Frankie and Stankie, page 17
Irmi and Heinrich set up house in Hillbrow, Johannesburg’s inner-city flatland, overhung with the smell of ageing gas cookers. In time, it became a pioneering mixed-race area: the first place in the country where young, dreadlocked black men would neck openly with white girls in the street, the first white area in which blacks began, illegally, to rent cheap high-rise ‘bachelor’ flats. Hillbrow could boast South Africa’s first and only all-night bookshop. It was full of elderly, concert-going, transplanted German Jews. It was the only place to get good rye bread and salt beef. It was the place where, in 1963, Barney Simon, director of Johannesburg’s Market Theatre, bumped into the Rivonia Trial’s two most rigorously hunted political escapees.
‘Hide us,’ they said – Harold Wolpe and Arthur Goldreich – ‘our pick-up car didn’t show.’
And he hid them in his flat, taking them up in the service lift, risking imprisonment himself – a secret good deed that needed to remain a secret for the next thirty years.
Then gradually the old German Jews got too scared to leave their flats at night and the concert audiences declined. Likewise the theatre’s audiences, which got scared of the inner-city flick-knives and the muggings and the shoot-outs. Hillbrow became the terrain of drug barons and then, with the opening of South Africa’s borders, the local drug barons were effectively seen off by bigger and scarier drug barons, who entered the country from the north.
By this time, Heinrich and Irmi had retired. They’d packed up and gone back to Berlin, taking the oak thrones with them. They had neither of them ever quite shuffled off that air of being displaced persons. Then Heinrich died within weeks of their reentry, and Irmi, finding that Berlin wasn’t home any more without him, returned on the rebound to Johannesburg. She placed herself in the German Old People’s Home, a hang-out full of aged ghastlies who’d done time in South West Africa. Sudwest, as they said. Dinah, when she visits her aunt there, in her small, functional room with shower and kitchenette, doesn’t like to ask Irmi why the two oak thrones are not a feature of her living space. She fancies that they’ll have gone under the hammer in an auction house somewhere in Berlin.
Seven
Lisa and Dinah go to high school in the same year. It’s the year in which Dr Malan, the Prime Minister, retires. He’s replaced by Mr J.G. Strijdom who is rabid to achieve what Dr Malan has tried to do and failed. That is to get rid of the Cape’s Coloured franchise. Mr Strijdom does this by increasing the number of Appeal Court judges and Nat-supporting senators until he’s got enough to push the business through. This is called the Separate Representation of Voters Act. Then he makes ‘mixed’ trade unions illegal, so that black and white workers won’t make common cause. This is called the Industrial Reconciliation Act. In Durban, most of the English are less bothered by these measures than by Mr Strijdom’s determination to make South Africa a republic. And when he declares that ‘God Save the Queen’ is no longer the national anthem, white Durbanites are bristling. There’s an English translation on offer for them, of the droney, slow-motion Afrikaans national anthem, but nobody Dinah’s come across ever bothers to learn the words.
Dinah can’t help noticing that Communist is now coming top among the government’s favourite buzz words. There’s been Dr Malan’s Suppression of Communism Act, but now it’s Communist this and Communist that pouring out of the radio. This is mainly because of the Defiance Campaign. Thousands of black South Africans have right then got the government shaking in its shoes, simply by organising a nation-wide sit-down in station waiting rooms, train carriages and public libraries marked ‘Europeans Only/Slegs Blankes’. Everything has now been labelled in the two official white languages, so that even the school buses say ‘No spitting/Moenie Spoeg Nie’, and persons visiting from abroad will often wonder why public lavatories, having announced ‘Gents/Here, will then go on to say ‘Ladies/Dames’. It’s confusing if you don’t realise that here is Afrikaans for gents. It’s like the plural of Herr. Some foreigners are also a bit freaked by the signs in butchers’ shop windows that say ‘Boys’ Meat Two Shillings’, because they don’t like its cannibalistic ring. And sometimes you can still see those butchers’ signs that say ‘Boys’ Meat Two Shillings. Dogs’ Meat Two and Sixpence’.
The government has managed to arrest eight thousand of the Defiance Campaigners and is using the Suppression of Communism Act as a catchall to nobble its leaders. Dinah hasn’t the first clue about what a Communist is, except that the runaway Brainy Rebel used to be one before the recent arrival of the black-edged telegram announcing his demise. So, along with most South Africans, she now thinks it’s Communism for a black person to sit in a white person’s waiting room, or for a black person to enter the public library. The list of banned persons is getting so long that to think about it is a bit like looking at the Roll of Honour on the Cenotaph.
Meanwhile, the Nats are pretty pleased about the firm hand that Mr Strijdom is taking and Parliament has been proudly referring to its own ‘reign of terror’ against the passive-resistance campaigners. Agitator is another of the government’s favourite words. Agitators must be eliminated, root and branch, because it’s a long-term conviction of the apartheid state that, without agitators, no black person would feel himself to have any grievance. Soon the state is rounding up five hundred Treason Trial accused – Communists and agitators from all ethnic groups – though the court whittles the number down to a mere one hundred and fifty. Even so, it’s a lot of people to have in the dock all at once and the trial drags on for four years, taking on an atmosphere of macabre fairground gaiety as the accused suddenly have the world’s media at their feet and the prosecution is repeatedly outwitted.
While it’s impossible for the accused to earn a living during this time, the good news is that the trial provides a rare opportunity for resistance leaders to liaise across ethnic boundaries – a thing which the state has by now rendered strictly illegal in real life. This is the high point of resistance success: a triumphant farce to be remembered in the dark and brutal days to come. When the last trialist is acquitted, there’s nothing much the state can do, except raid the house in which the celebrations take place in the hopes of nailing a few ‘mixed’ drinkers, because serving alcohol to a black person is also against the law.
As the politics gets more intense, Dinah’s dad has to spend more and more of his early morning time shouting back at the radio, so this is the girls’ regular daily wake-up sound – that’s before he’s blocked his rage by blasting them out with items from his ever-increasing record collection. Among recent early morning favourites are Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears promising doom and brimstone.
From Brig’ o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
Ev-ery nighte and alle
To Purgatory fire thou comest at last
And Christe receive thy saule
Meanwhile Lisa and Dinah are getting on with their ordinary little white schoolgirl lives.
Lisa has been looking forward to the pleasure of going to high school because that way she’ll get away from Dinah and Angela and the daily shower of newspaper fiancés. She’s really pleased that she’s going to be the only one with a hockey stick and a regulation Girls’ High navy swimsuit. She anticipates that Dinah will be looking enviously at her new school atlas and her new Concise Oxford English Dictionary. She’s already got her blue-and-silver tin box of mathematical instruments. In the event, Lisa is cheated out of this pleasure, because the school system changes that year. There’s a pilot scheme in which girls from Dinah’s school and Dinah’s year will move up early and spend five years, not four, in secondary education. So Lisa is stuck with Dinah and Angela after all.
By this time Dinah and Lisa are no longer each other’s best friend. Dinah has begun to position herself as a bit of a dissenter and she thinks of Lisa as a goody-goody. She knows that, unlike Lisa, she’ll never be a prefect and she doesn’t want to be one. She thinks that prefects are scabs. This instinct probably comes in part from not being the first-born, but also it comes from the government. For Dinah merely to think about the government is enough to make her believe that authority is by its nature suspect. Plus she’s messy and creative. She’s constantly cutting, gluing, painting and sewing which means a litter of paper clippings, dried paintbrushes, crushed pastels and glitter all over the floor of the shared bedroom. The shared bedroom rankles with both of them and with Lisa especially, who can’t stand disorder and is longing to have more privacy. From time to time she draws a chalk line down the middle of the room between the beds and screams at Dinah that she’s throwing away anything, anything that crosses the line.
Lisa, unbeknown to Dinah, has entered adolescence. She gets into huddles with their mum in a new and unaccustomed form of female bonding that Dinah finds a bit threatening. She has no idea that this has something to do with menstruation and, when she eventually finds out, over a year later, Lisa’s orderliness in the matter of female monthlies is quite astonishing to her. All that business with the horrible lumpy crotch pads that you have to wear hooked on to a saggy elastic waist belt that’s forever twisting and tweaking and spiralling. Oh yuk. Then there’s the business of soaking and laundering your inconveniently bouffant school knickers in those useless 1950s soap flakes. Plus there’s the matter of discreet disposal. How has Lisa managed this when there isn’t even a pedal bin in the lavatory?
Dinah hasn’t noticed any of it. She only notices that Lisa is always cross with her. She says ‘Shut up’ and ‘I hate you’ and ‘Anyway, everyone in my class thinks you’re goofy’. Lisa goes in for angry fits of physical intimidation so that Dinah has to fetch and carry for her at home. ‘Get me a banana,’ Lisa says, and if Dinah says she won’t, then Lisa will always thump her. Sometimes Dinah feels so angry that she retaliates in sneaky little-sisterish ways. She cuts up Lisa’s favourite shorts or she hides Lisa’s charm bracelet. She knows that a charm bracelet is a prized possession, because she’s got one too. And every time either sister has a birthday, people will give them more and more little silver charms, so that every link in the chain is heavy, now, with double-hung trinkets.
Dinah crouches, quaking with fear, for what seems like hours in the earthy, anti-termite zone under the floorboards of the house, clutching Lisa’s things, while above her head Lisa is stamping and raging and bursting into tears.
‘I know Dinah’s hidden it,’ she’ll be saying. ‘I know she has. And this time I’m really going to kill her. Just wait.’
The trouble with Dinah’s strategy is that it wrong-foots her with her parents, because Lisa is very good at inspiring confidence in adults. It leaves Dinah no option but to get herself cast in the role of the bad daughter. And once you’re the bad daughter, you might as well go for broke.
The move to high school coincides almost exactly with the move from the Butcher Estate. Almost, but not quite. The university’s lease on the estate is up within a few weeks. For the first days, Lisa and Dinah are conveyed the extra distance to their new school alongside the undergraduates, in canvas-covered army trucks left over from the war. Since the undergraduates are all male and nearly all engineers, the testosterone levels in the truck make the girls feel so uncomfortable that they demand the right to go by bus.
In Durban all the green buses are for blacks so these roar and judder past the groups of white schoolchildren in their variously banded panama hats and blazers. There are so many different school blazers in Durban that home-time on the Berea can look like the Henley Regatta, especially as some of the boys get made to wear straw boaters as well. The white kids call the blacks’ buses Green Mambas. The green buses are always on their last legs, belching out streams of black smoke and overloaded with downtown workers coming in from the black locations.
In the Transvaal, buses for blacks are right now political dynamite, because the companies who run them have tried to put up the fares. Black commuters have been boycotting the buses and walking, en masse, thirty kilometres a day, in and out of work. They picket the buses and sometimes burn them and stone them and even throw themselves in front of them. Then the bus companies hire the poorest township migrant workers to beat up the protesters. The Liberal Party has tried organising a lift system of volunteers with private cars, but all this does is give the police a chance to nail more agitators and Communists, since all they have to do is stand about taking down the numbers on the white drivers’ licence plates. What’s happened is that the sight of all those blacks walking in their thousands into white town centres singing protest songs has been enough to make the municipality hammer out a compromise.
Most of the white schoolkids with whom Lisa and Dinah take the bus don’t know about the bus boycotts. For them the Green Mambas are a fun way to tease their friends. Because, whenever there’s a Green Mamba coming, you can pretend it’s the bus your friend is waiting for.
‘Here comes your bus, Denise,’ you say and everyone will fall about laughing. Denise will pretend to be very indignant. Then she’ll take a turn.
‘Look, it’s yours,’ she’ll say. ‘Stop, stop, Green Mamba! Here’s a passenger for you.’
Angela gets on the bus two-thirds of the way along the route to high school, so Dinah always tries to save her a seat. She catches it in Nicholson Road outside a small semi-detached house that has Snow White and all Seven Dwarfs cast in concrete in the front garden. Plus there are several concrete toadstools and concrete butterflies. The figures are all about eighteen inches high, except for Snow White who is much bigger, and all of them are brightly painted.
Then the bus journey comes to an end for Lisa and Dinah because they vacate the Butcher Estate to make way for its new tenant, the South African Police. Dinah’s mum cries when the pergola is cut down and coils of barbed wire are erected on top of the tall green hedges all the way from Ridge Road above to Vause Road below. Soon the Butcher Estate has ‘Keep Out’ signs in two languages, with pictures of salivating Alsatians. Dinah never enters it again, though she passes it all the time. She remembers it as a magic place, big enough to get lost in, with its giant bamboo clumps and vervet monkeys and the carpets of jacaranda flowers outside the back door. With its passing she appears to lose all interest in the outdoors. The bullying, triumphalist tone of the police force means that to look at the Butcher Estate from the perimeter fence is like looking in at an enemy occupation.
The campus families have been leaving gradually. Dinah’s family are the last to go and Wendy Jones’s the first. Wendy goes without saying goodbye, because there’s a distance that’s developed between the children. Wendy Jones, Lisa’s fellow gingernut, has long ago stopped coming round to play and has closed ranks against the whole child commune. This has happened, shortly after the girls’ impromptu tea party, with the arrival of the family’s third child. Pregnant Mrs Jones, who sat on the grass all those years before, has given birth to baby Roddy whose head is much too big for him and who never learns to speak or to leave his pushchair. Instead his pushchair keeps on getting bigger.
Wendy has never said anything to the other children about Roddy being not quite right. The fact of his evident and serious disability isn’t admitted or aired. But Wendy stops playing and becomes Roddy’s obsessive second mother. She always walks alongside her mum and her little brother Owen eyeing the other children with suspicion. They are the wild, running, shrieking child-people from whom Roddy needs protection. Wendy smothers Roddy with out-loud baby talk as she passes the girls’ bungalow. Meanwhile Roddy lolls lifeless in his pushchair, his sad giant head topped with orange curls, like a sad Hallowe’en pumpkin thinking sad pumpkin thoughts.
Somewhere in Roddy’s yearning moon face is an echo of his pleasant, orange-haired dad; plump freckly Dr Vernon Jones from Wales with his little damp hands, who lectures in history and always wears his sandals with socks. Meanwhile Mrs Jones has doubled in size with Roddy’s birth and has become a person to be scared of. When the rift becomes a feud, Lisa and Dinah know in their hearts that it’s all really their fault, because, home alone for an hour one day, they spy little Owen Jones from the window and he’s playing with Lisa’s ball. They know that it’s Lisa’s because of the pattern on the rubber. From the house, the sisters swoop on Owen, two against one, like bullies. They grab the ball and dash indoors, slamming the door behind them. Victory! Then they watch Owen run whimpering home to tell his mother.
‘Quick!’ Lisa says. ‘Quick! Lock the back door. Shut all the windows. Draw the curtains. Quick! Hide! Hide! Mrs Jones is coming!’
Within minutes, Mrs Jones is thundering on the front door. ‘I know you’re in there,’ she says. ‘Come out!’ Then she raps on the windows. Then she goes round the back. ‘Come out!’ she cries. ‘Come out! Give that ball back to Owen at once!’
The girls don’t respond. They hardly dare to breathe. They crouch, scared but excited, under Lisa’s iron bed.
‘You’ve not heard the end of this!’ Mrs Jones says.
Eventually, she stomps off. Yet she doesn’t follow through. Dinah’s mum never finds out. And then, three weeks later, Lisa discovers her own ball. It’s lying at the bottom of the Klappkasten. Dinah and Lisa look at each other. Lisa is biting her lip. They look at both balls side by side. The balls are identical twins. After that, they have no option but to make their victim into their enemy. They can’t not hate Owen now, just as they hate his sister. It’s no speaks with either of them until the Joneses leave the Estate.
Dinah’s family moves for six months into some temporary campus housing alongside the university, while their own house is being built. The temporary house is a brick cottage, one of six, built into the indigenous woodland of Pigeon Valley, and so close to the high school that the girls are always in danger of being late for assembly. Their dad, for the first time ever, starts switching on Springbok Radio, because that way they can pace themselves by the commercials. They know that they have to be out of the house before the last line of the Zoomo Cough Sweet commercial. First they hear the forced, fake coughing fit and then the voice that says, ‘Stop that cough with ZOOMO!’ The word ZOOMO! must reach their ears just as they hit the main road.
