A Thriller Told Through the Eyes of a Six-Year-Old
Montclair, Durban, Natal Province — December 1943
If you walk along Anleno Road in Montclair today, you will find the Methodist Church still standing. Look at its outside wall.
The stain is still there.
Eighty years have not removed it. Paint has not covered it. Time, which erases so much, has left this particular mark alone.
It belongs to Doreen Nutbeam. She was eleven years old.
The Union of South Africa in December 1943 was a country at war — and Durban, its great eastern port, felt it more than most.
The city's harbour was thick with Allied shipping. Troops from across the British Empire moved through it in both directions — some arriving, some not returning. The Clairwood Military Camp on the city's southern edge housed thousands of soldiers, among them men of the Royal Artillery, far from home and poorly supervised.
Prime Minister Jan Smuts had committed the Union fully to the Allied cause. It was a popular war in the suburbs of Natal — bunting flew, collections were taken up, children donated toys. The war felt righteous and distant.
On Christmas Eve 1943, it arrived on the doorstep of Montclair.
Doreen Nutbeam was eleven years old and lived in Montclair, a quiet residential suburb of Durban set back from the coast, criss-crossed by familiar streets — Anleno Road, and the wider artery of Roland Chapman Drive.
She should have been home for Christmas.
She never made it.