Whitethorn Read online

  I keep calling it ‘the orphanage’ and that sounds pathetic, as if it was in the olden times or something, whereas the time was 1939 with everyone saying there was going to be a war with the Germans. The English against the Germans and you can guess who wanted to fight for the Germans. More about that later. The real name for the place was ‘The Boys Farm’.

  It was in the country, about four miles out of a small town known as Willemskrans, which means the Williams Cliffs. This was because it was in the Lebombo Mountains and the town snuggled against a mountainside and was slap-bang up against these tall, rocky cliffs that rose nearly a thousand feet upwards. People said that the climate and the flora and fauna at the top were different to those at the bottom. I wondered how this could be. Mattress said that the people who lived up there were a different tribe. One big cliff and all of a sudden everything changes, the trees, flowers, climate and the people. Maybe Tinker came from up top and she’d come down the Letaba River. This was improbable because she’d have to have fallen down some mighty waterfalls. To do this and to be still alive would be some sort of a miracle, so I guess she came from some place not too high up, where the creek started.

  Anyway, The Boys Farm was on twenty acres with its own vegetable garden, chickens, pigs, ten milking cows and a small dairy for making butter, there were also two donkeys to pull the small hand plough used for tilling. There was talk of a secondhand tractor but it never came to anything. Lots of things never came to anything in that place. We all worked in the vegetable garden and the older boys chopped wood and milked the cows.

  What we did was usually considered kaffir work. But they decided that we’d all grow up to work on farms or as motor mechanics, timber cutters, lorry drivers or maybe get an apprenticeship to be a carpenter or boilermaker in the mines. We had to learn early to do things around the place with our hands, as brains were not considered a high-up commodity. It’s funny when you don’t belong to anyone that the people responsible for looking after you just assume you’re nobody. You are the Government’s children and they can do as they wish with you. So they train you to be the lowest common denominator, except, of course, for the blacks. You definitely can’t be allowed to be as low as a black kaffir. So pigs are definitely not a white man’s work, they’re stinking creatures that live in mud and their own shit that gets squished up together to make a fearful greeny-black mud paste that stinks so much that you have to hold your nose as you approach. Even an orphan boy couldn’t be expected to work in the pigsty, which is why we had a pig boy. Although I must say, I got used to the pigs’ smell and didn’t mind it. Mattress said that if humans lay around in their own shit they’d smell just as bad as the sow.

  Mattress moved over to the sow, the greenish black stink-mud squelching between his toes. He had very large feet because he was a very big man and they were almost worn out. If they’d been shoes they would have needed to be thrown away long ago. The soles of his feet were about an inch thick and were splayed out with deep cracks running down the sides. It was as if he walked on an old pair of really thick leather soles about an inch and a half wider than the top part of his foot. This callused platform of hard, rough skin looked like it was glued to the underpart of his feet. He’d once explained this had happened from his having been a herd boy in the mountains when he was about my age.

  ‘Kleinbaas, I was a herd boy in the mountains of Zululand and the small boys looked after the village goats. Goats like to be on the high slopes and on the rocks and they’ve got you jumping from rock to rock and running and slipping and sliding down the razor-sharp shale. Soon you’re bleeding and sore and when you get back limping to the kraal at night the old men sitting under the marula trees laugh and say, “Umfaan, you are not a herd boy’s arsehole until the bleeding stops and the hard skin comes”.’ Mattress laughed at the memory. ‘Slowly, slowly, the soles of your feet grow hard.’ He pointed proudly to his feet. ‘And then when they get like this you know you have beaten the mountains and the rocks and the wicked whitethorns and the shale that cuts like a knife.’

  Mattress made me see that having feet like his could be a very big advantage in life because you didn’t need boots and could go anywhere you liked.

  As he walked over to the sow she looked at him with a suspicious eye and grunted a warning a bit louder than usual but otherwise didn’t move. Pigs can be dangerous and a sow protecting her young is not to be trifled with. She must have known Mattress because she didn’t seem to mind when he picked up four piglets by the tail, two in each hand, and walked over and dumped them over the short stone wall into a vacant pigsty next door. Boy! You should’ve heard the squealing going on! This left two teats vacant. He turned, walked over to me and reached over the wall and took Tinker from me. The tiny, sightless puppy seemed to disappear within his large hands. With each piglet having a teat to itself the remaining piglets were going at it hell for leather and didn’t even see Mattress placing Tinker next to a vacant teat. I waited anxiously as Tinker’s nose bounced against the huge teat that was bigger than her nose. At first she didn’t seem to know what to do but Mattress held her against the pig’s great pink teat and sort of rubbed her nose on it and a small drop of yellowish milk came out. Tinker was on it like a shot. Her tiny mouth opened and I don’t know how she got that big sow’s teat into her mouth but she did, and then she hung on.

  ‘Ahee! The mighty one!’ Mattress exclaimed, clapping. ‘She is a lioness this one. She will survive!’

  I can tell you I was very relieved. But then disaster struck, one of the piglets let go of his own teat and wanted Tinker’s.

  ‘Quick!’ I shouted to Mattress. ‘Save her!’

  Mattress did no such thing and Tinker was sent rolling into the stink-mud. Mattress laughed and picked her up. ‘She must learn that life is hard, Kleinbaas,’ he explained, but then he moved the piglet away and placed it back on its former teat and reinstated Tinker. It happened again. This time Tinker was sent sprawling against the wall near where I was standing and she gave a yelp and at that very moment, lying on her back, trying to get to her feet, her eyes opened and she looked straight into mine. I was the first thing she saw in her life, and I can tell you it was love at first sight. Her and me, from now on we were in this together, Tinker and Tom, a deadly combination in the making.

  Mattress picked her up again. ‘Back you go, little lioness,’ he said and placed her on the spare teat. This time she had a good feed, sucking for dear life, her tiny jaws working overtime, the sow’s rich milk running from the corners of her mouth. After a while you could see her tummy grow as big as a tennis ball so we knew she’d had enough.

  ‘The sow’s milk is good, Kleinbaas,’ Mattress said, handing Tinker back to me. ‘She will grow strong and soon she’ll be eating inyama,’ which means meat in Zulu.

  The next problem was accommodation and here Mattress wasn’t to prove very helpful. ‘Can Tinker live with you in your kaya?’ I asked him.

  He sat down on the pigsty wall and sighed heavily, looking down at his cracked feet, unable to meet my eyes. ‘This thing, it is not possible, Kleinbaas, the Big Baas Botha will not allow it. He will say I have a kaffir dog and they are not allowed here. We cannot have such a dog in this place, he will wring her neck.’

  I should explain the word ‘kaffir’. It was used like the word ‘nigger’ was used in America, which wasn’t very nice, so a kaffir dog was something that whites thought was pretty bad. Even I was shocked at the idea of Tinker being thought of as a kaffir dog.

  ‘Oh, but she is not a kaffir dog!’ I protested. Kaffir dogs were thin and scrawny with their ribs showing, they skulked around with their tails between their legs and with sores showing through their mangy pelts. They understood Voetsek very well and couldn’t look you in the eye. Tinker wouldn’t grow up to be like one of them.

  ‘We cannot have a dog in this place, we are black.’ Mattress said it without sadness, just sort of resigned. I knew he was right, we had rules in The Boys Farm and he had rules as th
e pig boy and you simply couldn’t go against the rules, no matter what. ‘I will lose my job,’ he said.

  I wanted to cry but what use would that be? Crying never solved anything and, besides, I wasn’t much good at the business of blubbing. It was bad enough being English but if they saw me blubbing all over the place they’d really have a go. I did what crying it was impossible to avoid at the big rock where nobody ever came except me. Then it struck me. I would keep Tinker at the rock, it had plenty of overhang and I could make her a sort of burrow underneath and every day take her to the pigsty for a feed. She’d be okay while I was at school, and when she got a bit bigger I would build a stone enclosure under the overhang where she could play when I wasn’t around or had to work in the vegetable garden.

  I felt pretty cheered up as I outlined this plan to Mattress, although from his expression I could see he seemed less than convinced. He nodded gravely and said maybe it was a plan that could work and that he was very sorry about not being able to help, but jobs were hard to come by and he had to send money back to his wife in Zululand.

  I was amazed to think that Mattress had a wife and that I didn’t even know about her, but there you go, white people didn’t spend much time asking black people about their lives, so Mattress was just the pig boy and didn’t exist beyond his immediate occupation. I had fallen into the same white-people-total-disinterest-in-black-people trap, and even at six years old I felt ashamed.

  ‘Do you have children, Mattress?’

  His face lit up. ‘One boy same like you, already he is with the goats and his feet I think they will soon be hard and will not bleed.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Mkiti Malokoane, but he also has a white man’s name, it’s Joe Louis, same like Joe Louis the mighty fighter who is Amabantu.’ Mkiti means ‘Big Feast’ and Malokoane was Mattress’s surname. I confess that I’d never heard of Joe Louis the boxer and thought he must be someone from Mattress’s tribe. But not long after Meneer Frikkie Botha, who was Mattress’s boss and who looked after the farm but was also the boxing coach, was answering a question from one of the boys, Fonnie du Preez, who was the best boxer at The Boys Farm. The question was, ‘Why are American kaffirs like Joe Louis such good boxers?’

  There was the name again, so I listened to the answer. ‘Ag, that Joe Louis is good, but he was knocked out by a white man, a German, Max Schmeling. With those American kaffir boxers they all one-punch Johnnies, you hear. Then they come across a white man with brains who can really box and it’s, “Good night, lights out, hear the dicky bird singing, kaffir!” Mostly those black guys they got glass jaws, man!’

  I thought that I’d better not tell Mattress that Joe Louis had a jaw that was made of glass and what happened to him, because I didn’t want him to be disappointed and maybe think he should have called his son Max.

  Much later on I heard that it must have just been a lucky punch from Max Schmeling that knocked Joe Louis out, because the next time they boxed Joe knocked out Max in the first round. Meneer Botha didn’t tell us that bit or that Joe Louis stayed Heavyweight Champion of the World for ages afterwards. So Mattress had every right to be proud and name his son after the great boxer. All this had happened already and Meneer Botha must have known it at the time. But he didn’t tell us, did he? He just made us think that Schmeling was the white hero that beat the black bastard. Which goes to show you have to find out about a person yourself and not listen to all the badmouthing going on all over the place. In life you can’t just take the part of a story that suits the way you think and leave the other stuff out.

  ‘I will help you find some rocks to make a home for the little lioness,’ Mattress offered kindly. But I knew he shouldn’t because if Meneer Botha caught Mattress helping me beyond his pigsty and dairy territory it could mean big trouble for him. Meneer Botha wasn’t kind to black people and always referred to them as black kaffirs and even sometimes as baboons.

  ‘It’s okay, I can do it myself,’ I said and I could see Mattress was relieved.

  ‘Maybe if you need some big rocks moved I can do it, Kleinbaas.’

  ‘She is only a very small dog,’ I replied. ‘There are lots of small rocks around.’

  So I dug a sort of burrow under the big rock and found some old mielie sacks to keep her warm and this became Tinker’s home and at night I’d close it using an old cut-in-half four-gallon paraffin tin so nothing could get at her.

  For a while all went well and the weeks passed and I’d take Tinker for a feed in the morning before going to school and then again when we returned to the farm. Soon she was a fat, happy puppy jumping up and down and being very playful. She was still on the sow’s teat but now she was the boss. Even though she was a lot smaller than the piglets they soon learned to stay away from her because she’d grab them by the tail or an ear and hang on for dear life. The piglet would try to shake her off to no avail and squeal blue murder. Mattress said that Tinker the lioness was learning to survive in the jungle. I began saving crusts for her from our breakfast bread and Mattress cut a jam tin in half and he’d bring her milk from the dairy when she was old enough not to need the sow’s teat.

  When things go well you tend to grow careless and I was taking Tinker for walks well away from the big rock when one day we turned a corner and there stood Pissy Vermaak with his knobbly knees and snotty nose and sort of caved-in chest.

  ‘Whose dog is that, Voetsek?’ he sniffed, pointing at Tinker.

  ‘It’s a dog. I found it just now,’ I lied.

  ‘Look, man, he’s fat, he must be someone’s,’ Pissy observed.

  ‘I dunno, I suppose,’ I said.

  ‘You jus’ found him?’ Pissy said suspiciously. ‘He jus’ came walking along all of a sudden, hey?’

  I nodded. I was still learning to lie and wasn’t very good at it yet. All this lying was getting me deeper and deeper into the shit. Pissy wasn’t someone I needed to be afraid of, as he couldn’t fight or anything, even though he was ten years old. He’d got his name when he was smaller and used to wet his bed. He was dangerous though because he had a reputation for reporting things to Mevrou, the matron. He had this bad chest and had to go to her every night to get medicine and that’s when he’d tittle-tattle. He’d tell her about the things that went on in the dormitory and other places so that before you knew it Mevrou called you in and you got six of the best with the sjambok. Nobody liked Pissy for that reason and also, he always smelled of piss, his skin when you got near smelled like piss when it has been standing in the chamberpot all night. People said that he could have fits ‘out of the blue’ if he got a fright or was beaten or something like that, although it had never happened while I’d been there. Maybe his smelling of piss had something to do with him having out-of-the-blue fits. He had ginger hair and lots of big brown freckles and his skin where he wasn’t sunburnt was pale pink, all of which was unusual for an Afrikaner.

  ‘He’s yours, isn’t he, Voetsek?’ Pissy bent down and picked up Tinker who was too small to know she was in enemy hands. ‘I think I’ll have him, take him for me.’

  ‘No!’ I screamed. ‘She’s mine, she’s my dog.’

  Pissy Vermaak laughed. ‘Ja, man, I thought so all the time. I’m going to tell on you, Voetsek. Wait till Mevrou hears what you been doing, hey.’

  ‘Please, Pissy, don’t tell her!’ I begged.

  ‘Only if you give him to me.’

  ‘She’s a her, not a him.’

  He mustn’t have heard when I first called Tinker a she and now his expression changed to one of alarm. ‘Sis, man! A bitch dog! She’ll have babies all over the place!’

  He started to squeeze Tinker around the neck as if to strangle her. Tinker gave a desperate yelp and bit him on the thumb. Pissy yelled ‘Eina!’ and dropped Tinker, who fell to the ground yelping and afraid. Pissy hopped up and down and wrung his hand in the air and then he brought his thumb up to his mouth to suck the hurt.

  I didn’t even realise I’d done it until after
Pissy had doubled up and began to cough, holding his stomach and coughing like mad and staggering all over the place. I’d driven my fist straight into his stomach, hard as anything. I can tell you I didn’t hang around to admire the result, but grabbed Tinker and ran back to the big rock and put her safely in her burrow.

  I knew that wasn’t the end of the matter. Far from it, a person doesn’t get away with that sort of thing with Pissy Vermaak around. He’d be reporting to Mevrou and she’d tell Meneer Botha, that was for sure. This time you in the deep shit, man! I was about to lose the one thing I loved the most in the whole world. Without Tinker I was on my own again and my happy days were all over, finish and klaar. So I just sat there under the rock and I blubbed a bit and tried to think what I might do. But my brain was scrambled and no ideas would come and I was becoming desperate and the bell would soon go for us to wash our hands before going in to supper. I’d cleaned out Tinker’s burrow so it was a bit deeper in case someone came looking for her, and we had to clean our nails for inspection before we went in to supper. Mine were bad from the burrowing and I would have to take my place at the end of the queue in the shower room for my turn to use the scrubbing brush and if I didn’t get a go before the supper bell went I’d get the sjambok. Not that it mattered, dirty nails got three cuts and you’d only be sore sitting for about an hour before it wore off. Right now dirty nails were the least of my problems.

  If Tinker and me ran away there wasn’t any place for us to go. I was deep inside enemy territory and a war was coming and Meneer Botha said he’d joined both the Broederbond and Die Ossewabrandwag, both sort of secret societies made up of Boere on Hitler’s side. He said the whole district felt the same and they were not going to fight for the blêrrie English, no matter what General Jan Christiaan Smuts said in all the newspapers and on the radio. Meneer Botha said that Jannie Smuts was a known traitor, a Boer War General who had gone over to the English in the First World War and became a hero to the British. So he was a definite traitor to the Boerevolk, to his very own herrenvolk.