A SONG IN THE MORNING Read online

  Silence in the van.

  "Let's have a bit of dignity, boys." An English accent.

  "Let's not give the bastards the pleasure of our fear."

  Jeez opened his door. He stepped down onto the street.

  He clasped his hands over the top of his head.

  In front of him and behind him the policemen began to run warily forward.

  Johannesburg is a hard city. It is a city where the Whites carry guns and the Blacks carry knives. Not a city where the pedestrians and shoppers cower on their faces because the police have drawn revolvers and have blocked off a Combi and are handcuffing four kaffirs and a kaffir lover. A crowd had gathered inside the minute that it took the police to hustle their five prisoners towards the wagon and to kick them up and slam the doors on them. There was something to see. The White guy was the something to see. Must have been more than forty, could have been more than fifty, and wearing decent slacks and a decent shirt. The crowd wondered what the White guy was doing with those Black bastards, what the hell he was at.

  Four long blocks away a cloud of slow moving smoke was settling above Pritchard Street.

  * * •

  Mr Justice Andries van Zyl had passed the sentence of the supreme penalty on 186 men, of whom his clerk had told him recently 142 had been executed. It would have been beyond him to believe that an innocent man had ever been convicted in a court over which he had presided. He attended church every Sunday morning and sometimes went back in the evening. When he retired in two years' time he would devote his energies to a charitable society supporting children afflicted by the spina bifida disease. Privately, in his room, after passing the death sentence, he would say a prayer for the condemned man; not a prayer that the man should be reprieved, but that he might go to his Maker with true repentance in his heart.

  On that late afternoon in the Palace of Justice on the north side of Pretoria's Church Square he dealt first with the four Blacks deemed guilty by himself and his two lay assessors of murder. There was no theatricality. The black cap had long before been dispensed with in the Republic's courts, and his sentencing voice was a racing monotone, that of a bowls club secretary getting through the minutes of a previous meeting.

  As Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom stared back at him from the dock, expressionless, exhausted of hope, he shuffled his papers, then pressed his metal-rimmed half moon spectacles tight onto the bridge of his nose. He allowed the murmurs to subside in the public gallery.

  He looked up at Jeez Carew.

  Mr Justice van Zyl saw a man only a few years younger than himself, and well dressed in a dark grey suit and a white shirt and a silk tie. He saw a face which seemed to say that there was nothing new to be learned. He saw the way that the shoulders were pulled back, and the way that the man's arms were held straight down to his sides. He saw that the prisoner's bearing was more militarily correct than that of the prison service guards at attention behind him.

  Mr Justice van Zyl had watched this White accused through seventeen days of court room business. He thought he had detected an arrogance. He disliked arrogance. The previous day he had decided that when he passed sentence on the White he would make a fuller statement than was usual for him. He would break that arrogance.

  "James Carew, you have been found guilty of murder without extenuating circumstances. There is only one sentence that I may pass upon you. It was your own decision that during your time in custody you refused to co-operate with the officers who have diligently investigated a quite appalling criminal act. You chose to remain silent. You have also rebuffed the efforts of a very able and conscientious counsel to present a defence on your behalf. I understand that you chose not to brief him, and also that you refused the opportunity offered you of going into the witness stand to give the court your own version of events on that horrific day in Johannesburg. By these actions I am forced to the conclusion that in your case extenuating circumstances do not exist which would mitigate your guilt.

  "I have heard in police evidence that you came from the United Kingdom to the Republic of South Africa twelve years ago. In the time you have resided here perhaps you have acquired the belief that different standards of justice obtain for our varied ethnic groups. You may have believed that the colour of your skin offers you some protection from the consequences of your actions. You would have deluded yourself, Mr Carew, if you believed that.

  The crime of which you have been found guilty involved a quite dastardly act. You acted together with terrorists of the outlawed African National Congress, one of whom had been trained in sabotage and murder in a communist state, to set off a bomb inside the Rand Supreme Court in Johannesburg. The bomb consisted of explosives and petrol to which had been added a quantity of household liquid detergent, the effect of the latter being that the flaming petrol would fasten itself to any clothes or flesh it came into contact with. The casualties would have been even more severe but for the devotion to duty and the personal sacrifice of warrant officer Prinsloo. In taking much of the blast of the bomb the warrant officer without doubt saved many others from the savagery that you intended. As the driver of the getaway vehicle your guilt is equal to that of the man who made the bomb and the men who delivered it. You were an essential member of a murderous conspiracy.

  "We live in a time when it is more than ever important that in our beloved country God-fearing men and women should support the legitimate forces of law and of order. No benefit to any person in the Republic, whatever his colour, can come from an outrage such as you helped to perpetrate.

  I truly hope that the sentence that I am about to pass on you will deter other foreigners from coming to our country, taking our hospitality, and repaying us with murder.

  "I believe, Mr Carew, in the efficacy of the deterrent. A lew years ago a distinguished colleague of mine said, 'The death penalty is like a warning, just like a lighthouse throwing its beams out to sea. We hear about shipwrecks, but we do not hear about the ships the lighthouse guides safely on its way. We do not have proof of the number of ships it saves, but we do not tear the lighthouse down.' Mr Carew, we will not permit our country to be used as a playground of mayhem by foreigners who conspire with such hate-consumed organisations as the African National Congress.

  "James Carew, the sentence of the court is that you be taken from here to a lawful place of execution and that you there be hanged by the neck until you are dead."

  There was no entreaty for the Lord to have mercy on James Carew's soul.

  Had Jeez slumped or even dropped his eyes from the Judge's face, then there would have been. Mr Justice van Zyl was vexed by the prisoner's composure. He thrust his papers together, propelled himself from his chair.

  "All rise," the clerk intoned.

  Mr Justice van Zyl stamped out of his court room, his assessors after him.

  A guard tapped Jeez on the shoulder. Jeez turned smartly and down the steps from the dock to the court room cells, followed by Happy and Charlie and Percy and Tom.

  In prison lore they were the "condemns". While they were driven under heavy escort to that part of Pretoria Central prison a mile and a half away that was reserved for these men who were condemned, a police major sat in the emptied courtroom filling in with a ball point pen the specific details of the printed form that was the death warrant. The form would go later to the sheriff of the capital city for his signature and in due course to the hangman as authority for his work.

  * * *

  An age later Jeez sat on the end of his bed and stared down at the sheet of writing paper, blank as yet, that lay on the table that was fastened into the cell wall.

  An endless time later. Countless days, more than a year.

  Long enough for the Rand Supreme Court and the ride up Rissik Street to be just a hated memory, a smell that was everywhere in the mind but couldn't be located.

  It was the first time that he had asked for writing paper and a pen.

  What to write? What to say? . . . He could hear the singing,. Many,
many voices in a slow dirge. Couldn't escape from the bastard singing. Shit, when it was his turn, who'd be singing for bloody Jeez?

  On the top right hand corner of the sheet of paper he wrote the date.

  2

  He let himself in through the front door and the atmosphere hit him.

  Before Jack had his key out of the lock and the door closed behind him, he could sense catastrophe.

  The vacuum cleaner was in the middle of the hall rug.

  His mother always did the carpets straight after Sam and Jack had gone to work and little Will to school. There were dirty clothes at the foot of the stairs. She would have put'

  the yesterday shirts and socks and pants into the machine straight after she'd done the carpets. Down the hall the door into the kitchen was open. The saucepans and the frying pan from last night's dinner and the morning's breakfast were in the sink.

  Had to be a catastrophe.

  Sam gone bankrupt? Will hurt? . . . But Will was sitting glumly at the top of the stairs, still in his school blazer, and he too had his routine and always changed out of his blazer, chucked it on the bedroom floor, as soon as he came in, and that would have been two hours back . . . Sam couldn't have gone bankrupt. What recession? Business never brighter, Sam was forever saying.

  The boy on the stairs shrugged dramatically, like no one had bothered to tell him what was biting his Mum and his Dad.

  Jack heard Sam's voice through the closed living room door.

  "Get it into your head, it's nothing to do with you."

  He heard his mother crying. Not loud weeping, not crying for sympathy. Real crying, real misery.

  "Whatever the bastard's done, Hilda, whatever he's going to get, that's not your concern."

  He turned to close the front door. Behind him was wretched, normal Churchill Close. Nothing ever happened in the dead end road where the cherry trees were in blossom and the pavements were swept and the mowers had been out once or twice already on the front lawns and the rose beds were weeded. Tudor homes set back from the road, where nothing ever went bad and sour. You could get a funeral moving out of neo-Elizabethan Churchill Close with half the residents not knowing there'd been a death. Jack dosed the door behind him.

  "He's gone out of your life." He heard the anger in Sam's voice.

  Jack knocked and went into the living room.

  His mother sat on the sofa beside the fireplace. Yesterday's ashes. She had a crumpled handkerchief tight in her fist and her eyes were red and swollen. She still wore the housecoat that was her early morning gear. Sam Perry was at the window. Jack didn't think that they could have been rowing between themselves, they hardly ever did, and never when Will could hear them.

  Jack was 26 years old. His quiet love for his mother was the same as it had been from the time he could first remember, when there had only been the two of them.

  "What's happened, Mum?"

  Sam replied for her. "There's been a letter."

  "Who from?"

  "There's been a letter come from a gaol in South Africa."

  "Will you, please, tell me who has written us a letter from South Africa."

  "A letter to your mother from a condemned cell in Pretoria Central prison."

  "Damn it, Sam, who wrote it?"

  "Your father."

  Sam turned to stare out of the window. His wife, Jack's mother, pointed wordlessly up to the mantelpiece, fresh tears on her cheeks. Amongst the delicate china pieces, next to the flower vase, was a small brown paper envelope.

  His mother's voice was muffled through the squeeze handkerchief.

  "You should read it, Jack. They're going to hang you father."

  He went slowly across the room. He stepped over th brimming ashtray in the middle of the carpet. She had bee there all day with her cigarettes and her letter. It was a envelope of flimsy paper with a blue airmail sticker and a 25

  cent stamp which showed the bulged bloom of a protea plant. Tight, joined handwriting had addressed the letter to Mrs Hilda Perry, 45 Green Walk, Coulsdon, Surrey, Great Britain. A different hand had crossed out that address and replaced it with Foxhaven, Churchill Close, Leatherhead Surrey. No one had seen a fox in Churchill Close for six years. On the reverse side of the envelope was overstamped

  "If Undelivered Return to Commissioner of Prisons, Pre toria", and there was a post box number. The envelope was featherlight, for a moment he looked again at the mantel piece.

  "It's inside, Jack," his mother said. "They don't seem to give them much in the way of paper."

  Sam said tersely, "You don't have to read it. Not after what he did to your mother and you."

  "If it's my father I'll read it," Jack said quietly. It wasn't a put down. Jack knew that Sam Perry had done his damn-dest to be a good proxy father to his wife's son.

  He drew the single sheet out of the envelope. Across the top of the sheet was written in capital letters JAMES

  CAREW - C2 3/86.

  "My father's James Curwen."

  "It's the name he's using there," his mother said.

  Jack turned the sheet over. The letter was signed "Jeez".

  His mother anticipated him. "It's what he always called himself. He was always Jeez to me and to everyone."

  To himself almost, but aloud, he read: "Dear Hilda, This comes a bit out of the blue I'm afraid, and I have to hope that it doesn't upset you. God knows that once I did enough to upset you and I've no right to repeat the dose. I suppose that it's because of my present situation, because I am sentenced to hang, that I thought it would be good to tie down some of the loose strings of my life, that's why I'm writing. About going out of your life, well, I'm not saying anything about that. What happened is gone. No excuses, no whining, it just happened . . . "

  "And, Christ, did it happen," Sam snapped. "Walked out on a fine lady and a two year-old child."

  Jack ignored him.

  ". . . A lot of years later I came back to the U.K. and I found out that you were well and married, that Jack was well, that you had a new baby. I didn't see the need to drag up the past. You were in good shape. I was OK. I reckoned you were best left alone . . . "

  "And why couldn't he leave her alone now?" Sam couldn't let go of it. "Suddenly, twenty-four years after he's dumped your mother, it's a sob story."

  " . . . So, I'm in a bit of a mess now, things aren't looking too good. As I used to say, you win some but most you lose.

  If you read in the papers that I'm going for the early walk then please just think of me that morning, and remember the better times. As I will. If nothing comes up at the last minute, this has to be goodbye to you and the lad. I watched him at sports once over the fence. I thought he was OK.

  Things aren't always what they seem. When I'm gone, ask the old man. He'll tell you. Yours affectionately, Jeez . . . "

  "Got all that's bloody coming to him."

  Jack put the letter back into the envelope. He was very pale. His hand trembled as he gave it to his mother.

  "Why should he have written to you, Mum?"

  "Perhaps there's no one else he could have written to."

  She stood up. Jack knew she wanted to be out of the room.

  She didn't want her husband and her son to see any more of her tears. She laughed in a silly, brittle way. "There's jobs. Will's tea. Our dinner. Have to be getting on."

  She was going to the door.

  "Do you want a hand, Mum?"

  "You talk with your father - with Sam."

  She went out. She couldn't help herself, she was sobbing before she'd closed the door.

  "Sponged for sympathy, that's what the bastard's done.

  Old man, indeed. I'd give him bloody old man."

  "Steady, Sam. He's my father."

  "I've put it together, what he did, what it said in the papers. He was involved with communist terrorists and murder."

  "You're talking about my father."

  "He treated your mother like dirt."

  "He's still my father."


  "He's not worth a single one of your mother's tears."

  "Do you bloody well want to hang him yourself?"

  "Don't swear at me, son, not when you're under my bloody roof."

  "Isn't it enough for you that they're going to throw him in a pit with a rope round his neck?"

  "He made his bed. He'd no call to bring his problems into my house, into your mother's life."

  "He's still my father," Jack said.

  Sam dropped his head. The hardness was gone from him.

  "I'm sorry, Jack, truly sorry that you ever had to read the letter."

  They had a drink together, large Scotch and small soda, and another, and there was time for one more before Hilda Perry called them to dinner. They talked loudly of business, Sam's garage and showroom and Jack's work. They sat at the dining room's mahogany table with candles lit. The man who was in a cell fifty-five hundred miles away was thought of but not spoken about. When they were having their coffee Will came in and sat on Hilda's knee and talked about the school soccer team and there were bellows of laughter.

  Jack pushed his chair back and stood up. His lather was going to hang. He thanked his mother for dinner. He said he had some work that had to be sorted by the morning. In a gaol on the side side of the world, dear God. He said he'd go to his room and put his head into his papers. Was so alone that the one he wrote to was the one he had most hurt.

  He told Will that he should learn to kick with his left foot if he ever wanted to be any good. He had no sense of his father's face. He rested his hand on Sam's shoulder, and Sam patted it. The man he didn't know was his father, and his father was going to hang.

  He went up the flower-carpeted staircase to his room.

  * * *

  It was a little under four miles to work, across on the London side of the town. Jack Curwen was employed by Richard Villiers and his son, Nicholas. The office was an unlikely place for D & C Ltd (Demolition and Clearance). There was no yard for JCB diggers and bulldozers and heavy earth-transporting lorries; there weren't any cranes; there weren't any workmen. Villiers was a shrewd man, which made him a good employer, and he'd long before decided that the way to the maximum profit and minimum outlay was to be in the art game of sub-contracting out. He hunted out the business and then pulled in the freelance operators that he needed. A few local calls could bring in a million pound's worth of plant and transport whose maintenance and upkeep was some other bugger's headache. D & C Ltd liked to boast that nothing was too small, nothing too large. They could clear the foundations of a 5000 square yard warehouse in dockland. They could take out the stump of an oak tree.