Harkaway's Sixth Column by John Harris Page A

coolly. ‘I’ve had it!’
    Tully stared at her sullenly. ‘I never saw you disappear,’ he said.
    ‘It’s one of my skills. Living in Africa where there isn’t a great deal of privacy, one learns these things.’
    ‘She’s had her bloody bath!’ Tully said later to Grobelaar. ‘While we were asleep.’
    Grobelaar shifted in his blankets. ‘Next time you’d better get her to let you scrub her back, man,’ he said. ‘Then you won’t miss it.’
    Over breakfast, they studied the three vehicles standing near the cave, all dusty, their wings a little dented, but all in good working order.
    ‘What are we going to do with ‘em?’ Tully asked.
    As they talked desultorily, Bronwen Ortton-Daniells listened to them. It didn’t disturb her to be surrounded by men. She’d always lived in a man’s world. She had four elder brothers and had spent most of her youth keeping her head above water among them. Men, she considered, had let her down. Her father by going bankrupt and hanging himself just when she’d been thinking of marriage, and the man to whom she’d been engaged by backing away at full speed when her father died. For several years after that she had looked after a sick mother because her brothers, all married with families, had, like her fiancé, backed away from responsibility as fast as they could go. When her mother had died, because she was untrained and could think of nothing else, she had offered her services to the London Foreign Mission.
    She had not expected problems. As a child she’d been given the Bible and set the task of learning by heart great chunks of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Judges, Proverbs and Psalms. She’d done it with a dogged willpower, determined to answer her father’s fanatic zeal with a zeal of her own. She’d read the Bible to her sick mother, even re-enacting scenes from the Old Testament with her, and in the arid religious household she’d inhabited it was the only fun she remembered.
    When she’d reached Abyssinia she’d found it very different from what she’d expected, but by then it was too late and she’d thrown herself into the work. Her mother and father had never spared the rod in bringing up their children and it had given their daughter a courage that took a lot of holding down. She’d often thought of changing her job but she’d started late and, with her life beginning to slip away, it had been too late to think of anything else.
    As she sat outside the cave and stared over the dusty plain, she decided it had probably been a dreadful mistake. After six years she’d achieved nothing and, despite her warm heart, the only children she’d had to love had been small black children belonging to other people whom she’d taught in a little school that was pathetic by anybody else’s standards but had been accepted with gratitude by the people among whom she’d worked. It had taken all her courage to give it all up and head for Somaliland.
    As she sat silently, her Bible on her lap, a lizard stared back at her, motionless, unblinking and statuesque. Somewhere overhead in the brassy sky an aeroplane was droning but she couldn’t see it and had no idea whether it was Italian or British from Aden. Unnoticed, the lizard she’d been watching slipped away. Somewhere in the scrub was the strong musty smell of leopard, probably the one which had once inhabited the cave they’d taken over. None of the others seemed to have noticed it and she realized her years in Africa had probably made her more perceptive.
    They were still discussing the vehicles they’d acquired.
    ‘We ought to do something with ‘em,’ Tully said, nagging at the idea.
    ‘Okay,’ Gooch said, ‘what?’
    Bronwen Ortton-Daniells sat up.
    ‘We could always go to war,’ she said.
    Gooch’s head turned. ‘We went to war,’ he pointed out. ‘And we lost it. Here, anyway.’
    Tully shrugged. ‘It’s nothing to do with us now,’ he pointed out.
    ‘It was something to do with you when you