This was the country Mattress had described to me so very long ago. I had a sudden stab of pain in my heart. Was he in heaven? Heaven was a high-up place, maybe it looked like this, waterfalls and big trees and sunlit glades. If I had been old enough when he died I would have pinned a note on his body with his name on it so God would know who he was now that he didn’t have a face. But there were always his platform feet, even God, who is a very busy person, couldn’t mistake them, and they hadn’t been scraped off by the road.
This time it was less easy to find wood, but we got some and when it was enough we started the braaivleis fire. Sergeant Van Niekerk said, ‘We better get in a swim, hey? Because later there will be ladies here.’
So we took off all of our clothes and he said, ‘I dare you to dive in first.’ So I did and when I came up I thought I must have just dived into a pool of ice. Sergeant Van Niekerk was laughing. ‘It’s cold, hey, Tom!’ Then he dived in and came up snorting like a walrus. ‘Here, man, it’s cold!’ he yelled above the sound of the waterfall.
Tinker was the only smart one who didn’t jump in, she just barked at the edge, maybe dogs know these things. We couldn’t stay in for long because it was too cold. When we got out we lay on this big sunny rock and got warm again and our skin dried.
‘Better get dressed, the others will be here soon,’ said Sergeant Van Niekerk. By now the fire was burnt down and only a wisp of smoke was rising. ‘A bit more wood and the embers will be perfect,’ he said.
It hadn’t even started properly and already this was the happiest day of my life. You’ll never believe what happened. Because the waterfall drowned out the sound, I didn’t hear the car coming and I suddenly looked up and there, like a ghost car, was Doctor Van Heerden’s ’39 Chevvie with the dicky-seat, and there in the dicky-seat is Marie. In the front was the Doctor and Mevrou Booysens. I couldn’t believe my eyes! Who was going to look after the Impala Café and the farmers coming to see Doctor Van Heerden? They had come all this way on their busiest day of the week, just to see me.
I’d hardly recovered from this shock when turning into the clearing is Meneer Van Niekerk’s old Plymouth and in it is his wife Anna, who once gave me an end-of-the-year prize at school for history. The back door of the car opened and it was Miss Phillips! Can you imagine? Miss Phillips from Johannesburg!
Marie came and gave me a big kiss, and then Mevrou Booysens and then Miss Phillips who hugged me and said, ‘Oh, oh, you precious child!’ and I thought she was going to cry because her voice went all of a sudden wobbly. She told me how she’d come down in the train and Meneer Van Niekerk had picked her up in Tzaneen. Then Mevrou Van Niekerk kissed me. Four kisses all at once, a brand-new world record!
Well! What a day-and-a-half it turned out to be! We didn’t catch any fish, but I think I ate about a yard of boerewors, and cakes and pudding and koeksisters and a big roast potato and all the cool drinks I wanted in proper bottles. They even had some biltong and I could take some home with me. Other nice things you couldn’t take, because they’d be confiscated, but nobody would know you had biltong in your pocket.
Then after lunch Meneer Van Niekerk made a speech and he said how proud they were of me winning the scholarship an’ all.
‘It is one of the proudest moments in the history of the school,’ he said. Then he added, if Gawie also won his scholarship it would make them all doubly proud, but they didn’t know his results yet. ‘This day is in your honour, Tom, we are very proud of you, but we not only honour you, we also honour the selfless love of a woman, Miss Phillips. Without this very special person, who knows what might have happened to these two brilliant boys. A headmaster can only do so much and they would probably have been lost in the wilderness.’
I’m glad he also mentioned Gawie because it was true about him. Miss Phillips had gone all red in the face and said she’d only done her duty as a teacher, and that it brought her great pleasure watching two fine young minds grow. We all knew it was lots and lots more than that. I loved Marie, but I also loved Miss Phillips a lot, but in a different sort of way.
After all the speeches were over, Doctor Van Heerden said how lucky it was that he’d left that old box of his dear brother’s books under the house and other nice things. ‘If half chopping off your finger brings young men like you into an old doctor’s life, Tom, then chop away,’ he said, and everyone laughed.
Then Mevrou Van Niekerk asked if they knew about the scholarship at The Boys Farm.
‘They got a letter,’ I replied.
‘They? You mean you got one?’ Miss Phillips exclaimed.
‘Yes.’
‘Did you tell them about your scholarship?’ Mevrou Van Niekerk asked.
‘They knew already, Mevrou. We are not allowed to get letters that haven’t been opened and read first by Meneer Prinsloo,’ I explained.
‘Was there a little celebration, maybe?’ Mevrou Booysens asked, offering me a brown-paper packet. ‘Have some dried peaches, they come from the Cape.’
I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell them what had happened and I couldn’t lie because we were not at The Boys Farm and they were all high-up people I loved and respected. I took a dried peach to cover up.
‘Perhaps I can explain,’ Meneer Van Niekerk suddenly interjected. ‘Jan and I have an old aunt, Mevrou Pienaar, who is the cook at The Boys Farm. She told me what happened.’ He went through the whole story and everyone was very quiet until the end when Doctor Van Heerden said, ‘I am ashamed that man calls himself a proud Afrikaner.’ Everyone shook their heads and Miss Phillips said, ‘What an iniquity!’ Marie came over and kissed me and gave me a big hug.
Which just goes to show, a person shouldn’t go around in life criticising people who go, ‘Eh? What did you say?’ all the time when you speak to them. It was obvious from how the headmaster told the story that Mevrou Pienaar had heard every word that went on that night. Now I also knew how Sergeant Van Niekerk knew so much about everything going on around the place and how Tinker was a famous ratter.
But then, all of a sudden, I knew something else. I now knew that they all knew the story of the letter before they came here. By deliberately telling it again in front of me it was Meneer Van Niekerk’s way of telling me, ‘Remember, Tom, the truth shall set you free.’ Badness doesn’t always win and good people must fight bad people and not let them get away with stuff. That was why they had all given up their valuable time to give me such a lovely picnic.
At two o’clock, because of the high krans the waterfall tumbled over, the sun was already gone and the glade grew quite chilly. Sergeant Van Niekerk said we would need to go because at three o’clock sharp the rain would come down and the road out would be slippery and dangerous. Then another nice thing happened. Doctor Van Heerden said, ‘Why not drive home with us and sit in the dicky-seat with Marie and enjoy the open air.’ I looked at Sergeant Van Niekerk to see if it was all right.
‘I dunno, man,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s a very pretty nooi you got there, Tom.’ He turned to the others. ‘Do you think they can be trusted?’
They all laughed and I dunno why, but I got all red in the face. This was because Gawie and me had seen this word geslagdrang in one of his shit squares. After a lot of puzzling we’d finally worked out from reading the rest that it’s what happens sometimes when you get close to a girl. In English it is ‘sex urge’.
‘Can Tinker come? She’s a very good watchdog,’ I replied. ‘Then there’s two women and only one boy.’
‘Hy is ‘n slimmetjie!’ Mevrou Booysens exclaimed, clapping her hands. ‘Naughty too!’ I don’t know why they thought I was clever, because it was only something Gawie and me had talked about once. One thing was for sure, if I had to put my snake into Marie, in a dicky-seat it couldn’t be done! Even if I knew how to do it, which I didn’t, and if I did, I wouldn’t. You can’t go doing something like that to somebody you love.
It was pretty squashed in the dicky-seat which stuck out of the back of th
e little ’39 Chevvie where in other cars you’d have a boot, but it was also wonderful with the wind in your face and the countryside flashing by. Not really flashing because it was quite slow with all the bends and twists in the road, and sometimes looking over the side it was a bit scary with rocks tumbling down over the edge of the road when the tyres hit them.
Marie said she really liked Miss Phillips and she wished she was her older sister because she was an only child. ‘You are a very lucky boy to have Miss Phillips in your life, Tom,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I replied, ‘she got me the scholarship I can’t have yet. I could never have had it otherwise. I don’t know how to say thank you properly.’ Then the big idea hit me! It was so simple I couldn’t believe it. ‘Marie, you a girl, hey?’
She laughed. ‘However did you guess, Tom?’
But I was so taken with my new thought that I hardly smiled. ‘If I gave you ten shillings, could you buy something for Miss Phillips?’ I forgot to tell you that when I rescued the red book, it wasn’t only that it was really important to me above all my other books, but also because that’s where my ten shillings was hidden. You’ll be glad to hear, my ten-shilling note was still as good as new, and so were my burned fingers.
‘Ten shillings! That’s a fortune,Tom. Where did you get ten shillings?’
I was discovering in life that women always need details that are not important and sidetrack a person. Before you know where you are, you telling them stuff you don’t want to even tell yourself. Now I had to tell her about the Easter bonnet and Piet Retief’s shiny feathers. So another person would know the crime. First Sergeant Van Niekerk, then Gawie and now Marie. ‘If I tell, will you promise on your word of honour this time not to tell anyone?’
‘What do you mean, this time,’ she said suspiciously.
‘Well, last time you swore on a stack of Bibles that you wouldn’t tell Doctor Van Heerden about me stealing the red book from under his house.’ I didn’t say this unkindly or in an accusing voice, I just wanted her to know that the truth would set her free.
‘Look what extra good came from me telling him?’ she exclaimed. ‘Now you not a thief any more. Don’t you think me blabbing was worth it?’
I couldn’t argue with her because I was also learning . . . no, that’s wrong. I’d known all along from dealing with Mevrou that you couldn’t win an argument with a woman because they’ve got a special logic that defeats you every time. So now I had to tell her about my second big crime, the plucking of the great Piet Retief’s tail feathers.
‘I’ll only tell you if you don’t think I’m a criminal again,’ I said carefully.
‘You don’t mean to say you stole it! I don’t believe it! You stole ten shillings!’ she exclaimed in amazement.
‘No, of course not!’ I shouted. We’d come to a straight section of the road when the ’39 Chevvie had speeded up, and I had to shout because the wind was whipping our voices away from us.
When we slowed down again,she said, ‘You’d better tell me, Tom. I hope I am not going to be disappointed in you?’
The way she said it made me quite scared. I simply couldn’t afford to lose another friend, even if she was older. So I had to tell her everything and take the risk that the truth would set me free. When I’d finished the story, she was laughing and clapping. ‘But Miss Phillips sent you a pound and now you’ve only got ten shillings. What did you spend the other ten shillings on?’
See how it works? With a woman you start with just a simple fact. Next thing you know you’re telling her about the ten shillings that turned into a pound up Gawie’s bum and then back into ten shillings again. Which was the same ten shillings I now had. I thought Marie was going to die laughing, and Tinker got quite excited and barked like mad.
Then we were down the high mountains and back into the hills on the road to The Boys Farm when Marie had her brilliant idea. It was so brilliant that I thought, maybe Marie is a mind-reader? But she couldn’t be, because the idea she came up with hadn’t been a subject on my mind when she’d been present. In fact, the last time I’d thought about it was in Meneer Prinsloo’s office that morning when he was talking about the drunken Australian sergeant and his mother who turned from pure as snow into a whore.
‘Tom, I have a good idea. Maybe you’ll like it, hey? I’m very good at needlework and sewing. I do it in the hospital ward when I’m on night duty. I’ve made several of these quilts and I’ve just finished one for my mum’s wedding present. With your ten shillings I can buy the cottons, tapes, backing material and the stuffing, and I have this big rag bag full of material scraps I’ve collected since I was a little girl. All the colours in the whole world, as well as lots of different patterns. Why don’t I make Miss Phillips a nice quilt? I don’t want to boast, you hear, but I’m good and have won several sewing prizes around the place.’
‘A quilt!’ I couldn’t believe my ears. ‘Does it have goosefeathers?’
‘Ja, Tom, all good quilts have goosefeathers. You’re not getting rubbish, you know!’
Sometimes in life you can get really lucky. That ten shillings had had a difficult journey. First, causing a big fight at the water pump, and it completely disappearing and me getting into trouble with Frikkie Botha saying the Union Jack was a nicer flag than the vierkleur. Then, all of a sudden reappearing as a pound up Gawie’s bum. Then turning into my ten shillings and back into a pound that was nearly used to buy mieliemeel in Tzaneen by Meneer Patel of Patel & Sons. Then, at the last moment getting rescued by Sergeant Van Niekerk. Then getting buried in the red book and having a very lucky escape from a bushfire! At long last, it was going to turn into the biggest surprise a person like Miss Phillips could ever have after her big win with the Easter bonnet that started everything. In life you never know what’s going to happen around every corner.
CHAPTER TEN
Unrequited Love
WELL, I’M TELLING YOU, that Bishop’s College met their match when they took on Miss Janneke Phillips! When she heard they wouldn’t take me because I was too young, she went to see the headmaster. It was some years later that she told me what had taken place, recalling the conversation almost word for word.
‘My dear Miss Phillips,’ the headmaster began. ‘While pastoral care is one of the features of this school, in our experience an almost twelve-year-old boy, especially one as precocious as young Fitzsaxby, would not yet be mentally and physically mature for the boarding-school environment. It would be much better in the long run if he remained where he is for another two years.’
Miss Phillips said that the whole of Johannesburg must have heard her laughing her head off. ‘Headmaster, do you not know this boy’s background?’ she asked the Reverend John Robertson.
‘Essentially no, but the boy is very bright, very bright indeed, which suggests intellectual parents and a carefully nurtured home environment, which doesn’t always suit a boy for the rough and tumble of a boys’ boarding school.’
‘But you addressed a letter to him at The Boys Farm?’
‘Well, yes, the name of his parents’ farm? Now I think of it, perhaps a little strange, but names can be like that. When I was a boy in Sussex, I recall a farm near my village was named “Doomsday Farm”. As a further example, whoever would have thought of calling the town from which I believe young Fitzsaxby comes, the Devil’s Canyon. Rather ante-mortem and dark, don’t you think?’
Janneke Phillips laughed. ‘For this town, I can assure you, it is a very appropriate name. Most of its inhabitants have a Great Trek mentality and the Boer War is refought every day!’
‘And this curiously named Boys Farm is what?’
‘It is an orphanage started for some of the child survivors of the British concentration camps and has simply continued to exist. Past wounds are still very much felt in this society and The Boys Farm, along with the local Dutch Reform Church, is a seedbed of bigotry and Afrikaner resentment against the British. Tom’s surname, Fitzsaxby, has been translated into the Afrikaan
s expletive, Voetsek, by which he is known, even by some of the adults at the institution.’
‘Good heavens!’ the Reverend Robertson exclaimed. ‘We had no idea.’
‘Tom Fitzsaxby has been at The Boys Farm since the age of four which makes his results even more remarkable, don’t you think? A successful graduate from The Boys Farm might, at best, be expected to become a lorry driver, railway worker or timber cutter. Many of them end up in trouble with the law. What’s more, as I’ve just indicated, with his English surname, Tom has been constantly and systematically persecuted, not only by the Afrikaner children, but also by the staff. Paradoxically, when I met him at the age of seven, he had entirely forgotten his native tongue and spoke only Afrikaans and Zulu. His English essay in your scholarship examination, for which your markers were kind enough to award him 95 per cent, was written by a boy who has almost no opportunity to practise the spoken language. Sir, this young boy has been beaten almost every day of his life and has suffered some sexual abuse. His only friend, a Zulu farm worker, was murdered by an unknown group of white men. Yet he has survived with his personality remarkably intact. Do you honestly think your boarding-school environment is going to have a negative effect on his character? If you don’t take him at the Bishop’s College next year he is condemned to spending a further two years in that vile institution,’ Miss Phillips said, laying it on a bit thick.
‘Well, yes, of course, my dear Miss Phillips, I can see your point, most unfortunate circumstances.’ He appeared to be thinking. ‘Is he a big child . . . big for his age?’
‘No, he’s slightly below average for an English-speaking boy. Certainly small among his Afrikaner peers.’ Miss Phillips saw a look of uncertainty cross the headmaster’s face. ‘Don’t worry, he’ll hold his own, and won’t be asking for any favours. I’m told he is a promising young scrum-half,’ she said, as if to confirm that I was tough enough.
This last bit was stretching things a bit. We started rugby at the age of nine, mostly just the little kids fooling about with a senior kid handling the ref’s whistle. It would be one pick-up team against another. I always got scrum-half, simply because I was the smallest. Scrum-half is a position where you get bashed a lot by the forwards if you don’t get the ball away to the back line quick smart. So I got quite okay at playing it, mainly because I was scared stiff. Miss Phillips had based her laudatory remark on a conversation at the picnic, when Sergeant Van Niekerk had asked, ‘What rugby possie do you play, Tom?’ I had replied, ‘Scrum-half, Meneer,’ to which he had said, ‘Ja, that’s good, I think you will be a good scrum-half.’
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