Shadows & Lies (28 page)

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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

Tags: #Mystery, #Historical

BOOK: Shadows & Lies
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She repeated what their old chief Lesoto had said: “They took our land and said it was theirs.” He had added that he would very much like to meet the Boer who had once made his wife crawl towards him on hands and knees and then kicked her in the face.
I have read, as most people in the civilised world have now read, accounts of the siege of Mafeking, which subsequently became universally famed. Lest anyone be inclined to make light of the sufferings incurred by those beleaguered in the town, let me say here and now that this wasn't entirely due to the number of casualties (though a third of the total number of soldiers and civilians confined there was lost or cruelly injured by the time the siege ended, which was terrible enough) but perhaps even more by the constant fear and strain of being under almost incessant and random fire. No one who hasn't experienced this can begin to imagine what it can be like, day in, day out, never knowing when the next shell might come, or where it might land. As all the world is now aware, it was a time of hardship and privation and exceptional bravery, of incredibly stoical endurance, but it was that continual shelling and its awful consequences – the grief for the dead and wounded – which made the siege hardest to bear. By the end, every man, woman and child in Mafeking was indescribably weary, and for many of them their lives were ruined or their nerves in shreds. That we were desperately hungry goes without saying, though we whites were not quite on the brink of starvation: this was entirely due to men like Lyall and Frank Whiteley, by then the town's elected mayor, who were far-sighted enough to foresee the possibility of our being cut off and had worked so unstintingly beforehand to lay in provisions. Even they could not have envisaged how desperately we should need them.
But my own, and Lyddie's, story is not entirely that of the tribulations endured during the siege – or only in so far as they affected us personally. I believe I may be forgiven if I feel that the shattering personal events which happened to us at that time began to seem of more importance than the capitulation or otherwise of the town to enemy forces. We are all, in the end, prisoners of circumstance, and victims of our own natures.
It was all very well to say we could defeat the enemy with resource and ingenuity, but neither was any match for the lack of adequate means to defend ourselves. “Short of men, short of rifles, short of ammunition. When one looks at our armoury, it's pitiful — obsolete and pitiful.” Hugh was indignant that no response to B-P's repeated requests for proper ordnance had yet been forthcoming, and he was afraid that, against the powerful long-range weapons the Dutch were known to possess, ours would prove sadly inadequate. All we had were obsolete single-loaders, in all no more than seven Maxim machine guns, a few ancient carbines of limited range and nowhere near enough Lee Enfield rifles to equip every man. Defending the town with such would be like facing an elephant herd with a catapult. “And as if that weren't enough, the gun carriages are in a shocking state, the fittings worn – and the fuses so old they've shrunk. There's nothing for it but to wedge them into the blessed shells with paper.”
Hugh was now with the Protectorate Regiment, an elite corps formed mainly from the reinforcements the colonel had brought with him, led by the flower of the British aristocracy, with names like Cecil, Cavendish, Fitzclarence and the like. I saw even less of my husband than when he had been up north, patrolling the border. Occasionally, he would come home for a quick bath and a change of clothing, but as soon as he'd eaten the meal I'd so carefully cooked, he was off again, scarcely noticing what he'd eaten. His whole attention was focused on the job in hand, with no time or room for anything else. I knew well enough by now that this was the nature of the man I had married; I scarcely expected him to take time off simply to be with me, but my guilt at what seemed like my own disloyalty in hoping for this occasionally grew to be a presence that lived and breathed in the room beside us when we were together. I knew my decision to move in with Lyddie, giving my own house over to refugees, would not make any difference to him.
A few months previously, I had come across her looking over
the sad little layette Mrs Crowther had put together, and which I had brought with me when I came out. She was turning over the tiny hand-stitched garments, the knitted jackets and bootees, the linen caps, folding the lacy, crotcheted shawl and the long, beautifully embroidered gown in which all the Crowthers, including Lyddie herself, had been christened.
“Oh, Lyddie.” How I wished she wouldn't torture herself like this – with what she must accept by now could never be.
She said nothing, but she looked across at me with a blinding smile, her eyes shining.
Again!
But this time, it was going to be all right. She knew it was. She felt so well, not even a trace of morning sickness. And indeed, she looked radiant. Her skin glowed as it used to in the damp British air, her hair took on its old shine and bounce, and the sunny optimism of her nature was once more to the fore. She could scarcely wait until January, when the baby would be born, and asserted confidently that the fighting would all be over by then, as if her present happy state endowed her with divine knowledge. She was, of course, advised to rest as much as possible. “I'm sure I shall become so fat and awkward, I shall feel disinclined to move much in any case,” she assured Lyall comfortably, but even when the days became warmer and the baby grew inside her, she seemed to find it impossible to keep still. “But I promise I won't ride.”
“I should hope not – but I would feel happier if you'd go somewhere safe – or better still, go back home.”
But Lyddie was adamant that since Mafeking was where Lyall was, Mafeking was where she would stay. She was not being very wise, perhaps, but when has common sense ever had anything to do with love?
 
The war actually arrived quite literally for us with a bang – or series of bangs. We were awakened the very morning after Dr Fox and his daughter had been installed in the convent by what could only be the noise of gunfire echoing across the plain. The boy Amos ran in gabbling excitedly that the Boers had crossed the border and were approaching Mafeking, setting fire to every farm or native kraal they came across on the way: the gunfire we
had heard was from our own troops firing on the enemy from an armoured train which was patrolling the line as far as it could get in both directions. That we were showing such spirit in fighting back was cheering news. Everyone assured everyone else that the Dutch would never take the town. For the moment, we might be effectively cut off from communications with the outside world, but never mind, pigeons had been sent off to Kimberley to inform them of our plight. In any case, help and support was expected any day. Colonel Plumer was patrolling the Limpopo with the Rhodesian Regiment and would soon march south with a flying column to meet reinforcements coming north.
I was working most of the time at the convent – running errands for the nuns, advising the girls to pray for victory, helping wherever they had need of help. There were no war casualties as yet, only the usual stream of patients with anything from minor accidents and illnesses, to fevers. The idea of myself selflessly nursing the sick and wounded had very much appealed to me. I wasn't qualified, but I could soon learn. Mother Superior brought me up short by gently reminding me of St Theresa of Avila's words:
‘We don't need any more saints here, but rather plenty of strong arms for scrubbing'.
She added that perhaps I'd be better employed in using any spare time helping Lyddie and a group of other women to roll bandages and stitch cartridge belts which were, like everything else, in short supply. Chastened, I swallowed my disappointment and did as I was bid.
 
“Can you ride a bicycle, Louisa?” I asked, finding the little girl all ready and waiting for me when I arrived at the convent the morning after she and her father had arrived, having promised to take her with me when I went down to the Chinese market garden to arrange for vegetables to be sent to the convent. These were to supplement the food we had been allotted for the many more mouths we now had to feed: women and children, crowded together in the tented laager, or camp, which the mayor had created to give them a measure of safety. Wagons had been drawn up as shelter and bombproof trenches erected around the tents. Swelling their numbers were those bitterly disappointed families who had been turned back when actually on their way to safety.
Louisa looked surprised that I needed to ask such a question.
“Oh yes, I can ride.”
“Then we'll ask if you may borrow Sister Mary Columba's.” This was a ramshackle old machine, and manifestly too big for such a small girl, but I was soon made aware that a trifle like that wouldn't defeat her, after a wobbly demonstration which seemed to satisfy the nuns. I could see they were very much taken with Louisa, even smiling indulgently at the breeches and cotton bush shirt she swore she'd been allowed to wear all the time at Orchard Farm. The poor child, when she arrived, had been stuffed like a sausage into a too tight frock that was in any case too warm for the day, and she was obviously more comfortable now. With her hair bundled up under a slouch hat, she could have been one of the boys of her own age who had been recruited as scouts to relay messages – and indeed, as we rode through the town, with the sporadic gunfire from the armoured train still continuing in the background, she watched them enviously as they pelted all over the place, hot, sweating and full of importance, furiously pedalling their bicycles between one command post and another.
“I'm going to ask if I can do that,” she announced as we rode up through the shady avenue of peach trees that led up to the fields of vegetables cultivated by the pigtailed Chinese who owned the market garden. It was enclosed by a little orchard and kept watered by a conduit from the Malopo; a cool splash of water came from a little fountain in an enclosed courtyard they had built, where they gave us green tea to drink while negotiations went ahead for the extra supplies of potatoes and onions needed for the influx of people into the laager. The little yellow men drove a hard bargain while insisting that they were giving me a good price because it was on behalf of the nuns, but they gave Louisa a couple of luscious peaches to take away with her.
We had just set off back when we heard a sudden sharp burst of shelling, much nearer than that which had been going on intermittently all morning. It was so sudden and unexpected that for a moment we didn't realise that the noise of it had come from somewhere in the direction of the women's laager.
The convent, the Victoria hospital, and the women's laager, too, had indeed been hit, yet by a miracle no one was hurt. “Well,
doesn't that just show!” exclaimed Sister Mary Columba. “If God hadn't wanted us to survive, He wouldn't have given us the brains to invent mud brick.” It was the first indication we had that the construction of Mafeking's buildings would be a positive asset for which we should learn to be extremely grateful: when a shell hit a building, as it had hit the convent, as often as not it passed clean through the mud bricks and out at the other side.
Perhaps because we were in reality very afraid, everyone tried to appear nonchalant, those first days. We made fun of the damage that was done, and great play was made on the cowardice of the enemy for shelling the hospital and directing their fire on women and children. Mr Whale, the editor of our local newspaper, who was possessed of a sardonic wit and refused to be intimidated by mere Dutchmen, posted a casualty list outside his office: ‘Killed, one hen; wounded, one yellow dog; smashed, one hotel window.'
But we were less inclined to laugh when the next day the Dutch seized the waterworks on the edge of the town and cut off the water supply. This could have spelt disaster and certain capitulation, had we not had many practical engineers in the town. Within hours, work had begun on drilling for water to supplement the tanks already in the town. The railway engineers trundled out machines for drilling and a great sigh of relief went up when, after the first well-shaft was sunk, only fifty feet below the hard, unforgiving rock upon which Mafeking stood, sweet, fresh water came gushing up. A second and a third had the same results. Whatever other privations we were likely to suffer, a shortage of water was unlikely to be one of them.
 
Scrubbing floors and stitching the stiff canvas for the cartridge belts, our fingers were soon very sore and raw. For once, I sympathised with Caroline Douglas when she moaned that she could no longer hold a needle. She was one of those women who had been on the train which had been turned back, and since the married quarters she and Thomas had occupied had now been taken by someone else, and the idea of sleeping in a tent in the women's laager brought on an attack of hysterics, the sisters had eventually found a tiny room in the convent where she could
stay.
The more I saw of Caroline, the more I sympathised with her husband. Rather than being grateful to the nuns for their hospitality, she complained continually: she was not well, she couldn't eat the mealie porridge and the sausages at breakfast because the thought of it made her sick; she had blisters on her hands from stitching the cartridge belts; could she please have another blanket on her bed, for the nights were very cold?
“Dear Caroline, you'd better get used to the mealie porridge – and the horsemeat sausages – like the rest of us, or starve,” Lyddie told her drily.
“Horsemeat? Oh, I never could!”
“You could, if you were hungry enough,” I said, less kindly. “Try offering it up, like the nuns do.”
We had already begun to eat a certain amount of horsemeat in lieu of beef and mutton. Grass was a commodity always in short supply in these parts and by now most of that within the enclosure had been nibbled down by the few cattle which had been allowed to be brought in; they would soon grow thin and become dry if they couldn't be driven out to seek sweet grass elsewhere. Horses, on the other hand, who also needed grass, we had more than a sufficiency of. Eating them killed two birds with one stone, though of course the very idea of eating horses was anathema to any Britisher. But those who were shot first tended to be sinewy old nags who'd had their day.
No wonder Thomas Douglas was always so unsmiling, I thought, listening to Caroline's complaints. The gossip about his wife and Roger Marriott had grown to such an extent that he must have been blind and deaf not to know of it – and I doubted whether he was the sort of man who would – or could – ignore such conduct in his wife. Perhaps that was why he had been glad of the excuse to pack her off to the Cape – and how mortified he must have been to see her back. I knew, from the languishing way she spoke of Marriott, that the affair was by no means over.
 
It was getting on for Christmas – and still relief didn't arrive. Intelligence reports circulated like wildfire; every day we had news of troops on their way but they never somehow got as far as Mafeking.
“Hugh, what are the Boers thinking of? They could surely have taken us by now. There are so many of them to our few that if they stormed us we'd surely have no chance.”
“For the same reason that B-P isn't rushing out to attack them. They're obeying orders to avoid loss of their own men,” replied Hugh, hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, unshaven since the beginning of the siege.
I put my arms around him and kissed him, and saw a flame leap in his eyes. Then he put me gently aside. “Not now, Hannah. The men are expecting me back.”

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