1999 - Ladysmith (6 page)

“Careful, young man,” she snapped, dismounting. “You should watch where you are walking.”

“I’m sorry, madam,” said Nevinson, going down on his knees to pick up the provisions. “I was taking in the scene.”

“Were you indeed?” She stood over him with one hand on the bicycle, the other on her hip—the very image of indomitable womanhood.

He straightened, putting the paper bags and cartons back into the basket. “I am afraid one of these eggs seems to be broken.” He cupped the goo of the broken egg in his palm and flicked it on to the ground.

“And so we shall all be cast down,” said the woman.

“I’m sorry?” queried Nevinson, wiping his palm with a handkerchief.

“This unspeakable war. It is a curse from the Lord, a judgement on the pride of the politicians and generals. On both sides! If they were nearer the light, this state of affairs would never have arisen.”

“I am sure you are right,” said Nevinson. “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”

“My name is Mrs Frinton. Now if you will excuse me, I must get to Star’s bakery before the bread runs out.”

She remounted her bicycle and rode off. Nevinson watched her thread her way through the crowd, wobbling dangerously, and reflected that perhaps her premonition of disaster was right. Women had a sixth sense about such things, he believed. The laying in of essentials and home comforts by the ladies of Ladysmith seemed to him a certain sign that the greater comfort, the way in which the town had hitherto complacently risen and settled into itself each day, sun-up to sundown, could not persist. He retrieved his pony and led it back to the cottage he had taken with Steevens and MacDonald, wondering where it was all going to end. For if Ladysmith fell, why not Natal, the Cape, indeed why not, as subject peoples everywhere saw that it was possible, the Empire itself?

It was a question that came back to him later that evening, when he was exploring the new cottage. The landlord had a surprisingly extensive library, which included a set of Gibbon: the 1872 edition, annotated by Doctor Smith. Steevens, who was a Gibbonian, had been delighted when his attention had been drawn to it. For want of anything else to read, Nevinson carried the first volume up to bed with him that night. He wouldn’t have time to get through much of it, of course, but just a few words from the great man would be a dose of good for his own prose.

But he found it as heavy to read as it was to carry, and after half an hour went downstairs again in his pyjamas to find something a bit more congenial. It wasn’t that he couldn’t stomach true learning. He was as well read as Steevens and had already published two books on German letters—one on Herder, one on Schiller—in addition to
Neighbours of Ours
, his Cockney fantasia about ordinary life in the East End. It was just that he wanted a good read to take his mind off things. He scanned the shelves:
Kloof Yarns, The Phantom Future, Women Adventurers, In the Heart of the Storm
…

Ah, here was just the thing.
Illusion: A Romance of Modern Egypt
. On taking it up to bed and settling down with it, he found that although the author wrote with great assurance, she took little pains with her style and employed an often clumsy extravagance of diction. Her figures, too—the officers of a dragoon regiment quartered in Cairo—had not quite the air of being true to the life of the historical period that they portrayed, of some forty or fifty years ago.

But as he got deeper into the sensational story, Nevinson began to entertain a very much higher opinion of the author’s talent. For, notwithstanding all her literary deficiencies, she was very effective. The plot seemed impossible, but it was dramatic; the figures seemed unreal, but were well grouped; and the hero, a captain, was thrown into due prominence: a rather commonplace, highly respectable man with many virtues and but one redeeming enthusiasm—his profession.

The story, which Nevinson finished that very night, went some way along these lines: one night, the captain is discovered hopelessly drunk, but he is popular with his regiment and the affair is concealed. Yet it happens again, and when he disgraces the uniform a third time he is court-martialled and dismissed from the service. He sets off south and is captured by the dervishes and made a slave. Here the honest, puzzled man rises to a great occasion, and after showing the courage of a martyr for the faith that he has, somewhat conventionally, held, he escapes, to find eventually that his disgrace was an ‘illusion’, and that he had been drugged by the enemy.

The novel was more striking than this bare analysis of its plot would indicate. It was written with an admirable sincerity and, thought Nevinson on going to sleep, was altogether uncommon.

In the morning, when he awoke, he thought it was rubbish.

T
he Biographer, sick from the effects of typhoid inoculation, could hardly focus upon the chalked words.
BOERS DEFEATED—THREE BATTLES—PENN SYMONS KILLED
. When he and the other passengers of the
Dunottar Castle
saw the blackboard hung on the side of the other ship—the
Australasian
, on its way from the Cape—at first not a word was spoken. Then, slowly, some people began expressing their desire for vengeance at Penn Symons’s death; others, including Churchill, were simply anxious that the fighting would not be over before they reached South Africa.

The remainder of the voyage was passed in heavy anticipation. The deck games of cricket and tug-of-war lost their gaiety, and people began packing, and sharpening their rusted swords. A special machine—somewhat like a bicycle, with a grindstone for a wheel—was brought out on deck for this purpose. As farrier, Perry Barnes was called upon to do the work, and by the time he had put an edge on 600 swords, he was heartily sick of the sight of steel.

The Biographer filmed him during his labour, and also got a good sequence of General Buller walking up some steps and looking directly into the lens.

“That’ll do,” the General said afterwards. “If you take any more, I’ll have you thrown overboard.”

The last days of the voyage passed. When the rocky shores of Robben Island came into view, Churchill, standing next to the Biographer at the rail, muttered that it was ‘a barren spot’, and retired to his cabin, complaining of the terrible slowness with which they were approaching the anchorage. But finally they arrived, and he came out and with the Biographer gathered round those bringing on despatches from Cape Town. Thereby they learned of the three battles in more detail—and of a shameful retreat to Ladysmith and the imminent besieging of the town. Buller landed in state the following morning, to the cheers of an enormous crowd, and the Biographer caught a good image of the early-morning sun shining upon his face. In a battered hansom cab Churchill, together with Atkins of the
Manchester Guardian
, went up to the Mount Nelson Hotel to plan their campaign and to conduct interviews with the military staff staying in that grand residence, before leaving for East London by rail, therefrom to catch the mail packet to Natal. They hoped in this way to gain a few days on everyone else in the race to Ladysmith.

“For that,” said Churchill to the Biographer on bidding him goodbye, “is where the bulk of the Boer army is massed, and where the outcome of this struggle will be determined. Though I cannot foresee any serious reverse for our troops.”

The Biographer was more circumspect, taking his time to explore Cape Town, while waiting for official acceptance of his formal petition to be allowed to follow the army. He found the town and its Table Mountain a very picturesque location; it was no surprise that the Boers loved this land and were willing to fight for it. The rich and varied grandeur of the place, with its gardens and vines and well-matured oaks, was worthy of a Claude or a Poussin. But the landscape did not awe him to such an extent that he did not film it: with a lens, if not a brush or a pen, the world was at his disposal.

He filmed the arrival of the New South Wales Lancers during this period, in the process of doing so discovering the considerable fascination that his equipment had for the natives, crowds of whom kept reaching out and touching his apparatus. He also took steps to procure a draft harness and a cart in which to carry his materials, hoping to add mules or horses to them at the next stopping place.

Finally the petition was granted, and the Biographer, together with his cart, rejoined the
Dunottar Castle
, which was to proceed to Natal with Buller and his staff. This it did, through five days of rough seas, arriving at Durban on November 10, to be greeted by a crowd of fifty or more rickshaw-runners. Yelling and capering about, they were dressed in outlandish costumes of horn and feather to attract custom. The Biographer took great pleasure in picking out from these magnificent specimens of manhood a figure he considered a veritable Umslopagaas, worthy of Rider Haggard. A horse could not have gone faster, and as he rode high in the seat the Biographer watched the droplets of sweat running down the Zulu’s muscular bare back.

Having installed himself in a rather grubby hotel (the town was full of refugees from the war, and rooms were difficult to secure), he made preparations, over the next few days, for his great trek north. The cart and harness were brought off the ship and united with a pair of horses. A tent was bought to cover the cart, and cooking utensils and tinned food purchased. The Biograph itself was strapped to the back of the cart in such a way that it could be raised and lowered at a moment’s notice, and also swivelled from right to left. It had rather the appearance of a gun, a passing soldier remarked, and got ‘shot’ for his cheek. Some of the other pictures the Biographer took during this period were less heartening. One in particular remained in his head as well as on the film he sent back in his last London box before the column departed: that of a refugee black woman, weary and downcast, feeding her child. She looked up at him with a cold eye as he secured the image. He wondered if she knew what he was doing.

Of the other things the Biographer did, in the long waiting time before the column set off (for an army with a mission, it had an extraordinary supineness about it), one was to visit a Hindu temple. There were many such temples in Durban, he discovered, to service that city’s large Indian population, brought over, fifty or so years before, to work as indentured labourers on farms and railways. Lately, many of them had turned to trade, and their success had drawn others to come from India and settle in South Africa as merchants.

He was called on to remove his boots before going into the temple. The inside of the place was filled with burning incense lamps and the frightening statues of various gods. It was also, as the Biographer discovered on entering an antechamber, the scene of a political meeting. He had heard from men in the Durban garrison that the Indian community had for several years been militating loudly against pass laws and restrictive taxes, and clamouring for representation. He supposed this was the purpose of the meeting. There was a large banner on the wall, reading NATAL INDIAN CONGRESS, and the main speaker was a small, slight young man with sharp black eyes that darted here and there from behind round spectacles. He seemed to have the audience in his spell, and once the meeting was over the Biographer quizzed him as to what he had been saying.

“Are you trying to throw down the government? Is that what all this is about?”

The man smiled, and looked down at the ground as they walked towards the Biographer’s rickshaw. The Zulu was seated in the dust with his back against the wheel, smoking a clay pipe with a prodigiously long stem.

“Oh no, not today. We are engaged upon a discussion about the war. I feel it is our duty, if we demand rights as British citizens, to help in the defence of the British Empire. To that end, myself and my colleagues are collecting together to have our services accepted as an ambulance corps.”

“But I thought you people wanted emancipation from the British?”

“We do, sir, we do. In fact, my own sympathies are entirely with the Boers. But it is my honest belief that we Indians, here and in our homeland—and, for that matter, these Zulus and other oppressed races—will only achieve our complete freedom within and through the British Empire. Not by shooting bullets at you fellows, but by persuading you of the error of your ways.”

“What errors?”

“Well, for instance, thinking that we Indians are cowards and only ever do things in our own self-interest. That is one reason why this ambulance corps is being formed—although above all it is a humanitarian impulse that is behind its formation.”

They had reached the rickshaw, and the Zulu sprang up with alacrity. The Indian held out his hand to him in greeting, at which the African looked askance. He gave the Biographer a look of great discomfort, and went to fasten himself between the shafts of his vehicle. The Indian appeared pained at the Zulu’s reaction, and then, to the Biographer’s astonishment, started undoing his shirt buttons, exposing the flesh of his chest.

“Let me tell you something, sir,” he said.

“Very well,” replied the Biographer, mystified.

“This brown skin is my birthright, and it does me honour, but in my heart I consider myself a black man. When I am treated as such, as so often by people of your own colour, I feel pride, not self-disgust.”

The Biographer nodded contemplatively.

“You nod, sir, but in truth you have no idea of what it is to be considered a ‘coolie’ or, worse still, a ‘kaffir’. All of our parts and graces are circumscribed by these labels—my friends are thought of as ‘coolie merchants’, while I am nothing but a ‘coolie barrister’. Our bodies, even when we eschew meat and liquor as I do, are considered unclean. I once went to a white barber in Pretoria, and he refused to cut my hair—so I cut it myself with a pair of clippers, and was happy to do so, in spite of my friends laughing at the mess I made of it. What they did not appreciate is that we Indians make similar distinctions in our own culture, refusing to allow our barbers to cut the hair of untouchables. Every time we suffer prejudice in South Africa we reap the reward of our own sinfulness in this regard.”