Frankie and Stankie (16 page)

Anyway, in that same year, the English are focused on a happening which is vastly more exciting in their hierarchy of public goings-on than a general election, and the teachers and pupils at the Berea Road Government School for Girls are no exception. They are all preparing to celebrate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. This is a very big occasion, but it's one that is not without its down side for Lisa and Dinah, much as they are enchanted by their free Coronation mugs. For weeks beforehand, the up-coming Coronation has ushered in a fever pitch of Durbanite royalism among the staff, and the girls' headmistress employs a non-stop three-line whip in the matter of peddling her stock of British flags. Every child is required to bring half a crown to school for the purpose of buying a small Union Jack on a stick. The flags
are about the size of a standard school exercise book and they're selling at a brisk pace.

The problem for Lisa and Dinah is that their dad has a theory about flags and he says they're not to have them. Flags represent nationalism, he says, and nationalism is a Bad Thing. Nationalism, along with religion, is the root of all evil.

‘Look what happened in Germany,' he says. ‘Look at what's happening right here.'

Lisa and Dinah are unimpressed. They're sick of always being deviants at school and they're longing to wave their Union Jacks along with the rest of the herd.

‘Oh plee-
eez
,' they whinge, but their dad is adamant.

‘You go and tell Miss Marshall that I'd just as soon you waved the flag of the Transvaal Republic,' he says. ‘Why not?' He is starting to get quite exercised about the flags and they can tell that he's really enjoying himself. ‘Go on,' he says. ‘Tell her. You go and tell her that you'll be happy to wave the
Vierkleur
.' The
Vierkleur
is the flag of the Transvaal's defunct Boer Republic.

Each day in the morning assembly, the head interrogates the children, who are seated before her in rows, cross-legged on the woodblock floor.

‘Stand up all those girls who have not yet purchased their flags,' she says.

At first it's lots of children who stand up, because, even for normally coping little girls, it takes time to remember your half a crown. But each day, as the group of non-purchasers is smaller, it gets more and more embarrassing. It's especially awful for Lisa who is a prefect and in the top class. One day it's only Lisa and Dinah, plus the tiny smattering of neglected children whose parents can never get anything much together, let alone find half a crown. Then, finally, it's that terrible day when it's only Lisa and Dinah.

The girls are utterly mortified but the two possible options open to them have simply never crossed their minds. One would be to stop standing up in the assembly hall and the other would be to explain. Instead they carry their shame through the whole day and go home, where Lisa, thank goodness, breaks down over their mum and cries. Their mum promises to slip them each half a crown next morning and whispers that they're not to tell their dad. But the Coronation isn't over yet because, in addition to the flag waving, there's to be all-day
feasting, singing, English country dancing and a fancy-dress parade. Your mum has got to make you a costume and she's also got to bake a cake for you to take to school for the party.

Dinah's mum throws herself into the fancy-dress project with enthusiasm. Lisa, who is now nearly as tall as a grown-up, has shed most of her puppy fat and can fit into her mother's clothes. Plus, she's newly besotted with Italian opera because the girls have recently been taken to a touring production of Verdi's
La Traviata
. For this reason, their mum conceives the idea that Lisa shall go as Violetta. She rakes through the
Klappkasten
, pulling out various numbers that date from her pre-marital dressy phase in Cape Town, and she settles on an ankle-length frilled white muslin garment which she has modified, complete with Born Arm sleeve, by Mrs van der Walt. With a camellia stuck in her auburn hair and a fan in her hand and a crewel-work scarf with a silk fringe, Lisa probably looks a lot more like Carmen than Violetta, but she certainly looks very nice. Dinah, thanks to her long blonde hair, is to go as Alice in Wonderland.

Among their fairly regular family book readings, the
Alice
books have always been big favourites of their dad's. He likes all the maths-y jokes and, since he's invariably the reader, he also gets to choose all the books. This means that until Peter comes along with his Hilaire Belloc Cautionary Tales, the girls are frequently subjected to the
Struwwelpeter
stories, which are read to them in German. Their parents think these stories are funny – though poor Lisa, the family's one-handed thumbsucker, is never much amused by the Dreaded Scissor Man who leaps on to the page in full colour, brandishing his giant's shears, and hacks off the small boy's thumbs. Lisa finds this upsetting, particularly as the picture shows his two copiously bleeding stumps in accurate close-up.

And Dinah, in turn, is wholly uncaptivated by the Fat Boy who suddenly becomes a non-eater and who – with repeated cries of
‘Ich esse keine Suppe nein!' –
dwindles swiftly from Fat Boy to Matchstick Boy and then to Deceased Boy, over five graphic illustrations. The second to last picture shows the Fat Boy relegated, thread-like, to the sick bed with a futile clutter of medicine bottles alongside him on the bedside cabinet. The only thing Dinah likes about this picture is the carefully drawn chamber pot that is sitting underneath the Fat Boy's bed. The last picture is of the Fat Boy's
tombstone which is planted on a sad little grassy knoll. The
Struwwelpeter
readings tend to be rotated with
Huckleberry Finn
and
Tom Sawyer
, both of which Lisa and Dinah think of as boys' books, and with the
Alice
books which tend to go way above their heads, but it's true that the books make a store of mental furniture which both girls come to relish later on.

In Sir John Tenniel's illustrations Alice has Dinah-length hair which exhibits the same kind of undulating crimp that Dinah gets when she unravels her school plaits. And Alice is wearing a full-skirted, puff-sleeved dress that happens to look very like Dinah's favourite party dress. So all Dinah needs for her fancy-dress costume is an Alice band and an apron which are both easily acquired. Then, Dinah's mum decides, she must have a flamingo: a full-sized model flamingo which is to be carried upside-down, just as Alice does in the croquet scene, when she uses the bird as a mallet. Dinah's mum has a lot of fun with the flamingo, because it's the first item of sculpture she's ever tried to make and it's also one of the few really challenging projects that's come her way in years. She starts by moulding a fine chicken-wire frame and covering it with strips of old blanket. Then she covers the whole thing with shades of flamingo-pink felt, detailing the creature's wings, beak and webbed feet with subtle artifice. The completed flamingo is a triumph and stands as tall as Dinah on wonderful spindly legs. And the crimped, loose Alice hair is rather enhancing. The girls' mum has just this once added a little blush of rouge to each daughter's cheeks, so they feel very satisfied with the way they look. There is a spring in their step as Violetta and Alice set out for school on Coronation Day.

At first they are merely slightly shaken when they meet five London Bobbies, two Beefeaters and one Grenadier Guard along the way, but by the time they are assembled in the playground for the parade, Lisa and Dinah have found themselves to be oddballs once again, in the company of two dozen crowned Lillibets and a dozen Dukes of Edinburgh. There are several more Beefeaters and a pair of Robin Hoods, four Admirals Lord Nelson, each with a cardboard telescope clamped to his blind eye, a smattering of square-mile City gents in bowler hats carrying rolled umbrellas and faked-up copies of the London
Times
, twenty-five redcoats, half a dozen khaki-clad British Tommies, three Sir Walter Raleighs and two ornately dressed Virgin Queens. One proud little girl is head to
foot in yards of Union Jack. She has a Union Jack hat, a Union Jack dress and Union Jack ballet shoes with pompoms. But probably the most envied girl of all is a bronzed and tridented Britannia encircled by an ingenious, coin-like bronze hoop that miraculously says ‘ONE PENNY' in apparently free-standing but discreetly wired bronze letters. The costume is a marvel and is shouting First Prize Winner before the procession so much as gets off the ground. In addition, there are a pair of Punch and Judys and one blue-painted Boadicea.

Nobody except for Lisa is dressed as a loose-living foreign consumptive and nobody, except for Dinah, is unaccountably wearing a pinny over her best party dress while carrying a large pink bird the wrong way up. Even before the parade has begun Dinah has heard poor Lisa try to explain herself twenty times.

‘I'm Violetta. She's in
La Traviata
. No, it's a op'ra. I said
op'ra
.'

The listening children gawp and shrug. The nearest anyone in Lisa's class has got to knowing what an opera is comes from early evening Springbok Radio, where the Firestone Strings play excerpts from the overture to
The Flying Dutchman
. The excerpts are interrupted, roughly every fifty seconds, by the ad breaks which repeatedly remind listeners that the Firestone Strings come courtesy of the Firestone Rubber Company.

Through the gauntlet of the fancy-dress parade, Dinah's ordeal is punctuated by the onlookers' repeating refrain: ‘Who's she?' ‘Who's she?' ‘Who's
she?'

Only occasionally there's a variation as the more protective members of the crowd move forward to pluck her by the sleeve.

‘Excuse me,' they whisper discreetly. ‘Excuse me, lovey, but you're carrying that bird upside-down.'

So Dinah, succumbing to the consensus, starts to carry her flamingo the right way up.

After the procession is over, she and her bosom friend Angela Trevean abandon their accessories under a tree and run off to find the stash of home-made cakes that have been cut up and arranged on enormous platters.

‘Look at that cake,' Angela says. ‘Look at
that
one. Look at
those
.'

‘Look at
that
one,' Dinah says.

They giggle as they point out what they take to be the funnier-looking cakes, though none of them is really that funny. It's just
that everything makes them giggle and giggle-stoking has become a sort of etiquette between them. Meanwhile they are loading their plates with slices of chocolate Swiss roll and wedges of Victoria sponge. Some people's mothers have been so intensely patriotic they've done their cakes in three layers, red, white and blue.

‘Look at
that
one,' Angela says.

‘
Ugh
,' Dinah says, and she giggles and groans extra hard, because it's a slice of two-tone loaf cake, chocolate and plain.

It's been cut from her own mother's German marble cake and she's not at all keen to have Angela find this out. She knows that cakes should be Victoria sponge. They should be two rounds stuck together with jam. Angela's mother knows this because she comes from Cornwall. It's because she comes from Cornwall that she has a pixie on her door knocker. Angela can't remember being a baby in St Austell, but she knows that pixies are her heritage. Dinah's mum's marble loaf cake is called
Karierte Affe
, which means chequered monkey.

After the second Nationalist general election victory, Dinah's mum is in denial. She copes with it by talking up the burlesque aspects of the system and shutting out all its horrors. She pretends to herself that the whole ghoulish process is no more than a ridiculous pantomime in which blacks and whites are made to enter the central post office through different doors, merely so that they can rejoin each other in the same queue once they're both inside. And the queue, let's face it, is long enough regardless of your skin colour, because the Post Office is yet another institution that is providing jobs for poor Afrikaners. And a lot of the poor Afrikaners are learning basic skills on the job.

The girls' dad responds by joining the Liberal Party – a new party with a non-racial membership which sees itself as a free-market alternative to the now banned Communist Party. Hitherto the Communists have been the only party in South Africa to endorse the idea of a non-racial franchise, but their dad hasn't trusted Communists since the defection of the Brainy Rebel.

The Liberal Party never quite manages to enlist the kind of mass black support that it has in mind, though it gains the odd black intellectual. Alan Paton is its most high-profile member and it succeeds in acquiring the membership of a flamboyant new heart
throb on the Durban scene, a tall, curly-haired Old Etonian, who has recently taken up a lecturing post in the politics department. The public school heart-throb ends his days as one of P.W. Botha's men in the apartheid state's last-ditch President's Council, but in Dinah's childhood he is much admired, not only for needling Special Branch policemen who have a time of it trying to spell his mile-long, Norman Conquest name, but also for having the liveliest quips in answer to racist repartee while engaged upon the futile task of canvassing for the Liberal Party. The girls' dad has also been trying to canvass for the Party, but he finds it hard to make any headway and, after a whole morning's doorstopping, he has got only one promise of support. It comes from a stone-deaf and aged anti-Semite, who doesn't like the United Party candidate because he's half a Jew. Dinah's dad feels obliged to belabour what the Liberal Party stands for, but he finally gives up gratefully when the old boy's hearing aid begins to whistle at a piercing frequency.

Mainly what Dinah remembers about the Liberal Party is that her mum once agrees to billet two delegates during the annual Party conference. The house being rather small and possessed of only two bedrooms, the delegates' beds will be Lisa's and Dinah's, while the girls, for the duration, are to have sleeping bags on their parents' floor. The delegates are two unknown Cape Town academics called Dr Liebmann and Dr Manheim.