Frankie and Stankie, page 24
By now the whole class is feigning persistent incomprehension, but Mrs Keithley has finally hit upon an explanation.
‘My girlies,’ she says, and she lowers her voice to a gruff whisper. ‘My girlies, it means – it means – a street woman.’
Everyone knows what a street woman is, because the Durban docks are pretty well right there in the town centre and Point Road is full of one-night cheap hotels. But when Maud gets round to scanning the small print of her corrected exercise book she’s aware of another mistake.
‘Hey, Dinah,’ she says. ‘That word you gave me for crusts. Well, look here. Mrs Keithley says it means scabs. I’ve put, “Dirty black hands are crawling all over the scabs that our children love.” ’
Maud’s mastery of sports avoidance is good for Dinah’s self-esteem. Dinah’s always been useless at games, yet she’s always felt the need to try. So during her first ever GHS hockey practice – and just when she’s giving it all she’s got – Dinah hears Miss Chase saying sarcastically, ‘The object is to advance upon the ball, Dinah, not to retreat from it. Understood?’ Miss Chase also has a low opinion of Dinah’s tennis hand. That’s ever since the day that Dinah’s passed out unconscious on the court. Something about the excessive summer heat and the dazzling sunlight and the uncorrected astigmatism, along with the routine menstrual excess and the hay-fever suppressants. They’ve all left Dinah charging uselessly from one side of the court to the other, always too late to scoop the ball, until her brain has sensibly made the decision to take a little holiday. At sixteen, Dinah is possibly the only white South African in the country who can’t swim a decent front crawl. Yet she always sits in the stands during swimming galas, lustily cheering for her house, or her school, or her team, just like everyone else.
Now, thanks entirely to Maud, Dinah has learned to wear her sporting incompetence with pride. She’s learned that there’s an alternative to that perpetual floundering in the shallow end as the butt of Miss Chase’s contempt. She’s learned to malinger in the school library where the kindly librarian, who has fallen under Maud’s spell, will always agree to let them hide. And the librarian confesses, shyly, during one of their occasional conversations, to a parallel career as the author of several hardback historical novels with somewhat lurid dust jackets. Maud writes a series of spoofy, hockey-mad poems as parodies of John Masefield and gets them published in the school magazine. So after that Miss Chase gives up on the pair of them and stops even trying to make them do PT. They’re licensed to sit out all the physical jerks on the bench, alongside the usual rotating assortment of shirkers.
‘I’ve got my periods, Miss Chase,’ says Michelle Blumhoff, who is one of the North Beach airhead set, but she’s very good at drawing. She says it week in, week out, until Miss Chase finally loses her rag.
‘PERIOD, Michelle. PERIOD!’ she screams. ‘Have them ONE AT A TIME, if you please!’
Michelle’s dad has once revealed to Beattie Blain that his swirl-patterned kipper tie has a nudie pin-up on the underside.
The only teacher whom Maud and Dinah admire and respect unreservedly, the only one they never send up, the only one in whose classes they never whisper, or giggle, or pass notes, the only teacher whose homework they always do, is the fifty-something Miss Byrd, whose art history classes are their perpetual inspiration. Miss Byrd and her sister are two shy professional spinsters who are rumoured to be living at home with a domineering mother. Yet in the classroom Miss Byrd is a colossus. Miss Byrd is always spellbinding. She takes her girls through a rigorous, high-speed chronology of Western art, along with some concessionary forays into the arts of India, Africa, Japan and China, so that within two years their files are bulging with hand-sketched details of Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns along with several kinds of architrave plus the façades and ground plans of something like fifty classical buildings.
Then they do Romanesque churches, both in Europe and Asia Minor. After that, they launch into the Gothic. They can sketch the sequence of the Parthenon frieze. They can write essays on the Charioteer of Delphi and on the Praxiteles Hermes. They know the sequence of the bas-reliefs on Trajan’s Column. They know the Pantheon, niche by niche. They know barrel vaulting and flying buttresses. They can draw the columns of the Córdoba Mosque and the fan-vaulted ceiling of the Divinity School in Oxford. They can draw, from memory, the various side elevations of Notre Dame and Chartres Cathedral and of Wells Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. They can make drawings of Ghiberti’s baptistry doors and of Brunelleschi’s dome.
They know, cell by cell, all the paintings in Fra Angelico’s monastery and all the Masaccios in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. They can write about the influence of Bellini on Mantegna and about the influence of Duccio on Giotto. They can tell, at a glance, what makes Giovanni da Fabriano different from Benozzo Gozzoli. They can write about the Dutch School and the Flemish School and the paintings of post-Reformation England and the influence of Constable on the French Impressionists. They can sketch each of the figures of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais.
Because Miss Byrd’s teaching has uses beyond its own field, the art girls know about Balzac because of Rodin; they know about Platonism because of Raphael; they know about commedia dell’arte because of Watteau. And Dinah knows more about the enclosure movement from looking at Thomas Gainsborough than she’s ever learned from listening to Miss Legge. Miss Byrd is never afraid of the present, which means that the girls know Sickert and Stanley Spencer and Francis Bacon and Diego Rivera. They know Rothko and Jacob Epstein.
Perhaps because her Protestant soul has difficulty in taking it on board, Miss Byrd simply leaves out the artists of the counter-Reformation, so that the baroque, except for Rubens, is one big blank. Seventeenth-century Italy has suddenly gone very quiet and, though Dinah knows de la Tour and Honthorst, she’s never heard of Caravaggio: the man himself, the founding father. Dinah also believes that Spain has ‘three great painters’, all of whom were ‘accidents of genius’. Velázquez, El Greco and Goya have no context in Miss Byrd’s book. There is no Ribera, no Zurbarán, no Murillo. They emerge, luminous, from a strange and barbarous nothing.
Miss Byrd is, in all sorts of ways, a woman limited by her time and her context, but Maud and Dinah don’t see this, because her brilliant extraordinary teaching is somehow coming from the other side of her head. Then, one day, after she’s given a lesson on prehistoric cave painting, Miss Byrd lets drop a cheery, unreviewed anecdote about having once seen South African Bushmen on display in a cage at Johannesburg’s Rand Easter Show. Maud and Dinah are staring at her, trying not to believe that she’s saying this without seeing that it’s appalling. They are trying hard themselves not to see the sad, violated rump of South Africa’s hunter-gatherers, the straggling survivors of persecution and genocide, in a cage alongside the prize bulls and the innovative tractors and the hot-dog stalls and boeremusiek. People as exhibits at an agricultural show. Yet it’s clear from Miss Byrd’s tinkling laughter in response to their squeamish expressions that she thinks Maud and Dinah are just being silly.
In their perpetual hanging out in the town centre, Maud and Dinah don’t always stick to dress shops. Sometimes Maud is having new jodhpurs fitted, which means, for Dinah, hours of waiting in the tailor’s shop, among all the bales of cavalry twill. Maud is unbelievably fussy about the jodhpurs and about all her riding gear. Horsemanship is an important part of what she does when Dinah isn’t with her, though Dinah knows that she’s an instructor at the riding school, as well as one of the school’s star performers. So she likes to nit-pick for ever. Sometimes Maud and Dinah hang out near the Cenotaph where they watch the impassioned Bible-thumpers going hammer and tongs at the queues of tired white commuters who are waiting for their buses to carry them home.
One day they have a try at being Bible-thumpers themselves, but their voices just get lost on the air and the hymn they try and sing peters out on them. Plus the school uniforms, they feel, are undermining their credibility.
‘That was terrible,’ Maud says, as they retreat behind the Cenotaph. ‘Nobody was taking any notice of us. Did you see that? They couldn’t even tell that we were preaching.’
Baptist evangelism is big right now and Billy Graham has recently gone global. So Maud and Dinah are not too surprised when one day, while dawdling alongside the vacant lots behind the beachfront hotels, they see that the Green Tent has risen up in the night, huge as that of Boswell’s Circus.
‘Let’s go in,’ Maud says. ‘Come on. Let’s.’
Inside, the tent has a green grass floor and rows of stacking chairs that have been arranged leaving a wide central aisle. There’s a long table at the altar end and an invisible Würlitzer is playing religious choruses, sort of quietly, under its breath. The tent is filling up fast as Maud and Dinah take their seats three rows from the front. Some of the women are wearing hats and gloves. Everyone in the tent is white, but maybe there’s a parallel tent somewhere for blacks. The Würlitzer gets louder and everyone sings ‘I met Jesus at the Crossroads’ and one or two other choruses before the preacher starts his harangue.
Just when they think he’s starting to wind down, he runs his eyes menacingly over the assembled worshippers and pauses to stare at particular individuals in the congregation. He’s making some very determined eye contact. Dinah is thinking, ‘Please let it not be me.’
‘Whoever will offer his life to the Lord?’ he says. ‘Who will be saved on this day? Who will repent him of his sins and be washed as white as snow? Come forward! Yes, you, sir! Come forward. you, madam! Come forward and give yourself to the Lord!’
People in ones and twos start shuffling timidly towards the front where the preacher lays his hands on them and directs them through a canvas doorway into an invisible place beyond the altar.
‘Come on,’ Maud says. ‘Let’s go. Let’s be saved.’
The girls join the line of people shuffling forward more boldly now, as the Würlitzer is stepping up the volume. Though they’re motivated by no more than a desire to see what goes on beyond the canvas doorway, they’re feeling little tremors of excitement.
Once through the doorway, all they can see is more tent, though this time it’s been subdivided into lots of little canvas cubicles. Each cubicle has got a row of three stacking chairs, along with one on its own for the saving monitor. All the saving monitors are wearing green tabards with enamelled badges that say ‘Jesus Saves’. Maud and Dinah’s monitor is a young woman, probably no older than seventeen. And she’s so sincere in her desire to see them saved that the girls right away start to feel like heels. They sit side-by-side on the stacking chairs and stare fixedly at the tent’s grassy floor, not daring to glance at each other. Yet soon the inevitable vibrations, the portents of giggles about to burst forth, are beginning to give them away.
‘You just came in for a laugh,’ says the monitor. ‘Didn’t you?’
They nod in silent shame.
‘Well, that’s not very nice, is it?’ she says.
They shake their heads, no, but the giggles keep rising to the surface.
‘It’s not very clever either,’ she says. ‘I think you’d better go, don’t you?’
They nod. They still can’t stop giggling. Then they retreat, ignominiously, back up the aisle in haste, pushing through the crush of people still lining up to be saved. They make their way out into the sunlight.
‘Phew,’ Dinah says. ‘I feel terrible.’
‘Me too,’ says Maud. ‘But I wish we could have got the badges. What shall we do now?’
Just occasionally, Maud has money. Lots of money. Like once every six months. Maud calls this money her divvy.
‘My divvy’s come,’ she’ll say. ‘Let’s go and spend it.’
This is when she buys new riding boots and when they both buy clothes in Truworth’s with her money. Maud buys them each a thing called a waist cincher which is a stiff elastic item like a twelve-inch deep belt that goes around your waist, underneath your clothes. It has whalebone struts at four-inch intervals and it looks like the middle bit of a merry widow, with no boob sections and no suspenders. It makes their twenty-inch waists go one and a half inches narrower, which they find very satisfactory.
Then they go and get their hair expensively dyed. Maud has found a tall Swedish hairdresser who proceeds along radical lines with startling effect. She starts by bleaching all the colour out of the hair so that their tresses look as white as those of Miss Legge. They sit side-by-side staring into the mirrors, two sixteen-year-olds, each with a white-string floor mop fixed to her head. After that, the Swede paints on a kind of mink blond paste, section by section, laboriously wrapping each strand in a little square of tin foil until their heads are nothing but overlapping silver scales. When they emerge from the foil they look fabulous. Their hair is an identical, exquisite mix of silver and palest sand. All their natural yellow is gone. They are the glamour twins of GHS. The only annoyance is the regulation black Alice band, which must be worn at all times ‘to keep the hair off the brow’. But Dinah and Maud don’t want their hair to be kept off the brow. They want it tousled and hanging in their eyes, just as the Swede has left it.
Maud’s divvy is lots of fun, though for a long time Dinah has no idea what it is or where it comes from. Then one day – but only after ages – Maud takes her home. It’s a big surprise for Dinah, because Maud’s family is working class. Maud’s is the only white working-class family that Dinah’s ever met.
Nine
Maud’s mother is shipped out from Aberdeen to the coal mining regions of northern Natal, as a mail-order bride for a Scottish migrant coal miner. She’s seventeen and he’s twice her age. For her family this makes one less mouth to feed at a time when the workhouse is looming, because Maud’s maternal grandfather – another long-distance Scottish migrant worker – has recently stopped writing letters home and his postal orders have dried up. The biggest coal towns in Natal are called Newcastle and Dundee, but Maud’s mother and her stranger husband live in a one-horse town called Danhauser where their daughter Lilian is born. But then, five years on, something happens. It happens because Maud’s mother and a woman friend are treating themselves to a winter holiday in Durban and they decide to go to the races.
The Durban July Handicap is the social occasion of the year. It’s terrifically dressy and some of the more extrovert women wear hats with whole nests of blackbirds on the crown, or entire banana plantations, in order to get their pictures on the social pages of the South African Sunday Times. Maud’s mother doesn’t have the wherewithal to dress up and she isn’t wearing a hat, but all the same she catches the eye of a racehorse owner who leaps social boundaries to become her long-term lover and he longs to be her husband. The lover is a man of means. He belongs to one of the landed families of the Natal sugar plantation elite, a group who are locally known as the Sugar Barons. And then, when podgy little dark-haired Lilian is eleven, the lover gets Maud’s mother pregnant.
The little blonde fairy girl is duly registered as the coal miner’s daughter but her arrival has made the lover all the more determined to become Maud’s mother’s husband. The problem is that the coal miner’s lungs are already showing signs of trouble and Maud’s mother will not desert him, because two wrongs don’t make a right. Plus there’s her crosspatch displaced daughter to consider, who’s on the edge of adolescence: Daddy’s girl Lilian, whose loathing for the new baby never abates. The Sugar Baron nonetheless pursues a policy of biding his time. He begins by making over a sum of money for his daughter which Maud’s mother invests, deciding to spend the bulk of it on sending the child, as soon as it’s possible, as a boarder to the Maris Stella Convent School in Durban. She’s full of secret pride at how bright the little girl is proving, though she dares not let her pleasure show in front of the coal miner or her elder daughter – given that the little brainbox is already no big favourite with either of the above.
At the convent five-year-old Maud soon learns to cry without making a single sound while the nuns comb the knots out of her long blonde hair and smack her on the head with the back of a hairbrush. Most of the nuns are Irish immigrant and killjoy. They have a grim northern mindset which is distinctly pre-Vatican II. And being acquainted with the circumstances of the little fairy girl’s origins, they are more than ever anxious not to be sparing with the rod. Meanwhile, Maud, who is missing her mum like mad, is certain that she must keep on striving to do her very best and then she’ll earn a reconciliation and be allowed to go back home. So the little fairy girl comes top in all her subjects and waits in hope for her mum to come and reclaim her. She isn’t remotely ready to understand that the more she shines at everything the more her big sister will resent her, or that it’s her own very presence in the house that is stoking all the anger and sense of grievance.
By the time Maud has been at the convent for five years, the coal miner’s lungs are sufficiently wrecked for him to be invalided out of the mine service on a small occupational pension – an ill wind which doesn’t blow everyone ill, since it provides the Sugar Baron with a chance to gain greater access. He buys Maud’s mother and her family a pretty little town house in Durban on the landward side of South Ridge, so the little fairy girl can now become a day girl at the convent and have riding lessons and a pedigree cocker spaniel puppy with wavy ginger ears. He visits the little house almost every day, especially now that poor old grumpy Lilian has seized the first opportunity to escape into a teenage marriage and establish a place of her own.
So these are good times for Maud and her mother, but the idyll doesn’t last, because, within two years of the purchase of the house, Lilian’s marriage has fallen apart and she’s back under her mother’s roof feeling ever more short-changed. And she’s filling up all available space, given that she’s already managed to produce two children. So now there’s little Darren and Debbie. The pretty little house is now dominated by the forceful if lowering presence of Lilian – an overweight, embittered young battleaxe who hates her pampered sister and longs to murder the dog. She hates Maud’s brains and her private-school accent and all the rosettes in Maud’s bedroom pertaining to successes at sundry gymkhanas. She hates the accident of Maud’s Botticelli face with the wide blue eyes and blonde braids.
