Riotous Assembly

by Tom Sharpe

  ‘I insist that you stop the battle,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘So do I,’ said the Mayor, who still didn’t feel very comfortable about the rubber spears.

  Dr Herzog hesitated. ‘Oh dear, I do wish you had told me it was illegal before. I don’t see what I can do now,’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Well, if you won’t stop it, I will,’ said the Kommandant.

  ‘Good man,’ said the Mayor, seconded by the councillors.

  Before he could think about the likely consequences of his intervention, Kommandant van Heerden found himself being helped off the saluting base and on to the parade ground. He marched slowly towards the two armies, and as he went the realization of his position slowly dawned on him. In the middle of the square halfway between the two opposing forces of lunatics, he began to regret his precipitate decision to intervene. On one side of him five hundred Zulu schizophrenics pawed the ground and waved their spears ferociously, while on the other, an equal number of white madmen awaited defeat with a determination made all the more awful by foreknowledge.

  Kommandant van Heerden halted and raised his hand. Silence fell over the two armies.

  ‘This is Kommandant van Heerden speaking,’ he shouted. ‘I am ordering you to disperse and return to your wards. This is an illegal gathering and contravenes the Riotous Assemblies Act.’

  He stopped and waited for the armies to retire. There was no sign of their doing anything of the sort. As his words echoed away, both sides stared insanely at their adversaries and there were murmurs in the ranks. Miss Hazelstone finished sighting the field guns and stepped forward. On the Zulu side an enormous warrior followed suit.

  ‘What is the meaning of this nonsense?’ Miss Hazelstone shouted.

  ‘You heard me,’ said the Kommandant. ‘This battle constitutes a breach of the peace. I insist you disperse.’

  In the space between the armies Kommandant van Heerden found his new role as keeper of the peace becoming more difficult.

  ‘You’ve no right to come here and interfere with our pageant,’ Miss Hazelstone insisted. ‘And it’s not a breach of the peace.’

  ‘We won,’ said the Zulu chief. ‘We won the battle of Isandhlwana and now we win it again.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ said the Kommandant and regretted the words as soon as he had said them. The murmurs in the ranks of the two armies indicated all too clearly that the spirit of belligerency was spreading.

  On the saluting base the spectators were growing as restless as the lunatics.

  ‘Are those axes made of rubber too?’ the Mayor asked as he watched several Zulus flourishing choppers in place of their spears.

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ said the Superintendent.

  ‘The British appear to be loading those field guns,’ said the Mayor.

  ‘Impossible,’ said the Superintendent. ‘They’ve nothing to load them with.’

  ‘They’re putting something up the spout,’ said the Mayor. ‘And those Zulus seem to be putting something on the ends of their spears. They look like knitting needles to me. Either that or bicycle spokes.’

  The alarm of the Mayor was as nothing to the panic that Kommandant van Heerden was beginning to feel. Miss Hazelstone and the Zulu chief were engaged in a fierce argument about who had won the Battle of Isandhlwana.

  ‘My grandfather was there,’ said Miss Hazelstone.

  ‘So was mine,’ said the Zulu.

  ‘Mine wasn’t,’ said the Kommandant, ‘and in any case I don’t care a stuff who won the battle, no one is going to win it here. I demand you withdraw your forces.’

  ‘We’re going to win,’ said the Zulu. ‘We’ve been losing all afternoon and we’ve a right to win.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Miss Hazelstone. ‘My grandfather won the victory and that’s all there is to be said.’

  ‘My grandfather told my father and my father told me that your grandfather ran away,’ the Zulu said.

  ‘How dare you?’ Miss Hazelstone shrieked. ‘How dare you insult a Hazelstone?’

  Kommandant van Heerden was horrified too. He knew from experience what was likely to be the result of any altercation between Miss Hazelstone and a Zulu. As the old lady wrestled with the sword that hung from her belt and the Zulu took refuge behind his enormous shield, Kommandant van Heerden made one last effort to restore harmony.

  ‘I order you to leave this parade ground.’ he yelled, drawing his revolver from its holster, but it was already too late. With an upward sweep of her sword Miss Hazelstone knocked the Kommandant’s arm into the air. The revolver fired harmlessly into the sky and with a great roar the two armies of the insane surged towards one another.

  As Miss Hazelstone’s sword swept through the air and the Zulu parried with his shield, Kommandant van Heerden turned to flee. One glance at the Zulu schizophrenics convinced him that if safety lay anywhere, it was with the British Army and he dashed towards the advancing lines of redcoats. A moment later he regretted his decision. Advancing at a run, a regiment of paranoid women in kilts, still headed by the depressed piper playing The Road to the Isles, swept over the Kommandant and he had just time to turn and run with them before he was bowled over and thrown to the ground. He lay still and was trodden on several times before the regiment was past. Then raising his head, he surveyed the scene around him.

  It was immediately clear that the Zulus had no intention of forgoing their victory. Nonplussed for a moment by the charge of the paranoid women, they had recovered their nerve and had counter-attacked to good effect. Using their short rubber spears now tipped with knitting needles, they were stabbing their way forward very successfully. On the left flank the Welsh Guards were making a desperate defence but their wooden rifles were no match for the assegais. As the Black Watch wavered and began to retreat Kommandant van Heerden scrambled to his feet and ran before them. Around him the parade ground echoed to the war-cry of the Zulu hordes, the screams of the wounded women, and the weird noises coming from the bagpipes. To add to the din a tape-recorder struck up the 1812 Overture through the loudspeakers. In the middle of the battle, Miss Hazelstone’s pith helmet could be seen bobbing about. Kommandant van Heerden made it to the British camp and collapsed inside one of the tents.

  To the spectators on the stand the re-enactment of history appeared at first to be entirely convincing. The valiant charge of the British and their subsequent retreat had an air of authenticity about them which the previous tableaux had lacked.

  ‘Amazing realism,’ said the Mayor, who had just seen a Guardsman run through with a spear.

  ‘I think the music helps too,’ said the Superintendent.

  The Mayor had to agree. ‘People seem to be screaming rather a lot,’ he said.

  ‘I’m sure this sort of thing helps the patients,’ Dr Herzog continued. ‘Tends to take their minds off their problems.’

  ‘I suppose it must,’ said the Mayor. ‘Certainly takes other things off. There’s a fellow over there who seems to have lost a leg.’

  On the square in front of them glimpses of a terrible reality were beginning to appear through the pageant of history. Increasingly it was becoming difficult to tell what was illusion from what was fact. History and present tragedy mingled inextricably. In some places, death was being mimed with a series of violent contortions whose realism far surpassed the agonies of those whose deaths were in no way rehearsed. To the strains of Tchaikovsky a number of patients in the Black Watch found themselves being raped by Zulu warriors while a detachment of frogmen who had never been anywhere near Isandhlwana threw themselves into the fray with all the vigour their flippers would allow.

  From the shelter of the tent into which he had crawled the Kommandant watched as the crew of a field gun aimed the weapon into the crowd of struggling combatants and was horrified to see Miss Hazelstone, minus her pith helmet and stained with blood, superintending the operation.

  ‘More chlorate and less sugar,’ he heard her say to a man who was filling what appeared to be a pillow
case with powder. The Kommandant waited no longer. He knew too well Miss Hazelstone’s remarkable skill with large-calibre weapons to risk being in the line of fire. Disentangling himself from the canvas and refusing the passionate overtures of a private of the Black Watch who had crawled in beside him, the Kommandant dashed for shelter towards the saluting base. He had covered some twenty yards when he heard Miss Hazelstone give the order to fire, and a moment later a sheet of flame enveloped the British camp. As an enormous explosion threw him to the ground and the blast slid him across the tarmac the Kommandant shut his eyes and prayed. Above his head portions of field gun mingled with combatants interrupted in their struggles. Miss Hazelstone had not merely fired the gun, she had exploded it. As he slid to a halt under the saluting base, Kommandant van Heerden raised his head and looked around at the subsiding chaos. The actors in the tableau had assumed a new and altogether convincing stillness and it was clear that nobody had won the Battle of Isandhlwana.

  The parade ground was littered with black and white bodies while what survivors there were had lost all interest in history. With all the marks of an entirely sane instinct for self-preservation, they crawled towards the sick bay.

  Only the staff seemed to have taken leave of their senses. On the stand above him the Kommandant could hear Dr Herzog still trying to reassure the late Mayor that the spears were made of rubber. To Kommandant van Heerden the assurance seemed quite unnecessary. Whatever had hit the Mayor had been made of something much more lethal.

  The Kommandant waited until Dr Herzog had been taken away before crawling from his hiding-place. He stood up and looked around. History had not merely been portrayed, he thought, it had been made. Not only the past but the present and future of South Africa was to be seen in the devastation that greeted his eyes. Picking his way over the bodies, the Kommandant made his way towards a large crater which had been blown in the middle of the parade ground. Beside it, there lay the remains of a plumed pith helmet and the Star Miss Hazelstone had been wearing.

  ‘A last memento,’ he murmured, and picked them up. Then still dazed and shaken he turned and made his way back to the car.

  19

  On the morning of his execution Jonathan Hazelstone was denied the usual privilege of choosing a hearty breakfast on the grounds that before all major operations patients had to do with light refreshment. Instead of the bacon and eggs he had ordered, he was allowed a cup of coffee and a visit from an Anglican chaplain. Jonathan found it difficult to decide which was the more unpleasant. On the whole he thought he preferred the coffee.

  His ties with the Church had been severed at the time of his trial and the Bishop had reached the conclusion that the refusal of the Church authorities to testify on his behalf had been due to the jealousy he knew to exist among his colleagues at the rapidity of his promotion to a bishopric. He had no idea that parts of his confession, particularly those chosen by Konstabel Els, had been shown to the Archbishop.

  ‘I knew the fellow was progressive,’ the Archbishop muttered as he read the extraordinary document, ‘but really this time he has gone too far,’ and he recalled Jonathan’s admission that he had used every possible method to attract people into the Church. ‘High Church in ritual, Low Church in approach, that’s my way,’ Jonathan had said, and the Archbishop could see that he had meant it. To combine sodomy with genuflection was to be High Church and Low with a vengeance and it was hardly surprising his congregations had grown so quickly.

  ‘I think the least said the soonest mended,’ the Archbishop had decided, and in short the Church had disowned him.

  The Chaplain who came to visit him in his last hours was not a South African. It had been impossible to persuade any self-respecting parson to minister to the needs of a man who had brought disgrace on his cloth and even the Bishop of Piemburg had declined the invitation.

  ‘There are moments when a man needs to be alone,’ he explained to Governor Schnapps over the telephone, ‘and this is surely one of them,’ and had gone back to compose a sermon on the Brotherhood of Man.

  In the end it was the Chaplain of a Cambridge college who was visiting Piemburg during the long vacation who was inveigled into Piemburg Prison to attend to the prisoner’s spiritual needs.

  ‘I understand there is a particularly fine display of prickly pears in the prison garden,’ the Vicar of Piemburg explained to the Chaplain, who was far more interested in the physical needs of rock plants than in the spiritual ones of his fellow men and the Chaplain had jumped at the opportunity afforded by the hanging to see a riot of prickly pears.

  Standing in the cell, the Chaplain found it difficult to know what to say.

  ‘You weren’t by any chance in the Navy?’ he asked finally.

  Jonathan shook his head.

  ‘I just wondered,’ the Chaplain continued. ‘There was a middy on HMS Clodius in ’43 I think it was, or it might have been ’44. His name was Hazelnut.’

  ‘Mine’s Hazelstone,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘So it is. How forgetful of me. One meets so many people in my profession.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said the Bishop.

  The Chaplain paused, and looked at the manacles and chains. ‘Do you wear those all the time?’ he asked. ‘They must be frightfully uncomfortable.’

  ‘Only when I’m going to be hanged,’ said the Bishop.

  The Chaplain thought he detected a note of bitterness in the remark, and recollected the reason for his visit.

  ‘Is there anything you would like to tell me?’ he asked.

  The Bishop could think of a great many things he would like to tell him, but there didn’t seem much point.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have made my confession.’

  The Chaplain sighed with relief. These occasions are so embarrassing, he thought.

  ‘I’ve never actually attended an execution before,’ he mumbled at last.

  ‘Nor have I,’ said the Bishop.

  ‘Nasty things,’ continued the Chaplain, ‘nasty but necessary. Still, they do say hanging is quick and painless. I daresay you’ll be quite relieved when it is all over.’

  The Bishop, whose hope of eternal life had vanished along with his faith, doubted if relieved was quite the right word. He tried to change the subject.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ he asked.

  ‘To the prison?’

  ‘To South Africa, though it’s much the same thing.’

  The Chaplain ignored the remark. He was a staunch supporter of the South African point of view at high table in his college, and had no time for liberals.

  ‘I try to get away to summer climes at least once a year,’ he said. ‘Undergraduates are so irreligious these days and my real interest lies in gardening. South Africa is full of lovely gardens.’

  ‘Then perhaps you’ll appreciate this poem,’ said the Bishop and began to recite ‘The Forerunners’.

  ‘Lovely enchanting language, sugar cane,

  Hony of roses, whither wilt thou flie?’

  He was still reciting when Governor Schnapps and Hangman Els arrived. As the chains were removed and he was strapped into the harness that held his arms, the Bishop continued:

  ‘True beautie dwells on high: ours is a flame

  But borrowed thence to light us thither.

  Beautie and beauteous words should go together.’

  ‘Bugger these buckles,’ said Els, who was having difficulty with the straps.

  The solemn procession passed out of Bottom into the bright sunshine of the prison courtyard. Stumbling between Els and the old warder, Jonathan looked round him for the last time. Incongruous against the dead black paint of the Death House stood a white ambulance. To everyone’s amazement, the condemned man laughed.

  ‘Bleak paleness chalkes the doore,’ he shouted,

  ‘The harbingers are come. See, see their mark:

  White is their colour and behold my head.’

  The two ambulance men stared in horror at the shouting figure whose corpse the
y had been sent to collect for the transplant operation.

  ‘But must they have my heart? Must they dispark

  Those sparkling feelings which therein were bred?’

  The little group hurried on up the steps to the scaffold. The old warder helped Els to get the Bishop on to the trap and then rushed down the ladder and across the courtyard to his office. It wasn’t that he was squeamish but he had no intention of being anywhere near the gallows when Els pulled the lever, and besides he had a good excuse for his absence. He had to phone the hospital the moment the ambulance left the prison.

  Standing on the trap the Bishop continued his recitation. Governor Schnapps asked the Chaplain what a harbinger was. The Chaplain said he thought it was probably a member of the hydrangea family though he seemed to remember having served under a Captain Harbinger during the war. Els was trying to get the cloth bag over the Bishop’s head. He was having some difficulty because the Bishop was so tall and the bag had evidently been made for a much smaller head. Els couldn’t get the Bishop to bend his legs because the straps prevented any movement. In the end Governor Schnapps had to give Els a lift up before he could drag the hood down into position. He had to repeat the performance when it came to putting the noose round the condemned man’s neck, and then Els pulled the rope so tight the Bishop was forced to stop his recitation.

  ‘Must dulnesse turn me to a clo—’ He ground to a halt.

  ‘For goodness sake, Els, loosen the bloody thing,’ Governor Schnapps shouted as the poem throttled to a stop. ‘You’re supposed to hang him down there, not strangle him up here.’

  ‘They seem to grow best in sandy soil,’ said the Chaplain.

  ‘Is that loose enough for you?’ Els asked after he had pulled the rope and loosened the noose so that it hung limply on the Bishop’s shoulders. He was sick of people telling him how to do his job. If the Governor was so bloody knowledgeable about hangings, why didn’t he do the job himself.

  ‘What do?’ Governor Schnapps said to the Chaplain.