The sons of the middle classes managed to defer their call up by going into university. Some emigrated, a few deserted and a tiny number pleaded conscientious objection and went to jail. But the great majority of young men went into the services and found the tedium quite lethal. Deaths from drink and drugs rose steadily; motor car accidents became more and more frequent and the number of deaths through careless, one might say carefree, handling of fire-arms, a form of suicide traditionally associated with the police in the old days, grew so alarmingly that the annual mortality rates actually overtook those inflicted by the Total Onslaught. In a notorious case, a young man named Gussie Lamprecht, a draftee lance-corporal in a coastal barracks, was enterprising enough to draw attention to this problem by telephoning a local newspaper, giving his name, rank and number, and promising that if their crime reporter would come to the beach he would see ‘something very interesting’. As the reporter walked along the pier, he related at the inquest, he saw before him a figure on the beach, whom he now knew to be the deceased, lift a pistol to his temple and fire. He remembered that the incident had terrified an Indian fisherman catching shad nearby. He had taken a picture which his newspaper was refused permission to publish, photographs of Defence Force property being forbidden, and young Gussie Lamprecht though deceased was still regarded as Defence Force property. The case caused an outcry, worried mothers of draftees demanded that the Government take action. The Regime responded by forbidding publication of any further figures relating to accidental death caused by firearms and a delegation of mothers thanked the Minister concerned from the depths of their hearts.
A problem more intractable was the increasing shortage of manpower. To ameliorate the imbalance caused by the giant call-up, the Regime suggested a new deal, a kind of leaseback of uniformed labour at army prices. The army would liaise with various businesses and industries and Government bodies which would state their requirements which would then be assessed in terms of manpower available and then where possible specialised labour would be leased back to organisations in need. Contingents of soldiers were deployed whose training in civilian life approximated to the skills required. The word ‘approximated’ covered a wide range and so cooks and engineers might find themselves spending the period of their military training working through files in the Department of Inland Revenue and young accountants could spend years knocking in fence posts to take the electrified wire surrounding the Independent Homelands in which the ethnic identity of each black tribe was so fiercely protected.
‘Is it true, in that place called Overseas, that white people and black people can meet as they please? You come and go when you like? No one tells you what to do? Everybody is equal?’ Joyce asked.
‘I have never been there, but I believe so,’ said Blanchaille.
‘Stop and consider, Blanchaille,’ Makapan was pleading with him now, ‘We haven’t got on well, I know that. But if you stayed maybe we could work something out.’
‘What do you fear, Father?’ Joyce demanded.
Blanchaille’s answer was intended to be brutally direct: ‘Destruction.’
He saw the shadow shift across her eyes like a bird dipping across still water, felt her dissatisfaction at his answer, for it told her nothing, or rather it told her what she already knew, what everyone knew. What he had been expected to say was in which scenario he anticipated that destruction. There were three main scenarios with which every South African was by that time so familiar that they referred to them by numbers, rather as Americans will talk of ‘taking the Fifth’, meaning the Fifth Amendment, or university students will say they’re hoping for a ‘good second’, South Africans would commonly talk of ‘going for One’, which translated meant that they favoured the first scenario for the end of things; this envisaged black hordes from the North sweeping down, joining the local Africans and obliterating the whites. While this view was still accorded some respect by traditionalists, being the most ancient of the nightmares, it was widely discounted. More people believed in the Second, in which the hordes would still sweep down, the local population would revolt but the whites would resist, fight them to a standstill and some sort of uneasy truce would prevail — until the next eruption. A minority of daring dreamers contemplated what they called No.3, which imagined the unimaginable, a defeat for the white forces who would retreat to the sea burning all behind them and die on the beaches, shooting their women and children first. It was this scenario which appealed so directly to the Azanian Liberation Front that their so-called Strike Kommando added No.3 to their designation. More recently another vision of the future conflict had begun to circulate in whispers and rumours and this scenario was doubly terrifying since it gave credence to No.3 while seeking to reassure the population that the white nation had found a defence against its possible defeat. Known as the ‘Fourth Option’ or more colloquially as ‘the Smash’, it suggested that nuclear weapons were being secretly prepared and if the worst came to the worst would be deployed, destroying the entire Southern Continent in an instant. Whispers of the Fourth Option had first begun to circulate at the last congress of the ruling National Party at which President Adolph Bubé had declared in his characteristic throaty growl: ‘We wish to live in peace — but if attacked we will resist and we shall never surrender. We will never leave this Africa we love but if by some misfortune we are forced to go, rest assured we shall not go alone… This is not a threat but a promise!’ The promise was met with wild applause from the party faithful and the newspapers interpreted the speech in the usual imaginative fashion with headlines ranging from PRESIDENT PLEADS FOR PEACE! to BUBÉ TALKS TOUGH! ‘WE’LL TAKE YOU WITH US’ WARNS PRESIDENT, to SOUTH AFRICA HAS NO NUCLEAR STRATEGY — OFFICIAL! This last referring to an off-the-record meeting between Bubé and various reporters after the speech in which he categorically denied that the Republic possessed nuclear weapons, or intended to manufacture any. The fact that he pronounced the first and the last b in bomb was regarded as highly significant and analysed at some length. Some papers suggesting that by putting peculiar emphasis on the word ‘bomb’ the President was signalling to hostile states to the north that they shouldn’t take his denial too seriously, while still others argued against attaching too much importance to peculiarities of pronunciation pointing out that Bubé had been talking English, which was not his first language, and he had, in any event, an emphatic, gutteral way of speaking. Subtle observers reported that the fact that he had used English showed that he intended his warning to carry as far as possible. He had closed the meeting by consulting with a flourish his gold hunter, a time-piece of great beauty and fabled accuracy manufactured in Cologne, closing the case with a decisive snap which left no one in any doubt of his determination to protect the country’s security at any cost.
Blanchaille’s second answer to Joyce and Makapan at their dawn meeting was more specific. ‘I am retiring.’
‘Father is weak now. Joyce must carry his bags.’
Blanchaille was aghast. ‘You want to come with me? When things got tough you went over to this man here. Now you’ve thought better of that and you return to me. What sort of behaviour is that?’
Joyce was not in the least abashed. ‘I didn’t know Father was going overseas.’
Makapan turned round and stalked off shouting: ‘Overseas! What the hell do you know of overseas? No good can come of this. And you Joyce — don’t make a fool of yourself. Stay with us. We will look after you. This man is mad. Don’t listen to him. Don’t go with him.’