Hateland (18 page)

    He regretted having to reject us. He felt the army needed more young men with our backbone and moral fibre. He said many young whites had been infected with defeatism and cowardice. Hardly anyone wanted to join the army, especially since the increase in fighting on the border. Young people were moving abroad, waking up as - spit - conscientious objectors, or even - horror of horrors - deserting. He regarded the country's youth as riddled with commies and conchies, pooftahs and pansies, whackos and weirdies. He sounded just like Adolf.

    He told us not to be dispirited. He said many Afrikaner farmers would employ an ex-British Army soldier as an armed security guard. He also mentioned a new 'private' police force that was being set up. He plucked a newspaper cutting from the papers on his desk and handed it to me. It read:

Low-profile patrol squads plus community participation and suburban security equal a three-cornered crime crackdown unit.

    This equation is the brainchild of an ex-Rhodesian who heads the Johannesburg Community Crime Counteraction Squad with thousands of members.

    The scheme, the first of its kind in South Africa, is based on similar operations in strife-torn areas of America.

    For 15 Rand per month, anyone may join the Community Policing Services scheme which guarantees 24-hour patrols in marked and unmarked vehicles, as well as regular house checks.

    Members display a triangular board depicting a skull and crossbones to enable the crack unit and other community participants to identify their homes.

    Clients are also given two 24-hour emergency telephone numbers. 'If we receive an emergency call we send out the nearest vehicle as quickly as possible to sort out the problem,' said the company director. The car is usually there in five minutes. 'We are not Nazi pigs, thugs or bully boys. We don't do this for fun,' he stressed. 'Our squad members are highly trained. All have police or military experience and are armed. Our job is not to investigate, but to protect.

    'We try to use minimal force, but if my men are in a dangerous situation, they are fully entitled to protect themselves.'

About a week later, we found ourselves sitting in a classroom with around ten other recruits to the Community Policing Services. At the interview, we'd been told by the company director - a Londoner by birth - that he could only offer us a position in the sales team. Later, when they'd (or we'd) recruited more customers, we could go over to the security side. He said our lack of work permits could be overlooked for the time being.

    The job didn't represent for me the fulfilment of a dream, but it was a start. We spent the first week learning sales techniques. The strategy hinged on terrifying people. Instructors taught us various techniques for playing on white people's fears of violent black criminals.

    Every word of the spiel that we had to learn by heart contributed towards making potential customers see their homes as little more than neon-lit invitations to every passing black burglar, rapist and murderer. By the end of our training, we could have turned up at Fort Knox and made its commander feel insecure.

    When they finally sent us out to meet the South African public, we didn't have to work too hard to sign up customers. Apart from our newly acquired sales skills, the escalating unrest (and the resulting climate of threat and insecurity) helped us reach our sales targets quite easily. We hadn't planned on ending up as door-to-door salesmen, but in the beginning, at least, the job amused us. We had a lot of fun striking fear into people.

    We'd stand on doorsteps hitting them with crime statistics (most of which we'd fabricated). Then we'd point out that 80 per cent of the state's police were engaged in fighting township violence, leaving only a pitiful remnant to protect the suburbs. Then we'd invent some awful crimes that had supposedly happened in the neighbourhood only recently, but which the authorities had hushed up to avoid scaring people.

    We'd bring the horror show to a climax with a 'free' security survey of their homes. Many of these homes already bristled with the sort of defences normally found at high-security military complexes. But, regardless of the fortifications, we'd always reach the regrettable conclusion that a gruesome fate beckoned for those who chose to live unprotected in such potential death traps.

    'High walls don't keep burglars out, Madam. They merely hide them once they've scaled the wall.'

    'Husband at work, Madam? So you're alone in your home with the children, are you? Very brave, if I may say so.'

    For that rare housewife who still seemed undecided, we'd glance accusingly at her children and say, 'Surely your children's safety is worth fifteen rand a month [around five English pounds at that time]?' Hardly anyone turned us down.

    However, after a month or so Colin and I felt bored. We asked the boss if we could start providing the physical protection our terrified customers now needed.

    He asked if we fancied working in nightclubs. He'd been approached by a few club managers after a dramatic increase in trouble at city-centre nightspots. Knife, and sometimes gun, fights had become commonplace. Bar takings had sunk.

    In Wolverhampton some years earlier, I'd served a sort of apprenticeship in the distinguished profession of the door. I'd worked both for a friend's band and in a town-centre pub. Since then, I'd done the job now and again, but, as with the salesman's post, it wasn't part of the dream that sustained me.

    However, I suspected the job would be more of a challenge in South Africa. Knives, handguns and even automatic rifles were held quite legally and openly by people. So they tended to be produced more readily in disputes. After only a few weeks in paradise, we knew that someone being shot or stabbed on the street, night or day, wasn't uncommon.

    The boss sent us to a nightclub in the centre of Johannesburg owned by a Greek family. Before letting us set off for our first shift, he issued us each with a pair of handcuffs, a heavy rubber baton, a 9 mm pistol and - presumably for the more difficult customers - a single-barrelled, Russian-made shotgun with 12 cartridges. He must have detected a slight flicker of disquiet on our faces. He tapped the shotgun and said, 'You probably won't have to use this, boys. But just in case. It'll scare the bastards.'

    Everything, apart from the shotgun, was attached to a gun-belt worn on the waist, so as not to restrict our mobility. Colin and I had already spent quite a lot of time as paying customers in Johannesburg nightclubs. We'd never encountered such heavily armed doormen. I mentioned this. Our boss confirmed that such weaponry might be considered unusual, but he'd promised the club manager that we'd stamp out the gang fights that were harming business. He thought the sight of us on the door would scare off troublemakers, reassure decent customers and generally encourage better manners on and off the dance floor. It was a new approach to customer service.

    But it worked. Gang fights ceased, and the club became very easy to manage. There were still the occasional scuffles caused by excess alcohol and wronged boyfriends (or girlfriends), but the manager and bar staff assured us that the general level of politeness and consideration to others had risen appreciably since our arrival. We moved out of the hotel into a flat in a high-rise block in Hillbrow, an area of the city centre which most considered 'rough'. Our neighbours were mostly Portuguese who'd been booted out of countries like Angola following the collapse of Portugal's colonial empire.

    Technically, I suppose, the Portuguese were 'whites', but in this land of obsessive racial classification I didn't meet any whites (that is, Afrikaners, Anglo-Saxons and others with passably pale skins, preferably of European origin) who regarded the Portuguese as being on an equal footing with them. The whites I spoke to seemed to regard them as on a par with (or even slightly below) the Asians, who themselves were on a par with (or even slightly above) the mixed-race coloureds, who, like everyone else, were above the blacks, who themselves were just above the dogs. But only just. The Portuguese had a reputation - unjustified, no doubt - for being small-time criminals with a penchant for stabbing.

    During the day, Colin and I would be 'stacking Zs' - a popular local term to describe sleeping - or drinking gallons of the local brew, Lion Beer, in a bar called The Moulin Rouge, which lay within staggering distance of our flat and was popular with British expatriates. Despite the French name, like most things in Johannesburg it was done out in 'American' style, with 1950s jukebox, pool table and high stools around a bar offering an array of vomit-provoking cocktails. We were popular there, at least in the sense that many customers went out of their way to make conversation with us. This may have had something to do with the fact that we were sometimes armed with the guns we were carrying to, or from, work.

    The barmaid was an absolutely stunning blonde South African who looked as if butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. She had her own little staff of 'pot-men' - blacks who'd collect and wash the glasses, clean the ashtrays and top up the peanuts: the sort of tasks a barmaid in England would perform herself.

    I used to watch in amazement as she slapped and shouted at the pot-men for making the slightest mistake. One minute, she'd be screaming at and slapping a cowering man, the next she'd be politely serving a customer as if nothing had happened. I watched horrified one day as, for no apparent reason, she gave a pot-man a particularly vicious slap. I asked her why. She said, 'I have to. If you don't let them know who's in charge, they'll turn on you one day.'

    She told me not to feel sorry for them, but rather to regard them as dogs. She added, 'Dogs know who their masters are. And dogs don't often bite their masters, do they?' Her views were quite common among many of the whites I met.

    A lot of the younger people in there were English. They'd moved to Jo'burg with their parents several years earlier. The young men now whinged about the most unpleasant consequence of the move - having to do national service in the South African Army. Most of them planned dodging it somehow, either by fleeing the country or taking up a non-military alternative, like working in a hospital. As our own attempt to join the army had been rebuffed, we used to taunt them for wanting to forgo such a 'great opportunity'.

    We became friends with a group of people from Essex. These included a brother and sister, Shane and Claire, who lived with their parents in Hillbrow, and their two cousins, sisters Susan and Karen. All came originally from Romford. They also had a friend called Tim, who used to tag along. He came from Yorkshire and regarded himself as a real ladies' man. In fact, he was a fool. I assumed his life had been changed by watching John Travolta in the film
Saturday Night Fever.
He appeared to model himself on Travolta's 'Disco King' character, while lacking the original's looks, talent and charm. He became the target for some of our more unpleasant practical jokes.

    I became attracted to one of Karen's friends, Debra, who came from Basildon. She'd come over for a holiday, but had kept extending her stay. She'd been there around nine months when we first met. She'd had a few jobs in that time. During the day, she worked as a hairdresser in a downtown salon. She told me that to earn a bit more money she'd taken on a part-time job behind the bar in a nightclub.

    One evening, she'd refused to serve two drunken Afrikaners. An argument had blown up. One of the Afrikaners had pulled out a handgun, pointed it at her and shouted, 'I'll kill you, you bitch.' Others in the bar had wrestled the gun from him before ejecting him. Debra said she'd been speechless with shock and fear. She'd left the job immediately. She was still a bit nervous when we first met.

    These new friends were different from our old friends. They were all reasonably balanced people with no interest in, or understanding of, the violent world in which we roamed. At first, we tried to give the impression that we were nice people just like them (although, obviously, the weaponry we sometimes carried slightly gave us away), but gradually the mask slipped.

    One evening, we found ourselves drinking with an American who claimed to be a 'Vietnam veteran'. He even wore a baseball cap inscribed with the name of 'his' elite unit, the 509th Arizona Penis Pullers, or something like that. At the beginning of the third hour of his storytelling about his incredible one-man war against the Vietcong, I told him to fuck off. He sat back in his high stool and said, 'No, you fuck off.' I punched him somewhere in the head. All I remember is his vet's cap flying off, Claire screaming hysterically and Colin jumping on me piggyback-style, shouting, 'Bernie. Calm down, you crazy bastard.' I was asked to leave.

    The next day, I bumped into Debra and Claire on the street. I mumbled a sort of apology and gave the excuse that I'd been mixing my drinks. They seemed to forgive me. But things were never really the same again. My true self had been exposed in the harsh and unforgiving light of the South African sun. Or, rather, in the dim rays from the 100-watt bulbs of The Moulin Rouge, to which we soon returned without anyone mentioning 'the incident'. Colin and I, despite our fitful attempts to hold on to our fresh-start ideals, soon reverted to our south London ways. That is, boozing, then abusing and sometimes beating people, such as our 'mate' Tim, the wannabe John Travolta.

    The problem with Tim was Tim. There was just something deeply irritating about him. One day, we invited him to our tenth-floor flat. Being a fool, he came. We handcuffed him gently to the balcony railings, sprayed him lightly with CS gas, then clubbed him playfully with our riot batons until his whimpering became pitiful and decency impelled us to desist. He stopped spending so much time with us.

    We still met up with the others, although usually in the club's alcohol-free areas, like the swimming pool. They seemed to avoid drinking with us. Claire, especially, seemed a little nervous around us. However, I was getting on very well with Debra. I wanted to ask her out, but kept putting it off, because I didn't think she'd be interested in anything more than friendship.