Frankie and Stankie (6 page)

The school wash-basins are all furnished with shiny pink chunks
of slimy carbolic soap that look like sections of human lung. Dinah sloshes water on her face and dries it on a soggy roller towel that seems anything but hygienic. Then she returns, cowed, to Miss Cowper's lesson. She coincides with the return of Miss McNeil, and another sea of waving hands.

‘Miss McNeil, Miss McNeil,' the girls say. Everyone is eager to be first with the news. ‘Miss Cowper called Dinah a silly little girl.'

Miss McNeil has the kindest smile. ‘I expect we're all a bit silly,' she says.

At big break Dinah discovers all sorts of things she's never heard of before, but she tries to pretend that she has. The girls of Class One have taken their lunch-boxes into the playground and they sit in a ring on the grass under a lychee tree that drops its pink armour-plated fruits, like small hard-boiled eggs. She learns about comics, because some of the girls have been to afternoon children's cinema at the Playhouse in town and they talk about what comics they've swapped for which, in the foyer before the show.

And they talk about a radio show called
Mister Walker Wants to Play
where people phone in and ask Mister Walker to play their favourite pop music. Mister Walker will ask the callers what their hobbies are and whether they'd like to send a message to anyone over the radio before their music is played.

So the caller will say, ‘My hobbies is picot-edging and crochet, Mister Walker, and I'd just like to say hello to my Auntie Ida and all the kids – hello there and keep smiling through – and for my record I'd like “Deep in My Heart” by Bing Crosby –
thank
you, Mister Walker.'

Mister Walker is Australian, but he puts on an American accent for the show. Dinah has never heard commercial radio, or seen a comic, and the only film she's been to see is
Nanook of the North
at the Roxy bio-café where she went with her dad. At the bio-café they show the same film over and over all day, so you can come and go any time. Plus you get a cup of tea or a mug of lemonade included in the price of your ticket.

Then Dinah learns about natives and koelies.

‘Would you rather have a native girl or a koelie to make your sandwiches?' a little girl asks.

Dinah doesn't know what the girl is talking about, because she's
never heard a black person called a native girl before, and she's never heard of a koelie. A koelie is an Indian and there are lots of Indians in Durban. Dinah's family don't yet have a maid and it's her dad who has made her sandwiches. He does lots of the cooking and domestic work, especially since her mum has got so frail. Dinah has salami and gherkin in her sandwiches with home-made mayonnaise and some fresh orange juice in a washed-out Dettol bottle. The others all have Edam or purple jam. Not melon-and-ginger jam, because that's just for the native girl. Ughh! And the native girl always has her own special tin plate and mug. Every child has a story about how one day their mother went out and came back home to find that the native girl was drinking out of one of the family's china teacups. Ughh! The native girl always gets the sack if she's caught and it serves her right. Because if you give them an inch they take a mile. That's what natives are like.

Native girl or koelie? The question is taking quite a while to reach Dinah because of her position in the circle, so she is able to suss that everyone would prefer a native girl to make her sandwiches rather than a koelie.

‘I'd like a native girl to make my sandwiches,' Dinah says.

Koelies are inherently more threatening than natives. Koelies are a plague in our midst. The girls talk about koelies just as if they were like cockroaches. Squash them and they're yellow inside. Natives are all right. They're just more stupid, but you can train them to be more hygienic. Everyone has a story about what thick skulls natives have. Everyone, except Dinah, has actually
seen
a bus driver knock down a native and drive right over his head. Afterwards the native always just gets up and walks away.

In history nice Mrs Hale explains that we have Indian immigrants in Natal to work on the sugar plantations because a native's idea of hard work is to sit under a tree with his hat over his eyes. And, one Wednesday, when it's the day to bring in extra sandwiches for the poor children in the native location, the headmistress holds up two huge doorstep sandwiches from the charity basket and asks which girl has brought them. Then, when Hilary Barber puts her hand up, Dinah thinks that she's going to get into trouble for bringing such horrible wedges of bread with a scrape of jam and no butter.

‘Look at Hilary's sandwiches, girls,' says the head. ‘These are the sort of sandwiches that a native likes.'

She doesn't tell the girls what Indians like because we don't bring sandwiches for them. Ughh!

Hilary's dad is a lawyer and one day, in class, when the teacher says does anyone know what a lawyer does, Hilary puts up her hand.

‘My dad's a lawyer,' she says.

‘And what does he do?' says the teacher.

‘He does lawyer work,' Hilary says.

Dinah's dad plays tennis on Sunday mornings with an Indian lawyer called Veejay Pillay. Dinah is terrified that someone at school will find this out.

‘Your dad plays tennis with koelies. Ughh!'

Dinah's mum is a bit exercised about Mr Pillay as well. They quarrel about it at home. Their mum isn't against Mr Pillay but she thinks their dad shouldn't be sticking his neck out. Lisa and Dinah copy their dad and laugh at their mum for being such a coward, but Dinah's mum is right in thinking politics can get scary. She's the only one in the family who has seen Hitler with her own eyes. And as a child after the First World War, she can remember seeing a Communist demonstration being broken up on her way home from school. She saw Rosa Luxemburg address a crowd in Berlin, but the police came and banged people on the head with truncheons and threw them into police cars. Dinah's mum saw blood spurt from a man's nose when a policeman banged him on the head. So she knows that if you're a Communist then someone will bang you on the head and make blood spurt out of your nose.

She knows that where politics is concerned you should keep your head down – and sometimes quite literally. She can remember the time when her own father quickly pushed her brother Otto's head down on the balcony that overlooked their Berlin street. Her brother had stuck his hand out and called out
‘Heil Hitler
!' in a piercing joke voice when a troop of Nazis went by, all marching in step. Her father saw one of the officers look up and scan the balconies, but by that time Otto wasn't visible because he was on the floor. All the same, when Alan Paton comes to tea one day Dinah's mum brings out one of the Kaiser's damask tablecloths. This is because, although he's political, he's written a book that has made him famous in America. It's called
Cry the Beloved Country
and it's going to be made into a film.

Dinah's dad goes on playing tennis with Veejay Pillay, and one
day the whole family is invited to a Hindu wedding. This requires them to cross the great divide into an area of distinct otherness where Indians live. The roads have more potholes and there are more banana trees. They descend from the ridge of the Berea into the valley behind. Indians must not live or work or have their shops in our parts of town, although, for the time being, they are cheek by jowl. Whites have the cooler ridges and Indians have the muggier valleys that the mosquitoes like best. Dinah's dad says these geographical demarcations are thanks to General Smuts, our leader. Where Indians live, or have lived, can always be charted by the density of the mango trees, lychee trees and avocado trees they planted. And later, as people are more rigorously moved from one area after another, as the system moves from imperial-racist to criminal lunatic, the trees become a sort of memorial to them, a sort of trail, like Hansel and Gretel's stones.

The wedding takes place in what Dinah's classmates call a koelie temple, though she doesn't tell them about the wedding and, anyway, a koelie temple is sufficiently remote from her classmates' experience to mean that any reference they might make is exclusively metaphorical. It means something gaudy and trashy. So a girl will say, ‘She was all dressed up like a koelie temple,' if the person's clothes were too shimmery and brash. The koelie temple is amazingly gaudy. So are the saris and the dresses of the little Indian girls. They are all made of purple and shocking pink and saffron-coloured silk with an overlay of scratchy lace and lots of sparkly trim and silver braid. The bride and groom, lavishly garlanded, sit for what seems like all day in a sort of bower at the altar end of the temple while the guests are served food on banana leaves. The banana leaves are their plates. Dinah is amazed by the temple's ornate interior because she has never been in a Catholic church – or in any church – and has had no contact with the baroque. All the churches she passes on her way home from school are Presbyterian or Methodist. They are all built of red brick, except for the one that has a sort of peanut-brittle pebbledash. The newer ones look like petrol stations or like giant 1940s gramophone cabinets. Some of the Dutch Reformed churches that she's seen in newspaper pictures look quite a lot like grain silos. Dinah's father is against religion but, once a week, on Sunday mornings, she hears the tail-end of the Dutch Reformed Church service in Afrikaans, because it comes just
before a classical music programme that her dad always listens to.

The church service frequently overruns its time, and this is because the dominie likes to pray and sermonise for ever. He intones his words in a slowed-up, stretched-out monotone, as if he were trying to make each one last as long as possible. This drives Dinah's dad into a frenzy. He swats the radio with a rolled-up newspaper as he waits for whatever Haydn or Palestrina is being promised in the weekly radio guide, and he rants at the dominie in fluent Afrikaans. Once the prayers are concluded it's time for the final hymn. This is nearly always a slowed-up version of one or other of the hymns that Dinah knows in English from her school assemblies. The Dutch Reformed hymn singing has a bullish, male-dominant sound and the hymns are sung strictly in unison. Harmonising is what natives do and who wants to be like them?

From almost every bus ride in Durban all through Dinah's early childhood, gangs of Zulu road builders, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, are to be seen at work. They raise picks and lower them to unspoken rhythms and they sing so perfectly in exquisite harmonies as they do so that Dinah is transfixed. She doesn't know if they are prison gangs or ordinary day labourers, but there is always one white foreman to about twelve of the black men. The white man is also stripped to the waist and burnt lobster red. And he is always screaming at the men with such intense and apparently inexplicable ferocity that it makes him sound raving mad. Then one day there's just one black man and he's got a pneumatic drill. The gangs and the foremen are gone for ever and, after that, whenever Dinah asks, nobody can seem to remember that the road-gang songs ever happened.

Scripture happens after lunch, and it's taught by Mrs Garson, who looks just like a picture-book granny, with funny half-moon specs. Her hair is parted dead-centre, just like Rosema's, and she has a bun at the back which is made out of her own hair arranged around a doughnut. Mrs Garson wears her bosom hanging over the belt of her shirtwaister dress and her face is strangely matt with powder. Her eyebrows and eyelashes as well. She looks as though she must immerse her face in a bag of flour every morning and then blow hard. Mrs Garson is so religious that she has a biblical quotation for every occasion. So, if any girls are chattering as they are putting on
their gym shoes, she'll write on the blackboard, ‘Let all things be done decently and in order.' And then she'll write in brackets after it, ‘II Corinthians, chapter 6, verse ix' – or whatever the reference is.

Mrs Garson runs the weekly optional bible class in the lunch-hour and she calls the gospels the Good News. She brings the Good News in Scripture as well and she has exciting visual aids. She's got a green baize board that she rolls down over the regular blackboard like a roller blind and a whole lot of shiny cut-out pictures that stick to the board. These are all the people in the Bible stories that she tells. Dinah has never heard about any of them before, so the shepherds and the wise men and the raising of Lazarus and Joseph with the many-coloured coat – well, it's all very Good News to her.

Mrs Garson teaches them how to say the Lord's Prayer with their eyes shut and their hands together. Dinah learns it off by heart that very day and she dashes home after school to show her parents. She longs for them to praise her for her new accomplishment. Dinah makes them wait outside the door of the bedroom that she shares with Lisa until she is in kneeling position beside her bed, with her eyes closed and her hands together. Then she calls out, ‘Ready!' Her parents come in and she starts to recite.

‘Ourfatherwhichartinheavenhallowedbethynamethy –'

She gets no further before her dad bursts out laughing. Dinah is mortified. It's probably one of the worst moments of her life. She hates him. She feels so bad that she wants to wither away. But she knows that what Mrs Garson says about the Good News is true – every word of it. Yet Mrs Garson has told all the same stories to Lisa for the last two years without them making any impact. Lisa is a natural materialist and the Good News never gets to her. Sometimes the girls have religious arguments together at home.

‘Well, if there is a God, why can't you see him?' Lisa says.

Dinah thinks of all sorts of reasons. ‘He's hidden behind the clouds,' she says.

‘Well, what if there aren't any clouds?' Lisa says.

‘It's because he's so big he takes up the whole sky,' Dinah says. ‘What you can see is just a little part of his blue cloak.'