Please God, which side is up? by Harris William;

Author:Harris, William;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
Published: 2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

The “Tabled” Cat

The African night was almost fully upon them. The cicadas had started their high pitched, continuous chittering; the paraffin lamp on the beer-splashed table was flickering low and the white kanzu-clad Kikuyu waiters stood discreetly out of earshot. The conspirators were deep in their whisky fuelled discussion. The cough of a lion in the darkness around them was noted but not remarked upon. They were sitting on the verandah of The Banda, a small lodge of a dozen or so one-storied rondavels close to the unfenced Nairobi game park. There was a dispirited and crumpled wire tapestry around the area but it could not possibly justify being called a fence. It would not have kept out a domestic pussycat never mind a lion.

Not that this disturbed the three old Africa hands at the table. They were white colonials, used to the sounds of the bush and they were also far too deeply involved in a conspiracy of revenge. Astonishingly, the subject of their intense discussion was in fact the pussycat and not the lions and leopards hunting innocent, frightened life out there in the darkness beyond them.

Disembowelled domestic cats were the latest Mau Mau symbol for terror. Hung on the gatepost of an isolated farm or occasionally carefully placed by the courageous in the silence of the night at the front door of the farmhouse, the dead cat and its bloody entrails gave notice to the white occupants that they were next on the list for murder and mayhem.

The three conspirators, all of them senior journalists and therefore designated as observers and not participants, were thoroughly pissed off with this enforced role. Action, dramatic action, was called for and who better than three men trained in their different spheres as part of Britain’s military elite?

There was big and burly Jack who was editor of the Sunday Post and formerly stood amid shot and shell as a young Beach Master on D-Day’s blood soaked Normandy sand -“Don’t remember much about it really, except the noise. Got out of it without a scratch. No war wound to boast about.”

And the tall, slim, elegant Ron who was an assistant editor and columnist on the Sunday Nation, a glider pilot who landed at Arnhem and endured the subsequent hell of a battering by German panzers – “I don’t remember feeling scared after we landed but I couldn’t stop my hands trembling. I mean they were all over the place, out of control no matter what I said to them. A para thrust a Sten gun at me and told me to fire it. I couldn’t see anybody to shoot at but I poked it out in front of me and shot at some trees. Then it was OK – well, sort of OK.”

Then there was me, average build, News Editor of the Daily Nation and, as you already know, only a couple of years out of National Service with 3 Commando Brigade – never heard a shot fired in anger so no worthy comment available.

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