Afterwards he realized that it had probably been his destination all along, but now it seemed an omen. He did not hesitate a moment, but hurried into the office and found a pile of telegram forms on the desk. The nib of the pen was faulty and it spluttered the pale watery ink, and stained his fingers.
‘MACDONALD 55 LOVERS WALK FORDSBURG. THEY KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE GOT IN THE CELLAR GET RID OF IT.’
He did not sign it.
The Post Office clerk assured him that if he paid the sevenpence for urgent rating, the message would have priority as soon as the northern lines were reinstated.
Mark wandered back into the street, feeling sick and depleted by the crisis of conscience, not certain that he had done the right thing in either circumstance, and he wondered just how futile was his hope that he might have forced Fergus MacDonald to throw that deadly cargo down some disused mine shaft before death and revolution was turned loose upon the land.
It was almost dark as Fergus MacDonald wheeled his bicycle into the shed and paused in the small backyard to slip the clips off the cuffs of his trousers, before going on to the kitchen door.
The smell of cooking cabbage filled the small room with a steamy moist cloud that made him pause and blink.
Helena was sitting at the kitchen table and she hardly glanced up as he entered. A cigarette dangled from her lips with an inch of grey ash clinging hopelessly to the end of it.
She still wore the grubby dressing-gown she had worn at breakfast, and it was clear that she had neither bathed nor changed since then. Her hair had grown longer and now dangled in oily black snakes to her cheeks. She had grown heavier in the last months, the line of her jaw blurring with a padding of fat and the hair on her upper lip darker and denser, breasts bulging and drooping heavily in the open front of the gown.
‘Hello then, love.’ Fergus shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it across the back of a kitchen chair. She turned the page of the pamphlet she was reading, squinting at the curl of blue smoke that drifted across her eyes.
Fergus opened a black bottle of porter and the gas hissed fiercely. ‘Anything happened today?’
‘Something for you,’ she nodded at the kitchen dresser, and the cigarette ash dropped down the front of her gown, settling in fine grey flakes.
Carrying the bottle, Fergus crossed to the dresser and fingered the buff envelope.
‘One of your popsies,’ Helena chuckled at the unlikeliness of her sally, and Fergus frowned and tore open the envelope.
He stared at the message for long uncomprehending seconds before he swore bitterly. ‘Jesus Christ!’ He slammed the bottle down on the kitchen table with a crash.
Even this late in the evening, there were small groups on each street corner. They had that disconsolate and bored air of men with too little to fill their days, even the commando drilling and the nightly meetings were beginning to pall. As Fergus MacDonald pedalled furiously through the darkening streets, his first alarm and fright turned to fierce exultation.
The time was right, they were as ready as they would ever be, if time drifted on without decisive action from either side, the long boring days of strike inactivity would erode their determination. What had seemed like disaster merely minutes before, he now saw was a heaven-sent opportunity. Let them come, we will be ready for them, he thought, and braked alongside a group of four loungers on the pavement outside the public bar of the Grand Fordsburg Hotel.
‘Get a message to all area commanders, they are to assemble at the Trade Hall immediately. It’s an emergency. Brothers, hurry.’
They scattered quickly, and he pedalled on up the rising ground of the dip, calling out his warning as he went.
In the Trade Union offices, there were still a dozen or so members; most of them were eating sandwiches and drinking Thermos tea, while a few worked on the issue of strike relief coupons to Union families, but the relaxed atmosphere changed as Fergus burst in.
‘All right, comrades, it’s beginning. The ZARPS1 are on their way.’
It was classic police tactics. They came in the first light of dawn. The advance guard rode down into the dip of land between Fordsburg and the railway crossing, where the Johannesburg road ran down between sleazy cottages and overgrown plots of open ground, thick with weeds and mounds of rotting refuse.
There was a heavy ground-mist in the dip, and the nine troopers on police chargers waded through it, as though fording the sluggish waters of a river crossing.
They had muted harness and muffled accoutrements, so that it was in ghostly silence that they breasted the softly swirling mists. The light was not yet strong enough to pick out their badges and burnished buttons, it was only the dark silhouette of their helmets that identified them.
Fifty yards behind the leading troopers followed the two police carriages. High four-wheelers with barred windows to hold prisoners, and beside each one of them marched ten constables. They carried their rifles at the slope, and were stepping out sharply to keep up with the carriages. As they entered the dip, the mist engulfed them, chest-high, so that their disembodied trunks bobbed in the white soft surface. They looked like strange dark sea-animals, and the mist muted the tramp of their boots.
Fergus MacDonald’s scouts had picked them up before they reached the railway crossing and for three miles had been pacing them, slipping back unseen ahead of the advance, runners reporting every few minutes to the cottage where Fergus had established his advance headquarters.
‘All right,’ Fergus snapped, as another of the dark figures ducked through the hedge of the sanitary lane behind the cottage and mumbled his report through the open window. ‘They are all coming in on the main road. Pull the other pickets out and get them here right away.’
The man grunted an acknowledgement and was gone. Fergus had his pickets on every possible approach to the town centre. The police might have split into a number of columns, but it seemed his precautions were unnecessary. Secure in the certainty of complete surprise and in overwhelming force, they were not bothering with diversion or flanking manoeuvres.
Twenty-nine troopers, Fergus calculated, together with the four drivers, was indeed a formidable force. More than sufficient, if it had not been for the warning from some unknown ally.
Fergus hurried through into the front parlour of the cottage. The family had been moved out before midnight, all the cottages along the road had been cleared. The grumpy squalling children in pyjamas carried on the shoulders of their fathers, the women with white frightened faces in the lamplight, bundling a few precious possessions with them as they hurried away.
Now the cottages seemed deserted, no lights showed, and the only sound was the mournful howling of a mongrel dog down in the dip. Yet in each cottage, at the windows that faced on to the road, silent men waited.
Fergus spoke to one of them in a whisper and he pointed down into the misty hollow, then spat and worked a round into the breech of the Lee-Enfield rifle which was propped on the windowsill.
The rifle bolt made a small metallic clash that lit a sparkle of memory and made the hair rise on Fergus’ neck. It was all so familiar, the silence, the mist and the night fraught with the menace of coming violence.
‘Only on my order,’ Fergus warned him softly. ‘Easy now, lads. Let them come right in the front door before we slam it on their heads.’
He could see the leading horsemen now, half a mile away but coming on fast in the strengthening light. It wasn’t shooting light yet, but the sky beyond the dark hills of the mine dumps was turning to that pale gull’s-egg blue that promised shooting light within minutes.
Fergus looked back at the road. The mist was an added bonus. He had not counted on that, but often when you did not call for fortune, she came a-knocking. The mist would persist until the first rays of the morning sun warmed and dispersed it – another half hour at least.
‘You all know your orders.’ Fergus raised his voice and they glanced at him, distracted for only a moment from their weapons and the oncoming enemy.
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They were all good men, veterans, blooded, as the sanguine generals of France would have it. It flashed through Fergus’ mind once again how ironical it was that men who had been trained to fight by the bosses were now about to tear down the structure which the bosses had trained them to defend.
‘We will tear down and rebuild,’ he thought, with exultation tingling in his blood. ‘We will destroy them with their own weapons, strangle them with their own dirty loot—’ he stopped himself, and pulled the dark grey cloth down over his eyes and turned up the collar of his coat.
‘Good luck to all of us, brothers,’ he called softly, and slipped out through the front door.
‘That old bugger has got guts,’ acknowledged one of the soldiers at the window.
‘You’re right, he ain’t afraid of nothing,’ agreed another, as they watched him dodge under the cover of the hedge and run forward until he reached the ditch beside the road, and jumped down into it.
There were a dozen men lying there below the lip, and as he dropped beside them, one of them handed him a pick-handle.
‘You strung that wire good and tight?’ Fergus asked, and the man grunted.
‘Tighter than a monkey’s arsehole,’ the man grinned wolfishly at him, his teeth glinting in the first soft light of morning. ‘And I checked the pegs meself – they’ll hold against a charging elephant.’
‘Right, brothers,’ Fergus told them. ‘With me when I give the word.’
And he lifted himself until he could see over the low blanket of mist. The troopers’ helmets bobbed in the mist as they came on up the slope, and now he could make out the sparkle of brass cap badges and see the dark stick-like barrels of their carbines rising above each right shoulder.
Fergus had paced out the ranges himself and marked them with pieces of rag tied to the telephone posts on the verge.
As they came up to the one-fifty-yard mark Fergus stood up from the ditch, and stepped into the middle of the road. He held his pick-handle above his head and shouted, ‘Halt! Stay where you are!’
His men rose out of the mist behind him and moved swiftly into position like a well-drilled team; dark, ominous figures standing shoulder to shoulder, blocking the road from verge to verge, holding their pick-handles ready across their hips, faces hidden by caps and collars.
The officer in the centre of the squadron of horsemen raised a hand to halt them and they bunched up and sat stolidly while the officer rose in his stirrups.
‘Who are you?’
‘Strikers’ Council,’ Fergus shouted back, ‘and we’ll have no scabs, black-legs or strike-breakers on this property!’
‘I am under orders from the Commissioner of Police, empowered by a warrant of the Supreme Court.’ The officer was a heavily built man, with a proud erect seat on his horse, and a dark waxed moustache with points that stuck out on each side of his face.
‘You’re strike-breakers!’ Fergus yelled. ‘And you’ll not set a foot on this property.’
‘Stand aside!’ warned the officer. The light was good enough now for Fergus to see that he wore the insignia of a Captain, and that his face was ruddy from sun and beer, his eyebrows thick and dark and beetling under the brim of his helmet. ‘You are obstructing the police. We will charge if we have to.’
‘Charge and be damned, puppets of imperialism, running dogs of capitalism—’
‘Troop, extend order,’ called the Captain, and the ranks opened for the second file to come up into a solid line. They sat on the restless horses, knee to knee.
‘Strike-breakers!’ yelled Fergus. ‘Your hands will be stained with the blood of innocent workers this day!’
‘Batons!’ called the Captain sternly, and the troopers drew the long oaken clubs from the scabbards at their knees and held them in the right hand, like cavalry sabres.
‘History will remember this atrocity,’ screamed Fergus, ‘the blood of the lamb—’
‘Walk, march! Forward!’ The line of dark horsemen waded forward through the mist as it swirled about their booted legs.
‘Gallop, charge!’ sang out the Captain, and the riders swung forward in their saddles, the batons extended along the horses’ necks, and they plunged forward; now the hooves drummed low thunder as they came down upon the line of standing figures.
The Captain was leading by a length in the centre of the line, and he went on to the wires first.
Fergus’ men had driven the steel jumper bars deep into the verge, pounding them in with nine-pound hammers, until only two feet of their six-foot length protruded, and they had strung the barbed wire across the road, treble strands pulled up rigid with the fencing strainers.
It cut the forelegs out from under the leading charger; the bone broke with a brittle snap, startlingly loud in the dawn, and the horse dropped, going over on to its shoulder still at full gallop.
An instant later the following wave of horsemen went on to the wire, and were cut down as though by a scythe, only three of them managing to wheel away in time. The cries of the men, and the screaming of the horses, mingled with the exultant yells of Fergus’ band as they ran forward, swinging their pick-handles.
One of the horses was up, riderless, its stirrups flapping, but it was pinned on its haunches, the broken forelegs flapping and spinning as it pawed in anguish at the air, its squeals high and pitiful above the cries of fallen men.
Fergus pulled the revolver out of the waist-band of his trousers, dodged around the crazed screaming animals and pulled the police Captain to his knees.
He had hit the ground with his shoulder and the side of his face. The shoulder was smashed, sagging down at a grotesque angle and the arm hanging twisted and lifeless. The flesh had been shaved from his face, ripped off by stone and gravel, so that the bone of his jaw was exposed in the mangled flesh.
‘Get up, you bastard,’ snarled Fergus, thrusting the pistol into the officer’s face, grinding the muzzle into the lacerated wound. ‘Get up you bloody black-leg. We’ll learn you a lesson.’
The three troopers who had escaped the wire had their mounts under control, and had circled to pick up their downed comrades, calling to them by name.
‘Grab a stirrup, Heintjie!’
‘Come on, Paul. Get up!’
Horses and men, milling and shouting and screaming in the mist, a savage confused conflict, above which Fergus raised his voice.
‘Stop them, don’t let the bastards get away,’ and his men swung the pick-handles, dodging forward under the police batons to thrust and hack at the horsemen, but they were not quick enough.
With men hanging from each stirrup leather, the horsemen reared and wheeled away, leaving only the badly hurt officer and another inert body lying among the wires and the terribly mutilated animals, while the police escort was doubling forward up the road in two columns.
Fergus saw them and fumed impatiently, trying to force his captive to his feet, but the man was hardly capable of sitting unaided.
The twenty constables stopped at fifty yards and one rank knelt, while the others fell in behind them, rifles at the ready. The command carried clearly.
‘One round. Warning fire!’
The volley of musketry crashed out. Aimed purposely high, it hissed and cracked over the heads of the strikers, and they scattered into the ditch.
For one moment, Fergus hesitated and then he pointed the pistol into the air and fired three shots in rapid succession. It was the agreed signal, and instantly a storm of rifle fire crashed from the silent cottages along the road, the muzzle flashes of the hidden rifles dull angry red in the dawn. The fire swept the road.
Fergus hesitated a second only and then he lowered the pistol. It was a Webley .455, a British officer’s sidearm. The police Captain saw his intention in his eyes, the merciless glare of the stooping eagle, and he mumbled a plea through his mangled lips, trying to lift hands to protect his face.
The pistol shot was lost in the storm of rifle fire from the cottages, and the answering police fire as they f
ell back in confusion into the dip.
The heavy lead bullet smashed into the Captain’s open pleading mouth, knocking the two front teeth out of his upper jaw, and then it plunged on into his throat and exited through the back of his skull in a scarlet burst of blood and bone chips, clubbing him down into the dirt of the roadway – while Fergus turned and darted away under the cover of the hedge.
Only at Fordsburg were the police raids repelled, for at the other centres there had been no warning, and the strikers had not taken even the most elementary precautions of placing sentries.
At the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, almost the entire leadership of the strike was assembled, meeting with the other unions who had not yet come out, but were considering sympathetic action. There were representatives of the Boilermakers’ Society, the Building and Allied Trades, the Typographical Union and half a dozen others – together with the most dynamic and forceful of the strikers. Harry Fisher was there, Andrews and Ben Caddy, and all the others.
The police were into the building while they were deep in dialectic, debating the strategy of the class struggle, and the first warning they had was the thunderous charge of booted feet on the wooden staircase.
Harry Fisher was at the head of the conference table, slumped down in his chair with his tangled wiry hair hanging on to. his forehead and his thumbs hooked in his braces, his sleeves rolled up around the thick hairy arms.
He was the only one to move. He leaned across the table and grabbed the rubber stamp of the High Council of Action and thrust it into his pocket.
As the rifle butts smashed in the lock of the Council Chamber, he leapt to his feet and thrust his shoulder into the shuttered casement. It burst open and, with surprising nimbleness for such a big man, he slipped through it.
The facade of the Trades Hall was heavily encrusted with fancy cast-iron grille work, and it gave him handholds. Like a bull gorilla, he swarmed up on to the third-floor ledge and worked his way to the corner.