A SONG IN THE MORNING Read Online Free PDF Page B

Telegraph at home. The Daily Telegraph was as routine as shaving and brushing his teeth in the morning. He asked at the Reception if he could see someone from the library.
    When the woman came he didn't spin a story, just asked directly if he could see a file. Nine times out of ten he would have been told that visitors were not permitted access to files without prior arrangement, but she looked at the rain-swept young man, and said:
    "What file is it you want?"
    "Everything on the Pritchard Five."
    "The ones who are condemned to hang in South Africa?"
    "Everything you have, please."
    "I can tell you now there's not much. The unrest and the economic crisis and the sanctions issue, that's what has taken up the space."
    But she took him to the library. She sat him at a table and brought him the file of newspaper clippings. She shrugged, she said that it was pretty thin, that there would probably be a long story on the day before the execution. She left him to read the file.
    There was a clipping from the day of the bombing that just mentioned the arrest of an unidentified White. Nothing then until the trial, and most of that detailed the prose-cution's evidence against Tom Mweshtu, that he'd been trained by the Soviets and had spent time in Kiev. James Carew was described as a white South African taxi driver, aged 63. Two paragraphs on the sentencing, what they were accused of, what their names were, that they showed no emotion when they were told they would hang. Months of a hole in the story and then the dismissal of the appeal, four paragraphs. Jack learned that the five had been in the maximum security compound of Pretoria Central gaol for thirteen months, that the Pope had urged the State President to exercise clemency, that three EEC Foreign Ministers had sent telegrams urging reprieves. Everything that he read had been in the paper pushed through the letter box every day at home - and he hadn't bothered, just as he hadn't stirred himself to take an interest in the shootings in the townships or in the detentions or the bombings.
    And then, there it was, the photograph.
    In last Tuesday's paper. It was probably still in the cupboard under the stairs. Might be lining a dustbin, or it might have been crumpled up by his mother for cleaning the front room windows. His mother always read the paper, front to back. Jack didn't know how she could not have recognised the photograph of her first husband. He had never before seen a photograph of his father.
    It was a mug shot, might have been a police picture, might have been for a passport. He peered down at the column-wide photograph, at the man who only managed two paragraphs with four others, who didn't rate as a hero, who was a white South African taxi driver, 53. He saw a gaunt face, staring, ungiving eyes, shadowed hollow cheeks, sparse short hair. The photograph was misting, blurring.
    Jack's fists were white knuckled, tight. He felt the choking in his chest. He saw the tears fall on the newsprint and be absorbed.
    When the woman came back from her desk to look into the corner where the young man had been sitting she found the file neatly piled, but open. She saw the damp on the photograph and wondered what the silly man had managed to spill on it, could have been the rain from his hair. She noticed when she gathered up the file that the final clipping reported that within the next few days the State President would make his decision as to whether the sentences of death should be carried out.
    Jack drove to Dorking and made sure of the contract for the removal of the thirty-two elm stumps. He rang his mother and said he'd be late home; then he set off to get himself drunk.

    3
    The drink hadn't hurt, had been something of a blessing because his stupor sleep didn't let him nightmare.
    First thing when he came down the stairs he hunted for the newspaper and his father's photograph. It was one from the top of the pile, next to the fire lighters. He tore out the picture and folded