Alice saw her husband off two days later, waving him goodbye at the station with a heavy heart. She felt guilty, as guilty – if not more so – than when she had faced up to the fact that, married to Colonel Covington years before, she was in love with Simon Fonthill. She knew that she had hurt Simon and that he realised, although the matter remained unspoken, that someone or something had come between them. They had not made love during his brief stay in Pretoria for she had made much of her tiredness and her need to write her cables to London. They had failed to agree on the cruelty of Kitchener’s concentration camp policy, although she knew that he had done his best to avoid farm burnings. He argued, she realised, as much to make debating points out of frustration from her coldness as from conviction.
Walking back from the station, Alice felt ashamed. She shook her head in self-dislike. It was, of course, James Fulton who had come between them. She had not been unfaithful in body to Simon but she knew that she had in her mind. On the veldt, as part of the correspondents’ pack with French, she and Fulton had ridden side by side, laughing and joking – she even sharing with him journalistic titbits that she had gathered to spark up her own bulletins. This was something that she had never done before. Alice Griffith never, never worked with the opposition. She hunted alone, always. Except now she had revelled in the companionship, the animal attraction of this handsome man, so much younger than herself, who had flattered her with his attention and aroused within her emotions that she knew should play no part in the workaday life of a forty-five-year-old married woman.
They had kissed once, very briefly in the starlight under a ridiculously romantic Transvaal moon. Then, she had pushed him away, shook her head and walked back to the fireside. But, oh how she had enjoyed it! And the next morning they had resumed their playful, coquettish courtship, as though nothing had happened. But it had and they both knew it.
Alice paused for a moment as she now strode back from the station and let the memory of that moment flood through her. Then, she stamped her foot. This would not do! She must end this thing before it became dangerous.
She diverted on her route to the hotel and turned off to the journalists’ enclave. But James was nowhere to be seen. She shrugged and walked on. She would face him the next time they met and explain that his pursuit of her must stop. Now, however, she must concentrate on her work.
A cable was awaiting her at the hotel from her editor, agreeing with enthusiasm her suggestion that she should concentrate on investigating the intriguing Miss Emily Hobhouse. The Morning Post had appointed another correspondent to lighten her load following Churchill’s return home and to replace the man killed at Ladysmith, so she was relieved of the task of hard news reporting which she had assumed over the last few weeks. Now she had the freedom to dig deeply for the colour stories that lay behind the campaigns. And, the editor wrote, the British public was growing uneasy about the camps. Alice now had a free hand to investigate and report on the doings of this little spinster in this militaristic environment. She rubbed her hands. Good. A story that she could get her teeth into – and one near to her feminist heart!
Alice had always followed the good correspondent’s practice of developing and nurturing contacts in the most unlikely places. A close, confiding smile, a flutter of her eyelashes and even the placing of a one-pound note in receptive palms from time to time, where necessary, had always stood her in good stead. Now, she hurried to Kitchener’s headquarters on some trivial pretence and was grateful to find a young subaltern she had cultivated busy at his desk. Did he, she wondered, know of this Miss Hobhouse who had been bothering the commander-in-chief and where she could be found? It was time, she confided, that the doings of this person were investigated.
The young man eagerly agreed. The woman, it seemed, had gained permission to visit one of the biggest of the new camps, at Bloemfontein, some one hundred and twenty-five miles to the south, and was there at that moment. The chief, it seemed, had been told by Whitehall that she should be allowed to go where she wanted, but he had curtailed her travelling only to Bloemfontein. Alice flashed her best smile to her informant and turned away. No time to lose! She rushed back to the hotel, packed a bag and within the hour found a train that, blessedly, was about to steam south to Port Elizabeth on the coast, stopping at Bloemfontein on the way. Her press pass gained her admittance and, some two and a half hours later, she stepped down onto the platform in the capital city of the Orange Free State, now, of course, completely in British hands.
The pressure of reporting on the campaigns out in the field had prevented Alice from visiting any of these strange new camps before and she approached this one with interest, taken there by a young Kaffir driving a canopied Cape cart, hired at the station.
The development was, as she had expected, near the railway line. She well understood Kitchener’s reasons for building the camps, or ‘laagers’ as he called them. Apart from denying succour to the Boers still fighting by preventing them from visiting their homes regularly, they were intended to provide secure camps to house those burghers who had surrendered to the British. They and their families were at risk from the Boer guerrilla leaders who had made it their policy to drive these men from their homes. They had to be housed somewhere.
Alice stepped down from the cart, dismissed the driver and told him to return for her within two hours. She stood for a moment looking at the camp. Her first impressions were favourable. Yes, Kitchener might be unfeeling but he was not a monster. This was a huge village of white bell tents, laid out neatly in militaristic lines, all pegged out on the brown veldt of the southern slopes of a kopje, rising directly from the railway lines. Yet, there were so many of them. The difficulties of feeding the occupants must be prodigious. And where, she wondered, was Emily Hobhouse? Looking from the lines of wire marking the boundaries of the camp, there was no sign of her.
At the guard tent, Alice showed her press pass to the sergeant and explained that she had arrived a little late to join the Hobhouse party. ‘Where, pray, is it?’ she enquired.
‘There ain’t no party, madam,’ grunted the sergeant. ‘Just that little lady on ’er own. She’s somewhere in the camp. God knows where.’
It took Alice almost an hour of walking along the rows between the tents to find her. As she went, she realised that overcrowding was rife. Children were everywhere and, from what she could see, tents that were meant to house, say, six soldiers, were now sheltering double that number. There were no standpipes for water nor brick-built boilers and, indeed, cooking seemed to be a matter of assembling a few sticks in the open and attempting to light a fire under whatever pots were at hand. Alice attempted to talk to several Boer huisvrouws, but none admitted to speaking English. In doing so, however, she was able to look inside several of the tents. The floors were of beaten earth on which mattresses were lined, each touching the other. Of conventional beds there was no sign. This was midsummer and the stench under the canvas was nauseous. Alice coughed and covered her nostrils with her handkerchief. Disease was in the air, of that there was no doubt.
She found Emily Hobhouse squatting on a stool at the end of one of the tent rows, busily writing in a notebook. Alice had wired the Morning Post library in London and asked for background details on the little spinster and now she hung back, out of sight, and quickly re-scanned the details she had been sent. Miss Hobhouse, it seemed, was forty-one years old and had spent years in a little Cornish village near Liskeard as a companion to her father, an invalid archdeacon. Then, in a sudden and surprising burst of initiative, she had sailed for Minnesota and had embarked on a futile mission to convert Cornish miners to temperance, pausing only to be jilted by a fiancé in Mexico.
She had returned to England just as the war in South Africa was getting under way and had flung herself into supporting the pro-Boer Relief Fund for South African Women and Children. But she did have influential contacts, for her uncle was Lord Hobhouse, a distinguished Liberal peer, who had arranged for her to meet St John Brodrick, Undersecretary for War at Whitehall. The result was that, with official, if unenthusiastic approval, she had sailed for the Cape with the declared aim of distributing comforts to the interned Boer civilians but also with the intention of examining the conditions in the camps and reporting back to her Liberal sponsors back home.
Alice smiled as she examined this determined little woman. Miss Hobhouse was indeed as described: dumpy and spinster-like. Dressed as though for a cool, spring day in England’s West Country, under bonnet and several layers of stiff fabrics, she was busily scribbling, impervious to the heat or to the stares of the barefooted children who surrounded her.
Clearing her throat, Alice advanced. ‘Miss Hobhouse?’
Without looking up, the woman held up her hand. ‘Just a minute,’ she said. ‘I must just finish this.’
Alice waited dutifully. Then Hobhouse raised her head. If she was surprised to see an English woman coolly and unconventionally dressed in white shirt, jodhpurs and riding boots, she gave no sign. ‘Yes, what is it?’
Alice held out her hand. ‘Alice Griffith of the Morning Post.’
‘Ah.’ Emily Hobhouse rose awkwardly to her feet and shook Alice’s hand. ‘How do you do? I know of you. I have read your reports. Would it be presumptuous of me to think that we might perhaps have sympathies in common concerning this ridiculous war?’
‘Well …’ Alice smiled. ‘Perhaps. But Miss Hobhouse, I am most interested in the purpose of your visit and what you are hoping to achieve. I have travelled from Pretoria to see you and I would be most grateful if you could spare a little time to talk to me about it – although I certainly don’t wish to interrupt your work unduly now.’
‘Good gracious, interrupt me all you like if you can help me tell the people back home about these disgraceful circumstances here.’ Emily Hobhouse’s cheeks glowed like apples under her bonnet. She swept her pencil round in an embracing gesture. ‘Do you know, madam, that there are eighteen hundred people here. Eighteen hundred! In tents designed to take perhaps eight hundred rough, hard-living soldiers. There are little children – here, you can see – who don’t have shoes or proper clothes and I suspect are about to go down with the fever. I came out to disperse a few comforts from the Relief Fund but, good gracious me, these people don’t need comforts, they need clean water, fuel for cooking, and proper food. These conditions are disgraceful and far, far worse than I suspected.’
Alice held up a hand to stop the flow. ‘Miss Hobhouse, shall we find a little shade and perhaps you will allow me to take a note or two?’
The little woman nodded and they walked to where a solitary, sad-looking eucalyptus tree offered some shelter from the fierce sun. There, as Alice’s pencil flew along the page – oh, how she wished again that she had learnt shorthand! – Emily Hobhouse told her of what she had learnt.
Here at Bloemfontein, it seemed, the city’s military governor, Major General Pretyman, had been courteous and anxious to help. But he had revealed details of the most incriminating kind. The families had been cleared from their burning homesteads and put down under canvas without care or forethought. There was not enough water to go round; soap did not exist in the settlement; no meat was supplied to those families whose men were still fighting, only meagre vegetables; and even those who did have meat existed on rations that hovered at starvation rate.
‘Some of the stories I have been told, madam,’ she continued, ‘have been horrendous. For instance, our General Bruce Hamilton posted a notice, after he had burnt the town of Ventersburg, telling them to go to the commandos if they wanted food. Now, I am here and seeing for myself. The camp latrines are quite inadequate and the authorities can’t cope. As you can see, the unemptied pails stand out in the sun, making the tents downwind of them unbearable to live in.
‘The authorities are at their wits’ end and they have no more idea how to cope with the difficulty of providing clothes for the people than the man in the moon. Crass male ignorance, stupidity, helplessness and muddling … and they don’t know how to face it.’
Alice took out a handkerchief and wiped her forehead. Miss Hobhouse, however, seemed impervious to the heat. ‘What do you intend to do about it, may I ask?’
‘Well, I am making a list now of the most vital deficiencies that I’ve seen here. That means soap, forage, more tents, brick boilers for drinking water, a tap water supply. I shall put these forward and see what the reaction is. Then I intend to visit other camps and report back to my sponsors back home – and, indeed, to the British public.’
Putting down her pencil, Alice leant forward. ‘Miss Hobhouse, you asked earlier if I shared your opinions about … what was it you called this war … ridiculous?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Well, let me tell you that I do, although my husband is a serving soldier out here and I don’t approve so much of the Boers’ attitude towards the Kaffirs and their idea of governance. Nevertheless, the farm clearances are, I believe, a barbaric act and I can see that this camp, at least, which I understand is the biggest, is a disgrace to a civilised nation. May I come with you and write in my newspaper about your activities and what you discover?’
Miss Hobhouse’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Travel with me? Well, my dear, let me warn you that I travel very light – although I have these comforts I intend to distribute – and also as quickly as I can.’
Alice smiled at the plump, overdressed figure before her. It would be hard to imagine any traveller looking less likely to move fast and untrammelled. ‘Miss Hobhouse,’ she said, ‘in my work and with my husband, I have travelled in many rough and distant parts of the Empire over the last twenty years and I am very used to hardship. I shall not encumber you, I promise.’
The woman looked at her quizzically. ‘Your newspaper is the Morning Post, I believe?’
‘Yes.’
She tilted her head to one side as though in gentle disbelief. ‘That seems to me to be an organ which often unthinkingly supports this Tory government. I fear, my dear, that, if the conditions here are typical, what you may have to report may be rather unacceptable fare to your employers and your readers.’
Alice nodded her head. ‘Yes, I take your point. But my editor has already given me permission to write about you and your work, for, it seems, there is already some discontent back home about the camps and, indeed, the progress of the war. It is true that the Post supports the war, but it is not jingoistic and I am used to treading carefully around the difficulty of reporting events that sometimes stick in the craw of our readers.’ She sighed. ‘The point is, however, that truth is sacred and …’ she looked around her at the rows of tents ‘… I shall report not only what you say, but what I see. And being with you will allow me to see for myself.’
Emily Hobhouse gave a soft, gentle smile that lit up her homely countenance, replacing for a moment the frown that seemed to be her set expression. ‘Well, you shall come with me, if you wish. You must pay your own way and I shall welcome whatever light you can shed back home on the circumstances of these poor people. But you must call me Emily and I shall call you … what was it?’
‘Alice.’
‘Of course. Alice.’
‘Thank you, Emily. Now tell me. What are your immediate plans, for I must think of cabling arrangements?’
‘After seeing what I can do here, I intend to entrain to see about half of the camps here in the Free State – at Norvalspont, Aliwal North, Springfontein, Kimberley and Orange River. I have, of course, these basic comforts that I must distribute. Then I go to Mafeking in the Transvaal. That, I hope, will give me a fair sample of these places. Maybe I shall have time to revisit some of them before I return home in April.’
‘To whom will you report?’
‘To the committee of the Distress Fund, but I intend to see that my report is also circulated to all members of parliament. If, as I expect, these conditions are widespread, then I hope to be able to put forward sensible suggestions for improving the system, if, that is, it cannot be removed completely.’
Alice nodded. ‘I hope you will allow me to help you, Emily, as well as my journalistic duties will allow.’
‘I shall be grateful. Let us start now, then, by seeing all the tents in this awful place that I have not been able to visit yet.’
‘What? All of them?’
‘Oh yes. We must be thorough.’
At the end of the day, the two women repaired to the simple hotel in the centre of the town where Alice was able to find herself a room next to that of Emily. In the morning, the two of them saw General Pretyman and submitted to him a list of essential requirements for the camp.
He accepted them without demur, although with a frown, and Emily explained that she would not be leaving Bloemfontein until she had visited the general again, in two days’ time, to check on how well her suggestions had been met. Sitting silently at the meeting and watching how her companion handled the general, Alice realised that Emily Hobhouse was not only a determined woman but also a skilled and sensitive negotiator. There was no trace of bluster or the shrill insistence of the harridan. The case of the internees was put with reason and balance. Her admiration for the little woman grew. The next few months, she realised, could be very interesting.
The next two days were taken up with distributing round the camp some of the clothing and other comforts from the Distress Fund that had travelled with Emily and, in Alice’s case, with carefully drafting and cabling back her first story. She was careful to write it in an unemotional, low-key style, keeping to the facts and stressing General Pretyman’s seeming anxiety to help. She was anxious to avoid any editorial ‘toning down’. She also wrote to Simon, stressing her thoughts of him and urging him to take care of his wound. Then she picked up her pen to tell James Fulton where she was, but thought better of it. He must be left to ponder her departure and her whereabouts. It would be good for him.
On the third day, Emily and Alice visited the general to enquire of the changes that had been made at the camp. As before, General Pretyman – what a strange name for one so stolidly, ordinary-looking! – was courteous and frank. It was agreed that soap could be provided, but only at one ounce per head per week, and also brick boilers. But fuel was ‘too precious’ to be spared and tap water impossible to provide because ‘the price was prohibitive’. Emily warned that disease and deaths would follow but met with no bending of the official knee.
Alice spoke little but made copious notes. Nor did Miss Hobhouse continue to argue or make further demands. For the moment she would keep her powder dry. There were other camps to visit and, no doubt, other battles to be fought.
The two women now took to the crowded rail network. Their travels around the Free State and then, later, back into the Transvaal, coincided with a series of Kitchener’s great ‘drives’ across the veldt, and everywhere the two women saw open trucks standing at sidings, full of women and children and the occasional man, exposed to the icy rains and hot sun of the high veldt. These sights, observed Emily, typified war ‘in all its destructiveness, cruelty, stupidity and nakedness’ and Alice could not remember seeing, in all her varied experiences of warfare, anything quite so heart-wrenching. The scenes, in fact, shook the two more than the sight of the camps, which at least presented a superficial picture of order and protection from the elements, with their rows of white bell tents, like medical dressings, thought Alice, covering suppurating sores.
The conditions in these camps varied, depending on various elements: the dedication and care of the superintendent in charge, the nearness of the supplies of water and fuel, the consciences of the local inhabitants and the care they showed and the dates when the camps were opened – for the earliest camps took first pick of the supplies.
Everywhere the two visited, Emily made pages of notes and then presented her recommendations for improvements, which were received with reactions ranging from wearied agreement and vague promises of remedial action to virtual indifference.
As they travelled, Alice continued to send her reports back to the Post. She struggled to keep indignation out of her stories, confining herself to factual accounts, leavened by descriptive quotes from Emily Hobhouse. She realised that not all of her cables were published – ‘too repetitively critical’ was one editorial reaction. But she also knew that many were used, with, as far as she could tell, little subediting. She also gathered that opinion was hardening in Britain against the war and its effect on Afrikaner civilians and she was glad to be playing some part in creating this, although she realised that without having the determined Miss Hobhouse as a topical peg on which to hang her stories, she would have obtained far less space.
After six weeks of juddering, wearying rail travel, Emily and Alice returned to Bloemfontein to check to see what changes, if any, had been made since Emily’s first visit there. They found that all the improvements that had been made – few as they were – had been swamped by new arrivals following the new anti-commando sweeps.
The camp itself, which remained the largest in South Africa, had doubled in size and more were expected. Since they had left six weeks before, there had been sixty-two deaths in the camp and the solitary doctor supplied for the settlement was himself laid low with enteric fever. Two of the Boer girls that Emily had trained as nurses had also died.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ declared Emily one evening as the two sat together in their little hotel in the city. Emily, temperate to the end, was sipping cocoa but, as the conditions in the camps had worsened the further they had travelled, Alice had taken to taking two nips of whisky before they retired every evening. It was, she said, ‘the solace of despair’. She put down her glass now.
‘Will you leave now?’ she enquired.
‘Yes. I will sail for England as soon as I can get a ship. This whole system has been a gigantic blunder. It is piling disaster upon disaster.’ She leant forward. ‘Do you know, Alice, I was thinking today of a parish I had known at home of two thousand people, where a funeral was an event – and usually of an old person. Here some twenty-five are being carried away every day. The full realisation of the position has dawned on me. It is a death rate not known except in the times of the Great Plagues. The whole talk is of death: who died yesterday, who lies dying today, who will be dead tomorrow.
‘I do not have accurate figures, but I understand that there are now more than ninety thousand whites and more than twenty-four thousand blacks in these camps.’
She shook her head. ‘I must return home as quickly as possible and present the facts to the British people. You have done wonders, my dear, but not everyone reads the Morning Post, you know.’
Alice took another sip of whisky, as though to anaesthetise herself against the scenes of death they had witnessed that day. ‘What will you recommend in your report?’
‘Well, of course, the huge deficiencies should be remedied immediately, with fuel, bedding, soap, clothing, diet and water supplies improved and the overcrowding and bad sanitation removed. Fundamentally, however, the whole system should be abolished. All those who have friends or relations who can take them should be allowed to leave the camps. No further refugees should be brought in. What’s more, seeing the growing impertinences of the Kaffirs, seeing the white women thus humiliated, every care should be taken to put them in places of authority.’
Alice hid a half smile. She had realised, of course, that Emily was a woman of her time with contemporary views about not mixing the races. But she was also a person of huge energy, great courage and simmering indignation with a moral backbone as rigid as the corset she habitually wore. ‘Good luck, Emily,’ she said, raising her glass. ‘It has been a pleasure and an honour to be with you.’
The next morning, Emily Hobhouse was on her way home, pecking Alice lightly on the cheek and then bustling aboard a train for Cape Town, to where she had cabled to make a reservation on board a steamer leaving for Southampton in a week’s time. As she watched her go, Alice felt a delicious shimmer of synthetic sympathy for those stiff-backed members of the Tory government – and of the right-wing members of the Liberal Party who supported them – who were not aware of what was awaiting them.
Back in the hotel, Alice completed her latest story on the camps: a summation of what she and Emily had seen over the previous six weeks and of what the doughty Miss Hobhouse intended to do on her return. She ploddingly then transposed this into cablese and took it to the cable office. Then, deep in thought, she returned to her room to write to Simon.
She had done so studiously once a week while on trek with Emily and, in return, had received two letters from him. This was as much as she expected, because she knew that he was somewhere in the south, far away from post offices. In both letters, his tone was cheery, unsentimental, of course, but still lacking that warmth that she was accustomed to receiving from him on the rare moments when they had been separated in the past. He was clearly still uncomfortable with her and she sighed. The events of the last six weeks had taken her mind off both her husband and James Fulton to some extent. Fulton had written to her once, having somehow found where she was staying for three nights on her peregrinations, for she had not written to him.
Alice re-read his letter now, before attempting to write to her husband. It was full of the warmth that was absent from Simon’s missive; cheerful, bouncing in style even, but saying how much he was missing her and that things were not the same without her by his side, with her smile, her soft skin … She threw down the letter and put her head in her hand. How she missed him, too, dammit! She realised that her self-imposed absence, her immersion in the doings of Emily Hobhouse had not removed him from her mind or her heart. Oh, what to do about it!
She closed her eyes for a while and then picked up her pen and wrote, ‘My dear, dear Simon …’