Whitethorn (34 page)

I didn't know what to say to this but then she asked, ‘Let me see your hand?'

I held out my bandaged hand and she examined the bandage carefully. ‘Tsk! This bandage is no good. See where is the safety pin.' She pointed to the large safety pin that was in the end of the bandage in the centre of my palm. ‘It will catch on things,' she explained. ‘This is another example of medical incompetence.' She unclipped the safety pin and began to unwind the bandage. What could I do? I couldn't exactly say that Doctor Van Heerden had said she mustn't. She lifted the gauze dressing that smelled vaguely of sulphur.

‘
Ag
, it is not so bad,' she sniffed. ‘If I had my way we would put on some honey. That doctor thinks he knows everything! Sometimes
volk
medicine is better. We
Boere
have used honey for burns since the Great Trek and even before that. But what would we know, eh?'

‘If it was honey a person could lick it off,' I said, attempting to smile.

‘You trying to be funny,
Voetsek
? To laugh at our old ways?'

‘
Nee
, Mevrou!' I said quickly, sorry I'd opened my big mouth for such a feeble joke.

Mevrou sighed and replaced the gauze and did up the bandage, this time the safety pin was positioned so that my wrist protected it from being caught on anything. I must say it was very clever.

‘Now take down your pants and touch your toes,' she said suddenly.

‘What for, Mevrou?' I cried. ‘I didn't start the fire and I lost all my books also!'

‘You lucky, man. Meneer Prinsloo should do it, but he says I must. You know you can't go into town without permission, you were out of bounds.'

‘What about Gawie Grobler? He came with?' I protested, pushing my khaki shorts down to my ankles and bending to touch my toes. I know I shouldn't have said this, Gawie getting off was all right, but it was just so unfair picking on me.

‘You the leader,
he
only followed you,' Mevrou explained.

‘But he is two years older than me!' I protested, turning to look up at her.

‘
Ag
, it doesn't matter about his age. He is not a strong person and is easily led. An Afrikaner boy who reads that English rubbish with evil in it is not a leader of men.'

For a moment I wondered if it had been Mevrou who had burned my books. She'd been in church last Sunday and heard what the
Dominee
had said about books in English. But I had to admit to myself that I'd never seen her walking anywhere near the library rock. She was too fat to walk such a long way and would never go through thornbushes and stuff. When she walked she planted one leg down – ‘Boom!' – then the other – ‘Boom!' – shifting her weight from one side to the other. Her fat shoulders also rolled with each step. You could see her coming for miles with her great stomach sticking out and her chin in the air.

Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack!
I waited for the next two whacks, but they didn't come. Out of bounds is six of the best and they always came from Meneer Prinsloo's long cane that I was now old enough to get if the crime was bad enough. Sometimes you can get lucky in life.

C
HAPTER
NINE

A Women's Selfless Love

OF COURSE, SERGEANT VAN Niekerk's enquiries came to nothing. Over four weekends he conducted interviews with every boy in the place. I could have told him all along it was a useless waste of time and energy. At The Boys Farm, in terms of volunteering information, he'd have to wait for hell to freeze over first. The thing was no boy there would have wanted to help me anyway. They thought the same as I did before Doctor Van Heerden told me I must read everything, every opinion, good or bad, then make my own mind up about things. They would believe the
Dominee
about English books being full of evil with the devil's messages lurking around every corner. Whoever burned my books would think they were doing a good thing and helping God's work. Sergeant Van Niekerk sniffing around the place would have made them even more secretive, more
stom
. The only thing that came out of it was that Gawie was now a
surrogaat
Engelsman
, a surrogate Englishman. ‘
Surrogaat
' was a big word for anyone to use and nobody would have known it normally, but Meneer Prinsloo had used it in his after-supper talk the night after the fire.

The fire, of course, was a very big subject and he really went to town. ‘You all know there has been a big fire and we have lost our pigs and nearly the dairy, so for this Christmas no pork on the table. We won't be able to send a gift of a nice leg of ham that Mevrou Van Schalkwyk kindly cures for us on her farm to the Inspector of Children's Institutions in Pretoria. This is a great shame because for ten years now since I came here we have killed a pig for Christmas and Mevrou's delicious cured-with-honey-in-her-smokehouse ham has gone to the good Inspector, who is always very accommodating to The Boys Farm. It is good to have a friend in high places in Pretoria, and now he doesn't get his Christmas ham.'

Meneer Prinsloo stopped and looked around the room. ‘But, of course, we also know the fire that nearly burned everything down was started by burning some
English
books, by a person or persons unknown.' His hands began to wave and his lips curled and the elastic braces began to stretch and strain at the leather fasteners that clipped onto the buttons on his trousers that ended in the middle of his stomach. ‘These books in question belonged to Tom Fitzsaxby and were also read by the now
surrogaat Engelsman,
Gawie Grobler.'

You could tell from his voice that he was disgusted with us, especially Gawie who was an Afrikaner and not a hard-case Englishman who caused so much trouble around the place. ‘This
surrogaat Engelsman
who we thought was so clever and also an Afrikaner now we know likes to read English books and maybe believe what no good Afrikaner can believe if he has a conscience!' Then he went on to say he wanted the boy or boys responsible for starting the fire to confess as it was a big disgrace to have a policeman snooping about the place and that the good reputation of The Boys Farm was at stake. ‘But maybe we can't find this person, or persons, perhaps it will be like the criminal person who stole Piet Retief's tail feathers and is never to be found!'

Meneer Prinsloo knew as we all did that nobody was going to confess. There was not a snowball's hope in hell of such a thing happening. But at least he wasn't accusing Gawie and me of starting the fire, like he'd told Sergeant Van Niekerk he definitely had witnesses who saw us do it. With Pissy Vermaak no longer here, you couldn't just go around finding witnesses that would swear on a stack of Bibles that we'd started the fire when we didn't. Maybe the other boys had no time for me but they had even less for members of the staff, particularly Meneer Prinsloo. But by calling Gawie a surrogate Englishman, it was all finish and
klaar
with him.

Poor Gawie was in the super-deep shit and all because of me. Going to school on Monday, he didn't walk with me, nor had he talked with me in the dormitory the previous night or in the wash house when we were washing our face and hands and feet before going to bed. Just before we got to school he walked past me and said in a loud voice so everyone could hear, ‘
Voetsek
,
Voetsek
!' I think it was supposed to be funny, and then he clouted me behind the head and moved on. I wasn't scared of Gawie and I reckon I could have taken him any time he liked, but now I had a bandaged hand. What was the use of doing that, anyway? Everyone laughed and someone shouted, ‘You not game to take him, hey,
Voetsek
?' And then the kids started chanting, ‘
Surrogaat
!
Surrogaat
!
Surrogaat
!' and they all laughed some more, but this time at poor Gawie, who was only trying to show them he was a
regte
Boer
all the time and that he didn't like me any more
.

As for me, I was pretty sad. I'd lost Gawie and my books all at the one time. Where was I? I was nowhere, that's where! A nobody, nowhere! Now there was just Tinker and me and the burnt red book, starting all over again from scratch. I would have to write and tell Miss Phillips what had happened. What if she was very cross that I hadn't taken better care of the books she'd sent? They'd cost good money of her own, and perhaps I couldn't make a person like her, who hadn't grown up in an orphanage, understand that you weren't allowed to keep things in the dormitory. On the other hand, keeping books in old paraffin tins under a big rock sounds a pretty dumb thing to do. What if just a natural bushfire came along? Maybe she'd think I was ungrateful and that I just threw her books into old paraffin tins after I'd read them. ‘You ungrateful child, after all I've done for you! Paraffin tins, and not even new ones!'

I was now ten, nearly eleven, and I wasn't sure how well I spoke English. But by now, thanks to Miss Phillips, I could read and write it pretty well. I used to speak English to Tinker who would listen and put her head to one side and even sometimes bark. I also told her she was English, being a fox terrier and all. I said, ‘If you even say it in Afrikaans it's
foksterriër
, so this is definite proof that, like me, you are English. It's just that we've somehow got ourselves born in the wrong place.' I don't think she really cared if she was Afrikaner or English, because she was a one-man dog and if I had been an Eskimo she wouldn't have cared less. She loved me lots and lots and didn't ask questions about a person all the time.

But Gawie was a different matter altogether. To be a
surrogaat Engelsman
was like you don't know who you are all of a sudden. All your life you've been a proud Afrikaner,
regte
Boer
with an uncle in Pretoria (even if it wasn't true). Now you are an in-between something or other, neither a
rooinek
like me, nor a proper
Boer
. I mean, if someone came up to me and handed me some beads and a big gold cross and said, ‘Sorry,
Voetsek
, from now on you a Roman Catholic, man!' How would I feel? Not very happy, I can tell you! You'd have to learn all those prayers so you could go ‘click' one, ‘click' two, ‘click' three and so on, because God would know if you didn't know them off by heart and you'd be punished for trying to take shortcuts with praying! I'd probably be all right because, if I could learn to recite the red book, I reckon I could do those bead prayers also. It still wouldn't be nice one moment to be who you
really
are and talking to God direct, and the next it's beads clicking and crosses dangling and you're somebody else altogether. Somebody you never even thought you were going to be until Meneer Prinsloo said you were it.

That week in school I was trying to get up enough courage to write to Miss Phillips. I could only have two goes. You couldn't waste paper because of the war, and if you tore a page out of the exercise book the Government gave you at school then you had to go to the middle where the staples were so two would come out. That's two pages and nobody would know you'd torn them out. But four pages would be too many and maybe they'd find out. So I had to practise the letter I was going to write in my head and then write the one I decided on, and after that make a clean copy with the page that was leftover.

So after I got it all straight in my head, I wrote:

Dear Miss Phillips,

I have some very bad news. There has been a terrible fire and
all my books have been burned. It is a tragedy but not my fault,
somebody else did it because of what the
Dominee
said in church
about books in English should be burned because lurking in the pages
is evil. You reading along nicely and then when you not looking a
bit of evil is written. In Germany it happened, but Adolf Hitler has
a man called Joseph Goebbels who finds out every time and they
burn that book. You can take him into a whole library and he'll go straight to the bad book and burn it. But the English don't do that
and so the
Dominee
said we mustn't read English books because
most of them have evil lurking. Doctor Van Heerden says that's
rubbish, but too late, someone already burned all my books you sent
me. I don't know what to say, except that I'm very sorry because you
paid good money for them and I loved them very much. You must
understand about the old paraffin tins, there was nowhere else, we
are not allowed to keep things like books under our beds and so I had
to hide them under the big rock in a small cave I dug. I am asking
for your forgiveness because I am very grateful for what you did for
me. I hope you are not going to be very cross reading this. Now some
good news! I rescued the red book at the last minute. Hooray! Now
for the bad news! It is burned on the corner and some words are also
gone missing, but not a lot. Also, I burned my hand taking it out
of the fire. But it is not too bad and only has a bandage and some
sulphur on it and I have to exercise it so I don't lose my fingers. Did
you know that the
Boere
used honey on burns in the Great Trek?

Your obedient student,
Tom Fitzsaxby
Woof–Woof!

I wasn't too sure about the ‘Woof–Woof!' ending because I didn't know if I was going to be in disgrace. But sometimes in life you have to hope for the best. I sent the letter off with the next exercise that luckily I'd already done before the fire. I was waiting for Gawie to finish his, but now it looked as if he wasn't going to. I didn't mention this to Miss Phillips because I didn't want her to feel sorry for me losing a friend when she had every right to be angry over the burned books. And anyway, there wasn't any room left on the page.