Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Never you mind, we know about him, Jan Smuts now has the same blood on his hands as the British for the women and children who died in the concentration camps.’ That’s what Meneer Botha said. So you can see, running away with Tinker, especially with me being English, was a hopeless proposition. People wouldn’t lift a finger to help an English boy and his little bitch dog that was one day going to have babies that would need to be drowned in a sack.

  At supper that night, which was the usual boiled potatoes and cabbage and stew that was gravy with only a very little bit of meat and lots of carrots and bits of tomato skin, I hardly managed to finish what was on my plate and I didn’t mind when someone took two of my potatoes and I didn’t even clean the plate with a piece of bread. I just didn’t have an appetite for life at that moment. I’d looked for Pissy but his table was at the other end of the dining room and I was too small to see him over all the heads that were in the way.

  After we’d eaten, as usual the superintendent of the orphanage, Meneer Prinsloo, who was big and fat and wore braces and waved his hands about a lot, read from the Bible and said prayers and then told us stuff we needed to know which were called ‘daily instructions’, only they were meant for the next day. Then the other staff would say things if they needed to and last of all Mevrou, the matron, would stand up and read out who had to come and see her. This was usually the small kids who needed to be punished or boys who had to get medicine. She was only allowed to give the sjambok to the small kids under ten. After that you would get a proper whipping from Meneer Botha who, for the most part, was the punishment master. Sometimes, because he was once a district champion boxer, he’d make a boy put on the gloves and then he’d beat the shit out of him. ‘Fair and square,’ he’d always say. ‘If you can hit me you can get a bit of your own back.’ But even the biggest boys, who were sixteen, couldn’t get near him and they’d get in the ring with him and he’d really do some damage, black eyes and bloody noses and everything. Except for Fonnie du Preez who was fifteen, nearly sixteen, and schools’ lightweight champion as far as Louis Trichardt, Duiwelskrans, Tzaneen, Lydenburg and Pilgrims Rest. He was the one kid who could have easily landed a good few telling punches on anyone he liked including Meneer Botha. But it never happened, because Fonnie du Preez was Meneer Botha’s favourite. He’d taught him to box and the two of them were thick as thieves. People said they were like father and son. Meneer Botha said Fonnie was a natural who moved like lightning and had a knockout punch in both hands and would go far, maybe even to the schools’ boxing championships in Pretoria.

  The funny thing was that Pissy Vermaak was protected by Fonnie du Preez. They were said to be related, they were second cousins or something like that. Although how this was possible was hard to see, they were a complete mismatch; one big and dark and built like a blue gum tree trunk and the other a real weed. They’d often be seen together, Pissy doing things for Fonnie like he was his servant.

  Going into the ring with Meneer Botha was supposed to make a man out of you. But if there was a choice of the boxing ring or the sjambok you took the sjambok every time. This was because Meneer Botha was only allowed to give you six of the best and, while nobody said how hard he could hit you, it was still better than his invitation to meet him in the boxing ring. It wasn’t just about being knocked all over the place, it was that everyone was made to watch you being humiliated. Boere are a proud people and can’t stand to be humiliated. It’s not in their blood. With cuts from the cane you could always cover your arse with your trousers. An hour later everyone would forget about your beating, but with a hiding in the ring you’d walk around for days with a black eye, split lip and puffed-up and torn ears, maybe that’s what people thought kids like us who belonged to the Government ought to look like.

  While I’m on the subject of punishment, Meneer Prinsloo, the superintendent, would also do punishment, but only if it was a really big crime called masturbation or for stealing or taking God’s name in vain. The other staff could pinch you, give you a clout on the back of the head, kick your arse or whack you over the knuckles with a steeledged ruler, but they weren’t allowed to give you formal punishment where you had to remove your trousers and bend over and get six of the best.

  So I waited for Mevrou to call my name. It wasn’t the sjambok I was afraid of. We all got beaten so often that you sort of got used to it and it wasn’t too bad. A sore bum is a sore bum and everyone in the showers had the welts of the cuts from the sjambok crisscrossing their bums like Chinese writing. It was Mevrou discovering about Tinker that worried me sick. She’d tell Meneer Botha who was in charge of things outside the hostel and that would be the end of my little dog. Like Mattress said, he’d call her a kaffir dog and wring her neck.

  To my surprise my name wasn’t called out and nor was Pissy’s. This was strange because you always went for medicine after supper and Pissy would always have to go to get his cough mixture. But there you go, miracles will never cease, maybe he hadn’t said anything. Which was a big surprise because he could have blabbed easily enough because he had nothing to fear. There was no touching Pissy for fear of Fonnie du Preez. What’s more, Mevrou never gave him the sjambok because he was ‘too delicate of health’ and it was suggested that physical violence might bring on one of his out-of-the-blue fits. His coughing condition was bad enough as it was, so you see he had nothing to lose by being a telltale. You could hear him coughing at night in the little kids’ dormitory and people would shout at him to shurrup, but he couldn’t. He was the only person in the showers to have no marks on his pink bum. And the guys would say, ‘Pissy’s got a girl’s bum . . . Pissy’s got a girl’s bum.’ Maybe it wasn’t easy for him being sick and having out-of-the-blue fits and not being allowed to get the sjambok like everyone else.

  And then all of a sudden I remembered about him getting a fit from physical violence, and I had punched him in the stomach. He’d staggered around coughing and I’d run away before seeing what happened. Maybe he’d had an out-of-the-blue fit. It was the first time I’d ever been brave and I might have given Pissy a fit or even killed him. I’d clean forgotten about him getting fits and, besides, I’d barely been aware of hitting him. I’d even quietly congratulated myself over the punch, which was the only good thing in the whole disaster and I intended bragging a bit to Mattress how I’d also got a strong heart like he said Tinker possessed.

  Tinker, like I said before, wouldn’t put up with any nonsense from the piglets that were miles bigger than she was. She was the smallest by far but she wasn’t afraid and Mattress said it was because she was a lioness and had a strong heart.

  ‘Sometimes, Kleinbaas, you’ve just got to stand up for yourself even if you are the smallest,’ Mattress said. ‘The lioness doesn’t have to be told she’s brave, she just knows and so do all the other animals, even the big male lion who is supposed to be the boss of the jungle, they all know who is the real boss and who does the hunting. People can be the same, Kleinbaas. A strong heart isn’t about size.’

  That night Pissy’s bed in the dormitory was empty. Nobody said anything about this because it wasn’t unusual for him to spend the night in the sick room when his chest was bad. All the other kids were pretty pleased by his absence because it meant we’d have a quiet night for a change. I was worried and didn’t think I’d be able to sleep but I was also very tired from the long day with all the worries I had accumulated and did fall asleep soon enough. Your eyes don’t always listen to your brain worrying. Mattress said that when things went wrong they’d seem better after a good night’s sleep. ‘In the morning the memory is washed clean,’ he said, that’s the closest I could get from the Zulu, which was, ‘In the morning the river has washed over the worry stones and the water is clean.’

  The wake-up bell went at six o’clock and we had to hurry up and wash our faces, get dressed, make our beds and our towels had to be folded over the end bedrail. By six-thirty we would be standing at attention at the end of our bed for what was known by us
boys as ‘half-jack inspection’. This was the daily dormitory inspection conducted by Mevrou who came round with her sjambok at the ready to inspect our beds and our folded towels and to punish the slightest untidiness. Even a button undone on your shirt could earn you a good whack.

  I should explain about the word sjambok. A real sjambok is made of a single strip of rhino hide and is usually about four feet long and about an inch thick at the handle and gradually tapers down to about an eighth of an inch or less at the tip. While it is supple it isn’t like a whip and it only really bends on contact with the flesh. It is used by prison warders and the South African Police Force and by farmers to beat kaffirs. In the right hands it can kill, but it always delivers a severe blow and causes great welts and, if it’s correctly shaped and prepared, it will cut like a knife into flesh and even expose bone. It is much feared by the black people.

  Now, Mevrou didn’t have one of those, a proper sjambok. What she had was a thick piece of leather about the length and thickness of a razor strop nailed onto a wooden handle. We called it a sjambok because that’s what we called anything that the staff beat you with. Her particular sjambok couldn’t kill you or anything, but it left a pretty broad mark on your bum, and it hurt like hell. Meneer Prinsloo and Meneer Botha used a long bamboo cane as their sjambok and you could tell who was who by the cuts on a person’s bum. All the little kids had broad marks from Mevrou’s sjambok and the older kids had these red and blue cuts that were the marks from the cane. When a kid got to be eleven he’d show his first cane cuts and brag how he’d taken six of the best and hadn’t even blubbed. It was a tradition to take your punishment like a man and not even let out an ‘Ooh!’ or a single ‘Eina!’ which is an Afrikaans ‘ouch’, although I have to admit I wasn’t always very good at this particular tradition.

  When Mevrou entered the dormitory we’d all shout out the mandatory ‘Goeie môre, Mevrou! Good morning, Missus!’

  ‘Goeie môre, kinders,’ she’d reply on a good day.

  On a good morning she’d wear a green, starched uniform and her hair would be pulled back in a tight bun at the back of her head, with a net holding the bun. Sometimes she’d appear first thing in the morning in her nightdress and slippers with her grey hair looking like scouring wire and falling all over the place. Her teeth would be missing so her lips sort of caved in with little slanted vertical lines pulling inwards around her lips like the drawstring on a pipe tobacco bag. On these occasions the whites of her eyes would be blood-red and the front of her nightdress would be unbuttoned and through the white thin cotton nightgown you’d see the shape of her great breasts. You could also see the teats, blackish and bigger than the sow’s, at the end of her titties. The top part of her breasts pushed out of the unbuttoned part of her nightdress, great white lumps like bread dough with a black fly sitting on one of the rounded pieces of dough, only it was a hairy mole. Half-jack inspection was always a dangerous time but on those occasions when she appeared in her nightdress, you’d better watch out, man, this was no time for jokes.

  Also, on nightdress mornings we’d shout, ‘Goeie môre, Mevrou!’ as usual and all that would come in reply would be ‘Hurrump!’ It was a snort exactly like the sow’s. That’s when you knew it was going to be a bad, bad day for everyone concerned because she’d been to bed with Doctor Half-Jack. Half a bottle of Tolley’s five-star brandy in those days came in a flat bottle known as a half-jack. One Sunday when Mevrou had her day off to visit her brother and sister-in-law, which she did after church, she had an accident. She always carried her handbag and also one of those big brown paper shopping bags with string handles and if you got a glimpse inside you’d see all these little parcels of the same size wrapped in newspaper. Nobody knew what these could possibly be because they were too small to be loaves of bread and you wouldn’t wrap a cake in newspaper like that and anyway, why would you have all those cakes? What’s more, when Mevrou returned just before supper on Sunday night she still carried the paper bag, and if you got near enough to take a peek the little parcels in newspaper were still there exactly the same as in the morning when she’d left. It was a very strange business we couldn’t get to the bottom of, until her accident.

  On this particular morning when church was over and the beetle had chomped the beard and I’d received my mandatory punches in the ribs, we were all lined up beside the road, ready to be marched back to The Boys Farm. Sunday everywhere else may have been a day of rest, the Lord’s Day, but on the farm we had to work in the vegetable garden or chop the week’s wood for the kitchen and for the laundry hot-water system. It was the only day we didn’t have school or sport so it became the main working day. On Saturday night after supper we’d get our weekly change of clothes, a clean pair of khaki shorts and shirt so we could wear them to church in the morning. But after church we had to get back into our last week’s dirty clothes because the rest of Sunday was a working-in-the-vegetable-garden day. Then we’d shower again on Sunday night so we’d be clean and put on our going-to-church nice clean clothes again on Monday for school. You didn’t get boots until you were thirteen. All us little kids had to bother about was trying to keep both items clean for a week. If you spilt gravy on a shirt or got your pants dirty so that they looked worse than anyone else’s you got the sjambok. I was almost certain to get the sjambok every Wednesday because it didn’t matter how hard I tried, my shirt and shorts were always the worst in our dormitory. Keeping clean was a very tiresome business and I wouldn’t get the hang of it until I was much older.

  Mevrou stood waiting with her fat sister-in-law beside us outside the church on the side of the road while her brother went to bring his lorry around to pick the two of them up and take Mevrou to the main family farm. She had six brothers and they all had farms next door to each other in a valley somewhere in the high mountains. She’d once told us that her father had found this valley in 1898 after the Boer War because he never wanted to see anyone that was English. He’d built his house and he never left the farm again, not even to come to nagmaal. The six brothers only went to school to learn to count and read a bit and then went back to the farm. In the district they were known to be very tough and you wouldn’t want to pick a fight with a Van Schalkwyk if you wanted to stay alive for long.

  Two of Mevrou’s brothers played rugby for Northern Transvaal and Boetie, the one who had gone to fetch the lorry, was once the amateur heavyweight boxing champion of the Transvaal with twenty fights and seventeen knockouts. He was banned from amateur boxing because in a championship fight he was boxing against an English-speaking heavyweight from Johannesburg. It turned out to be a very even fight and Boetie Van Schalkwyk managed to knock the rooinek out but it happened right on the bell in the final round, or just after the bell, the three judges said. So the boxer from Jo’burg was given the decision. When the referee held up the other boxer’s hand, Boetie lost his temper and turned around and smashed the other boxer in the jaw and knocked him out a second time for good measure. People said the Van Schalkwyks were wild men who talked first with their fists and were best left alone. I just thought you’d like to know this stuff about Mevrou’s family.

  Anyway, we’re standing at the side of the road outside the church when this town kid on a bicycle comes riding towards us showing off big time, riding with his hands in his pockets. This kid knew none of us could ever own a bicycle and he was free to do what he liked and had the whole day to do anything he cared to do. He made the mistake of coming too close to Flippy Marais who was standing next to me so I saw the whole thing happen. Flippy quickly stuck his foot out, planted it against the frame of the bike and gave it a great push. With no grip on the handlebars the kid lost control. Next moment it veered straight into Mevrou who landed on her enormous fat bum and her legs stuck up in the air showing her pink crepe de Chine bloomers that came down to just above her knees where the elastic bands cut into the flesh. The brown paper bag went flying and landed with a crash of glass, and there were these empty half-jack brandy bottles st
icking out of pieces of newspaper scattered all over the road. The town kid jumped to his feet, retrieved his bicycle, mounted it and was gone like a rat up a drainpipe. On Monday morning at school he probably expected to get the shit knocked out of him by Fonnie du Preez or one of the other tough kids from The Boys Farm, but instead we all went up and congratulated him. That’s how we discovered that Mevrou went to bed with Doctor Half-Jack.

  The morning following Pissy’s absence was a nightdress morning and Mevrou snorted her ‘Hurrump!’ and walked straight to his bed and brought her sjambok up and smashed it down on his pillow several times until she was panting, then she said, ‘Genoeg!’ which means ‘enough’. As in, ‘Look, man . . . I’ve had enough, you hear! Genoeg!’ Then she slammed the sjambok down once more across the pillow as hard as she could so that the whack resounded through the dormitory, making us all jump. If your bum had been that pillow I can guarantee you’d have trouble sitting for days. This time some feathers flew out of the side of the pillow and up into the air. I watched as one was caught by a draught of air and sailed right up past my nose and turned and floated out of the window behind my bed four rows away from Pissy’s pillow.

  ‘Kobus Vermaak has had an epileptic fit and somebody here is to blame! I want to know who it is! If you don’t tell who hit him then you all going to get in trouble, you hear?’ She looked around, her bloodshot eyes taking in each of us. The fly resting on her tits was moving up and down with her heavy breathing. ‘I don’t want you playing all innocent, hey! Somebody here knows, and if you don’t tell me who it is you all going to get the sjambok!’ She waited but only silence followed. ‘I’m going to ask each one of you, “Did you hit Kobus Vermaak?” and you going to look me in the face and if you done it, I’ll know. It’s no use, you can’t fool me, you hear?’