'Miss Godolphin? At last,' he said, and his voice brought out a rush of goose-bumps down Tara's arms.
The rest of the day was spent in reconnaisance and the filming of more background material, this time with Moses as the central figure in each shot. The New Brighton township was typical of the South African urban locations, rows of identical low-cost housing laid out in geometric squares of narrow roads, some of them paved and others rutted and filled with muddy puddles in which the pre-school children and toddlers, many of them naked or dressed only in ragged shorts, played raucously.
Kitty filmed Moses picking his way around the puddles, squatting to talk to the children, lifting a marvellously photogenic little black cherub in his arms and wiping his snotty nose.
'That's great stuff,' Kitty enthused. 'He's going to look magnificent on film." The children followed Moses, laughing and skipping behind him as though he were the Pied Piper, and the women attracted by the commotion came out of the squalid little cottages. When they recognized Moses and saw the cameras, they began to ululate and dance.
They were natural actresses and completely without inhibition, and Kitty was everywhere, calling for shots and unusual camera angles, clearly delighted by the footage she was getting.
In the late afternoon the working men began to arrive back in the township by bus and train. Most of them were production-line workers in the vehicle assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, or factory-workers in the tyre companies of Goodyear and Firestone, for Port Elizabeth and its satellite town of Uitenhage formed the centre of the country's motor vehicle industry.
Moses walked the narrow streets with the camera following him, and he stopped to talk to the returning workers, while the camera recorded their complaints and problems, most of which were the practical everyday worries of making ends meet while remaining within the narrow lines demarcated by the forest of racial laws. Kitty could edit most of that out, but every one of them mentioned the 'show on demand' clause of the pass laws as the thing they hated and feared most. In every little vignette they filmed Moses Gama was the central heroic figure.
'By the time I've finished with him, he will be as famous as Martin Luther King,' Kitty enthused.
They joined the nuns for their frugal evening meal, and afterwards Kitty Godolphin was still not satisfied. Outside one of the cottages near the mission a family was cooking on an open fire, and Kitty had Moses join them, hunched over the fire in the night with the flames lighting his face, adding drama to his already massive presence as she filmed him while he spoke. In the background one of the women was singing a lullaby to the infant at her breast, and there were the murmurous sounds of the location, the soft cries of the children and the distant yapping of pariah dogs.
Moses Gama's words were poignant and moving, spoken in that deep thrilling voice, as he described the agony of his land and his people, so that Tara, listening to him in the darkness, found tears running down her face.
In the morning Kitty left her team at the mission, and without the camera the three of them, Kitty and Tara and Moses, drove in the Buick to the railway station that served the township and watched the black commuters swarm like hiving bees through the station entrance marked NON WHITES --, NIE BLANKES, crowding on to the platform reserved for blacks, and as soon as the train pulled in, flooding into the coaches set aside for them.
Through the other entrance, marked WHITES ONLY -- BLANKES ALLEENLIK, a few white officials and others who had business in the township sauntered and unhurriedly entered the first-class coaches at the rear of the train where they sat on green leathercovered seats and gazed out through glass at the black swarm on the opposite platform with detached expressions as though they were viewing creatures of another species.
'I've got to try and get that,' Kitty muttered. 'I've got to get that reaction on film." She was busily scribbling notes in her pad, sketching rough maps of the station layout and marking in camera sites and angles.
Before noon Moses excused himself. 'I have to meet the local organizers and make the final plans for tomorrow,' and he drove away in the Buick.
Tara took Kitty and the team down to the seaside at St George's Strand, and they filmed the bathers on the beaches lying under the signboards BLANKES ALLEENLIK -- WHITES ONLY. School was out and tanned young people, the girls in bikinis and the boys with short haircuts and frank open faces lolled on the white sand, or played beach games and surfed the rolling green waves.
When Kitty asked them, 'How would you feel if black pea151e came to swim here?" some of them giggled nervously at a question they had never considered before: 'They aren't allowed to come here - they've got their own beaches." And at least one was indignant. 'They can't come here and look at our girls in bathing-costumes." He was a beefy young man with seasalt caked in his sun-streaked hair and skin peeling from his sunburned nose.
'But wouldn't you look at the black girls in their bathing costumes?" Kitty asked innocently.
'Sis, man!" said the surfer, his handsome tanned features contorted with utter disgust at the suggestion.
'It's just too good to be true!" Kitty marvelled at her own fortune.
'I'll cut that in with some footage I've got of a beautiful black dancer in a Soweto night club." On the way back to the mission Kitty asked Tara to stop at the New Brighton railway station once again, for a final reconnaisanc› They left the cameras in the Packard and two white-uniformed railway constables watched them with idle disinterest as they wandered around the almost deserted platforms that during the rush hours swarmed with thousands of black commuters. Quietly Kitty pointed out to her team the locations she had chosen earlier, and explained to them what shots she would be striving for.
That night Moses joined them for the evening meal in the mission refectory, and though the conversation was light and cheerful, there was a hint of tension in their laughter. When Moses left, Tara went out with him to where the Buick was parked in the darkness behind the mission clinic.
'I want to be with you tonight,' she told him pathetically. 'I feel so alone without you." 'That is not possible." 'It's dark - we could go for a drive to the beach,' she pleaded.
'The police patrols are looking for just that sort of thing,' Moses told her. 'You would see yourself in the Sunday Times next week end." 'Make love to me here, please Moses,' and he was angry.
'Your selfishness is that of a spoilt child - you think only of your.
self and your own desires, even now when we are on the threshold all great events, you would take risks that could bring us down." Tara lay awake most of the night and listened to Kitty's peaceful breathing in the iron bed across the cell.
She fell asleep just before dawn, and awoke feeling nauseous and heavy, when Kitty leapt gaily out of bed in her pink striped pyjamas, eager for the day.
'June twenty-sixth,' she cried. 'The big day at last!" None of them took more than a cup of coffee for an early breakfast. Tara felt too sick and the others were too keyed up. Hank had checked his equipment the previous night, but now he went over it again before he loaded it into the Packard and they drove down to the railway station.
It was gloomy and the few street lights were still burning while under them the hordes of black commuters hurried. However, by the time they reached the station the first rays of the sun struck the entrance and the light was perfect for filming. Tara noticed that a pair of police Black Maria vans were parked outside the main entrance and instead of the two young constables who had been on duty the previous day, there were eight railway policemen in a group under the station clock. They were in blue uniform with black peaked caps and holstered sidearms on their polished leather Sam Browne belts. They all carried riot batons.
'They have been warned,' Tara exclaimed, as she parked across the street from the two vans. 'They are expecting trouble -just look at them." Kitty had twisted around and was giving last-minute instructions to Hank in the back seat, but when Tara glanced at her to assess her reaction to the waiting police, Romething about Kitty's expression and her inability to meet Tara's eyes made her pause.