Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  So after school we ran down to Patel & Sons. The idea was to catch up with the kids from The Boys Farm afterwards, before they reached the front gate and we’d be in time for the line-up. Before we entered the shop Gawie said, ‘Let me do the talking hey, Voetsek. I’m eleven and you only nine and still a little kid.’ I must say I was quite relieved and also impressed that Gawie was the one to do the negotiation because I had no idea how to go about dealing with an Indian person. We entered the shop that was full of everything you could imagine a black person would want to buy. I don’t know about Gawie, but I was pretty nervous.

  ‘Good afternoon, boys,’ Mr Patel said, smiling. ‘What can I do for you?’ ‘Good afternoon,’ we said back. We didn’t say ‘Good afternoon, Meneer’ like you had to with a white person grown-up. This was because while an Indian wasn’t a black, but was a sort of halfway-up person but still a non-white that couldn’t use a white person’s lavatory, but different to a black and not so low. Mr Patel’s skin was shiny and soft brown and he had black hair, just like a proper person.

  Gawie slapped down our pound note and said quite calmly, ‘Can we have two red suckers, please?’

  ‘My goodness gracious, we are wanting two suckers and we are having one pound!’ Mr Patel said, looking surprised. ‘Two suckers is two pennies and we are giving for them a one-pound note,’ he repeated. He looked at us suspiciously. ‘And where are two boys that are walking with bare feet getting this one pound you are giving me?’

  We’d guessed wrong. Mr Patel was a person who had scruples. My first instinct was to grab the pound note from the counter and run, but then I saw that Mr Patel had picked it up.

  ‘We didn’t steal it!’ Gawie protested.

  ‘I am not knowing this,’ Mr Patel said. ‘One pound, that is a lot of money for one boy to have.’

  ‘It’s both of ours,’ I said, as if this immediately rectified the matter.

  ‘Together you are having this pound?’ he exclaimed, now even more suspicious than before. ‘I am very, very worried, boys,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I am wanting your mother to come and see me. If she is telling me this pound is yours then I am giving you, on the spot, two suckers and nineteen and tenpence change.’

  ‘We don’t have a mother!’ we both said at once. Almost immediately I realised that this only got us deeper into the deep shit.

  ‘Your father, he is coming then?’

  ‘We’re from The Boys Farm,’ I said despairingly.

  ‘Then I am calling right away Meneer Prinsloo,’ he declared.

  ‘No!’ we shouted.

  Mr Patel shrugged. ‘Who am I calling to be making confirmations about this two-red-sucker pound, boys?’

  ‘We didn’t steal it!’ Gawie protested again. ‘I swear it on a stack of Bibles.’

  I wasn’t in a position to remind him that Mr Patel didn’t believe in the Bible. ‘Call Sergeant Van Niekerk,’ I said suddenly. It just came out without thinking.

  ‘I am calling Sergeant Van Niekerk?’ Mr Patel was obviously impressed. ‘At the police station?’

  Gawie gave me a look as if to say I must have all of a sudden gone crazy. If I was, then it was too late. I nodded to Mr Patel who turned and went to the telephone on the wall and rang up the exchange at the post office and asked them to put him through to the police station. He waited and seemed to be listening, and then he hung up the phone.

  ‘Sergeant Van Niekerk is in the native location,’ he explained. ‘I am telling you what I am going to do. For this pound I am giving you a receipt and I am keeping it until I am seeing Sergeant Van Niekerk. If he is explaining and you are explaining how this pound is yours then we are doing business, hey boys?’ he smiled. ‘Now you are getting a bansella from me.’ He put his hand in the sucker jar and took out two red suckers. ‘Bansella, boys, from Patel & Sons,’ he announced rather grandly. ‘I must be having now your names for putting on this receipt forthwith and so forth.’

  We gave him our names. ‘One Afrikaner, one English, my goodness gracious me, what have we got here?’ He wrote out a receipt for our pound and gave it to Gawie. ‘Keep this safe, boys. If I am dying in the night then it is proving you have one pound with Patel & Sons. Tomorrow you are coming here after school and we are sorting this out. Goodbye and I am wishing you very, very good luck, boys.’

  We had to run like hell and only just caught the kids marching back from school before they turned into the front gate of The Boys Farm. We didn’t even have time to suck the sucker and so we had to save it and suck it in bed when everyone was asleep and hide the stick until the next morning.

  ‘What’s a receipt?’ Gawie asked when we’d got our breath back and were standing in the line-up.

  ‘I don’t know. We’ll look it up in the dictionary at the library rock tomorrow, but I think it sort of means Mr Patel has our pound on appro.’

  ‘I hope he doesn’t die tonight,’ Gawie said.

  I must say that pound Miss Phillips sent me was causing a lot of problems. I had no idea having lots of money could be such a difficult thing.

  ‘Sergeant Van Niekerk could arrest us,’ Gawie said.

  ‘He is my friend, I’ll tell him the truth, he’s a high-up and I don’t think he likes Meneer Prinsloo, even if he is also a high-up,’ I said to reassure him. Gawie still seemed unconvinced. ‘Remember the day Sergeant Van Niekerk took Fonnie du Preez away in the police van to go to Pretoria?’

  Gawie nodded.

  ‘Well, didn’t you see? Meneer Prinsloo nearly broke his braces and burst his stomach open and he stormed off with Frikkie Botha and Mevrou. Remember?’

  Gawie looked horrified. ‘You going to tell Sergeant Van Niekerk the truth, Voetsek? You can’t tell him about the ten shillings turning into a pound up my bum!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll only tell him about the feathers.’

  Gawie looked at me completely mystified. ‘Huh? What feathers?’

  We’d become best friends so quickly that I clean forgot that I hadn’t told him the story of stealing the rooster’s feathers. Standing in line next to all the other kids was certainly not the time to do so.

  ‘Shush! We talking too loud, someone will hear. I’ll tell you later,’ I said out the side of my mouth.

  Then someone called out, ‘Hey, Gawie, is Voetsek all of a sudden your pal? Perhaps you also like the Union Jack better than the vierkleur, hey?’

  ‘No!’ Gawie shouted back. ‘I am a real Boer!’ He immediately distanced himself from me. It was okay because that’s what we’d agreed he’d do when we were not alone. He couldn’t afford to be seen to be friends with the rooinek.

  The next day nothing happened. After school we went down to see Mr Patel but there was only an Indian lady there in a long pink dress that sort of wrapped around her with it only going over one shoulder and it wasn’t the sort of dress you’d see a white lady wear in the day, and a diamond in her nose and this red spot in the middle of her forehead. She also had smooth hair.

  ‘Can we see Meneer Patel, please?’ Gawie asked.

  ‘He is going out all afternoon and not coming back until five o’clock,’ she announced. ‘He is going to Tzaneen today to buy mielie meal.’

  ‘With our pound, I’ll bet,’ Gawie said bitterly when we went outside.

  I’d looked up the meaning for receipt – ‘the act of receiving or being received into one’s possession’ – which didn’t help one little bit to make us feel any better because that’s exactly what Mr Patel had done. He’d received our pound into his possession, alright, and it didn’t look like coming back into ours in a hurry. For once in his life Meneer Prinsloo must have been right. That blêrrie Indian Mr Patel couldn’t be trusted as far as you could throw him. We’d been cheated right out of our pound easy as anything. What’s more, there was nothing we could do about it because now he was busy buying mielies in Tzaneen with our money.

  I’d confessed to Gawie about the Great Shiny-Feather Robbery and he’d quickly pointed out that I’d commi
tted a major crime against a grown-up, high-up person like Meneer Prinsloo, that my calling on Sergeant Van Niekerk for help to get our pound back was just about the most stupid thing a person could do.

  ‘It’s like locking yourself up in gaol and throwing the key out the window!’ he said. ‘We lost our pound but now you still going to gaol in Pretoria, Voetsek!’ he said darkly.

  ‘No, that’s not true!’ I protested. ‘If Mr Patel stole our pound he wouldn’t be going around telling people all over the place. Like the lady with a diamond in her nose said, he just went to Tzaneen and while nobody was looking he bought some bags of mielie meal with our pound.’

  ‘You got a point, Voetsek,’ Gawie said, grudgingly admitting to my logic.

  While we lost our pound I felt reasonably safe after such a narrow escape from going to prison. But I have discovered that life seldom goes the way you hope it will. At morning play break Meneer Van Niekerk called me to his office and when I got there Gawie Grobler was already waiting and so was Sergeant Van Niekerk. Talk about being in the deep shit!

  ‘Good morning, Tom,’ Sergeant Van Niekerk said. ‘We meet again, hey?’

  ‘Goeie môre, Meneer,’ I stammered, then turned to the headmaster and said good morning to him as well.

  ‘Is it true that the two of you paid Mr Patel at the Indian shop a visit after school yesterday?’ Sergeant Van Niekerk asked sternly.

  ‘Ja, Meneer,’ we both said, looking contrite.

  ‘So tell me, what is all this about?’

  Gawie turned and looked at me. All of a sudden it was the younger person that had to do all the talking.

  ‘Meneer, it is all my fault, I stole the feathers from Piet Retief’s bum and Miss Phillips won the Easter Bonnet prize at the Rand Easter Show and sent me a pound. Gawie Grobler did nothing wrong, Meneer!’ I cried in one big burst of confession.

  ‘Whoa! Not so fast, Tom. What’s this about feathers from Piet Retief’s bum? Maybe he had a feather in his hat, but this is the first I hear that the great Boer leader had feathers coming out of his backside.’

  ‘He’s a rooster, Meneer,’ I stammered.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk turned to his brother, the headmaster. ‘I think I’ll take Tom here outside for a little chat. If I need Gawie we can always get to him later.’

  The headmaster told Gawie to go back to class and Sergeant Van Niekerk took me outside and then to the front gate. Tinker was waiting outside the headmaster’s office and followed us. When we got to the gate, the police van was parked right there and half on the pavement. If anyone else had done it they’d have got into a lot of trouble.

  ‘Get in, Tom,’ the sergeant instructed, then he saw Tinker. ‘Bring her too.’ He opened the door of the passenger side of the van. I remembered he’d done the same to Fonnie du Preez so I didn’t get my hopes up too far, but at least Tinker was coming with me to gaol. I picked her up and climbed in, and this time it was my heart that was going boom-boom-boom against her little chest. She licked my hand. Sergeant Van Niekerk climbed in on the other side behind the steering wheel and I asked, ‘Am I being arrested and will you send me to Pretoria, Meneer?’

  He turned on the ignition and the big Ford engine went varoom! When a person could hear again he said, ‘Ja, something like that, Tom. Only I thought perhaps instead of Pretoria prison we might go to the Impala Café and you could have all ten toppings while you tell me the whole story, hey? What do you say?’

  Mevrou Booysens welcomed me like a long-lost friend. ‘Where have you been, Tom? It’s about two years since you came in. How is your finger? Marie and I often talk about you. She is in Pietersburg training to be a nurse. Can you still eat ten toppings? Do you still have that nice little dog?’

  I must say I was amazed. You don’t expect grown-ups to have a memory like that. I showed her the scar on my finger and told her Tinker was waiting outside.

  ‘Even the dog has good manners,’ she said. ‘We going to find him a nice bone, hey?’

  So I told Sergeant Van Niekerk everything except about the water-pump incident and the pound disappearing up Gawie’s bum. By the time I was finished I’d also finished the ice-cream that still came in a bowl that stood on one leg.

  ‘He has a stomach like a cement-mixer,’ Mevrou Booysens said, beaming down at me before taking it away. ‘But the dog doesn’t eat the bone, Tom. It’s a nice one with meat still on.’

  I’d been so concerned about myself that I’d clean forgotten. ‘She won’t till she gets the password, Mevrou,’ I explained, then looked at Sergeant Van Niekerk for permission to go outside the shop. Mevrou Booysens followed. Tinker was lying with both her paws on this big meaty bone and her nose right up against it.

  ‘Izinyawo ezinkulu zika Mattress,’ I said, and in a trice Tinker grabbed the juicy bone, happy as can be.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk had come out and must have heard me give Tinker the password and now he shook his head.

  ‘Mattress’s big feet,’ he said softly to himself. ‘You loved that Bantu, didn’t you, Tom? I’m sorry I couldn’t get a conviction. The case is still open and I promise you I’ll keep trying.’

  We returned to the table. ‘Two suckers coming up, what colour do you want, Tom?’ Mevrou Booysens asked.

  ‘Red and yellow, please, Mevrou,’ I said. I was still not too sure I was safe because my sentence hadn’t yet been passed, and if I was going to go to gaol the suckers would come in handy as a bit of comfort.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk said, ‘Well, Tom, I haven’t had an official complaint from the superintendent of The Boys Farm about Piet Retief’s missing tail feathers so I have decided to close the books on the case. We will now go down to Mr Patel’s shop to get your pound as I am completely satisfied it is rightfully yours.’ He paused and seemed to be thinking. ‘It might be a good idea to stay away from Meneer Prinsloo’s roosters, though. Offenders often return to the scene of their crime and we don’t want him seeing you around his chickens. What did you say the second rooster was called?’

  ‘General Botha,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s blasphemy!’ he laughed. ‘Meneer Prinsloo should be arrested for treason.’

  When we got to Patel & Sons (it later turned out the sons were in India going to Bombay University) my pound was returned, even though Gawie still had the receipt in his trouser pocket at school.

  ‘Thank you, Meneer Patel,’ I said. ‘Can I please have two ten-shilling notes instead?’

  ‘Certainly! We are giving you two ten-shilling notes quick smart, Tom,’ Mr Patel said. ‘Sergeant Van Niekerk tells me you are a very, very fine boy. You want anything, you come and see me. For you it’s wholesale price every time.’

  I think he must have liked me calling him Meneer Patel because I don’t suppose it happened very often from the white people around the place, even Sergeant Van Niekerk only called him Patel. I didn’t care because you have to admit he’d turned out to be a very nice person in the end, offering me wholesale and all that. Mattress was supposed to be a dirty kaffir and the lowest down you could get, but he was still my best friend ever. At church once the Dominee read from the Bible and it told us that Jesus once said to the man next to him on the cross about people going to heaven, ‘In my father’s house there are many mansions, I go to prepare a place for you.’ Every night I prayed to God to please give Mattress a really nice house with some cows to milk and a black-and-white sow that had lots of piglets.

  Outside the shop Sergeant Van Niekerk went down on his haunches and put his hand on my shoulder, looked me in the eyes and asked, ‘Tom, are you sure you want to give Gawie Grobler ten shillings? It’s a lot of money. You do know the whole pound rightly belongs to you now, don’t you?’

  ‘Ja, Meneer, but he is my friend, just like Mattress was.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he replied. ‘A man should always have a friend he can trust.’ I was too young to realise that Sergeant Van Niekerk had, once again, proved to be just such a friend, even though he was a high-up and a very importan
t person who could have had anyone he liked as his friend.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  For Love of Country

  BY NOW YOU CAN see there was a fair amount of politics going on around the place so I thought maybe we should talk about the war, which to me was a very confusing time. Who’s right and who’s wrong, that was my problem. It wasn’t too hard to decide who was right if you listened to Meneer Prinsloo, Frikkie Botha and Mevrou or, in particular, the Dominee. Every Sunday he was saying all sort of things from the pulpit, but mainly that maybe on the surface Hitler wasn’t a God-fearing man but we must look below the surface for the truth.

  ‘God, we must understand,’ the Dominee said, ‘works in mysterious ways and maybe Hitler is the political Messiah who will restore South Africa to the Afrikaner folk who, we must remember, invented white supremacy long before he came along.’ The Almighty was definitely against the English all the way and obviously against the Jews who crucified the Lord Jesus Christ, and Hitler was the same. So this proved once and for all that anyone who fought the English and hated the Jews and knew that white people were superior to other races was a God-fearing person.

  ‘Now, let us examine for a moment why Adolf Hitler doesn’t bring God into his message to the world,’ the Dominee said one Sunday. ‘It is because of the Church of Rome.’ He went on about how with all the Roman Catholics in Germany Hitler couldn’t just come out and say up-front that he was a Protestant and a Lutheran. Because after the Jews the Roman Catholics were the worst there was, worshipping idols and a man called the Pope and the Virgin Mary, who was the mother of Jesus but also just a humble common woman because God wanted it to be that way. He, the Lord God Almighty, wanted His son to be born of man so Mary was just the womb suitcase Jesus came in. She was definitely not worth worshipping, not just because she was a woman, but because God said so.

  ‘In the meantime, they, the Roman Catholics, are forgetting all about mentioning Jesus who was the Son of God and it is all Pope and Mary this, and Mary and Pope that, and so-called holy statues everywhere. With Roman Catholics in Germany and with Italy being one hundred per cent Roman Catholic, Adolf Hitler couldn’t just come out and say he was a proper Christian and didn’t worship idols or Virgin Marys.’