The brigandshaw chronicl.., p.2
The Brigandshaw Chronicles Box Set 2, page 2
part #4 of The Brigandshaw Chronicles Series
“It’s civilian,” said Keppel. “No roundels on the wings or fuselage. One man flying alone in the middle of Africa.”
“He’s got to be English,” said Ralph as the aircraft flew in low over their heads, making them turn quickly to follow its passage over the mouth of their cave. The pilot was waving a gloved hand, his head trailing a silk red scarf, face hidden by a leather flying helmet and goggles. Another face appeared from the observer’s cockpit. It was a small boy with his hands on the leather hide of the cockpit surround. He was gripping it with both hands but they could hear his treble voice yelling at them after the first rush of sound from the engines, the propellers thrashing the air to keep the craft in the sky.
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Ralph. “Did you see that?”
“Poor old Alfred. He’ll never be the same again. First the comet in the night sky and now this.” Keppel was grinning at the empty entrance to the cave. The sound of the plane was receding.
“Pinch me, Keppel,” said Ralph.
“It was real. One of the Rhodesians must have flown in the war and brought a plane back with him.”
“One of the fighter aces was a Rhodesian. Harry Brigandshaw. Shot down twenty-three Germans. He was one of the few aces they never gave a Victoria Cross. There was a scandal in the press. Something to do with Brigandshaw’s commanding officer. You ever been up in the air?”
“He’s coming back again… Go and get Alfred.”
“He won’t come out of the cave.”
They watched the aircraft fly back and circle over their heads, the meat still roasting over the fire. Something was thrown out of the pilot’s cockpit, tied in the red silk scarf. The scarf trailed down like an unopened parachute they had once seen in France when a British observer jumped from a basket under an observation balloon that a German fighter was shooting up. The observer had broken both his legs and was sent home to Blighty… The boy was looking straight down at them as a package bounced inside the mouth of the cave. The pilot raised his gloved fist and the aircraft droned away until the sound was gone from the sky.
Keppel easily found the scarf. Tied at the end was a tin of Navy Cut tobacco. The tin was weighted with a small spanner when they opened the lid. Inside was the message, scrawled badly on a calling card similar to the ones Ralph and Keppel had used in the mess during the war. They read the message.
CALL IN AT ELEPHANT WALK ON YOUR WAY BACK TO SALISBURY
On the other side of the card was engraved:
COLONEL H BRIGANDSHAW, ROYAL FLYING CORPS
“Well, I’ll be buggered,” said Ralph again. “The comet was a sign of our luck changing. Not the end of the world. Alfred! Come on out. We’re leaving. Load up the packhorses.”
“You want to go now?”
“Chances like this never came before. Do you want to wander around the bush for the rest of your life? Let’s face it. We’re lousy prospectors. Not surprising when we don’t know what we are looking for… Oh my God! A hot bath followed by a plateful of fresh vegetables. The smell of a woman. The voice of a woman. Oh my God! It’s a double message from heaven. Come on. Get cracking. No time to waste. It’s the first bloody invitation we’ve had since coming to Africa.”
“What’s Elephant Walk?” asked Keppel.
“The name of his farm. I saw the sign on the road the morning before we crossed the Mazoe River. Twenty miles out of Salisbury thereabouts. Some hundred miles from here. Go and get Alfred before he tries to run off into the bush… I wish he could speak English… Can’t believe it. Bloody civilisation beckons again. Maybe Brigandshaw can give us a job… You think knowing his name had something to do with dropping the message? Telepathy. There’s a lot more to this life than we understand.”
“Doing what? All we are trained to do is kill people. So far as I know there isn’t a war going on in Africa.”
“There’s always a war going on somewhere.”
In the end, they packed up everything themselves. Alfred was quite useless, trembling without control… With the three packhorses carrying the paraphernalia of amateur prospectors ready to travel, they pushed Alfred up onto his horse. It was two o’clock in the afternoon when they began the long journey to Elephant Walk. Ralph had looked at his watch to check the time. He was whistling a tune. One of the songs they had sung in the troopship crossing the English Channel when they went home, without Malcolm Scott, at the end of the war in France. When they thought the world would be their oyster before the reality of so many demobbed men looking for civilian jobs became apparent.
The bush was dry in June. There had been no rain since the end of April. The tall elephant grass was brown and brushed the bellies of the horses as they followed the tracks they had made on their journey northwest from Salisbury a month earlier. Nothing had grown without rain. Some of their tracks were scuffed by animals. There was no visible sign of man cutting their trail. The wind had blown dust over the marks in the hard earth cut by the metal horseshoes. Since arriving in Rhodesia at the end of the rainy season, they had learnt to follow their own tracks and to read the stars to stop themselves going round in circles… There were no landmarks. Bush. Trees, not very tall and mostly leafless. Great round granite rocks with bald heads the size of an ocean liner. And grass. Tall grass hiding the teeming herds of animals most of the time, especially the smaller animals. They could see the elephant moving through the bush eating leaves from the tops of the trees with their trunks, pulling off the few succulent ones, bringing them down into their mouths. Tons of fodder every day. The elephant ignoring the yellow and black spotted giraffe, the beautiful camels of the African bush.
They rode on all afternoon, making camp at dusk. They had to help Alfred down from his horse. He was jabbering away to them again in his own language.
“It was a great, red snapping snake. It chased me into the cave. Jumping up into the air and making a terrible noise. Not a snake of this world. Another message from the ancestors… We die now.”
The two Englishmen, unable to understand a word of the Shona, ignored him. Alfred was gibbering, his mind unhinged. If they could talk to him it would help, but they couldn’t. Luckily for Alfred, Ralph kept the red silk scarf in his pocket. Had he pulled it out like a magician it would have likely stopped the man’s heart, killing him on the spot. Alfred was that obsessed with Harry Brigandshaw’s silk scarf, and the empty Navy Cut tobacco tin with a spanner inside making all the noise.
They both gave him a pat on the shoulder, sat him on a fallen tree trunk and went about preparing their camp for the night, bringing in firewood and clearing a large enough area of dry grass to make the fire and not set the bush alight.
The light went quickly. The crickets sang in the tall grass and from up in the trees. Their world shrank, becoming smaller with only the pool of light around the flickering fire. As they chewed the cold venison they had brought with them, they could hear animals all round their camp. Alfred ate some of the meat. They hoped he would sleep and feel better in the morning. At least he had stopped gibbering. They were worried about the man they had hired in Salisbury to show them through the African bush.
There had been a kill not far away from the camp. The hyena were loud and raucous. A wild dog barked and sent shivers down their spines. The scavengers were getting to eat from the kill.
“The lion have eaten,” said Keppel. “They won’t bother us now. Don’t sleep too well. We’ll have to keep the fire up ourselves. Poor old Alfred. Aircraft almost frightened him to death.”
“It would you if you’d never seen machinery before… What a place to live. Africa. Man living with the animals without all the rubbish of civilisation. Makes you think. Does a man need any more than this to be happy?”
“Just make sure we don’t make someone their dinner by letting the fire go out. A hyena can bite right through your leg. Take it right off.”
“Shut up, Keppel… You want some more cold meat?”
“The tea is ready.”
The sparks from the fire lifted up under the branches of the trees where they had camped. Away from the fire and the soft sparks rising in the heat of the flames, danced fireflies. Small red eyes flitting around in the dark of the bush. Noiseless.
Alfred went to sleep, curled up next to the fire. Ralph covered him with a blanket. The night cold had begun to grip the side of their bodies away from the fire.
“What are we going to do?” asked Keppel.
“I have absolutely no idea… Let the gods decide. We’re young.”
They rode off after breakfast with Alfred managing to climb onto his own horse. He was still muttering to himself. They hoped someone on Elephant Walk would translate for them the Shona so they knew what he was talking about. There had to be more than an aircraft in the sky. The fear in the black man’s eyes was palpable.
By mid-morning, they were in savannah. The grass came up to their knees. They rode through a sea of grass gently blowing in the morning wind. They could hear the tsetse fly following as they rode. When the fly bit them through their khaki shirts it was like a red-hot needle in their flesh. Their wide-brimmed bush hats kept the sun from their eyes, the sweatbands soaked black with sweat. They rode in riding breeches with thick leather puttees that covered from the top of their leather boots to their knees. The blue sky was lightly patterned with soft white clouds as far as the hills to the north that ended at the Zambezi escarpment where they had come from. Alfred was riding again in front, as was his job. Out of the sea of swaying brown grass, a lion’s head came up ten yards to the side of them, making the lead horse bolt with Alfred trying to keep in the saddle. The male lion with its long black mane turned to look at the fleeing horseman. The lion did not move. It turned to look at Keppel and Ralph who had pulled up their horses and taken their rifles from the bucket holsters in front of their right knees. The three packhorses had stopped, frozen. The horses were neighing in fear. Alfred was a hundred yards in front of them, at full gallop and still in the saddle.
A lioness stood up in the grass and looked at Ralph with cold, yellow eyes half closed against the direct rays of the morning sun. All around them lions stood up, showing their big heads above the sea of grass. Many of them were only cubs. The packhorses were too frightened to bolt, their sides shivering. All the lions were looking at them. Ralph and Keppel were in the middle of a large pride that had been sleeping in the grass. The black-maned lion yawned and disappeared. As quickly as they had risen to have a look at the interruption, the big cats disappeared back into the grass.
Ralph had the three packhorses on one long line and gently pulled them forward. Guns at the ready, they moved through the grass expecting to trample on a sleeping lion. Searching all around, adrenaline pumping, fear sweating the backs of their shirts.
Slowly they moved away from the hidden danger.
Ten minutes later, they looked back at where they had been. There was no sign of the pride of lions. In front, there was no sign of Alfred. The horse had bolted out of the savannah. Out of their sight. Into the trees that were mostly msasa. Small with spreading canopies that looked like tabletops from a distance. A large bird was sitting on top of one of the trees using its wings to keep its balance.
“Poor old Alfred,” said Ralph. “Just not his week.”
“You think he fell off?”
“We’ll soon find out. That horse cut a swathe through the grass even my mother could follow… We were lucky. They were sleeping off an earlier dinner… How many did you see?” Ralph wanted to laugh now the danger was over.
“Fifteen, twenty. I didn’t count.”
“The horse will be blown. We’ll have to camp when we find him. How long do you think that invitation will last?” Ralph had taken off his sweat-stained bush hat and was wiping his forehead with the back of his right hand. Then he drank from a water bottle, his old army water bottle that he kept on his hip. The water tasted cool.
It took them three hours to find Alfred’s blown horse. Alfred was grinning at them, showing two rows of perfectly white teeth.
“Lion,” he said. “Shumba.”
They all laughed together from the relief, as much at finding each other again as from being far away from the pride of lions.
The bolting horse had finally stopped on the banks of a small river. It was a perfect spot to camp with tall shade trees on the banks. A troop of vervet monkeys were watching them, their faces peering around the protection of the green leaves. Small round faces with perfect black markings. Every time they pulled back their faces from the canopy of the trees, they thought they were hidden, leaving their long grey tails plain as pikestaffs. All the trees had their roots in the river.
Within five minutes, Keppel had caught a five-pound fish. Freshwater bream. It was the best food they had eaten since making their permanent camp in the cave on top of the escarpment back in February. Keppel had scaled the fish. They cooked it whole over the coals of the fire, and then placed it on their one tin plate. Eating under the tree with the monkeys, the three men sat cross-legged around the dish. They broke into the white flesh of the fish with their fingers. They ate slowly, luxuriously, until they were full. Then they lay back in the shade of the tall tree and went to sleep away from the noonday sun.
When they woke, the monkeys had gone. The tree above them was empty. Buck were drinking from the river on the opposite bank. Waterbuck. The buck saw the waking men and ran back into the safety of the thorn bush.
They stayed the night on the bank of the river and crossed in the morning. The water came up to the bellies of the horses as they crossed. They had fired shots into the water to make a path away from the crocodiles that watched them from a small island in the stream. The crocodiles had big eyes but did not move into the water. All three of them had their guns at the ready to protect themselves with the packhorses in the middle of the small cavalcade.
Two days later, navigating the savannah like sailors far out on the great oceans of the world, they joined the wagon-rutted road that had been cut for fifty miles out of Salisbury by the Southern Rhodesian government to open up the country to the north. Only once had they passed an African village. Rondavels with thinly thatched roofs. Long-legged chickens. Black pigs that ate human faeces and kept the area around the huts clean of disease. Near the village were stalks of old maize stands. The village was on another small river. Near the river were patches of pumpkin with thorn bush fences to keep out the pigs and wild animals. Later, they saw a herd of long-horned cattle that belonged to the village being tended by two small naked and very thin boys. They both ignored the greeting from Alfred. Just stared. Ralph wondered what had happened to the rest of the people, as the village had been empty. Not even an emaciated dog had been seen in another village on their journey north out of Salisbury at the end of the rainy season. It was as though the whole of that part of Africa had been cleansed of people. Ralph wondered about it more than once. Was it war or disease? If the English wanted to farm in that part of Africa, there would be little labour to employ. Even the cattle with the small boys had been skin and bones. Walking skeletons.
The following day they found a sign that read ‘Elephant Walk’ and turned off the government road that led to nowhere. Later, they found out the new government of Charles Coghlan was to open up the empty land to European settlement. The problem was the tsetse fly that killed people and cattle and fed off the game that was immune to the deadly sickness. To settle the area would mean shooting out the game to eradicate the problem, a task beyond the new government. Africa had a way of protecting its solitude, Ralph was to find out in years to come. Nature always prevailed. Always had a new disease to keep the population of man under control. To stop the bush from being overgrazed by man and beast.
A good, well-worn track led off the road, marked by vehicle wheels along with the ruts of the old wagon wheels. The earth was a strange red. The red dust soon covered them all.
Out of nowhere came an avenue of jacaranda trees. The trees were many years old. At the end of the line of jacaranda were farm buildings and one huge shed next to a well-kept airstrip. They could see the tailpiece of the Handley Page through the open door of the hangar. There were people everywhere going about their business. The buildings were solid and well kept. Between the buildings were lawns. On the lawns, in neat rows, stood farm equipment newly painted. Ploughs. Discers. Ridgers. Some pieces of equipment Ralph had never seen before.
A white man dressed in cotton trousers, open-necked shirt, bush shoes and a large hat, came out of one of the smaller buildings as their horses threaded their way through the brick tobacco barns that rose high on both sides of them, each with a tall chimney rising up to thirty feet above their heads. There were fires at the base of the barns, round, brick-made fires long enough to burn the trunk of a tree. Next to the fires were stacks of trees ready for the next year’s tobacco season.
The man was well built, his face turned mahogany by the African sun, and in his mid-thirties. There was not an ounce of fat on his body. His shirt hung like a rag from the back of his trousers. The smiling eyes looking at the travellers were green marbled with grey flecks. Ralph had a way of telling a man from his eyes. He was a little short of six-foot, his hands covered in black grease and old oil. He was trying to clean them with a dirty rag that was spreading the grease up his arms.
“You got my message. Well done. Can’t shake hands. Covered in engine oil. Bloody tractor’s blown a gasket. You’re just in time for lunch. My name’s Harry Brigandshaw. Come and meet my wife down at the compound. My man over there is Tembo and he’ll look after your man along with the horses.”
“This is yours,” said Ralph, taking the red silk scarf out of his pocket. “My name’s Ralph Madgwick. My friend is Keppel Howland.”
“Thanks. Flew with me right through the war… What’s wrong with your man? He looked terrified. Oh well, nothing Tembo can’t cure. He’s a magician. We’ll walk. The houses are half a mile from here. The gardens run down to the Mazoe River. What on earth were you chaps doing up there on the escarpment? Saw the smoke from your fire. Couldn’t believe my eyes and neither could my nephew.”
