One evening the radio remarked in the unemphatic, almost affable voice which unfolds history in our bloody times, that there was going to be a national strike for a period not yet determined, but probably for some weeks; organized by a strike committee in (the authorities thought) not this city but another one; and that the identities of the strike leaders were not known. This news was received in a silence reverberating with what had not been said. After all, for how many years had these people talked of the kaffirs rising and throwing the whites into the sea; of murders, blood-baths, throat-slittings, rape and arson. The discrepancy between fantasy and the tone of the announcer was an insult in itself. The hostility towards their own authorities which characterized the white people during that strike started from the moment they heard the bland voice of the announcer. He was white, yes; but he was part of the Government, because everyone near authority was; and Government ‘as usual’ was not handling things right.

The note of farce, of grotesque improbability—the characteristic of every event in that unfortunate country—was struck from the very first moment.

On this evening Martha was talking to Mrs Van, who had telephoned immediately after the news, when sounds of anger came from the next veranda, where Mrs Huxtable berated her servant.

‘Well, Jack,’ Martha heard, as Mrs Van said: ‘Matty, have you heard the news?’—‘and what have you got to say for yourself, that’s what I want to know!’

Martha had not seen any of her friends for some time because of her father’s death, and her grief over Thomas’s death. She was out of touch and prepared to accept the admonishing note in Mrs Van’s voice: ‘I hope you’re not busy with anything important, I’m going to need help.’

‘Of course, Mrs Van.’

‘What’s your dear friend Solly up to?’

‘But why Solly? He’s just an idiot.’

From the veranda: ‘Missus? What are you saying, missus?’

‘Yes, but that brother of his, Joss, is up to all sorts of things. I had a man from Northern Province in last week, and he was telling me about a white man called Cohen. A good, clever baas, he said. Well, that couldn’t possibly be Solly, so it must be Joss.’

‘After all we’ve done for you,’ came Mrs Huxtable’s aggrieved voice from the veranda.

‘I think the citizens are all likely to be very hysterical,’ observed Martha. ‘They’ve started already.’

‘Quite so. And that’s why we must find out what’s going on soon. Get hold of Solly, find out from him what his brother’s doing, and let me know.’

Before telephoning Solly, Martha went to her veranda. Mrs Huxtable, a plump female in a cocktail dress of black crêpe that showed a fat, creased neck and the backs of fat, red arms, was standing on her veranda, and in front of her stood her cook, arms down by his sides, looking puzzled.

‘I would never have believed it,’ went on Mrs Huxtable. As one time-honoured phrase followed another, each as predictable as those used in the parent-child confrontation scene which this so much resembled, her voice rose, sharpened, was weighted with the consciousness of her betrayal.

As for him, he was beginning to understand this was not a question of dust on the furniture.

‘But missus, what have I done?’

‘You stand there, butter wouldn’t melt, but all the time you are planning to cut our throats, yes, I can see it in your eyes, don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking.’

‘Hau!’ protested the man, suddenly angry, his anger carrying the scene into dignity at a stroke: ‘What is this? Have I not done your work? Why do you say such things to me?’

Small hedges separated the garden of this house from the gardens on either side. People came out on to verandas, or went down on their lawns to get a better view. The angry housewife and the angry servant were like people on a stage.

‘I have always known that one day this is how you would repay us. Always!’ said Mrs Huxtable, her eyes raised to the sky.

‘Here I stand,’ said the man. ‘You say these things to me and my heart feels sorrow because of your words. But not once have you told me what it is you hold in your heart against me.’

‘It’s not only you, you cheeky thing,’ said Mrs Huxtable, sinking back to the ridiculous, ‘it’s the whole lot of you. Well, I’ll promise you something, the Government’ll have the troops out any minute, then watch out, that’ll teach you.’

‘That’s right,’ came a violent voice from across the street. ‘They all need a good hiding to make them come to their senses.’

The man glanced quickly around: across the street, women with their arms akimbo, glaring at him—people glaring through hedges. He understood, because of the word troops, that something was happening he knew nothing about. He turned and walked away, fast. He was frightened.

‘Ever hear such a thing, strike,’ said one of the women. ‘Who do they think they are?’

‘They can’t keep a house clean, and they think they know how to run a strike.’

‘Enough to make a cat laugh, I don’t think.’

‘I’m going to get out my old man’s revolver—they’ll get what’s coming to them.’

And so on. As usual.

Meanwhile, Martha rang Solly. He was, as he pointed out, roaring with laughter.

‘Well, enjoy yourself. But what’s happening?’

‘Search me. Why don’t you ask Joss?’

‘How can we? Has he got anything to do with this?’

‘Why should I tell you, comrade Matty?’

‘For past services. What’s happened to that man—your protégé?’

‘He’s in jail. Pass offences.’

‘And Mr Zlentli—working away, I suppose?’

‘No, they deported him last week. He was from Nyasaland.’

‘Ah.’ Martha waited. Nothing. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘All I know is, about a dozen men were taken to various borders by lorry and dumped over, a couple of weeks ago: including all my contacts.’

‘Luckily, they haven’t dumped the right ones, from the look of it.’

‘That is a matter of opinion.’

‘Well, thanks for all your help.’

‘Any time.’

Martha telephoned Mrs Van, and went to stand on her veranda. In a few moments, the target drew arrows. Mrs Huxtable, then another woman, then several, came to accuse Martha, the ‘Red’, of personally and collectively fomenting the strike. ‘This is what comes of putting ideas into their heads,’ etc., etc.

‘If it’s not the Reds, it’s the communists,’ said one woman.

‘And why aren’t the troops here yet?’ asked another.

‘But what do you want troops for?’ said Martha.

‘My boy has run away,’ said Mrs Huxtable.

‘So has mine. His blankets are gone from his room.’

The women agitatedly went off to see after their servants. Shrill voices up and down the street. Groups of white youths were observed gathering on the street corners. A white man came striding down the street shouting: ‘Vigilantes. Vigilantes. Anyone interested, come to the Sports Club, five o’clock.’ The white youths drifted after him, some of them shouting: ‘Vigilantes! Vigilantes!’

The women came back and stood about on their verandas and lawns complaining that their servants had mostly run away. Later it was discovered that in the first few hours, many Africans had simply run off into the veld and prepared themselves to sit out any trouble there. Very sensibly as it turned out.

Soon Anton came in. His news was that the Africans on the railways were not coming to work next day. An announcement had been made to this effect. Everything was being done correctly, except that it was illegal to strike, illegal to belong to trade unions or to form them. The strike leaders remained invisible. It was rumoured among the white railway workers that the strike was well prepared, that the black workers had been warned against agents-provocateurs; that the air of the Africans going off work this evening had been reassuringly calm. The white workers, in their roles as whites, had been alarmed and indignant. In their roles as workers, they had been impressed, and had even wished their black colleagues good luck as they went off.

Nothing like this had been seen in the Colony’s seventy years of ‘history’—that is, of white occupation.

Before Anton had even sat down for a drink, the telephone rang. It was the Forsters, who were perturbed about the news, and needing Anton’s presence. They suggested that Martha should come too, which could only mean they felt everyone was in the grip of a frightful emergency. ‘Getting all the women and children together under one roof,’ said Martha, bad-tempered. Anton said: ‘They mean to be kind, Matty,’ and departed to the Forsters.

The telephone rang again: the exchange at Dilingwe, in the Yani Valley. Mrs Quest had booked a call to Mrs Hesse, but the lines were jammed with calls, would Mrs Hesse hold on? Martha held on, and waited for her mother’s voice.

Mrs Quest was now an old lady living in her son’s house on a remote farm among mountains a hundred miles or so south of the Zambesi escarpment. Living on the Quest farm she had thought this must be the furthest possible point of the journey away from her beginnings in the tall Victorian house in South London. But she had been wrong. The mountains she now lived among were those glimpsed sometimes from the Quests’ old house after rain had washed the skies clean. Far mountains moved nearer in a pure air; they opened, and between them appeared distant hilly valleys usually invisible; and beyond them again, rose faint blue sunlit peaks. No one lived up there, it wasn’t settled yet. But it was settled now, by, among others, young Jonathan Quest and his family.

Mrs Quest came back from the funeral to the big house which now had in it herself, a cook, a house servant, a gardener, and a small boy for the odd jobs. And the little white dog. For years Mrs Quest had run things, managed things, arranged and planned and organized. She had kept her husband alive long after anyone else could—so the doctor had told her, over and over again. Now here she sat, an old lady on a veranda with a little dog on her lap. It had happened from one day to the next.

It seemed she had not foreseen it. She had not really understood, when she talked year after year of ‘in my old age’ just what that would mean.

For years and years now, Mrs Quest had not been allowed to be more than a physical being. And now, suddenly, there was nothing for her to do. No matter how one put it, looked at it, glossed it over, that was the truth. There she sat, a vigorous old woman in the middle of a great garden which she must leave; and Martha watched how her limbs strove and wrestled with enforced inactivity. Mrs Quest would suddenly find herself on her feet—her physical memory had told her legs that it was time for her husband’s wash or his medicine—and she would be half-way to the kitchen or the bathroom before she had understood it was years of habit which she must fight, subdue, change. She would return to her chair by Martha, her hands slowly twisting together, her eyes staring sullenly in front of her. Then she said: ‘This won’t do, will it!’ Martha and she lit cigarettes. A minute later she would be off down the veranda towards the kitchen on some errand for the dead man. Catching herself out she would stop, and pretend to be attending to a plant on the veranda. Or she called to the servant: ‘Make tea for two, Jonah!’ She came back saying: ‘He can’t really hear me from this end of the veranda.’ She sat, slowly, trying to smile, while her eyes lowered themselves to hide their fear, their distress. What was she going to do with herself? How to use all her knowledge, her energy, her flair, and above all, the sudden explosion of old needs which was bound to make itself felt now when at last the braces were taken off Mrs Quest’s real nature—which was gay, and kind and sociable?

Day after day, and still day after day, the two women sat on the veranda, smoking, while Mrs Quest looked (not too clear-sightedly yet, the truth was too painful to face) into her future as a guest in other people’s houses. And Martha sat, fearful, because she knew her mother would now want to share her life. But Martha was going to England. ‘Perhaps I’ll come to England and live with you,’ Mrs Quest kept saying, with a painful laugh, her eyes not meeting Martha’s. And Martha would say, as uncomfortably and falsely: ‘But I’m not there yet!’

Meanwhile, the practical things were being done by Jonathan, who arranged for the sale of the big, useless house and the garden, that fruit of Mrs Quest’s frustration, which would add, so the agent said, hundreds on to the sale price. It was suggested that Mrs Quest should go and stay a while with the family in the mountains. The daughter-in-law needed help with her babies. Mrs Quest listened to this invitation smiling dryly: she knew just how much the young wife would welcome the arrival of a masterful old woman. But she packed her things and went. Standing on the veranda of the house from where, only a few weeks ago, they had taken the body of Mr Quest for what she had insisted was his last sleep, looking around the magnificent scented garden with the little white dog clutched to her chest by one arm, the other holding a parcel full of toys for her son’s children, she had seemed to Martha like a defiantly brave small girl.

At last Jonathan’s voice sounded, not Mrs Quest’s. He said, irritably, that if the townspeople wanted to take all this sort of nonsense seriously, then it was their affair, but all his kaffirs were working, and if they weren’t still at work tomorrow, then they’d know what to expect. Anyway, ignorant savages, they had not heard there was a strike on, and how could they, since there was no radio for miles, except in the Quest’s house, and he, Jonathan, would personally see to it that the newspapers never got into the hands of servants who might spread the news to the compound. But he knew better than to expect Martha and her ilk to behave as sensibly. Mrs Quest then came on to speak. She was worried about the house, not yet sold, and standing empty. She felt it was in danger of being looted or burned down. ‘Not that it’s likely,’ said Mrs Quest. ‘They aren’t capable of doing a good day’s work, let alone running a revolution.’

‘But mother,’ said Martha, hearing the flat, almost jolly sound of her voice with disquiet at the ineffectiveness of common sense in time of public emotion: ‘this isn’t a revolution, it’s just a strike.’

‘What? Oh, I see. You know what I mean dear, and I do want you to go up and see if everything’s all right.’

Martha promised she would look at the house, decided she would do nothing so absurd—but of course, went.

At the gate she looked into a garden which was already an overgrown solitude claimed by birds. Willing herself to walk up the path, and into the house, she found herself, instead, creeping like a trespasser through the garden and around the outside of the house. On tiptoe in the overgrown flowerbed, she looked in at the room where Mrs Quest had nursed her husband. Now it was an empty room with a forgotten wooden chair lying on the floor. It was a small room. There was a brown stain on the discoloured wall. Well, so it was just an empty room now, and people would soon buy the house and the room be used as a bedroom again, perhaps even as a nursery—and no one would know the horrors that had gone on here. But supposing, she asked herself, against the surge of angry protest that must accompany any thought of her father—suppose that had been no worse than what went on in any room, long enough built? No, no, no, please God, that was not true, it couldn’t be…Martha went nearer, actually clambered on to the windowsill, sat on it. She hoped that a mouse might appear from the floor and run over the boards, or a spider let itself down from the ceiling—something alive. But nothing. All around the silent house the garden rang, shrilled, clamoured with birds. Outside the garden moved hot, noisy traffic. Martha had not been with her father when he died. (Well, of course not! said Martha’s bitter inner commentator.) Mrs Quest, telephoning to say that Mr Quest could not possibly last till morning, had caught Martha undressing for bed. She had dressed again, actually thinking: If I don’t of course it will be tonight that he decides to die, it’s exactly the sort of thing…then Marjorie arrived, with a letter from Thomas’s wife, saying that Thomas had died of blackwater in the Zambesi Valley. The Africans of the tribe had done their best for the white man who had so inexplicably chosen to live with them—which is what it amounted to: Thomas had been staying in the same village for six months. They had been good to him, but anyway, he was dead. (Well, of course! said the uselessly savage commentator—what else had he been wanting but to die, futilely, away from his own people, and among strangers.) Martha had not gone to her mother that night. Instead she sat with Thomas’s wife’s letter in her hand, not thinking about Thomas—for what was there to think? and not crying over him either. And she certainly was not able to hear what he said.

 

When Martha went up to her mother, Mr Quest had become a grey, brushed, elderly gentleman lying with closed eyes in a shaded room. His face was very white, and so were his thin, thin hands. At first the room was horribly silent, but then a fly buzzed about, and kept settling on the pillow beside Mr Quest’s head. Mrs Quest and Martha chased the fly out, after a good deal of trouble, then it was really quiet, and they stood on either side of the dead man, looking at him. They felt something should be said, for the other’s sake; but they could not think of anything. They embraced awkwardly, and a futile irritation entered them both. Soon they went to sit on the veranda.

Mr Quest had lain after his death only twenty-four hours in this room, before the undertaker had borne him away in a neat coffin with a silver cross on it. They had stood flowering branches about the room and thrown scented water into the air to cool it. At one point a small girl in a pink dress had stood in neat white shoes and white socks beside the dead man and said: ‘Is that my grandfather?’ Her face had a look of polite, disapproving curiosity on it and she had turned and gone willingly away on Mrs Quest’s hand.

Now the room was empty, the house was empty, and the garden was particularly and unbelievably empty, and Martha kept looking for a pink-frocked small girl who might be playing there with a white dog.

She walked back home through the deep avenues where every window and door let shafts of light fall across gardens, where women stood on the verandas, waiting for something to happen, where the youths hung about on the street corners, their faces sharpened by willing suspicion.

At home Marjorie and Mrs Van were waiting for her. But first Martha telephoned her mother to say the house had been visited, and everything was all right. Then she added her person to the forces of common sense and reason—Mrs Van with a look of calm purpose on her face, her hands folded, thinking aloud; Marjorie with a pencil and some paper, ready to take down the results of such thoughts. It was a question, said Mrs Van, of deciding what was the right thing to do, and doing it quickly. The white people were all quite crazy already; and if Government did not do something soon, there would be bloodshed…at which point Anton telephoned from the West suburb where, he said, there was panic. An African delivering a parcel to an unfamiliar house had been observed standing on the back veranda with ‘a very funny look on his face’. The daughter of the house, friend of the Forsters’ youngest daughter, had lost her head and set her dogs on the man. They had torn open an arm, and the parcel, revealing a newly altered dress. But the man’s explanation that he had been looking for the servants to give the parcel to, did nothing to mollify. The houseboys had run away, said the girl, she was alone in the house, how did she know he was not part of the plot? She had telephoned the Forsters in tears; they had gone by car to fetch her. They also brought the African. He had his bitten arm bound up in the kitchen, while he was told it was ‘all his fault anyway, for going on strike’. At which he asked, what was a strike? The Forsters’ kitchen was full of neighbours who wanted to start Citizens’ Protection Committees. ‘But it’s quite all right, there’s no need to lose our heads,’ Anton kept saying loudly, in the avuncular voice which went with his role in the West suburb.

‘But perhaps it isn’t all right,’ Martha said. ‘Mrs Van says she saw a group of white schoolboys beating up a black man outside her house. Next, someone’s going to be killed.’

‘If the good woman had any sense…’ (In the Forster household, dislike of the socialist Mrs Van was expressed thus, and Anton had adopted the phrase.) ‘If the good woman has any sense, she’ll see that the Town Council takes steps.’

‘Which steps?’ said Martha. ‘The good woman is here. Perhaps you’d like to give her instructions.’ She was angry because she knew his tone and the words were for the benefit of people listening to Anton.

‘Now, now, now,’ said Mrs Van, while Marjorie smiled. ‘There’s a time and a place for matrimonial tiffs,’ said Mrs Van, with her emphatic nod.

‘If you analyse the situation,’ said Anton, ‘you’ll see the danger is the whites.’ His voice had lost the false geniality of the last remark, and Martha said: ‘Oh, you’re alone again, good.’

‘Precisely so, so listen…but not now.’

‘Damn,’ said Martha.

‘The authorities should see that they are all locked up in the locations for a few days,’ he went on, but with a tone that told Martha he meant what he said, even if the words were being chosen for other ears.

‘Well,’ said Martha, ‘all the same, it’s hard to know whether this is brilliant strategy or merely the future son-in-law speaking.’

‘Matty!’ said Mrs Van, crossly.

‘But if the authorities want to take reprisals, how convenient to have them all locked up,’ said Martha.

He said: ‘Yes, yes, but there are other factors.’

‘Or are you saying it is the lesser of the two evils?’

‘Taking all the factors into consideration, the sooner they are locked up the better.’

‘Is there any chance of you being alone in the next few minutes, if so, I’ll just go on talking.’

‘No, it doesn’t look like it.’

‘Well, it’s very annoying.’

‘There is information to the effect that there are strike committees in each township. The strike leaders have instructed all the Africans to stay in their houses tomorrow.’

‘Oh.’

‘The townships are full of speechmakers and agitators of all sorts.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Yes, that is the position.’

‘Well, I’ll tell Mrs Van all this.’

‘And are you going to spend the night with Mrs Van der Bylt?’ enquired Anton, the sentimental note returning to his voice. ‘I hope you are looking after yourself.’

‘Oh, damn it,’ said Martha. ‘Do stop. Oh, very well, tell them that I am, if it’s going to make a good impression, why should I care!’

Martha transmitted the information to Mrs Van, who received it with the comment that it was a pity personal emotions could not be kept out of politics.

The telephone again: Mr Van der Bylt, in search of his wife: Mrs Maynard was ‘in full cry’, he said, and waiting for her in the drawing-room. Mrs Van said to the two young women: ‘You two had better come with me—if there are any errands to be run, you’ll be useful.’

They fell in behind Mrs Van.

Mrs Maynard was waiting on the veranda. The two formidable matrons did not bother to exchange politenesses. They stood facing each other, Mrs Maynard, from force of habit, picking dead leaves from a creeper that grew on a veranda similar to her own, Mrs Van der Bylt twirling the car keys around her forefinger.

‘In my opinion,’ said Mrs Maynard, ‘they ought all to be locked up in the townships at once.’

‘I think I agree with you,’ said Mrs Van.

‘You do?’ said Mrs Maynard, surprised.

The Van der Bylts’ houseboy now arrived on the veranda, agitated out of his usual manners. ‘Madam,’ he said to Mrs Van, ‘there’s a man in the kitchen. He says I’ve got to go to the location, madam.’

‘Oh, poor things, isn’t it dreadful!’ said Mrs Maynard.

‘Then you must go, he is a picket,’ said the socialist Mrs Van.

‘A picket?’ said the servant. ‘But I do not think he is a good man.’

Mrs Van turned towards him, and opened her mouth—probably about to launch into a history of trade unionism. But she relinquished this pleasure, and instructed Martha and Marjorie to ‘go into the kitchen and explain why he has the duty to go on strike.’

Marjorie and Martha accompanied the bewildered man to the kitchen, and heard Mrs Van say: ‘I suggest you and I sit down and have a quiet drink to celebrate the first time in our careers that we have agreed on a course of action without quarrelling about it.’ She sounded amused, but Mrs Maynard certainly was not: ‘Oh, my dear!’ the young women heard her exclaim, ‘I’m glad you can joke. It is at moments like these I remember what a powder-keg we live in. And of course, everything could be handled so easily if only people would keep their heads. All one needs is to deport a dozen or so of the ringleaders and throw trouble-makers into prison. But no, people have to run around shouting about guns and Citizens’ Committees. So annoying.’

‘However that might be, I suggest…’

The drawing-room door shut on the two generals.

The young women now confronted Mrs Van’s houseboy and her cook who had been with her, as she claimed proudly like any conventional white mistress, for forty years. There were also two little black boys and an old man who was a gardener. Marjorie began: ‘Now, it’s like this, do you know what a strike is?’

‘No, madam.’

‘Then I’ll explain. That man who has just been here is called a picket. I’ll tell you what that means.’

‘Wait a minute, missus.’ One of the little boys was sent running to the hedge: in a minute the servants from next door had arrived. Soon, twenty or so Africans, with two nurse girls, were in the Van der Bylt kitchen, a sort of informal meeting was in progress. The man from the strike committees had reappeared, and stood morosely vigilant at the back of the room, neither nodding nor disagreeing with what Marjorie, then Martha, said. Finally, the servants said: ‘Thank you,’ or shook their heads doubtfully, and began drifting off towards the locations. ‘You had better take some food with you, just in case,’ said Marjorie, out of some kind of inspired insight. Mr Van’s cook, a dignified old man, said: ‘I go only because my madam tells me to go. I think this is a wicked, wicked thing, and I do not understand it. God will forgive me.’

Eventually a group of about thirty men, and five women who were children’s nannies, set off down the street with the picket walking behind like a jailer. The dignified cook went first, leading a small boy by the hand, and carrying some bread and fruit tied into a large, checked cloth.

Marjorie and Martha found Mrs Maynard energetically telephoning; while Mrs Van sat sipping orangeade. Mrs Van allowed herself a small wink at her two aides. Mrs Maynard was saying: ‘Yes, I’m sure of it! There’s not a moment to lose!’

It was now getting on towards midnight, and certain orders must be got out: it was a question of getting other people to give certain orders. And tomorrow’s newspaper was being held up from the printer’s on the suggestion of a friend of Mrs Van who knew the editor.

Calls had been made by Mrs Maynard to Government House, to the Prime Minister’s wife, to the houses of various Ministers—these calls were, of course, quite informal, and could never appear in any log-book, minute-book, or record. And Mrs Van had telephoned, on a lower social level, but perhaps more immediately effectively, to all kinds of officials and organizations.

It appeared that: ‘They are all bone-stupid, but they’ll get the point in time,’ as Mrs Maynard said.

She sat down again, sweeping out a large hand, palm upwards, in a grateful gesture towards her old rival: ‘My dear, what a relief it is to have a sensible person like you beside one, at a moment like this.’

Marjorie and Martha, exchanging glances, interpreted the situation as one which would be pleased to be rid of the possibility of their ironical comments on it. They said good night, as Mr Van, palely courteous as always, came into the drawing-room saying: ‘Well, ladies, I gather there’s the spirit of unrest abroad?’

‘Typical,’ said Marjorie, as the two young women separated to go to their homes. ‘When something does happen at last, where are we? Running around with Mrs Van and that awful Maynard female, and giving lectures on trade unionism to house servants.’

The avenues were quiet, but the street Martha lived in had groups of people sitting behind darkened windows, looking out. Presumably they had guns. As Martha approached her house, a young man with a gun bulging the khaki of his trousers stepped forward from under a tree where a group of young men had set themselves on guard. He said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m warning you, it’s not safe to walk around alone at night.’ ‘Oh, don’t be so damned silly,’ she said, noting that she sounded as dictatorial as Mrs Van, but they were all too far gone in their fantasies of heroism to understand this was a traitor, not merely a reckless citizen.

‘You get indoors quick,’ he said, ‘and don’t worry, sleep tight, we’ll be here standing guard all night. If the Government won’t do anything then we’ll have to, that’s all.’

Next morning the newspapers carried exhortations to keep calm and use moderation, under enormous headlines of Strike, Total Strike, National Strike, Threat, Danger, Alarm. And there was not a black face to be seen.

All the Africans were in their townships, because an order had gone forth that any African demanding admittance to a township must be let in, but that no African could be allowed out. The boundaries of the townships were patrolled by police and troops, and it was an offence for any white citizen to go near the townships. The second and third days were the same. People read the violent and exclamatory newspapers feeling expressed by them: while the radio, which continued to announce this national occasion like ‘a bloody old maid at a bloody tea party’, caused nothing but ill-feeling. In a house near Martha’s a man smashed his radio to express his emotions.

The telephones were worked overtime, not only with messages of consolation and support (white women did their own housework and looked after their own children for the first time in their lives) but for news. Which, however, tended to be the same, all over the country. When Mrs Huxtable’s cousin from the opposite end of the Colony to Jonathan Quest was telephoned he said: ‘All my kaffirs are at work, they don’t know what a strike is, and neither would yours if you didn’t educate them to read the newspapers.’ Farmers everywhere were for the most part untouched. For one thing, it was hard for men to strike from farm compounds from which they could be flushed like so many birds—unless they ran away, and many did. For another, the strike committees did not have the resources to travel thousands of miles from farm to farm. No, it was an affair of the towns, and of industry, proving finally those wiseacres to be right who had said that the good kaffirs were those who had not encountered the three Rs.

Martha rang Jack Dobie: he was delighted to be able to say that all his white trade unionists were furious at the efficiencies and discipline of a strike which proved that they, the white unions, could never again refuse membership to Africans because of the black man’s backwardness. ‘But they will, of course.’

Martha was telephoned by Solly, who had left the city for a friend’s house in a small town, because he was convinced he would be arrested by the authorities on account of his long career of seditious activity. He had sat waiting in his parents’ home for three days with everything packed ready for prison, but nothing happened. When he reached Braksdorp, he suddenly remembered it was only thirty miles from one of the largest mines in the Colony, where the strike was total. The authorities would imagine that Solly was responsible for the striking mineworkers, he thought. In which case, Martha would find, hidden under a stone urn in the Cohens’ garden, a full, documented account of his, Solly Cohen’s, work over the last seven years for the Africans. Martha was to hand this document to a suitable lawyer. ‘Very well, I shall. And how’s the strike with you?’ ‘Fine. Of course, the objectives are incorrectly formulated.’ ‘Oh, how should they be formulated?’ ‘But we can’t discuss that kind of thing over the telephone, the wires are probably tapped.’ ‘In that case, your document will have been filched from under the garden urn before I can get to it.’ ‘It doesn’t matter, because I’ve got copies of it here.’ ‘Cheer up, Solly, they’ll arrest you yet. I’d do it myself to make you happy.’

‘Very funny, I don’t think…’

On the fourth night, a telephone call from a friend of Maisie’s: Maisie did not have a telephone. Martha was to come at once. Mrs McGrew was so upset, she didn’t know what to do with herself.

Martha bicycled down to Maisie’s, which was no longer over the bar, but a few streets away. She had a large room in a house which supplied food. But it was more informal than a boarding-house. Maisie and the little girl Rita lived in a large room off a veranda which was as large as a second room. Maisie had many parties, or rather, her life was a permanent party, for she never arranged anything, people—men and women—dropped in at all hours. There were a couple of unattached women in the same house who lived the same way. And sometimes Flora came, if there was someone to sit with old Johnny. Maisie had cheap drink from the bar where she worked and the landlady let her use the kitchen as she liked. There were all the ingredients for good times. Few evenings Maisie did not bring home friends from the bar, or find them there, when she got in. Few evenings failed to prolong themselves till dawn. Maisie rose late, dawdled about, made cups of tea, did her nails, washed her hair and invented new hair-styles. Meanwhile, her little girl watched her. This child, who had a bed on the veranda outside the room, joined in the parties when she was awakened by the noise, got up and went to bed according to the lazy impulses of Maisie, was petted by the innumerable people who came to the house, was fed by the landlady when Maisie had a hangover. Kind gentlemen asked her for kisses and took her for drives. The granddaughter of the Maynards was leading the life of a prostitute’s child. But Maisie was not a prostitute. ‘After all, Matty,’ she said, looking upset—someone had said something not very nice to her in the bar: ‘There’s no harm in what I do. I like having men around, that’s my trouble. But my rent gets paid by my wages from the bar. Sometimes one of my friends gives me a present, but I never take money. No, that’s always been my greatest principle, I never take money from people.’ But, according to report, Maisie, the most inefficient barmaid in the history of the trade, was given her high wages and allowed to be late and lazy because she attracted so much custom to the bar.

At any rate, there was Maisie—enjoying life, as she said. And there was Rita. Rita Maynard, as Martha could not help calling her, privately.

When Martha stepped off her bicycle in the big, moonlit garden which was filled with pawpaws, grenadilla vines, moon-flowers, from which the veranda, filled with more plants, was separated only by a wooden trellis, the little girl Rita stood on the steps, a lighted room behind her. Rita, now six years old, looked much older. She was unfortunate physically—a great lump of a girl with heavy limbs and a thick neck. ‘Just like Binkie, drat him,’ as Maisie said. ‘Imagine, Matty, when Binkie and I decided to have some fun that time, we didn’t even take it so seriously. I mean, it wasn’t worth it, because now…’ But she did not say in so many words Rita was not the child she would have chosen. Black-browed, self-consciously smiling, awkward, more like a ten-year-old than a child of six (Martha could not help comparing her with Caroline) Rita stood outside a door through which Martha could see Mr and Mrs Maynard—large, heavy, black-browed, red-faced.

They sat side by side on a sofa, and opposite them sat Maisie, languid and sulky, fanning herself with a frond of leaves. The ceiling light, dim, rather yellow (the garden outside seemed brighter with moonlight than this room), was as much a source of heat as of light.

Maisie’s mother, who had been invited to come into town to help with Rita because of the lack of servants, sat smiling nervously in a corner.

Maisie looked fat and hot and distressed, but the slow movement of her white hand with the leaves on it asserted her independence. Her face was irritated, but her body, flagrant in damp, blue cotton, knew they would go soon, and then her life could go on.

The room seemed full of hot, stuffy shadows.

There was a sweet smell—oversweet, insistent. Unconsciously they all kept looking for the source of the smell—too much, in the airless room.

Mrs Gale, a run-down, heat-drained woman, the widow of a small mineworker in a remote town, sat holding a saucer with a blob of pink pudding in it, for Rita. The pudding was melting in red and white streaks and it was this which smelled. Mrs Gale’s face had a look of distaste, while she sat conscientiously holding the saucer trying to nod and smile Rita towards her supper.

But Mrs Gale’s face was not only tired with the heat, it was strained because of her distrust of these two formidable people, the Maynards, and altogether she looked, because of her variety of expressions, as if she might either cackle with laughter, sneeze, or begin to cry. But the way she sat, the ease of it, the way her small feet in neat shoes were placed before her, the relationship between her hand and the saucer it held, came out of a different level of existence from anything in her face. Maisie and she were mother and daughter, the fat, blonde woman and the greying old one were, unmistakably, the same flesh. And Maisie’s irritation was probably partly due to the fact that inviting her mother here, to ‘show’ the Maynards, very likely, how unnecessary they were to Rita, had made things worse by emphasizing, by pushing down everyone’s throat, the extraordinary, fantastic, cruel facts of inheritance. For whose child was Rita? Maisie’s? No. Nor was she the grandchild of Mrs Gale. Perhaps Rita’s daughter might inherit this smiling ease of the flesh, but Rita, as she stood on the veranda trying to ignore the sweet, smelly pudding, smiling at her mother, examining the lady and the gentlemen who were such frequent and such upsetting visitors—she was a Maynard.

What bad luck, how savage! For if the genes had not fallen so, in such a pattern, how much easier to refuse the Maynards, to send them away when they came—so unbearably often, and more and more often, separately and together. And Maisie would have forgotten Binkie, have been able to accept, perhaps, another father for Rita, than the ghost of Athen.

In Maisie’s room, full of pictures of dogs, kittens and pretty ladies, there was no sign now of her dead husbands or of Binkie or of divorced Andrew. On a table all by itself, with a perky black ribbon pinned to its corner by a black-headed pin, was a Christmas card from Greece. Printed in the United States, this card had on it the picture of an Evzone, the Greek soldier in his kilt-like skirt and fancy pose. Like something out of a chorus, the Evzone smiled and said in Greek and in English: A Happy Christmas. Inside were the words: Dear Friend, thank you for your letters to Athen. I am told to instruct you: Athen was arrested the summer he came to his home. He died of an illness in the prison. His friends Themos, Manolis, Christis Melas had illness in prison at the same time as Athen.

There was no signature to this message.

This was all Maisie or Martha or any of them ever heard in reply to their many letters to Greece. Everyone who came to Maisie’s room was told about Athen. ‘Yes,’ Maisie had been heard to say: ‘if he hadn’t got sick in prison, then I would have gone to Greece to marry him.’ Sometimes late at night visitors saw Maisie pick up the card: she wept, in a moment of abstraction from the party which went on around her. They looked at each other, and poured her another drink. ‘Cheer up, Maisie,’ someone would say, ‘tears don’t bring back the dead.’ ‘You’re right,’ she said, as she sat letting the tears dry themselves on her cheeks, ‘but sometimes when I think of him my sorrow gets too much.’

In short, Athen was officially Maisie’s dead man and now she need never marry.

When Mr Maynard had picked up the card to enquire: ‘And who is this deceased gentleman?’ Maisie had held out her hand for it, looking him proudly in the face. ‘It’s nothing you would understand,’ she said.

The Maynards had descended on Maisie tonight because of the strike: if all the servants were locked in the townships, then Rita was without a nursemaid. ‘This is Mom,’ Maisie repeated. ‘This is my mom, she’s here to help with Rita.’

‘Of course,’ said Mrs Maynard, ‘it’s asking for trouble, having the child sleeping on the veranda, and even all through the rainy season.’

‘I don’t agree,’ said Maisie, and yawned.

After a moment, Maisie’s mother remarked, smiling politely, but stirring the melting pink blob around and around and around: ‘Maisie always slept on the veranda when she was little. She said she liked to see the stars.’

Mrs Maynard let out an explosive breath that sounded like Pah!

‘Surely she ought to be in bed, it’s after nine,’ Mr Maynard said.

‘It’s her bedtime when I say it is,’ said Maisie. Her irritation exploded in: ‘Mom, if Rita’s going to eat that jelly, but if not, it’s making me nervous.’

Mrs Gale held out the saucer to Rita, who unhappily smiled a refusal. The little girl was on the point of tears. Mrs Gale got up and took the saucer out of the room. When she came back, she had a piece of iced pink cake, which the child began cramming fast into her mouth, making crumbs everywhere. It was evident she was hungry.

‘Doesn’t Rita get a proper supper?’ said Mrs Maynard.

‘When you’ve finished that cake, Rita,’ Maisie said to the child, ignoring Mrs Maynard, ‘you must go with gran and have your bath.’

This was not the first time Martha had been a witness of this impasse which, as everyone knew, would go on for years yet. She hesitated on the veranda, no one knowing she was there, for some moments. But Rita had seen her: she must go in. She smiled socially at Mrs Maynard, nodded as coldly as she knew how at Mr Maynard, kissed Maisie’s damp, hot cheek, shook Mrs Gale by the hand. She sat beside Mrs Gale to make a demonstration of her loyalties.

‘Well, I suppose we might as well go?’ enquired Mr Maynard, of his wife, but Maisie said: ‘Please yourself.’ She sat fanning, fanning. The air from the moving frond of leaves quivered a tendril of hair on her fat neck under her ear, and shook the surface of a glass of water on the table. Globules of coloured light on the table top shook too. Rita, forgetting the grown-ups, was slowly drawn towards these patterns of light. She stood by her mother’s knees, and put her forefinger into the light, where it dissolved into a watery gold and rose. She took out her finger—behold, there it was! She put it into the light—it was gone. She smiled with pleasure and looked up at her mother. Maisie saw what she was doing, and smiled with her.

‘Look, mommy, my finger goes away.’

Rita held her finger in the magical dissolving light, and the two smiled at each other—close.

Mr Maynard looked at his wife and rose. She slowly got to her feet. Mr Maynard went out to the veranda, nodding at Maisie and at Mrs Gale. ‘He treats mom like a servant,’ Maisie complained afterwards—and snubbed him now by yawning as he went out. Mrs Maynard, with a smile partly wistful and partly peremptory, held out her hand to the little girl with the same impulsive, open-palmed gesture she had used for Mrs Van with the words: ‘a sensible person like you!’ She was offering the child, so to speak, her own defencelessness. Rita kept one forefinger in the pool of quivering lights, and almost offered her hand to the tall old woman bending over her. But she glanced quickly at her mother, and put her almost friendly hand behind her back. Mr Maynard, watching this incident from the veranda, let out a sort of bark or grunt, and said to Martha: ‘Martha, I’d like a word with you.’

Martha glanced at Maisie, Maisie shrugged. She went on fanning, fanning. Rita now tried to climb on her mother’s lap. ‘Oh, Rita,’ said Maisie, irritated; but then made herself smile as the great lump of a child clambered awkwardly up. Maisie smiled sourly at the Maynards past Rita’s head; then Rita put her face down against her mother’s shoulder so that she, too, could receive the cool streams of air from the waving leaves.

‘Well?’ said Martha. Her dislike of the Maynards kept her face rigid. But she thought that only three days ago she had been a sort of aide to Mrs Maynard on the night the strike began. An unwilling, sour smile, like Maisie’s, came on to her lips: she could feel it there, and could not make it go away. She knew she was smiling from fear, as Maisie did. But Maisie was honest: ‘They scare me so much, Matty’ She, Martha, did not find it easy to admit how much these people frightened her. But—Lord! to be in the hands of these people, to be at the mercy of these great, charging, blundering…

Mr Maynard said to Martha: ‘It’s an absurd situation, impossible!’

‘How would you feel?’ demanded Mrs Maynard.

They were appealing to her, even commanding her, Martha: they, the Maynards, feeling themselves to be in the right, as they always were, stood confronting Martha, side by side, two great, strong, heavy-jowled people in their plated armours of thick, stiff cloth.

‘But whose fault is it, after all?’ Martha said, feebly, because she knew the futility of it.

‘But my dear…’

Mrs Maynard was smiling mistily at Martha, her lips quivered, and it was clear that she felt, and would always feel, that she was the victim of cruel circumstances.

Mr Maynard gazed past Martha into the room where mother and child sat together in the big chair. His eyes filled with tears and he turned and walked off the veranda. His wife followed, fumbling for the handkerchief which was hoisted, like a white flag, from the cuff of her sleeve.

In a moment they had been swallowed by the great car that stood waiting outside the rooming house.

‘They always park it in full view, just so everyone can say: Judge Maynard’s visiting Maisie again,’ Maisie complained continually, in frenzies of resentment and annoyance.

‘Oh, my God!’ said Maisie, as the Maynards disappeared; and she heaved off Rita in a convulsive movement, as if the child had been smothering her. The heavy child scrambled down, and stood smiling in embarrassment for her uncouthness at her mother.

‘Oh, God! Christ. Damn them. Blast them. Oh, drat it! What shall I do—oh!’ Maisie spurted tears, while she patted the child’s shoulder with the hand that held the leaves. The frond caught in Rita’s black hair, tickled her face and made her sneeze. Then she, too, began to cry: it was a sort of double hysteria, in relief at the Maynards going at last.

Maisie said: ‘I’ve just remembered, Matty. Those silly idiots, they made me forget what I asked you for. The thing is, my friend that rang you up got what I said wrong. I didn’t want you to come here, I wanted you to telephone Mrs Van der Bylt with a message from Flora. Flora says, she’s got to see Mrs Van der Bylt on something urgent to do with the kaffirs and the strike. Johnny said she must tell Mrs Van der Bylt. But Flora can’t leave Johnny, he’s not too good today.’

‘Why don’t you ask Mr Maynard to take Flora up in the car?’ suggested Mrs Gale.

‘You couldn’t ask the Maynards to go to Johnny’s house, they’d die of shock, knowing that sort of house existed,’ said Maisie.

‘Wait,’ said Martha, and she ran after the Maynards’ car, which had just begun to move off. She said to Mrs Maynard through the window: ‘Could you ring Mrs Van der Bylt and tell her that her friend Johnny Lindsay has got urgent news for her? Maisie doesn’t have a telephone.’

‘Of course Maisie doesn’t have a telephone. Maisie doesn’t have anything an ordinary, sensible person would have,’ said Mrs Maynard, nodding emphatically. But she had been crying: her great, commanding face was all soft and appealing.

When Martha got back, Maisie was lying down on the bed or divan under the window which overlooked the veranda. Rita sat timidly beside her mother, smiling awkwardly, as if she were at fault, or in some way lacking. The poor little girl’s size defeated her in this way too: everyone, including her mother, forgot how young she was, and expected from her the reactions of a ten-year-old. Now she wanted to do something for her mother, but she did not know what.

‘I shall have to get married, Matty,’ Maisie was saying, twisting her head from side to side. Water sparkled in the creases of her fat neck, water streamed down her red cheeks. Tendrils of her hair were matted on to the pillow. ‘Perhaps I should marry Jackie. But I don’t want to get married.’

‘But Maisie, if you did get married, what difference would that make?’

Mrs Gale, sitting by the head of the divan, leaned over to fan her daughter. Rita sat swinging her large legs. She reached down to scratch inside a soiled white sock. She smiled apologetically, knowing in the fatal, helpless pain of a clumsy child, that she was bound to irritate. And sure enough, the energetic scratch of her fingernail on bare skin sounded loudly, and Maisie said: ‘Oh dear, Rita—don’t do that, and don’t crowd me, there’s a good girl, it’s so hot.’ She hastily smiled, to soften her complaint, and Rita smiled painfully. The grandmother watched, with her sharp, kind eyes, saying nothing. She fanned Maisie, and smiled at Rita. Suddenly Rita let her head droop, under the accumulated miseries of the evening. Tears squeezed under the thick, black lashes. Mrs Gale held out her hand. Rita flung herself at her grandmother, knocking the bed and Maisie’s bare arm. Too big to climb on the old woman’s lap, she stood pressed against Mrs Gale’s thighs, her thick arms around her neck, blubbering loudly.

Maisie lay, her mouth half-open, breathing heavily, listening to the little girl cry, to her mother’s quiet: ‘There, girlie, there, it’s so hot, that’s what got into all of us.’ Maisie smiled resignedly at Martha, who said: ‘Well, I’ve got to go.’

‘There, there,’ said the old woman to the child. ‘Now don’t be upset. Perhaps you’ll come and stay with me in my little house in Gotwe, would you like that? Your mom’ll let you come and visit your gran, and you’ll like that.’

‘Well, it would keep the Maynards off me for a bit, that’d be something,’ said Maisie.

‘I’ll telephone Mrs Van myself when I get home. Do you know what Flora wants to tell Mrs Van?’

‘I don’t know. It seems a kaffir got out of the location and came to tell Johnny they were being badly treated inside. But what can Johnny do? He’s on his last legs, Flora says.’

Martha cycled home, telephoned Mrs Van, was answered by Mr Van. Yes, Mrs Maynard had telephoned, but Mrs Van had not come in yet. He had put a message for her on the pad.

Martha thought: Perhaps I should go down and see Flora? But because she was tired, she remembered, again, ‘running around and about’. How ridiculous, how absurd, this business of always rushing off on someone else’s affairs. All over the town were people who automatically said: Ask Marjorie Black, ask Matty Hesse, if they needed anything. But nothing was changed, except that Marjorie and Martha felt important and that they understood life. Martha went to bed, and was dropping off to sleep, when Anton came in—for the first night since the strike began.

‘Well?’ she said, ‘and how is it going?’

Anton kissed her cheek, and said: ‘It’s nice to see you, Matty.’ They smiled, even held hands a minute. Then he began undressing. ‘They are sensible people, on the whole, when things are explained to them,’ he said.

‘Well, that’s a good thing, in the circumstances.’

Anton drawled humorously: ‘Yes, you could say that.’

‘Well,’ she said at last, ‘how very extraordinary everything is!’

‘Yes, you could say that too.’

The telephone rang. Anton answered it.

He said to Martha: ‘A friend of Maisie’s says I must tell you that Mrs McGrew says that Flora says she’s at Maisie’s. I hope that makes sense.’ He continued undressing.

‘I suppose I’d better just make sure…’ Again Martha rang the Van der Bylt house, and Mr Van, elaborately polite, said for the second time that a message was on the pad for Mrs Van. ‘Could you please change it to say that Flora’s at Mrs McGrew’s?’ said Martha.

‘My wife is to go to Mrs McGrew’s place when she comes in?’

‘So it seems.’

Next morning, when Mrs Van telephoned, it was to say that Johnny was dead.

What had happened was this:

An African had somehow got out of the main township past the troops and made his way to Johnny Lindsay’s. The strike was four days old, and there was hardly any food left in the locations, and none was being brought in. The troops would not allow people out to get food. ‘All the people had to eat were the fine words of the strike-leaders and the children were all crying,’ said the African.

Johnny told him that he did not think he could do anything about it, but that he would tell Mrs Van. Meanwhile, the man said he wanted to hide in Johnny’s house. Johnny pointed out that he, Johnny, the old socialist, the old trade unionist, was being put in an impossible position—how could he hide strikers who ought by rights to be with their comrades? The man had said that surely ordinary rules could go by the board when troops, not pickets, disciplined strikers. Johnny had agreed, his last recorded words being (in an unfinished memorandum addressed to Mrs Van): ‘The damn fools lock up every black man inside the townships: one per cent of the Africans knew what a strike was before, now there isn’t an African in the cities who hasn’t had a week’s course in the theory and practice of trade unionism. And if an African actually tries to run away from this home-course in strike tactics, the authorities drag him back and make him listen.’

Flora asked this man to stay and watch Johnny while she went off to Maisie’s, to get Maisie’s friend to ring up Mrs Van. But when she got there, she and Maisie decided it was too difficult to ring Mrs Van. For one thing, a message had already been sent once, by the Maynards. For another, they couldn’t face telephoning that house because that ‘old nanny goat, Mr Van’ was enough to put anybody off.

So Maisie’s friend had gone back to her place, and telephoned Martha and got Anton, who told Martha who rang Mr Van for the second time.

Normally, of course, a servant would have been sent up to Mrs Van with a note, and none of this running around and about would have been necessary.

Meanwhile, a patrolling policeman had caught a glimpse of a black man in Johnny’s room. When he arrived at the sick man’s bedside, there was only Johnny, apparently asleep: the African had run out of the house on seeing the policeman, and had hidden himself. The policeman searched, but did not find him. Half an hour later he came back to lecture Johnny for ‘harbouring the enemy’ as he put it to the coroner. ‘Didn’t Johnny know,’ he had planned to say, ‘that there was a strike on?’

But Johnny was asleep.

‘And how was I to know he was so ill?’

‘Didn’t you see the oxygen tanks?’

‘But it was my duty to round up any kaffirs I saw and take them back to the townships. It wasn’t my duty to nurse sick people.’

At Maisie’s place Flora had quite a good bit to drink. Maisie was still upset by the Maynards’ visit, and Flora was worn out by nights of sitting up with the sick man. Flora dropped off to sleep, and woke up about 2 A.M., sober. She wanted to go back home, but while it was only a short way from Maisie’s place to Johnny’s house, it was a rough area of town, and the strike made her nervous. Flora consoled herself by thinking that it was all right, Johnny wasn’t alone, he had the black man from the location with him. And more than likely Mrs Van would have made her way to him by now. She tried to doze off again in a big armchair, but it was no use—‘something kept tugging at me, and I decided to go home.’ But she was frightened. Mrs Gale made her coffee and offered to walk with her: she had spent all her life in tough places, she said, what was half a mile’s walk even in rough streets compared to what she was used to? But Maisie said she would be nervous without her mother. Then a policeman, seeing the lights on, had appeared and asked if everything was all right. It was three in the morning. Flora asked him to walk with her back to her home. He did, and when they reached it, no one was there. There was no Johnny in the bed, the sheets and blankets were anyhow, and an oxygen tube lay on the pillow, and the oxygen tank was quite empty.

‘Oh God, oh God, forgive me,’ sobbed Flora, clutching the policeman.

She tried to console herself by thinking Mrs Van might have taken Johnny home with her. But why should she have done? She had often sat a night through with Johnny in this room, and the old man had not been out of bed for weeks. As it happened, Mrs Van knew nothing about all this: coming in late and tired, she had glanced at the messages on the pad, but not thoroughly: the two messages about Johnny, or rather, Maisie, were on the back of a sheet.

Flora and the policeman began running through the streets around the house. They had seen some blood on the doorstep. At last they found Johnny face down on the doorstep of an Indian shop a few hundred yards away. He was dead, and had been dead, so the doctor said, for three or four hours.

Had he been trying to go for help? To find Mrs Van to tell her about the situation in the townships? Of course, no one would ever really know, but Flora knew. She confided to Mrs Van that he must have been worried about her, Flora: he had gone to look for her. He had not been able to let Flora out of his sight that last week or so. He kept calling, even if she was out of the room for a few moments: ‘Where are you, Flora, where are you, my love?’

The strike lasted a few more days. It was not ‘broken’ by hunger; because some food did get into the townships, though not enough. Perhaps it was the absurdity of the situation that ended it. There the Africans all were, up and down the Colony, locked in because the authorities were frightened about what the white people might do.

Things got more ridiculous every day. Car loads of white people went down to the boundaries of the locations to shout insults in at the Africans, and then began shouting at the white and black guards too. In the townships, many Africans sat waiting gloomily for death: at last, they said, the white people had got them where they wanted them—all locked up, weakened with hunger, and helpless. Soon, they said, the troops would move in and slaughter them. The ghost of Lobengula had been seen, it was claimed, with his impis. A few Africans got out somehow from behind fences and cordons and had run away to join earlier fugitives in the veld.

The strike leaders, still invisible, continued to issue orders for discipline, order, restraint. They claimed their authority was absolute, and probably it was; but how was this to be proved when it was white troops who played the role of pickets?

Meanwhile, everyone waited with nerves on edge for something to happen which would spark off real trouble.

The strike came to an end, both sides claiming victory, though the strikers’ main demand, namely that a law should be passed insisting on a minimum wage of three pounds a month, was not gained.

The day after the strike, Johnny was buried. There had been no graves dug for some days because the grave diggers were all locked up in the townships, and the first labourers emerging from the gates of the townships as the strike ended were commandeered by the authorities for that by now most essential service: to dig graves which would be filled as they were completed.

Johnny did not have a religious service, although Flora wanted one. Mrs Van spoke an address ‘as a humanist and a socialist’. Half a dozen services were in progress that afternoon: all over the cemetery groups of people stood above open graves, with white-robed priests and censer-swinging little boys.

Flora stayed alone in the little house for some days. Then she moved into Maisie’s rooming house in the next room along the veranda from Maisie. Rita had gone with her grandmother to Gotwe for a prolonged stay—there was talk of her going to school there.

‘They get on very well together,’ Maisie said. ‘After all, my mom never knew Binkie, so she doesn’t have to get all upset, being reminded about him. And that fixes the Maynards. They can’t go running out to Gotwe every time they’ve got nothing better to do. It’s nearly two hundred miles.’