Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  Then the Dominee said that because we don’t live in a perfect world, sometimes there has to be political compromise. ‘But just you wait and see, after Hitler wins the war the Catholics will be the next to go up in smoke!’ The Dominee got very worked up saying all this stuff and the beetle chewed overtime on the beard grass. He kept thumping the pulpit and the light coming from the window behind made the beetle’s ears blood-red and he thumped so hard the Bible fell with a mighty thump to the floor.

  One of my big problems was that when you saw a person shout a lot and thump things like the Bible, you knew that he wanted you to believe stuff that maybe you should look at a bit more carefully before you did. Meneer Prinsloo was another such person, a shouter whose hands were windmills and who pushed his stomach out so his braces had to hang on for dear life, and so you also knew you had to be careful because a lot of what he said was sheer, utter and complete bullshit.

  Now I must say it came as a big surprise to learn that there were people called Jews still hanging around the place after all this time since the Bible. I mean, there were no English or Afrikaners in the Bible because they didn’t exist yet. But according to everyone the Jews were still here and they were still guilty of crucifying the Son of God. That is not a thing you can forgive lightly, and the ones escaping from Germany needed to be kept out of South Africa at all costs. Everybody said we already had enough Christ-killers allowed in by the British and the Smuts Government. The Jews now owned all the goldmines and diamonds and wanted to sack decent-living white miners and put kaffirs in to work underground because the Jews could give them less wages and make more profit.

  So you see I was trying to sort all of this stuff out in my head, and in one of our many discussions on the library rock I said to Gawie Grobler, ‘Okay, answer me this. If Jesus died for our sins so that we could have eternal life like the Dominee says, then why are we angry with the Jews for killing him? He came down from heaven and was supposed to be killed in the first place. God said to Him, “Go down there and talk to people about us, then you have to die so their sins can be forgiven and they can start all over again, washed in the blood of the lamb, which is you.” When the Jews did it to him like they were supposed to, all of a sudden they can’t come into South Africa? Didn’t God know all the time they were supposed to do it? The Dominee says the Jews were God’s chosen people, after the Afrikaners, so God must have chosen them to do it to Jesus!’

  Gawie thought for a while, then said, ‘No, Voetsek, you got it wrong, man. It was the Romans that were supposed to do it all the time. God said Jesus had to die but the Romans had to do it. At the last minute the Jews said they wanted to have a part in it but that was never supposed to happen because up to then the Jews were God’s chosen people.’ He added, ‘But they not anymore, we are.’

  I knew he meant the Afrikaner volk and not me, because the Dominee said that the Afrikaners could easily be one of the lost tribes of Israel, so they had every right to claim that they were now God’s chosen people. The Dominee pointed out that they’d also done a lot of wandering in the wilderness among the heathen, as a matter of fact, for more than forty years, which beat the pants off Moses’s record. What’s more, there had been no backsliding by worshipping craven images, like Aaron did the moment Moses’s back was turned when he climbed up the mountain to talk to God about some laws to be made called the Ten Commandments. ‘The Afrikaner tribe,’ the Dominee said, ‘had kept the true faith to this very moment, and mostly the Ten Commandments and so were definitely a first-class chosen people who God could trust not to let Him down.’

  So if, according to Gawie, that took care of why God didn’t like the Jews any more, it still didn’t answer why He hated the Romans who were only following His orders.

  ‘But why do we hate the Romans when God said they had to kill Jesus? It’s not their fault, if God says something you’ve got to do it, man,’ I insisted.

  ‘Ag, Voetsek, you don’t understand! God doesn’t hate the Romans because they killed Jesus! He hates them because after they killed Him they turned into Roman Catholics, and now they worship the Pope and the Virgin Mary and Jesus only comes in third possie. That’s why we have to hate Roman Catholics as well.’

  ‘Okay, I buy that, but why do we let the Roman Catholics into South Africa and not the Jews, hey?’

  ‘We didn’t, the English did. It’s just another one of their terrible sins.’ To drive the point home he said, ‘You don’t see any Afrikaners who are Roman Catholics, do you?’

  I was forced to admit that I didn’t know a single Afrikaner who was a Roman Catholic. I wasn’t even sure if I’d recognise a Roman Catholic or a Jew if I saw one. There certainly weren’t any in Duiwelskrans. ‘How do you know if someone’s a Roman Catholic or a Jew?’ I asked Gawie.

  ‘Easy, man,’ he said with great authority. ‘My uncle in Pretoria says you can tell a Roman Catholic because they wear a big gold cross around their neck and count beads that’s supposed to be their prayers. They don’t do proper prayers like us, they’ve got this necklace and every bead on it is a prayer that’s already been said lots of times before. So if they just count them, they think it’s the same as saying them, and in the meantime they’re saving time. Imagine if you’re God and you’re waiting to hear all the prayers coming up to heaven at night and on Sunday morning all you hear is click “one”, click “two”, click “three” going on down below. How is He supposed to remember all the prayers they’ve gone and turned into numbers? Wragtig! It’s an insult to God!’

  ‘And Jews? How do you know if you run into one?’

  Gawie paused, then said, ‘My uncle in Pretoria says they’ve got this really big hooked nose and a black beard and long curly hair and they wear a round hat.’

  ‘You mean they all look like Jesus?’

  ‘No, man! Jesus had a straight nose, just like yours and mine, and he didn’t wear a hat,’ he said, growing impatient with my questioning.

  ‘Oom Paul Kruger, the President of the Transvaal Republic during the Boer War, had a beard, a hooked nose and long hair and he wasn’t a Jew!’ I protested. We’d recently seen this picture of the young ‘Oom Paul’ in a history lesson at school, taken before he got fat, and to me he fitted the description Gawie’s uncle had given of a Jew down to a T.

  Gawie sighed this long sigh. ‘Voetsek, Oom Paul had a big blobby nose and all Boere at that time had beards, and his hair was long because he was so busy fighting the British he didn’t have time to get his mother to cut it.’

  I thought it best to leave the discussion there. You couldn’t argue about Oom Paul Kruger because that could take me back into blasphemy territory and I was still suffering from the flag business. While I thought I might be able to recognise a Roman Catholic by the big gold cross dangling around his neck and his beads clicking away while he’s counting instead of saying prayers, I wasn’t at all sure about knowing a Jew should I eventually came across one. There were plenty of Boere around with black beards and hooked noses that wore big hats. The Dominee was one for a start. Maybe it was the hair that would give them away. Because most people around the place had the short back and sides, so if a man suddenly had curly black hair, like a girl’s, you’d know he was a Jew who shouldn’t be allowed into South Africa. But, on the other hand, maybe he was just a Boer who needed a haircut. Some of the Boere coming down from the high mountains for Nagmaal had their hair long, so you could easy make a big mistake.

  I was also getting a bit worried about Gawie’s uncle in Pretoria. Like most of the kids, Gawie never had any relations visit at Christmas time. Already I’d been in The Boys Farm since I was four years old and I don’t remember Gawie’s uncle ever coming to visit and he never once went to Pretoria on a holiday. His uncle must have done an awful lot of talking to him about hen’s teeth and snoring in fires and Jews and Catholics counting beads before Gawie came, which was when he was only five years old.

  Now that the war was on we also were getting extra lectures after dinner fr
om Meneer Prinsloo who, like everyone else in the district, supported the Nationalist Party like all decent, God-fearing Afrikaners. They were bitterly opposed to the United Party and ‘that traitor to his own people, Prime Minister Jan Christiaan Smuts, who ought to be locked up for treason and the key thrown away!’ We weren’t supposed to talk about these lectures if a grown-up who was a stranger asked. Meneer Prinsloo wanted us to understand that there were evil things going on that were designed to destroy the Afrikaner people, ‘who couldn’t be destroyed and would still be racially pure when the second coming of Jesus comes!’

  In one of his braces-straining sessions he said, ‘This whole war is an example of British/Jewish imperialism, and we in the Nationalist Party must fight them tooth and nail!’ I hoped he wasn’t expecting too many tooth-and-nail fighters from The Boys Farm because we didn’t have too many teeth left after the horse pliers, and most of us chewed our nails right down to the quick.

  Meneer Prinsloo also agreed with the Dominee that Hitler was an okay person for all the same reasons. But he also said, in the Boer War the Germans were on our side all the way up to their eyebrows but couldn’t fight for us because they didn’t want to get into trouble with the British, but they sold Mauser rifles and bullets to us really cheap, and gave us bandages and medicine for nothing, and built portable field hospitals also for nothing.

  ‘Instead of killing our women and children like the British, they saved our lives!’ Meneer Prinsloo’s braces were stretched to breaking point and his stomach stuck out beyond the platform where the staff table was, and his hands were moving so fast in the air around him that they were blurry.

  It was a good point, even coming from Meneer Prinsloo. ‘Now, boys, let me be quite fair and put the case to you. If somebody says to you that you must pick a side to fight on,’ he paused and looked down at us from the platform, ‘on the one side is someone who kills Afrikaner women and children in concentration camps and on the other is someone who saves their lives with bandages, medicine and whole field hospitals.’ He took a breath, then said, ‘As an Afrikaner, who you going to pick, hey?’ Another pause to make sure we all got the point. ‘So, I ask you, why are we fighting on the British side all of a sudden? Let me tell you why – because of British/Jewish imperialism! The Jews and the British own the goldmines and the diamonds and because Adolf Hitler says, “No more Jews in Germany, finish and klaar!” so now we got to fight against our old friends. Now is that fair? Is that what a Boer, a regte Boer, would do? A man of high honour and outstanding principles?’

  Up to this point he had been pretty calm for someone like him, but all of a sudden his hands did somersaults in the air, and his arms practically flew off his shoulders and he roared at us, ‘Never! You hear, never! Never! Never! Never! I swear it on the graves of my dead grandmother Hester Prinsloo and great Tante Freda, who died of blackwater fever in the British concentration camps! God rest their souls and give them a home in heaven as far away from any British as possible!’ When you think about it, he didn’t have to worry – how could there be any British in heaven after what they’d done?

  Then Frikkie Botha and Mevrou and even old Mevrou Pienaar the cook stood up and clapped and Frikkie Botha extended his hand in the Nazi salute. All of a sudden all the adults copied. Meneer Prinsloo stood there on the edge of the platform with his right arm raised and his stomach pulled in as much as it could for a change and the braces practically not extended. We all stood up and clapped and pushed out our arms in the Nazi salute. When I stood up the two boys on either side of me pushed me down again and held me down with a hand on either shoulder so they couldn’t clap but could still salute, except one of them had to salute with the wrong arm.

  Frikkie shouted, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Everyone shouted back and Meneer Prinsloo’s arm that had been in the salute started to wave around slowly at first, then the other one did as well, and they both started to windmill and he shouted, ‘Victory to the Third Reich and freedom to the Afrikaner volk!’ Everybody cheered like mad. I’ve got to tell you, it was very confusing. I decided on the spot that if ever I came across a Jewish imperialist who owned a gold or diamond mine, I was going to give him a piece of my mind. I’d also tell them to have a haircut quick smart because while a beard is okay, you can’t go walking around with long, curly black hair sacking white people who’ve got jobs in your goldmine just so they can put a bit of food on the table for their wife and children.

  Later someone told Mevrou I hadn’t stood up and clapped and done the salute after Meneer Prinsloo’s magnificent speech, so then I got seven of the best. ‘Tonight you getting three for the British —’ Whack! Whack! Whack!‘ and three for the Jews, Voetsek.’ Whack! Whack! Whack! Whack! ‘That’s a bansella from me, Mevrou Van Schalkwyk!’

  So there was more Chinese writing on my bum. I’d never met a Jew and already I was being punished because of them, which just goes to show you can’t be careful enough with Jewish imperialists all over the place.

  The next night Meneer Prinsloo stood up and said he was very pleased with what happened the night before. He announced that he’d bought a new young Black Orpington rooster from a breeder in Acorn Hoek, which was a little dorp that you wouldn’t ever think would have pedigree anythings, let alone roosters. He said again how Piet Retief had been sabotaged by some criminal person and all his hopes had been dashed. General Botha, his other rooster, wasn’t good enough for the big-time shows, so now we could all learn a lesson of hope snatched from the jaws of disaster. ‘Man het ’n plan, a man has a plan,’ he said. ‘In life you’ve got to take the hard bumps as well as the tender kisses. Last night I had a dream, more like a vision, because the spirit of the Lord was definitely with me and I knew that the hand of God was guiding me. I am going to start from scratch with a new rooster who will be called Adolf Hitler after the great and glorious leader who has been through hard times but now is a world-champion leader.’ He concluded by saying, ‘If Adolf Hitler had tail feathers they would shine like the sun and scrape the very roof of the sky!’

  We all clapped but Meneer Prinsloo held his hand up for silence. ‘Now, one thing more,’ he said. ‘We don’t know who the criminal mind was who sabotaged Piet Retief, but if anyone sees a certain vet when he comes to pull out your teeth and is afterwards hanging around the Black Orpingtons they must come and tell me immediately. This is an order!’ He let this point sink in before explaining further. ‘The Great Piet Retief, who is to become chicken soup, would have entered the Potgietersrus Agricultural Show as the preliminary to qualify for the Rand Easter Show, and everybody knows it was a foregone conclusion he would have won. But now Scarlet Pimpernel, the Rhode Island Red who is owned by a certain vet, has just won Best Rooster at Show!’ He looked around darkly. ‘I’m not saying any more, you hear? Except maybe this, everybody who knows a chicken knows that a certain vet’s Scarlet Pimpernel wasn’t a patch on Piet Retief whose tail feathers left that imposter champion’s sprawling in the dust!’

  Meneer Prinsloo asked us to leave lots of crusts on the table because he felt in his water that in Adolf Hitler he had a potential grand champion. ‘Magtig! Already he is only a cockerel and you can see how proud he walks!’

  We all clapped again because when Meneer Prinsloo made a speech clapping was compulsory. I remembered Sergeant Van Niekerk’s warning to me not to return to the scene of the Great Shiny-Feather Robbery. On the other hand, Doctor Dyke’s big Alsatian had come sniffing around and tried to mount Tinker, and already there were three of my teeth missing because of the dreaded horse pliers. Maybe this year Miss Phillips could wear a handful of magnificent red feathers in her Easter bonnet from a champion Rhode Island Red, but then I remembered it would be a crime if it happened outside The Boys Farm and would count against me with God and also Sergeant Van Niekerk.

  Here’s a funny thing that happened. Even at Christmas we didn’t get roast chicken because you had to be a proper family to get chicken at Christmas. I’d never tasted chicken and it would be some time b
efore I did. Piet Retief was too tough to be a roast chicken, him being a rooster and all. But don’t think we got to taste the soup old Mevrou Pienaar made from him because one chicken, even a champion rooster, couldn’t get tasted in soup by sixty kids. The soup got served to the staff at the platform table. If you watched carefully everyone drank their soup slowly, holding their spoons just so and sipping with a great politeness. This was because they were aware that this was a dark moment in chickendom, that they were drinking the soup of somebody who could have been a grand champion at the Rand Easter Show. Meneer Prinsloo was the last to finish. He put his spoon back down on the plate slowly and precisely, then he took his serviette and wiped his eyes. Everybody was silent for a while after. Guess what happened to the chicken bones? Tinker got them in his scoff bowl that night. Tinker, who was, technically speaking, also a criminal, got to taste chicken before any kid at The Boys Farm. Crunch! Crunch! Crunch!

  Maybe you’ve had enough of the war already, but I have to tell you about Frikkie Botha and how he went to blow up a bridge and blew himself up by mistake, which turned out to be no joke, I can tell you that for sure.

  Frikkie was a member of the Ossewabrandwag, the Ox-Wagon Fireguard, which was known to everyone as the OB, but he was also a member of Die Stormjaer Van Afrikanderdom, the storm-troopers of the Afrikaner Nation. They were sort of soldiers of the OB and had lots of duties that I don’t think they were supposed to have, like blowing up bridges, post offices and telegraph poles, and fighting the soldiers going to the war and who in their spare time tried to break up the political meetings that were against the Government and, of course, beating up kaffirs for practice. You weren’t supposed to ever talk about them but it seemed to me that everyone around the place was one. Maybe not Doctor Van Heerden, Sergeant Van Niekerk or Meneer Van Niekerk the headmaster because they never said and didn’t go to the meetings.