Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘From Miss Phillips in Johannesburg. She’s written you a letter she has asked me to read to you.’

  Already I was getting lost with all the English words he was using. Some I understood, but I’d never had a letter and I hadn’t seen too many either. ‘I have a letter, Sir?’ I asked to make sure I understood. It didn’t seem possible that someone so low down as me could receive a letter with a stamp on the outside that you had to tear open to see what it said on the inside. I felt sure I must have misunderstood.

  ‘A letter in English, Tom,’ he said, not chastising me this time for replying in Afrikaans. ‘Now, you probably won’t understand it all but I’ll repeat everything in Afrikaans afterwards.’

  I didn’t understand much of that last sentence, let alone the letter, only when he repeated it all in Afrikaans. The letter I have to this day, it’s kept inside the pages of the red book.

  My dear Tom,

  I have written to Meneer Van Niekerk concerning you. I have asked him to read this letter to you. I don’t expect you’ll understand all of it until you’re more proficient in your own language, but I’m sure he’ll explain.

  I have enclosed a book for you to read. It is the first in what I hope will one day be your own library. With the book is a list of questions and some writing paper. What I want you to do is to read the book and answer the questions in English and send them back to me in the self-addressed envelope, also enclosed.

  You will receive a new book with questions every two weeks when I will also comment on the answers you gave to the last set of questions I received from you. It will be like a test, but one that you should enjoy doing.

  I feel sure that between us we’ll soon have you reading English fluently and while I don’t think you’ll get much opportunity to talk it as a language, writing and understanding it is the most important thing for the time being.

  Just remember, Tom Fitzsaxby, I am very proud of you and I know we can do this together.

  With love,

  Janneke Phillips (Miss)

  And so began my love for the written word and I also got my first ‘With love’. I would read the books she’d send at every available moment and then again and, if the book wasn’t too long, once more before I would attempt the questions she’d send along with it.

  After a while she began to send me poems that she encouraged me to learn off by heart and to repeat aloud to myself. I’d sit on the big rock with Tinker and recite William Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ to her and would wonder who the daffodils were, an army or something like that who had golden shields or helmets maybe, and there were a lot of them because they appeared in a host. It was only much later that I learned they were only flowers and I must say I was disappointed, that’s a lot of trouble to take over some yellow flowers.

  Soon the books became longer and more exciting, and reading became a life for me where there was no sjambok, no Mevrou, no Boys Farm. I recall crying my heart out over Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales, ‘The Little Match Girl’ in particular, with ‘The Little Mermaid’ and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ not too far behind in the crying stakes.

  From there I took a leap into Peter Pan and Robinson Crusoe, then even higher to Charles Dickens and Oliver Twist to name but a few of the many books she sent as I grew older and more proficient. When I was nine I received a dictionary from Miss Phillips as a Christmas present. It was a big book, nearly as big as the red book, and had every word in it that was in the whole English language. Miss Phillips said I should learn a new word every day and try to write it in a sentence and send every day’s sentence to her along with the questions she’d ask about the latest book she’d sent me.

  I never gave up on the red book and from the very beginning read from it every day but still with almost no comprehension. With the arrival of the dictionary it started to unravel bit by bit. I’d be lying if I said it was as interesting as the books Miss Phillips sent me, because it wasn’t. Later I would realise that it was dry legal writing in old-fashioned English, but it was mine and I loved it and would learn whole pages off by heart. This ability to retain the information in it word for word in large lumps would hold me in good stead later in life.

  Children are never sufficiently grateful for those things that are done gratuitously for them. It may be the inability of children to return advantages that are bestowed on them that makes it seem that they take them for granted. While I was aware that Janneke Phillips was single-handedly bringing about a change in my life, I didn’t know to what end or even comprehend the work and attention she so lavishly showered upon me. I simply had no tangible way to thank her for the gift of learning and, as I later perceived, the love she so willingly gave to me. I saw only the schoolteacher who was at times a hard taskmaster and I tried very hard to please her with my work. I recall I once wrote to her about Tinker and told Miss Phillips how her way of saying thank you was ‘Woof-Woof’ and thereafter always wrote ‘Woof-Woof’ on the bottom of the completed questionnaire or essay she’d set for me. I think Miss Phillips liked that because once in haste I neglected to write it at the bottom of a lesson. When the new book arrived there was a small note included that asked if I was displeased with her for some reason as my ‘Woof-Woof’ was missing from the bottom of the last lesson.

  I would very much have liked to have bought her a gift but we were never given any money and I wasn’t old enough to work on a farm during the school holidays when the boys who were would come back to The Boys Farm with ten shillings.

  Then, out of the blue, something happened. One of the exercises Miss Phillips had sent down was to do with these similes. You know, ‘Free as a —’ and then you’d think a bit and write ‘bird’ in the space provided. Right after ‘Free as a bird’ came ‘Light as a —’ and, of course, I wrote ‘feather’.

  That’s when I had my big idea. You see, I’d told myself that even if I found something that I could send Miss Phillips I wouldn’t have any money to send it to her. I couldn’t put it in the self-addressed envelope with my homework because you paid the Government money for stamps and if what you sent was more than you paid then there’d be lots of trouble, and they’d maybe fine her. But this idea was perfect. I decided to send her a tail feather from one of Meneer Prinsloo’s shiny-feathered roosters. It would be so light it could easily go into the self-addressed envelope I used when my work was completed and returned to her.

  So Tinker and I would visit the chicken house every day to see if a feather had dropped off. But God must have glued those big feathers that stick out of the backside of a rooster very, very tight because one just didn’t drop off.

  One day I got Tinker to bail up a rooster and I grabbed hold of his tail feathers and pulled with all my might and four feathers came out, and it was like a miracle; every one of them was perfect. They were long and curved and so shiny-black you could see other colours like purple and green in them. Another miracle was they fitted into the large envelope Miss Phillips had sent without bending them. Then they were off all the way to Johannesburg with my work, the first gift I had ever been able to send to anyone. I must say I felt very pleased with myself.

  What a catastrophe! That night after dinner Meneer Prinsloo stood up and you could see immediately something was very wrong because his stomach was pushed way out with the braces straining to breaking point, and his hands were flapping ten to the dozen in the air.

  ‘Who has destroyed Piet Retief?’ he shouted. Piet Retief was a famous Afrikaner leader in the Great Trek and he’d been dead over a hundred years so we didn’t know what Meneer Prinsloo was going on about. ‘Next week is the agricultural show in Pietersburg! Now somebody has stolen his tail feathers!’ He’d gone all red in the face and his hands had become windmills. ‘Tail feathers don’t just fall out of a Black Orpington rooster, you hear? Somebody here is sabotaging my chance to win the silver cup and blue ribbon, not only in Pietersburg next week but at the Rand Easter Show in Johannesburg, the biggest in the whole land, you hear?’

 
; Thank God we were sitting at the table because I could feel my knees starting to shake. If only Meneer Prinsloo had known Piet Retief’s tail feathers were on their way to Johannesburg already.

  ‘Wragtig! Let me tell you one thing is certain. I will find the boy who done this act of sabotage, whoever he is! He won’t get away with it! Now I only have General Botha to put in the Pietersburg show and he’s not good enough for the Rand Easter Show. I want all the boys who are responsible for feeding the chickens to stay behind. I’m going to get to the bottom of this if it takes all night, you hear? To do such a thing to an innocent person’s chicken is a criminal act against mankind!’

  The three boys on chicken-feeding duty that week each got the sjambok and came back from Meneer Prinsloo very grumpy, but they didn’t complain because that’s how it was. You often got punished for stuff you didn’t do. It was called ‘getting cuts on appro’. Nobody knew what appro meant until I looked it up in my dictionary. It meant on approval. Gawie Grobler said he’d like to know who approved them because he certainly didn’t, and trust an English word to be for something nasty you got for nothing.

  You probably think I should have admitted to pulling out Piet Retief’s tail feathers but that’s not how things worked on The Boys Farm. Even the guys who got the sjambok would have thought I was mad if I’d confessed. There was this unspoken rule, outside The Boys Farm you were honest, inside it was every boy for himself and you didn’t complain when something unfair happened to you.

  I kept all Miss Janneke Phillips’s letters except one that I learned off by heart and tore up into little pieces and watched them float down the creek to who knows where. It was this one.

  My dearest Tom,

  What a lovely surprise! Thank you for the four beautiful feathers and now I have a story to tell you. Up here at this time of the year we have a large agricultural show called the Rand Easter Show and we also have the Easter Show Handicap which is a big horse race held at a racecourse named Turfontein. My father always takes me to these races and every year there is a prize for the best hat – the Easter Bonnet Prize.

  All the ladies go in for this competition and spend a fortune on their hats and guess who won it this year? Me! Hooray! With a hat that featured your four beautiful feathers! I received a silver cup and a cheque for ten pounds!

  I am enclosing a one-pound note as your share of the bounty, so don’t spend it all at once on sweets and make yourself thoroughly sick.

  Your essay on A Tale of Two Cities was very good. You’re coming along splendidly.

  With gratitude and love,

  Janneke Phillips

  Now I had a ‘With gratitude and love’ to add to all my ‘With love’s and a ‘My dearest Tom’ to add to my ‘Dear Tom’s but I couldn’t keep the letter in case it was discovered and taken to Meneer Prinsloo. I thought very hard about this, telling myself that no one in the small boys dormitory could read English, not even Mevrou. But eventually discretion seemed the best way to go so I tore it up, like I said. In life you got to think ahead. You see, we didn’t have any private space like lockers or anything. We had to keep our schoolbooks or anything else we had under our beds at the very end concealed by the towel hanging down, everything neatly stacked because if it was untidy or something got dusty you got the sjambok.

  So now there was the one-pound note, which was the most money I’d ever heard that a boy could have. The sixteen-year-olds that worked on the farms all school holidays only got ten shillings from the farmer at the end of the holiday, so I had two holiday-works’ worth in one hit and for doing nothing as well. How and where was I ever to hide such a treasure? If anyone saw it, then it was gone for sure as God made little apples. One of the big guys would soon have it in his pocket. Even the ten shillings the big guys got for working on someone’s farm was handed to Meneer Prinsloo by the farmer and the boy who did the work got two shillings to spend and a receipt for eight shillings that he could reclaim when he left The Boys Farm. If you worked every holiday from when you were allowed at fifteen you could leave the place with three pounds for the two years of working because there were three school holidays every year long enough for you to work through.

  Now I had one pound and the terrible responsibility of hiding it where it couldn’t be stolen. Worse still, I couldn’t spend any of it because they’d see me eating a sucker or even an Eskimo Pie and they’d think I must have stolen some money to get it. ‘Now you a terrible little thief, Voetsek!’ Whack! Whack! Whack! ‘Stealing money for suckers!’ Whack! Whack! Whack! ‘Six of the best is not good enough, you have to learn a lesson, you hear?’ Whack! Whack! ‘Take eight!’ No whack. And that’s only if I didn’t get sent to Meneer Prinsloo for the long-cane sjambok. Stealing a pound would probably also get you sent to the Reformatory School in Pretoria to join Fonnie du Preez. How you would go about stealing a pound was beyond me.

  Talking about stealing, I suppose, technically speaking, the Great Shiny-Feather Robbery was stealing. This meant I was a thief twice over, the red book from under Doctor Van Heerden’s house and now the four shiny-black feathers from Piet Retief the rooster. But I reckoned the fact that Meneer Prinsloo got to win the silver cup at the Rand Easter Show Races cancelled out the second theft, even if he didn’t know about it. Anyway, the feather theft happened inside The Boys Farm so it didn’t really count. Too bad I couldn’t tell Meneer Prinsloo about his rooster’s big win that wasn’t a blue ribbon, but was even better – an Easter bonnet! It could have made me a hero.

  Where to hide the pound note was the worst crisis I’d ever had, except for punching Pissy Vermaak in the stomach for trying to take Tinker and what Fonnie du Preez and him did to me after. I kept the pound note in my trouser pocket when we were watering the young orange trees down at the orchards, but my hand went in so often to check that it was still there that I practically wore the paper out. Japie Betzer, one of the big guys, noticed my hand going in and said out loud so everyone could hear, ‘Look! Voetsek’s got a hole inside his pocket and he’s jerking himself off!’

  My hand came out of my trouser pocket so fast the lining came out as well and the pound note fell at my feet. In a trice I put my foot on it to hide it but it was too late, and I was suddenly surrounded. We were all standing next to the water pump waiting to fill our paraffin tin buckets and the ground around the pump was muddy from water that had spilled. My pound note was under my right foot in the mud and Japie, who’d started it all, stood over me. He was fifteen years old.

  ‘What you got there under your foot, Voetsek?’ he growled.

  ‘Nothing,’ I replied fearfully.

  ‘You lying, man! I seen something.’

  ‘It’s just a piece of old paper,’ I protested, thinking fast.

  ‘Move your foot and let me see this piece of paper,’ Japie demanded.

  ‘I think it’s money,’ someone said. ‘A ten-bob note!’

  There was a gasp from everyone standing around and then Japie gave me a great push in the chest. I went arse over tit into the mud and then there were seven boys diving at the pound note sticking out of the mud. Talk about a scrum!

  All of a sudden there were bodies everywhere fighting and kicking and rolling over each other. Gawie Grobler managed to get the pound note but the others were onto him like a pack of mad dogs.

  ‘Stop!’ It was Meneer Frikkie Botha who’d suddenly come up. Everyone stopped and got up with their clothes covered with mud, and we all stood with our hands behind our backs the way you were supposed to in a line-up.

  ‘What’s going on, hey?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing, Meneer!’ we all chorused.

  ‘So nothing’s going on and all of a sudden you all fighting and rolling around in the mud?’

  We all looked down at our feet and remained silent.

  ‘This nothing that’s going on is all of a sudden going to turn into six of the best for everyone if somebody doesn’t tell me what this is all about,’ Frikkie Botha growled. He turned to Japie Betzer. ‘Japi
e, I saw you push Tom, here! Why?’

  ‘It was nothing, Meneer. We was just playing,’ Japie mumbled, not looking up.

  ‘I see, playing in the mud for nothing, is that it?’ He looked around. ‘You think I’m stupid?’

  ‘No, Meneer!’ we all chorused again. He looked at me sternly. ‘Tom, why did Japie push you?’

  I was in the deep shit. If I told Frikkie Botha about the pound note I’d be up in front of Meneer Prinsloo in a flash. If I told Meneer Prinsloo that I’d received the pound note from Miss Phillips he’d ask to see the letter that was floating in little pieces down the Limpopo River. If he believed me, which was very unlikely, he’d write to Miss Phillips who’d tell him about the four black feathers and how she’d won the Easter Bonnet competition at the Rand Easter Show. I was suddenly between a rock and a hard place and my Great Shiny-Feather Robbery would be exposed and it was Pretoria for sure, possibly not the reformatory, but hanging by the neck until I was stone dead.

  ‘I said the Union Jack was a nicer flag than the vierkleur, Meneer,’ I lied. The vierkleur was the flag of the Transvaal Republic before the British defeated the Boere in the Boer War. In that part of the world it was a sacred ensign. People kept it in a bottom drawer for one day when the Boere would rise up and defeat the verdomde English and restore the sacred God-given flag to its rightful place outside every police station in the land.

  Suddenly Frikkie Botha’s large hand landed on the side of my head and lifted me off my feet so that I landed back in the mud. ‘You said what?’ he growled. ‘You better take that back, you hear? Stand up, man!’ he yelled. I stood up. ‘Now say you sorry to God!’

  ‘Sorry, God,’ I said.

  ‘No, man, look up to heaven and go down on your knees and bring your hands together and say sorry to God for sacrilege and dishonour to the true flag.’

  Back into the mud I went with my ear stinging and my head ringing. ‘Sorry, God for sacrilege and dishonour to the true flag,’ I said with a small sob and a sniff.