Frankie and Stankie (10 page)

And next morning the flying ants are no longer flying. They are writhing on the ground en masse. They have all shed their wings and become termites that can eat at high speed through the foundations of houses or through the roots of passion-fruit vines. They're so fast that you can see your plants actually withering as they munch. Piles of papery wings lie in the gutters and clog the storm drains. The storm drains have always fascinated Dinah, who is, in general, likely to take up challenges with regard to climbing and crawling. Because the rains come heavy and tropical in Durban, the gutters are deep and the pavements high, so the concrete ramps from pavement to street that cover the storm drains leave just enough room for a scrawny child to crawl through. Dinah can remember several times taking up dares to crawl on her belly through the triangular, eight-foot-long concrete tunnels created by these ramps which are open on the wide side to torrents of gushing water.

Every year Lucy goes home to what locals call the kraal. She goes home to Zululand and she returns with gifts for her employers. These are always one excessively scrawny dead chicken and a handful of oranges that come the size of golf balls. The girls' dad explains to them that the size bears witness to the over-use of over-populated land. But at school, Lisa and Dinah learn that the smallness of the oranges is because the Zulus cause soil erosion by refusing to engage in contour ploughing, much as we have tried to educate them in this matter. The eroded crevices are called dongas. Zulus have got a word for soil erosion but they haven't got a word for thank you. This is what white people say. ‘There is no word for thank you in the Zulu language.' This is why the Zulus are never grateful.

In geography the girls are required to draw pictures of the erroneous way that Zulus plough: vertical furrows, running down the hill. Then, alongside, they draw pictures of proper ploughing, with the furrows going in concentric, horizontal rings around the hill. They do these with their Lakeland coloured pencils that come in a tin with a water-colour painting of Windermere on the lid. Dinah's mother will pressure-cook Lucy's chicken and then make a big pot of soup. She always refers to the chickens as ‘ze zousand-year-old fowl', but only when Lucy isn't listening.

Then one day, five years on, there's a kerfuffle in the servants' quarters and Lucy is in floods of tears because her father has arranged a marriage and he has come to fetch her home. She weeps and clings to Lisa and Dinah, just as the girls are weeping and clinging to her. But as the old man has pointed out earlier, Lucy is an obedient girl. She soon succumbs and allows herself to be stripped of her housemaid's overalls and headscarf. Then she is elaborately prepared for marriage.

By the time the wedding party is ready to leave, Lucy is bare-breasted and has a tall hairstyle moulded with red mud, and lots of beads on her neck and wrists and ankles. Plus she's wearing a sort of sporran covered in beads, like a little apron over her crotch. Then she is encased in a blanket cloak for the third-class train ride home. Lucy's appearance ought not to be a shock to the girls, since the centre of Durban is still dotted with bare-breasted young Zulu women with mud-sculpted hair, moulded into shapes like the tall,
exotic hats in Piero della Francesca paintings. They're adorned with elaborate beadwork and tinkly seed anklets. These are the country girls come to town to visit their menfolk who are working at jobs in town. But once Lucy is dressed in her bride's gear, Lisa and Dinah keep their distance – just as Lucy does from them. It's as if she isn't quite Lucy any more and they feel shy to reach out and touch her.

Then Lucy's gone and, though they long for her, they never see her again. After a while there's a new maid called Maria. She's very efficient and townie and she's very fluent in English. But poor efficient Maria has a permanent downside, because there's a violent drug-addicted boyfriend who comes by quite frequently at night and he attacks her with a knife. And once the screams in the small hours and the police raids get too much for everybody, including all the other servants, Maria is paid off with two months' wages and given a glowing reference so that she can start the doomed cycle all over again somewhere else. ‘To Whom It May Concern.'

Lots of blacks smoke cannabis, which is locally called dagga. The papers are always full of pictures of police raids in rural Natal. Police anthropology maintains that dagga makes ‘the natives' violent. But this is decades before white students have taken to smoking it as a means of invoking peace and love.

The reason why the Zulus whom Dinah sees in Durban are less townie than the indigenous people she remembers from Cape Town is not only because whites have settled in Natal much later. It's also because the Zulus are stronger. In the Cape, the Khoi have lost all their land before the end of the eighteenth century – by which time the settlers are bumping up against the Xhosa's land in the east. The Xhosa clans are thriving farmers and they've got some fabulous pastures but, on their own, the Dutch settlers aren't strong enough to grab it for themselves. So it's only when the British take the Cape that the Xhosa lose their land. The British have recently defeated Napoleon, so now they can whistle up any number of redcoats who haven't got very much to do. So the project is total onslaught and it continues for thirty-five years. In her school history, Dinah's forever having to learn about the eight Xhosa Wars but, always, in the history lessons, the wars are the Xhosa's own fault. Plus one of the wars has got something to do with somebody stealing an axe. A lot of the war stuff has got
muddled in her mind with white people having to teach the Xhosa about wearing trousers and also about how they should start to build their houses square – because the Xhosa's houses are round.

The British officers in her history book's pictures all have that pretty, effeminate look that she's seen in oil portraits of Lord Nelson. They've got wide-spaced eyes and sucked-in cheeks and those wafty puffs of silver hair. But what they're saying is that they will not cease, ‘so long as a single kaffir remains alive'. So the Xhosa get their land sold off as white-settler sheep farms. Plus their cattle and their social structures are screwed. And those Xhosa who are left alive have started to eat out of dustbins.

The Zulus have a different story because, by the time the British set up their little trading post in Durban, it's twenty years into the nineteenth century. And the Zulus have stopped being a group of clans because by then King Shaka has come along and has welded them into the Zulu nation with an effective military dimension. So, although they concede significant chunks of land, they don't become a serious target until the end of the century when the mines are rabid for more labour. Blacks with land are a thorn in the flesh of those wanting cheap migrant mine workers. Plus other black migrant mine workers will need to be moved across the Zulus' territory and that could pose a problem. So the British High Commissioner decides to stoke a war. He makes wild demands of Cetshwayo, the Zulu king, knowing that these can't be met. Cetshwayo's response is to keep things cool. He won't start a war with the British, he says, since he considers them his friends. But if they choose to start with him, then his armies will be ready. So the British march into Zululand, whereupon the unthinkable happens. Twenty thousand highly disciplined Zulus with assegais demolish the British forces at the Battle of Isandlwana.

After that, honour requires that the Zulus get defeated next time round, but the victory doesn't come particularly cheap and the memory of Isandlwana never quite goes away. So total onslaught is not an option. Instead the British abolish the Zulu monarchy and divide the kingdom into thirteen chiefdoms, saying that they are ‘restoring' Zululand to its rightful, traditional structure. That is to say, to the structure it had before Shaka came along and spoilt it.

Cetshwayo is imprisoned in the Cape Town Castle, but, being an active letter writer, he finally secures a passage to London and a
lunch date with Queen Victoria. He charms the queen, he charms fashionable London, especially the female contingent, because Cetshwayo is a tall black
Ü
bermensch
and he's quite incredibly good-looking. From his six-month billet in Kensington he at last secures the right to go home, but within the year he's dead.

Nonetheless, for all their new, somewhat pseudo chiefs, plus a medley of punitive taxes, the Zulus, unlike the Xhosa, are never quite eating their own sandals. And, more than any other defeated group, they manage to hang on to something. They hang on to an idea of themselves. And, while this proves both a strength and a weakness, it accounts for Lucy's allure –
that she carries around a sense of herself: a sense of being who she is
.

All that year in Mrs Vaughan-Jones's class, Dinah is so miserable that her health goes steadily downhill. She faints in assembly three times and, each time, gets carted off to the sick room. She gets asthma so badly nearly every Sunday night that she can't go to school on Monday mornings. She develops four consecutive bouts of bronchitis. Once she gets a high fever that makes all the skin come off her hands and she stays in bed for so long that her parents buy her a Fairy Cycle as a lure to get her up. So Dinah gets up for just long enough to fall off the Fairy Cycle and rip open both her knees. Then she goes back to bed with two thick pus-y scabs that grow a kind of fur which is nice to pick at. After that, the Fairy Cycle becomes the property of the child commune. All the kids on the Butcher Estate learn how to ride it, except Dinah.

One Monday morning she is screaming with pain after a night of wheezing and she says she can't pee. Her abdomen is hard and distended. By the time the doctor comes and recommends immersion in a hot bath, it's too late for her to go to school. Oh bliss. In the bath, Dinah's sphincter muscles relax. Her pee flows copious and dark, dyeing the bath water amber.

Dinah is by now quite phobic about school and prays for lightning bolts, twisted ankles and asthma attacks. Anything.
Anything
. And there is something increasingly seductive about bed. She sits propped up in bed and sews throughout her days off school. Her mother buys her squares of felt. She sews a whole range of miniature three-dimensional animal toys, which she cuts out from patterns of her own design. She blanket-stitches the seams
together with embroidery thread. The animals become family heirlooms and hang from the Christmas tree each year. There is a monkey and a giraffe, and a lion with an orange-wool mane. There's an elephant and a deer and a hare, and a sheepdog with a pink felt tongue hanging out of his open felt mouth. Dinah always remembers the satisfaction she got from working out how to make the sheepdog's open mouth. And she makes paper dolls to her own designs too, with wardrobes of paper clothes that hook on to the dolls' shoulders and hips with tabs.

She writes stories in little home-made books with lots of illustrations – books that are always tribute for her mother.
The Strange Little Dog Who Only Ate Tomatoes
. Then there's
The Kitten Who Had No Tail
. One day she starts writing her most ambitious story. It's about a mouse who saves an old Dutch sailing ship from capture by gnawing through the ropes that are binding it to a pirate ship. The mouse's name is a pun. He's called Hieronymous.

Sometimes she creeps out of bed to play with her big home-made doll's house. This is an ever-increasing collection of wooden margarine crates that her mother has painted for her. The doll's house is inhabited by pipe-cleaner people who've been sent by her grandmother in The Hague. Each time Dinah has a birthday, people on the Butcher Estate give her more and more items of doll's-house furniture – and kind Mrs Notcutt, who keeps a present cupboard for birthdays, has more than once supplied the pipe-cleaner people with whole suites. Whenever Dinah gets another set of furniture, then her mother has to paint another margarine crate and soon the doll's-house people are living in a fifteen-roomed mansion with a music room, three bathrooms, five reception rooms and a nursery. And while her parents – the Gieseke thrones excepted – incline towards post-war Swedish birchwood interiors, the pipe-cleaner people have a more traditional style. Their house is all mahogany and Chippendale and the grand piano has a red Chinese-y lacquer. Dinah also has a Dryads miniature weaving loom, eight inches by ten, which is just big enough for her to weave carpets for all the doll's-house rooms.

Sometimes her mother weaves the dolls a carpet too, since in her heart she longs for a proper weaving loom all for herself. Dinah's mother worked as a dress designer in Berlin before the war. She designed ball gowns for a small couture house until one day the head of house asked her to model the gowns herself.

‘You have a fine figure, Marianne,' he said. ‘You'd look beautiful in the clothes.'

At home, as far as her parents were concerned, this suggestion was tantamount to an assertion that their daughter had loose morals, and Dinah's mum was made to resign the job immediately and be a stay-at-home girl from then on: an old-fashioned young lady waiting for a suitable husband. Now she likes to make dresses for Dinah's dolls, but because she's so hopeless at the practicalities of sewing, Dinah has to match up all the seams herself.

Dinah's mum has some old books in which she once collected smoothed-out sheets of silver paper from chocolate wrappings. So the silver paper is fifteen years older than Dinah. Each sheet is different. Each has a period look. Some have star patterns and some have a sort of tumbling-block effect when she holds them up to the light. Dinah loves to play with them.

It's bliss to be alone in the house with her mother. Her only rival is the piano. Dinah's mother plays Scarlatti and Bach and Brahms all morning. She plays Haydn and Mozart and Chopin, which Dinah finds a trial. She calls out for drinks, but her mum can't hear her. Sometimes she whistles along so persistently that it makes her mother stop. There are days when nothing will stop her mother's piano playing except for a dramatic tropical thunderstorm, which drives them into each other's arms. One day Dinah and her mother are cowering in the tiny passage after a deafening crack of thunder, when a zigzag bolt of lightning runs down the opposite wall three feet from where they are standing. Dinah has no idea that the lightning could have killed them, though she always remembers the crackle. She remembers it as the day God sketched a lifesize gold Christmas tree on the passage wall just for the two of them. Not for anyone else.