No Country to Call Their Own - Dishonoured In the Land of Their Birth - The Sequel to Chameleon Mountain

No Country to Call Their Own

So this over concentration (of the coloured people) in the Western Cape is not working for them. They should spread to the rest of the country.

Jimmy Manyi in an interview on KykNet in 2010. At the time he was director-general of the Department of Labour, and president of the Black Business Forum.

* * * * *

I now know who Nelson Mandela was talking about when he said from the dock that he had fought against white domination and he had fought against black domination. Jimmy, he was talking about fighting against people like you.

Trevor Manuel in an open letter to the press in 2011. At the time he was a cabinet minister in the presidency.

PROLOGUE

There had been happier times, before the road came snaking down into the valley, inexorably boring into the fabric of their lives as they were exposed to the prejudice of the outside world. They had been innocent of any unhealthy distinction of race and class until the persecutors arrived with the assistance of a gravel road.

He remembered the happy days with a poignancy that lingered. Sometimes it was only those memories that sustained his will to go on, gave him a base to return to when he thought the world was crazy, crazy and so unfair he could rip his heart out.

Here he was halfway through his allotted three score and ten years, hundreds of kilometres from the valley of his youth, sitting on a hard chair on the narrow verandah of a small house squatting on a tract of flat sand between the majesty of mountains far distant.

How had this come to pass?

He knew the answer and this preoccupation of the past, this bitterness that soured his stomach and his relationships, was not something he welcomed or even honoured too much nowadays.

He couldn’t afford it. He had a mission now, was caught up in a movement to rectify the mistakes of the past, to restore the pride and the wealth of all the people.

And he had his children to consider: his two girls and his boy. They had been born into this aberrant world, but he truly believed they would see the other side of racial domination, perhaps within a decade, and he wanted to prepare them, make them ready for the day when they could take their place in society as equals.

They must not harbour his bitterness, not see the shame he felt on being discarded so many years ago in the ironically pretty town of Prince Albert.

Man, this bitterness was acid.

Why couldn’t he discard it? Think of something else. Think of that first meeting in the Rocklands Community Centre. What energy! There were some wonderful people there, people of all races: leaders, visionaries, men and women who could inspire with the hope of a better life.

A tremor of fear came and went. Yes, he had to fight the fear. The state would use all their many and cruel means to put the movement down. They had to keep it inclusive, fight on, remain determined and, yes, even cheerful, optimistic for the change, for the final goal of a nation without fear and prejudice, a nation for all her peoples, descendants of all the diverse cultures that came to this place they called South Africa.

Thought of the name of his country brought the words and rhythm of the national anthem to mind, the words he used to sing in the school hall in Oudtshoorn at assembly, the words they believed until they realised those words and their promise truly referred to only one race. It was their blue sky and deep sea, not his. He was denied his birth right to God-created nature.

He remembered going to Newlands to watch the All Blacks play the Springboks. He sat with others given his epithet by the state, his label, hundreds of them, men who loved their rugby but jeered at the anthem and cheered the team from across the Indian Ocean, the enemy under normal times, in a normal society.

Afterwards the boere taunted them, their eyes burning with the fire of zealous fervour, calling them traitors to their country and they shouted back, Whose country? Not ours. Yours! Yours, while you treat us like pigs, we who were here before you.

He had shouted back with the best of them but it was shameful, really. He who had been an aspirant Springbok all those years ago in his innocent times, he was cheering for a foreign country to beat his revered Springboks.

It was undignified, mass hatred, fuelled by the beer and the wine. Something he, as a former teacher of children, should not have allowed himself to be drawn into. He was supposed to be amongst those who set the example. What if his son had seen him bellowing red-faced at those who ridiculed them, the representatives of the hated regime?

What an upside-down country.

THE VALLEY  ||  Chapter One

As we approached the huts, a shaggy giant in goatskins appeared and spoke to us in some outlandish Dutch. He was a white man named Cordier, who lived here with his wife and a brood of half-wild children, in complete isolation from the outside world.

Deneys Reitz. Commando.

* * * * *

At the western end of Gamkaskloof, just before the river, stands a cottage that has been in the family for over a century, since Benji Baartman bought it from the Erasmus family in 1850. It has been much added to, first by Benji, who had a carpenter’s skill, and then by his son, Dan.

Isaac, the son of Dan, had lived there at first when he came to the valley, some said to escape his demons.

When his son, Walter, was married he was given the house. Isaac had built himself a new home in the truncated valley across the river where he lived a reclusive life, happy that the periodic flooding of the river denied access to people who might intrude on his solitude.

It was in Walter’s cottage that a son was born the week before Christmas in 1947. They named him Falk, because there was a falcon hunting rock pigeons above the home on that day, its prehistoric screech a backdrop to the cries of the mother and the first bawl of the son.

He was their first child and was, sadly, to be their only child for his mother, Stephanie, conceived with difficulty and lost three babies in the first three months after conception and then never fell pregnant again.

Walter was an angry man, given to melancholy. The inability to produce more children was just another reason to immerse himself in self-pity. But the primary cause of his fractious and intemperate nature was due to the circumstances of his birth and upbringing.

And for that he blamed his father.

Isaac Baartman had tried hard to meet the expectations of his parents. They were wonderful people, his parents: father Dan, the businessman and guerrilla fighter; mother, Josie, so strong and loving. The years in the gentle arms of the mountains that surrounded their farm, Rooikrantz, should have healed his fear of life.

He was twenty-two when he told them he was going to live in the family cottage in Gamkaskloof. They were devastated, had not read the extent of the damage wrought by the war, and also wondered if it was not the conflagration starting in Europe that scared him. They could do nothing to dissuade him.

The first four years in the valley, before the troubles descended on him, were the happiest of his adult life. He raised goats and came to grudgingly admire the animals for their independence. They demanded nothing of him.

He did not enter the social life of the valley except for his observance of the Sabbath when he attended the church service, held at the school. He normally escaped straight after the service but he also had a young man’s healthy appetite for female company and occasionally he lingered.

There was a young woman who piqued his interest for she was known to be of loose morals and he fantasised about the meaning of that judgment. Her name was Faith, an unsuitable name, it seemed, and also not appropriate to her physical being, for she had a look in her eye and a lascivious smile that awakened the devil in Isaac.

He would never have done anything about it for he was far too insecure to make overtures.

That didn’t stop her making the first move. The Baartman family was famous in the valley. Benji was a hero who stopped the taxman coming into the valley. Dan was the most famous man to have left the valley for he became a member of the Cape Parliament and was said to have accumulated vast wealth on the Kimberley diamond fields.

And to add to the allure, the Baartman men were all fine looking, with good physiques and the bluest of eyes. Isaac was no different. Although, in him, his retiring nature disguised some of his physical attributes.

On a hot, midsummer day he was bathing in the Gamka River when she appeared on the bank. He was swimming nude, not out of a sense of adventure, but because no-one ever came to that stretch of the river.

He had not seen her until she called cheerfully.

Hallo, Isaac Baartman. So this is where ye hide.

He was mortified at his nakedness, hidden though it was in the deep water, and astounded that she would have come walking all the way from her home, a distance of more than a mile.

What are you doing here?

I’ve come to see ye. Are you not pleased?

Please go away, Faith.

Ah, I see. Have ye no clothes on, Isaac?

Please, Faith I beg you, please go away.

That’s not polite. I’ve come all this way to see ye. Do you not like me?

It’s not that, Faith. I’m embarrassed.

If that’s the case, ye should be embarrassed for a proper reason.

Faith Willemse affected the dress of the younger women in the valley who had taken to wearing long skirts and blouses rather than the pinafore-type shift dresses, long and shapeless, worn by the matrons. She began unbuttoning her blouse.

What are you doing?

I’m undressing for ye. If ye be naked then it’s fitting that I be too.

He protested no more and could not look away as she revealed herself, although his training told him it was not polite for him to stare at the naked body of a woman.

When she was completely undressed, she stood face-on to him and raised her arms.

Do ye like what ye see, Isaac Baartman?

She had a wonderful figure, slim of waist and limb, and he took it all in but mostly he was aroused by the sight of her abundant dark pubic hair against the alabaster whiteness of her skin.

He said nothing, was incapable of speech. It had become her show.

Well, come out now. I can’t follow ye for I can’t swim.

Was she really inviting him out of the water? That could only mean she wanted to make love to him. That thought made him weak but also paradoxically emboldened him, and he left the water despite his acute embarrassment at the physical manifestation of his desires.

After that day she came many times, not turned off by his first clumsy efforts at lovemaking. At first he was pleased and did not reject her, for he had never known a woman intimately before her. But, in time, her shallowness of knowledge and self-centred interest overcame his lust and he began to wish he could find a way to break the union.

It was too late.

He found she was pregnant when a delegation of Willemses visited him: father, three brothers, and Faith, keeping in the background. The father did all the talking.

Ye’ve impregnated my daughter, Isaac Baartman.

He was mortified and looked to her for a word or a sign but she gave him back nothing.

His response was weak.

I didn’t know. I’m sorry.

Sorry is not good enough. Action is what I want. What will ye do?

I’ll pay my way. I’ll pay for the child to be raised.

Pay, be damned! It’s not paying that a child wants in this world, it’s a father and a proper home.

He knew he should be cautious. They might beat him. But that would not cause him to make a commitment and he feared not the wrath of those men. It was the moral dilemma that occupied his thoughts as he stood there silent before them. A child of his own. That was something he never believed could be possible. He had steeled himself to living alone for the rest of his days but now he was to father another person in his likeness. The thought was alluring and in the end, irresistible.

The father blustered.

Come on then, speak up.

He was still working it out and finally came to a conclusion. When he spoke it was in strength.

I’ll marry your daughter on one condition, Meneer Willemse. If she ever leaves me, the child stays with me. She must sign a paper to that effect.

Whether it was those conditions, so impossible for a mother to accept unless she did not care, or whether she grew bored of her life with a reclusive man, Faith stayed only two years after the boy was born before she left Gamkaskloof with a man from the valley, and never returned.

It was a blessing for him but not for their son, Walter.

Chapter Two

Despite the stern nature of his father, young Falk Baartman was a happy child, and for that credit had to be given to the character and love of his mother.

Stephanie nee Cordier was of pioneer stock. Her family were one of the first to come to the valley in the early nineteenth century. Some might call the Cordier family backward in not embracing modern ideas, such that did trickle into the valley. But none would deny that they were hard workers and Stephanie, like all the sons and daughters, was put to work in the fields even before she went to school.

She was a pleasant looking woman, with regular features. But she was not pretty in the accepted sense, and her broad shoulders and calloused hands spoke of the work she had done from childhood. Nevertheless, in all other qualities admired in a woman she was a gem: selfless, loving, loyal and kind.

The finest act of Walters’s short life was to recognise those qualities and win her for his wife. And for seeing beyond her mere physical qualities, Stephanie adored her husband and would not hear a bad word against him.

Because of the loving attention of his mother, Falk was not badly affected by his father’s increased desire for isolation and his periodic anxiety attacks. Walter was becoming like his father before him and did not leave the valley once in the years after the birth of his son.

In earlier years, Walter had left the valley with some frequency, often precipitated by an argument with his father. On those occasions he went to Rooikrantz, the farm owned by his grandparents.

The first time he did so he was only eleven years of age, and it was testament to his physical prowess and horsemanship that he went alone, taking the route through the gorges northwards along the Gamka River, and then eastwards to the farm. It was a full day’s travel when the river was not in spate.

That first time Isaac came to fetch him, embarrassed and angry at the obvious rejection of his son. When it happened again Isaac waited for the son to make the decision to return, impotent to make his son love him, and unable to embrace the world for the benefit of the boy.

Walter stayed away for months at a time.

Isaacs’s parents, Dan and Josie, were distraught at the lack of connection between their son and grandson, and did their best to mend the rift. But they were not the worst affected by the breach between father and son. It was Isaac’s sister, Tess, only two years older than him, who watched and cried within.

Tess and Isaac had experienced the war together. They were only seven and nine, respectively, when they witnessed the murder of their brother, Robert, on the banks of the Orange River, and then experienced the horror of the British camps in Bloemfontein and Springfontein. Like her brother, Tess had also struggled to come to grips with normal life after the war, despite their parents’ efforts to reduce the damage to their psyches.

Tess waited until Walter was in his teens before broaching the subject of the war as the reason for Isaac’s behaviour. She suggested they take a walk through the fig orchards to get them out of the house and the hearing of her parents.

Has your dad told you about the war between the Boers and the British, Walter?

No, Aunt Tess.

That’s a pity, for it would help you understand him better. Would you like to hear about your father’s and my experiences during the war?

I’m not sure.

I think it might help you.

Okay, you can tell me.

"When the war started, your grandmother, your dad, our brother Robert, and I went to our farm on the Orange River near Kimberley. Your grandfather went to fight in the war on the side of the Boers.

Do you know about your Uncle Robert?

No, Aunty.

Tess was saddened that her brother had not even told his boy the basic family history.

Robert was a wonderful boy. He was clever and strong and my, could he shoot! He was the oldest of us and when the war started he was eleven, three years older than me and five older than your dad.

Why hasn’t my dad told me about him, Aunty?

"I don’t know, Walter. But maybe it’s because of what I’m about to tell you. You see, Robert was killed that first year of the war. Some British soldiers came to the farm and Robert thought he had to defend his family, even though he was so young. They shot him. We all saw him dead because we ran to where he was lying on the ground.

It was the worst moment of my life and I think it was even worse for your dad because a son always thinks he should defend his family. I think your dad was ashamed that he hadn’t helped Robert, even though he was only seven at the time.

Tess could see the boy’s interest in the story. That, at least, was a good beginning.

Your dad never told you about the camps either, did he?

No. What were the camps?

The British put the Boer women and children and some old men into concentration camps. They took them off the farms because they didn’t want them to help their men fight the war.

What’s a concentration camp?

It was a camp of tents, Walter, hundreds of tents put together to imprison us. They had soldiers guarding us and they kept us there, even though we wanted to go home. It was horrible in those camps. The food was awful, often rotten, and everything was dirty. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food or water and we went without for days. We couldn’t wash properly. Many got sick and many of us died, especially the children.

That’s awful, Aunt Tess. How long were you in those places?

About two years.

Did any of your friends die there?

Yes, many. It got so that we didn’t want to make friends for they could die and that would make us even sadder. The one who affected us most was your Aunt Mary’s mother. I’m not sure if you know this, Walter, but Mary was adopted by your grandfather and mother after the war for she’d lost both her mother in the camps and her father in the war.

Tess waited for the questions.

I know why you’re telling me this, Aunt Tess. I’m sorry but it doesn’t help me much. Why didn’t my father tell me? He doesn’t care enough to tell me these things.

Do you think that’s why he didn’t tell you?

Yes, I do.

I know for a fact, Walter, that he can’t tell anyone about those days. The only way he can deal with those memories is to pretend it didn’t happen. Can you understand him doing that?

No I can’t. How can anyone do that?

I’ve studied these things Walter, because I was a little like your dad. If things are really terrible, sometimes your brain just switches them off. Your brain won’t let you see those things because they bring you such pain, and you can’t do anything about it, really.

Walter thought about what had been said, and his aunt could see he was taking her words seriously, but then a look of stubbornness came over him.

Why did he chase my mother away?

She was horrified at that interpretation. Tess had met Faith and had seen her shallowness and knew her lack of love for husband or son.

Do you think your dad chased her away?

Yes, my grand pappy Willemse told me.

Oh Walter, I’m sorry he told you that. It’s just not true. Your dad would never have chased her away.

Then why did she leave me?

That was impossible to answer without killing the love of son for mother.

I don’t know, Walter. But I promise you, your dad did not chase her away.

It was an unsatisfactory end to the discussion between aunt and nephew. She knew Walter would reflect on what he had learned but, because of the lack of tears, the lack of any strong emotional reaction, she wondered if his attitude towards his father would change.

Unfortunately, her fears were correct. Walter never reconciled with his father.

Even Falk, shielded as he was by his mother, and with the distraction of his first year at school, realised something significant had changed for his father. He heard his parents talking in the early hours of the morning: his father’s tone anxious, his mother’s reassuring. Falk could not make out the words.

It was only when he was an adult that his mother revealed the subject of those late night vigils.

Walter had become obsessed with the dangers of the new laws the government was introducing to classify and separate the races. The new laws had been in place for years, but news travelled into the valley very slowly. Besides, as a largely white populace, the people of the valley believed themselves unduly affected by what was going on beyond the mountains that protected them.

Walter did not have that conviction of exclusion. He knew his ancestry began with the union of a Dutch settler and a Khoikhoi woman.

His fears were numerous: ostracism, rejection by his wife, loss of home, his son’s reaction. He held them inside himself for a full half year before he finally steeled himself to discuss them with Stephanie.

He waited until the dark of one night when she returned from a visit to the outside toilet and had blown the candle light out. He did not want her to see his expression as he introduced the feared subject.

Wife.

You’re awake, Walter. What’s troubling you?

Can we talk?

Why, yes, of course. If you feel it can’t wait for the morning.

You know these new laws that the government has made?

Which ones are those?

These new laws that tell you what kind of person you are: white or black, or coloured or Asian.

I know a bit about them. Why?

I’m a coloured, Stephanie.

You’re not a coloured, Walter. Look at you. You’re whiter than me. What coloured person has blue eyes?

It doesn’t matter what you look like, Stephanie. What matters is if your family has coloured blood.

I know about your background, Walter, that you are descended from a Khoikhoi woman. You told me about it. But it means nothing to me and others will feel the same. You’re worrying needlessly, my husband. What does your birth certificate say?

It says I’m white.

There you go. Stop worrying.

But he couldn’t, and he returned to the subject again and again.

Eventually, he asked one of the transport riders who brought provisions into the valley to get him a transcript of the laws from the library in Calitzdorp.

He was not a great reader. They had only a bible in the house, but he read this new bible, the bible of the architects of a new social order, studying every clause.

He woke her on another night.

Stephanie.

Her patience was at an end but she suppressed the desire to censure him.

Yes, Walter. I’m awake now.

One of these laws is called the Population Registration Act. You know what it says about coloureds?

No, I don’t know.

It tells you all about the blacks, how they came to the country from the north, ‘the indigenous people’, it says. All of that. And it tells you all about the whites, how they came from across the seas, ‘Europeans’, it calls them. But they didn’t know what to say about people of mixed blood. They say this, Stephanie – I memorised the words. They say ‘a coloured is neither a black nor a white’. They’re saying we who are a mixture of white and black take nothing from the identity of those who gave us birth. Nothing, Stephanie. We have no place, neither a black nor a white. Me and our son.

Her heart went out to him for she had seldom heard him so disconsolate. Nor had she considered the devastating effect of relegating people to generalisations until she saw it through his eyes. She put her arms around him to console him and he started to cry.

Walter Baartman took his life not long after that emotionally draining night. He went to the gravesite of his ancestor, Benji, high on the plateau to the south of the valley. He knew of the place for his grandfather, Dan, had taken him, showed him the remains of a cross that he had made for his father, Benji.

Walter sat on the weathered pile of stones that marked the grave, placed the barrel of the revolver in his mouth, and pulled the trigger, ending the unendurable fears he harboured deep in his being.

When Walter did not return that night, nor the next day, Stephanie knew he had taken his life and she knew where to find his body. He would be with Benji, the hero Walter had always wanted to be, a bold man of action who sacrificed his life for his community.

Before she even had the certainty of seeing his body, she started mourning his passing, the man who had believed in her more than he believed in himself. In her he had found the one person he could trust and that belief made her a giant: a plain looking woman with broad shoulders and calloused hands who had the conviction of her rightful place in the body of man.

She determined to give her son that same pride of self. Not a superior pride that bested others, but a belief that all men and women had their dignity bestowed on them by God. Had not Jesus in the Beatitudes described those qualities and that birthright?

Her son, Falk, would be raised with self-pride and respect for others, irrespective of race or economic standing.

Chapter Three

The Gamkaskloof School was a community paid school which provided tuition up to the level of standard 7, a level regarded by most of the klowers as quite adequate for the education of a child. The school was not affiliated to any church group, nor did it receive funding or control from the state. Facilities, teaching aids and textbooks were scarce or non-existent. Nevertheless, there was a pride in standards from teachers and parents.

There were three teachers. Two were women who were the class teachers, splitting the children who attended the school along age lines – under tens and over tens; and a male teacher who was a subject teacher, honing the language skills of the pupils.

The language of tuition was Afrikaans, the predominant language of the valley. But the third teacher, Trevor Weiss, a young man direct from the teachers’ training college, was to specialise in English tuition. Some of the more liberal elders had recognised the importance of that language in the economic life outside the valley.

Weiss had come to Gamkaskloof more because his interest had been piqued by tales of the strange settlement tucked away in the Swartberg Mountains, rather than the teaching experience he might gain – and certainly not for the salary.

When Falk went to the school, he was taken into the class of Mevrou Ferreira, a middle-aged woman of the valley. This was the bigger of the two classes, with just under twenty pupils.

Four others started with Falk that year of 1954, the year he would turn seven years of age.

It was a very special day, that first day. The school was in the middle of the valley, almost two miles from where Falk lived. His mother walked him there the first day, along the shaded dirt road that crossed and recrossed the stream that ran down the valley into the Gamka River. Along the way they passed klowers’ houses, and through the trees could make out planted fields with the people already working them. And they saw the numerous weirs that held back the waters of the stream.

It was the first school day of the new year, late January, hot days – which meant early starts, seven to one in the first term, with a break at ten. The early start meant Stephanie was preparing breakfast for her two men at five-thirty. It was a chore she relished. That day the sun was peeping over the eastern ramparts, sending shafts of golden light into the kitchen, the frying of eggs and vegetables titillated the senses of smell and hearing and, in the background, the sleepy first greetings of father and son.

Falk skipped down the road ahead of her and returned often, egging her on, much like an excited dog on a hunt. He had been anticipating this day for months, pestering her for advanced lessons.

The bible was too much for him, the writing small, and the pages full. He found other printed matter in the house, information on foodstuffs and toiletries and made her read them to him so that he could memorise them. They had no writing materials so she taught him the alphabet by writing the characters in the fine dust in front of their cottage. He knew and could recognise every letter in normal and capital form.

Falk was also constantly counting things: the number of sheep in a field, the steps taken to walk down to their swimming hole in the river.

Stephanie was beginning to think she and Walter had conceived a genius but would never tell anyone, her natural conservatism incapable of expressing such an extravagant opinion. But she happily thought these things to herself.

There was a little ceremony at the school to welcome the new intake, the older children lined up on the uncovered veranda of the simple three-room building. They had come early for it was a tradition. The teacher of the senior class, Mevrou De Villiers, read the names of the new pupils while they, themselves, stood below with their mothers. Each child was cheered, perhaps Falk more than the others as he was the son of a hero family, the third Baartman son to attend the school.

For the first week, while the youngest were being orientated into school life and routines, Este Ferreira taught just the four newest recruits and the five from the class of ’53, using the slightly older children in a mentoring role. Her even older pupils went to Mevrou De Villiers’ class for that week.

She was delighted to find that two of the four new children held early promise of being exceptionally talented, for there is nothing more motivating to the true teacher than a pupil who can remind them why they had chosen their profession. Este also knew that these two would push each other to heights they could not attain on their own.

The two were Falk and a girl of the Erasmus family, descendants of the same family that sold Benji the family cottage. Her name was Isabel, soon shortened to Isa. The little girl was short and stocky with tightly curled blonde hair and pale blue eyes. Este was to have the two under her care for three years, a year short of their allotted time, and she came to call them her blue-eyed geniuses.

That first day of school, Stephanie went back to fetch her son, so keen was she to hear his experiences. It was not something she could sustain, over eight miles that first day, and he walked to school on his own thereafter, joining with other children along the way.

All the way home he regaled her with stories of the other kids and she soon realised that a large part of his education was going to come from the process of socialisation with his peers. Chief among those he singled out for discussion, were Isa and the boy who ruled the roost in the junior class, Frans Malherbe.

Naturally, Stephanie knew the parents of both children for the Gamkaskloof community, even at its peak in the days before the road was built, contained only around one hundred citizens.

The Erasmus family lived near the head of the valley and were known to supply most of the intoxicating liquor in the valley, distilled from their grape vines. The Malherbe family had only recently come into the valley, their grandfather and head of the family had discovered the valley when he was in Smuts’ Commando raid into the Cape and they were running from the concerted efforts of the British army to cut them off and destroy them.

The Malherbe boys were known to be tough and uncompromising, ‘typical Transvaal Boers’ was the complaint of those who were on the receiving end of their aggression. In the adult community, people steered clear of them, but it seemed that their influence extended to the playground of the school, for that was where Falk had met Frans, during first break. Stephanie found it ominous that the older boy had impressed his will upon Falk in such a short time.

Falk’s first two terms of school were filled with the delight of learning and the jostling for pecking order which contained three pillars: the status of the parents, the strength of will and body, and success in the classroom. In all of those pillars, Falk was a leader among his age group but, because of the peculiarity of having a class with children from the age of five to nine, he had to play second fiddle to the older and stronger boys.

All of Falk’s early gains came crashing down when his father died in the autumn term.

He would never forget that moment when he learnt of his father’s death. In the years to come, the time and place of that moment, even the smells and sounds of the valley, would reappear before him in times of sadness.

Walter had been missing several days and his mother had told him the evening before that they thought he might