The Power of One

me feel terribly guilty. ‘The Lord has blessed you with a good brain. I pray every day that you will take Him into your heart and use your fine mind to glorify His precious name.’ She gathered the pieces up and dropped them into her handbag, giving me a sort of squiffy smile. ‘I’m sure it can be mended, you are just not your old cheerful self at present, are you?’ But her eyes weren’t smiling as she spoke.

That afternoon I wrote a note to Mrs Boxall at the library. All it said was, ‘Please come! In the afternoon,’ and I signed it. I also wrote a note for Marie asking her if she would take the note to Mrs Boxall at the Barberton public library. Marie had switched mid-week to night duty and came on at six p.m. with our dinner. I handed her the note. She read it quickly and hid it in the pocket of her white starched junior nurse’s uniform. She picked up my dinner tray from the trolley and brought it over to me.

‘I’ll only do it if it’s got nothing to do with that spy,’ she whispered as she put my tray down in front of me. I handed her the second note. She gave me a suspicious look as she took it. ‘I got to read it first before I say I’ll do it.’ She read the note and seemed assured by its contents. ‘I’ve got my day off tomorrow, I’ll do it then. Now promise you’ll eat your pumpkin, you left it last night and also your peas.’ She seated herself on the side of the bed and, taking up a teaspoon, she filled it with pumpkin and put it through the hole in the corner of my mouth. I had lost four top and bottom teeth on the same side where the sergeant’s boot had landed, and Marie called it my ‘feeding hole’. She was the best of anyone at getting the mashed food they were beginning to give me through the hole without making my gums bleed.

I spent the rest of the evening writing for Mrs Boxall a long, detailed description of what had happened. Doc, when I presented him with my botanical notes, would always stress that a botanist is concerned with detail. ‘Observation is what makes a scientist,’ he said. ‘It is only by seeing things in minute detail that we learn their secrets. Others can walk past a plant for a whole life and never even notice the colour of its blossoms, but the botanist knows every beat of its heart and turning of petal.’ And so I wrote it all down just the way it happened, even the swear-words, and then I hid the three sheets of paper in my pillowslip. Mrs Boxall came the very next afternoon. In her string bag she carried a new William book by Richmal Crompton, a book called Flowers from the banks of the Zambesi by Revd William Barton of the London Missionary Society and three copies of National Geographic. ‘You are such a precocious child, Peekay, I hope they suit your catholic taste.’ Like Doc, Mrs Boxall never talked down to me. With the result that I didn’t always understand her and wondered what the Catholics might have to do with my taste.

I withdrew my notes from inside the pillow and handed them to Mrs Boxall. ‘Well now, pray, what have we here?’ she said, taking the three pages and reaching into her bag for her glasses. She read for a long time and then read the three pages again before looking up at me. ‘Remarkable! You are a remarkable child. This comes just in time. A military court is being convened next week and things are looking pretty grim for our professor, my dear. The whole jolly town is up in arms about him. People are seeing Jerries in their chamberpots.’ She chuckled at her own joke. ‘I tried to see him in prison but those dreadful Boers said only authorised people could see him. If a librarian isn’t an authorised person then who is, I ask you? But the stupid warder at the gate wouldn’t budge. I’ve started a petition in the library but so far I only have twelve signatures and three of them are Boers and we all know where their sympathies lie, do we not? That dreadful little man, Georgie Hankin, has threatened to say some perfectly ghastly things about me in Goldfields News and has told me privately that, if I persist, he can’t have a Nazi-sympathiser writing a column in his newspaper. Honestly, you’d think it was The Times of London the way he carries on about that dreadful little rag!’ She paused, dug once more into her string bag and withdrew a copy of the Goldfields News. Taking up almost half the front page was Doc’s picture of me sitting on the rock. Above the picture in huge black letters it said, THE BOY HE TRIED TO KILL! Just above the headline and below the masthead was written Special Spy Edition. Under the picture the caption read, Like Abraham’s biblical sacrifice of Isaac, the innocent boy waits on the rock. No doubt Georgie Hankin, who as usual had it all wrong, saw this as his finest professional hour.

Doc’s arrest had occurred just in time for the weekly edition which appeared on a Monday. It carried the original news of the arrest, and this special two-page mid-week edition, using precious rationed newsprint, was an attempt by Mr Hankin to achieve immortality in his profession. The reason Mrs Boxall hadn’t been able to visit me was because Dr Simpson, in resisting Georgie and his photographer’s attempts to come and see me, had banned all visitors. She was surprised that I hadn’t seen the earlier paper and promised to bring it the following afternoon, though as a trained librarian she had little trouble verbally reproducing the essence and the flavour of Monday’s big story.

The essence of the story reported in the News was that the Provost officer and his sergeant had waited most of the afternoon for Doc to arrive. When he appeared with a small boy in tow, he was in a dishevelled state and it was obvious to the two military policemen that he had been drinking. The sergeant, on the orders of the officer, escorted him back to his cottage to allow him to clean up. Whereupon, when his back was turned, Doc attacked the sergeant with a heavy metal-topped walking stick and attempted to run for the hills. It was pointed out that Doc knew the hills well and would easily be able to conceal himself indefinitely in one of the hundreds of disused mine shafts dotted all through the mountains. He would then make his way across the mountains to Lourenco Marques, the nearest neutral territory.

The story had gone on to say that the sergeant was stunned from the blows he had received and it looked as though Doc would make good his escape had it not been for me who had bravely tackled him. Hearing my scream, the officer had rushed down the path just in time to see Doc take a vicious kick at my head. The officer arrested the suspected spy at the point of his pistol.

The editorial went on to point out that Doc was a noted photographer, and that under the guise of photographing cactus he had undoubtedly taken pictures of likely enemy landing places and established landmarks and mine shafts for storing food and weapons for enemy spies infiltrating South Africa from Portuguese territory. The paper pointed out that there were no pictures to be found of such places, confirming that they had already reached the enemy and that no clever spy would leave such incriminating evidence around. Fortuitously, inside the expensive German Leica camera the spy had used that very afternoon was exposed film of a hole in the mountainside, with the ore tailings dug from the mine heaped directly outside the shaft making it an ideal defensive position. In Doc’s notepad had been found a compass bearing and exact location of the disused mine. There had also been several pictures of a succulent, which proved how cunning and careful to cover up Doc had been.

The picture was, of course, the site where we had found Senecio serpens, the blue chalksticks. The remainder of the exposed pictures on Doc’s film had been of the succulent. Doc, as he had taught me to do, always established the location of a find, the direction of the prevailing winds, by studying the bush and larger plants in the immediate area, the soil conditions and the surrounding rock types.

To the rumour-happy folk of Barberton it was all very feasible and few of them paused long enough to examine the evidence or to question the town’s fifteen-year relationship with Doc. Mrs Boxall said people were going around saying, ‘Once a Jerry always a Jerry!’ satisfied that this covered a multitude of sins. ‘Goodness, Peekay, I’d suspect my dear old father before I’d suspect the professor. He doesn’t have a patriotic bone in his body unless it’s for Africa and has something to do with cactus.’ She folded my notes carefully and placed them in her handbag. ‘Oh dear, I nearly forgot, I brought you a bag of gob-stoppers. Oh my goodness!’ she said in an alarmed voice. ‘I’d quite forgotten about your jaw, what an idiot I am.’ She dropped the rock-hard candy into her bag and clipped it shut and leaned over and touched me on the chin. ‘Chin up, old chap, we’ve got all the evidence we need to get our mutual friend out of trouble. I’ll get back tomorrow with the news.’ She was gone, her sensible brogue shoes clattering on the polished cement floor, her back straight as a ramrod and her bobbed head held high. I could hear her still clattering down the verandah long after she was out of sight.

For the first time in a week I felt happy. Mrs Boxall was not the sort to be trifled with and I had every confidence that she’d sort things out. She was Doc’s friend and mine as well and as Doc had so often said, ‘This woman, she is not a fool, Peekay.’

But I didn’t see Mrs Boxall the next day. Somehow my mother had heard of her visit and had seen Dr Simpson who brought down a ban on visitors again. I had begun to make semi-intelligent sounds through my wired jaw and Marie, after a few trial sessions, had little trouble understanding me. She said she had a little brother who was a bit wonky in the head and I sounded a lot like him, which made it easy for her to understand me. It was nice to talk to someone again and it was Marie who told me about my mother’s visit to Dr Simpson which she overheard while she was in the dispensary. My mother said nothing to me the morning after she had visited the doctor and I was once again cut off without any news. Marie also told me that I would be going home on Tuesday and she was quite sad about it. She was fifteen years old and came from a farm in the valley. She only got one weekend a month off to go