Footnotes
Chapter 1
1 “Impi” is the Zulu or Sindabele for an army or regiment. This force usually attacked in a formation shaped like a crescent moon: thin and light at the tips of the horns; deep and solid in the centre. The task of the horns was to spread out and surround the enemy; that of the centre constantly to reinforce its extreme flanks.
1 Alas! She only lived to be ninety because of her inability to spare herself, and that is another and greater story to write. [Footnote added 1986.]
Chapter 2
1 T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’.
Chapter 4
1 Fragment of a poem by the author.
Chapter 6
1 Apart from feelings arising out of a life-long friendship with William Plomer, I believe no one with any sense of the quintessential Africa can be unconscious of a very great debt to him. His was the first imagination to allow the black man of Africa to enter it in his own human right. Even the great and good Olive Schreiner saw the native primarily as a social and ethical problem. Plomer was the first to accept him without qualification or reservation as a human being. His stories of Africa are tremendously brave pioneer achievements and broke the first shackles in the European mind-forged manacles of Africa. Books like Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country or my own In a Province would not have been possible but for him.
Chapter 16
1 Donner, literally thunder, is the Afrikaans equivalent of the Australian “Bastard”. It can be either a term of great affection or extreme abuse. On this occasion, I do not think it was a term of affection.
Chapter 21
1 W. T. H. Nichols was a great camp Commander. In the last war I saw courage of all kinds but none quite of the Nichols quality. It was almost a matter of routine with him. All day and every day it was with him, as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes or the shape of his head. Neither that courage nor, what is rarer still, his imagination failed him or us in those long, grim, inarticulate years in Japanese prisons. When we were released I stayed behind in Java, but I happen to know that on return to England not one of our thousand odd British prisoners-of-war needed rehabilitation—so unlike the prisoners returning from other theatres of war.
[Footnote added, 1986.] In my book The Night of the New Moon, which is dedicated to Nichols, I tried to make some acknowledgement of the debt that his country and fellow prisoners-of-war owe him. After the war he continued to serve in the R.A.F., became Group Captain and later Air Commodore, and has now retired after years of distinguished work at Fontainebleau and Brussels.
Chapter 21
1 Ian Horobin, Conservative Member of Parliament for Southwark, when war broke out abandoned politics for service in the R.A.F. After the capitulation of the Allied forces in Java he made an attempt to break away and join me in the hills of Bantam; but, as a result of this, he fell ill, was captured by the Japanese and imprisoned. Because he resolutely refused to answer the questions put to him about me and other matters, he was sorely beaten-up and ill-treated by his captors and was in a very poor state of health when I too was bundled into prison with him many months later. But his spirit was indomitable and we all brought away with us a generous store of the wise and witty sayings with which Horobin enlivened our days in jail.
He wrote a most moving poem about this execution called “Java Sunday”. We buried it carefully lest it should fall into Japanese hands. After the war I kept a company of Japanese prisoners digging for it for a week but we never found it again and, alas, Horobin can neither remember it nor has the heart to rewrite it. And in a sense this is not necessary. The poem was lived out in another way, for Horobin put all his great qualities of mind and spirit unreservedly into the creation of the Mansfield House University Settlement for Boys in the East End of London.