The Cinnamon Tree

by Aubrey Flegg

  ‘No!’ yelled Yola. You can’t! You won’t have time to get away.’

  She lunged for the tape but he snatched it out of reach. Holding the tape in his mouth, he flicked out the music tape that was in the drive, thrust the special tape into the machine and pressed the button.

  ‘One … two … thr–’ he counted and the recorded shriek of a mine detector rang out. ‘Jeez, that’s short. I can run fast, but not that fast.’

  ‘You can’t, you can’t, oh don’t,’ pleaded Yola, but Fintan was tilting the ghetto blaster to get the light on the buttons.

  ‘Got it! I think we can. It depends on what’s on the other side of this tape. When Fintan pressed the play button the camp area was filled with wild Irish music. Yola wondered where she was; she thought of the dancing lab technician. Then Fintan was beside her, explaining, reassuring her.

  ‘See what I’ll do, there’s no panic. I’ll rewind a couple of minutes of the music, then, while the music is playing out, I’ll walk quietly back – I won’t even run. When the music finishes, the tape will reverse, only then will it play the mine detector noises. If we’re lucky we’ll hear a pop as the mine goes off. Get everyone ready to go and we’ll be out of here in ten minutes.’

  Yola tried to get out of the low chair, but couldn’t. She heard the falsetto twitter as Fintan rewound a generous few minutes’ worth of tape. Then he was gone.

  Uncle Banda called the boys and got them to untie the feet of the two drunken instructors so that they could walk, but told them to leave Juvimba to him. Fintan reached the door of the ammunition dump; they all turned to watch. He waved – a warning, perhaps – and bent to the ghetto blaster. Even from a distance the volume of the music was impressive. Then, calmly, Fintan began walking towards them.

  Only Juvimba saw the boy soldier who had suddenly appeared in the clearing, noticed that he had a gun and knew that this was Ukebu, one of his own – a little killer. Juvimba’s mind worked fast: Ukebu had obviously dealt with the scout Uncle Banda had sent down to bring him back. All this meant just one thing – fortune had turned in Juvimba’s favour and the KLA troops had landed without the alarm being raised. He filled his lungs and yelled.

  ‘Shoot him, Ukebu! Shoot the white man. I am Captain Juvimba. Shoot him!’

  The boy’s rifle jerked up as if pulled by a string; Fintan saw him. Perhaps the boy was confused by the music, perhaps he didn’t recognise Juvimba’s voice, but the split-second delay was vital. There was a log beside the path. Fintan hurled himself over it. The boy’s rifle rattled out, bullets kicking up dust along the length of the log. Like startled rabbits, everyone who could dived for cover. Only Yola and Juvimba remained in the open. Yola sat frozen in her chair. She heard a scuffle behind her, but dared not move. Perhaps the boy wouldn’t see her. He was looking about him, trying to locate Juvimba. But he kept his gun pointed at the log. The music was rising. Surely this was the climax? In a minute the tape would reverse and Fintan was pinned down only metres from the steel doors. She heard Juvimba’s voice low beside her.

  ‘I don’t need a messenger now, do I?’ Then he raised his voice. ‘Shoot the girl here beside me.’ Then he changed his mind. ‘No! Turn the music off first. They have no guns.’ For one fateful second the boy hesitated.

  It was a burst of three shots and it came from behind Yola. The muzzle flashes lit up the ground around her. She flinched and then looked at the boy in amazement. He lurched – surely he’d been hit! He was staring at his hands; his menacing profile had changed. His gun was gone, blown out of his hands by that single burst of fire. The music stopped. Everything stopped. Everybody seemed to have lost the power to move. Seconds ticked by. The tape would be reversing.

  Fintan burst from behind the log and hurtled towards her, foreshortened in her view, like a sprinter from the blocks. But he had waited too long. The familiar screech of a mine detector, magnified a hundred times by the ghetto blaster, screamed out.

  It was the steel door that blew first, arching lazily above Fintan’s head like a piece of bent cardboard. Then the concrete top lifted skywards, broken into great gobbets of concrete held together by steel rods; still no sound had reached her. All colour was gone save for one intense centre of red and orange. She saw the blast hit Fintan, throw him up and forward like someone caught by a wave. The boy soldier, Ukebu, was spinning like a top. Uncle Banda wrenched her to the ground as something hard crashed into the side of the hut.

  25

  Letting in the Light

  It was an hour before Fintan was recovered enough to be moved. The boys found a stretcher and put him on to it, ready for a rapid exit. Uncle Banda went down to the jetty to investigate.

  ‘The KLA have gone,’ he said. ‘They probably thought the government army was here with that explosion. Anyway, there is nothing now for them to attack with.’

  Fintan was holding Yola’s hand. She wanted to stay with him, but there was something she felt she had to do first. Juvimba was dead: the piece of concrete that had struck the hut had killed him outright. She couldn’t look at him, but she asked the boys to take the ropes off his feet and hands – she felt she owed this to Sindu. Perhaps his role in all this need never be known. The boys joked as they worked and Yola shuddered.

  Suddenly, Yola was conscious of a presence beside her. It was the girl-boy, her friend of the clear eyes.

  Uncle Banda nodded and said in English, ‘We call him Jimmy.’ Yola wondered if she saw a wink. Then he switched to Kasembi. ‘It was Jimmy who fired the shot that saved us. He knew where Juvimba’s rifle was in the hut and dived for it. That was a very fine shot – to hit the rifle and not hurt your friend.’ The child’s face lit up; she looked changed when she smiled.

  ‘Oh I don’t mind if I kill him, we all hates Ukebu. I aim for his rifle. He has even stronger medicine than Gabbin, see. Captain Juvimba make him kill his own brother. I couldn’t kill him. Bullets would bounce off him with no harm.’

  Later, Yola was proud of the fact that she hadn’t said anything to ‘Jimmy’ that night, apart from thanking her. But if Juvimba had been alive she would have broken him into bits. Could a girl like this, or indeed any of the others, ever be normal again?

  With first light the people of the Noose began to pour in along the cleared corridor through the minefield. The first one or two came walking lightly, nervously, expecting to step on a mine at any moment, but soon the trickle became a flow. Women came, struggling up the gully side with huge bundles on their heads. Jostling cattle came through, their drovers anxiously beating them away from the tapes that the deminers had raised on stakes beside the gap.

  Fintan was able to walk again, limping, but otherwise sound as they walked out against the throng of people. Yola felt that it should be a triumphant march with cheering and clapping and grateful handshakes, but it wasn’t. The people streaming in spared hardly a glance for them; their eyes were set on homes they hadn’t seen for years. At one point there was rough shouting ahead and everyone pulled in to the sides as a column of government soldiers came through at a run. The army captain barked at them to get out of the way. Yola shouted at him that there was no one left to fight, but he didn’t hear or turn.

  They walked out three by three. Uncle Banda, Yola and the girl-boy with the bright eyes and murderous ways were behind. The other trio walked in front: Sailor, on his lead, then Fintan and Gabbin, holding hands, as Africans like to do.

  Yola looked at them with a sigh and said to herself, ‘My boys.’

  EPILOGUE

  Cutting the Noose

  A flush of green now blankets the hill where Managu, the bull, wandered while Gabbin played in the Russian tank. The deminers have stripped the hill bare of bush in their search for landmines. The larger trees remain, as do the paths, persisting as paths do, even when everything around them changes. Hans looked at his watch.

  ‘You have half an hour if Fintan is to get his flight to Simbada,’ he said, and climbed into the driver’s seat.

  It was
Shimima who had sent them. ‘Yola, my little friend, there are ghosts still on the hill where you went that day. They will come back to haunt you if you do not go. Go with your friend and take Gabbin with you, too; it is important that he goes.’

  But Gabbin would not come. He sat in the back of the Landcruiser beside Uncle Banda and looked away from the hill. Often since they had returned from the Noose, he had dark moods and would be silent or say bitter things that reminded Yola of the time he had fooled poor Sister Martha. Yola had lost Gabbin; he was Uncle Banda’s now and she missed him with an empty pain. She sighed and took Fintan’s hand. They could walk side by side now because people no longer feared to walk at the edges of the path. It was all so changed. The bushes she had had to jump to see over were gone. They could see right over the town.

  Fintan was going home. She had been overjoyed when Father had told her that the people of the Noose had contributed to her fare so that she could go back to school in Ireland. But what would Fintan feel about her then, a lame little school-girl in an Irish convent?

  They turned a bend, and there it was: the cinnamon tree. The branch curved down, inviting her to jump again. Managu’s bell was surely tolling on the hillside below. In a second she’d be whole again. It had never happened! Then the ghosts were around her, plucking at her, mocking her. The ugly scar seared into the bark of the tree glared at her. Suddenly the smell of cinnamon was welling up, swirling inside her head. Gabbin was calling ‘Yola … Yola … I’m coming!’ But she had been unconscious when he had come to save her life that time beneath the tree. Why must the spirits mock her? Then she realised that someone was shaking her. She looked up; Fintan’s face swam in her rising tears.

  ‘Yola, listen to me, listen … he’s coming!’

  ‘Who … who?’

  ‘Why Gabbin, of course!’

  At once Yola was alert, listening with her whole body. She took a deep breath and the air was clean and fresh, blowing the cinnamon scent from her mind. Fintan stepped back.

  ‘I won’t be far,’ he whispered. He bent and kissed her, a light, rich kiss that seemed to be an echo of everything she felt for him. Her mind filled with music, as if all the discord and dissonance of the past years were resolving itself now into one mighty chord. She could hear the pat of running feet on the path, and Gabbin called.

  ‘Yola, I’m here!’

  ABOUT THE CINNAMON TREE

  There is a cinnamon tree, and there was a landmine under it. I could see the rim of it sticking out through the red earth before Vincent, an Angolan deminer, sent me away so that he could lift it and make it safe.

  In 1998 I travelled to Angola, inspired by Princess Diana, who had chosen to wake the world to the evil of landmines by visiting this, the landmines capital of the world. I wanted to write this book, but first I needed to meet the victims and to see how landmines were located and dealt with. Angola has been at war for thirty-eight years: first a war of independence from Portugal, and then twenty-four years of civil war. During this time, ten million landmines have been laid there, most of which are still in the ground. Over 70,000 people have lost limbs and many, particularly children, have died.

  But Kasemba, my imaginary country, is not Angola. You will not find it on a map of Africa, nor will you find a Yola or a Gabbin quite as I describe them. Nevertheless, much of what I have told in The Cinnamon Tree is real.

  There are a number of demining groups in Angola, but I was looked after by a wonderful organisation called Norwegian People’s Aid. In The Cinnamon Tree, when Yola travels from Nopani to Simbada, I am describing a trip very like my own from Luanda, the capital of Angola, to Lobito, where Norwegian People’s Aid have their field-station. It was there that I saw dogs being trained to sniff out mines. I watched a beautiful German Shepherd looping left and right, just as Sailor did for Yola on her nighttime expedition, his tail waving with excitement. Then he sank to the ground, his Angolan handler marked the spot and a supervisor came with a spade and carefully dug up a large anti-tank mine. Incidentally, Yola’s nighttime expedition was far more dangerous than she realised. Responsible deminers would not walk into a minefield like that.

  Later, I was taken to the little town of Gabela, where I saw a real mineclearance in operation. There was a hill, and a Russian tank – just like the one Gabbin was playing in when he lost Managu the bull – but there were no boys near the tank while I was there. Discipline was tight. The Angolan deminers worked in pairs, each pair fifty metres apart, in case of accidents. Only a week before, a deminer had been injured when he accidentally pulled a tripwire attached to a hand grenade in the bushes. Vincent, the supervisor, showed me a stake marking the place where they had recently found a landmine. Beside the spot was a bent stick with a piece of string attached. It was a bird trap, set by some youngster while the mine was still in the ground. When he knelt to set his trap, he was only centimetres away from the mine. Later that day, Vincent called me over to look at a mine they had uncovered under a tree. He pointed out how it had been placed there so that anyone trying to climb the tree would step on it, a soldier or a sniper perhaps – or even a girl like Yola. Vincent took his knife out and broke off a piece of the bark, smiling as he asked me to smell it. Yes, the smell was cinnamon.

  For Yola’s family life I turned to the people that I had lived among once for a year, on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. Here important men, like Yola’s father, often had several wives. By giving a good bride-price for a new young bride, the wealthy man could help a neighbour and, at the same time, get welcome help for his senior wife. Often this worked well, even for the young bride. She moved from being a drudge at home, perhaps, to being the wife of an important man, with both status and security. If there were problems it was the senior wife who kept the peace. In Africa, age and wisdom are respected. Any man of importance is expected to show wisdom and good judgement. Father, with his almost telepathic understanding of people, is a portrait of a wise Kenyan I knew.

  How is it then that wise and gentle people find themselves locked in war? One of the reasons is that unscrupulous people make money out of selling arms. In The Cinnamon Tree, Mr Birthistle represents the underbelly of the arms trade – people who sell guns and ammunition to anyone who is prepared to pay for them. But arms dealers are not the only offenders. Both governments and arms manufacturers make the money to develop their Star Wars weapons by selling armaments. We are disgusted at the thought of germ warfare, but rifles, like germs, spread the disease of war.

  Some guns are now so light that children can handle them. Gabbin, at age eleven, could easily strip, clean and fire a Kalashnikov rifle. It looks like a toy, and weighs only 4.3 kilos, but yet it is capable of firing 600 bullets a minute. Every day, children are taken from their families and taught to fight. There is nothing romantic about this. Children are often given a choice: kill your own parents or be killed yourself. If they do this, they are so torn by guilt and grief that they can be made to believe or do anything. Crazed children, persuaded that they are invincible, are forced to lead attacks or even to walk through minefields.

  The Cinnamon Tree was written for you to enjoy. If, however, you would like to learn more, or do something about some of the issues raised in this book, these websites will give you accurate information:

  1. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (http://www.icbl.org) is a network of organisations working for a Global Ban on Landmines. I was shown landmine clearance in Angola by Norwegian People’s Aid (http://www.npaid.no); similar work is being done by MAG (http://www.magclearsmines.org) who are based in Manchester in the UK. Both clear and destroy landsmines and other unexploded weapons as well as assisting the victims.

  2. You might be interested in raising money for mine clearance. Adopt-A-Minefield is a wonderful scheme where large and small donations are collected to clear specific minefields. You can find out about the minefield you have adopted, see how the clearance is going, and how the people who were affected are getting back to normal lives (http:/
/www.landmines.org).

  3. Perhaps you are interested in campaigning against the use of children as child soldiers. There are as many as 300, 000 children under the age of 18 serving in government forces or armed rebel groups. Some are as young as 8 years old. You can learn about these from Human Rights Watch (http://hrw.org./campaigns/crp/index.htm). The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers (http://www.child-soldiers.org) works to prevent the use of children as soldiers. In my story Gabbin is lucky because he has a family to go back to. Most child soldiers find that nobody wants them when they give up their guns.

  4. There is a very important campaign starting now to stop countries manufacturing arms and selling them to just anyone who will buy them. You can find out about The Campaign Against The Arms Trade at http://www.realworld.org.uk/index.html.

  About the Author

  AUBREY FLEGG was born in Dublin and spent his early childhood on a farm in County Sligo. His later schooldays were spent in England, but he returned to Dublin to study geology. After a period of research in Kenya he joined the Geological Survey of Ireland; he is now retired and lives in Dublin with his wife, Jennifer.