Frankie and Stankie (12 page)

Ouma Smuts is much loved by the nation – or, at least, by that part of the nation that can vote – and she has black, un-styled Afro hair that would have a hard time passing the pencil test. Plus she wears old tennis shoes without any laces decades before this can be interpreted as a fashion statement. Unfortunately, by the time of the 1948 election, the General himself is well past his prime. He's over seventy and it's obvious to anyone with eyes that the brilliant guerrilla leader who went on to become the friend of Quakers and the darling of several North Oxford salons is now wearing his hair in a silly bald man's comb-over.

Because the English whites live in the cities and work in business, they want a political party that will make sure blacks have just enough freedom to be able to move from the native reserves into the towns to work for knock-down wages in the mines and factories, just so long as they can be shunted back to the reserves again, once they're too old or too disabled, or in any way extraneous to requirements. Afrikaner whites tend to live on farms and in one-horse country towns, so they want a political party that will make sure blacks can't move into the cities. That way they'll have to stay in the countryside, working as serfs on white farms and getting paid in bags of maize. The two parties are colloquially known as the Nats and the ‘UP' – the latter pronounced ‘you-pee' – which gives rise to several popular wee-wee jokes at school.

At Dinah's school all the girls are UP because they're English-speaking. Everyone at school knows the English are Best, even though lots of the girls have surnames like Van Jaarsveld, du Plessis, Tonetti, da Souza, Levy, Engelbrecht, Herschel and de Bondt. Everyone in the melting pot has read those books about the little English princesses, Lillibet and Margaret Rose. Everyone knows that Crawfie is the royal nanny. Everyone, even Dinah, has had a bash at joining the Brownies and learning to gabble the oath:

ipromisetodomybesttodomyduty

togodthekingandmycountry

tohelpotherpeopleatalltimes

especially thoseathome

– though Dinah, who can plait, knit, sew, boil an egg, lay the table and make hospital corners in bedsheets as well as anyone else in the
Elf pack, who invariably produces the most shined-up, Brasso-buffed penny for her weekly subs, never advances beyond the tweenie stage; never gets her hands on the coveted brown uniform, having somehow been sniffed out by the pack sixer at the St Thomas's Anglican Church platoon as Quite the Wrong Sort.

This is an assessment much assisted by her dad who arrives to collect her one evening and, finding himself inadvertently trapped before the Brown Owl
Anschluss
on Show Day, cannot contain either his irritation or his mirth, as he's forced back into the seating area and suffered to sit through the proceedings. This mortifying event is one which he afterwards incorporates into his public anecdote collection as ‘the night on which a mad woman rushed at me shouting “Tweet-tweet-tuwhit-tuwhoo” '. He likes to embellish it with an account of how one of the Brownies faultlessly demonstrated her table-laying skills to the assembled throng, extracting all the implements from a cardboard box – only to find, after she'd finished, that the tablecloth was neatly folded right at the bottom of the box. One of his favourite routines is about Dinah's Brownie efforts at ‘helping at home'. These, he asserts, consist entirely of her leaving a trail of spilled Brasso and blackened copper tarnish all over the kitchen table in the hour before the weekly pack meetings.

Everyone takes out Enid Blyton books from the school library and knows that proper children call their mothers Mummy. They have buttered toast for tea, which they eat in front of crackling log fires on winter afternoons. Proper English children have real snow at Christmas instead of cotton wool and glitter stuck to the windows. And they have a person in the kitchen called Cook, who is definitely not a native girl. She will do a ‘splendid spread' for a picnic or an outdoor adventure if you approach her diplomatically. And she doesn't have bare feet like the native girl. She's an awesome white crosspatch who commands respect and she comes complete with a uniform not unlike what nurses wear, including the sturdy laced shoes.

Cook is always scary, but in Durban nobody is scared of the native girl and, once, when Lisa is helping to make rock cakes in Bugs Gourlay's kitchen, she stands on the native girl's foot by mistake so she says sorry, but Bugs's mum says to Lisa that she must never say sorry to a native girl.

‘You mustn't lower yourself,' she says.

Bugs's mum says this right in front of the native girl, so Lisa is really embarrassed.

Bugs's real name is Beulah, but she hates it and she hates being a girl. She makes everyone call her Bugs, and she wears boys' khaki shorts with a snake belt. Bugs is school swimming champ and she always has a pink peeling nose from spending so much time at the Beach Baths. She's older than Lisa and, when she's thirteen, Bugs suddenly becomes the biggest flirt in the neighbourhood. She manages this without ever wearing a dress and without giving up on her locker-room style, though sometimes Bugs will wear a puff-sleeved broderie anglaise blouse with her khaki shorts and her snake belt.

At school, everybody hates the Afrikaans lessons and resists learning anything, even though it's quite an easy language because it doesn't have verb conjugations, and even though Mrs van Heynigen is very strict and makes the class chant their vocab every day while she claps out the rhythms with her hands. By the next day half the class will have forgotten it all. If any girl can't find her vocab notebook in class, Mrs van Heynigen always does the same thing. She strides up the aisle and flings back the girl's desk lid on to the head of the girl in front.

‘The only way to find a lost book is to shake out all the books and throw them elsewhere,' she says, with her rich rolled ‘r' sounds. As she speaks, she begins to toss the girl's books in all directions across the room. She does this until the missing book is found, or until the desk is empty. Girls duck and suppress giggles as books come hurtling towards them, and they use their hands to protect their heads. Since these moments of theatre are all that anyone ever enjoys about the Afrikaans lessons, some of the bolder girls begin to hide their vocab notebooks on purpose, but Mrs van Heynigen soon smells a rat.

Dinah has never been into the rural hinterland of the Transvaal or the Orange Free State where most white Afrikaners live. Her family can't afford holidays, and anyway her dad always says he is too busy. He prefers to spend his vacations staying at home and puzzling, or plucking at his new second-hand Spanish guitar which has begun to displace his mandolin. So the only three countrified
places she has been to are all just around the corner and all of them are a little bit aberrant. There is Mrs Hall's smallholding on the edge of Durban. There is Henrietta's parents' farm near the Howick Falls – a scenic spot where people go to get engaged. Then there's the Marianhill Monastery, which is about ten miles away in the beautiful Natal midlands.

Mrs Hall is a kind lady in the university administration who throws an annual children's Christmas party and, one year, Lisa and Dinah get invited for the first time. She has a huge Christmas tree loaded with little wrapped presents and the children are told to choose one each. Then Margaret Carpenter and her brother, who are both older than Lisa and Dinah, spread the word that really Mrs Hall said you could take as many presents as you like. And, because Lisa and Dinah are first-timers at the party who hold back a bit while the rest of the infant gannets go to work with alacrity, it is they who are last at it, still stripping the tree of its few forlorn remnants when Mrs Hall re-enters the party space.

She tells them to stop it at once and, for a kind lady, she's sounding really cross.

‘I'm disappointed in you two,' she says. ‘And I'm really surprised. Those presents are for the native children on the farm. Their party is tomorrow.'

Lisa and Dinah want the earth to swallow them. They're so ashamed that they leave their legitimate presents behind, even though Dinah's is a tiny, jointed ceramic doll, her absolute heart's desire. And then, on the way out, when a goose takes bites out of Dinah's head, it's none other than one of the despoiled native children who comes and rescues her.

‘Let's never go back,' Lisa says in a whisper, but Dinah can't seem to speak at all.

Henrietta is a beautiful young politically dissident school teacher who works at the Indian Girls' High School in Durban and specialises in having all the men in the university fall in love with her. She's turned them all down, one by one, and transformed them into friends, watching with apparent equanimity as they go off and get married to other women. Sometimes she has weekend parties at the farm and everyone takes the train three stops down the line and sleeps over at the farmhouse where her mother makes pancakes and porridge for breakfast. What Dinah remembers most is refusing
point blank to sleep in a baby's cot, even though Henrietta's mum is pressed for beds and Dinah's still easily small enough to fit in it.

‘I won't sleep in a baby's cot,' she says.

So Henrietta's brother has to go off and ferret for ages in a medley of outbuildings until he comes up with a roll-up khaki army bed with lots of metal rods that get slotted into corresponding canvas pockets.

Henrietta's current suitor is a comparative newcomer, a physicist called Ted, who shares his name with the farm sheepdog. So when Henrietta tells the girls' dad that Ted is putting on weight, he agrees with her because it's true – especially after Ted's orgy of breakfast pancakes that morning. But then Henrietta really confuses him.

‘He's been accused of stealing sheep,' she says.

‘Really?' Dinah's dad says. ‘Surely not?'

‘Oh yes,' says Henrietta. ‘I'm afraid it's true. He's been doing it in broad daylight from all the neighbouring farms.'

‘Never!' says Dinah's dad.

Henrietta sighs. ‘We might have to have him put down,' she says. ‘And I've always loved him so dearly. Ever since he came through distemper as a puppy.'

At Marianhill the monks and nuns run a craft school for local Zulus and a farm with pigs and chickens. Plus the nuns run a really cheap guest house that has some permanent old people there as well. Whenever Dinah's family goes there, Dinah and Lisa delight in watching Mary, the Coloured maid-of-all-work, who yells encouragement into the ears of assorted deaf and toothless residents at mealtimes.

‘Ach, come on now, Mrs Thomas,' she says. ‘It's just slip-down for pudding today. It slips down like anything, Mrs Thomas, I'm telling you now. Just try a little spoonful and see how easy it just slips down.'

Their mum buddies up to Sister Pieta who has painted a new altarpiece for the chapel and their dad is very soon highjacked to go on walks with a deaf old monk who's fond of birdwatching, but he can't any longer hear the bird calls. Since, among all the things that the girls' dad is best at, whistling is definitely one, he spends his mornings productively at Marianhill, whistling bird calls into the ear of the deaf old monk whose face lights up with each new sound.

One day, Peter Bullen comes with them and, because he's a fidgety person, he clicks his camera shutter on his last exposure by mistake, just as Sister Pieta is taking them all to see the new mural she's painted in the chapel.

‘Bloody hell!' he says. But then he remembers he's walking with a nun and the back of his neck goes bright red. ‘Oh Christ Almighty!' he says.

Sister Pieta is trying not to laugh, but the girls just keep on giggling about it all through the trip – all the way to the chapel and all the way back.

The real country, the terrifying country, as Dinah envisages it, is somewhere beyond the Vaal and the Orange Rivers, where she knows that Afrikaner farmers have dominion over earth-coloured peasants dressed in rags and sacks. And she knows that the farmers keep guns in their bedrooms and that shooting is a popular hobby. She knows this because occasionally the farmers shoot their own wives or their children by mistake, and then it gets into the papers. Sometimes they'll shoot the black housemaid who's coming in with the morning tea, because they think she's an intruder. Or their children will get hold of the guns and shoot each other while playing Cowboys and Indians. Now and again the odd farmer's son will go gun crazy after a coming-of-age spree with his mates on too much cheap Cape brandy. Then, instead of having his fun lobbing empty Castle beer cans out of the car windows at black pedestrians, he'll take a pot shot at one of them instead. She remembers a man being quoted in the paper.

‘I always wanted to shoot a
kaffertjie
for my twenty-first, your honour,' he says.

Kaffertjie
is the diminutive of kaffir, which is the most in-your-face offensive way of referring to a black person, just as hotnot is the most offensive way of saying Coloured. But lots of Afrikaners still use kaffir just as if it were the regular word for a black person. Kaffir isn't that much used by the English these days but, instead, white Durbanites call all male Indians Sammy and all female Indians Mary – or sometimes, to be pejorative, it'll be koelie-Mary. So they'll say to the Indian fruit vendor, ‘Have you got a nice watermelon for me today, Sammy?' – just as if Sammy was his name. Or they'll say, ‘Who does that koelie-Mary think she is – sitting on the
bench there like Lady Muck on Toast?' That's if they see an Indian woman sitting on a park bench, just like a white person, instead of squatting on her haunches as Indians usually do.

And when Sally's mother takes a Union Castle boat to visit her relations in London and she sees two Indian women in saris coming out of the Ladies' Room in Selfridge's – the very Ladies' Room that she's about to use herself – she's so knocked back that she goes and complains about it to the manager.