Coincidence: A Novel by J. W. Ironmonger Page A

the requisite knowledge and demand, ‘Onyo – please tell our esteemed visitor about Yoweri Museveni, the President of Uganda,’ and the child would happily oblige. But apart from coaching her most accommodating pupils, Ugandan history was not an especially large part of Rebecca Folley’s curriculum. She taught First Aid, and human biology; how children were conceived, and how AIDS was transmitted. She taught practical nursing and simple paramedical skills: how to treat broken limbs, how to recognise the symptoms of malaria, how to avoid parasites, how to protect against mosquito bites. She taught fundamental life skills – basic economics and business. She taught agriculture and horticulture, how to improve the yield and efficiency of small family farms, how to treat and care for the soil, how to water, till, crop, rotate and plan for the next season, and while these were skills that most of the children would learn in other ways, they were proficiencies that Rebecca was sure would benefit the children when it came to making their own farms succeed. Rebecca also taught some geography, and she tried to get the children reading. The mission would receive occasional parcels of books sent out from kindly charities in the West, and these would be registered into the school library and then lent out, and frequently they were also returned (because only by returning a book would a child be allowed to borrow another). On trips to Gulu and to Kampala, Rebecca would buy comics and comic books because these were always a way to encourage reading, and every afternoon the older children would have their reading hour in silence while Rebecca settled into a deep chair with a book of her own, the glorious peace only interrupted by the chanting from the primary class and the raised voices of the water queue.
    In the evenings the farm boys would lead the cattle into the barn and tether them there out of reach of opportunist thieves, and then they would do the same with the goats. The hens and the cockerels would find their own way into the shed, and the farm boys would shut and bolt the doors and clip the padlocks into place. By the time they had finished, the bell in the mess hall would be ringing for tea; Azalea and Anyeko would be pulling on the bell – ding . . . ding . . . ding – a slow and steady ring because that was the rhythm for the mess bell, one ring every second like a steady pulse; a reassuring rhythm, a comforting call to dine.
    There was another ring this bell could make, but then it wouldn’t be the dinner bell. The other ring was fast and urgent – a dingdingdingdingding – rapid and fierce, loud and deafening, a rhythm that panicked and called out ‘danger danger danger’. These were the rings that they only did in practice, and Luke would prepare them in advance; this was the alarm bell ring. ‘When you hear the alarm bell ring,’ Luke would tell everyone at the mission, ‘then this will be your order to flee. When you hear the alarm bell, you must run !’
    The orders for the alarm bell were clear, but all the same they rehearsed them. The village children would flee the compound. In any direction – or all directions – they would escape the mission with every ounce of energy they could muster. Some would run back up the driveway, others would cross the fields, others would head into the farmstead and loop around; but whichever route they took, the instructions were very plain – the schoolchildren should get home to their villages, to their circular Acholi huts, as fast as they could and seek out their parents or elder siblings. There they should hide in the hidey-holes and small dark places that had been prepared for them, and they should not return until their families were confident that it was safe. For the mission orphans the instructions were much the same. For each of them there was a hiding place in Langadi town. If the