Frankie and Stankie (17 page)

‘I hope these delegates are not too big,' their mum says doubtfully, as she plumps up the pillows on the narrow, girlie little beds.

But she has hardly spoken before the delegates are standing in the doorway. Then they are bending their heads in order to effect an entry. They cast their eyes around the living room, seeking out any chairs that might possibly withstand their weight, because the Doctors Liebmann and Manheim are both almost seven foot tall and both are unambiguously fat.

Dinah's mum never ceases to find this episode hilarious and, from time to time, she'll recall it and then she'll suddenly say,
‘Gott-ach-Gott! Diese dikke Liebmann und Manheim! Ach-Gott-ach-Gott-noch-mal
!' And her eyes will fill with tears of joy.

Angela Trevean has been Dinah's best friend ever since Class Three. Bossy Sally is history and it's all down to kind Miss Vaizey and her brilliant matchmaking skills.

‘Sally and Dinah,' she says one day, early on in Class Three's second term. ‘I'm going to have to separate you.'

‘Aaw, Miss Vaiz-
eey
,' say the girls.

‘There's far too much talking and distracting going on,' she says. ‘Sally, I want you to change places with Angela.'

It doesn't cross Dinah's mind that Miss Vaizey might have noticed that Sally is a bully and that nice little Angela Trevean hasn't yet found anyone to team up with, but the arrangement induces love at first sight and the moment Angela is in place beside her, the chattering and giggling begin. Angela and Dinah chatter and giggle their way almost non-stop through the next four years, yet nobody makes them separate. They giggle their way through to the top class and on into the first year of high school, where the friendship abruptly stops. But, for the moment, they do their best giggling in cookery and sewing because Mrs Stewart is not only ferocious but she's eccentric, so that it's all the more exciting to court the dangers of her wrath.

Mrs Stewart is eccentric because she comes from England and she often says ‘weather permitting', which always makes everyone giggle. The cake sale will take place, ‘weather permitting', she says. The craft show will be worth a visit, ‘weather permitting'. In Durban the weather is always permitting, so the girls see no reason on this earth for her to say it. Durban is that place where you can always plan a beach picnic five weeks in advance. Angela and Dinah giggle because Mrs Stewart makes them scrub the cookery-room tables after each session and while they're doing it she'll take hold of somebody's elbow and work it back and forth.

‘A little more elbow grease, girlie,' she'll say. ‘A little more elbow grease, that's the way.'

They giggle because she praises ammonia. She says it's got a ‘nice clean smell'. Mrs Stewart will uncork the bottle and give it a hearty sniff before pushing it forcefully under everyone's nose and making them have a sniff. The bottle is aptly brandnamed Scrubb's Ammonia.

‘Ah,' she says. ‘That's a good clean smell!
Isn't
that a good clean smell?'

She says it as the class is reeling and swooning, but substance abuse is not yet a concept on the international youth agenda.

Angela and Dinah giggle in sewing because Mrs Stewart makes
all the girls allow for growth, so everything they make is always completely unwearable. Plus she always makes you sew every seam three times over, no matter how fine your stitches may be on the first two attempts. The routine is that you have to take your completed seam up for inspection before you're allowed to proceed. Everything from gym shorts to pyjamas is stitched by hand, as though the sewing machine has not yet been invented. Mrs Stewart will then take the garment off you and start wrenching violently at your seam while you're trying not to explode into giggles. She's built like a battleship and she has huge, asbestos hands which – as she has previously demonstrated in cookery – are immune to boiling water. Once she has ripped your seam in two, she'll fling the garment back at you for you to catch on the wing.

‘Cobbling, I call that,' she says, though Angela's stitches are always exquisite and microscopic. And even Dinah's running stitches are moderately all right. ‘That's not sewing, that's cobbling,' she says. ‘GO and get a job cobbling mailbags at one of Her Majesty's prisons!'

The giggle potential with Mrs Stewart usually has to do with these predictable repeating refrains, but one day, having ripped open Angela's centre seam, she says, unexpectedly, ‘I want you to run round that again.' And Angela, seizing her moment, carefully lays out the two halves of her giant's pyjama bottoms on the floor, right in front of Mrs Stewart's table, and she proceeds to run around them. She circumnavigates the pyjamas fully three times before Mrs Stewart orders her sharply to sit down.

Cookery is always the best fun, not only because of the ammonia and the elbow grease, but because Mrs Stewart makes them cook such foul, inedible things. They do ‘convalescent diets' for months on end and, even when they're cooking for healthy people, everything has to be boiled, simmered, stewed and steamed. They do barley broth and stewed prunes with custard. They do lots of lumpy puddings using tapioca and sago and suet and arrowroot and cornflour. Nearly everything they cook is tasteless and gluey, but especially when it's steamed fish. This is because steamed fish always comes with an extra gluey and tasteless white sauce.

One day, after the girls have done steamed fish in white sauce, Angela forgets hers on the classroom window-sill at home time, so it stays there right through the long weekend because there's a state
holiday coming up. They have lots of state holidays at Dinah's school, because, as well as all the Empire Days and Union Days, there are the ever-increasing numbers of Afrikaner Nationalist heroes to be honoured, and voortrekker battles to be commemorated. There is Kruger Day and van Riebeck day and Dingaan's Day which has recently been re-named ‘The Day of the Covenant'. That's because we can't have a day named after a Zulu king and, anyway, it marks the defeat of Dingaan at the Battle of Blood River, when the voortrekkers made a covenant always to mark the day of the battle if only God would help them to win. Then, once God had done so, they promptly forgot all about the covenant for something like forty years. But now it's been resurrected as a centrepiece of Nationalist triumphalism.

Dinah's school, along with all the other schools, has just been celebrating van Riebeck Day in style, because that year it's the three hundredth anniversary of Jan van Riebeck's landing at the Cape in 1652. Dinah and Angela can now draw ground plans in their sleep of the Cape Town Castle which the founder erected, complete with moat, in the shape of a five-pointed star. And they can rattle off the names of the star's five points:

Orange
Nassau
Leerdam
Buuren
Katzenellenbogen

Dinah's dad is inclined to welcome these patriotic holidays, because there's always more classical music than usual on the radio, since it's thought to have more gravitas. Whenever there's a bout of unscheduled classical music and it's not on a patriotic holiday, Dinah's dad will hazard that there's been a significant death.

‘Prime Minister's been shot,' he'll say.

He says it more with hope than with conviction, but, eventually, on one distant day – after prolonged but unexplained extracts from the B Minor Mass – Dinah's dad turns out, at last, to be right. Someone has shot at Dr Verwoerd during the Rand Easter Show, but the bullets have just bounced off him, thus proving his demigod status.

Meanwhile, all through van Riebeck Day, Angela's fish is steadily rotting and stinking on the classroom window-sill and, when the girls return to school, the white sauce has grown green hairs. The smell is so prodigious when the lid of the tin food caddy is lifted that Angela and Dinah become almost ecstatic with delight. Spontaneous pilgrimages to the window-sill take place throughout the day, as the girls' admiring classmates tiptoe up to the holy site and gingerly lift the lid. Finally it's Mrs Gordon who gets wise to the proceedings and makes Angela throw it away.

Mrs Stewart has a female cousin who lives in Manor Gardens and she's got her own vegetable patch. She supplies Mrs Stewart with cabbages for the school menus, and Angela and Dinah are dispatched once a week to collect the cousin's crop. This is another ecstatic experience, because the cousin is a born-again muck and mulch person and her particular repeating refrains have all to do with the hearts of cabbages.

‘Feel the heart on that one, dear,' the cousin will say to the girls.

She exhorts each girl in turn to bend down and fondle the cabbages' hearts, so that the effort of suppressing their giggles as they crouch to squeeze the cabbages is almost more than Angela and Dinah can bear. Having finally made their escape from the cousin, they howl and chortle the length of the street with a cardboard box full of cabbages bouncing between them as they run.

Angela, too, has an older sister and she's very good at thinking up sister-goading schemes. Her own sister is now in high school and, as such, is beyond their reach, but Lisa, with her new prefect's dignity, is a very rewarding target. At first the scheme is merely to cut out all the pictures they can find in the newspaper of particularly hideous men, and to ambush Lisa in the school corridors with these and flash them at her while chanting as loudly as they can.

‘He's your fiancé – he's your fiancé,' the younger sisters chant and because Lisa gets so furious about it, they find it too much fun to stop.

As time passes, the game is modified and corrupted, first to a system of multiple cut-out fiancés which the two girls simply hurl at Lisa, before running off uttering their chant. ‘Fiancé, fiancé, fiancé…' Then it becomes a system of multiple fiancés who are
ripped up into a fine confetti and rained down upon Lisa as she's trying to go home. Finally, the girls simply hurl great handfuls of ripped-up newsprint at Lisa, while their chant has become so corrupted that it isn't any longer intelligible to anyone but themselves.

‘Vombay-vombay-vombay –' But it still puts Lisa into a rage.

‘Shuddup-shuddup-shud-UP-SHUDD
UP
!!' she says. ‘I'm telling on you.'

Angela's presence is a real pain for Lisa, but it's very good for Dinah, who is transformed from weed, cry-baby and shrinking violet into swanky slouch with street cred. And Angela is the best antidote against Dinah's mother's morbid anxieties.

‘Careful with a sewing needle,' is one of Dinah's mum's favourite maxims. ‘Careful, Dee, that you don't lose it.'

She herself is terrifically careful and she does her lumpish sock darning with a needle she's been using since before the Second World War. If Dinah ever so much as thinks of losing a needle, she has her mum's story of Tante Berthe to stop her. Tante Berthe, Dinah's mum says, once lost a needle while sewing as a girl. It penetrated her buttock and, finally, after the aunt had suffered decades of respiratory and digestive complaints along with violent and spasmodic shooting pains, the needle emerged between her shoulder blades, having travelled at its leisure through all Tante Berthe's inner organs.

‘My sister's forever losing needles,' Angela says to Dinah. ‘And it's usually in her bed.'

She herself has just managed to mislay the third needle of the afternoon and is having a little scrabble on the maize mat at her feet.

‘What happens to her?' Dinah says in some alarm, but Angela just laughs.

‘She gets pricked,' she says and she gives a casual shrug before she gets up from the floor. ‘Can't find it,' she says.

For Dinah this is a landmark moment, a moment of liberation. Every morning on the bus to school, Angela greets Dinah with unpredictable salutations, because she likes the sounds of words.

‘Hello,
Mong-Cherree
,' she says. ‘I didn't make that up. I think it's French.'

Or one day she'll have made up a long and complicated new
salutation which Dinah and she both internalise instantly, while nobody else can ever manage to take its sequence on board.

‘Hello,
Waghoggiwempshonist
,' she'll say. And to this it's obvious that there's only one reply.

‘Hello,
Waghoggiwempshonist-Ishnessishness
,' Dinah says.

Their final severance at high school is painful, like divorce.

Dinah's mum's parents, having emigrated to Cape Town in 1933, then returned briefly to Berlin, thinking to come back soon. But the timing of their return was such that they were very shortly caught there by the war. And afterwards – once hostilities were over – they couldn't be reunited with their children. The pro-British United Party government of General Smuts would not allow Germans into South Africa. So it was thanks to the Afrikaner Nationalist election victory of 1948 that Lisa and Dinah finally got to meet their maternal grandparents the following year. By then the girls were eight and nine.

On the day that the two foreign grandparents appeared in the Durban bungalow, they stayed for only three hours before being whisked off to Johannesburg to be billeted with one of their sons. So Dinah thereafter always felt that she knew them – knew the idea of them, anyway – not from that brief lunchtime visit, but through her mum's family stories about her early life in pre-war Berlin.

Comfortably settled in Lindenstrasse,
circa
1928, the Jacobsens were clearly not a political family.
But they knew that Hitler was common; a common little man and grubby
. For Dinah's mum, ‘common' survives as a frequent and defining moral quality. So Dinah's mum and her brothers were all prone to mimicking Hitler's accent, while they amused each other with anecdotes about the eggie breakfasts and other food debris which the demagogue was reputed to slop down the front of his shirts. The family was liberalbourgeois and politically apathetic, inclined at first to view the movement not so much with alarm as with distaste – the more so, because its visual aesthetic was so predominantly kitsch.