Gerald Seymour - A song in the morning

He yearned for quiet outside his cell. But the C section corridor, and the small corridor through C section 2 were never quiet in the daylight hours. There were always the voices of the prison officers as they told stories, laughed, talked about the papers and the television. There was always the shout of a duty officer approaching a locked door, and the door clattering open, and the smack of it closing.

Those were the noises that were on top of the singing.

No singing that morning, and that meant no hammer of the trap being tested in the afternoon. Each time he heard the shout for the doors to be opened, and then the clatter, and then the smack, he stiffened, and the sweat sprang to his forehead and his armpits and his groin.

There would be a shout and a clatter and a smack when they came to tell Jeez that it was commutation, or when they came to tell Jeez which day it would be, which dawn for the short walk.

He often thought of the others.

He hadn't seen the others for thirteen months, not since the passing of the sentence and the drive in the meshed police wagon across Pretoria and up the hill to the gaol. He hadn't seen them since the apartheid of the reception area at Beverly Hills. They had gone right to B section, he had gone left to C section. That was "separate development" for you. Four for B section because they were Black, Jeez for C section because he was White. They'd been laughing that day thirteen months before, walking loosely, easily in their leg irons and hand-cuffs. He wondered how they'd be now, waiting to learn if they'd all go. A bastard, that, if one or two of them were reprieved, and the others were taken to the hanging room… Wouldn't be a bastard, they'd all five go, because it had been a policeman. He'd meet them again in the preparation room. There they'd be together, apartheid waived, "separate development" non-operable…

There was a shout. There was the clatter of a door opening.

There was the smack of a door closing.

Still and upright on his bed, Jeez waited.

He knew all the distances that sound carried through the unseen parts of the gaol. He had heard the door that was the entrance to the C section corridor. There was a murmur of voices. Another door opening. The door into C section 2. The unchanging ritual. He wondered why they always shouted their approach to a locked door, why the door was invariably slammed behind them.

He felt the wetness on his skin. He saw the flash of a face at the grille.

He stood at attention. He stood every time a prison officer entered his cell. A key turned in the oiled lock.

Sergeant Oosthuizen, smiling benignly.

"Morning, Carew. You slept well, did you, man? Your room's a picture. Wish my lady kept our house like you keep your room. You're going to have your exercise early, straight after your lunch… "

Jeez closed his eyes. All the shouting, all the clattering of the doors, all the slamming, to tell him that he was to be exercised an hour earlier than was routine.

"Yes, Sergeant."

"There's a nice afternoon for you, you've a visit."

He was very slight. With his crash helmet on, Jan van Niekerk seemed almost misshapen. There was something grotesque about such small shoulders capped by the gleaming bulge of the helmet.

The Suzuki 50cc was his pride and joy. For insurance purposes it was a moped, but in Jan's mind it was a fully-powered scrambler/road machine. He passed only cyclists and joggers, he was forever being buffeted in the slipstream of overtaking lorries and cars, but the Suzuki was his freedom.

In term time he came each morning from his parents' home in Rosebank down the long straight Oxford, onto Victoria and Empire, and then along Jan Smuts to the University of Witwatersrand.

He loved the moped, whatever its lack of speed, because the under-powered Suzuki provided him with the first real independence of his 21 year old life. His club foot, his right foot, was a deformity from birth. He had endured a childhood of splints and physiotherapy. He had had to be ferried in his mother's car to and from school, he had never played rugby or cricket. The wedge that was built into the raised heel of his leather ankle boot gave him a rolling limp and prevented him from walking any great distance. Before the moped he had been dependent on others. Along with the moped came a black leather two-piece riding suit. The combination of his stunted physique and his taste for biker's gear made Jan a student apart. In the huge university he was virtually friendless, and that bothered him not at all.

His friends were far divorced from the Wits campus. His own comrades. He had his own contact codes. He enjoyed a secret area of life that was undreamed of by his colleagues on the Social Sciences course. In this society, dominated by muscle power and sports skills where he could play no part, his Suzuki and his comrades gave him the purpose he craved.

His parents marvelled at the difference in their son's attitude since they had bought him the moped. They thought of him as a good serious boy, and one who showed no inclination towards the radicalism that they detested and that seemed so rife on the campus. At home, Jan gave no sign of interest in politics. They knew from their circle of friends who had kids at Wits that their Jan had no links with the students, mostly Jewish, who led the university demonstrations and protests, who were whipped by the police, savaged by the security staff dogs. Jan had described those activists to his parents as ridiculous middle class kids with a guilt complex. They knew Jan had left the campus early on the day that Dr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Cooperation and Development, had been pelted and heckled.

On another day he had walked away from the burning of the Republic's flag and the waving of that rag of the African National Congress. His parents thought the making of Jan had been his moped and his studies.

There was a White girl doing ten years in the women's prison at Pretoria Central. She had been active in radical politics before devoting herself to the collecting of information for the A.N.C. Impossible to make the switch from overt to covert work. Jan had always been covert. Anyone who knew him, his parents, his sister, his lecturers, the students he sat with in lectures, would have been thunder-struck to have discovered that Jan van Niekerk was a courier for the Umkonto we Sizwe.

A harmless little figure on his bumblebee of a moped, Jan pulled into the campus, parked behind the Senate House.

He limped past the portico and columns at the front of the building, across the wide paved walkway and down over the lawns. He preferred to walk on grass, easier and less jarring on his right foot. He walked around the amphitheatre, ignored the swimming pool and slogged his way up the steps to the modern concrete of the Students' Union. He saw the posters advertising the evening meeting to protest against police brutality on the Eastern Cape, went right past them.

His greatest contempt was for the students who shouted against the government from the safety of the campus. He believed that when those students had graduated they would turn their backs on decency and honour, that they would buy their homes in the White suburbs and live out their lives with privilege stowed in their hip pockets.

Crippled and forever awkward, Jan van Niekerk would be there on the day of reckoning. He believed that absolutely.

A day of reckoning, a day of fire. His struggle with his disability had tempered his steel strength of purpose. That purpose was the cause of Umkonto we Sizwe.

On the first floor of the Students' Union he had a metal locker, opened by his personal key. He had depressed the top of the door at the centre, where it was weakest, a full quarter of an inch. The locker was where he kept his biking leathers and it was his dead letter drop. Four other men only in the sprawling mass of the city of Johannesburg knew of Jan van Niekerk's locker. In these days of the state of emergency, of the regulations justifying widened police power, to be cautious was to stay free, to be exceedingly careful was to avoid the interrogation cells of John Vorster Square.