Frankie and Stankie (11 page)

Whenever Dinah returns to school after a patch of illness, Mrs Vaughan-Jones always prods and pinches her. She picks her brain about the details of the illnesses, without ever reading her parents' notes. When Dinah tries to answer, she gets mimicked and contradicted. By the end of the year Mrs Vaughan-Jones is making Dinah take her sick notes straight to the head who always colludes with the teachers. The open-air school is their joint favourite threat. It's a terrifying prospect for Dinah: an institution conceived by fresh-air
fascists in which all the local dafties and cripples are lumped together. If you're at the open-air school, you have to go off every morning in a special white bus with writing on the side. And you have to do things like make wicker baskets all day long instead of doing proper work, even if you're brainy, because proper work might make you much too tired. Dinah knows that to be sent there would be the end of the world.

Then, one astonishing day, Mrs Vaughan-Jones Goes Too Far and Dinah, and all future generations, are saved. It's the final week of the school year, just coming up to Christmas and it's Toy Day. Dinah has been away with bronchitis just before Toy Day, but she knows, when she goes back, that it's the day on which you're allowed to bring a favourite toy to school. Because she knows better than to bring Rosema, with her darned nose and wool hair, she brings Felicity-Jane, a new doll that has plastic button-over shoes and can stand up all by herself. Felicity-Jane is a present from one of Dinah's dad's grateful students. He's knocked at the door the previous weekend with two identical dolls in cellophane boxes. The dolls are wearing silk and lace dresses very like those worn by the little Indian girls at the Hindu wedding. One doll is for Lisa and one for Dinah.

Although it's still coming-to-school time, Mrs Vaughan-Jones makes Dinah stand Felicity-Jane four-square in the open classroom doorway. Then she orders Dinah to come and stand at the teacher's table with her back to the door while she goes through her usual sadist's routine over the sick note.

‘Was the sickness in your hair?' she says and she tugs Dinah's plaits. Next, she stamps on Dinah's feet. ‘Was the sickness in your feet?' she says.

As she proceeds, the inevitable happens. Poor, squinty, permed Melanie dashes in, hoping not to be late, and she sends Felicity-Jane flying. The doll is not broken, but Mrs Vaughan-Jones decides to cut short her interrogation of Dinah in order to set about Melanie. She is beating Melanie about the head with the metal-edged ruler in time to her own rhythmic ranting.

‘How-many-times-have-you-been-told-not-to-run-in-school?'

Then she starts telling her off for being careless with Dinah's new doll, which is worth ‘such a lot of money'. It's all making Dinah feel terrible. Mrs Vaughan-Jones makes Melanie say sorry to Dinah out
loud in front of the class. By this time Melanie is crying and so is Dinah.

Then, once both girls are snivelling and humiliated, Mrs Vaughan-Jones breaks into one of her scary, moon-faced smiles.

‘But we've got a surprise for Dinah, haven't we, Class Two?' she says.

‘Yesmrsvaughanjones,' the class chants in reply.

She plucks the large red Top Girl rosette from her teacher's drawer on the podium and pins it, for the last time, to Dinah's wheezy little concave chest. On this occasion, Dinah has managed to complete the monthly tests just before she got bronchitis, so someone else has had to move all her books from the bottom of the D row to the top of the Al ice-cream row. Dinah is sent to her new place, but she's still so scared that someone will smash Felicity-Jane that she can't enjoy her elevation. This is because Mrs Vaughan-Jones has made her put the doll right back in the open doorway.

Just then a new girl comes in on a visit with both her parents. They are a trio of beautiful, small-boned Italian immigrants – part of the post-war immigration boom. Mamma, Papa and Bambina. Lots of Italians are coming to live here right now, because the men have been prisoners-of-war in South Africa and they've decided to return with their families. Claudia Tucci looks just like a child film star in a white muslin party dress and she wears her hair in ringlets tied with ribbons. Her mum wears red lipstick and peep-toe shoes and gloves and a white dress to match Claudia's only with a wide circular skirt, and a hat of white straw, like a plate with the crown cut away. Signor Tucci is wearing a smart black suit and very shiny black shoes. His hair is parted dead centre and he's got a nice little black moustache. None of them can speak a word of English. They skirt delicately round Felicity-Jane, looking at her with some surprise, and they approach the teacher's table, where Mrs Vaughan-Jones gabbles and spits at them, pushing her mad woman's moon face right into Claudia's face and giving her a poke in the ribs. Then she sees fit to take the family on a tour of the classroom. She leads them straight up to the top of the Al row.

‘This is Dinah,' she says, ‘our Top Girl. Snivelling, as usual.'

Dinah knows that she looks hideous with her red swollen eyes and her red swollen nose and her asthmatic's black smudges around
her eyes. She wishes the floor would swallow her up as the angelic trio beams down upon her.

None of the Tucci family understands a single word of what Mrs Vaughan-Jones is saying, but they can see that the Class Two Top Girl is not a happy little creature. Signora Tucci opens her white straw handbag and plucks out a little wrapped bonbon which she slips into the pocket of Dinah's hideous grass-green uniform. Signor Tucci mimes a little cheering-up routine, which involves persistent waves and winks, while Mrs Vaughan-Jones is talking. When they leave, Claudia goes ahead, doing skippety little dance steps down the aisle. Her feet are two dainty little mice.

Claudia Tucci never turns up at Dinah's school, but Dinah sees her, two years on, at the Durban Beach Baths. It's the inter-school junior swimming gala and, like Dinah, she isn't swimming. She's cheering on her team from the tiered stands that rise up in front of the Cuban Hat drive-in restaurant. Dinah can't help noticing that the bold red-and-black blazer of the girls' convent school is looking very good on her.

Meanwhile from everywhere in the school the sounds of Christmas carols are floating into the classroom. Everyone in the school is doing Christmasy things, special-treat things, except for Dinah's class, because Mrs Vaughan-Jones is making them keep on copying notes from the board. Suddenly she makes one of her lunges at Patsy John and she's armed with her metal-edged ruler. The only difference this time is that she seems to have forgotten that she's still standing on her podium. She misses her footing and falls flat on her face. Literally flat on her face. The class, which is already silent, falls so silent that it's eerie. Dinah thinks that maybe Mrs Vaughan-Jones is dead – or then again maybe not. It could be that she's like a wicked witch in a fairy-tale who's just playing dead in order to trick them.

Finally, after ages, Mrs Vaughan-Jones gets up very slowly and, with the ruler still in her hand, she advances on Patsy without a word. Her jaw is sort of wobbling and there's dribble on her chin. She drags Patsy out of her seat by the hair without a word and pulls her along until they are on the spot where Mrs Vaughan-Jones fell. Silent tears have started from Patsy's Kewpie-doll eyes, because the pain in the hair follicles on her scalp must be unbearable. Then Mrs Vaughan-Jones shakes Patsy, back and forth, before forcing her to
the floor and planting a foot in the small of Patsy's back. She gets Penny-Lou Headley to empty Patsy's desk and make a pile of all her books and pens on the floor.

‘You'll do your work down
there
, Patsy John,' she says, in a slightly lisping voice. ‘You deliberately caused me to fall. Now let this be a lesson to you.'

And Patsy has to spend the rest of the day doing her work like that, lying face down on the floor. Then, the next day – and the next and the next – Mrs Vaughan-Jones isn't there. And then it's the Christmas holidays.

Once it's the holidays, Dinah forgets all about Class Two, because when she gets back she'll be upstairs in Class Three with Miss Vaizey, who smiles and chats and sits on her desk swinging her legs. Sometimes Miss Vaizey wears a polka-dot dress with a full skirt and cap sleeves, or she wears a tight pencil skirt with a kick pleat at the back and a trim white blouse with a cameo brooch. And she lets her girls do really fun things, like making 3D maps of all four provinces of the Union of South Africa on pastry boards with Plasticine. The Cape, Natal, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. She gets you to do all the forested areas with bits of bath sponge that you dip in dark-green paint. Dinah knows all about these things from Lisa who's had a great time all year and she's made lots of friends.

Plus, once you get past Class Two, you do cookery and sewing in the special domestic science annexe with Mrs Stewart, but everyone calls her Stewpot behind her back. The girls have been preparing for cookery all through Class Two, because, on one afternoon a week, they have had to work at making their cookery aprons by hand. The aprons are white poplin but they have checked gingham waistbands and matching blue or red gingham borders and pockets. On all the gingham bits the girls have to do cross-stitch patterns. If your gingham is red then you do your cross-stitch with blue embroidery thread and, if it's blue, you use red. You have to embroider your name on the white bit of the pocket as well, in chain-stitched cursive.

At home, over Christmas, Lisa and Dinah make peg bags and needle books for their mum and they buy their dad some very tight brown socks that are quite hard for him to get on and off. They buy the socks with all the money Dinah's got saved in her red tin money
box and it has to be a together-present, because Lisa hasn't got any money left. She's spent it all on Toffo-lux and Crunchie bars. Their mum bakes special plaited doughnuts and cream puffs, and she makes biscuits in different Christmasy shapes, like fir trees and bells and stars. She decorates the Advent
Kranz
with greenery and hangs it over the dining table with tall candles and red ribbons.

Because Dinah's mum does German-style Christmas, it's Christmas Eve that is the big time and the girls always open their presents by candlelight after supper while the radio is relaying the Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College Chapel in Cambridge. Dinah loves the pure, posh-voiced treble of the choir-school boys – and especially that of the one who reads the lesson into the darkness of her living room, against the nightly siren-scream of the grasshoppers. For supper they have home-boiled ham and asparagus out of a tin and shredded carrot salad and potato salad with lots of mayonnaise. Dinah's dad always makes the mayonnaise in a bowl, adding the oil drop by drop with a wooden spoon. Mayonnaise and piccalilli are about the only things that Dinah really loves to eat, so she'll eat almost anything if it's smothered in mayonnaise.

Back at school Mrs Vaughan-Jones has been dispatched as if by spontaneous combustion. Or perhaps she's just dissolved, like the Wicked Witch of the North in
The Wizard of Oz
that Lisa and Dinah have just been taken to see. But no! She hasn't, because Dinah sees her one more time and it's about two years later. Mrs Vaughan-Jones is doddling down West Street, right in the town centre. She's making strange niddy-noddy head movements and talking gibberish to herself. Her mouth is wearing a madder version of the scary moonfaced smile and she's dressed in a plaid skirt and a cable-stitched cardi. Dinah can see that, at the back, Mrs Vaughan-Jones's skirt has got all tucked up into the waistband of her bloomers, so that from behind you can see all the way up her lumpy, gnarled old legs.

A bit of Dinah wants to go and sort out the old woman's skirt, but she can't for fear that Mrs Vaughan-Jones will suddenly spin round, dextrous and triumphant. And Dinah will be back in Class Two, gnawing her way tearfully through a mountain of packed lunch. Or she'll be stuffed, snivelling, into the hot seat at the top of the Al ice-cream row. Besides, Dinah finds that her legs have
turned to jelly and she can't seem to move an inch. Mrs Vaughan-Jones walks right on past her, because the increasing egg-yolk film in the corners of her eyes has clearly done for her fly's-eye vision. Then, once she's moved on by, Dinah's heart leaps inside her and she knows that she is glad. Free for ever of Mrs Vaughan-Jones and so glad that she wants to dance and sing.

The general election in 1948 is being fought between one white party and another white party. Black people and Indians can't vote. Coloureds can vote, but only in the Cape, because the Cape still has that little vestige remaining of its onetime colour-blind franchise. So blacks used to have the vote in the Cape, but they don't any more. Not since the Act of Union at the end of the Boer War. At school Dinah is taught that this elimination of the Cape's black franchise was a Good Thing, because it means all four provinces of the Union of South Africa now have the same Native Policy. And UNITY IS STRENGTH – that's the Union's motto. In Afrikaans it's just the same.
Eendrag Maak Mag
. Dinah is taught that anything which brings the two white-language groups together is always a Good Thing, because it proves that both groups have put the enmity of the Boer War behind them and that Afrikaner and English South Africans are now the best of friends. Meanwhile, the two groups go on hating each other like poison. The only rule is that any gestures of unity between them will come at the price of short-changing the blacks.

The two white parties are called the United Party and the National Party. The United Party is the one English whites like best, even though its leader is the former Boer War general, Jan Smuts. But these days the General is big friends with all the captains of industry – and, for the moment, they're all English. Plus he loves to hobnob with the British royal family and, since the Windsors seem to love him back, his photo-opportunities are many. With his dapper little naval beard and his regal bearing, you might think that the General
was
one of the Windsors, were it not for the occasional presence of his wife, Ouma.