2017
Train to Start
January 1969 call-up. Durban. The thronged railway station. Mothers smiling with moist eyes. Fathers giving dad-like friendly punches on the upper arms. Conversations limited, but intentions good. A few girlfriends and sisters teasing them about how their long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, would soon be lying on the barbershop floor.
They’d heard there were similar trains going from other parts of the country that same day, and for the next two days. This was the week when it would all start. A new phase.
Their own destination: Kimberley. They would be off-loaded from the trains into army Bedfords and taken to Danie Theron Combat School. Most of them were 17 years old, straight out of school barely a month before, and many would be due back home for the start of university at the end of the month. After three long and tough weeks in basic training. Weeks tough enough to shake their mothers out of them, in the words of the uniformed corporal on the platform.
‘You guys are going to kak off once you’re in uniform. You’ll think school was a picnic. Ever made your own bed? Cleaned your own toilet? You wait. You gonna die, man.’
Seventeen. Not old enough to vote. Not old enough to drive. But old enough to kill, the same corporal would tell them once he had them on parade, away from their parents.
‘So start thinking like a man. Otherwise die. Maybe with a bayonet in you. Grow up. Now. And do what you’re told.’
Someone on the platform said, as station officials started becoming animated, that this corporal was nothing compared to what they would experience in Kimberley.
‘Ja. This guy is actually quite pleasant compared to some of them,’ one older brother agreed. ‘You should have seen the guys we had.’
The whistles blew. The platform started to empty. They packed them in. Inappropriate suitcases were stowed, crammed, squashed and damaged. Strangers found themselves seated next to strangers, squeezed and pushed and shoved together like the pilchards his mom had shaken from the tin into the salad last night.
The train chugged out of the station. Those with families that had come to see them off leaned for one last time out of the windows. The anxiety-ameliorating cheerful babble in the compartments started to settle down as the train picked up speed, and as many of them started to contemplate life away from mom and dad.
I journey on a bleeding train.
He stared out of the window at the grimy back-ends of buildings he had only ever seen from the streets. He remembered his best friend’s first attempt at writing poetry, at school. He had felt embarrassed on that occasion, talking to him about poetry. Talking about it outside English class, anyway. Seemed a weird thing to do, two guys talking about stuff like that. But he liked what Robert had read to him on that occasion. Maybe you had to be deeply troubled to write poetry, like old Rob seemed to be. He wondered why he, himself, had never tried. He had thought some of the stuff, of course, but had never written it down.
The individuals started to emerge from the mass of sardines packed into the compartments. They began to position themselves in relation to one another. The wise-guys. The jokers. The confident ones. The athletes and rugby stars, the cricketers and the football players. The girl-conquerors. As the train sped past the distant suburbs, new alliances started forming. Over the hours, with each stop where they were permitted to hop quickly onto the station platform to buy a coke or a snack, those alliances firmed up as packets of crisps and peanuts were shared and sips from another’s bottle were occasionally allowed.
The tall gangly guy named Schultz gradually built a reputation, one that would sustain him throughout his sojourn in Kimberley and into the next four or five camps elsewhere in Natal, before the formula would eventually wear thin in one miserable camp in the bush four years later when one of his buddies would scream at him to stop joking and start thinking for once. But that was in the future. For now, he was the man. Have you heard this guy’s jokes? He would oblige whenever someone urged him: Tell him the one about... and they laughed, and shared their crisps with him, and offered him swigs of coke from their bottles. More people arrived from neighbouring compartments, to find the cause of the roars and the guffaws. Schultz was the man.
Every now and then there was a pause in the levity, and a moment of silence. Occasional bouts of thinking.
One of them said he’d heard the permanent force guys were starting to kak themselves because of this bullshit in South-West Africa, man. Others mentioned, without any real knowledge, big things happening in Angola and Mozambique, too. One talked briefly about Mozambique, but when he realised he was unable to link his comments to the subject under discussion, he switched to ...delicious lobsters, okes, I’m telling you, my old man says they’re the best in the world. In response to a question he told them he himself didn’t know much about the place. But he’d heard, you know, from his dad? And I listen to LM Radio a helluva lot.
Angola. South-West Africa. Portugal. One or two even used the word ‘Namibia’ rather than ‘South-West’, and attracted glances that read: Communist. One guy attracted hushed admiration and knowing nods by mentioning the name Jonas Savimbi. I hear he’s a really scary oke, from another voice in the passageway, produced another few moments of silence.
The talk moved from there to questions about the training that faced them. Would they learn karate? Bayonets? Hand-to-hand? It’s a good thing to learn how to defend yourself. You know, in case some guy breaks in and ... well, you know. Someone else said they were looking forward to the rifle range. They had already had some experience, because their dad had taught them
