War Cry

Leon tried to cut through the emotions that were crowding out his rational mind and make some sense of what Hartson had just said: that calm, unflappable English voice delivering such devastating, heartbreaking news. Leon wanted something he could fight, an enemy he could defeat, for what in God’s name was the point of his existence as a man if not to protect his woman and his child? But there was nothing to be done, for the war was all within her, out of his reach.

‘Do I have your consent?’ Dr Hartson repeated.

Leon nodded. ‘Do whatever you think is best, doctor. And if it comes to a choice …’ Leon stopped, choking on his words as he fought back desperate tears, ‘for God’s sake, please … save Eva.’

‘I’ll do my very best, I promise you,’ Hartson said. He half-turned, about to walk away, then stopped and looked back at Leon. ‘There’s a waiting room just down the corridor. Take a seat in there, why don’t you? I’ll have someone bring you some tea, good and sweet to keep your blood sugar up, eh?’

Hartson had taken half-a-dozen steps down the corridor, when Leon said, ‘Doctor?’

Hartson stopped: ‘Yes?’

‘Good luck.’

Hartson said nothing, just looked for a couple more seconds at Leon, then went away towards the operating theatre.

Leon watched him go, gave a heavy sigh, then went in search of the waiting room.

An hour passed in the waiting room. There were four battered old armchairs and Leon sat in each one of them as he tried to find somewhere he could be still without needing to get up and pace around the room, just to work off the tension that had his guts as tight as drumskins. A low wooden table sat in the middle of the room, surrounded by the chairs. A few dog-eared old issues of Punch were scattered across its surface, next to a dirty Bakelite ashtray. Leon picked up the magazines in turn, flicked through their pages, gazed blankly at the cartoons, hardly even seeing the drawings, still less appreciating their jokes. The tea arrived after the best part of half an hour’s wait and he gulped it down in a couple of minutes. The sugar perked him up, as Doctor Hartson had predicted, but the additional energy only made his restlessness worse.

As Leon was leaving the clubhouse, back at the polo club, Doc Thompson had pressed a packet of Player’s Navy Cut cigarettes into his hand, saying, ‘These may come in handy.’

‘I don’t smoke,’ Leon had replied but in the chaos Thompson hadn’t heard, so Leon had shoved the cigarettes into his trouser pocket and forgotten all about them. Now he took out the crushed and crumpled pack. Thompson had stuck a book of matches into the pack. The words ‘Henderson’s General Store, Gilgil, Kenya’ were printed on the flap of card that covered the matches.

As a boy, Leon had grown up with the smell of the cheroots that his father Ryder Courtney kept clamped between his teeth as he navigated his river boats up and down the Nile or haggled with the men from whom he bought and sold. When the clash of wills between father and son became too intense for them to remain in the same house, Leon had left the family home in Cairo to seek his fortune in the new colony of British East Africa, as Kenya had then been known. The smell of cigar smoke had always been associated in his mind with his father, and everything he was trying to escape, and the only time he had ever smoked had been during the war when, like virtually every other soldier in the British army, he did it to pass the time and ease the tension in the long hours of tedium and apprehension that preceded the start of any battle. The day he left the army, he threw away his smokes, but now he realized that Doc Thompson had not so much given him the packet of Player’s as prescribed it for precisely this helpless period of waiting for news that might very well be bad.

Leon lit up his first cigarette, felt the familiar sensation of the smoke filling his lungs and then the long, slow, relaxing exhalation as it poured back out again. There were eight more in the packet and Leon smoked them all over the next two hours. By that point the air in the waiting room was thick with smoke, his clothes stank and his mouth tasted as filthy as the ashtray that was now half-filled with his fag-ends.

Leon suddenly felt a desperate need for fresh, clean air. He walked out of the waiting room, along the corridor and through the two swing-doors into the world beyond. The area in front of the European Hospital and the road on which it stood was laid out in a pleasant garden, bounded on three sides by the drive, and on the fourth by the wall that ran along the road on which the hospital was located. Benches had been placed for patients and their visitors to sit on. The storm had passed, night had fallen and the air was as cool and refreshing as water from a mountain stream. Leon wiped the rainwater off one of the benches with his hand then sat down on it, stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back, gazing up at the majestic, infinite beauty of the stars in the southern sky. There was no traffic on the road outside and the only sound to be heard was the noise of the insects chattering away in the bushes and trees. Leon closed his eyes and for a moment a sensation of deep peace and relaxation spread through him, easing the tension from his muscles.

Then he heard the clatter of the doors.

Leon opened his eyes, sat up straight on the bench and looked towards the hospital entrance. In the harsh white glare of the light that illuminated the spaces beneath the awning, Leon saw Dr Hartson walking towards him. His shoulders were slumped, his tread was heavy and there was an air about him that Leon had seen in soldiers who had just taken a beating and lost comrades in the process.

And then he knew the message that Dr Hartson was bearing with him on that slow, exhausted trudge across the lawn and it was as if all the constellations had suddenly vanished from the sky and blackness fell upon Leon Courtney. For he had lost the sun and moon and stars that had illuminated his existence.

Hartson had reached him now. He must have known that he had no need to tell Leon what had happened. So he just said, ‘I am so very sorry, old man. We did everything we could, but …’

Hartson may have finished his sentence, but if he did Leon Courtney never heard him. For now the dam inside him broke and all he could hear was the sound of his own sobbing.

In her room at Lusima, Saffron lay awake for what seemed like hours before she dropped into a fitful sleep, plagued by dreams that were filled with anger, danger and a terrible sense that something was missing, no matter how hard she tried to find it. Then she woke suddenly. There was someone in her room, she knew there was. She sat up straight, eyes wide, staring from side to side, straining her ears for any sound, but although that sense of another presence very close to her remained, there was no sign at all of anyone she could see or hear.

She turned on her bedside light.

The room was empty. The door was closed.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the presence vanished and, in a moment of absolute clarity, Saffron understood.

‘Mummy!’ she cried out. ‘Mummy! Come back!’

But Mummy was gone and she wasn’t ever coming back. Saffron knew that now, and with that knowledge all the comfort and security her mother had brought with her disappeared from Saffron’s life and an entirely new chapter of her existence began.

At the age of thirteen, Leon sent Saffron to Rodean, a girls’ boarding school in Parktown. ‘It’s time you got a proper education,’ he’d told her. ‘When I’m gone, you’ll be in charge of the estate, and all my Courtney business interests. You need to know about more than cookery, needlework and flower arranging.’

‘But why do I have to go all the way to South Africa?’ Saffron protested. ‘I’m sure there are good schools in Kenya too.’

‘Indeed there are. But I’ve asked around and it seems that none of them offers the kind of education for girls that you will get at Roedean. It’s the sister establishment of a very famous girls’ school in England. Literally so, apparently: three sisters started the place in England and then a fourth one came out to South Africa and started the place in Jo’burg with a chum. That was thirty years ago and apparently it’s gone from strength to strength since, a really top-notch place. And Saffy …’ Leon’s voice had softened as he started to speak from the heart, rather than the head, ‘it’s no life for you here, rattling around the estate with just me and the staff for company.’

‘But I like rattling around the estate! It’s my home. And all the people on it are my family,’ Saffron pleaded.

‘I know, my darling, and there’s not one of them that doesn’t love you as their own. But you need to be around girls your age, and you need women you can look up to and learn from. There are things I just can’t teach you. Things only women know. And … well … you know …’

Yes, of course Saffron knew. In the end, so many conversations with her father came back to the great hole in their lives where her mother should have been. He had never found another woman to replace her. There had been plenty of women who liked the idea of being Mrs Leon Courtney and mistress of one of the largest, best run and most breathtakingly beautiful estates in East Africa. Several of them had found their way to Lusima and done their best to impress Saffron’s father by sucking up to her.

‘If one more silly woman tells me that she’s sure we shall be the most terrific chums, I am going to scream,’ Saffy had told Kippy, during one of their daily heart-to-hearts (though in truth the pony was only really interested in the apple that she knew her mistress was hiding behind her back). But each of the women disappeared within a matter of days, weeks, or in one case a full three months, and Saffron had long since given up paying any attention to any of them.

That did not, however, mean she loved her father any less, or was bored with her home. Lusima was a magical kingdom in which she was the Crown Princess and there was nowhere else in the world she wanted to be. So she had fought with every logical argument she could muster and every emotional trick she could play, but it had done her no good. Her father had made up his mind, and when Leon Courtney did that, no force on God’s earth could budge him from his decision.

Going to Roedean meant that Saffron would have to leave home for the first time. Leon knew that the experience was bound to be hard for her, so he was keen to make it as exciting as possible, to distract her from any thought of homesickness for as long as possible. To that end, he did not take her on a steamship to Durban, the nearest port to Johannesburg, but instead booked tickets on the final legs of the brand new Imperial Airways service from England to South Africa. And he did not take her to Johannesburg. Instead, shortly after Christmas 1932, he and Saffron flew all the way to Cape Town.

‘I thought it was time you met the South African branch of the family,’ Leon told her, ‘starting with your cousin Centaine.’

‘That’s an odd name,’ Saffron replied.

‘It’s French, and it means a hundred. So “Une centaine d’années” means “a century”.’

‘Well that’s even odder. Who calls a girl “Century”?’

‘Someone whose daughter is born in the first hour of the first day of the first month of the first year of a century might, if they were French. Centaine’s maiden name was de Thiry and she met my cousin Michael in France when he was stationed there with the Royal Flying Corps during the war. Michael was a fighter pilot.’

‘Did they fall in love?’

‘Yes.’

‘How romantic!’ Saffron’s imagination instantly conjured up an image of a dashing pilot and a beautiful French girl swooning at one another, though she still knew too little about love to have much of an idea what would happen after that.

‘I’ve decided that Centaine is a lovely name,’ she said, with characteristic decisiveness. But then something struck her. ‘You said Michael was a fighter pilot, and you haven’t said we’re meeting him in South Africa. So …’

‘He died, yes. The damn Germans shot him down.’

‘So how did she end up in South Africa?’

‘Well, Michael and Centaine got married,’ Leon began. In truth, he had always had his doubts as to whether the knot had ever been tied, but the family had accepted Centaine as one of their own and any doubts had been discreetly swept under the carpet. ‘When he died Centaine was pregnant with his baby, and she had no family left in France so it was decided to send her down to South Africa because she and the child, when it came, would be safer there.’

‘Wasn’t there any war in South Africa, then?’

‘Nothing to write home about. South West Africa had been a German colony, so plenty of people there were on the Kaiser’s side. So were some of the Boers, because they hated the British. The Germans actually planned to help the Boers rise up and conquer South Africa but … well, that never happened.’

Mostly because your mother and I stopped it happening, Leon thought, but did not say. Instead he went on, ‘Anyway, there was far, far less fighting of any kind in South Africa than there was in France, so it should have been much safer for Centaine to be here, except for one thing …’