Whitethorn (49 page)

The problem with lying about not having parents is that you can't just say you don't have a mother or a father, and don't know who they are, because you have to have at least a mother and she must be somewhere. In my case, all I knew was that my mother delivered me to the orphanage and cried a lot, and then disappeared forever. If you say this then you're telling the truth, and that points to one direction, you back to being illegitimate. The only thing that was good about The Boys Farm was that everyone was more or less in the same boat, but even then everyone wants to have someone somewhere, that's why Gawie had to invent his uncle in Pretoria.

You can only invent one lie and the best one is that both your parents are dead and that makes you an orphan. But how did they die is always the next question. Then you've got to invent a whole new lie. The trick here is to invent a very simple lie, like, for instance, they died in a motorcar crash when you were still a baby and you couldn't even remember them. That's a safe lie and you can keep telling it, but it's not much of a story. There you are, a baby in a basket in the back seat, and bang-smash-tinkle, it's all over, and now all of a sudden you're an orphan. There are no memories or past, just this black hole called coming from nowhere and being a no-one. It may sometimes work, but even nowhere has a history, and a no-one was once a someone. So people want to know who these dead people were. Where did they come from? Why no relatives? Where were they going at the time of the crash? What did your father do before he died? Where did they live? If you can't answer these questions they'll think you're lying, and you just want to cover up that you're illegitimate. So back to the drawing board you go. This time you decide to design a new and improved lie, and that's where the trouble begins.

So here is my new-and-improved lie. Remember the waterfall Sergeant Van Niekerk took me to on the day of the grand picnic? Where when you stood in a certain position and called out, your voice kept echoing? It was the most beautiful spot I'd ever seen, and if someone had to die that was about as nice a place to die as you could think of. A great sheet of white water tumbling down into a tropical rainforest, strange and beautiful birds calling out, diamond sunlight and every day rain when the world would begin all over again. So I put this beautiful woman and handsome man at the very top of the falls. They'd left their baby in the shade of a giant tree at the bottom of the waterfall. Then they'd climbed up the cliff and undressed and stood on a rock, and kissed and then, holding hands, they'd jumped down into the waterfall and disappeared, never to be found again. A young herd boy looking after his father's goats in the high mountains heard the echo of a baby crying, and followed the great echo to find the child lying swaddled in a blanket under the tree. His name was Mokiti Malokoane, but he also had a white man's name, Joe Louis, and was the son of a mighty chief named Mattress Malokoane who sat under a marula tree all day and drank
kaffir
beer, and was terribly wise and greatly respected for his platform feet. The question of my name was easily enough solved because my parents had written a message across my chest and stomach in beautiful copperplate handwriting:

Tom Fitzsaxby,
the legitimate son of
Rosemarie and John Fitzsaxby

The woman's name came from Marie smelling of roses and the man's name was the English version of Jan, which was Sergeant Van Niekerk's Christian name. I decided to always end the story by saying, ‘Now the truly amazing thing is that you can search every phone book in every town and city in South Africa and you won't find a single Fitzsaxby.' Whether this was true or not I was unable to prove, but Miss Phillips had once said that because it was such an unusual surname she'd looked through the Johannesburg phone directory and found no Fitzsaxby, so I reckoned I was pretty safe.

In reviewing my new-and-improved lie I discovered one rather sad fact. I was unable to refer to my erstwhile parents as young or beautiful and handsome or even that they'd kissed and held hands as they jumped. If they were destined to disappear forever and nobody had seen them arrive at the great waterfall, how would I have known they loved each other and were young, beautiful and handsome? The key to the new-and-improved lie was that I told it very sparingly, and only after a great deal of prompting. This was to give the impression that I was myself reluctant to believe it. If having heard the story someone was to say, ‘Is that
really
true, Tom?' I could shrug my shoulders and answer, ‘How can I possibly know? But all I can say is that I've been taken to the spot where it was supposed to have happened and it is exactly the way it was described to me. The echo is there, the big tree is there, the waterfall is there and the big rock they're supposed to have jumped from is there.'

Now my third problem was money. Everyone had pocket money and I had none. Not a single penny. I'm sure if there hadn't been the excitement of the birth and the event at the railway station that Doctor Van Heerden or Sergeant Van Niekerk would have given me maybe five shillings, but in all the gerfuffle they didn't remember. The guys would go to the tuckshop and buy a cream bun or a Cornish pastie and a Pepsi-Cola, and if you were in a group you couldn't do the same. They were all rich kids, and often one would offer to buy me a bun or a Pepsi, but, of course, you couldn't accept because you couldn't reciprocate. So you'd always just say, ‘No, thanks, I'm not hungry,' or something dumb like that. Of course, everybody knows you don't have those nice-tasting things because you're hungry. So you could never hang around with a bunch of guys after school because all roads led to the tuckshop.

Maybe all of this sounds like a little thing, but being illegitimate isn't, and a nobody with no money in a school made up of kids with rich parents who knew exactly who they were and had the money to prove it was a difficult situation. If I was going to be forced into being a loner then I had to decide what kind of loner I wanted to be. In my experience there are only two places to hide if you're a ‘nobody' and a forced-to-be loner, either at the back of or at the front of life. At the back is to be a nothing person, someone who is present but seldom noticed, whose opinion is never sought or given, and who is the last to be picked for anything. Until Miss Phillips came into my life and, of course, with the exception of Mattress, this was what I had been at The Boys Farm. Hiding at the back of life wasn't a very successful method of living, and contained a fair amount of unhappiness, but it had nevertheless allowed me to survive reasonably intact in an institution from which most kids emerged damaged.

Now an entirely different set of circumstances again required me to be different. I lacked the means or the background to be the same as everyone else, so I had to decide whether I would revert to the nobody-at-the-back version, or to hide at the front where I would simply attempt to be better at everything than anyone else. Doing this up-front way would never cause anyone to think to ask about my past, my successful present would be sufficient evidence of a normal background, and the lack of detail about my past would hopefully be seen as a sign of modesty.

So this is the path I chose at the Bishop's College. I had a head start by winning the scholarship and by being the youngest boy in the school. This translated into me being thought of as brilliant. The two other scholarship winners, Nathan Feinstein and Julian Solomon, matched me in intellect, and often enough surpassed me, but it was always pointed out that I was two years younger than them. I was also in for another big shock. Jewish noses were exactly the same as everyone else's and they wore their hair short, and both Nathan and Julian said their fathers didn't have curly black hair and beards; one was bald and the other one was sort of mousey brown. When I asked them how many solid-gold teeth their fathers had, they both looked at me in a bemused way, and replied, ‘None.' Of course, I couldn't ask them about diamonds. I mean, after you'd already asked about the solid-gold teeth you couldn't just come out and say, ‘Oh yeah, and how many diamonds does your father have stuck up his bum?' But I realised that was probably also untrue, and there'd never been any such thing happen to Jewish mouths or bums.

Throughout the school, the Jewish pupils in general and the scholarship guys in particular tended to be the very brightest academically. I became the token gentile brain. This gave me a special status among the mainly gentile boys at the school. It also meant that I had almost earned the right to be a loner, as someone thought to have a superior mind doesn't have to make excuses for himself or even behave the same as everyone else. I'd also become fairly quick with a quip, which was another way of keeping people at arm's length. So having brains and a sharp tongue that usually brought laughter proved an excellent means of camouflage, a way of hiding myself in front where nobody could see who I really was.

As time went by I joined the debating society and chess club and represented Transvaal schools in both. While I was small, I proved to be wiry and agile and I was toughened by my previous life at The Boys Farm. I became a successful, if not exceptional, rugby scrum-half and cricket wicket-keeper/ batsman. Eventually I made it into the first team for both sports, and in my final year became a prefect, earning my school colours in rugby and chess, a combination that once again confirmed my loner status and largely did the speaking for me. I'm not telling you all this stuff in order to brag, but simply to get the information about the formal part of my schooling at the Bishop's College out of the way. There was another aspect of my life when I was growing into adulthood in the big city that you could be more interested in hearing about.So now back to the beginning. Gawie and me arrived in Pretoria early the next morning and I helped him drag his shiny new trunk off the train. We'd slept pretty well in the top bunks on either side of the compartment we'd gotten into when we changed trains at Louis Trichardt. Two old men had been in the compartment when we joined the train, and they both wanted the bottom bunks so we got lucky and got the top ones. The conductor rattled on the compartment door at five o'clock the next morning and shouted, ‘Pretoria one hour! Dining car open for breakfast!'

The two old men, Meneer Uys and Meneer Viljoen, asked us if we were going to breakfast and Gawie said yes he was and showed them a railway breakfast voucher. We'd already discussed this the night before and Gawie said he'd bring me back a slice of bread if it was allowed, or if nobody was looking. I can tell you one thing for sure, I was starving hungry.

Meneer Viljoen said, ‘A boy is always hungry in the morning, come along, son.'

‘I don't have a voucher, Meneer,' I replied.

‘Who said you need one, hey? Isn't my money good enough to buy a hungry boy some breakfast?'

I don't know how he knew how hungry I was, but that was a breakfast and a half. One of the best you could hope for – bacon and eggs and as much toast as you liked and a whole big silver pot of coffee on the table and you could take as much sugar as you liked. We all sat together and it turned out that Meneer Viljoen was a stock inspector looking for foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and Meneer Uys trained people how to do morse code on railway stations. They both got off at Pretoria, and both shook my hand, wishing me and Gawie luck at our new schools.

‘A good education is a precious thing, Tom, you don't want to grow up to be a stock inspector,' Meneer Viljoen laughed.

‘Thank you for breakfast, Meneer, I will try to do my best.'

‘
Ja
,' he said. ‘After the war, we going to need clever young people like you and your friend to build South Africa.'

‘And maybe get a Nationalist government for the
volk
and get rid of that imposter Jan Smuts,' Meneer Uys called out.

The train pulled out of Pretoria and soon enough the land outside the compartment window was flat and not very interesting with here a tree and there another, and when you passed a farm it had a windmill and grew only
mielies
. Then we passed huge expanses of tin shanties, single-room houses made of this and that; bits of corrugated iron, hessian sacking, box wood, canvas and old paraffin tins beaten flat that had gone rusty. Dirt roads with oily puddles wandered through these makeshift shelters and black people, especially little kids, were everywhere you looked. It was the biggest
kaffir
location you could possibly imagine. But then these huge hills of white sand called mine dumps started coming up and I knew from my discussions with Gawie this must be the region of Witwatersrand and that Johannesburg would soon be next.

When it did, I couldn't believe my own eyes! You'd never seen building like this in your whole life. They just went up and up and up forever, and how a person would be expected to climb to the top I couldn't say because they'd be exhausted long before they got there, and what about old people? Of course, up to that time, I'd never seen or heard about an electric lift that was a little room that went up and down tall buildings, and even had its own driver in a smart uniform and cap.

The train pulled into Johannesburg Central Station. People, hundreds of people, milling around and shouting, happy, welcoming faces everywhere, arms waving, whistles blowing and black porters expertly navigating trolleys on the crowded platform. I couldn't imagine how I could possibly find Miss Phillips, what if she got the wrong day, what would I do? I suddenly panicked, nobody had told me how big the station was, and the whole city was a place where I didn't know a single person, except for her.