‘So this is where you kept her,’ Willie said.
‘Yes.’ The Tiger managed a smile. ‘She’ll cook us a meal.’
But there was no sign of Pansy and all her possessions had gone, too, all her clothes, all the little trinkets she’d carried around with her – the tintype photograph of her mother and father, the cheap crockery house with the words ‘A Present From Brighton’ that she cherished, the china cockerel, the cushion cover decorated with union jacks and the face of Lord Roberts, even the picture of the Tiger with Willie and the Poser in the tin and brass frame.
‘She’s done a bunk,’ the Tiger said hollowly. He stood staring at Willie for a moment, then he suddenly remembered the bag of chips under the water-butt and bolted outside in a panic. He was too late. Pansy had sharp eyes.
The only food in the house had gone rotten and they had to change Fish’s half-sovereign to buy eggs and beans and coffee. It was a drab Christmas dinner.
‘Funny she went off like that,’ the Tiger said.
‘There are a lot of funny things about this affair,’ Willie agreed, sitting gloomily at the kitchen table with a glass of beer. ‘Why was Poser off to Cape Town, for instance? There was no need to bolt like that. We had it all tied up. It was a wonderful plan.’
‘Except,’ the Tiger said, ‘that as usual it didn’t work.’
A week later a letter arrived. It had been pushed through the door while they were out buying food. It had a Cape Town postmark and was addressed to Mr Horiss Clarense Lavender, Esquier.
They stared at each other then the Tiger tore at the envelope and wrenched out the letter.
Dere Tiger, he read. A gril cant wate for ever and I have got maried to Dolly Fitch. I am meeting him in Capetown. He has a bit of bisness to attend to 1st, to rase some cash, and then we are off to the good old USA to strat all over agane. Hopping this finds you as it leves me. In the pink. Yores sinserly. It had been signed P Whistlecraft, but this had been crossed out and corrected to P Fish, Mrs Pansy’s confusion seemed to stare out of the smudged page.
The Tiger studied it silently, then he handed it to Willie. ‘How did he find out where she was?’ he said.
With the presentation of Fish’s body to the authorities it was decided that honour was finally satisfied and Mace’s men were called off. Instant’s corpse was never found and a hard-faced sergeant-major appeared in his place to take Mace’s unit to Cape Town. Mace had gone ahead of them, the doctor considering that he might be suffering from a fractured skull.
It didn’t take long for their departure to filter through, and Willie and the Tiger cautiously took the train to Winifred. Poll greeted them cheerfully.
‘Where did you get to?’ she asked.
‘Looked like trouble,’ Willie said evasively. ‘Thought we’d better hop it.’
‘Just as well,’ Poll said. ‘That army feller was here looking for deserters. They shot Dolly Fish. He’d pinched some diamonds, they said. From that feller upstairs.’
She handed over a letter addressed to Fish. ‘You’d better have this,’ she said. ‘It’s a bill. From the livery stable. For that horse.’
‘Which horse?’
She looked at the Tiger. ‘That little lop-eared grey with the limp,’ she said. ‘The one that knew where to go without telling. They said he’d bought it off you some time ago.’
Under the circumstances they decided it might be as well to leave Winifred for a while. Though Mace had vanished, Berkeley hadn’t.
They said goodbye to Poll, borrowed a fiver from her, and took the train to Chichester Junction. As it pulled out of the station, they went along to the dining car, ordered beers and sat staring at them. Outside, the day was brilliant and the sky was all forget-me-nots and lilies. The Tiger was still in a gloomy mood.
Then Willie beamed as a thought struck him. ‘One thing,’ he pointed out. ‘With the Poser gone, it only leaves…’
The Tiger looked up, suddenly more cheerful. ‘…You and me!’ he said.
‘Exactly. Nothing to stop us going back and lifting the oof either now. Army’s gone. No sentries on duty. Nobody to worry about a couple of fellers wandering about the crossroads at the witching hour of midnight.’
They were in a mellow mood when the train drew into Chichester Junction. As they descended from the carriage they stood staring round them in amazement. Neither of them had shown his face in the place for months and the station was surrounded now by engine sheds and warehouses where all the freight moving north to repair the ravages of war was stacked.
‘Place’s grown,’ Willie said wonderingly as they stood in the station entrance and stared down Nicholson Street. ‘Brick buildings these days. Slate roofs.’
A man reading a Diamond Fields Advertiser nearby overheard them. ‘We’ve got a theatre, too,’ he said. ‘And a new water-works as well. The whole supply of drinking water isn’t done in for the week these days if someone gets in the wrong bath at the hotel.’
Willie peered cautiously about him. There wasn’t a soldier in sight.
‘Army all gone?’ he asked.
‘Not a dirty-nosed little drummer boy in the whole damn place,’ the man with the newspaper said.
Willie looked at the Tiger and smiled. ‘Ought to take a cab,’ he suggested.
They hailed a dusty victoria and climbed inside. ‘War memorial,’ Willie said.
The Kaffir coachman nodded and drove them slowly out of the station forecourt. There were still planks and bricks and sheets of corrugated iron lying about the streets with hundreds of bags of cement, and they noticed at once that all the empty spaces between the buildings they had known were filled in.
‘Almost unrecognisable,’ Willie said.
They jogged along in silence for a while, still impressed, then the cab stopped at a road junction.
Willie gestured. ‘Not here,’ he said. ‘Where the battle was fought.’
The cab driver pointed and they both sat bolt upright to stare at a wide square covered with wooden blocks and surrounded by brick buildings with slate roofs, either built or in the process of being built.
‘This isn’t it,’ Willie said. ‘The one we want is outside town.’
‘Outside town Roscoff way now, Baas.’ The coachman gestured with his whip. ‘Out to Sinai and Shakespeare. Dis here Birdham Square.’
Willie and the Tiger stared at each other then, without speaking, they both rose slowly to their feet in the victoria and gazed about them. The square was surrounded by offices, shops, wide pavements and newly planted trees.
‘But the memorial?’ Willie said in a shaking voice.
Their eyes followed the cab driver’s whip. In the centre of the square was an island of flagstones and gardens round a group of jacarandas and, in the centre of it, shaded by the trees and flanked by spiked chains, was an area of cobbles and a pyramid of white cemented stones.
‘New, Baas,’ the driver said proudly. ‘Daar de old tree where de general die.’
Slowly, still in silence, they climbed out of the cab and walked across to the island, dodging the traffic that clattered past. They stopped on the island, still without speaking, and stared at the sto
ne pyramid, then, together almost, as though they were both activated by the same impulse, they stepped over the chains and approached it. There was a plaque of polished bronze bolted to the front.
Battle of Chichester Junction, they read. 27 March 1900. On this spot died Brigadier-General H A C Birdham and 193 of his officers and men. They fought well. Requiescant in Pace.
General Wickover had done his work well.
Epilogue
It has become the fashion in recent years to append to all true histories an account of what happened to the surviving protagonists. As this is a true history, there appears to be no reason why it should be different.
Southey failed to prosper and so did Berkeley. The police chasing Fish to Johannesburg rode smack into Corporal MacFiggins’ party who mistook them in the darkness for the men they were waiting for. Fired on, the police fired back and, though no one was hurt, the ensuing enquiry did Berkeley’s reputation no good.
Poll eventually married again and went respectable. The hotel still exists though it now stands many storeys high and rates five stars in the tourist guides. In the bar there are still faded prints of what it looked like at the turn of the century but, though the name hangs in large illuminated letters over the glass and steel awning at the entrance, nobody in Winifred these days has the faintest idea how it got it.
Instant turned up in Cape Town in Prinsloo’s suit and with Prinsloo’s daughter on his arm. The army never did work out what had happened to him. Wooden went back to England and, because he couldn’t think of anything else to do and couldn’t imagine life with nothing to complain about, remained in the army. When war broke out again in 1914 he made life miserable for Kitchener’s volunteers by telling them how he won the war before their war.
Despite General Wickover, for the main protagonists there was still what might be called a happy ending. When Pansy read in the Cape papers what had happened to Fish she shed no tears but wrote at once from her mother’s to an attorney in Tylersville, Texas, enclosing her marriage lines. The marriage lines were genuine enough but Fish’s ranch wasn’t. Like so many other ranches offered as bait to English girls in later wars, it turned out to be a shack with a collapsing split-rail fence, hardly any land and no stock.
There was nothing for it but to swallow her pride and, using the fare for America she’d saved, she headed back to Winifred and appeared in front of the Tiger tearful, contrite, and more loving then ever.
‘Hello, Tiger,’ she said nervously.
‘Hello, Panse,’ the Tiger said cautiously.
‘What are you doing these days?’
The Tiger drew a deep breath that seemed to hurt him. ‘Willie’s got himself a job with the Parks and Gardens Department,’ he said. ‘They took over responsibility for the war memorial. I’m a foreman.’
There was a long silence, then it was Pansy’s turn to take a deep painful breath.
‘It was that Dolly,’ she said.
To her surprise, the Tiger didn’t get pompous or self-important. He didn’t even black her eye. He merely went to a drawer and took out a pair of bent spectacles and handed them to her. ‘They were Dolly Fish’s,’ he said.
It was his way of consoling her for her loss.
‘We haven’t got the money,’ he said. ‘We’ll never get it now, in spite of what Willie thinks.’
He explained and it shook her almost as much as the news about Fish. However, she was a realistic girl and she wasted no time on something she couldn’t change. She fished in her handbag and held out a small screw of paper.
‘There’s this,’ she said.
The Tiger opened the paper carefully and found himself staring at the packet of klips from under the water-butt.
He looked up at Pansy and grinned, blinking rapidly. She was watching him under her eyebrows and nervously fluttering her lashes at him so that his heart started to pound suddenly.
‘We don’t need any money, Tiger,’ she said impulsively. ‘We’ve got each other.’
‘Yes,’ the Tiger agreed, hurriedly reaching for her hand to pull her after him. ‘And we’ve kind of got used to each other now, haven’t we?’
They went to Pansy’s mother’s in Cape Town for the honeymoon and were celebrating in a hotel in Adderley Street when they got talking to a black-haired arrogant-looking young Englishman who was taking a drink. The Tiger was drunk enough to tell him the whole sad story at great length.
‘We came here to make our fortune,’ he said. ‘But we never did. What did you come for?’
‘To earn enough to marry my girl Nell,’ the Englishman said.
‘You do,’ the Tiger told him. ‘You go home and marry your Nell. And be quick about it.’
Which is exactly what the dark young man, my father, did.
There were various alarms and excursions when the council dug up Birdham Square to put in electricity, telephone cables and drains, but nothing came of any of them because there was no occasion to go anywhere near the war memorial, and when they replaced the worn out wooden blocks that covered the surface of the road they didn’t dig very deep.
Willie and the Tiger remained in Chichester Junction until one day when Willie came face to face with Captain Mace. He had achieved a measure of fame by then as the man who had tracked down and shot it out with Dolly Fish, the notorious Free State bandit. The story had become legend by this time and had improved considerably in the telling.
He was peering at the inscription on the war memorial. ‘Often think that thing could tell a tale if it could speak,’ he said.
He’d been thinking of the battle, but Willie wasn’t.
‘You bet,’ he said, giving him a smile and hurrying away. As he turned the corner, he saw Mace staring after him, a puzzled frown on his face as though some chord of memory had been struck.
A few enquiries showed that Mace had resigned his commission and after various business ventures in the Cape had returned to Chichester Junction to buy a farm outside the city. It seemed wiser to move on and they took a train that night for Durban. Mace was still around Chichester Junction thirty-odd years later. He never left South Africa and kept going back to stare at the war memorial, a tall, stooping old gentleman inflicted by deafness and with a puzzled frown still on his face.
As for Willie and the Tiger, they came out of the affair better than they’d ever expected. Just when they were on their beam-ends, Willie’s father died and he returned to England to claim the family estate. The following year his blue eyes and winning smile captured the heart of the daughter and only child of Sir Louis Kaplan, the gold magnate. The Tiger got a good enough job out of it to buy Pansy the big house she’d always wanted. The relief had come just in time.
The war memorial in Chichester Junction was still there when I passed through in 1941, but Birdham Square is out of date again now and the earnest Boers who are the city fathers are now considering building an underground shopping precinct. Though they don’t know it, they will probably be able to pay for a lot of the work without having to raise the city rate.
Synopses of John Harris Titles
Published by House of Stratus
Army of Shadows
It is the winter of 1944. France is under the iron fist of the Nazis. But liberation is just around the corner and a crew from a Lancaster bomber is part of the fight for Freedom. As they fly towards their European target, a Messerschmitt blazes through the sky in a fiery attack and of the nine-man crew aboard the bomber, only two men survive to parachute into Occupied France. They join an ever-growing army of shadows (the men and women of the French Resistance), to play a lethal game of cat and mouse.
China Seas
In this action-packed adventure, Willie Sarth becomes a survivor. Forced to fight pirates on the East China Seas, wrestle for his life on the South China Seas and cross the Sea of Japan ravaged by typhus, Sarth is determined to come out alive. Dealing with human tragedy, war and revolution, Harris presents a novel which packs an awesome punch.
The Claws of
Mercy
In Sierra Leone, a remote bush community crackles with racial tensions. Few white people live amongst the natives of Freetown and Authority seems distant. Everyday life in Freetown revolves around an opencast iron mine, and the man in charge dictates peace and prosperity for everyone. But, for the white population, his leadership is a matter of life or death where every decision is like being snatched by the claws of mercy.
Corporal Cotton’s Little War
Storming through Europe, the Nazis are sure to conquer Greece but for one man, Michael Anthony Cotton, a heroic marine who smuggles weapons of war and money to the Greek Resistance. Born Mihale Andoni Cotonou, Cotton gets mixed up in a lethal mission involving guns and high-speed chases. John Harris produces an unforgettable champion, persuasive and striking with a touch of mastery in this action-packed thriller set against the dazzle of the Aegean.
The Cross of Lazzaro
The Cross of Lazzaro is a gripping story filled with mystery and fraught with personal battles. This tense, unusual novel begins with the seemingly divine reappearance of a wooden cross once belonging to a sixth-century bishop. The vision emerges from the depths of an Italian lake, and a menacing local antagonism is subsequently stirred. But what can the cross mean?
Flawed Banner
John Harris’ spine-tingling adventure inhabits the shadowy world of cunning and espionage. As the Nazi hordes of Germany overrun France, devouring the free world with fascist fervour, a young intelligence officer, James Woodyatt, is shipped across the Channel to find a First World War hero…an old man who may have been a spy…who may be in possession of Nazi secrets.
The Fox From His Lair
A brilliant German agent lies in wait for the Allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France. While the Allies prepare a vast armed camp, no one is aware of the enemy within, and when a sudden, deadly E-boat attacks, the Fox strikes, stealing secret invasion plans in the ensuing panic. What follows is a deadly pursuit as the Fox tries to get the plans to Germany in time, hotly pursued by two officers with orders to stop him at all costs.
