Mukiwa by Peter Godwin

Author:Peter Godwin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1996-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

Book Two

Twelve

The training camp for white police officers, Morris Depot, was in the Avenues, round the corner from the president’s residence, not far from St George’s. I’d been there once from school, to Camp Hospital to have my police medical. Some boys at school had heard that the tests would include one where the nurse scooped up your balls in a cold metal spoon and then asked you to cough, to see if they retracted properly. This was apparently an important test to see if you were man enough. Man enough for what, I wondered uneasily as I reported to Camp Hospital. The matron was sternly middle-aged, with grey wings to her hair, and an unembarrassable air.

Take your shoes and shirt off,’ she said, when it was finally my turn. ‘Oh, and loosen your trousers.’

I unbuckled my belt warily and she approached me, brandishing a sort of spoon. Here goes, I thought, and unzipped my flies for the testicle spoon.

‘Stick your tongue out and say “ah”,’ she said, and brought the spatula not to my crotch, but up to my mouth.

There was a battery of tests after that. She weighed me and measured me, x-rayed me, checked my eyesight and my lung capacity, took urine and blood samples, and made sure I didn’t have flat feet.

Soon I was lying back on the hard surgery bed, where an elderly doctor felt my spleen, prodded my liver, tapped my ribcage, and listened to my heart with his stethoscope. He was shining his torch into my eyes, and pulling the lids down and peering in at my eyeballs, when suddenly he slid his cold hand down my loosened waistband. I let out an involuntary squawk.

‘It’s all right, relax,’ he soothed, and pressed his fingers above and slightly to the side of my balls. ‘Now cough.’

‘Uhuh, uhuh,’ I coughed, rather pathetically.

‘No, boy, cough properly,’ he insisted irritably. I coughed again, and he removed his hand and ticked something on his clipboard.

‘What’s it for?’ I asked.

‘To check for your proneness to hernia, boy. We can’t have you in the Force if your guts are going to be popping out now, can we?’

To get into the police, you had to be at least 5ft 9in., 140 pounds and have good eyesight, a driving licence, and at least six O levels. In our year, though, they raised the academic requirement to three A levels, because of the large number of candidates. You also had to pass an interview. Finally, I got an acceptance letter ordering me to report to Morris Depot and informing me of my regimental number. Quite a few of the applicants from St George’s got ‘regret to inform you’ letters, so the five of us who had been accepted felt pretty chuffed, fancying ourselves as an elite.

With the acceptance letter came a little booklet on the origins and traditions of the British South Africa Police. The BSAP, said the booklet, was the country’s senior service, raised in 1889 to protect the first pioneer column trekking up from South Africa.

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