Three water-cannons rumbled past, and disappeared through the jumble of parked vehicles towards the next street. From time to time we heard more shots, and the sound of voices raised angrily. Occasionally, the explosions were deeper and more powerful, and slowly a red glow brightened near by. More army lorries and police vans arrived, and the men inside ran towards the street. We at our barricade said nothing, only too aware of the flagrant provocation and absolute inadequacy that our solitary shotgun represented. It was kept fully loaded, but out of sight. At that time, I would not have liked to be the man in possession of it.
We waited at the barricade all night, listening to the sounds of the battle only fifty yards away. As dawn came, the noise gradually lessened. We saw the bodies of several soldiers and policemen carried away, and many more wounded driven off in ambulances.
As the full light of day came, nearly two hundred white people, some dressed in only their nightclothes, were escorted by the police towards a fleet of ambulances and lorries a mile away. As they passed our barricade, some of them tried to argue with us, but were herded on by the soldiers. While they passed, I looked at the men on our side of the barricade and wondered whether the hard lack of expression was also on my own face.
We waited for the activity outside to die down, but the sound of gunfire continued spasmodically for many hours. We saw no normal traffic on the road, and assumed that it had of necessity been diverted. One of the men at our barricade was carrying a transistor radio, and we listened anxiously to each of the BBC’s news-bulletins hoping to hear some word of reassurance.
By ten o’clock it was apparent that events had levelled off. Most of the police vehicles had driven away, but the army was still around us. About once every five minutes there was a gunshot. A few houses in the next street were still burning, but there was no sign of the fires spreading.
As soon as I could manage it I slipped away from the barricade, and walked back to my house.
I found Isobel and Sally still sheltering under the stairs. Isobel had withdrawn almost entirely; she had lost all her colour, the pupils of her eyes were dilated and she slurred her speech when she spoke. Sally was no better. Their story was a garbled and incomplete recounting of a series of events they had experienced at secondhand: explosions, shouting voices, gunfire and the spreading crackle of burning wood … all heard as they lay in the dark. While I made them some tea and warmed up some food, I inspected the damage to the house.
A petrol-bomb had exploded in the garden, setting fire to our shed. All the windows at the back had been broken, and lodged in the walls I found several bullets. Even as I stood in the back room a bullet flew through the window and missed me by a few inches.
I crawled on my hands and knees to the window, and peered through.
Our house normally commanded a view across the intervening gardens to the houses in the next street. As I knelt there, I saw that of them only about a half were still intact. Through the windows of some of these I could see several people moving. One man, a short Negro in filthy clothes, stood in the garden sheltering behind a part of a fence. It was he who had fired his gun at me. As I watched he fired again, this time at the house next to mine.
When Isobel and Sally had dressed, we took the three suitcases we had packed the previous week and I put them in the car. While Isobel went through the house and systematically locked all interconnecting doors and cupboards, I collected our cash.
Shortly afterwards, we drove down to the barricade. Here we were stopped by the other men.
“Where do you think you’re going, Whitman?” one of them asked me. It was Johnson, one of the men with whom I had shared a patrol three nights before.
“We’re leaving,” I said. “We’re going to Isobel’s parents.” Johnson reached in through the open window, turned off the ignition before I could stop him, and took the key.
“Sorry,” he said. “No one leaves. If we all ran out, the niggers’d be in like a flash.”
Several of the men had crowded round. By my side, I felt Isobel tense. Sally was in the back. I didn’t care to think how this may be affecting her.
“We can’t stay here. Our house overlooks those others. It’s only a matter of time before they come through the gardens.”
I saw several of the men glance at one another. Johnson, whose house wasn’t on the same side as ours, said stubbornly: “We’ve got to stick together. It’s our only hope.”
Isobel leaned over me and looked up at Johnson imploringly. “Please,” she said. “Have you thought of us? What about your own wife? Does she want to stay?”
“It’s only a matter of time,” I said again. “You’ve seen the pattern in other places. Once the Afrims have got a street to themselves, they spread through the rest of the district in a few nights.”
“But we’ve got the law on our side,” one of the other men said, nodding his head in the direction of the soldiers outside the barricade.
“They’re not on anyone’s side. You might as well pull down the barricade. It’s useless now.”
Johnson moved away from the car-window and went to speak to one of the other men. It was Nicholson, one of the leaders of the patrol committee. After a few seconds, Nicholson himself came over.
“You’re not leaving,” he said finally. “No one’s leaving. Get the car away from here and come back on barricade duty. It’s all we can do.”
He tossed the ignition-key in, and it fell on Isobel’s lap. She picked it up. I wound the window-handle and closed the window tightly.
As I started the engine, I said to Isobeclass="underline" “Do you want to chance it?”
She looked at the men in front of us, and at the barbed-wire barricade, and at the armed soldiers beyond it. She said nothing.
Behind us, Sally was crying. “I want to go home, Daddy,” she said.
I turned the car round and drove back slowly to our house. As we passed one of the other houses on the same side of the street as our own, we heard the sound of a woman screaming inside. I glanced at Isobel, and saw her close her eyes.
I stopped the car by the house. It looked strangely normal. We sat in the car and made no move to get out. I left the engine running. To turn it off would have been too final.
After a while I put the car into forward gear and drove down to the end of the street, towards the recreation-field. When the barricade had been erected at the main-road end, only two strands of wire had been put across here, and it was normally unmanned. So it was now. There was no one around; like the rest of the street it was at once unnervingly normal and abnormal. I stopped the car, jumped out and pulled down the wire. Beyond it was a wooden fence, held in place by a row of stakes. I tried it with my hands, and found that it was firm but not immovable.
I drove the car over the wire and stopped with the bumper bar touching the wooden fence. In first gear I pushed the fence, until it snapped and fell. In front of us the recreation-field was deserted. I drove across it, feeling the car lurch in and out of the ruts of the previous year’s sport.
I pulled myself out of the water and lay gasping for breath on the bank of the river. The physical shock of the cold water had exhausted me. Every part of my body ached and throbbed. I lay still.
Five minutes later I stood up, then looked back across the water to where Isobel and Sally were waiting for me. I walked upstream, carrying the end of the rope I had towed behind me, until I was directly opposite them. Isobel was sitting on the soil of the bank, not watching me but staring blankly downstream. By her side, Sally stood attentively.