Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  Now an entirely different set of circumstances again required me to be different. I lacked the means or the background to be the same as everyone else, so I had to decide whether I would revert to the nobody-at-the-back version, or to hide at the front where I would simply attempt to be better at everything than anyone else. Doing this up-front way would never cause anyone to think to ask about my past, my successful present would be sufficient evidence of a normal background, and the lack of detail about my past would hopefully be seen as a sign of modesty.

  So this is the path I chose at the Bishop’s College. I had a head start by winning the scholarship and by being the youngest boy in the school. This translated into me being thought of as brilliant. The two other scholarship winners, Nathan Feinstein and Julian Solomon, matched me in intellect, and often enough surpassed me, but it was always pointed out that I was two years younger than them. I was also in for another big shock. Jewish noses were exactly the same as everyone else’s and they wore their hair short, and both Nathan and Julian said their fathers didn’t have curly black hair and beards; one was bald and the other one was sort of mousey brown. When I asked them how many solid-gold teeth their fathers had, they both looked at me in a bemused way, and replied, ‘None.’ Of course, I couldn’t ask them about diamonds. I mean, after you’d already asked about the solid-gold teeth you couldn’t just come out and say, ‘Oh yeah, and how many diamonds does your father have stuck up his bum?’ But I realised that was probably also untrue, and there’d never been any such thing happen to Jewish mouths or bums.

  Throughout the school, the Jewish pupils in general and the scholarship guys in particular tended to be the very brightest academically. I became the token gentile brain. This gave me a special status among the mainly gentile boys at the school. It also meant that I had almost earned the right to be a loner, as someone thought to have a superior mind doesn’t have to make excuses for himself or even behave the same as everyone else. I’d also become fairly quick with a quip, which was another way of keeping people at arm’s length. So having brains and a sharp tongue that usually brought laughter proved an excellent means of camouflage, a way of hiding myself in front where nobody could see who I really was.

  As time went by I joined the debating society and chess club and represented Transvaal schools in both. While I was small, I proved to be wiry and agile and I was toughened by my previous life at The Boys Farm. I became a successful, if not exceptional, rugby scrum-half and cricket wicket-keeper/ batsman. Eventually I made it into the first team for both sports, and in my final year became a prefect, earning my school colours in rugby and chess, a combination that once again confirmed my loner status and largely did the speaking for me. I’m not telling you all this stuff in order to brag, but simply to get the information about the formal part of my schooling at the Bishop’s College out of the way. There was another aspect of my life when I was growing into adulthood in the big city that you could be more interested in hearing about.So now back to the beginning. Gawie and me arrived in Pretoria early the next morning and I helped him drag his shiny new trunk off the train. We’d slept pretty well in the top bunks on either side of the compartment we’d gotten into when we changed trains at Louis Trichardt. Two old men had been in the compartment when we joined the train, and they both wanted the bottom bunks so we got lucky and got the top ones. The conductor rattled on the compartment door at five o’clock the next morning and shouted, ‘Pretoria one hour! Dining car open for breakfast!’

  The two old men, Meneer Uys and Meneer Viljoen, asked us if we were going to breakfast and Gawie said yes he was and showed them a railway breakfast voucher. We’d already discussed this the night before and Gawie said he’d bring me back a slice of bread if it was allowed, or if nobody was looking. I can tell you one thing for sure, I was starving hungry.

  Meneer Viljoen said, ‘A boy is always hungry in the morning, come along, son.’

  ‘I don’t have a voucher, Meneer,’ I replied.

  ‘Who said you need one, hey? Isn’t my money good enough to buy a hungry boy some breakfast?’

  I don’t know how he knew how hungry I was, but that was a breakfast and a half. One of the best you could hope for – bacon and eggs and as much toast as you liked and a whole big silver pot of coffee on the table and you could take as much sugar as you liked. We all sat together and it turned out that Meneer Viljoen was a stock inspector looking for foot-and-mouth disease in cattle, and Meneer Uys trained people how to do morse code on railway stations. They both got off at Pretoria, and both shook my hand, wishing me and Gawie luck at our new schools.

  ‘A good education is a precious thing, Tom, you don’t want to grow up to be a stock inspector,’ Meneer Viljoen laughed.

  ‘Thank you for breakfast, Meneer, I will try to do my best.’

  ‘Ja,’ he said. ‘After the war, we going to need clever young people like you and your friend to build South Africa.’

  ‘And maybe get a Nationalist government for the volk and get rid of that imposter Jan Smuts,’ Meneer Uys called out.

  The train pulled out of Pretoria and soon enough the land outside the compartment window was flat and not very interesting with here a tree and there another, and when you passed a farm it had a windmill and grew only mielies. Then we passed huge expanses of tin shanties, single-room houses made of this and that; bits of corrugated iron, hessian sacking, box wood, canvas and old paraffin tins beaten flat that had gone rusty. Dirt roads with oily puddles wandered through these makeshift shelters and black people, especially little kids, were everywhere you looked. It was the biggest kaffir location you could possibly imagine. But then these huge hills of white sand called mine dumps started coming up and I knew from my discussions with Gawie this must be the region of Witwatersrand and that Johannesburg would soon be next.

  When it did, I couldn’t believe my own eyes! You’d never seen building like this in your whole life. They just went up and up and up forever, and how a person would be expected to climb to the top I couldn’t say because they’d be exhausted long before they got there, and what about old people? Of course, up to that time, I’d never seen or heard about an electric lift that was a little room that went up and down tall buildings, and even had its own driver in a smart uniform and cap.

  The train pulled into Johannesburg Central Station. People, hundreds of people, milling around and shouting, happy, welcoming faces everywhere, arms waving, whistles blowing and black porters expertly navigating trolleys on the crowded platform. I couldn’t imagine how I could possibly find Miss Phillips, what if she got the wrong day, what would I do? I suddenly panicked, nobody had told me how big the station was, and the whole city was a place where I didn’t know a single person, except for her.

  I waited until everyone had left the carriage because with my Doctor Van Heerden suitcase in one hand and the quilt in the other, I filled up the whole corridor. When I got onto the platform the crowds were already starting to thin out, people’s backs walking away with porters carrying suitcases. Still no Miss Phillips. If she’d got the wrong day could a person sleep on a railway station? How lucky that I’d had eggs and bacon and four pieces of toast for breakfast because I could now definitely last until tomorrow. If I ever met Meneer Viljoen again, I’d tell him how he’d saved my life. I sat on my suitcase thinking about the pickle I was in when Miss Phillips’ voice said quite casually, ‘Oh, there you are, Tom.’ She’d come from behind, and the next thing she said was, ‘And the first thing we’re going to do is to let you grow your hair!’ Then she ran her gloved hand over my shaved head and gave me a truly super big hug. She smelled of roses.

  Boy, was she pleased with the quilt! You’ve never seen anybody so happy about something. I explained to her about the ten shillings and how it had escaped the big fire, but I didn’t tell her about Gawie’s bum hiding hole when it was still a pound and its other adventures on the way to turning into a quilt. She started to cry and said it was the best present she’d ever received and
she gave me another big hug and I wasn’t wrong, she definitely smelled of roses and, as far as I knew, she was still a Miss Phillips, maybe there was another shotgun wedding coming up?

  ‘It’s still early, Tom, and we have to go to John Orr’s to get you some underpants, then I’ll take you to the art gallery, and after that we’ll have lunch. We’ll store your suitcase in a locker here at the station and get it this afternoon, you have to be at the School House at three o’clock.’

  ‘Underpants?’ The last time underpants had come up for discussion was with Gawie, who said he’d seen them advertised on a shit square, and they were called Jockeys and were only worn by men who rode racing horses. ‘Are we supposed to ride horses at school, Miss?’

  ‘Horses? Why, of course not, Tom. What on earth gave you such a strange idea?’

  ‘Gawie says they’re called Jockeys and so must only be worn by people who ride racing horses.’

  Miss Phillips laughed and explained that this was only the name of a brand of underpants. I didn’t want to ask any further questions because I didn’t understand why I had to wear them in the first place. It would be like boys wearing bloomers, and why would you do a thing like that? Thank goodness no-one at The Boys Farm would see me. ‘There goes Voetsek the Rooinek who wears girls bloomers!’ Talk about shame. ‘Is it compulsory?’ I asked.

  ‘You need them when you go to high school because, you see, that’s when young boys reach puberty and your body will start to change,’ Miss Phillips explained. But it wasn’t much of an explanation and I made a note to check puberty in my dictionary when I got my suitcase back. There had already been some talk of body changes at The Boys Farm when Meneer Prinsloo did his lecture about masturbation. Mevrou and old Mevrou Pienaar had to leave the dining room, and then about twice a year we’d get the body-changing talk that led to masturbation, which was known as ‘slogging’. With Miss Phillips talking about body changes I thought it must have something to do with slogging because, according to Meneer Prinsloo, that happened when a boy was about thirteen. It was also forbidden, and if you got caught you got six of the best from Meneer Prinsloo with the long cane. It was supposed to be against God’s will and if you did it too much you would go blind, but everyone said that was bullshit because lots of the older kids did it a lot and they hadn’t gone blind and nobody knew of anyone who ever had. Before Gawie became a surrogaat and couldn’t afford to be my friend and after one of Meneer Prinsloo’s ‘boys only’ lectures we’d once discussed masturbation.

  ‘You’re nearly thirteen, has it happened to you yet?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Ja, I’m trying it on,’ he giggled.

  ‘But it’s supposed to be a sin against God?’

  ‘That’s only if you do it a lot, man.’

  ‘How much is a lot?’

  ‘Hundreds of times! Every now and again is okay.’

  I don’t know how all of a sudden Gawie became such an expert on God’s opinion on masturbation, but he did point out that the Dominee had never brought it up in church and we only had Meneer Prinsloo’s word for it.

  ‘It’s going on all over the place, and if God was angry the Dominee would have said so,’ he assured me.

  So I tried it when Gawie showed me how it was done, but I couldn’t make it happen yet because I was only eleven.

  I wondered if I should tell Miss Phillips that it was still too early for underpants and she mustn’t waste her money, but then again, she might ask me why, then how would I answer her question? I couldn’t say, ‘Because I can’t masturbate yet, Miss.’ But answer me this, if it sent you blind or was a sin against God, were underpants some sort of protection against blindness or becoming a sinner?

  So we got these six pairs of underpants and Miss Phillips said I should wear one pair, and after a while you got used to them and they were quite comfortable. There was this hole in them like a fly in your pants but without buttons, and you didn’t have to take them off like a girl’s bloomers when you had to take a piss, quite convenient really.

  Then it was on to the art gallery that was in a big park with ponds and ducks and trees, with benches for people to sit on, but only if you were a white person, and lots of lawn and flowers, and black nannies sitting together on the grass laughing and talking, and one taking charge of looking after lots of little white kids running around.

  Now, of course, I’d seen pictures before but I don’t think they were paintings. Some were on the classroom walls at school, and at Doctor Van Heerden’s house I think two were real paintings because if you looked closely you could see brush marks. There was also a picture of a wagon being pulled by oxen over a mountain in the Great Trek in the dining room at The Boys Farm, but it didn’t have brush marks, and then, of course, there were pictures in books, but nothing like the art gallery. Here was picture after picture, and proper paintings called oils, some were almost as big as a whole wall of a room. Miss Phillips said some of the paintings were worth thousands of pounds, and you could easily see why, they had frames painted gold and were very elaborate. Never mind the paintings, if you just owned the frames you’d have to be very rich. But after a while you couldn’t look any more because there were so many, but you could see people painted just about everything that happens in life, and even something called still life, which is mostly bunches of flowers or pieces of fruit. There were even painting of ladies with no clothes on that you were allowed to look at, and see parts you’d never seen before with just a piece of wispy-looking cloth covering their you-know-what, but nothing to cover the top. Miss Phillips must have seen me go red in the face and back away when all of a sudden we came around a corner and there’s this big painting of a lady lying on a bed. She’s got no clothes on and everything’s showing, and the wispy covering you could almost see through and it took no imagination. But you had to wonder how a whole baby could come out of there. Miss Phillips said, ‘It’s proper art, Tom, you’re supposed to look at it, the human form is a feast for the eyes.’ All I can say is that she was very lucky the Dominee wasn’t there. But also, if this was proper art then there had to be something that wasn’t proper, and I wondered what it might be.

  So after the art gallery we had to have lunch. ‘What would you like to have for lunch, Tom?’ Miss Phillips asked.

  First underpants, and now a question I’d never been asked before in my whole life, we’d only been in Johannesburg a few hours and already life was getting very complicated. I only knew two things you could eat at a place where you had to pay and that was a mixed grill and ice-cream on one leg. In Duiwelskrans a mixed grill was a very expensive treat to have, and a person couldn’t just come out and say you’d like something like that for a lunch out of the blue when you’d been shopping for underpants.

  Miss Phillips must have seen my hesitation because she said, ‘How about roast chicken? They do a nice roast chicken with chips at a restaurant near here or perhaps you’d like a curry?’

  Remember how I was supposed to go to Doctor Van Heerden’s for Christmas and Mevrou said I couldn’t because Marie’s wedding took up three months’ worth of Government Permission Monthly Outings? Well, that was the time I was supposed to taste roast chicken because Marie said the boere always gave the good doctor several nice roasting chickens for Christmas lunch. She said that was why he had all the chickens in his backyard, because he got so many he couldn’t eat them all and kept the rest for laying eggs. So now, at long last, I was going to taste my first roast chicken. As for having a curry instead, that’s a funny thing I forgot to tell you, the Impala Café was still doing mixed grills under the direction of Mr Patel’s son and daughter-in-law, but the Sunday lunch boere were taking to curry like nobody’s business. But I had to choose the chicken because I hadn’t waited all my life to taste curry.

  All I can say is that it was simply delicious, just as good as people said it was, and it wasn’t even Christmas time. Did you know that a chicken has two sorts of meat, brown and white, and the brown is definitely the best tasting?


  But at lunch Miss Phillips dropped her bombshell and, of course, it was about her smelling of roses.

  ‘Tom, I have some news,’ she began. ‘I’m getting engaged to be married.’

  ‘Are you going to have a baby?’ I asked.

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ she exclaimed, adding in a softer voice, ‘Well, not right away.’

  Ha! She didn’t even know herself. I had learned somewhere that what you said at a time like this was ‘Congratulations, and who is the lucky man?’ Although I don’t know where I would have learned this saying, because with both weddings I’d attended I already knew who the lucky man was. But I didn’t with Miss Phillips, so that’s what I said to her.

  ‘Thank you, Tom, he’s a colonel in the army and on the General Staff, but before the war he was in the Foreign Service. If we win the war, he’ll be returning to his old job and I expect we’ll have to live in Pretoria and if he gets a posting overseas, who knows.’ She reached out and touched my hand. ‘Tom, wherever I am or we are, you’ll always be in my life.’ Then she smiled and brought her other hand across the table so both her hands rested on mine. ‘I make you this promise, I will never ever part with my beautiful quilt and it will be on my wedding bed and will remain there until the day I die.’ Her nails were painted bright red and were longer than they’d been before, and a person sort of knew she was saying goodbye even if, like her shotgun wedding to come, she didn’t know it herself. My life was becoming full of goodbyes and I felt truly sad that I would lose Miss Phillips once the war was over. I don’t know how you can tell a person that not only are you grateful for what they’ve done, but you also love them. It was something I’d never had the opportunity to practise, and so I hoped that when the time finally came to say a real goodbye to her I’d be able to find the right words.