A song in the morning

* • •

He had the wipers on, shovelling the rain off the windscreen, for the drive into the city.

By luck he found a parking space near the street market behind Waterloo station.

He walked over the bridge with the rain lashing his face, soaking his trousers and his shoes, and he hadn't cared.

His father had never been mentioned since his mother's second marriage. What he knew of his father was what he had been told when he was a child. A bastard of a man had walked out of his mother's life, told her that he would be away for a few days and had never come back. Jack had been two years old. He had had it drilled into him that his father was a callous man who had opted out and left a young mother with a child that was little more than a baby. There was nothing accidental about it because money had come to his mother all the time that she had been bringing up the child, and had kept on coming right up to the week of her registry office marriage to Sam Perry. Jack knew that. Never a word from his father, only the cruel mockery of a monthly stipend. He had never asked about how the money was paid or where it had come from. But it had arrived, sufficient for the household bills, food and electricity and heating oil and a caravan holiday each August, right up to the time of the wedding. It was as if his father had watched their lives from a safe distance, and stopped the money when he'd known it was no longer needed. Jack had kept his father's name and it would have been hell's complicated to change it to Jack Perry. He had been Jack Curwen at grammar school, and Jack Curwen at college. But of Jeez Curwen there was never a word in Sam Perry's household.

He turned left onto the Strand. He knew where he was going. He knew that he had first to go to Trafalgar Square.

He knew nothing of this man who was condemned to die in South Africa but his name and his age, and that he was his father. He didn't know his face, nor his habits. He didn't know whether he drank, or swore or whored. He didn't know whether he laughed, whether he cried, whether he prayed. He hadn't the least idea what he did for a living.

He had to fend off the spike of an umbrella tent, and the woman who was powering out of Simpson's didn't notice him, so didn't apologise. He came into the square. Weather too awful and season too early for the tourists. The column and the lions and the statues were granite grey in the rain.

Sam Perry had been good to them. Good to his mother by marrying her, kind to her son who had no blood with him but whom he had treated as his own. Sam had worked hard to make himself into Jack's father. Jack could remember the days at the infant and primary schools before Sum had showed up. Other kids' dads helping with school projects, shouting at the sports afternoons, dropping them at school, picking them up. It didn't make sense to Jack that a man who cared so little for his wife and kid that he could walk out on them should keep a watch to satisfy himself that their survival was assured. Jack didn't know a single detail about the man who was his father.

He crossed the Strand. The rain ran on his forehead, dribbled into his eyes and his nose and his mouth.

There were six demonstrators outside the South African embassy and eight policemen standing on the steps of the building.

It was obvious enough that he should come here. He knew the embassy. Everybody who travelled through central London knew that the embassy was in Trafalgar Square, huge and powerful in its cleaned colonial yellow stone. He had seen the demonstrators on television the week before, when they started their vigil. The embassy building's solidity mocked the critics of South Africa, the orange and white and blue flag sodden but defiant on the high pole. The policemen, gathered close to the main double doors were able to take some protection from the rain. The demonstrators had no shelter. Two were coloured, four were white.

They were drenched. The rain had run the paint of the slogans on their placards which they held against their knees.

FREEDOM FOR THE PRITCHARD FIVE. NO RACIST HANGINGS IN SA. THE ROPE FOR APARTHEID, NOT FOR FREEDOM FIGHTERS.

Before last night Jack would not have given a second glance to men and women who stood in the rain outside the embassy of the Republic of South Africa. Any more than the diplomats inside, in the dry and the warm, gave a shit for them, or their slogans.

He saw the distaste on the police sergeant's face as he walked to speak to the demonstrators. The man he picked out was middle forties, Jack guessed, because the hair that was lank on the back of his neck was streaked grey. The man was shivering in a poplin sports top that was keeping out none of the rain. He wore plastic badges for Anti-Apartheid and the African National Congress and the South West African People's Organisation. His jogging shoes were holed and worn, but he stood motionless in the streams of water on the pavement. His placard was

FREEDOM FOR THE PRITCHARD FIVE.

All six looked at him coldly, mirroring the stares of the policemen.

"Good morning. Can you tell me about your protest?"

"Pretty obvious, isn't it? You can read."

"I thought you'd want to tell me," Jack said.

"We don't need your kind of interest."

"What the hell does that mean?"

"Just go up the steps and join the other fascists."

Jack read the man's supercilious stare. He had his hair cut short, he wore a businessman's rain coat, a charcoal suit, he wore a tie.

He looked hard into the man's eyes.

"Listen, I am not a policeman. I am not a snooper. I am a private citizen, and I want to know something about the Pritchard Five."

There must have been something in Jack's gaze, and the lash of his voice. The man shrugged.

"You can sign the petition."

"How many signatures?"

"One hundred and fourteen."

"That all?"

"This is a racist society." The man rolled his words, as if they gave him a satisfaction. "There's not many who care that four heroic freedom fighters will go to (heir deaths."

"Who are they?" Jack asked.

"Happy Zikala, Charlie Schoba, Percy Ngoye and Tom Mweshtu. They took the battle into the middle of Johannesburg in broad daylight. It will be a crime against humanity if they hang."

"Your placard calls them the Pritchard Five.''

"He only drove the car."

"And he's white," Jack yelled. "So he doesn't get to be a hero."

Jack wanted to get the hell away, but the man was tugging at his sleeve.

"The issue is whether the White minority government and the White minority courts will dare to hang four Black freedom fighters. That's what it's about… "

Jack wrenched himself clear.

He walked the length of the Strand and on until he came to Fleet Street. Sam and Hilda Perry always took the Daily Telegraph at home. The Daily Telegraph was as routine as shaving and brushing his teeth in the morning. He asked at the Reception if he could see someone from the library.

When the woman came he didn't spin a story, just asked directly if he could see a file. Nine times out of ten he would have been told that visitors were not permitted access to files without prior arrangement, but she looked at the rain-swept young man, and said:

"What file is it you want?"

"Everything on the Pritchard Five."

"The ones who are condemned to hang in South Africa?"

"Everything you have, please."

"I can tell you now there's not much. The unrest and the economic crisis and the sanctions issue, that's what has taken up the space."

But she took him to the library. She sat him at a table and brought him the file of newspaper clippings. She shrugged, she said that it was pretty thin, that there would probably be a long story on the day before the execution. She left him to read the file.

There was a clipping from the day of the bombing that just mentioned the arrest of an unidentified White. Nothing then until the trial, and most of that detailed the prose-cution's evidence against Tom Mweshtu, that he'd been trained by the Soviets and had spent time in Kiev. James Carew was described as a white South African taxi driver, aged 63. Two paragraphs on the sentencing, what they were accused of, what their names were, that they showed no emotion when they were told they would hang. Months of a hole in the story and then the dismissal of the appeal, four paragraphs. Jack learned that the five had been in the maximum security compound of Pretoria Central gaol for thirteen months, that the Pope had urged the State President to exercise clemency, that three EEC Foreign Ministers had sent telegrams urging reprieves. Everything that he read had been in the paper pushed through the letter box every day at home – and he hadn't bothered, just as he hadn't stirred himself to take an interest in the shootings in the townships or in the detentions or the bombings.

And then, there it was, the photograph.

In last Tuesday's paper. It was probably still in the cupboard under the stairs. Might be lining a dustbin, or it might have been crumpled up by his mother for cleaning the front room windows. His mother always read the paper, front to back. Jack didn't know how she could not have recognised the photograph of her first husband. He had never before seen a photograph of his father.

It was a mug shot, might have been a police picture, might have been for a passport. He peered down at the column-wide photograph, at the man who only managed two paragraphs with four others, who didn't rate as a hero, who was a white South African taxi driver, 53. He saw a gaunt face, staring, ungiving eyes, shadowed hollow cheeks, sparse short hair. The photograph was misting, blurring.

Jack's fists were white knuckled, tight. He felt the choking in his chest. He saw the tears fall on the newsprint and be absorbed.

When the woman came back from her desk to look into the corner where the young man had been sitting she found the file neatly piled, but open. She saw the damp on the photograph and wondered what the silly man had managed to spill on it, could have been the rain from his hair. She noticed when she gathered up the file that the final clipping reported that within the next few days the State President would make his decision as to whether the sentences of death should be carried out.

Jack drove to Dorking and made sure of the contract for the removal of the thirty-two elm stumps. He rang his mother and said he'd be late home; then he set off to get himself drunk.