Whitethorn

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘S’bona,’ I said, approaching him.

  ‘S’bona, Baas,’ he said, returning my greeting.

  ‘Can you show me the house of Baas Fisher, please?’ I asked him in his own language, not knowing the word for ‘office’ in Zulu.

  He pointed further down the corridor, and placing his cleaning rag back into a sudsy bucket, bid me to follow him.

  ‘What is your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Union Jack,’ he replied, then suddenly halting and standing to attention and saluting, he smilingly added in English, ‘King Georgie, he is my king.’

  ‘I am Tom,’ I replied, just as we reached an impressive-looking office somewhat larger than the glass-and-wood panelled ones surrounding it. An unoccupied secretary’s desk stood immediately outside the door. On the door was painted ‘Mr Lewis Fisher. General Manager’.

  ‘The madam, she is not here,’ Union Jack said, again in English, indicating the secretary’s desk.

  ‘Ngiyabonga,’ I said, thanking him for his courtesy, and he seemed surprised when I extended my hand. He took it and I shook his own in the double-grasp commonly used by the African people. Then I knocked on the door and a voice that didn’t sound all that friendly called, ‘Come!’

  I opened the door and entered. Mr Fisher looked up from some paperwork he was doing. ‘Oh, is it three o’clock, already?’ He capped his gold fountain pen and placed it on the glass-topped desk. ‘Tom, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Sir,’ I replied, somewhat nervously. ‘Tom Fitzsaxby, and I have an appointment for the trial trainee music salesman,’ I reminded him, just in case he’d forgotten.

  ‘Ja, of course, please sit, Tom,’ he said in quite a friendly tone, indicating the chair in front of his desk. The office was of a sufficient size to have a separate area with a leather lounge and two matching chairs, a fancy sort of oriental-looking carpet and a coffee-table on which rested a cut-glass vase of yellow roses. On the wall was a large oil painting of an African village with the Drakensberg Mountains in the background. You could tell from just looking that Mr Fisher was a pretty important person and I was surprised that he’d be interviewing such a low-down as me.

  Mr Fisher leaned back in his chair. ‘So, what have you got to say for yourself, young man?’ he asked.

  How do you answer a question like that? ‘Nothing much yet, Sir,’ I replied. My instinct told me not to mention my international reputation as a tract writer.

  ‘Yet?’ he seemed amused.

  ‘Well, I’d like very much to learn how to be a trainee music salesman, Sir.’

  ‘Well, I must warn you, it’s a far cry from the religious business, Tom,’ he said, recalling our previous phone conversation. Then he chuckled, though more to himself. ‘There are some people who think jazz is the music of the devil. What do you think?’

  I didn’t know how to answer him. ‘I’ve only heard it on Springbok Radio, Sir.’ Then I added, ‘It sounded okay to me. Dizzy Gillespie and all that,’ I said, remembering a snatch of an announcer’s conversation overheard in passing on the radio in the prep room at school.

  ‘What do you know about music, Tom?’ he asked, looking directly at me.

  ‘Nothing, Sir.’

  His eyebrows shot up in surprise, ‘Nothing?’

  ‘That’s why I need to be a trial trainee music salesman, so I can learn,’ I said, perhaps a little too ingenuously.

  He smiled and leaned forward. ‘Well, at least you’re honest, I like that. What school did you attend?’

  ‘Still attend, Sir. The Bishop’s College.’

  To my surprise his arms spread wide. ‘Well, I never! Why didn’t you say so in the first place, Mr Polliack’s three boys all went to Bishop’s. I myself wasn’t that privileged,’ he added.

  ‘I’m a scholarship student, Sir,’ I explained.

  ‘Not from a wealthy family, eh?’

  ‘No, Sir.’ Please don’t ask me any more, I thought desperately, but I need not have worried because I was about to learn the abracadabra, open sesame of the private-school system among English-speaking South Africans.

  He seemed pleased. ‘And you need a job for the Christmas holidays?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, please, Sir.’

  Mr Fisher, half-rising, reached out across his desk, his hand extended. ‘Welcome to Polliack’s, the largest musical emporium in all of Africa,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Now, let’s have your personal details. What did you say your surname was again?’

  And so ended my career as a writer of religious tracts and I began as a salesman in the ungodly business of jazz music and what was known in the firm as popular syncopation, a musical style in which Miss Patti Page, among others, featured hugely.

  I’m a Lonely Little Petunia (in an Onion Patch)

  ***

  Put Another Nickel In (Music! Music! Music!)

  ***

  Bongo, Bongo, Bongo (I Don’t Want to Leave the Congo)

  ***

  Please No Squeeza Da Banana

  ***

  Five Minutes More (Give Me Five Minutes More,

  Only Five Minutes More)

  ***

  It Might As Well Be Spring

  I could learna set of lyrics in ten minutes, but if my life depended on it I couldn’t have hummed the tune to which they were attached. Over Christmas, after the trial was dropped, I became simply the trainee musical salesman and general factotum who appeared every school holidays. Over the following year I learned to fake a musical prowess, listening to the drumbeat in the background, and keeping time by snapping my fingers, or shaking my shoulders, or tapping my feet, and in the process becoming the complete musical phoney. The Boys Farm was paying off at last. A customer would ask me about the latest hit record, and while I found it for him or her, placed it on the turntable and handed them a set of earphones, I’d recite the entire set of lyrics with the result that I fooled almost everyone but myself. I was learning to be a salesman. Smelly Jelly had taught me how to praise the Lord using well-rounded vowels, and it worked just as well with lyrics. I could make a set of inane lyrics in plain-speak sound like the meaning of life to your average teenager, particularly if it was a love song. For instance, with Perry Como’s ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ I could often reduce a young woman to teary-eyed euphoria and the sale was made long before the actual record started to spin on the turntable.

  Now here’s a funny thing. My Salvation Army too-big brown sportsjacket and my too-short school grey flannels, my turned-up-at-the-collar white shirts and frayed-at-the-edges Smelly Jelly black or maroon ties seemed to add to my musical authority. I became the teenage eccentric, the one-off, the wunderkind, all the while using influence I didn’t have. Kids would wait for me to serve them, ask me earnest questions about the artists and hang on every word I uttered as if I was the Holy Grail of pop music. ‘All you need is a pair of horn-rimmed glasses,’ Graham Truby of the first-day ‘Hmm’ would declare. ‘A little myopia to add to that hapless boy musical-genius look.’

  The point being the sniffy Graham of the tucked-in-at-the-waist blue suit, striped shirt, bow tie, matching handkerchief and pronounced lisp disliked serving the kids. Bobby Black, who was the department head, a jazz drummer in black stovepipe pants, jacket down to his knees, black string tie, lolly-pink shirt and shoes called winklepickers so pointed that if he kicked you up the arse you’d end up with lockjaw, stuck to selling jazz. He had a semi-famous band called Bobby Dazzle that played strictly purist jazz, jazz and only jazz. Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, and so on.

  The three of us turned out to be an ideal combination for the music basement. The adult jazz aficionados were drawn to Bobby with his gollywog hairdo, long sideburns and early teddy boy suit. Graham greatly fancied himself as Mr Opera, Ballet and Classical music, attracting the pretentious, the serious-minded and the older foreign-accent customers. While the young and uninformed, the musical plethora were left to ‘Fitzy’, who knew the words to every popular song you could name and
left you feeling like a champion because you knew enough to have purchased a hit song before it became one. Smelly Jelly’s born-again imprecations such as ‘Praise the Lord! Praise His precious name, my dear brother in Christ’ became adapted to the music biz in statements such as, ‘Yeah, good one! You’ve so very prudently picked Patti Page, the Princess of Pop!’ Or to a pretty young girl customer, ‘Perry Como will touch the love chords in your deeply musical soul!’ My customers ate all this rhetoric up in spoonfuls, and I confess I enjoyed the attention. Here was a place you didn’t have to hide from the front. At the end of the day Mr Fisher simply looked at your sales figures.

  Thank goodness my sales were pretty good as we were on a salary and commission, and by the time the July holidays came around I’d made sufficient money to buy myself an entirely new outfit. The pair of honey-coloured corduroy trousers I’d lusted after for a year, dark-brown suede brothel creepers with thick crepe rubber soles, three new shirts, two knitted ties, a Fair Isle jumper and a brand-new, properly fitting Harris Tweed sportsjacket. Six months saving, but worth every penny. It was the first time ever that every single thing I wore was brand-new and in the latest fashion. Boy, was I ever pleased with myself!

  I remember it was a Saturday morning, the busiest time of the week because the shops closed at noon. I arrived in the music basement looking like a million dollars only to be confronted by Bobby Black.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he said, staring at me. ‘Graham, get here quick, man!’ he shouted across the basement.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, smiling proudly, thinking he was pulling my leg.

  Graham now stood at Bobby’s side, forefinger poised on lip, free hand placed on tucked waist, head cocked. ‘Oh dear! Oh dearie me!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘What?’ I asked again, hunching my shoulders and spreading my hands.

  ‘Home!’ Bobby ordered, pointing to the stairs.

  ‘What’s wrong, Bobby?’ I asked, totally bemused, looking down at my brilliant new duds.

  ‘You’ve just fucked your entire image, son! Now go home and get into your usual gear and get back here, pronto, we’ve got a busy morning ahead of us.’

  ‘And wash that ghastly Brylcreem out of your hair!’ Graham added.

  If I sound like I was killing them at Polliack’s, while I was doing well enough I was still the kid around the place doing chores and messages when it wasn’t busy in the basement. I seldom got a lunch hour as I’d have to mind a floor while the floor manager of, say, the electrical department – ‘fridges, washing machines, toasters, radiograms, floor polishers, electric fans and the new-fangled dishwashers’ – was out to lunch. I was never allocated lunch-hour duty at front of house, the grey-carpeted ground floor. This, I knew, had a lot to do with my being a callow youth in the Salvo gear that worked so well for my persona in the basement.

  Often I’d be given the piano department, the poshest place of all, to mind. It was separately located on the fourth floor where the musical behemoths rested in an atmosphere of splendid, highly polished calm. The three Steinway Baby Grands resting separately from the uprights on a platform decorated with potted palms planted in cut-down beer barrels with the hoops made of highly burnished brass, one of the many chores allocated to Union Jack.

  I hated the piano department because, as you’d expect, it was never busy. People don’t exactly walk off the street to buy a piano, or didn’t in those days anyway. Instead, they made an appointment with Mr Farquarson who, in turn, ‘made a suitable appointment’ and then put them through a long and often harrowing interrogation. Buying your piano from Polliack’s added an extra dimension to its value and so you had to earn your piano-playing rights by establishing your credentials as the ‘the right kind of people’ to own one from the largest musical emporium in all of Africa.

  My dislike for the piano department extended to Mr Farquarson, a fat, effete Englishman who was a terrible snob and who referred to his forebears as ‘County’, his pronunciation rich with such perfectly rounded vowels that he’d have left Smelly Jelly for dead. He was also a sometime–concert pianist, although nobody knew quite where his illustrious career had taken place. To his credit he could certainly tickle the ivories better than most, though of course always classical.

  He wore striped grey pants without turn-ups, ending over black patent leather shoes fitted with white spats. His jacket was a black linen cutaway without lapels or buttons and slightly flared where the sleeves met the shoulders. It fell down to the back of his knees in the manner of an Oxford don. He always wore a highly starched white shirt topped by an Eton collar, and instead of a tie an exaggerated maroon bow frothed from under his several chins with the ends of the ribbon resting on his enormous stomach. If he’d worn a prep school cap he would have been a dead cert for Billy Bunter’s father. He was known around the place as ‘The Ship of State’, or by Graham as ‘That disgusting old queen upstairs!’ Bobby Black had once picked up on Graham after he’d heard him expressing his sentiments concerning Mr Farquarson and said, ‘Look who’s talking.’

  Graham got very upset. ‘I’m not fat and I’m not disgusting, I’ll have you know I’m a perfectly respectable and rather nice queer!’ he replied indignantly.

  Later he confided in me that jazz drummers are deeply into pain and habitually place their dicks on the kettledrum, which accounted for all that grimacing in jam sessions. ‘No names, no pack drill, Fitz,’ he’d pouted, then, indicating Bobby’s cubicle with a flick of his head, ‘That’s the only way the prick can manage to get a free bang!’

  I can tell you, I was moving further and further away from the Born-again Christian Missionary Society, even if it was a pretty feeble joke. I tried to imagine what sort of tract I’d have to write to bring Graham or Bobby to their knees, begging for salvation, but was forced to concede that I wouldn’t know where to begin. ‘The drummer that banged for Jesus,’ an unfortunate ambiguity. ‘The faggot that lit a spiritual bonfire!’ I was definitely losing my touch.

  At the end of that year, 1950, I sat for my matriculation exams and then it was school holidays once again. One lazy afternoon in January, with Christmas well and truly over and empty pockets prompting ‘sale’ signs in almost every shop in town, my biggest break ever came seemingly out of the blue and into the piano department one lunchtime.

  It appeared in the form of a large boer who looked decidedly awkward in his soiled moleskins, khaki open-neck shirt, scalloped under the armpits with sweat, scuffed working boots and wide-brimmed hat that had seen 10 000 sunrises and defied a hundred dust storms. In the pristine, softly glowing sheen of Polliack’s piano department he looked as incongruous as a gorilla in a cathedral. I don’t mean he looked like a large ape, because he didn’t, it was just that he seemed completely out of context standing in front of the lift holding a string-handled brown-paper shopping bag.

  But first a little background explanation. The Cold War between Russia and America was beginning to hot up. Korea, North and South, tucked in between China and Japan, was beginning to look like the place where a showdown between the Communists and the Free World was likely to take place. There was a great deal of sword-rattling going on between the two superpowers and the coming conflict was being touted as a peacekeeping mission under the aegis of the brand-new United Nations. North Korea was Communist and supported by Russia, while South Korea was a so-called democracy propped up by America. Communist China, the crouching dragon puffing smoke, looked on from across the Yalu River, all potential players waiting on the sideline. The world it seemed was returning to war. Gold and copper prices soared and so did the price of wool. Sheep farmers in the Karoo, the dry, flat desert country east of Cape Town, for generations barely eking out a living with their vast flocks on an unforgiving landscape, became overnight millionaires. The wool boom was on for one and all. Korea was a land where the winter temperatures fell to 30 degrees below zero and the American army, among others, had to rug up in anticipation of the big conflict in the cold.

&nb
sp; I’d only just arrived to spend what might be anything up to three boring hours babysitting the pianos. Mr Farquarson was about to leave for an extended lunch hour to be spent, he unnecessarily informed me, ‘over lunch at the Carlton and a few glasses of excellent libation with the conductor of the Johannesburg Symphony Orchestra’. He was preparing to depart, arranging his large black felt hat at a jaunty slant, the brim on one side up and on the other down, when the boer walked in. The Afrikaner stood hesitantly at the entrance to the lift, holding the brown-paper shopping bag with both hands in front of him. Though the Ship of State must have seen him, he showed no reaction whatsoever. He took one finally admiring look at himself in the mirror and, turning to me, said, ‘Get rid of that, Boy!’ Then he pontificated towards the lift, passing the boer as if he simply wasn’t there. Thankfully the lift was still stationary and opened immediately to accept his corpulent prow.

  ‘Goeie middag, Meneer,’ I said, bidding the boer good afternoon.

  At first he didn’t reply. A look of consternation appeared on his face as his eyes swept over the department. ‘Here, man, how is a man supposed to make a choice?’ he said in Afrikaans.

  I was about to ask if he had an appointment but then realised, of course, he didn’t. ‘Do you wish to purchase a piano?’ I asked.

  ‘Ja, of course,’ he said, looking at me as if I was mad. ‘You think I come in a place like this to get out of the sun?’

  My heart began to beat faster, and I thought for a moment to ask him to wait and then try to catch up with Mr Farquarson and bring him back, but quickly realised that all I would receive in return would be a stern rebuke.

  ‘How much is a piano?’ the boer asked.

  ‘Various prices, Meneer,’ I answered politely, ‘but first maybe a cup of coffee or a cool drink?’