Frankie and Stankie (38 page)

The PAC barely manages to survive. The ANC finally changes its strategy to one of clandestine armed resistance. Its leaders are spirited away into exile, or they go underground within the country. Meanwhile, the poor old Pass Law protesters, who so confidently burnt their passes, are now standing in abject lines, waiting to be issued with new ones. And that is the year in which Cato Manor is re-zoned for whites.

So Dinah's four years at university coincide with a dramatic downturn in the texture of national life. It leaves her with ongoing feelings of moral discomfort and unease. Dinah is feeling out of tune, because the mass of the white student body is clearly hell-bent on having a good time. And it's only if you're a weirdo that you don't feel up for it. Dinah is always feeling that she's got no right to a good time. Because how can she claim any right to such a thing, when all around her most people have got no rights at all? And everything that's on offer for her is set up at their expense? Plus, right now, you can't get into the lecture halls for the Saracen armoured vehicles which are lining the university's main access. Soldier boys in heavy boots are tramping up the library stairs.

Yet Dinah loves the work. She especially loves discovering the early English poets, but not even the medieval literature man can remain immune from the soldier boys' presence – and, one day, after his Sir Gawain lecture, he's tried to take himself home, but he finds he can't. His car's been hemmed in by two armoured vehicles, so he taps on the window of the front-most contraption to ask if the driver will pull forward.

‘Suddenly a creature leapt out at me,' he reports. The creature, he says, was carrying a gun with fixed bayonet. Plus he was wearing a steel helmet with wire netting on top. The netting, says the medieval literature man, was covered all over with camouflage foliage.

‘YOU a SCHOOdent?' the creature asks him.

‘N-no,' the medievalist quavers, ‘I'm a member of staff.'

‘DJOO KNOW ANYONE WHO WANTS A GOOD DANCE BAND?' the creature says to him.

The medieval literature man is now in possession of a phone number that's been scribbled on the back of a cigarette packet and he's rather proud of it. Dinah is fond of this anecdote, though she doesn't believe in the foliage. Nor in the wire netting. The Saracens, the guns and the bayonets – she's seen those for herself.

The events of March 1960 have had little impact on the white student body, which hasn't seemed to register that there's been a change in the style of racist repression. Plus Harold Macmillan's ‘Winds of Change' speech has mainly seemed to have had the effect of causing comment on his teeth. White students are used to blacks having terrible teeth. And poor white Afrikaners, as well, are often missing some teeth. But a posh-voiced English Milord?! Those derelict, tobacco-brown teeth?!

‘Jeez, man, have you checked out his teeth?' the students are saying to each other. ‘Jeez, man, can you
credit
it? Teeth as bad as that?'

And nothing, not even the soldier boys, is interfering with the fun and games of the Freshers' Reception Committee.

On Jenny and Dinah's first day on campus, the order has come from the high command of the Freshers' Reception Committee. It's been posted up in the halls of residence and on several campus lamp-posts. All new first-year students – all Freshers and Freshettes – must assemble at three o'clock, sharp, in science lab B4. Afterwards, throughout the month of induction, all Freshers' Reception sessions will take place daily on the lawns alongside the ornamental fish ponds on King George V Avenue. All Freshers and Freshettes must be appropriately dressed. That is to say, they must all be got up like village idiots in giant green Easter Bunny bow ties for men and giant green propeller hair ribbons for women. Plus all Fresh Persons must at all times wear a cardboard disc one foot in diameter. This must be hanging round a person's neck and must state name, age, sex and subject.

Jenny and Dinah, having expended so much time on their pale-sand Voguey look, now find themselves on campus with little time and no materials with which to construct their Freshette discs. Dinah can't remember where the green ribbons came from. She
can only think that they must have been issued, by some senior female commandant, in standard one-yard lengths. But grabbing such bits of cardboard as they can find stacked behind the hall-of-residence refuse bins, they proceed to Dinah's dad's maths department to locate a pair of compasses – which, as it turns out, not a single member of staff can boast among his possessions. Dinah's dad makes use of his shoelace and swings it for them, deftly, through three hundred and sixty degrees.

There are three girls by now, not two, because Jenny and Dinah have taken pity on a waif-like, lisping blonde. They've encountered her in Dinah's new hall of residence, in the throes of an asthma attack brought on by extreme anxiety in the face of the disc ordeal. Her name is Jacinta-May Fairweather and she's obviously not local. Her dad is an engineer on contract to a company in the Transvaal and she's spent something like eighteen months in Johannesburg's only progressive school. It's a school that proceeds along A.S. Neill lines and it's unique in offering its pupils access to a sexual guidance counsellor. Jacinta-May doesn't look as though she's had recourse to the services of a sexual guidance counsellor. Not yet. Her face is pure Mabel Lucie Atwell and her voice is Violet Elizabeth Bott. And, while Jenny and Dinah's cardboard discs have been contrived from two sides of a sturdy, twelve-pack soft-drinks carton, Jacinta-May has seen fit to dismantle the skimpy pink tissue box which her mum has bedded in her trunk. The tissue box is not only inadequate. It has all its bend lines in place, which means that, however much she flattens it out, it keeps on reverting to its former cuboid shape. The three of them gather round Dinah's dad's desk, taking turns with his propelling pencil until their discs are complete.

Dinah's disc is the most acceptable. Jenny's is all right except that her spacing's gone a bit eccentric, so that instead of having her full name, Jennifer Stern, on the top line and her sex on the line below, her disc has ‘Jennifer' on the top line with her surname and sex alongside each other on the second line. Jacinta-May's is a hopeless non-starter, likely to fall to bits with the first puff of wind. The academic staff, as far as Dinah can see, are indifferent to these undergrad induction romps. That's except for the English professor, who earns her admiration for insisting, at the start of every lecture, that the bows and the discs come off. On the whole, the
authorities seem content to let the seniors have their fun – now that the Freshers' Reception Committee is no longer actually drowning Fresh Persons in the campus fishponds. Or flushing people's heads down the lavs.

By the time the discs are finally hanging round the necks of the three girls, they are already five minutes late. Jenny and Dinah trip into the science lab, proceeding, as indicated, all the way to the front where the Committee is glaring at them, stony-faced. Jenny and Dinah are would-be sophisticates in their respectively beige and black sheath dresses with matching slingback shoes. Jacinta-May is in kiddies' sandals and a little sprigged frock with a shiny sash. They stand in a row before the eight-person Committee, Jenny smiling radiantly, showing her sweet pearly teeth. The Committee members are scrutinising their discs.

‘This one's a stern female,' says one, a remark which is followed by male roars from the rest of the high command. Jenny laughs too, while still maintaining eye contact with the head honcho.

‘Freshettes don't laugh,' says the head honcho grimly.

He is sitting dead centre. They are all ignoring Dinah, embarrassed by her evident connection with their own maths professor. They glare instead at Jacinta-May, who is still breathing with difficulty.

‘Hey, Freshette, what's the matter with your disc?' demands the one at the centre of the Reception Committee.

‘Well, you
theee
,' says Jacinta-May, wheezing and mincing at the same time, ‘I wuth
obliged
to make my dithc out of my tithoo bokth. And
twy ath I may
, it will
perthitht
in returning to the shape of a tithoo bokth.'

The Committee is pretty well floored by this. They stare at her as if she's just descended from some alien planet. Then they look at each other in puzzlement.

‘And if you keep on being
tho howwid
to me,' Jacinta-May is saying, ‘then my athma will jutht keep getting wurth.'

The Committee clearly considers it judicious to order the trio to sit down. Two of the eight are women. There's the spinster and the tart. The first is a shrill and stick-like person with scratchy blonde straw for hair. The other is a dark-haired glossed-up creature with broad shoulders and fearsome boobs. Dinah considers the boobs a deformity, until she discovers, as time goes on, that these are perceived as
a desirable extra in campus mating rituals. There's a myth abroad that busty girls are more ready to make themselves available and the female Committee Person in question has obviously bought into the myth. The rest of the panel, bar one, are white male engineering students, most of whom are wearing shorts. They're looking not unlike Mrs Keithley's
Die Huisgenoot
Springbok rugby team – only none of them has got a moustache. One of the Committee, and only one, is a final-year Jewish law student, which makes him seem like a traitor. The women both have the pathetic look of collaborators who've joined the high command in the hopes of finding favour with the half-dozen bully-boy alpha males. But, instead, right now, the alpha males are intent on eyeing up the new female intake. And, because of their front-row-position in science lab B4, Jenny and Dinah can pick up the undercurrent of
sotto voce
obscenity that the male Committee members are engaging in among themselves.

‘Now
there's
a pig I'd like to stick,' says one, nodding his head towards row three. Jeez, but would I love to stick that pig?! I'd love to make it squeal.'

The Freshers' Reception Committee's daily follow-up sessions are referred to as Song Practice. Everything about them is repellent to a degree. Jenny, brave Jenny, turns up for just two sessions and from then on she gives them a miss. Dinah is more vulnerable for being resident on campus, so she goes along for the first week out of four. As far as she's aware, she and Jenny are the only drop-outs – that's except for beautiful Jed who looks too much of a wild man for anyone to stop him. To Dinah's amazement, the remaining Fresh Persons are giving every appearance of being eager to play along – and this, by now, includes Jacinta-May, who has quickly discovered that her lisping-moppet attributes are pleasing to the Committee's high command.

The Song Practice sessions are taken up with coercing the first-year students into memorising and belting out a range of rugger choruses which have been set to the tunes of popular songs. Some have been borrowed from America, so they make no local sense. There's ‘Morphine Bill and Cocaine Sue', for example, who are ‘walking down Fifth Avenue'. It has a chorus that counts as the soul of wit:

Honey have a (sniff) have a (sniff) on me

Honey have a (sniff) on me.

In place of the word sniff, the Fresh Persons all have to execute a vigorous, loud sniff. Some of the songs are obliquely racist, while others have racism as their
raison d'être
. There's the one, for example, that borrows the word muntu from white Southern Rhodesia and depicts black people as living in trees.

Mamma Muntu

And Baby Muntu too

Climbed to the top

Of the Big Bamboo.

Dinah can't remember the intervening stanzas. But she remembers the last line as an incitement to assassinate a local clergyman:

Look, said Mamma Muntu

Look who we've shot.

We've shot the Reverend

Michael Scott.

Michael Scott is a hate figure, because he's defended black squatters against eviction and has worked, together with Ruth First and others, to expose excessive punishment beatings among white farmers using prison labour. At this moment he's in the news again, as one of a delegation to the UN, to plead against South Africa's being granted rights to incorporate the mandated South West Africa into the apartheid state. The South African Government has effectively done so already, having, just a few months earlier, shot eleven people dead whilst imposing one of its illegal township ‘forced removal' schemes.

Dinah's most un-favourite song has a repeating refrain that goes ‘Roll your leg over'. Whenever this song comes round, the Freshers' Reception Committee will always pluck out a mixed pair of Fresh Persons, who are then required to come out front and mime the sex act whilst lying on the grass, one on top of the other. Dinah has noticed that the Committee members will almost always make a point of picking on the most weedy-looking and flat-chested among the girl students – the ones with the skinniest legs, or the most unworldly look. And they'll choose the most owlish and gormless of the young men – the ones with bad acne, or the ones that look as if
they might have been brought up by the Plymouth Brethren. It's only when they run out of substandard specimens that they start picking on people like Jed.

In between the horrible songs, the Committee makes offensive personal remarks and propagandises for an event which is being promoted as the grand finale of the Freshers' induction. This event is called Freshers' Dinner. All Fresh Persons are to attend the dinner, which will take place in a B-rated north-coast hotel. It's in the nature of a dinner dance, so there's a promise it will get quite smoochy as the night wears on. None of the girls can go to Freshers' Dinner without being invited as someone's partner – and it's the male Fresh Persons who are being coerced into inviting the girls. That's after the male Committee members have had first pick themselves. It's at this point that Dinah decides to drop out of the Song Practice sessions, for all she knows that, at some point soon, she's going to be taking the rap. She drops out the moment she hears the head honcho utter a line that strikes like déjà vu.