Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

‘You stay with her, Tom. You may put her on your lap. Here, let me help you,’ Doctor Van Heerden said gently. He sat me on the floor, making sure my back was against the wall, and put the cushion with Tinker on it and the drip still in her onto my lap. ‘I’ll call by later,’ he said.

  So I sat there and talked to Tinker. I told her how I’d found her floating in the stream in the wet sack, the smallest but still alive because she was the bravest from the very beginning. I said how I’d squeezed the water out of her and dried her in the sun. Then we talked about Mattress and the big black-and-white sow and Mattress’s platform feet. How he always said she was a lioness, and how she’d lived in a paraffin tin under the big rock and had grown up to be the world champion ratter. I told her about all the other times we’d talked at the big rock, and what had happened to her with Fonnie du Preez and Pissy that time they tried to choke her. Then about the big fire, and even the time she got to taste chicken, the carcass and bones of Piet Retief, even before anyone at The Boys Farm themselves knew how chicken tasted. I reminded her of the story of the Easter bonnet feathers she’d helped me to get for Miss Phillips, and the pound up Gawie’s bum and the great day of our visit to the waterfall in the high mountains. And then, because it had been a long day and I hadn’t meant to do it on purpose, I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up it was dawn and a rooster was crowing in the backyard, and both my hands were resting on Tinker, and she was dead. Her heart had been too badly broken to be able to mend.

  BOOK

  TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Love Thine Enemy

  IT SEEMS TO ME that a child’s past can be one of two things: a generally pleasant experience roughly summed up as childhood; or a graveyard of past happenings, the fatal emotional accidents that occur in the process of growing up without love. Too many emotional tombstones existed for me in Duiwelskrans, and the road to this cemetery of the psyche was paved with loneliness stones. Not only the murder of Mattress and the death of Tinker, but also the days, months and years of accumulated unhappiness. Mevrou’s acerbic voice constantly undermining my fragile confidence. Waking up to a thousand mornings of half-jack misery, and with it the greedy presence of the air-scything sjambok. Meneer Prinsloo’s windmilling arms grinding out self-righteousness, hypocrisy, hurtfulness and constant God-bothering. The incident at the big rock where Fonnie du Preez and Pissy Vermaak were involved. The prevailing presence of the Dominee’s vitriolic hatred of my kind that seemed contained in the air I breathed. The book-burning inspired by his fist-thumping-pulpit and right-wing dogma. Doctor Dyke’s disregard for our pain and the sense of worthlessness his horse pliers provoked in us as he mutilated our laughter. The endless humiliations of Rooinek and Voetsek and the constant need to lie in order to survive. Once my soul had escaped this umbrageous mountain town it couldn’t ever return.

  Anyway, enough of that. I’d been a general alert on the wireless and now all the papers wanted the story of the boy and his dog. It was even printed in Die Vaderland, so maybe one of the kids at The Boys Farm would be about to wipe his bum and there we’d be, Tinker and me, being famous on a shit square.

  Sergeant Van Niekerk took me up the high mountains to the waterfall, where we buried Tinker under the giant tree. The picnic had only been one day in her life but it was the best one. At first I thought about burying her under the big rock, but that held too many sad memories. If Tinker couldn’t go to heaven then she shouldn’t be buried among the whitethorn with the sad memories, or near people that were not always nice. The waterfall, white and clean and eternal, was as good a place as heaven could possibly be. If she wanted to bark, then the kloofs and kranses, the deep valleys, canyons and high buttresses, would carry the echo for miles and miles, and the herd boys would swear among themselves that it was the roar of the lioness Mattress always claimed her to be.

  Anyway, when it all came out in the papers, Miss Phillips, who had a bit of Auntie in her when it came to persuading people, went to see the headmaster. He ummed and ahhhed a bit, but with a letter added from Meneer Van Niekerk, he eventually agreed I could come back. So that’s how I got my first bit of education.

  The war came to an end in early May and Miss Phillips married her colonel and became Mrs Hammond. He was once again a nobody, but quite a high-up nobody because he was in the diplomatic service. He was an official in a consulate and they sent him to Australia, to the capital Canberra, a city designed by a man called Burley Griffin that goes around in circles. So I couldn’t see her any more, and it was back to writing letters to a person I would always truly love.

  Before I leave school and go to university, there’s something I have to tell you about. It’s the school holidays. Because I had no money and things wear out, like shirts and shoes and other bits and pieces, such as, believe it or not, underpants, or when I had to get into long trousers or save up for a new blazer, the school holidays were the time I had to find a job to pay for them.

  Now just after the war it wasn’t easy to get a job with all the soldiers returning and needing work. When you’re only thirteen years old it was even harder to get temporary employment. When the first school holiday came along, Doctor Van Heerden applied successfully to the Government for me to stay with them rather than to return to The Boys Farm and he sent me my rail fare to return to Duiwelskrans. I have to say they couldn’t have been nicer to me, and Marie and Sergeant Van Niekerk and his headmaster brother Meneer Van Niekerk as well. They were the salt of the earth and the pillars of my limited wisdom and I will always love them. I returned three times during my twelfth year because that was when I had no real necessities. So, apart from having no money I was able to survive the first year at the Bishop’s College.

  I knew these good people would look after me, but I just couldn’t go back to Duiwelskrans. Each of the holidays spent in that high mountain town alienated me further and, besides, I had always depended on others, and it was time I took care of myself. Sergeant Van Niekerk and Marie, Doctor and Mevrou Van Heerden and the headmaster and his wife would remain my friends for life and I wrote to them regularly thereafter, but I was almost thirteen and practically grown up. If I was going to make it on my own in life then the sooner I found work and a place to stay during the school holidays, the better.

  I found my first job in the ‘situations vacant’ column of The Rand Daily Mail. It was for the Born-again Christian Missionary Society situated upstairs in a smelly and untidy arcade off Pritchard Street, Johannesburg. It was a place where unsmiling European migrants with thick accents and a babble of various languages began their precarious and fearful middle-aged lives all over again. A small, crooked concrete burrow jammed between the smooth-walled skyscrapers where optimism had long since been abandoned and hope was a dirty word.

  The office of the Born-again Christian Missionary Society was, by the standards of its neighbours, a shining example of business virtue, an oasis of light in a disconsolate semi-dark desert of forsaken dreams. It was contained in three offices on the first floor, each lit with two central strips of neon that extended the width of the ceiling to produce an incandescent light almost blinding to the eye. The centre room, leading from the rickety balcony and stairs, contained a Christian bookshop with the injunction above the door, ‘Come in and browse for Christ’ and directly below it in smaller letters, ‘Prop. Pastor Jellicoe Smellie’.

  From either side of the interior of the bookshop a door led into two small offices. The office on the left, untidy and impossibly cluttered, contained two desks, each serviced by a stiff bentwood kitchen chair. The second office was the home of a small offset printing press set amid an equally untidy landscape of paper stacked on the floor and shelves filled with printing clutter. When the printing press was in operation it emitted a mixture of clanking, humming, hissing and slapping sounds. To anyone passing through the arcade below, it was as if this cacophony was responsible for manufacturing the sharp blue neon light pumping into the general gloom below.

  The tiny advertis
ment in the ‘situations vacant’ column read: ‘Energetic b.a. Christian required, must have excellent handwriting, apply personally, 9 a.m to 6 p.m., no age limit.’ This was followed by the address in the city. With my Boys Farm and Dominee background, my passing for a born-again Christian was a cinch. While I expected the ‘no age limit’ meant they might accept an elderly person, I convinced myself that this also extended to the young, providing that I could prove myself a sufficiently worthy candidate.

  Moreover, I knew myself to have a terrific hand, as this was one of the very few qualities about me that was constantly admired. The education dished out at the Duiwelskrans school was a fairly hit-or-miss affair, but the highest standards of handwriting were rigidly inculcated. I guess the reasoning behind this was that a domkop with seriously immaculate handwriting would not as easily give away his innate stupidity. In the handwriting department I’d have to be an outstanding candidate for the job, and besides, I had boundless energy.

  Fake the born-again Christian, demonstrate the handwriting and evidence the energy, and all I possibly had against me was my age. I arrived at the Born-again Christian Missionary Society believing I was in with half a chance

  Pastor Jellicoe Smellie appeared to be quite old, perhaps sixty. He was tall, bald and dried out. His skin was the colour of parchment, with the exception being his nose – it was sharp and heavily veined. His pale grey eyes were slightly rheumy, pink-edged like those of a white rabbit, and he wore rimless spectacles, two squares of heavy glass on either side of his purple nose. He had Albert Einstein hair and was dressed in a once-white linen suit that was badly ink-stained, and it hung untidily from his six-foot-something frame. This general sense of untidiness was refuted by his highly polished black boots, with the toe-cap of the right boot removed. He wore brown cotton socks from which the toe of his right foot protruded at a right angle from the sock to point directly at the shiny left boot. This was because either it had broken through the restraints of the cotton, or a deliberate hole had been created for it to emerge. This misplaced big toe had the peculiar effect of throwing him slightly off-balance so that he leaned permanently to the right, a bit like the Tower of Pisa.

  ‘Yes, what do you want, boy?’ he asked, and because of the angle of his body, the one pale grey eye looking down at me through the square prisms looked larger and more pinkrimmed than the other.

  ‘I’ve come about the situation vacant, Sir. The one in The Rand Daily Mail,’ I said, holding out the postage-stamp-sized piece of newsprint I’d cut from the paper.

  ‘Oh no, definitely not, far too young, far too young, definitely not, definitely not!’

  ‘Can I show you my handwriting, Sir?’

  ‘No, no, definitely not, definitely not! Simply atrocious, your generation, atrocious, atrocious!’

  I had prepared a page from an exercise book with a carefully crafted copy of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. If I say so myself, it looked very good, every swirl identical, all the i’s and the t’s carefully dotted and crossed, and the angle of the copperplate script leaning at about the same angle as Jellicoe Smellie was. I reached into my shirt pocket and handed the folded page to him. ‘Can you take a look please, Sir?’ I persisted.

  He snatched the folded paper from my grasp just as a customer walked in, and Pastor Jellicoe Smellie left me and walked over to the customer with a decided limp. I had no idea a toe taking a left-hand turn could so affect a person’s walk. ‘Praise the Lord, can I help you, my sister in Christ?’ he asked the customer.

  The customer, a woman about the age of Miss Phillips, took one look at the tall, leaning man with the fly-away steel-grey hair, pink eyes and purple nose, and turned and fled without a word, her footsteps echoing down the rickety stairs to the level of the arcade.

  ‘Hmmph! Definitely not, definitely not a born-again Christian. Hallelujah, praise His precious name,’ Jellicoe Smellie said, as if talking to himself. He turned to pass through to the little office leading from the book room. ‘What are you doing here, boy?’ he said, surprised to see me still there.

  I pointed to the folded piece of paper in his hand. ‘You have my piece of paper, Sir. You haven’t looked at it.’

  He looked down as if surprised to find he was still holding the folded page. ‘Umph! Definitely not, definitely not,’ he said, opening it, and then he looked surprised, his rheumy pink-rimmed eyes widening. ‘Can you do fifty an hour?’

  ‘Fifty . . . an hour?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Are you deaf, boy? I said fifty an hour – envelopes, addresses – no, I don’t think so, definitely not, definitely not!’ he said, still staring at the poem in his hand.

  I had no idea whether I could address fifty envelopes in an hour but I needed the job badly. ‘I think so, Sir.’

  ‘A born-again Christian? Taken Christ into your life, into your life?’

  ‘Yes, Sir, definitely, definitely!’ His speech mannerism was beginning to affect me.

  ‘Washed in the blood of the lamb?’

  I was on solid ground here. The Dominee had said we needed to be washed in the blood of the lamb, although I’m not so sure he’d intended to include me together with the volk. ‘Oh yes, Sir!’

  ‘Praise the Lord, praise His precious name! Boys’ wages, one pound ten a week, not a penny more, don’t argue, I can’t be persuaded, definitely not, definitely not!’ He glared down at me as if he expected me to object. ‘Own fountain pen?’

  ‘No, Sir.’

  ‘One pound and eight shillings a week, two shillings a week to hire my fountain pen, fountain pen!’

  I did a quick calculation. I needed one shilling and sixpence to eat once a day. Should I find weekly lodgings, say a bed and breakfast for ten shillings, that left seven and sixpence a week I could save. I’d set my target for the month of the school holidays at two pounds saved, and what Jellicoe Smellie was offering me was ten shillings short.

  ‘Sir, I could work during my lunch hour if you don’t charge me for the fountain pen?’ I offered hopefully.

  His pale, papery-looking hand came up and slapped hard against his breast pocket concealing his fountain pen.

  For a moment the impact of his hand on his chest looked as if it might make him teeter out of control and crash to the floor. ‘Definitely not, definitely not! Can’t, can’t! What lunch hour?’ he exclaimed.

  I had nowhere to stay that night and while I’d scoffed-up during the last meal at school and would be okay until the morning, I knew I’d soon be hungry. I’d naively convinced myself I’d get the job and get down to work immediately, and at the end of each day I’d be paid and be able to eat at night. Now this first opportunity to be solvent was about to slip through my fingers. I knew this sanctimonious old bastard was cheating me and there was nothing I could do about it. The loneliness stones began to build up within my breast. It was The Boys Farm all over again. ‘To thine own self be true, Tom’, the words Meneer Van Niekerk had written in the inside cover of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary sprang as if from nowhere into my head.

  ‘Then I can’t take the job, Sir,’ I heard myself saying, and turned to walk to the door just a few steps away, my heart beating like billyo. I knew I must escape quickly as I could feel tears begin to well. I was about to make a fool of myself. The last time I’d wept was for several days when I’d been truly heartbroken and I’d promised myself that the next time I did so it would be for something or someone as important to me as Tinker.

  I had reached the top of the rickety stairs when I heard him shout, ‘Wait, boy! Wait, wait!’ I turned and waited as Jellicoe Smellie, leaning diagonally across the doorframe of the bookshop, ordered, ‘Come back at once, boy! At once, at once!’ I sensed a hint of panic in his voice.

  ‘It’s not boy, Sir! It’s Tom, Tom Fitzsaxby!’ I said somewhat petulantly. It was the first time in my life that I’d contradicted an adult and I could feel my face burning.

  ‘Fitz? Fitz-Saxby, royal bastard,’ he said. �
��Most curious, most curious.’

  I was astonished that he knew I was a bastard, as for the royal I had no idea what he was on about, but I told myself that if he’d already found my weak spot there wasn’t much point in hanging around. So I ran down the stairs, which visibly shook and trembled with each step I took.

  ‘Come back! Come back, come back, can you write tracts? An extra ten shillings a week if you can and a free fountain pen, free fountain pen!’ he shouted down to me from the edge of the balcony.

  I looked up and saw that his large papery-coloured hands now gripped the edge of the wrought-iron balcony but failed to pull him into an upright position. The railing began to sway under his weight, and he appeared as if he was about to hurl himself to his death below. His right-angled big toe, protruding from under the bottom rail, pointed directly at me, wriggling accusingly as if it was telling me his death would be my fault.

  ‘What’s a tract?’ I called up to him.

  ‘Definitely can, definitely can! Come up, come!’ He gestured with his right hand.

  It was by now quite clear that Jellicoe Smellie was completely bonkers. But then, he was no worse than Meneer Prinsloo with his chickens and windmilling arms or Mevrou in praise of shit squares and her lopsided logic or the Dominee with his well-rounded sermons and preposterous dogma. So I returned up the shaky stairs. I thought, however, that I should establish my identity once and for all, though this time avoiding my surname. ‘My name is Tom, Sir,’ I announced as I entered.

  ‘Jellicoe Smellie,’ he said, bowing sideways as if we were starting from scratch.

  I followed him into the small office just as a customer walked in, this time a man. ‘You have a customer, Sir,’ I said to Jellicoe Smellie’s back.

  ‘Definitely not, definitely not! Can’t, can’t!’ He turned around, almost losing his balance, but upon seeing the customer he suddenly cried out, ‘Praise the Lord, can I help you, my dear brother in Christ?’