Legacy of War Page 31

  ‘Life goes on, eh?’

  Saffron looked up at Gerhard. Time, suffering and African sun had etched lines in his skin, but the soul that she saw when she looked in his eyes was still just the same after all these years, and the sight of him was still enough to make her heart constrict with the sheer force of her love.

  ‘You know, it’s very annoying, the way you’re always so calm and sensible,’ she said, not sounding in the very least annoyed.

  He grinned. ‘And always so right, too.’

  ‘That just makes it worse.’

  The two women exchanged kisses and Saffron said, ‘I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I had to come down here . . . I need your help.’

  ‘Really?’ Wangari smiled. ‘It’s usually us asking you. But please, tell me what you need. If I can help you in any way, of course I will.’

  ‘It’s about the screening centres and the camps. One hears such terrible rumours about what goes on in those places. Of course the governor and his people deny everything. I thought maybe you might have heard something, or spoken to someone who could provide some evidence, one way or the other.’

  Wangari’s face fell. ‘It’s not just rumours,’ she said. ‘In fact . . .’ She stopped, thought for a second and then said, ‘Wait a moment.’

  Wangari returned to her office. A couple of minutes went by and Saffron was starting to wonder whether she should find somewhere to sit down when Wangari re-emerged and said, ‘Come in.’

  She showed Saffron to a plain wooden seat opposite her desk. The client she had been seeing was sitting next to Saffron on an identical chair.

  ‘This is Mrs . . . Otieno,’ Wangari said, and by the slight pause Saffron sensed that this was an alias, rather than a real name. ‘I have told her you can be trusted.’

  ‘Hello, my name is Saffron Courtney,’ she said, speaking Swahili. ‘Please, call me Saffron.’

  Mrs Otieno was a young woman, still in her twenties by Saffron’s estimation, but she sat hunched in a chair like a woman three times her age. She had an air about her that Saffron had only encountered once before, during her journey across Germany at the end of the war. It was the desolation of someone who has been utterly defeated, whose soul has been crushed, and whose body has been abused.

  ‘Please, tell Saffron why you are here,’ Wangari said.

  ‘I want to know what has happened to my husband,’ she said.

  ‘When did you see him last?’ Saffron asked.

  ‘At the screening camp.’

  ‘So you were there with him?’

  ‘Yes, we were both taken there. The police said it was because we had taken the oath.’

  ‘And had you?’

  ‘Yes – but we had no choice. They said they would kill us if we did not. We said that to the police, but they did not believe us.’

  ‘I see . . . Did they question you at the screening centre?’

  ‘Yes, but not together.’

  Wangari gently said, ‘Tell Saffron about the man who questioned you.’

  Mrs Otieno grimaced. She wrapped her arms around herself and curled her torso into a ball, as if she were at any moment expecting to be beaten.

  My God, the poor woman is petrified, Saffron thought.

  ‘It’s all right. No one can hurt you here,’ Wangari said.

  Mrs Otieno looked at Saffron with the sorrowful, liquid eyes of a beaten dog.

  ‘It was Nguuo,’ she said. ‘The torturer.’

  Saffron recognised the word: nguuo was the Kiyuku term for hippopotamus.

  ‘Is he very fat?’ she asked.

  Mrs Otieno nodded.

  ‘And is he as deadly as the hippopotamus?’

  Another nod.

  Saffron was going to ask Mrs Otieno another question, but decided it would be cruel to force her to relive her torment a second time, if she had already done so for Wangari. She asked Wangari, in English, ‘What did he do to her?’

  ‘He punched her, slapped her and hit her with a kiboko. His men kicked her, repeatedly, while she was on the ground.’

  ‘That’s awful . . . shameful,’ Saffron said.

  ‘No, that’s normal – but Nguuo did more than that. He took nettles, which had been bound together to form stiff bunches, and he shoved them up her anus and her vagina.’

  ‘Oh, dear God . . .’ Saffron gasped.

  ‘She can count herself lucky. Other women have suffered the same torture, with thorn branches.’

  Saffron shook her head in disbelief. ‘I thought it might be bad . . . but this . . . It makes me think of the things the Gestapo did to our captured agents. Have you been able to find out anything at all about what happened to Mr Otieno, Wangari?’

  ‘A little. I’ve been pestering the authorities for months, and I’ve confirmed that Mrs Otieno’s account of their arrest is accurate. They were taken to the screening centre. They were interrogated. Mrs Otieno was released when it was clear she knew nothing about the Mau Mau’s activities. As for Mr Otieno, he is no longer listed as an inmate at the screening centre, but I have not been able to find any record of him at any of the detention camps.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘That he died under questioning. We’ve had reports of electric shocks, eyes being gouged out, men being castrated—’

  ‘Why do men do this?’ Saffron asked, and her eyes were full of tears. ‘How can they do it . . . now . . . when they know what this leads to?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Wangari replied. ‘Perhaps mankind is doomed never to learn from its past. Perhaps we will always repeat the same mistakes, the same evils forever.’

  ‘No, we can’t . . . we mustn’t.’

  Saffron looked at Mrs Otieno. She was cowering in her chair, paying no attention to their conversation, lost in her own world of grief and desolation.

  ‘Gerhard was like her, you know,’ Saffron told Wangari. ‘When I found him at the end of the war, after he’d been in the Nazis’ camps, he was lying in bed, so ill, so starved, I actually thought he was dead. As time went by, his body started to recover, but not his mind. He was frightened all the time. He recoiled if I reached out to touch him. He was still in shock, I suppose. It took a long time, but we got there in the end.’

  Saffron looked at Mrs Otieno.

  ‘I know what it is to be beaten,’ she said. ‘I know what it is to suffer. But you will get better, I promise. I will find you a home where you can be safe. I give you my word.’

  Mrs Otieno was uncertain how she should react to this unexpected kindness, unable to believe it could be true.

  ‘You can trust Saffron,’ Wangari said.

  Mrs Otieno burst out crying. Saffron knelt by her chair to comfort her.

  ‘This man, Nguoo,’ Saffron said to Wangari. ‘Do you have his real name?’

  Wangari looked through her papers and said, ‘De Lancey . . . Quentin De Lancey. Apparently he’s some kind of auxiliary policeman.’ Wangari caught the reaction on Saffron’s face when she heard the name. ‘Do you know him?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Saffron. ‘My family is all too familiar with Quentin bloody De Lancey.’

  Wangari got up from her chair and walked towards the door. She gestured to Saffron to join her.

  ‘When are you going home?’ she asked, in a low voice, not wanting Mrs Otieno to overhear them.

  ‘I was planning to drive back this afternoon.’

  ‘Could you stay in Nairobi tonight?’

  ‘I suppose so – why?’

  ‘There’s someone I want you to meet. He might be able to give you hope that people can learn from their experiences.’

  Saffron knew better than to ask who that ‘someone’ was. If Wangari had felt able to give his name, she would already have done so.

  ‘Then tell me where I have to be, and when, and I will be there.’

  ‘Good evening,’ said the tall, thin, bespectacled man who greeted Saffron when she rang his front doorbell. ‘Do come in. Would
you like a glass of sherry?’

  The Reverend Jasper Plaister was a Church of England vicar in his late sixties, who worked as the chaplain and Latin master at the Prince of Wales school, less than half a mile away. He possessed a thin sprinkling of unkempt grey hair around a bald spot whose skin was mottled by decades of exposure to the African sun. He wore a grey wool cardigan, fraying at the hem, with leather patches at the elbow. The front garden of his modest villa in the western suburbs of Nairobi was small, but well-tended. The car outside was an Austin 7, at least fifteen years old and battered around the edges.

  Plaister led Saffron into the hall and she smelled cooking as he called out, ‘Agatha, dearest, Mrs Courtney Meerbach is here.’

  A door opened and a plump woman with a smiling face, topped by a silver bun that was gradually escaping from the hairpins keeping it in place, appeared.

  ‘So good of you to come,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron before she greeted Saffron with a firm handshake. ‘I’ll be with you in a second, just preparing some nibbles.’

  Like her husband, Agatha Plaister worked at the Prince of Wales School, where she was the matron of one of the houses. The school was a fee-paying, all-white boarding establishment for boys, proudly modelled on the great English public schools.

  The Plaisters were dedicated to their jobs and the boys they taught and cared for. But they were equally passionate in their commitment to the ideal of African independence. For the past twenty years, the couple had been staunch supporters of political organisations like the Kikuyu Central Association and the Kenya African Union that were set up by the colony’s native population.

  For years, their beliefs had been regarded by the school’s headmaster and governors as unfortunate but essentially harmless. They were the kind of woolly-minded do-gooding one might expect from a vicar and his wife. Now the stakes were higher and the Plaisters’ views were more controversial.

  ‘Jumbo,’ Plaister said cheerfully as he led Saffron into the living room, where she spotted Wangari and Benjamin sitting side by side on a sofa. ‘Here’s our final guest.’

  From the way the Plaisters spoke, it was as if Saffron was joining them for tea at a country vicarage. Yet the middle-aged African in a checked shirt and leather jacket who rose to his feet to greet her was regarded as a dangerous menace to society by the majority of white Kenyans.

  ‘Mr Kenyatta,’ Saffron said, recognising the colony’s leading black politician.

  She was taken by surprise. She had no idea that Jomo Kenyatta was the person Wangari had wanted her to meet, nor that he was the kind of man who wore a leather jacket when not undertaking public engagements, still less that anyone would call him ‘Jumbo’.

  ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you,’ she said, shaking his hand.

  ‘The pleasure is mine,’ Kenyatta replied. ‘I am no admirer of the seizure of land by white settlers. But I do acknowledge the efforts your father has made on behalf of the workers on his estate. He shows them great respect and consideration. I wish there were more like him.’

  ‘He will be pleased to hear that,’ Saffron said, taking a chair that stood at one end of the settee. Kenyatta sat down opposite her.

  ‘Your father sounds like a true Christian, Mrs Courtney Meerbach,’ Plaister said. ‘All God’s children are equal in His sight. Once one accepts that, then it is simply unacceptable, indeed impossible, to discriminate on the grounds of race.’

  ‘I’m afraid religion doesn’t play much part in my father’s thinking, Reverend,’ Saffron replied. ‘He’d say he was being practical and businesslike. His view is simple. Africa will gain its freedom, just as India has done. It is therefore in everyone’s interests, not least for families like ours, to let that process happen peacefully. The last thing we want is a violent revolution. We all have too much at stake.’

  The chaplain handed Saffron the glass of sherry he had promised her with a kindly smile on his face. But his eyes were disconcertingly sharp.

  ‘Not every man who does God’s work is aware that the Lord is working through him,’ he said.

  ‘I will point that out to my pa. I’m curious to hear what his answer will be. But can I ask you, Reverend, why did you call Mr Kenyatta “Jumbo”?’

  The two men laughed.

  ‘I’ll answer that, Jasper,’ Kenyatta said. ‘It was a nickname I acquired in England during the war. As you may know, I spent the years from ’39 to ’45 working on a farm near a place called Storrington, in Sussex, a beautiful part of the country. My friends at the local pub, where I was a regular, used to call me Jumbo. I told Jasper about it once and he seemed tickled by the name. I said he was free to use it too, since he is also a dear friend.’

  ‘It’s a pity more people don’t know that story,’ Saffron observed. ‘They might not be so convinced that you are a dangerous Communist revolutionary if they thought of you drinking a pint in a country pub, surrounded by English friends who’d given you a jolly nickname.’

  Kenyatta gave a long, sad sigh. ‘That misconception is the bane of my life. It is true that I went to university in Moscow, just as I also studied in London. But studying in Russia does not make me a Communist, any more than wanting freedom and justice for my people makes me a revolutionary. What could be more British than the idea of one man, one vote? All I am seeking is the same rights for my people as you take for granted for yours. But for some reason, the colonial authorities are convinced that I am behind what you whites call the Mau Mau. I can assure you, nothing could be further from the truth.’

  Wangari leaned forward. ‘This is why I wanted you to be here tonight, Saffron. Your family is influential in the white community. If it can work with those of us seeking peaceful change, maybe we could create something new, something better, instead of repeating all the old mistakes.’

  Before Saffron could answer, there was a hammering on the front door.

  Plaister got to his feet, saying, ‘I’ll see to that,’ and left the room.

  Saffron felt a sudden jolt of alarm. Throughout her time in Occupied Europe, a knock on the door had been the sound she dreaded most, for it would mean that the Gestapo had come for her. In the atmosphere of fear and suppression that was settling over Kenya, her first thought was, it’s the police come to break up our meeting.

  She heard Plaister say, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in,’ followed by the sound of a brief scuffle and heavy footsteps down the hall. Kenyatta rose and Saffron did the same, steeling herself to stand up for everyone against the accusations of sedition and conspiracy she felt certain were about to be thrown at them.

  But the men who barged into the room, with Plaister trailing behind them, were not policemen.

  They were both black and, Saffron guessed, Kikuyu. The first was tall and handsome. The other embodied the Mau Mau, as portrayed by white politicians and journalists: a savagely scarred African with a panga in his hand. The good-looking one stared at her. Saffron was well accustomed to men examining her from head to toe, whether to satisfy their sexual interest, or to judge whether she could be trusted. But never in her life had she been confronted by a gaze as hard and implacable as this.

  ‘What is this woman doing here?’ the man asked.

  ‘She’s my guest, which you are not,’ Plaister said, as forcefully as he could, though there was a reedy, trembling edge to his voice. ‘I’ll thank you to leave.’

  The intruder ignored him. Instead he addressed Kenyatta.

  ‘She leaves, now. The old man and his wife wait outside until we are done.’

  ‘No, it is you and your tame ape who must leave,’ Kenyatta said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’ The man pulled a gun from his jacket. He looked at Benjamin and Wangari. ‘I know you,’ he said, frowning as he tried to place them, and added, ‘You run the clinic.’ He looked at Wangari. ‘Your father is the traitor, Ndiri, who grows fat on his people’s suffering.’

  Neither she nor Benjamin said a word, though both looked at the man with unflinching eyes.


  ‘You leave too,’ he said. ‘Or you and your white friends die.’

  Saffron was studying the two armed men, assessing the threat they posed. They carried themselves with assuredness and alertness that suggested they were well trained and battle hardened: war veterans, most likely. There was no bluster in the death threat. It was a statement of fact: ‘I get what I want or people will be killed.’

  I could probably deal with them if I had to, but there would be blood, Saffron concluded.

  Kenyatta turned to his friends. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘I will deal with this warmonger myself.’

  ‘No, old man. I will tell you how things are, and you will accept it, or . . .’

  There was no need to repeat himself. It was obvious what alternative was being offered.

  ‘Go,’ Kenyatta repeated.

  The Plaisters, Saffron, Benjamin and Wangari went outside and stood in a cluster on the immaculately mown front lawn, like evacuees from a fire drill.

  ‘It’s probably best for you to leave,’ Plaister said. ‘I fear for your safety if those murdering hooligans find you here when they leave.’

  ‘I take it they’re Mau Mau,’ Saffron said.

  ‘Oh yes. The chap with the gun is one of their most senior men.’

  ‘He looked like a man who was used to being in charge. But what about you and Agatha? Will you be all right?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll manage, dear,’ Agatha said. ‘We’ve been here for more than forty years, Jasper and I. We began as missionaries, way out in the bush. Life was much wilder and more dangerous then, I can assure you. We can look after ourselves.’

  ‘Then I’ll take my leave,’ Saffron said. ‘Can I give you two a lift?’ she asked Benjamin and Wangari.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Benjamin said. ‘We came here on our bicycles. We’ll ride back to the clinic.’

  Saffron kissed Wangari goodbye and shook hands with all the others. She got back into her car and drove towards the Muthaiga Club, where she was spending the night. Her mind was trying to make sense of everything that had happened at the Plaisters’ house.