Frankie and Stankie (48 page)

‘Or if you're Wolpe or Goldreich,' he says. ‘Out! Out of the car!' His brakes are suddenly screaming to a halt and he's wrenching open the back door. Then he's reaching for his rifle. ‘Out!' he says. ‘Out! Out!'

‘Jesus Christ!' Sam says, exhausted, as they collapse on the grassy verge. They're gratefully watching the dust cloud rise behind the farmer's departing car. ‘So what was all that about?'

Dinah shrugs. ‘Prominent Jewish nose? Now we'll never get a lift back.'

They're seated, in the pitch darkness, on a small minor road. Nobody is going to come by for hours. But yes! It's after only ten minutes that two young Indian trading brothers are pulling up in a truck; a large, ancient truck which judders heavily to a stop. And they're driving all the way back to Durban. Hurrah! Hurrah! The four of them are soon seated, wedged tightly, in a row up front and, almost as soon, the brothers have insisted that Sam take a turn to drive. Sam is fairly terrified because the thing is huge and unfamiliar, but at least, in the darkness, he's unaware of the reason he's being made to drive. This is so that the two trading brothers can commit acts of sexual interference with Dinah all the way back home. And they are doing so in tandem. One has his hands inside her pants, while the other is busy down her blouse. And Dinah is spending the entire homeward route silently wrestling with two sets of wandering hands, while trying not to give offence. She's not quite daring to assert herself, just in case the day should turn ugly. Well. Uglier than it's proved to be so far.

So that is Dinah's last memory of her last day in her own country. Or of the place that, once upon time,
was
her country. Is. Was. Long ago. I go to create in the smithy of my soul. Or do I? Why, exactly? For what reason do I go? Nonetheless, I go. I went. But always at my back I hear. I see. I smell. That land where lemon trees grow. And avocados and lychees. And pawpaws. And spiky aloes. And giant bamboo.
Kennst du das Land
? Well, perhaps I do no longer. Sometimes – though not very often now – Dinah will still put on her jacaranda-pod earrings. And then people in England think that she's wearing varnished potato crisps.

Sam and Dinah dock in Southampton on a dark cold day in January. It's seven-thirty in the morning, but it could be the middle of the night. The light begins to glimmer feebly as they approach the city, via the boat train that runs along the backs of grey-brown terraced houses. It flashes past all the grey-brown yards with their grey-brown sheds and grey-brown garden fences. On the hoardings, all along the railway line, are posters that read like patriotic boasts. Or sometimes they read like exhortations. ‘This is the STRONG country' one set of posters says. The other set says, ‘TAKE COURAGE'.

‘It's beer ads,' Sam says eventually. ‘There must be a beer called Courage. Maybe there's another one called Strong?'

Though the day is cold enough to stiffen Dinah's toes, Sam is not wearing his duffel coat because he's still got asthma from the boat. Dusty blankets have appeared after the stop-off day in Las Palmas and that's what's brought it on. After Las Palmas the economy-class swimming pool is filled with bright-red spherical tomatoes. All are the size of ping-pong balls. All are exactly the same. To Dinah and Sam the spherical tomatoes are a thing of miracle and wonder. That is, until they try one of them and find that it tastes like mush. Every tomato they've eaten hitherto has come an irregular orangey-green and it's often had scallops and grooves – sometimes even cracks and scars. But it's always tasted intense and lemony; it's tasted of tomato heaven.

Their first stop is a fortnight's free lodging with a kind friend in south London, who has a very small newly built flat. In the flat it's always raining indoors. Water is pouring down the insides of the windows and black mould is growing up the frames. This is because
the flats have been built without a gas supply. The building contractors have made a deal with the Electricity Board – and nobody now living in the flats can afford the electric heating. So the heating ducts have no function at all, except to slice up adventurous pet hamsters, while the residents are all using paraffin heaters, which are causing the indoor rain.

Sam and Dinah, who are given the only bedroom, are to sleep in a pretty old iron bed that the friend has bought from a second-hand stall under the Brixton railway arches. It has two ancient horsehair mattresses to compensate for its sagging wires. And the old black Valor paraffin heater is throwing a pretty rose window of light on to the ceiling. The problem is that, in addition, it's filling the room with smoke. And it could hardly be more embarrassing that, within ten minutes of going to bed, Sam has to be rushed into Dulwich Hospital, because his chest has gone into spasm. Once admitted, he's kept there for a week where he shares a room with an old Brixton white man who has had his voice box removed. The old Brixton white man has learned to speak on burps, so he's using all the burps he can muster to rant against the Caribbean immigrants who are currently moving into Brixton. Meanwhile, out in the real world, Dinah must sign up at the local police station because, ever since Dr Verwoerd has got South Africa expelled from the Commonwealth, that country's citizens count as aliens.

‘It's a crying shame, nice white people like you having to register as aliens,' says the police constable. ‘When these nig-nogs and all sorts, with names we can't pronounce, can come swanning in here just as they please.'

It's at times like this that Dinah feels impelled to get on her personal soapbox. She feels the same at the greengrocer's when she refuses to buy South African fruit.

‘Quite right. I agree with you,' the greengrocer says. ‘When you think of all those dirty black hands that go crawling all over the fruit-'

But this is London 1964. It's long before that city has become the multi-ethnic showpiece of Europe.

By now it's started snowing. It's the first snow that Dinah's ever seen. So she goes shopping in Oxford Street for some sturdy winter clothes. Her hostess has persuaded her that she'll need vests along with those passion-killing knickers that come halfway down your thighs. Dinah can never get used to the knickers and she finds that
there's something peculiarly horrible about wearing a vest with a bra. It makes you feel as if you've got all your underclothes on back to front. So she never wears her purchases. Plus, because she has no idea that Oxford Street is a little bit penny bazaar, she's puzzled to find that all she wants to buy there is a set of squeaky plastic mice that are on sale alongside the Underground station.

By the time Sam's been discharged from hospital, Dinah has found them a flat. Well, in the ad it's called a flat, but in fact it's not quite self-contained. Not like a Durban bachelor flat. The flat is the top two rooms of a tall house in Highgate and it's got its own kitchenette. But the bathroom on the landing is shared. And it's very soon clear that the landlady expects them to use the Hoover every day and the bath tub once a week. Sam and Dinah want to use the bath tub every day and the Hoover once a week, so there's a conflict of lifestyle from the start. And that's before Dinah commits the faux pas of removing a pair of net curtains. The net curtains are blurring the pleasant wintry view over Highgate Woods, so Dinah takes them down. In doing so she has no idea that she's committing a major transgression and she goes tripping off to her teaching job in Hackney which has just begun that week. Meanwhile Sam is taking the rap.

‘My nets!' says the landlady, accosting him on the stairs. ‘My
best nets
! What on earth have you done with them? I looked up from the garden and just imagine my shock. “My
best nets
!” I said to my husband. “Where are my
very best nets
?!” '

Sam is blinking at her in confusion, because he hasn't noticed the nets in the first place, nor that Dinah has taken them down. And he's on his way to the Reading Room of the British Museum, which is why he's halfway down the stairs. So that weekend Sam and Dinah are once again scanning the lettings as they sit morosely in a coffee house in Swiss Cottage alongside the John Lewis shop. It's exactly the sort of strudel hangout that feels like German-Jewish Johannesburg, so at least they're feeling at home. And it's there that they run into Harold Wolpe who has come in to buy some cakes. He laughs at their story and doesn't believe them that it's the net curtains that have got them thrown out. He says they must have done something worse. But he nonetheless invites them to stay.

‘We've got all these bedrooms,' he says.

Harold has arrived in a blaze of glory as a high-profile escape
artist from the apartheid reign of terror. He's been interviewed on all the news channels and the British Home Secretary has loaned him a house on Hampstead's salubrious Heath Drive. The rooms are vast and the en suite bathrooms have black-and-white marble floor tiles. The Edwardian bath tubs have roll tops and elegant old-fashioned chrome taps with elaborate chrome shower contraptions. Only there's not much sleep to be had in Harold's house, because everyone there is playing bridge through the night. The Rivonia Trial is going on and it's hard for people to go to sleep when they're waiting to know whether their comrades are about to be sentenced to death.

Each day, Dinah takes the train to Dalston Junction, near Stoke Newington. Then she takes a bus. Her school is near the Hackney Marshes where she's in charge of a class of seven-year-olds, about whom she knows nothing. Absolutely zilch. She has no idea that seven-year-olds like lots and lots of rules. Rules about whose turn it is to hand out the milk. Rules about whose turn it is to lead the class crocodile into assembly. Rules about the gathering in of pencils before each playtime comes round. So this is why, by the end of day one, her class doesn't have any pencils. And when she sends to the secretary for more, she's told that she's had her lot. Her class has had its pencil ration until the end of the spring term. The school year, Dinah's discovered, has only three seasons in England. And, curiously, though it's freezing cold, there's never any winter. The terms are spring and summer and autumn. Then it's the Christmas Holidays. Then – hey presto! – it's back to spring.

The crisis point of her every school day comes when Dinah has to take PE. Because not only is she conspicuously useless at any form of physical activity – that's with the exception of ballroom dancing, in which art, thanks to Mrs Dudley Andrews, she's possessed of a bronze medal – but PE always takes place in the hall: the communal, old-fashioned assembly hall, on to which all the classroom doors open. So her every failure is mercilessly public; her exposure is absolute. And always, before she can blow her whistle to assemble her children into lines, every male seven-year-old in her class is halfway up the wall bars, loudly whooping out Tarzan noises that are echoing round the whole school. Even when it comes to classroom work, the noise level emanating from her corner is
unacceptably high. Which is why, after three days, Mr Sparks has come in to rescue her. Mr Sparks is an old hand at teaching juniors and he's been raised in Hackney himself.

‘Let me give you a little demonstration,' he says.

Then he turns to glare at Dinah's children. Dinah's class has fallen completely silent upon the moment of his entry.

‘Line up!' says Mr Sparks, sounding very Fi Foe Fum. Then he says, ‘Back to your places!'

He has the class do this four times over. Each time he says their lining up won't do. They're not doing it quickly enough and they'll have to do it again. Finally he changes the drill. Throughout his demonstration he's assumed a man-eating ogre's voice that comes an octave down from where his normal voice is pitched.

‘Stand up!' he says. ‘Hands on heads! Sit down! Stand up! Hands on heads! Sit down!'

The children are all scrabbling feverishly to do Mr Sparks's bidding, but still Mr Sparks is not pleased. He stretches out his fearsome right arm and points an accusing finger. The object of his attention is an unusually small boy. The boy's name is Jeffrey Hirschmann and his testicles haven't dropped. Jeffrey's mother has told Dinah this on the afternoon of the first day.

‘You, boy!' says Mr Sparks. ‘Why don't you put your hands on your head when I tell you to?'

Jeffrey has been doing exactly the same as all the others have been doing, but now he's shaking and gulping in a paroxysm of guilt.

‘Sir,' he says, in a small capitulating squeak. ‘Sir. Sorry, sir.'

Mr Sparks meanwhile has turned aside to Dinah and he's speaking a little skittishly, half under his breath.

‘Pick on one of them,' he's saying to her. ‘Preferably the smallest.'

Then he returns his attention to the class. He's picked up the hymn book from Dinah's table and he's leafing through it as he speaks.

‘Take out your hymn books,' he says. He's reverted to the ogre's voice. ‘Open them at page ninety-three. Copy out hymn number one hundred and two. All five verses.'

The hymn books are out, the jotters are out. Heads are bent in concentration. Then he turns again to Dinah.

‘Keep them doing that for a week,' he says. ‘Lining up. Sitting down. Hands on heads. Copying out hymns. You'll have them eating out of your hand.'

Then Mr Sparks leaves the room.

The classroom door has barely closed behind him when pandemonium breaks loose. All ten Jewish children are jumping up and down and poor skinny goggle-eyed Simon Schaffer has managed to steam up his lenses. They've all begun to call out loud and each is more strident than the next.

‘Miss!
Miss
!' they're saying. ‘My mum says I'm not allowed copying out
ANY
fink about Jesus!
ANY
body as makes me copy out
ANY
fink about Jesus – that person's got to go to Mr Mynott!'