A December Story

In the manner of Saki (H.H. Munro)

There is a wall in Montclair that has kept a secret for eighty years.

Not kept it in the way that walls keep secrets — through silence, through indifference, through the simple absence of a mouth. This wall has kept its secret the way a wound keeps a scar: visibly, permanently, and in defiance of every human effort to make it otherwise. Paint has been applied. Weather has worked its patient remedies. Eight decades have passed in the ordinary way that decades pass, carrying away everything they can carry.

The mark remains.

It belongs to Doreen Nutbeam. She was eleven years old, and she should have been home for Christmas.

December 1943 was a warm month in Durban, as December months in Durban reliably are. The city had the particular quality of a place that knows it is important and has, for the moment, chosen not to show it — its harbour dense with Allied shipping, its southern camp at Clairwood housing thousands of soldiers from across the British Empire, its suburbs going about the business of wartime domesticity with the conscious cheerfulness of people who have decided, by general agreement, to present a confident face to difficult circumstances.

The war, in the white suburbs of Natal, had a quality of moral clarity that wars rarely sustain on examination. It felt righteous and distant. Bunting flew. Collections were taken up. Children donated toys with the photogenic generosity of children who have been told they are doing something important.

In the newspapers, the word sacrifice appeared with great frequency, usually in sentences that were not written by the people doing the sacrificing.

Prime Minister Smuts had committed the Union fully to the Allied cause, which meant, among other things, that several thousand young men from the Royal Artillery were quartered at Clairwood with inadequate supervision, too much time, and proximity to a city whose civilian population had not entirely consented to the arrangement.

Most of them caused no trouble.

Sidney Bernard Smith absconded from the camp in the days before Christmas and encountered a girl named Doreen near St Stephen's Church on Anleno Road.

He caused considerable trouble.

Montclair in 1943 was the sort of suburb that prided itself on knowing its own character: quiet streets, familiar faces, the unhurried confidence of a neighbourhood that believed, with the comfortable certainty of the untested, that events of a certain kind happened elsewhere. To other places. To people who had made different choices.

The suburb would spend some time revising this belief after Christmas Eve.

What followed Smith's act was one of the largest manhunts Durban had seen — more than a thousand police officers and civilians pressing through the scrub and overgrowth of Montclair's back gardens with the grim systematic thoroughness of people who have stopped hoping they are wrong about what they are looking for. Streets went quiet. Doors locked in the daytime, which was not how Montclair doors had previously behaved. The sun continued to shine on the stoeps and the bougainvillea and the familiar angles of the rooftops with what struck some residents as a certain lack of editorial sensitivity.

Smith had not fled far. He had, in fact, retreated into the dense overgrowth behind the houses off Roland Chapman Drive and was lying in a hollow — a dip in the ground, a depression carved out by rain or simply by the earth's own inconsistencies — wearing a long shirt that hung about his bare legs in the fashion of a man whose circumstances have overtaken his wardrobe. His uniform was gone. His boots, perhaps, were somewhere in the scrub. He had the look, though no one who saw him that day described it quite this way, of a man who had reached the end of a very long calculation and found the answer unsatisfactory.