Riotous Assembly Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Tom Sharpe

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Copyright

  About the Author

  Tom Sharpe was born in 1928 and educated at Lancing College and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He did his national service in the Marines before going to South Africa in 1951, where he did social work before teaching in Natal. He had a photographic studio in Pietermaritzburg from 1957 until 1961, and from 1963 to 1972 he was a lecturer in History at the Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

  He is the author of sixteen novels, including Porterhouse Blue and Blott on the Landscape which were serialised on television, and Wilt which was made into a film. In 1986 he was awarded the XXIIIème Grand Prix de l’Humour Noir Xavier Forneret and in 2010 he received the inaugural BBK La Risa de Bilbao Prize. Tom Sharpe died in 2013.

  Also by Tom Sharpe

  Indecent Exposure

  Porterhouse Blue

  Blott on the Landscape

  Wilt

  The Great Pursuit

  The Throwback

  The Wilt Alternative

  Ancestral Vices

  Vintage Stuff

  Wilt on High

  Grantchester Grind

  The Midden

  The Gropes

  The Wilt Inheritance

  Riotous Assembly

  Tom Sharpe

  For all those members of the

  South African Police Force whose

  lives are dedicated to the

  preservation of Western Civilization

  in Southern Africa

  1

  Piemburg is deceptive. Nothing about it is entirely what it seems to be. Huddled among the foothills of the Drakensberg and crouching at the feet of a great flat-topped hill it has few of the marks of a capital city. Travellers whose trains to Johannesburg stop, if they bother, beneath the rusting sheet-metal gingerbread of its station roof, or who whisk past on the National Highway, glimpse a tiny town that seems to have died and been embalmed. For Piemburg is by popular accounts quite dead. Sleepy Hollow they call it, and an American visitor is reported to have looked at Piemburg and said, ‘Half the size of New York Cemetery and twice as dead.’ And certainly at a first glance the city’s lack of animation seems complete. It lies curled in its valley under the African sun and sleeps. Its red iron roofs and wrought-iron balconies bespeak a distant age of long-forgotten enterprise. Its roads are lined with jacarandas and its gardens are lush with flowering dark verandahs. Everything grows immediately and just as immediately stands still. Time and the climate both combine to growth and growth’s suspension.

  And Piemburg grew with the garrison, and with the garrison’s departure died. Or fell asleep. The capital of Zululand, it sprang up with the British Empire’s conquest of the Zulu nation. In the first flush of that resounding victory, Piemburg was transformed from a tiny settlement long deserted by its Afrikaner founders into a capital city. Civic buildings multiplied in a rash of colonnade and red Victorian brick. The Governor’s mansion bloomed with Italian marble floors, Venetian glass and all the trimmings of Imperial splendour. The railway station, a paragon of metal fretwork and faïence, provided a suitable staging post for the Viceregal trains that passed through Piemburg on their way to farther and less attractive Imperial dominions in the hinterland of Africa. And as the great steam engines blustered up the winding gradient to Empire View, the hill above Piemburg, carrying with them their august burden to an early death by tsetse fly or malarial mosquito, monocled and moustached men would gaze serenely down on the capital of Zululand and murmur, ‘A gem, a gem set in a green and yellow ring,’ and then turn back to study the wholly inaccurate survey maps of their new territories.

  Piemburg would salute their passing with a Governor’s greeting on the station platform and an exchange of statesmanlike admonitions made inaudible by the military band playing under the iron roof. And Piemburg would pay its respects a few months later when the Viceregal coffin borne in a carriage draped in black and drawn by a locomotive adorned with wreaths halted a moment while the band played a death march with a gusto that made once more inaudible the Governor’s condolences to the aide-de-camp. And in the intervals between Imperial progress and Imperial retreat, the capital of Zululand would adorn itself with new bandstands and botanical gardens and the amusement of a tiny metropolis. In Fort Rapier the great parade ground would echo to the bellowed commands of sergeant-majors. Thousands of putteed legs would stamp or turn about, and the glittering bayonets would eddy to and fro across the brilliant square.

  In the town itself the streets were prickly with waxed moustaches. Blanco and brass polish stood high on the list of life’s necessities. In the Imperial Hotel the mornings and afternoons were liquid among potted plants and wicker chairs with the music of a Palm Court orchestra. Sam Browne belts and whalebone waist-pinchers restrained the officers and their wives who listened to the whine of the violins and recalled the shires and parishes of England with thankful melancholy. Many would never return and those who stayed and were not buried in the military cemetery in Fort Rapier would build their houses as close to the Governor’s mansion as their seniority and overdrafts allowed.

  While the garrison stayed Piemburg prospered. Piemburg was even, briefly, gay. The Garrison Theatre was made brilliant by performances of plays and revues that bred one great English actor and playwright and charmed the Governor and his wife. Bazaars and garden parties were bright with the parasols and bustles of wives who had been swept from the terraced suburbs and semi-detached houses of South London to the grandeur of the lawns and shrubberies of Piemburg by the surprising good fortune of having married husbands whose mediocrity won for them the reward of being posted to this distant sliver of the Empire. The taste of the Victorian lower middle class imposed itself indelibly upon Piemburg and has stayed there to this day. And with the taste there came an immutable sense of hierarchy. Viceroys, governors, generals, vice-governors, colonels, down the ranks swept, broadening as they went, through nuances too subtle to enumerate, where schools and wives’ fathers’ professions and a dropped aspirate or one retained ‘g’ could cause a major to step in an instant up above a lieutenant-colonel. At the bottom of the scale came private soldiers in the pay corps. Below these pariahs there was nothing left. Zulus competed with Pondos, Coloureds with Indians. What happened down there was simply nobody’s concern. All that one had to know was that somewhere even lower than the loyal Zulus and the treacherous Pondos there were the Boers. And so it went until the war. Boers didn’t wash. Boers were cowards. Boers were stupid. Boers were an excrescence that blocked the way to Cairo. Piemburg ignored the Boers.

  And then came the Boer War and as the Boers shot the monocles out of the eyes of the officers of Fort Rapier, waiting deliberately for a semaphore reflection of the sun to signal a suitable monocled target, a new respect was born in Piemburg. The Boer could shoot straight. The Boer was cunning. The Boer was now the enemy.

  And but a moment later the Boer was the enemy no more. The obstacle to Cairo and the gold mines quite removed, Piemburg began its swift decline. As the garrison departed and the bands played ‘Goodbye Dolly Gray’ for the last time, Piemburg fe
ll asleep. Like a replete puff-adder coiled and bloated it lay under the African sun and dreamt of its brief days of glory. Only a sense of precedence remained to multiply in the luxuriant climate of its own mediocrity. The houses stood and gazed at the ring of hills and on their stoeps the sons and grandsons of the sergeant-majors, quartermaster sergeants and warrant officers pretended to a grandeur their ancestors had never known. In Piemburg time stood still, marked only by the dust that gathered on the heads of the stuffed lions that mouldered in the Alexandra Club and by the drip of snobbery. Piemburg’s mediocrity was venomous and waited gently on events.

  2

  Kommandant van Heerden had few illusions about himself and a great many about everything else. And it was thanks to his illusions that he found himself in charge of the Police Station in Piemburg. It was not a very onerous position. Piemburg’s mediocrity was not conducive to more than petty crime and it had been felt at Police Headquarters in Pretoria that, while Kommandant van Heerden’s appointment might push the city’s crime rate up, it would at least serve to lower the waves of violence and theft that had followed his posting to other more enterprising towns.

  Besides, Piemburg deserved the Kommandant. As the one town in the Republic still to fly the Union Jack from the Town Hall, Piemburg needed to be taught that the Government could not be challenged without taking some revenge.

  Kommandant van Heerden knew that his appointment was not due to his success in the field of criminal investigation. He fondly imagined it had come to him because he understood the English. It was in fact due to the reputation of his grandfather, Klaasie van Heerden, who had served under General Cronje at the Battle of Paardeberg and had been shot by the British for refusing to obey the order of his commanding officer to surrender. He had instead stayed put in a hole in the bank of the Modder River and shot down twelve soldiers of the Essex Regiment who were relieving themselves there some forty-eight hours after the last shot had been fired. The fact that Klaasie had been fast asleep throughout the entire battle and had never heard the order to cease fire was discounted by the British during his trial and by later generations of Afrikaans historians. Instead he was accounted a hero who had been martyred for his devotion to the Boer Republics and as a hero he was revered by Afrikaans Nationalists all over South Africa.

  It was this legend that had helped Kommandant van Heerden to his present rank. It had taken a long time for his incompetence to live down the reputation for cunning that had been bequeathed him by his grandfather, and by that time it was too late for Police Headquarters to do anything about his inefficiency except put him in command of Piemburg.

  Kommandant van Heerden imagined that he had got the post because it was in an English town and certainly it was just the post he wanted. The Kommandant believed that he was one of the few Afrikaaners who really understood the English mind. In spite of the treatment the British had meted out to his grandfather, in spite of the brutality the British had shown to the Boer women and children in the concentration camps, in spite of the sentimentality the British wasted on their black servants, in spite of everything, Kommandant van Heerden admired the British.

  There was something about their blundering stupidity that appealed to him. It called out to something deep within his being. He couldn’t say exactly what it was, but deep called to deep and, if the Kommandant could have chosen his place of birth, its time and nationality, he would have plumped for Piemburg in 1890 and the heart of an English gentleman.

  If he had one regret, it was that his own mediocrity had never had the chance to express itself with anything like the degree of success that had attended the mediocrity and muddle-headedness of the rulers of the British Empire. Born an English gentleman in Victorian Britain he might well have risen to the rank of field marshal. His military ineptitude would surely have been rewarded by constant and rapid promotion. He was certain he could have done as well as Lord Chelmsford, whose forces had been massacred by the Zulus at Isandhlwana. Stormberg, Spion Kop, Magersfontein, might have been even more appalling disasters had he been in command. Kommandant van Heerden had been born out of nation, time and place.

  The same could not be said of the Kommandant’s second-in-command, Luitenant Verkramp, nor of Konstabel Els. That they should never have been born at all, or, if their births could not have been aborted, that their nation, place and time should have been as distant as possible from his own, was Kommandant van Heerden’s most fervent and frequent wish.

  Luitenant Verkramp hated the English. His grandfather had not suffered as had the Kommandant’s for the sake of the Boer Republics. Instead he had proclaimed peace and friendship for the British Empire from the pulpit of his church in the Cape and had made a small fortune on the side by supplying the British Army with the Basuto ponies it needed for its mounted infantry. Verkramp’s childhood had been spent in the shadow of that pulpit and little Verkramp had inherited a marked eschatological bent from his grandfather and a hatred for all things English from his father who had spent his life trying to live down the name of ‘traitor’ which had clung to the Verkramp family long after the Boer War. Luitenant Verkramp brought both inheritances with him to his work. He combined his inquisitorial tendencies with his antipathy for the English by becoming head of the Security Branch in Piemburg, a post which allowed him to send reports on the political reliability of the citizens of Piemburg to his superiors in BOSS, the Bureau of State Security in Pretoria. Even Kommandant van Heerden was the subject of Luitenant Verkramp’s suspicions and the Kommandant had taken good care to read the reports about himself that Verkramp had submitted. In one of these he had detected the innuendo that he was insufficiently active in pursuit of Communist cells.

  In the week following, the Kommandant had sought to rebut the accusation by a series of lightning raids on likely Communist groups. A playreading of Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the Piemburg Amateur Dramatic Society had been interrupted by the entrance of the Kommandant and his men who confiscated all copies of the play and took the names of all present. Black Beauty had been removed from the shelves of the Public Library on the Kommandant’s orders. The showing of the film The African Queen had been banned at the local cinema, as had an article on weather forecasting in the Piemburg News entitled ‘Red Sky at Night’.

  All in all the Kommandant felt satisfied that he had made significant moves to combat the spread of Marxism in Piemburg and the public outcry that followed would, he felt, go a long way to convince BOSS that he was not as soft on Communists as Luitenant Verkramp’s report had suggested. Besides he had Verkramp’s report on Konstabel Els to fall back on.

  The gulf that separated fact from fiction in all the Luitenant’s reports on political life in Piemburg widened to a cosmic abyss in the report he had submitted on Konstabel Els. In it Els was described as a regular attendant at the Dutch Reformed Church, an ardent member of the Nationalist Party and a determined opponent of ‘liberalistic and communistic tendencies to pollute racial purity by social, economic and political methods of integration’. Since Els neither went to church nor belonged to the Nationalist Party and was a living exponent of mixed sexual intercourse, Kommandant van Heerden felt that he had Luitenant Verkramp’s reputation for accuracy by the short hairs.

  With Konstabel Els matters stood rather differently. For one thing Els constituted no sort of threat to the Kommandant though a very considerable one to nearly everyone else in Piemburg. His natural aptitude for violence and particularly for shooting black people was only equalled by his taste for brandy and his predilection for forcing the less attractive parts of his person into those parts of African women legally reserved for male members of their own race. Kommandant van Heerden had had to speak quite severely to him about the illegality of this last tendency on several occasions, but he had put Els’ taste for black women down to the undoubted fact that the Konstabel was of mixed race himself.

  No, Konstabel Els had his virtues. He was conscientious, he was an excellent shot and he knew how to operate the
electrical-therapy machine which had proved such a boon in extracting confessions from suspects. Luitenant Verkramp had brought it back from one of his visits to Pretoria and Els had immediately made himself extraordinarily proficient with it. It had originally been intended for political suspects only, but Luitenant Verkramp’s efforts to find any saboteurs or Communists in Piemburg to try the gadget out on had failed so hopelessly that Els had finally had to arrest a native boy he had caught early one morning with a bottle of milk in his hand. The fact that Els knew him to be the milk-delivery boy hadn’t prevented the Konstabel proving the efficacy of electric-shock therapy and after five minutes’ treatment the boy readily confessed that he had stolen the milk, while after ten minutes he admitted administering poisoned milk to fifty European households that very morning. When Els proposed transferring the terminal from the boy’s toe to his penis, the suspect admitted to being a member of the Communist Party and agreed that he had been trained in milk sabotage in Peking. At that point Luitenant Verkramp confessed himself satisfied with the experiment and the milk-delivery boy was charged with being out without a Pass, obstructing the police in the course of their duties and resisting arrest, which charges got him six months’ hard labour and satisfied the magistrate that his injuries were justified if not actually self-inflicted. Yes, Els had his virtues, not the least of which was a deep if obscure sense of devotion to his commanding officer. Not that Kommandant van Heerden was in the least interested in Konstabel Els’ regard for him, but it made a change from the abiding dislike that emanated from Luitenant Verkramp.

  All in all Kommandant van Heerden felt well satisfied with life in Piemburg. Things would go on as they had in the past and he would have time to continue his private hobby, the intellectual puzzle of trying to understand the English, a puzzle he knew to be impossible to solve but for that very reason endlessly fascinating.