A SONG IN THE MORNING by Gerald Seymour

Author:Gerald Seymour [Seymour, Gerald]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-03-25T21:00:52.968000+00:00

Jacob Thiroko had heard the news of the John Vorster Square bomb on the radio in the morning.

He was astounded. He had thought in terms of an unguarded civil administration building, a noisy gesture simply. John Vorster Square was something else…

He had heard on the radio that the attacker had picked his moment to charge through an opened gate, hurl his bomb, and then escape under the nose of an armed sentry. An attack with the spontaneity of passion, nothing that was cold and predetermined. Thiroko recognised the extent of the danger. The most feared soldier was the man who was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.

Thiroko thought that he had gambled hugely on Carew's son, and the boy had repaid him by throwing a bomb into the most hated institution on the whole of the East Transvaal.

The radio had said that long into the night there had been crowds on the streets of Soweto cheering the success of the attack, jeering at the police in their Casspirs who had come to disperse them with gas and birdshot.

The Indian owner of the safe house had long since gone about his business of selling motor car accessories when Thiroko came down stairs. In the kitchen he ate a slice of toast and drank strong coffee prepared for him by the Indian's wife. He ate increasingly little. Easier not to eat.

His suitcase was packed, his room ready for another guest. He said his goodbyes to the Indian's wife, and left her home, and walked slowly with his suitcase to the Finchley Central underground station. For the first time since he had arrived in London he journeyed to the offices of the African National Congress. A terraced house in a side street off the Pentonville Road. A heavy green door beside windows covered with close mesh that was proof against firebombs.

He endured the back slapping greeting of the London comrades—blacks and Indians and whites. He elbowed his way with little grace through the earnest congratulations of those who fought the regime from trenches that were separated from the battlefield by thirteen hours' flying. A small few he trusted. A great many he regarded with contempt. Thiroko was a military man. These were the pamphleteers and the speakers at fringe meetings, and the dreamers who said that the total revolution was at hand and that power was at the corner to be grasped. Thiroko was at home in the training camps of northern Angola, or with the young people of the Solomon Mahlangu school in Tanzania, or with the fighters when they retired across the Botswana border to rest up in black Africa. He thought they were all communists in the London office. They were the men and women with whom he hardly cared to pass the day. There was one man in the terraced house with whom he would have entrusted his life. A man who was old, a skinny tent pole with the pebble-rolling accent of Hungary, a man they all called

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