A person gets accustomed to everything and Marie’s oohing, ahhhhhhing, and screaming out has been going on so long, and I’ve been wiping her sweating face with a wet towel so that it’s got like there’s only her and me in the world and we just have to put up with everything until something happens. It was now four hours since she called out to me the first time.
‘Tom, take off, aaaahhh, my bloomers,’ Marie gasps. She is pulling at her dress, making it come up above her waist. ‘Pull them down!’ she sobs.
I get down on my knees and grab her bloomers but she can’t get her legs together and they won’t come off.
‘Cut, cut them!’ she cries. ‘Ahhhhhhhh!’ Another big pain comes.
I managed to find a large pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer and cut the elastic around her legs and waist, then cut through one leg and then the other and pulled the bloomers away. Suddenly there’s sort of water coming out from between her legs that soaks the towels, running across the floor. I pulled the wet towels away and put some new ones down. I was trying to mop up the water, and at the same time trying not to look because what I’ve seen is all red and pulsing and I think maybe Marie is going to die because there’s lots of blood.
Now she really starts panting and crying out and she grabbed the handles of the kitchen cupboards with each hand, jamming her back further into the corner. Tinker is at the kitchen door barking, and knowing something is terribly wrong but she’s not allowed in. I take a quick look over at Marie and I could see something coming out between Marie’s legs, and she’s still screaming blue murder. Then I remember I’m supposed to hold her legs apart. So I grab them and stand up and then hang on. But she’s miles too strong for me. She’s knocking me this way and that and ahhhhhhing and sobbing, and I’m hanging on trying to keep her legs apart and her bottom’s bouncing on the towels and her back is arching and she’s screaming her head off and still holding onto the cupboard door handles. Then she yells the biggest scream of all, ‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!’ Suddenly, plop, and there’s something that’s covered in blood and slime that’s definitely a baby lying between her legs. It’s got this sort of meat rope that looks like boerewors going from its bellybutton back inside Marie, and I start to cry because there must be something terribly wrong with all the blood and the rope thing. Then Sergeant Van Niekerk bursts into the kitchen and kneels down beside Marie, putting her head on his lap while she sobs and sobs.
Mevrou Van Heerden arrives, and takes one look and kneels down and picks up the baby by the feet and holds it upside down and spanks its bottom, and all of a sudden there’s this crying coming out of its mouth. Sergeant Van Niekerk starts to cry and laugh, and so does Mevrou Van Heerden. There’s a whole first-class crying match going on with some laughing thrown in. Mevrou puts the baby on Marie’s stomach and that’s when Doctor Van Heerden arrives.
When it’s all settled down and the baby, a girl, so now she can’t be Benny Osler when she grows up, is cleaned up and turns out to be a sort of deep rosy pink colour with lots of wrinkles, like an old person. Everyone says how pretty she is, just like her mother, but she isn’t. Maybe when the wrinkles go she’ll look a bit better. Doctor Van Heerden cut the boerewors rope, which is called an umbilical cord, and he told me it was always supposed to be there. Mevrou Van Heerden explains that the Tzaneen midwife had another pregnancy to attend to and was still busy and was going to get her husband to drive her when it was over. Now, of course, it’s too late.
With all this excitement going on it’s suddenly nearly four o’clock and lots of things are happening. The doctor has to go back to the hospital, so he’s taken the ’39 Chevvie. Sergeant Van Niekerk has to go to court because the district magistrate is in town and there’s court cases going on, so he has to leave Marie, who is now in bed in the spare room. She’s had stitches down there, and Doctor Van Heerden has given her a pain-killing needle. She has to stay the night and can only go back to her own house in the morning. The midwife still hasn’t arrived and Mevrou Van Heerden is staying, of course, to look after Marie.
So now I’m in the deep shit because it’s a quarter to five and that’s the curfew for The Boys Farm today. This is because we’re having our supper at five o’clock as there is going to be this big farewell for the Afrikaner Genius at the railway station that begins at half past six, because the train leaves at eight o’clock. Even if I run it’s going to take me half an hour to get back. I knock on the half-open bedroom door and Mevrou Van Heerden calls out, ‘No need to knock, Tom. Come in.’ But I’d never been in a room when a lady was in bed, and you couldn’t just walk in.
‘My hero!’ Marie called out weakly. ‘Come here, Tom, let me give you a big hug, hey.’ She is so tired she can hardly talk. So I go over to her and she gives me a hug and whispers, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you, Tom! You were wonderful, you hear?’ Then she puts three kisses all over my face. She didn’t smell of roses, just sweat, so I suppose after the baby comes out, the rose smell goes. She looked a bit sad and said, ‘If the baby had been a boy we were going to call him Tom.’ She closed her eyes and was quiet for a moment.
‘You must have a good sleep, Marie,’ I said.
‘Ja, it’s far too much excitement for one day,’ Mevrou Van Heerden exclaimed.
Marie opened her eyes and said, ‘I’ve just thought of a name, we’re going to call her Saxby. I don’t know what her other name will be, but her first name will definitely be Saxby.’
‘But it’s English,’ I said, surprised.
‘Ja, and that’s nice too,’ she said softly. ‘Goodbye, Tom, we’ll see you in the holidays.’
Mevrou Van Heerden came out of the bedroom with me, and I thanked her for everything. The first one-legged ice-cream, and the red and pineapple suckers, and Marie taking me to Doctor Van Heerden, and everything that happened to me that was kind ever since.
‘Tom, we love you, you know? We want you to come and stay with us during the school holidays. This will be your home. Doctor Van Heerden has written to Pretoria to get the papers to release you from The Boys Farm.’ She gave me a kiss and a big hug and she said that under the circumstances, she didn’t think she could come to the train. ‘Tom, I’d like to stay here with Marie, do you think you can make your own way back to The Boys Farm?’
‘Ja, of course,’ I said. ‘Thank you for everything you and the doctor have done for me. I’ll just go out and say goodbye to Tinker.’ I wish I could have found all the words I needed to thank her, but all of a sudden I couldn’t find the right ones because of the lump in my throat.
But now the hard part. I took Tinker to her chicken-wired-in yard and held her to my chest and kissed her, and I couldn’t help it, I started to cry again. I put her down and closed the wire gate, and didn’t look back and ran away as fast as I could down the road. I only managed to stop blubbing when I got to the gate of The Boys Farm, where I didn’t get any supper and got the last sjambokking of my orphanage career. Six of the best and I didn’t feel even one of them.
This is what happened. Gawie, being the big hero, was taken to the railway station with Meneer and Mevrou Prinsloo in the Plymouth, which was polished to within an inch of its life. Oh yes, I forgot to say Gawie had a brand-new trunk with all his clothes, also brand-new and bought in a proper shop paid for out of the Meet the Genius money. People were very happy, because it showed you could help others less fortunate and be a proud community as well. Here’s the funny part, remember how the Dominee said if anyone in the congregation knitted, that Gawie needed grey socks? The Dominee forgot to say how many socks. In the next three weeks Gawie got forty pairs. Forty pairs of socks every colour grey you could find in a storm cloud! So Gawie took six pairs that matched and the rest were given to the kids at The Boys Farm. There was one pair left over at the end too small for anyone, and Mevrou called me in. ‘Here, Voetsek, you can have these,’ she said.
I didn’t even try them on for size. ‘Thank you, Mevrou, but I have six pairs already,’ I told her. I was very happy to be
able to refuse the socks, they were the wrong colour grey from my other ones anyway. To tell you the truth, what I was really thinking was, ‘You can stick those grey socks up your fat bum!’
Doctor Van Heerden had given me his own leather suitcase, the one he’d used when he’d gone to the university in Stellenbosh to study medicine. On the outside lid it had ‘A. van H.’ embossed on the leather, the letters were once in gold but now the gold had worn off. All my stuff fitted into the suitcase nicely, I can tell you, when you saw it all packed: white shirts, and grey pants, and socks, and a new toothbrush and toothpaste, and a dish that had a lid that contained a cake of Lifebuoy soap. And, of course, my Meneer Van Niekerk Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and the red book, which I had completely memorised, all 783 pages. All my things together in the one place in that suitcase were something else to see.
There was one other thing I haven’t told you about. Just before he was murdered and lost his face, Mattress had plaited a leather collar out of cowhide for Tinker. He’d scraped off all the hair and chewed the thin thongs until they were very supple, then he’d plaited them together. ‘Ahee, Kleinbaas, it should be made from the hide of a lioness for such a mighty dog!’ he’d said, but it was still beautiful and Tinker looked very good with it on. Then just before I left for boarding school, Sergeant Van Niekerk brought this new dog collar with a brass tag on it that said ‘Tinker – If lost, Tel. 00’, which was the telephone number of the police station. I couldn’t say that I wanted Tinker to keep the Mattress collar on, because having a tag on the collar was a very good idea. So I kept the beautiful Mattress-plaited collar. When I was packing my suitcase I tried it around my wrist. It turned out to be a bit big but it didn’t fall off over my hand, and if you pushed it up your arm a bit it remained tight. Now that I was wearing long sleeves on my white shirts nobody would know it was there. Now I had a bit of Tinker with me all the time wherever I went.
As I mentioned before, the boys who sang in the church choir were also coming to the railway station in The Boys Farm lorry driven by Koos van de Merwe, with Mevrou sitting in the front next to him. There we were on the big Afrikaner Genius farewell night, me in my new uniform and them in clean khaki shirts and pants. It was only a Wednesday, so it just goes to show how much more important the occasion was than a wedding. The choirboys didn’t tease me too much because of the funny badge on my blazer pocket.
‘What’s that funny pointy cap and the two crossed walking sticks mean, Voetsek?’ one of them asked, and they all laughed. But they weren’t really mocking me because I think they were a bit jack of all the attention the Afrikaner Genius had been getting.
One of the boys, Willem Kriegler, who was fifteen but his voice still hadn’t broken so he was still in the choir, said, ‘You know, Voetsek, if you weren’t a Rooinek maybe you’d be even cleverer than the Third Class Rooster.’
Everyone laughed and nodded their heads. Afrikaner Genius was the name the Dominee gave Gawie and Meneer Prinsloo was using it all the time, so The Boys Farm kids definitely wouldn’t use it. Like I said before, it’s not a good idea to be seen as a super-clever person in such company. It wasn’t really Gawie’s fault because he wasn’t boastful or anything, it was just that he was trapped between the Dominee and Meneer Prinsloo, and couldn’t escape all the new attention he was getting all of a sudden.
When we got to the station there were a lot of people there, more even than would fit in the church on Sunday. It looked as though the whole town had come to see Gawie leave. Two big timber trucks with those long trays at the back were pulled up right on the platform next to the waiting train, and on one was a boere musiek band with violins, banjos, concertinas, guitars, piano accordions and even a small portable organ. On the other truck there were chairs on the end of the tray facing the train for the high-ups to sit, and behind these chairs was where the church choir stood. The trucks were decorated with crinkle paper in the four colours of the vierkleur. On the high-ups truck were Gawie and Meneer Prinsloo and the Dominee and Doctor Dyke and some of the church elders and the stationmaster and someone I hadn’t ever seen before, it turned out he was the district court magistrate.
Mevrou told the choirboys to climb up and join the rest of the church choir on the back of the high-ups truck and then turned to me. ‘Take your suitcase and that stupid quilt and get in the train, your compartment is number four, you hear?’
‘Ja, dankie, Mevrou, totsiens,’ I said, offering her my hand as I thanked her and wished her goodbye.
She didn’t accept my hand, and clucked her tongue. ‘Tsk! Maak gou! Nobody wants to see you around here, Voetsek.’
Koos van de Merwe, The Boys Farm lorry driver, went to pick up my suitcase and the quilt.
‘Leave it!’ Mevrou said. ‘The Rooinek is big enough to do it himself!’
‘There’s a big crowd and it bulky, and he’s only a small guy,’ Koos protested.
‘No, leave it! Let him carry it, you hear, the little kaffirboetie must learn he can’t have people running around after him all the time. He thinks he can get away with everything!’
So I lugged my suitcase and Miss Phillips’ quilt through the crowd on the platform. It was a pretty heavy and bulky combination and I had to keep saying, ‘Excuse me, Meneer,’ and ‘Excuse me Mevrou,’ to people who were standing on the platform, who I was bumping into because I couldn’t help it. Finally I managed to get both items up the steps and onto the train, by which time I was puffing and panting, and my arms were practically pulled out of their sockets. It was a hot summer night and in my new blazer and tie I was sweating like billyo when I finally got into the compartment. From then on things were good because sitting alone in that compartment, looking through the open window, I reckon I had the best view of the grand proceedings that were about to commence. Gawie’s trunk was already in the compartment, so I knew we were travelling together.
It had been a long day that had started at dawn, and with all my secret blubbing and saying goodbye to Tinker, and then Marie having her baby, and having to run all the way back to The Boys Farm, I was pretty exhausted. I was glad I was alone watching through the train window. I was a bit hungry though, missing supper and because it had only been a cold polony lunch, these thin, round, pink slices of meat you cut from this huge sausage that’s got white blobs of fat in it. Polony is very nice but the thin slices were not enough with only beetroot and tomato and lettuce and a cold potato. You don’t get full-up in a hurry on that kind of food. But I couldn’t ask for more because Marie and her mum were talking about the baby coming, maybe in the next day or two, and what a pity I wouldn’t be there, and they clean forgot to ask if I was still hungry, which I was. Anyway, the jelly and banana custard after was truly excellent.
All of a sudden the music started. Let me assure you, there’s nothing better than boere musiek. The band played all the old tunes and people began to sing and boeremense know how to sing a good song, believe you me, they got voices like an angels’ choir. People had bottles of Lion lager beer and half-jacks of brandy and there was true merriness all around the place. The choir sang two hymns, ‘Abide with me’ and ‘Jerusalem’, both in Afrikaans, of course.
After the hymns the Dominee stood up and started to talk. ‘Dames en Here, we are all gathered here on a very auspicious occasion.’ He paused and looked down at the assembled crowd. ‘Now, some of you may think it’s only a young boy going to school in Pretoria and that this is not such a big occasion to celebrate. But you be wrong! What we are doing here is looking into the face of the future. In this boy, Gawie Grobler, we are seeing our Afrikaner destiny —’
I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you about the Dominee’s speech, or any of the other speeches that may have followed, because I was already fast asleep. Then something must have woken me, and what it was was a disturbance in the crowd. You know how you’re asleep and there’s sounds you can’t hear happening in the world that’s awake, and then they change suddenly and you’re wide awake because of these new
noises going on?
I looked out of the train carriage window, and there’s Doctor Van Heerden followed by Sergeant Van Niekerk climbing up the ladder onto the back of the high-ups and choir lorry. The Dominee is no longer speaking, and now it’s Meneer Prinsloo, who’s standing up with his stomach practically falling over the back of the lorry. If it plopped onto somebody’s head below it would definitely kill them, good thing the braces were strong. He must have been addressing the crowd. He’s probably been talking about being the Government father of Gawie and how he is a loving father to us all. How he spotted Gawie early on and single-handedly he’s made him into an Afrikaner genius. But now he’s silent and surprised as he looks at the two men climbing up towards him. The crowd is also silent, waiting to see what will happen next because both the doctor and the sergeant have a lot of respect in this town.
You can see the crowd thinks, with the doctor and the policeman suddenly making an appearance, something bad or serious has happened. This is confirmed when Doctor Van Heerden puts up his hands for silence, which is already there. ‘Dames en Here, Sergeant Van Niekerk and myself have come here tonight to try to make right a serious wrong.’ He paused and looked down at the silent crowd. ‘Let me first offer my sincere congratulations to this young man, Gawie Grobler from The Boys Farm.’ He turned to Gawie. ‘You have done well, son, and we are all rightly proud of you.’
Sergeant Van Niekerk is by now standing beside Doctor Van Heerden, and Meneer Prinsloo doesn’t know what to do and looks at the Dominee, who points to his chair, showing that he must sit down. So Meneer Prinsloo sits down, but you can see he is not one bit happy.
Doctor Van Heerden doesn’t even appear to see Meneer Prinsloo. ‘We Afrikaners are a proud people and a stubborn people and some may even say a narrow-minded people, but they mistake this for a single-minded people, a people with a purpose.’ This gets a clap from the crowd. ‘But one thing you can never say about an Afrikaner is that we are an ungenerous people.’ This gets a big clap. Doctor Van Heerden holds up his hand again. ‘In this town, at The Boys Farm is another orphan and I want to tell you about him. Recently he sat for an examination for a scholarship to a school in Johannesburg. A very famous school, believe me. Two thousand four hundred students sat for this scholarship, it is the biggest and perhaps the most prestigious school in the land. With an astonishing average mark of 95 per cent this boy, who is only eleven years old, won one of the three scholarships available. This makes him capable of achieving anything he wants in life, simply because it makes him one of the most gifted and brilliant young men in South Africa! But because his name is Tom Fitzsaxby and not a good Afrikaner name like Van Heerden, Van Niekerk, Prinsloo, Van Schalkwyk or Grobler, this community, as well as those people responsible for running The Boys Farm, have completely ostracised him.’ Doctor Van Heerden stopped and looked around at the people below, and then turned around and looked at all the high-ups sitting behind him. Then he said, ‘I have served this town and this farming community for twenty years, and you have all been kind and generous to me, more so than I know I deserve. But tonight I am ashamed of us. Ashamed of my own volk. This bitterness towards a young orphan’s name is a truly shameful thing and not worthy of the Afrikaner people.’
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