Verwandte Artikel zu Ladysmith

Ladysmith - Hardcover

Foden, Giles

 
9780375409202: Ladysmith
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375409203 ISBN 13: 9780375409202
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2000

Inhaltsangabe

A harrowing novel of the Boer War visits the South African town of Ladysmith in 1899, which has been surrounded by Boer forces and threatened with destruction.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Giles Foden has been assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement and is now on the staff of The Guardian.

Giles Foden has been assistant editor of the <i>Times Literary Supplement</i> and is now on the staff of <i>The Guardian</i>. <b>The Last King of Scotland</b> won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. He lives in London.

Aus dem Klappentext

hor of the Whitbread Award-winning <b>The Last King of Scotland</b> comes a spellbinding tale of a town under siege in colonial Africa and a young woman who finds love and freedom in the midst of a devastating war.<br><br>The year is 1899, and the South African town of Ladysmith is surrounded by Boer forces. No one expects the siege to last, but it does, for a harrowing 120 days -- four months of dire emergency: food shortages during which bread is made with laundry detergent and the soldiers' horses are killed to feed the troops; bombings that force the townspeople into tunnels and makeshift shelters. But in the thick of shells and shrapnel, disease and deprivation, one young woman discovers an unexpected freedom: a chance to break old loyalties and establish new loves. Even as the world she knows collapses around her, Bella Kiernan finds the courage to escape from convention, to rebel against the political forces that threaten her homeland and to pursue her life's greatest romance.

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Prologue

If you hold the bottle up against the light as you pour it into the glass, you will see what colour Guinness really is. Just where the cheerful liquid flows over the lip of the bottle, you will see a beautiful deep colour glittering like a jewel. It is a moment in time, and it is called the ruby point. The landlord told me that.

Oh boys, how it all comes back. Before her death, I worked at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, shovelling steaming hops into the fermentation bins. The place was full of heat, like it was somehow alive. We had to strip off our shirts, and the smell of the malt went into the very pores of our skin. When I got home, she would say that she could taste it on me. And now I am tasting the bitter brew myself, sitting in the Cock and Anchor at Liverpool docks, waiting for a ship. Little Bella and Jane are fast asleep in a room upstairs. They keep asking about their mother, and I do not know how to tell them that her story is over.

How did it begin? It began with a battering ram, which the landlord's men -- another landlord, as different from this friendly Liverpudlian as could be imagined -- brought and erected outside my family's cottage in Tarbert. It was a huge trunk of timber, over twenty-five feet long, which they hung from a tripod and swung at the door, behind which I had barricaded myself with my brother Michael. The pair of us had carried in ledges of limestone. We could hear the shooting outside, and then the battering started. It didn't last long, the door splitting in straightaway and the ledges falling over. Then the ram came right inside, sending pots and kettles flying above the hearth, and smashing my drinking cup. Its chips fell onto the floor, along with the grindings of the limestone, which was like yellow flour. Then one of the constables fired in a bullet, which took my brother full in the chest, killing him on the instant.

They beat me afterwards, and left me for dead also, on the edge of a peat bog. When I woke up, there was blood in my mouth, and my body was bruised and raw. Everywhere around me were the blocks and pyramids of the peat stacks. I dragged myself up a boreen to the house of a member of the Brotherhood, Joe Ward, and he gave me a bath, some new clothes, and a fry. Also some money, with which to go to Dublin. There was nothing left for me in North Kerry now: my parents dead, my brother killed. Even if I had been able to get another smallholding, the land had been squeezed dry of nourishment, and there would be no respite from the rents. I don't know, anyway, that I would have been able to make it work. Since the death of our mother and father, Michael and I had done our best to keep that pocket of ground going, setting potatoes wherever we could, even along the cliff tops. But every day, the lack of food scrabbled at our stomachs, and I think we both knew that things could not last.

The roads to Dublin were heavy with travellers. Everybody was on the move. Most were starving, most thought they would get to America, most would die. On the way, I fell in with a sweet girl called Cathleen. She and I would go foraging for food together. It was on one of these trips, looking for mushrooms in some dark corner of forest, that we had our first flourish, her pulling up her petticoats on a bed of leaf mould. I think, maybe, that it was there that Bella was conceived.

On arrival in Dublin, I made contact with the Republican Brotherhood again. It was through them that I secured the job at Arthur Guinness and also lodgings in Kevin Street. My first work for the Brotherhood was to go on a parade in Phoenix Park, where Cathleen and I, on seeing the son of Randolph Churchill, secretary to the Lord Lieutenant, frightened his donkey and made him fall off. He was out for a ride with his nurse, who I believe was called Mrs. Everest.

That was our first action. In later years, Cathleen and I got caught up with a mightier crowd, a grouping within the Brotherhood that was responsible for many of the great patriotic feats of the time. Led by John MacBride, it included James Devine, Christopher Fallon and Finbar Sheehy in its ranks. Devine was the commander of our cell, which had arranged to meet at a pub in Middle Abbey Street at ten o'clock. The reason given for the meeting was to plan the bombing of a police station -- but I knew that MacBride, or Foxy Jack as we used to call him, suspected Sheehy of being an informer and wished Devine to interrogate him.

Dublin was misty that night, and where the gold of the gas lamps hung suspended, each one had a little muffler of grey. Cathleen remained outside in an alleyway underneath one of these, keeping watch, while I went into the pub with Fallon and Devine. Waiting for Sheehy, we sat in the pews in a fug of stout, Sweet Afton and Gold Plug. A man in a cap was playing an old air on the piano. Half an hour passed. There was still no sign of Sheehy. Devine decided to abandon the meeting in case the authorities had been put on the alert. We came out of the pub, and it was then that I heard Cathleen's warning whistle. I turned and saw that there was a party of men shadowing us. Sheehy had betrayed us.


They were detectives, carrying revolvers and sticks. One of them shouted "Arrest that man!" and they ran up towards us, attempting to lay hands on Fallon, who was hindmost and had taken his gun out. He turned and fired two shots, killing one of the detectives and hitting the hat of another. Fallon was then hit himself, and his limbs became wrapped up with those of the policeman who had tried to lay hold of him. Devine had meanwhile grabbed one of the others by the arms and was wrestling with him, at the same time trying to draw his own revolver from a hiding place in his trousers. There was great confusion and noise of discharging guns, but among it all I heard Cathleen's signal whistle again. Fearing for our lives, I ran off in her direction, the opposite way the police would expect. As I did so, another detective fired after me. It was that bullet which did it, for on reaching Cathleen in the dark alley, I found her knocked down, with a hole in her throat.

I could hear the running steps of the detectives in the cobbled street behind me, and did not know what to do. I picked her up. There was blood all down her front, and in the gaslight her face looked as pale as an angel's. I could see at once that she was dead. The running steps were getting closer. I let her body go. It slid down the wall, and her head fell to one side, making the awful, blood-filled hole gape wider. I cannot get the picture out of my head. When I ran from the scene, it was as if I was running into that hole. There were lots of people around by now also, and their open mouths were like that hole, too.

I have been running ever since. Taking the children sleepy-eyed from their beds, I took the first packet from Dun Laoghaire the next morning, and arrived here. It is not safe, as I see from the newspaper that I am being sought, and we must flee again. Once more, the Brotherhood has helped me, paying for passage to South Africa, where many of our brethren have gone -- in part because there is work to be done there, fighting the empire in whose name liberty is being suppressed, as it has been in Ireland this last hundred years or more; in other part because there are opportunities for enrichment in the gold and diamond fields. MacBride is also thinking of coming out, if things get too hot for him.

Myself and the children leave in the morning . . . My God, is this to be her memory? The account in this newspaper styles my wife a common prostitute. Up in the room with the girls is something that tells a different story -- a photograph taken by an Englishman who came to Dublin to make pictures of "the Irish poor," as he put it. He gave me it as a gift, and when he did I never knew it would become...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2000
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375409203
ISBN 13 
9780375409202
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
287
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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