One evening I made my way to the ops room in the middle of our base to do the Midnight Shift.
It was very quiet, apart from the radio hissing and crackling. There wasn’t much to do on the midnight shift, except to try to stay awake. I was paging through the occurrence book when a pretty little grey cat padded into the room. She was mewing and seemed in distress. I thought she was hungry, but she refused the bully beef and milk I offered her on a plate.
It seemed as if she was trying to tell me something. I noticed that her stomach was very swollen and realized that she was about to give birth and was asking for help.
Now I had something to do until sunrise. I found an old wooden empty ammo box. It was warm, so I took my jersey off and lined the bottom of the box with it. I put the box in a dark corner and placed the cat in it. She settled down immediately and I was tempted to watch and help her if necessary, but decided to give her space and let nature take its course. By 2 a.m. the first faint mewing came from the box and two hours later I went to have a look at the Mother cleaning and suckling her new Kittens. I felt like a proud new father.
A few days later, when we returned from patrol, I was eager to check on my kittens and their mother. I rushed to the ops room, but they weren’t there.
‘Where are they?’ I asked the radio operator, but he did not answer.
Then someone told me with a smile: ‘We drowned them in a bucket of water, the mother too. There were too many cats on this base so we decided to get rid of all of them.’
I was upset and very angry, but said nothing – they might have seen my feelings as a sign of weakness but I was determined to get revenge.
By this stage I was running out of money and didn’t want to borrow from Rob or Lorenzo, so my next trick was to teach the Boertjies how to gamble. Blackjack and poker games made me enough money for the rest of our stay. I didn’t cheat of course but I did adapt the rules to my advantage.
