People of Heaven Read online

  Beverley Harper died of cancer on 9 August 2002. She rests at peace in the Africa she so loved.

  Her ashes lie by the Boteti River in Botswana, below a lodge called Leroo-la-Tau. It means Footprints of Lion.

  It is a special place.

  This simple plaque marks her passing:

  Also by Beverley Harper

  Storms Over Africa

  Edge of the Rain

  Echo of an Angry God

  People of Heaven

  The Forgotten Sea

  Jackal’s Dance

  Shadows in the Grass

  Footprints of Lion

  PEOPLE

  of

  HEAVEN

  BEVERLEY HARPER

  This book is for my family – Robert, Piers, Miles and Adam for their continuing support and love and above all for being who they are.

  First published 1999 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  This Pan edition published 2000 by Pan Macmillan Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  Copyright © Beverley Harper 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Harper, Beverley.

  People of heaven.

  ISBN 0 330 36197 X.

  I. Title.

  A823.3

  Typeset in 11.5/13pt Bembo by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  These electronic editions published in 1999 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney 2000

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  People of Heaven

  Beverley Harper

  Adobe eReader format: 978-1-74262-693-2

  EPUB format: 978-1-74262-695-6

  Online format: 978-1-74262-692-5

  Macmillan Digital Australia

  www.macmillandigital.com.au

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com.au to read more about all our books and to buy both print and ebooks online. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  ABOUT BEVERLEY HARPER

  ALSO BY BEVERLEY HARPER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE: 1945–1952

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO: 1960

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  PART THREE: 1964–1967

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PART FOUR: 1969 Onwards

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EPILOGUE: 1999

  I am indebted to Anne and Jim Boyd; Ann and Bob Cochrane; and Beryl and Basil ‘Mac’ McMenamin; all of Swaziland for three incredible days and nights at Nkankanka Lodge overlooking the Mlawula Stream in Mbuluzi Game Reserve. The stories of old Zululand will stay with me forever.

  Also to Gloria Goold and Robin Jones, many thanks and much love for reasons too numerous to mention.

  PROLOGUE

  She was running hard, as fast as she could. Panic flooded her body. Flecks of froth gathered at her mouth. She had almost reached the end of her endurance. It was dark, virtually impossible to see. She had to get away – hide somewhere – it was the only way.

  The pain was awful. Rolling waves of it through her body. Still she ran, seeking sanctuary, fleeing the danger, concentrating on only one thing. To reach a safe place.

  Stumbling over a low bush, she nearly fell. Air whistled through tortured lungs as she sucked it in. Her heart thudded painfully. Limbs trembling with exertion, she pushed on. Here was not safe. They would find her. She needed something deeper, darker, more inaccessible.

  Finally, she could go no further and sank down, exhausted. The pain had intensified until it was the only thing left – banishing even her terror. Somewhere off in the distance, hyena chittered and giggled their hideous night noises. They would come for her, following the blood smell. She needed to regain strength.

  She lay gasping for air. A shard of agony ripped through her. Summoning the very last of her reserves, she staggered up and headed for dense bush nearby. It would have to do. Ignoring sharp thorns and pushing through to the centre of the thicket, she lay down again, thoroughly spent. There, she trembled with pain and fear, listening for any warning that danger approached. A hunting leopard gave a sawing cough nearby but she knew it would not harm her. The hyena were further away. At last she had no option, giving herself up to the insistent rolling waves of agony as her time grew near.

  The urge to push was irresistible and she obeyed her natural instincts, even though she had no experience – for this was her first baby. For nearly an hour, she bore down with the pain and strained. Everything else – her earlier panic and fear – went away as she laboured alone in the thicket in the blackness that was the African night.

  At last she felt something slippery between her thighs. It was coming. She gave one last mighty push and the baby slithered out onto the ground, mewling feebly. The new mother could not rest. Staggering to her feet, she knew she had to get away, take the baby and flee from the blood and sticky mess of afterbirth before hyena found them.

  Tired as she was, her only instinct was to protect her new baby. Lowering her head, she nudged it gently, licking away the cocoon of mucus from the birth sac covering its face. The small creature found wobbly legs and the mother nudged it again. Nose to nose, making soft noises, she coaxed her baby away from the scene of its birth, stepping backwards and waiting until it followed, before taking another step. In this manner, mother and child made a distance of several hundred metres before stopping for a well-deserved rest.

  The infant found teat. Wearily, the mother allowed it to suckle. At last, just as dawn lightened the sky to the east, the baby settled down to sleep and the mother – solitary, bad-tempered, aggressive creature that she was – allowed herself the luxury of love. She hated all other things. In three years or so, she would also hate this one but, for now, licking gently, she nuzzled and bonded with her baby.

  She was unaware of something very important. The rest of the world were too. After all, the birth of a black rhinoceros deep in the wilds of Zululand would probably mean nothing, even go unnoticed by all but a few.

  But this tiny creature symbolised hope.

  Hope for a species so endangered that only a handful remained outside cap
tivity.

  Hope that this baby might be allowed to live and breed before the species disappeared forever.

  Hope that man, in his insane quest for the so-called aphrodisiac powers of powdered rhinoceros horn, might not find and kill this one.

  Hope that someone, at some time out there in the world of men, might come to their senses before it was too late.

  She was just a dumb, plodding animal and her continued existence was beyond her control. The terror from which she had fled had been no more than an instinct to hide from the night creatures of the African bush. If given the power of reason, the black rhinoceros mother would have known that she had far more to fear from the two-legged day creatures.

  PART ONE

  1945–1952

  ONE

  Joe King shifted on the hard leather seat as the train lurched crazily from side to side. He’d had two choices, take the milk train from Durban to Empangeni or hitchhike. He’d opted for the train but was beginning to wish he hadn’t. He scowled through the window which rattled and shook and stared out unseeingly at the dark land beyond. He was bone weary. His thin body, wrapped in an oversized greatcoat, was perpetually cold. An ache, deep and raw, burned in the upper part of his right arm where the bullet had cracked bone. The quacks had said he was lucky to have the use of it. Bugger them! What good was an arm that only half worked?

  He could see his reflection in the window, thrown back at him in the soft light of the carriage. Joe rubbed his good hand wearily over his face, feeling the stubble of three days’ growth. What was Claire going to think of him now?

  Claire! He could barely remember her face. He thought that was strange. He had loved her so much – she had been his life. He pulled his wallet from the deep greatcoat pocket and took out a faded and creased sepia brown photograph. It had been a long time since Joe had looked at it. There. There was Claire. Standing on the verandah of her parents’ home, head back laughing, fine strong legs slightly apart, a breeze ruffling her long blonde hair, pressing the thin cotton of her dress against a firm, slim body.

  Joe stared at the photograph of his wife. They had married young, she was just twenty, Joe nearly twenty-two. Joe’s father had divided his vast estate between his four sons and Joe, the youngest, had nearly 2500 acres to administer. He needed a wife, he was in love with Claire, he had his own land. What more could a man ask for?

  For eighteen months they had been happy. Claire was a wife to make a man proud. She ran the household and took care of the farm’s bookwork. She organised the gardeners and kept a firm but fair grip on the house servants, leaving Joe free to run the farm. At night, while never initiating intimacy between them, she willingly submitted to Joe’s advances, never developing the convenient headache which some of his friends complained afflicted their wives regularly. If Claire said she had a headache, then Claire had a headache.

  When she told him she was pregnant, Joe believed his life was complete. He enjoyed the sight of his young wife growing heavy with his child. He revelled in the ribald teasing of his friends. He had visions of teaching a son to play cricket and rugby.

  Claire blossomed but the realities of parenthood soon had Joe longing for the peace and privacy he’d enjoyed before his son was born. Too late, Joe realised that by rushing headlong into marriage and a family he had become stuck in an inescapable rut. He hadn’t taken time out to live. Claire was his first love but, as responsibility weighed heavily on him, he began to question that too.

  Then came the war. Like all the other eager and fit young men, Joe listened to the rumblings intently. And while the young wives sensibly worried and feared for their menfolk, their husbands fidgeted and grew excited at the prospect, spurred on by inevitable dreams of glory and heroism. Joe and Claire were no exception.

  ‘God!’ Joe thought, as he sat in the rocking carriage. ‘If only we’d known.’ Men maimed or killed, others left tormented by memories. Was this what the women had feared? He sighed and put the snapshot back in his wallet. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s how it worked. Not entirely though, there were some things he found easy to remember.

  He could recall every line of her body, the feel of her under his hands, the smell of her hair and the softness of her in that private place between her legs. Sometimes during the past three years, in despair, if he closed his eyes he could almost imagine she was under him, that his hot thrusting was not onto his hand against the flea-infested straw mattress. Sometimes it had helped. Mostly, though, it had increased his agony and frustration to the point where he would weep hot tears of hopelessness and despair. Especially when he became too sick and dispirited to get those urges any more. Or, more correctly, to do anything about them when he did.

  Joe blinked and the past went away. He was left staring into the darkness that hid the land of his birth. The hot, steamy sugarcane belt of Zululand was just out there. He wanted to open the window and breathe it in but he was too cold. ‘Welcome home,’ he mocked his reflection. ‘Welcome back to all those things you went to war to save.’ Joe sneered at himself. ‘Bullshit!’ he thought. He’d gone to war for excitement. He’d gone because the reality of his life hit him squarely between the eyes and frightened the shit out of him. Twenty-six, married, a father, and a farm around his neck. Joe had gone to war to experience life before it passed him by. If the war hadn’t come along, he’d have lived his life out in plodding monotony. But the war had come along and Joe seized the opportunity, telling himself it was for king and country. It was for king all right. Joe King.

  October 1939 – Joe had been among the first to sign up. Too impatient to wait for South Africa, Joe had used his parents’ country of birth and his own British passport to join the Royal Air Force. He could still see Claire, in tears, holding their son’s hand as the ship cast off, turning slowly towards Durban Bluff and its deepwater channel to the Indian Ocean. Michael was only three years old. The sight had left Joe unmoved.

  Watching Claire grow smaller as the ship pulled away came as something of a relief. He still loved her but she represented everything about his life that tied him down.

  ‘What will it be like now?’ Joe wondered. ‘It’s been five years. I’ve changed. Will she have changed? Will I love her? Can I do this? Do I want to?’

  He wondered if his son would be as demanding. Michael would be nearly eight. ‘Christ! I have an eight-year-old son I don’t know and a wife I can barely remember. We’re strangers.’

  He had been twenty-six and he was never going to die.

  Joe had been flying his own aeroplane for several years, a fact which the Royal Air Force put to good use. They threw him at the Germans time and time again. Desperate dogfights over the English Channel, raids over Berlin, moonless nights flying parachute drops over France.

  Joe was having the time of his life. The beer, once he got used to it, was good. The men, living as they did with death riding their shoulders, were a wild and reckless crowd. The women, who did it for England and who were turned on by the possibility that this fuck could be his last, were plentiful. Joe forgot Claire, forgot his son, forgot his farm, even forgot his country. He was having fun, lived with gut-churning exhilaration and bowel-liquefying fear, with bravado a constant companion and with dark and terrifying nightmares. Not that he’d admit them. He was Joe King, he was tough and he was going to live forever.

  Until he was shot down over France and nearly burned to death in the cockpit of his plane. Only the actions of two brave peasant farmers got him out alive but not before both legs were badly burned. His relief at being saved had been short-lived. Before he could be carried from the wreck, he had been captured. His uniform saved his life, the Frenchmen had not been so lucky – shot as they stood with hands in the air.

  Joe shook his head but the past stayed with him. It was there in his reflection, in the thin face and haunted eyes, in the tight mouth and hunched shoulders. ‘Bastards!’ Joe hated the Germans. Not for their arrogance and cruelty. Not because they had become the enemy. But because the
y’d taken a young man and turned him into an old one. His once jet-black hair was flecked with grey. His once strong body was wasted and aching.

  For as long as he lived, Joe would never forget his capture and three years of hell. His first impression of the camp would remain with him forever. It had been winter. The ground was churned up and frozen solid. Three separate fences of barbed wire ran around the perimeter. Inside, the forty-acre camp was segmented with more barbed wire, with trenches running parallel.

  Wooden huts, or converted barns, housed the prisoners. Each building accommodated around 200 men. They slept on planks of wood covered with a thin layer of straw. They were jammed in like sardines with no thought for comfort or privacy. No blankets were provided, no lights and no heating. The prisoners huddled together, human contact their one source of warmth.

  Camp food was so terrible that the men quickly lost condition. Bread and coffee in the morning, thin soup at midday made with chickpeas, lentils or vermicelli, and the same soup in the evening.

  The fittest, usually those newly arrived, were put to work building roads in the area. Once their undernourished condition took its toll, they were given lighter tasks – cleaning huts, emptying latrines, burying the dead and various other jobs necessary to keep the camp running. Despite his burns, Joe was expected to carry out the heavier road-building work. His legs eventually healed, leaving them badly scarred. And they ached, oh God how they ached, in the cold of winter. But at least he was alive.

  The dead were buried naked. No new clothes were ever issued and the men had to find replacements where they could. Joe quickly swallowed his disgust at wearing dead men’s shoes as his second winter in the camp bit deep and the cold split his feet raw open.

  Worst of all were the rollcalls. Four times a day, in all weather, the men assembled for anything up to an hour. They were expected to stand completely still, any fidgeting being punished by a swift and ruthless blow from a rifle butt.