Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

"You are a good boy. You work here, you have a family.

You have to exist through the next weeks, then you have to resume your life. After it has happened you have to forget your father."

"I'm going to South Africa."

"Do you listen to anybody?"

Jack couldn't help himself, a snap grin. "Hardly ever."

"It is not my intention to help you to kill yourself."

''I'm going to bring my father home."

''Impossible, you understand that word?"

''Give me the chance."

"Your failure would hurt us, and it is impossible that you could succeed."

"Not if you helped me."

Thioko shook his head, as if he did not believe what he learned in the slate grey eyes of Jack Curwen.

"I can't do it."

Jack's hand covered Thiroko's fist, a hard unyielding grip.

Where were you when the Court bomb went off? Where will you be when five men hang? Sitting on your arse and comfortable?"

"You take a chance with me, young man." The anger was brilliant on Thiroko's face.

"Lying in your pit and snoring?"

"I care about my men," Thiroko spat the answer.

"Your Movement took a chance with the lives of five men.

You owe it to them to help me."

"No one tells me my duty."

"Your duty is to help them, not to sit on your bloody hands."

Thiroko softened. He had never been in combat in South Africa. He had never fired a Kalashnikov assault rifle at the Boer police or the Boer troops. He had never carried a bomb to a target and known the fear sweat in the fold of his stomach. He thought of what the physician had told him.

"What do you want?"

Jack felt the glow of success. "I can't take explosives with me, I can't get them through the airport. I want access to explosives in South Africa – and I want a team."

"Why should I trust you with a team?"

"When I get to Johannesburg, give me explosives, that's all. Sit on your hands, on your arse, and wait, and listen to the radio. You'll hear what your explosives have done, the radio'll tell you, what I've done on my own, and when you're satisfied then you'll give me a team."

"What is it you want exactly?"

"When I arrive I want a minimum of twenty pounds of explosive. I want detonators and Cordtex and safety fuse. I will hit the target of my choice. Then you'll know I'm worth the team."

"All for your father."

"To bring him back."

Thiroko took a notepad from his pocket. He wrote out an address. He showed the address to Jack, told him to memorise it, let his eyes linger on it, then folded the paper and tore it into a hundred pieces that he threw to float away and disperse over the grass. He told Jack to meet him at the address the following morning.

"You're going to help me?"

"I am going to think about helping you."

"Time's very short."

"I too learned to count. I know how many days are available."

Thiroko walked away from the bench. He was soon gone from sight. Jack was trembling. God, the assurance and the bombast had fled him. God, and was he frightened.

•* •

He was an age finding a phone box that worked.

He rang Jimmy Sandham at work. He wanted to meet with him, had to talk to someone.

A brisk voice answering, stating that he was through to the Foreign Office. Jack gave the extension number. Sandham had started him on his road. Jack wanted to meet him for a drink, to listen to his quiet control.

"Could I speak to Mr Sandham, please – a personal call."

A woman's voice, "Not here I'm afraid."

"Will I get him later, this afternoon?"

"He's taken a few days' leave."

"Since when?"

"He left yesterday."

''How long is he away?"

" Who is it asking for him, please?" lack put the phone down. He tried the home number. No reply.

He rang George Hawkins and invited himself over. He rang D amp; C and said he wouldn't be back that day.

It hit him. He had forgotten Duggie Arkwright. After leaving Lincoln's Inn Fields, he had walked into the West End, and then he had spent another ten minutes looking for a phone that wasn't broken or occupied. Duggie had sat down at the entrance to the square when Jack had gone forward to meet Thiroko. He hadn't been there when Jack had left. Duggie had done the introduction and had himself a tail, and Jack had put him out of his mind. He'd ring him when he could. He'd ring him when he came back.

He looked into a shop window. There were three layers of television sets: cash, sale, and credit. They all carried the same picture. Of high armoured personnel carriers driving through a South African township of tin roofs and brick walls, and of gas plumes, and of the blue uniforms blasting with their shot guns, of running crowds, of police chasing with the long whips held back to strike in anger. The caption said they were old pictures, had to be because the camera crews were banned from the riot areas.

He wasn't going there to take a side in a civil war. He was going there to bring his father home. And it wasn't real. It was only old pictures on a bank of television screens. He knew what was bloody real. It was that his father was going to hang in three weeks, that Duggie had a tail that morning, that a woman had said Sandham had gone on leave.

He went to find his car, then to George's to talk about explosives.

He was the moth, the file was the lamp.

The Director General had read, word by word, every page in the Curwen/Carew file. He had started to imagine that he knew the man.

There was a photograph in uniform, early twenties from its date. There was a portrait shot before the fiasco in Albania. There was another shot taken during the debrief and after the hospital check-up. There was a blow-up of a Johannesburg newspaper photograph of Carew being brought out of court. The change was Albania. The flesh had been stripped off the man. But he couldn't mistake the defiance in the features, especially in those taken after the decade in Spac.

He had read Carew's South African reports. They were poorly written, but they were dense with names and gossip.

There was no analysis, no interpretation, all as raw as sewage in a down flow. It crossed his mind to wonder whether the security police in Pretoria often had access to such quality information.

In the Alexandra township, three doors down Fifteenth Avenue from the north side junction with Hofmeyer there were stored under the back room floor boards, two R.P.G.-7 anti-tank rocket launchers, and eight missiles for the launchers were in waste ground beside the church wall on Second Avenue.

A 49-year-old street cleaner, who lived on Key in the Jabulani district of Soweto, had for two years been Umkonto we Sizwe commander of the whole township.

Seven Kalashnikov rifles were buried in protective grease wrapping in Dobsonville in the park that was bordered by Mahlangati and Matomela.

At a house, number given, on Mhlaba in the Chiawelo district, military planning meetings were held, when security conditions allowed movement in the night of the first Tuesday of each month. The fall back rendezvous was on Pilane in the Molapo district.

There was the house number in the Mamelodi township of Pretoria where a press printed A.N.C. literature. There was the name of the school from which that literature was dispersed, the identity of the schoolmaster who wrote the broadsheets.

Lists of officials in South African Laundry, Dry Cleaning and Dyeing Workers Union, and in Textile Workers Union (Transvaal), and in South African Chemical Workers Union, who were either politically or militarily active in A.N.C.

The names of couriers, African names, who carried low-level messages around the townships. One White named.

| van Niekerk, aged 19, disabled, student. And a White girl, named. Both addresses.

Careful maps showing infiltration routes into South Africa from Botswana.