Whitethorn (50 page)

I waited until everyone had left the carriage because with my Doctor Van Heerden suitcase in one hand and the quilt in the other, I filled up the whole corridor. When I got onto the platform the crowds were already starting to thin out, people's backs walking away with porters carrying suitcases. Still no Miss Phillips. If she'd got the wrong day could a person sleep on a railway station? How lucky that I'd had eggs and bacon and four pieces of toast for breakfast because I could now definitely last until tomorrow. If I ever met Meneer Viljoen again, I'd tell him how he'd saved my life. I sat on my suitcase thinking about the pickle I was in when Miss Phillips' voice said quite casually, ‘Oh, there you are, Tom.' She'd come from behind, and the next thing she said was, ‘And the first thing we're going to do is to let you grow your hair!' Then she ran her gloved hand over my shaved head and gave me a truly super big hug. She smelled of roses.

Boy, was she pleased with the quilt! You've never seen anybody so happy about something. I explained to her about the ten shillings and how it had escaped the big fire, but I didn't tell her about Gawie's bum hiding hole when it was still a pound and its other adventures on the way to turning into a quilt. She started to cry and said it was the best present she'd ever received and she gave me another big hug and I wasn't wrong, she definitely smelled of roses and, as far as I knew, she was still a Miss Phillips, maybe there was another shotgun wedding coming up?

‘It's still early, Tom, and we have to go to John Orr's to get you some underpants, then I'll take you to the art gallery, and after that we'll have lunch. We'll store your suitcase in a locker here at the station and get it this afternoon, you have to be at the School House at three o'clock.'

‘Underpants?' The last time underpants had come up for discussion was with Gawie, who said he'd seen them advertised on a shit square, and they were called Jockeys and were only worn by men who rode racing horses. ‘Are we supposed to ride horses at school, Miss?'

‘Horses? Why, of course not, Tom. What on earth gave you such a strange idea?'

‘Gawie says they're called Jockeys and so must only be worn by people who ride racing horses.'

Miss Phillips laughed and explained that this was only the name of a brand of underpants. I didn't want to ask any further questions because I didn't understand why I had to wear them in the first place. It would be like boys wearing bloomers, and why would you do a thing like that? Thank goodness no-one at The Boys Farm would see me. ‘There goes
Voetsek
the
Rooinek
who wears girls bloomers!' Talk about shame. ‘Is it compulsory?' I asked.

‘You need them when you go to high school because, you see, that's when young boys reach puberty and your body will start to change,' Miss Phillips explained. But it wasn't much of an explanation and I made a note to check puberty in my dictionary when I got my suitcase back. There had already been some talk of body changes at The Boys Farm when Meneer Prinsloo did his lecture about masturbation. Mevrou and old Mevrou Pienaar had to leave the dining room, and then about twice a year we'd get the body-changing talk that led to masturbation, which was known as ‘slogging'. With Miss Phillips talking about body changes I thought it must have something to do with slogging because, according to Meneer Prinsloo, that happened when a boy was about thirteen. It was also forbidden, and if you got caught you got six of the best from Meneer Prinsloo with the long cane. It was supposed to be against God's will and if you did it too much you would go blind, but everyone said that was bullshit because lots of the older kids did it a lot and they hadn't gone blind and nobody knew of anyone who ever had. Before Gawie became a
surrogaat
and couldn't afford to be my friend and after one of Meneer Prinsloo's ‘boys only' lectures we'd once discussed masturbation.

‘You're nearly thirteen, has it happened to you yet?' I'd asked him.

‘
Ja
, I'm trying it on,' he giggled.

‘But it's supposed to be a sin against God?'

‘That's only if you do it a lot, man.'

‘How much is a lot?'

‘Hundreds of times! Every now and again is okay.'

I don't know how all of a sudden Gawie became such an expert on God's opinion on masturbation, but he did point out that the
Dominee
had never brought it up in church and we only had Meneer Prinsloo's word for it.

‘It's going on all over the place, and if God was angry the
Dominee
would have said so,' he assured me.

So I tried it when Gawie showed me how it was done, but I couldn't make it happen yet because I was only eleven.

I wondered if I should tell Miss Phillips that it was still too early for underpants and she mustn't waste her money, but then again, she might ask me why, then how would I answer her question? I couldn't say, ‘Because I can't masturbate yet, Miss.' But answer me this, if it sent you blind or was a sin against God, were underpants some sort of protection against blindness or becoming a sinner?

So we got these six pairs of underpants and Miss Phillips said I should wear one pair, and after a while you got used to them and they were quite comfortable. There was this hole in them like a fly in your pants but without buttons, and you didn't have to take them off like a girl's bloomers when you had to take a piss, quite convenient really.

Then it was on to the art gallery that was in a big park with ponds and ducks and trees, with benches for people to sit on, but only if you were a white person, and lots of lawn and flowers, and black nannies sitting together on the grass laughing and talking, and one taking charge of looking after lots of little white kids running around.

Now, of course, I'd seen pictures before but I don't think they were paintings. Some were on the classroom walls at school, and at Doctor Van Heerden's house I think two were real paintings because if you looked closely you could see brush marks. There was also a picture of a wagon being pulled by oxen over a mountain in the Great Trek in the dining room at The Boys Farm, but it didn't have brush marks, and then, of course, there were pictures in books, but nothing like the art gallery. Here was picture after picture, and proper paintings called oils, some were almost as big as a whole wall of a room. Miss Phillips said some of the paintings were worth thousands of pounds, and you could easily see why, they had frames painted gold and were very elaborate. Never mind the paintings, if you just owned the frames you'd have to be very rich. But after a while you couldn't look any more because there were so many, but you could see people painted just about everything that happens in life, and even something called still life, which is mostly bunches of flowers or pieces of fruit. There were even painting of ladies with no clothes on that you were allowed to look at, and see parts you'd never seen before with just a piece of wispy-looking cloth covering their you-know-what, but nothing to cover the top. Miss Phillips must have seen me go red in the face and back away when all of a sudden we came around a corner and there's this big painting of a lady lying on a bed. She's got no clothes on and everything's showing, and the wispy covering you could almost see through and it took no imagination. But you had to wonder how a whole baby could come out of there. Miss Phillips said, ‘It's proper art, Tom, you're
supposed
to look at it, the human form is a feast for the eyes.' All I can say is that she was very lucky the
Dominee
wasn't there. But also, if this was proper art then there had to be something that wasn't proper, and I wondered what it might be.

So after the art gallery we had to have lunch. ‘What would you like to have for lunch, Tom?' Miss Phillips asked.

First underpants, and now a question I'd never been asked before in my whole life, we'd only been in Johannesburg a few hours and already life was getting very complicated. I only knew two things you could eat at a place where you had to pay and that was a mixed grill and ice-cream on one leg. In Duiwelskrans a mixed grill was a very expensive treat to have, and a person couldn't just come out and say you'd like something like that for a lunch out of the blue when you'd been shopping for underpants.

Miss Phillips must have seen my hesitation because she said, ‘How about roast chicken? They do a nice roast chicken with chips at a restaurant near here or perhaps you'd like a curry?'

Remember how I was supposed to go to Doctor Van Heerden's for Christmas and Mevrou said I couldn't because Marie's wedding took up three months' worth of Government Permission Monthly Outings? Well, that was the time I was supposed to taste roast chicken because Marie said the
boere
always gave the good doctor several nice roasting chickens for Christmas lunch. She said that was why he had all the chickens in his backyard, because he got so many he couldn't eat them all and kept the rest for laying eggs. So now, at long last, I was going to taste my first roast chicken. As for having a curry instead, that's a funny thing I forgot to tell you, the Impala Café was still doing mixed grills under the direction of Mr Patel's son and daughter-in-law, but the Sunday lunch
boere
were taking to curry like nobody's business. But I had to choose the chicken because I hadn't waited all my life to taste curry.

All I can say is that it was simply delicious, just as good as people said it was, and it wasn't even Christmas time. Did you know that a chicken has two sorts of meat, brown and white, and the brown is definitely the best tasting?

But at lunch Miss Phillips dropped her bombshell and, of course, it was about her smelling of roses.

‘Tom, I have some news,' she began. ‘I'm getting engaged to be married.'

‘Are you going to have a baby?' I asked.

‘Good heavens, no!' she exclaimed, adding in a softer voice, ‘Well, not right away.'

Ha! She didn't even know herself. I had learned somewhere that what you said at a time like this was ‘Congratulations, and who is the lucky man?' Although I don't know where I would have learned this saying, because with both weddings I'd attended I already knew who the lucky man was. But I didn't with Miss Phillips, so that's what I said to her.

‘Thank you, Tom, he's a colonel in the army and on the General Staff, but before the war he was in the Foreign Service. If we win the war, he'll be returning to his old job and I expect we'll have to live in Pretoria and if he gets a posting overseas, who knows.' She reached out and touched my hand. ‘Tom, wherever I am or we are, you'll always be in my life.' Then she smiled and brought her other hand across the table so both her hands rested on mine. ‘I make you this promise, I will never ever part with my beautiful quilt and it will be on my wedding bed and will remain there until the day I die.' Her nails were painted bright red and were longer than they'd been before, and a person sort of knew she was saying goodbye even if, like her shotgun wedding to come, she didn't know it herself. My life was becoming full of goodbyes and I felt truly sad that I would lose Miss Phillips once the war was over. I don't know how you can tell a person that not only are you grateful for what they've done, but you also love them. It was something I'd never had the opportunity to practise, and so I hoped that when the time finally came to say a real goodbye to her I'd be able to find the right words.

That was my first day away from The Boys Farm, except for one small further thing. Where we had our roast chicken wasn't very far away from Johannesburg Central Station where we had to get my suitcase, and then we were going to the Bishop's College. So we walked and as we were going into the station, on the pavement was a white beggar sitting on a box, and next to him was a little dog, a fox terrier, and my heart gave this terrible jolt. The dog wasn't like Tinker because it had a brown spot on its chest, but it had a face almost the same as Tinker's, and suddenly the loneliness stones began piling up in my chest and I had to fight very hard not to cry. In front of the dog was an old felt hat lying upside down and inside it were a few coins, sixpences and shillings, and the little dog looked up at me as if to say, ‘How about a sixpence, Sir?' And if I'd had a sixpence I would have put it in the hat for sure, a person couldn't turn a dog like that down flat. Then I looked closely at the beggar, not that there was much to see, but what you could see wasn't very nice. He wore a dirty black hood over his head with a hole cut out for one eye and another hole for one ear, so this hood only had an eye and an ear sticking out, but his right hand was just a pink stump with no fingers, and it was on the top edge of a neatly painted wooden board hanging around his neck and resting in his lap. The sign read:

Are you game? See my
BOMBED FACE
! Pay a shilling.
Children
only
sixpence.

The beggar started making grunting and snorting noises, and furiously pointing at us with his stump, getting very excited with the painted board wobbling up and down on his lap as he jerked his head to get our attention.

‘Come, Tom,' Miss Phillips said, grabbing me by the elbow. ‘The poor man is harmless but not quite right in his head.' I wish I could have asked her for sixpence. Not to look at his face, but to give to his little dog guarding the money.

We got my suitcase and put the underpants inside and left the quilt in the locker, and Miss Phillips said she'd get it on her way back from the school. To my surprise we took a taxi and that was another first thing I'd ever done. Underpants, art gallery, roast chicken and a taxi, all first things on the same day. The taxi had a meter with a handle that looked like a little flag sticking out of the top. When we started out the driver pulled the little flag down and it began to tick and show an amount of money on a black-and-white enamel dial that kept changing by a penny. I kept looking at it because it was getting to be quite a lot by the time we got to the Bishop's College – two shillings and sixpence – because the school was way out in a suburb next to the highway to Pretoria. Miss Phillips must have seen the worried look on my face when she paid and she said, ‘I know it's expensive, but it's such a business lugging a heavy suitcase on a bus and from the bus stop through the grounds to the School House.' She was right about that, once we went through the school gates, we travelled past several rugby grounds and a cricket pitch, and along an avenue that was lined with huge old English oak trees, until we eventually got to the boarding house known as School House.